Category: Los Angeles

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Sarah Palin Effigy Hanging in West Hollywood

This is in very bad taste. If you are not a fan of Sarah Palin, I recommend ignoring her existence entirely. Not only is this lame attempt at a joke in poor taste — and not only in light of reported Obama effigies (most recently at a Christian university in Oregon — but acknowledging Palin in such an extreme way (or any way) only gives her more credibility / recognition. As it is there will be no shortage of Sarah Palin drag queens at this week’s Halloween Parade. Ugh… From tonight’s CBS2 news:


“I know if we had done it with Barack Obama, people would’ve probably
thrown things through our windows,” [creator of the display Chad Michael] Morrisette said. “The image of a hanged black man is a lot more intense than the image of a hanged white woman — for our country — in the history of our country.”
[…]

“It should be seen as art and it should be seen within the month of October. It is Halloween. It’s time to be scary. It’s time to be spooky,”
Morrisette said.

CBS/KCAL is the only network to report on this, even though it was pointed out as early as Thursday by WeHo News. The display is on this house at the corner of Fountain Avenue at Orange Grove.

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Radiohead at Hollywood Bowl — Best Live Band Today

radiohead hollywood bowl

After being somewhat underwhelmed by Radiohead from outside Lollapalooza earlier this month, I was completely blown away last night at the Hollywood Bowl. I had looked forward to seeing Radiohead at the Bowl all year as it is my favorite venue — the open [dry] air element lends itself to pristine sound and with the elaborate light/visual show put on by Radiohead’s crew, sitting in the Bowl felt not unlike floating in outer space. Jonny Greenwood is one of the greatest guitarists of our time. I’m saying this now, because, it’s not just his tone and creativity, but his ability to rip away in multiple directions and also disappear into the atmosphere of a song or play straight acoustic. Kind of like Jimmy Page. And while I like to make fun of Thom Yorke for mumbling and moaning incessantly, he was very effective and very sharp utilizing his voice as a melodic instrument. And the guy is no hack at guitar/piano either.

I snuck some short video clips with my crappy digital [still] — it’s worth sharing the handful of 15-second clips combined in the video below to give you an idea of the light show. The sound is horrible on the camera, although it was pristine at the show… and yes, the video may be nauseating, but, hey, you’ve been warned. Further below, the setlist and a few more videos from the end of the show of 1-2 minutes each.

15 sec. clips of Radiohead songs @ Hollywood Bowl 8/25/08 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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NowPublic Names LA’s 20 Most Influential Individuals

Crowdsourcing news site NowPublic released a list of LA’s ‘Most Public’ and — however arbitrarily — selected many of my favorite people both online and off including #4: Micki Krimmel, #5: Zadi Diaz of Epic Fu, #6: Dave Bullock, #8: Zach Behrens of LAist, #10: Kent Nichols of Ask a Ninja, #15: Sean Bonner of MetBlogs, and #20: Efren Toscano of TechZulu.

The full list (and [purported] methodology) is here.

Coolest thing about the list? It drew me back to NowPublic for the first time in months and I really like the re-design. Last year NowPublic’s partnered with AP and more recently, believe it or not, NP acquired Guy Kawasaki’s Truemors. Most attractive about their redesign is the dynamically updating homepage… much more inviting as a reader and contributor.

UPDATE: Sean Bonner wrote a great post exposing the true annoyance of such link-baiting tactics as engineered (in this instance) by PR firm morris+king to exemplify how filling a page with self-referential links (all of the names on the list refer not to that individual’s web site, but to a nowpublic.com member page, created especially for this campaign) and baiting such “influentials” to spread the word and linkylove spam is ugly and should be seen through. THIS is where the rel=”nofollow” comes handy. By adding that tag to the end of a URI, search engine robots and crawlers are flagged to not weigh the reference of a hyperlink to the rank or relevance of the destination.

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In an iReport World, Who Can We Trust?

Real or Photoshopped?In the mid-2008 media world, every network, blog, and news website wants to break the big impact story in times of developing news. For hours after a 5.3 magnitude earthquake centered near Chino Hills, ~30 miles from LA, rocked Southern California, all of the major networks and their websites continued carrying the news with a red BREAKING NEWS flag attached. But other than shaking up millions of people and scattering items off of shelves, there was no “news” to break (at least as of 4pm, more than 4 hours after the initial temblor).

The photo above first aired on CNN and was sent in by someone who was supposedly in the supermarket at the time — what CNN terms as an iReporter. Sure, it is very possible that many of the paper goods were shaken to the ground during the 15-20 seconds in which the ground, building, and everything else shook. But how are we to know when to believe whether a photo or video is faked, fabricated, or Photoshopped? CNN’s iReport Terms of Use addresses nothing about photo manipulation or regulations. And, to be fair, it’s not just citizen reporters that purposely fake photos for effect or attention, there are the memorable lessons in photojournalism fakery brought to us by the likes of Reuters, the LA Times and most recently, the Iranian government (and here are more.

Considering the small size and low resolution of the above photo, I won’t venture to investigate the possibility that it was digitally manipulated or whether it’s an honest to goodness eyewitness photo. But below, you’ll see a few surveillance camera or eyewitness camera viewpoint of what is clearly either real footage of the earthquake and it’s after affects, or simply fakes.

REAL:

Surveillance video from Incycle Bicycles store in San Dimas (~12 miles from the epicenter)

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