Today the LA Weekly reports that beloved, above-reproach labor leader Miguel Contreras, who dropped dead unexpectedly at the age of 52 last year, happened to do so at a South LA massage parlor-cum-house-of-ill-repute.
And why didn’t anybody hear about this sooner? Because Los Angeles’ political leaders — including both mayoral candidates, mid-campaign — showed up at the emergency room and did major spin control. There was no autopsy, which can’t quite be explained, and which isn’t quite typical. Chances are there will be, at the very least, further investigation.
Adding kerfluffle to intrigue, today happened to be the last day of Harold Meyerson’s longtime tenure at the paper. Meyerson is an unabashed liberal (hear, hear!) but his predictable, knee-jerk leftism helped make the paper’s political coverage stale and unreadable. Like, for years. So on his last day, he sends a memo to the paper saying that they’ve sunk to a new low. And the new LA Weekly editor shoots back. LA Observed has the whole back and forth. Fascinating.
Despite the fact that Meyerson comes down against tabloidism, I can almost see Danny Devito playing him in LA Confidential: 2010.
For 5 years after the September 11th attacks, the Federal Education Department shared student aid application information with the FBI.
Under the program, called Project Strikeback, the Education Department
received names from the F.B.I. and checked them against its student aid
database, forwarding information. Each year, the Education Department
collects information from 14 million applications for federal student
aid.
Ostensibly the aid dollars might have been used to fund terrorist activities. Now I don’t know what a decent missile launcher goes for these days on the black market, but I wager it’s more than the sad, scrappy funding grad students receive. Anything would reap a better financial reward.
There are 2 good things about this story: First, it’s no longer happening; it happened to be cancelled 10 days after an investigator’s in-person interview with a Department of Education official. Second: that investigator? A grad student at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism — who, I hope, did her research with funding from the Department of Education.
This week Ron Hogan adds a little levity to the ongoing hotties of publishing debate with a Writer’s Digest piece called Does This Book Jacket Make Me Look Fat? Technically, Galleycat’s winenrs were NAL/Roc editor Liz Scheier and Stephen Barbara, an agent with Donald Maas. But when people in the publishing world are hot, don’t we all win, really?
And news is out that Matt Cheney will have a story in One Story this fall. Actually, he’ll have THE story in One Story, since that’s how One Story works. Hooray for Matt!
All of which made me think, hey, didn’t I see Ron and Matt in the same place earlier this year? And didn’t I have a camera? Why yes! That was when I snuck into AWP with Kassia (we were at SXSWi, but the two conferences were in the same building). Seems to me like Kassia ought to have some cool news on the way, too.
Some people have asked what SXSW Interactive was like, and frankly, it wasn’t what I expected. As is clear in this little piece that the LA Times printed today.
So tonight Paul Auster hit LA in conversation with the David Ulin. Sounds like the only thing we got that San Francisco didn’t get came from Ulin, who said it had been a busy day; he’d been finishing this Sunday’s LA Times’ Book Review, which he edits, and he’d had to stop everything to watch James Frey on Oprah.
Sheez, I only edit this and I gave it a pass. I must have missed something good.
Pinky’s Paperhaus is in the sidebar of the LA Times blogging article. While falling into the "arts" category would have been, um, more intellectual (Mark is there, of course), I’ll take "out there." Why not.
The very smart and occasionally silly Lee Goldberg is also on the list, for his behind-the-scenes blog about being a Hollywood writer and producer. He just visited the Haus with his brother Tod; they talked about their new books and about selling dirty socks on eBay (well, Tod talked about the dirty socks).
If you had the patience to come here via the Times, Pinky’s Paperhaus podcasts interviews with writers as they guest DJ and talk about their work. Plus other writerly things of interest. Like Jack Klugman.
