Senator Alex Padilla calls on the racist three to resign. Yesterday protestors gathered in front of Martinez’s home to blare her racist comments on a loop from a loudspeaker
I would say there are really two things going on here, one is the way Latinos becoming politically powerful in Los Angeles has lead to specifically white or light-skinned Latinos becoming political representatives of powerful districts in places like Los Angeles. If you speak Spanish and spend enough time around people like this, you will generally hear them say horribly racist things about people of color, including other Latinos, as in the tape released here where they refer to indigenous southern Mexicans as “little brown people” and “tan feo”. One thing that this really reminds me of is the current scandal about workplace racism in the large warehouses of the Inland Empire, particularly the language used is almost identical to that used by the latino warehouse management about black workers.
Then there’s the other thing, which is all the elections that are fast approaching, and redistricting. I’m not as qualified to talk about the little political intrigues there, because I don’t live in LA anymore or follow the politics closely enough to fully explain it, but there are currently some very serious fights between various groups of city council members over districts and upcoming elections, and they seem to be very focused around the racial demographics of these districts and how they will come into play during future elections. I’m almost positive that that’s why Padilla is making this statement, because he’s up for re-election.
Then there’s the reason and method by which this statement was recorded and leaked, which is a bit suspicious in my opinion. There’s a mayors race coming up pretty soon, and iirc the leaked conversation was posted to Reddit with a caption saying something like “looks like city council is in bed with organized labor” or something to that extent. So I would not be surprised if this leak was an attempt to create infighting between the dominant liberal political bloc in Los Angeles, create splits between black and Latino communities, and make the endorsements of establishment organized labor useless politically, or even harmful. That’s not to say that these people shouldn’t be held to account for the frankly disgusting things they’ve said (I’m particularly disgusted with DeLeon, who I met when he was running to try and replace Diane Feinstein, and who seemed to at least have the rhetoric of a legitimate “berniecrat”. Apparently, he’s just as racist as other light-skinned Latinos in SoCal, which is extremely disappointing, because we need young, progressive latino political leaders desperately who are actually legitimately committed to the cause), but I think it is important to be aware of the context that this recording is being disseminated in, because it will almost certainly be used in attack ads in the coming elections, if it isn’t already.
I mean, if we’re really going to be honest, the whole project of “representation” for minority groups within Los Angeles politics has failed spectacularly, and this is just one sad example of that. What they’ve done is just elect a bunch of white Latinos, a token gay white guy, a few token black people, etc, to fit the racial demographics of each district, but these people are generally not truly progressive or anti-racist activists in any way, they are all professional politicians, businessmen, and the like; in general, people who are continuing with more of the same in politics, just with a black, Asian, gay, or spanish-speaking face. I mean, they even made a latino dude the sheriff, and somehow he seems to be even worse than the previous white dude. It’s almost as if we can’t vote our way to equality in a fundamentally corrupt and racist political system! Who woulda thunk it??
Well, Gil Cedillo and the Latino Caucus did manage to get Villaraigosa as mayor 2005-2013, which was an absolute shambles, so much that they lost City Attorney – who contracting runs through – to Carmen Trutanich, a Republican(!), so they couldn’t even get the usual spoils from it. All they managed to do was waste the opportunity of the new city charter – explicitly designed to centralize power – while the council adapted.
Well, as I understood it it was also about the eastside labor-latino scene (and cliques) starting to elbow out the Westside Jewish-professional one in city party and government structures, how’s that coming along?
One thing about LA’s freeze on building and attempt to hold “neighborhood character” is that the commercial mix of an area is often like, 15 years behind the neighborhood demographic.
Like, there were parts of Melrose Boulevard that I went to in 2008 that I was like “oh, this makes Melrose Place (1992-1999) make a bit more sense!”
I visited back down to Echo Park in like, summer 2019? after leaving in 2011, and like, the only new construction I saw – some townhouses up by the terminus of the 2 in this hot neighborhood you heard about on the other coast – was about equal to the amount of change I would expect on any given Portland eastside block between 13th and 48th over the same period.
But the stores on Sunset, which had been like, cheap/blue collar work clothes, or storefronts that carried all, but only, the stuff you got with WIC vouchers, or these 3 restaurants that were owned in common as basically identical meh Mexican cafeterias, finally matched what I’d’ve expected from the block down from The Echo/Echoplex
Realizing that the thing about the 2000s, certainly at least in my LA experience – neo-disco “blog house” DJed parties with photographers and not like, scene scene kids, but like the Mis-Shapes, Cory Kennedy, the kind of scene that “scene” was gesturing at, rooftop parties at art collectives, VICE magazine, hipsters – is that those are all recapitulations of things that originally came about in the load-bearing context of heavy hard drug use – heroin, cocaine, benzos and other pills – and were a little silly in our generation.
VICE started out (as government-funded CanCon) in Toronto when it was a beat, heroiny (but not white-flighted. Canada!) city. Back before they sold out (and were richly paid) a sort of raw-dadly “don’t be fucking junkies, kids” was part of Gavin McInnes’ schtick.
And then I went to a free VICE party in Hollywood sponsored by Colt 45, which was funding it and giving free tallboys because before the ‘08 crash alcohol companies just gave it away to establish brands with us urban (pre-social media use) “influencers” and I guess the “indie sleaze” 70s vibe (I used to live two blocks from the original American Apparel store!) matched up with the “hey, remember Billy Dee Williams?” branding. But it just… no. We were a wild, free, and fun-loving crowd in that we were in our twenties, but…
I mean, part of it was we were the back-to-the-city generation, and that was the kind of authentic grittiness we had romanticized about the last time white life was lived in cities, the 1970s. Of course we were middle-class white, like 70s cities or the places where the headline meth and Oxy waves weren’t.
Ecstasy kinda came back but they called it “Molly” and held “raves” in stadiums
Xanax was kind of a thing but as an anxiolytic it’s kind of a combination of benzos that don’t fuck you up and cocaine that doesn’t get you speeding (cocaine is not only a stimulant but an anti-anxiety agent; when cokeheads tell you all about their brilliant idea for a screenplay/world domination scheme it’s cause they’re not only amped up but disinhibited)
Coke was kind of a thing, Gawker all “can you imagine! there’s a coke bar in Brooklyn (that surely sells trampled-on shit) called Kokies!”
But that was kinda the suburbanites thrilled at their urban worldliness that they could even find anything harder than weed now, one $60 bag at a time, it wasn’t really sybaritic excess. Even at post-warehouse sunrise afterparties where we got naked in the hot tub there were never piles of cocaine or anything, and we mostly made jokes and left by 9
Sparks, that was our thing. Coming before Four Loko, it was the wild speedball combination of malt liquor and caffeine, that’s how adventurous we were.
Seeing maps of the LA mayoral election and they’re drawing “the eastside” as starting further east than I’d ever heard (anywhere between Western and the 110) when I was there in the 2000s.
the attitude this flyer from nick studios has is amazing. it’s done….finally
I went past the Klasky Csupo building on what, Sunset, Santa Monica? (Highland was later) all the time when I lived in LA and went around back, where the fenced-in back was Aah! Real Monsters murals and a smoke break minyan at all times, and yeah, I buy it
Did you know that the average voice actor only makes about $31,400 a year? That’s around $1,500 less than the US median for individuals. When John DiMaggio says he thinks all voice actors should be paid more, he’s not just
a millionaire out to get more millions. He’s someone who can afford to risk passing up a contract fight to raise the wages of those who can’t afford to. He’s absolutely right when he says that VAs are treated and paid like shit and he’s absolutely right to draw attention to the issue.
Yeah no matter how big the show they’re on, most voice actors aren’t paid any better than retail workers.
At the management office in LA our clients did a lot of VA work – we had among others classic That Guy (Teenface Version) Adam Wylie, who was voicing Ben 10 at the time – and the thing though is at that level you don’t even need to leave your house, you just go into your basement studio, record lines for the four major productions you’re currently in and all the ones you’re auditioning for, send them in over digital lines, and go out for dinner.
So Silver Lake used to be known as like, a particularly gay area of LA when the city was still centered on downtown and then for a while the Latin gay part of town when the white boys were in WeHo, so I’ve apparently casually been to these shops like The Stockroom that have had gay national reputations for decades (I have a riding crop from there!).
I just thought Circus of Books was a remnant newsagent, honestly
Without a whistle-blower, is there any way to tell if a popular game show is rigged?
Shows bid out the awarding of prizes to bond companies, who will take lump sums in exchange for covering all award payouts for a season, they def. have an interest in keeping things on the level, when I was in LA I knew a guy who worked crew on America’s Bingo Night at launch and the ball hopper malfunctioned and spewed all the balls over the stage and only the bond company stooges were allowed to touch them so the crew just kicked back and watched them scrambling around with these man-sized bingo balls
Oh God I remember how the road you took from Sunset up to the fucking Trader Joe’s in Silver Lake was technically a canyon but it was far enough inland it was pretty moist and verdant not like the coastal scrub, and there were like, a scattering of houses under tall trees, and with my 2022 goggles on it was fucking absurd that a few blocks off Sunset in the hot part of LA looked like that in the mid-2000s
So whenever I’d do acid there was an afterglow period for like 12 hours afterwards where I could just consider any issue, figure out what needed to be done to resolve it, figure out what to do to make that happen, and say exactly the right thing to get anyone I need to go along, switch to back-up Options B and C on the fly without missing a beat
Anyway, I’ve basically been doing that continuously since early December, last night there was a guy who came tangent to it in what must have seemed like an incredibly fortuitous coincidence that I totally no-sold
The peak example of this was when I was in LA, dropped acid on Halloween, went to a roof party on Sunset on the Silver Lake/Echo Park border with a cute Berklee girl there to start her career as a toy for music industry guys, had my soldier costume (this is where I started wearing BDU pants) inspire some other attendees to share thoughts about their military service or racial and American identities that would have been way too intimate to deal with even if I was sober, paced around Griffith Park for hours as the sun came up and Mexican laborers started their soccer league games, came home, resolved to convince my friend he was in an abusive relationship with his live-in girlfriend of several years and needed to leave her, and then did
O-Zone were Moldovan? O-Zone did Numa Numa? The managers I interned for in Hollywood had them! Also Nasim Pedrad (pre-SNL), Ellen Cleghorne (post-) and Aaron Carter.
wondering how it should affect my reception of Brokeback Mountain (2005) that Jake Gyllenhaal’s bisexuality was the most open secret in Hollywood back since I was there
Also something about growing up in LA because I feel like if you grow up in any kind of close proximity to the entertainment industry, “there are lots of creeps and there is lots of child abuse within the entertainment industry” is actually fairly common knowledge, I feel like a ton of people knew about child actors being drugged and sexually exploited for example, everyone knew about the “casting couch,” all but the most sheltered kids knew about “red light districts” and where they were, etc.
I knew lots of people who felt they had to leave LA to raise children and one of the thoughts that’s always gone through my mind (though there are plenty of other reasons a person leaves an expensive, dirty big city to raise children) is that it’s very, very difficult to shelter your children there or curate their knowledge of the world. They’re going to know things you may not want them to know and they’re going to ask you questions you may not want to answer.
I feel like practically everyone who was into the whole “sheltering of our children” white Christian middle class vibe, tried to get their kids out of the city or get out of the city before having them.
Yet plenty of us had no choice but to grow up there anyway, despite the fact that we were going to learn about things that we weren’t supposed to know about
There were red light districts in LA? I mean, I knew about the Figueroa streetwalking track, and the Thai ladyboys on Western, and the “massage” brothels in WeHo, and that elsewhere it was the Korean massage places that were handjob parlors, and the hillside houses off Mullholland that are essentially permanent porn sets…
Actually I guess I did know where the red light districts were.
Remembering the time my Brooklyn urban planning college girlfriend visited me after graduation in LA and I was looking up (in a Thomas Guide, this was before smartphones) where we were going and it was like 12 blocks away and I told her to get in the car and she did dramatic frown at me and I was like “fine” and that day she got to learn how long LA blocks are to walk
it must suck for the cast of scrubs to try and have acting careers afterwards. like they're all just gonna be so and so from scrubs, a font of approximate adequacy from an era when most shows weren't made to be tolerable for more than an episode at a time
Like I see pushback here but can confirm sitcoms were considered dead in Hollywood in the early 2000s – hourlong drama was still good for scripted but the rest of the energy was in game shows and reality and even animation – until 30 Rock, which was not expected to be the one of it and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip to survive
