Vol 06 Issue 46

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BREAKING WIND Why cartoonist Lynda Barry hates clean energy KILL, BABY, KILL! The last 77 days of Bush ABSENCE OF 'SOLACE' Andy Klein sees new Bond, feels sad LET THE BLAMING BEGIN! Who lost Prop. 8?

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THE BOY FROMOUT OF THIS WORLDTHE AUTHENTIC DEATH OF CULT ICON TOM GRAEFF BY RON GARMON

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EDITORIAL Editor Rebecca Schoenkopf rebeccas@lacitybeat.com

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Arts Editor Ron Garmon rong@lacitybeat.com Film Editor Andy Klein andyk@lacitybeat.com Calendar Assistant Arrissia Owen Turner calendar@lacitybeat.com Copy Editor Joshua Sindell Editorial Contributors Ramie Becker, Paul Birchall, Andre Coleman, Michael Collins, Miles Clements, Mick Farren, Richard Foss, Matt Gaffney, Andrew Gumbel, Marc B. Haefele, Tom Hayden, Bill Holdship, Jessica Hundley, Mark Keizer, Carl Kozlowski, Kim Lachance, Ken Layne, Steve Lowery, Wade Major, Browne Molyneux, Anthony Miller, Chris Morris, Amy Nicholson, Arrissia Owen Turner, Donna Perlmutter, Joe Piasecki, Neal Pollack, Ted Rall, Erika Schickel, Tom Sharpe, Don Shirley, Kirk Silsbee, Brent Simon, Coco Tanaka, Don Waller, Jim Washburn, Wonkette, Chris Ziegler Editorial Interns Gabrielle Paluch, Porsche Simpson, Nathan Solis

ART Art Director Paul Takizawa artdirector@lacitybeat.com

06 06 07 08

News Letters. Page’s Pulitzer, plus crotchety coots! Old News. What if Steve Lowery were gay or a chicken? Sometimes I like to wonder. Wonkette’s Weekette! The Sarah Palin Fail-o-Meter ends. With a fail. Action of the Week! It’s a post-Stonewall Stonewall, minus the drag queen riots.

Feature

14 The Boy From Out of This World. Ron Garmon dives into the sad past of one-flick-wonder cult director Tom Graeff, and the paper corpse Garmon kept in his pocket.

Living

18 Eat. Miles Clements lays down a little bit of knowledge about ponzu sauce and Shin Okinawa. Miles is totally like that! Plus, enjoy a little nosh, bubbe, in Bites.

Web & Print Production Manager Meghan Quinn

19 The Last Sportswriter. Neal Pollack lays his NFL championship bets. If he put Obama down on Intrade, I might actually listen

Advertising Art Director Sandy Wachs

20 Eco Topic. Our Miss Coco drinks her way through the last days of GWB. Say, is there anything left for him to fuck up? There is!

Classified Production Artist Tac Phun Contributing Artists and Photographers Bob Aul, Jordan Crane, Scott Gandell, John Gilhooley, Alexx Henry, Maura Lanahan, Gary Leonard, Melodie McDaniel, Joe McGarry, Luke McGarry, Nathan Ota, Ethan Pines, Josh Reiss, Rosheila Robles, Gregg Segal, Elliott Shaffner, Bill Smith, Ted Soqui

ADVERTISING Sales Director Mark Kochel markk@lacitybeat.com Sales Manager Amit Mehta amitm@lacitybeat.com Co-op Advertising Director Spencer Cooper Music & Entertainment Sales Manager Jon Bookatz Business Development Manager Diana James Account Executive Sarah Stacey Classified Supervisor Michael DeFillippo

to him!

LA&E

21 Seven Days. She’s Julie, and she’ll be your cruise director. 22 Film. Andy Klein on the absence of Solace. (No word on Daniel Craig’s beefcake quotient.) 28 Third Degree. Gabrielle Paluch and comic icon Lynda Barry in a don’t-miss interview about creativity (that’s not meandering) and wind (that doesn’t blow). Plus a small selection of gallery tidbits for you to enjoy, in Sketches!

29 Stage. Don Shirley says you can take the man out of La Mancha … . Plus all the latest reviews, in Currently Playing! 30 Music. Chris Morris places his hope in Mavis Staples, in Sonic Nation. Your music to-do list: Schoenkopf on Charlie Wadhams,

Paluch on Marnie Sterns, and Nathan Solis on And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Dead. Garmon is entranced by Tangerine Dream and Solis is ear-raped (in a good way) by Starfucker, in Live Reviews. Joshua Sindell gives you a week’s worth of rawk, in NightBeat. A greasy pile of new reviews, in Merch. And Garmon won’t let go of Safari Sam’s pantleg – like the sweetest Rottweiler! – in Clubland.

Classifieds

35 Advertising Spectacular! Hey! Do you maybe need a job? Or some medical marijuana? 36 Jonesin’ Crosswords and Real Astrology. Here are things for you to pass the time with, while you look for a job, or are stoned. TAKE MY PICTURE, GARY LEONARD

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THE MORE THINGS CHANGE

“The word ‘traitor’ comes to mind.” Achtung, Baby What an excellent look at the political economic challenges that we face in 2009 [Mick Farren’s “Truth, Justice, and the New American Way,” Nov. 6]. What can we do? Looking at economic conditions in deeper, more informed, less partisan ways is imperative. Realizing the importance of maintaining our attention level and personal investment in the political situation will be crucial. As progressives, our political maturity has to match our newly proven American grassroots leadership. So it’s awesome to see L.A. CityBeat hitting the ground running with an outstanding policy piece. Kudos. –Diegonomics Via lacitybeat.com Lemme Hear That Dirty Word: Socialism! The reason they found public support for a $7 billion school bond was because of the low 55 percent approval threshold and the fact that 60 percent of the voters have never seen a property tax bill [Marc B. Haefele’s “Q, Rated,” Nov. 6]. It’s easy to OK spending someone else’s money. –dcoffin Via lacitybeat.com Smarten Up I think you’ll find that Prop. 1A replaces Prop. 1 [“CityBeat Recommends: Endorsements ’08,” Oct. 30]. Even the most lackluster reporter should have discovered that. I like your paper, but feel that sometimes you think readers are dumber than I suspect they are. You might consider having your editor enhance the intellectual tone of articles, and see how readers respond. –Catherine Via e-mail Warriors, Come Out to Play This piece is unfocused in structure, thin in substance, bereft of a point of view, careless in factual detail, and bitchy in tone [Nathaniel Page’s “Weekend With the Warriors,” Oct. 23]. Sort of like an ill-tempered non sequitur, only longer. To borrow an observation from playwright John Bolton, your sentences were complete – they had subjects and predicates. But what was the object? You fooled us all right, Mr. Page. We took you at your word. Silly us. We accepted you as a Minuteman who believed in our country’s sovereignty and the rule of law. So yes, we were foolish. But what were you? You entered our midst pretending to be one thing while harboring something else in your heart. The word “traitor” comes to mind. Sneaking past our vetting process makes you no more

of a Minuteman than stealing a Social Security number makes an illegal an American citizen. The most annoying aspect of your piece is the ill-concealed contempt you direct at better men than yourself – men who have done your fighting for you in the service of our country, and who are still willing to put themselves at risk to protect it. I’m thinking in particular of Joe, who seems to be one of your favorite targets. I’ve stood several watches with him, and I’ve never heard him express anything resembling the sentiments you attribute to him. If some of these guys are old, slow, and overweight, remember they were serving our country (that includes you, Buster!) long before you were born. “Geriatric” or not, they’re still better men than you, because they’re willing to give themselves to a cause greater than personal ambition. You, however, write as though you had no skin in the game. I won’t speculate on your motives for pretending to be “one of our ilk,” but patriotism doesn’t appear to be among them. –True Via lacitybeat.com Nathaniel Page deserves consideration for a Pulitzer. One of the most ironic statements in the article came from Rick, who insisted, “We are not right wing loons.” For real? Any sane or rational person concerned about so-called “illegal immigration” would consider the cause – namely the glaring inequities of NAFTA and similar trade agreements, the dearth of family planning, and the effects of global warming. They would encourage the growth of labor unions south of the border. Barack Obama and his Democratic allies address all of these issues. John McCain does not. If the Minutemen were really concerned about addressing the problem, they’d join forces with labor leaders and elect Obama. But instead, the Minutemen engage in hate-filled, violent rhetoric that sounds like something from the KKK. More than any other group, the Minutemen embody all the core beliefs of the GOP. Obama is not the issue of this election. Far more important is what sort of country we want to live in. I love this country too much to turn it over to psychotics like the Minutemen and their party of choice, the GOP. –William Joseph Miller Los Angeles

BY STEVE LOWERY

Monday, November 3 Just one day until the election and people are hungry for change. Really. People are so hungry they will actually eat cash of any sort, and while this may not be so good for one’s digestive tract, it does mean we’ve finally found a use for those foxy and delicious Susan B. Anthony dollars. But the people? They’re hungry. A story in today’s L.A. Times chronicles the high demand at local food banks: Folks who run Pacoima’s Meet Each Need With Dignity say requests for food have doubled in a year, while at the Valley Food Bank demand has gone from serving 55,000 families last year to more than 67,000 this year. Valley Food Bank once had a 60-day supply of canned and nonperishable goods; it’s now down to 30 days. And as demand has jumped so has the competition for donations. The Valley Food Bank was scheduled to get 350 turkeys before Thanksgiving from an Indian tribe, but the Indians pulled the turkeys and gave them somewhere else. Hmmmm. An Indian promises something then takes it back; giving something and then ungiving, as it were. You know what that makes them? Turkeys. Tuesday, November 4 I have a friend from Hawaii – no, not him – who I play this little game with. Anytime he complains about something, say, his car gets a flat tire, I say, “Yeah, but you’ve got a flat tire in Hawaii.” The suffix changes everything. It’s a game I got from my AfricanAmerican friends who would do much the same whenever anyone would wax on about the old days, say something like “The 1950s were a more innocent time,” to which my black friends would add “unless you were black.” So, tonight, we have elected a black president and everything has changed ... unless you’re gay. Funny: everyone is so busy slapping themselves on the backs, invoking the name of Martin Luther King Jr. by saying we’ve realized his dream of a nation that has overcome its fear and small-mindedness, and all the while anti-gay measures have passed in Florida, Arkansas, Arizona, and, bless our homophobic souls, here in blue California. And they didn’t just pass. They paaaaased; the Florida measure, which like our Prop. 8 restricts marriage to heterosexuals, got 62 percent of the vote. All of it just goes to show how resilient human beings are when it comes to finding new people to hate. So, just stop quoting Dr. King, because no one seems to remember that the “I Have A Dream” speech ends with him saying he dreams of a day when freedom comes to “all of God’s children.” Instead, I suggest any time you’re feeling like we’ve progressed past hate, remember Dr. King’s other wise words: “Just shut the fuck up.” Wednesday, November 5 And enough with the White House pets.

Send letters to editor@lacitybeat.com or do it up old school: Letters to the Editor, LA CITYBEAT, 5209 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90036.

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Thursday, November 6 Now that the election is history and has made history – unless you’re gay – we can get back to what we love to do best: blame television. A study published today in the journal Pediatrics by the Santa Monicabased RAND Corporation says teenagers who watch television programs with sexual content are much more likely to be involved in pregnancy. Sexual content was defined as depictions of sex as well as dialogue about sex or discussion about sex, which means just about any show on TV including Sesame Street and its foxy and delicious Maria. You know what else has a lot of sexual content? Shakespeare. The Old Testament. Look, the reason kids who watch a lot of sexual content on TV are more likely to have sex is not because they watch sexual content, it’s because they watch a lot of TV. They’re boooored. They have long stretches of nothing to do in their lives and that is usually when sex happens. That’s why births skyrocket nine months after blackouts. It’s why they call it a “pregnant pause.â€? Friday, November 7 About 2,000 folks show up at an antiProp. 8 demonstration and march in Long Beach. It’s just one of many this weekend. The Long Beach march is distinguished by the positive vibe and cleverness of its participants – lots of handholding and nuzzling of gay-type peoples, along with great signs like “I only want to have one wifeâ€? (swipe at the Mormon Church, main funder of Prop. 8); “If I were a chicken, I’d have more rightsâ€? (unless you’re a gay chicken); and, my personal favorite, “You done pissed off the queers!â€? Saturday, November 8 Blown. Sunday, November 9 Since all politics is local, the new president-elect might want to read Earl Ofari Hutchinson’s column written in this week’s L.A. Daily News. In it, Hutchinson begs developer Rick Caruso to run against Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa because, Hutchinson writes, “there are legions of voters fed up with his media grandstanding and self-serving, it’s-allabout-me careerism. But most of all because Villaraigosa forgot why he got to City Hall.â€? You may remember, when Villaraigosa was elected about four years ago, that was hailed as momentous and historic since he was the first Latino elected mayor in L.A. Now Hutchinson, who is black, is begging Caruso, who is white, to run against Villaraigosa. History is all very nice, but it doesn’t last very long; it is, by definition, in the past. People live in the potholed, traffic-laden, unemployed now, and they want someone to take care of that. Mayor Tony? I dunno. He always seems to show up at the right places, look the right way, say the right thing; but as far as actually doing stuff, I dunno. Hutchinson writes, “Four years later, city residents are still waiting for that hope and the promises to be fulfilled. Streets and freeways look like parking lots most of the day. South L.A. is still one of the most neglected areas of the city. Neighborhood councils are as toothless as ever. Crime has dropped and policeminority relations have improved. But that’s mostly due to efforts of police Chief William Bratton.â€? What he’s saying is, not much has changed. Unless you’re gay.âœś

MONDAY

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McCain-Palin Wingnuts Mourn Obama’s Granny At least America’s fringe-right conservatives will show a bit of those family values we hear so much about when, say, the Democratic presidential nominee’s ailing grandmother dies, at age 87, right? Right? Oh, sorry, what were we thinking? Happy black president’s day eve, wingnuts. From, obviously, the Free Republic website: t 4FSJPVTMZ IBT BOZPOF BDUVBMMZ TFFO UIJT woman in recent years? If Obama has some of his thugs guarding her (and if there is, indeed, a body) I hope they do an autopsy to make sure Granny’s passing was a natural event. t 4P #BSSZ HPFT BOE TFF T HSBOOZ (SBOOZ EJFT EBZ CFGPSF FMFDUJPO 4IF JT QSPCBCMZ one know who really knows where he was born. Well as the church lady used to say.�isn’t that special� t 4IF XBT TXJOEMFE JOUP SBJTJOH TPNFPOF else’s child. I do not believe that hussein is half white. t 4IF XBT BMTP B DPNNVOJTU TZNQBUIJ[FS along with her husband, a long and proud tradition of socialists. Oh, and good friends with Frank Marshall Davis, a signed up Communist, who they JOUSPEVDFE MJUUMF #BSSZ UP 0OF IFMM PG B woman, yup. t .VSEFSFE *U T OPU NVSEFS XIFO JU T GPS the chosen one. The dems will blame it on lack of universal health care and get a double bang for the buck. Obama will forgive her racism and find another family member to use and throw under the bus. –Ken Layne Sarah Palin Releases Medical Records Fax From Some Doctor 4P NVDI OFXT GSPN EPPNFE MPTFS TOPXCJMMZ 4BSBI 1BMJO UPOJHIU )FS SPHVF campaign is going super-rogue, by, uh, getting her own investigator to release a new investigation saying that, actually, she did not abuse her power with the DSB[Z PCTFTTJPO UP m SF IFS FY CSPUIFS JO MBX BOE PI TPNF MPDBM EPDUPS TFOU B GBY to Anderson Cooper or something, on Election Eve. *U T BMM CFDBVTF PG "OESFX 4VMMJWBO BOE she is in great shape and surely had all those babies herself, even the magical new baby, and she is in good health to MPTF UIF (01 OPNJOBUJPO JO BOE NBZCF FWFO –KL TUESDAY Barack Obama Is President ‌ of AMERICA 7:59 PM: With the West Coast polls closed and Obama already holding JODMVEJOH 7JSHJOJB y XFMM ZPV DBO count, even if you’re very wasted right now. California has 55 electoral votes, 8BTIJOHUPO TUBUF IBT )BXBJJ IBT and Oregon has 7. You can add that to FMFDUPSBM WPUFT $// TBZT IF IBT right now. We have a new president. His OBNF JT #BSBDL 0CBNB –KL McCain Concedes, With Dignity, This Is Awkward Ugh, must we do this, too? Yes, we will watch John McCain, who is looking down with disgust at his supporters, who are booing and hissing. It is no fun to lose a

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NO ON PROP. 8 RALLY All week long Twenty thousand one day, a mere 12,000 another, and the No on 8 protests are here (they’re queer, get used to it) and settling in nicely, thank you, like a drummer on your couch “just temporarily, man.” They’re down in Lake Forest. They’re in Long Beach. They’re in Silver Lake. And they’re outside the Mormon Temple every single night. It’s massive, spontaneous, a post-Stonewall Stonewall without the drag queen riots. Everything’s better with drag queens! I blame everyone. The miserable campaign run by the brain trust behind No on 8. Mouthbreathers who numbingly repeat utter bullshit about how Prop. 8 would have mandated what preachers could say in the pulpit (for real!). Those disgusting ads that said to think of the children, those poor precious innocents who would be taught that men could marry other men – oh my stars! – when in fact men being able to marry other men was, for a minute, the law of the land. And hey! Don’t forget to blame black people! The liberal coalition is going to take a lot more than “healing.” Gay friends are spiteful and angry, actually ruing having voted for Obama. They want to punish African Americans who proclaimed with their overwhelming 70 percent vote that gay families are separate and unequal. One L.A. Times op-ed this week, by a writer who is both black and lesbian, proclaimed that gay marriage had a white bias – that letting gay people marry would do nothing to stop people getting pulled over for being black. It was infuriating and muttonheaded, as if civil rights were a zero sum. You know what else doesn’t stop people getting pulled over for being black? The polio vaccine. No more polio vaccine! Dick. Karl Rove tried for a decade – especially with the Fear of the Brown Planet, which is now yesterday’s news – but we are finally divided and conquered. In the city of Los Angeles, we had more than 82 percent turnout – and we actually voted Prop. 8 down, 57 to 42 percent. We live in what’s (ostensibly) a civilized place – where (ostensibly) when one of us is raised

up, we are all raised up. Where we’re not running around like jealous six-year-olds throwing screamy tantrums because someone got a pony – even though we already have one. Despite the fact that we’re blessed to be here among right-thinking people, you are going to see a whole host of new Log Cabin members – those are the Republicans who are gay and self-hating, like Dave Chapelle’s blind and black Klansman – joining up purely out of spite. Like PUMAs (Party Unity My Ass, the Hillary hags who had themselves a royal hissy and voted for McCain), I predict, a lot of our queer buddies are probably going to join a party that thinks they’re going to hell. I’m indulging in my most palpable disgust with the execrable No on 8 campaign, run howlingly badly by people who seemed to believe they could trick voters into denying Prop. 8 so long as they never uttered the words “gay marriage” or featured a gay person in their ads. If you’re not willing to say what it is you’re actually espousing – if you feel that the people you’re representing should be hidden, that you can base a campaign on sleight of hand and deception – you deserve to lose. Except that you, in your self-appointed roles as managers of the losing campaign, diminished us all. “It had the feel of a lily-white, liberal campaign,” Prop. 8 strategist Frank Schubert told the L.A. Times. And he would know. It’s not that gay marriage has a white bias. It was the No on fucking 8 campaign. Only at the very end did the campaign try to illuminate this central point – that the drive to marry whomever we love is a basic tenet of civil rights, from slaves who were bred to one another regardless of their desires right on through the years to Loving vs. Virginia, which only in 1967, when President-Elect Barack Obama was not quite six years old, proclaimed that laws banning interracial marriage were unconstitutional. You know: those laws that banned interracial marriage because some bigotty morons thought the Bible forbade it. Now? Forty years later? Only assholes in Wyoming (long story) will say so out loud. (And that is why we should put the toxic waste from Yucca Mountain there.) Fuck you, too. –Rebecca Schoenkopf

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N<<B<KK< contest. But good god, his supporters are garbage. McCain looks like he’s going to cry. What a bunch of trash. Good god, they’re a mob. A mob. They never even liked him, and only really came around when he stupidly hired a moron to fill out the ticket. He won’t mention Palin! 11:25 PM — Oh, finally he mentions her, the grinning jackass, and the crowd goes MAD. 11:25 PM — The wingnuts are writing McCain’s obit right now. 11:26 PM — They will gather ’round this stupid fool, Sarah Palin, who shouldn’t be allowed to night-manage a Circle K. 11:27 PM — But old Walnuts tries to go out with class. He knows he made his mistakes. 11:27 PM — More angry boos. 11:27 PM — Because he mentioned Obama and Biden in a nice way. 11:27 PM — Boos, chants, USA USA USA, angry shouts. 11:27 PM — 333-155, that’s the CNN ticker now. 11:28 PM — He doesn’t allow Palin to speak. He hates her stupid guts. 11:29 PM — Off they go, to tragic Star Wars Darth Vader death music. What is this? –KL Oh Jesus Christ ‌ Obama’s Victory Speech You did it, Liberals! Thanks to your help, your hard work, this country will officially be renamed “The American Caliphateâ€? in January 2009. Forty years ago your associate editor’s neighborhood in Southeast D.C. was on fire, nightly. The MLK assassination did not “go overâ€? very well here. But right now, there are two fireworks displays running strong and people honking their horns, for fun. People get so worked up about things, don’t they? Well let’s stop rambling and see what the new president has to say. 11:48 PM — Hey, CNN, this article is called “Barack Obama’s Victory Speech,â€? not “Anderson Cooper Giving Bedroom Eyes to Roland Martin.â€? Enough. Make Obama come on. 11:50 PM — Oh right, now that Obama is an American president, we have to hate him. Ahem: “OBAMA IS A WAR CRIMINAL.â€? Catchy! 11:52 PM — Oh man, CNN is showing all of the hippie Democrats screaming at George W. Bush outside the White House gates. What do they want from him now, ANOTHER HANDOUT? 11:57 PM — Ah, Mr. Big Shot finally decides to show up. With the fam. Michelle is wearing a red furry apron! 11:59 PM — He tells his family to get the hell out of the way already, he has to talk to the nuts. 11:59 PM — “I am your leader, mortals. Feed me LIVE BABIES.â€? 12:00 PM — “Thanks for voting for me. Those lines were long. I would not have waited in them, because I have a life.â€? 12:01 PM — This day, this moment, this nanosecond, Change has become a word in the English language. 12:02 PM — “I got a gracious call from Senator McCain.â€? Crowd offers thoroughly guttural “MEHHHHH.â€? 12:02 PM — He looks forward to working with Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin, and he hopes to work with them. No, scratch that, he hopes that Palin just goes away to her hell cave. 12:03 PM — He thanks Michelle Obama for being his Wife. 12:03 PM — He tells his daughters that he will give them a puppy, finally, so in return they can just shut up for the next few years while he heals Racism. 12:04 PM — Thanks his white grandmother, depicted above. 12:05 PM — Thanks his staffers for making him win. 12:06 PM — BUT ABOVE ALL ‌ 12:07 PM — I thank you people, again, for voting for me and making other humans

vote for me. Oh there’s a white gal crying in the crowd! There’s Oprah standing next to a bunch of Poors! There’s Big Ben! There’s Parliament! 12:07 PM — Here’s the standard, “Our world is near apocalypse. Nothing is affordable. We have more wars now than all the wars in history, combined. We have cancer. There is literally nothing good about life right nowâ€? setup, followed by the killer “Meh, we’ll work on all that stuffâ€? denouement. 12:08 PM — Oh here he goes, it’s starting; he says we “allâ€? have to work harder now. GRRR we knew he would do this. DON’T TAX ME FOR WORKING HARD, NOOBAMA. Let me enjoy my drink of bacon grease right here alone. 12:12 PM — He thanks that 106-year-old lady in Atlanta for voting for him. This guy knows how to strike a nerve. If he really had wanted to go for the kill, though, he would’ve mentioned the 109-year-old lady who voted for him. But he is Humble. 12:13 PM — Man alive, this guy can give a speech. This is getting BRUTAL. 12:15 PM — The end. The last few minutes of that speech were probably the best of his career. Yes we can. Oh and there’s Joe Biden! He can do whatever he wants, too. 12:18 PM — You know, it’s really rude of Barry not to tell his wife about that huge red carpet that died on her dress. Jill Biden’s lime is more preferable tonight. 12:21 PM — Wonkette roommate operative “Robâ€? says he wants to give Joe Biden’s old mum a hug. Rob is so weird sometimes. 12:22 PM — Barry just kissed Joe Biden, gross. 12:22 PM — [Deep breath] AHHHHH IT’S OVER BABY! OBAMA WON! THANK YOU EVERLOVING JESUS IT IS FINALLY OVER! GAAAAHHHHH! 12:23 PM — That’s all for now. –JN WEDNESDAY Barack Obama Wins ‌ Indiana, Too! Indiana. With 99% of the precincts reporting, Indiana has gone blue/black or whatever new thing we will call states. Indiana. It is 2:09 a.m., on Wednesday, and Indiana is in the tank. Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Nevada ‌ it’s 349-159, at the moment. It is a massive win. –KL Rahm Emanuel, Next White House Chief of Staff? Hmm, very interesting! Rahm Emanuel loudly pooh-poohed Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy — you know, the deal where you actually pretend that states besides Ohio and Florida matter in electing a president — and now he has been offered the job of Chief of Staff to that same strategy’s biggest benefactor, Barack Obama. Of course Emanuel is from Chicago, just like Barack Obama, so he is well versed in CHICAGOSTYLE POLITICS (i.e. cooking deep-dish pizzas for William Ayers in Tony Rezko’s slum kitchens, with Louis Farrakhan). This is an interesting-ish move, given that Rahm Emanuel seemed to want to be Speaker of the House someday. Now he is “agonizingâ€? over whether or not to take the job Obama offered him. DO IT DO IT DO IT, the next four years will be like Entourage meets The West Wing. –Sara K. Smith Sarah Palin Returns to Alaska Just a few short months ago, your Wonkette loved the snow dwarf Sarah Palin and all the adorable scrapes she got into — for example, being sexily “rear-endedâ€? by a complete stranger outside Anchorage. But then one fateful day in late August, cruel John McCain had to nominate Sarah Palin for vice president, and overnight the charming and harmless governor of a charming and harmless state transformed into a snarling, sneering peddler of ignorant racist garbage, and we were sad. But now former VP candidate Sarah Palin

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N<<B<KK< has two whole years left as governor of Alaska, which means she can get back to reachin’ across that aisle and workin’ on the things that matters most to Alaskans, like generating more government checks for them to enjoy. Unfortunately, the price of oil is waaaay down from its peak, which means lower state revenues for Alaska, and presumably smaller payments to each resident who makes the incredible sacrifice of living in that frigid backwater. Also, many of Sarah Palin’s former Democratic allies are a little sore that she was such a horrible nasty anger-bear during her nine-week campaign for vice president, but they’ll get over it. –SKS McCain Campaign Knocks ‘Wasilla Hillbillies Looting Neiman Marcus From Coast to Coast’ Oh, Sarah Palin, your trashy ass may be back in Alaska today, but you’ve left enough enemies down here in the contiguous U.S. — the real, pro-America America — to keep Wonkette going until Christmas. From this wonderful Newsweek collection of campaign trails, we learn today that Palin’s shopping spree was a lot worse than the original outrageous $150,000 orgy of luxury. Palin’s behavior is exactly what happens when some ignorant white trash wins the lottery: total excess, ending in bankruptcy. But she bankrupted an entire major political party, ha ha. Also, her behavior is exactly like that of a gangsta-rapper who briefly hits the big time and immediately covers themselves in golden trinkets. Good god, Sarah Palin is human garbage: “One senior aide said that Nicolle Wallace had told Palin to buy three suits for the convention and hire a stylist. But instead, the vice presidential nominee began buying for herself and her family — clothes and accessories from top stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. According to two knowledgeable sources, a vast majority of the clothes were bought by a wealthy donor, who was shocked when he got the bill. Palin also used low-level staffers to buy some of the clothes on their credit cards.� A disgusted McCain aide calls the Palins “Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast.� McCain staffers tell Newsweek that Palin spent “tens of thousands� more than the original $150,000 reported before the election, as well as “$20,000 to $40,000� in clothes specifically for her idiot husband, Todd. TWENTY-THOUSAND TO FORTYTHOUSAND DOLLARS for a man’s clothes. Jesus christ it is a good thing Todd Palin doesn’t live in California, or his gay Hollywood marriage would be illegal. –KL

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Obamas Will Adopt Precious Rescue Puppy, Destroy American Businesses Oh look at those Obamas once again “doing the right thing� and being decent or whatever. The terrorist cell “PETA� just sent us this email, claiming that “Obama and his wife, Michelle, have announced that they will adopt a rescued dog for their daughters instead of patronizing a pet store or breeder.� Oh la dee dah, President Hopesa-lot, going to save an innocent puppy (probably a “street organizer� single-parent puppy) from euthanasia while shutting down Joe the Breeder’s puppy mill, HENGHH? Last night, of course, Barack Obama promised his daughters they would finally be getting that puppy, which will live with them, in the White House, because Barack Obama is the president-elect. But instead of supporting the grim Puppy Mill trade with its muck-eyed petstore spawn, the Obamas are going to get a rescue dog — you know, a stray at a

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shelter or an abandoned animal rescued by one of those nice rescue-pet groups. Barack Obama is, so far, the first American president who can make reasonable people cry with his family’s choice of a house pet. –KL Sarah Palin Thought Africa Was A Country, Not A Continent ‌ And this unbelievable nugget comes from a Fox News reporter. That Sarah Palin thought Africa was a country, not a continent. God bless you, Carl Cameron, for promising an “avalancheâ€? of Palin revelations that had been off-the-record until the election was over. She threw temper tantrums and was unmanageable. She didn’t prepare for her Couric interview. And did we mention that she thought Africa was a country, and not a continent? Wait until she hears about Australia: It’s both. –JN THURSDAY Sure He’ll Take That Barack Obama is being a dick by making McCain lose even more electoral votes. Obama probably earned one (1) electoral vote from Nebraska, which divvies up its total prize by district. –JN FRIDAY Lieberman Camp Calls Potential Punishment ‘Unacceptable’ Joe Lieberman has spent every day of the last two years sliming the Democratic Party in op-eds, interviews, campaign events, and Republican political conventions; he has called the current president-elect dangerous and unpatriotic in recent months. He has done all of this because back in 2006 he lost a state primary and watched as major players in the Democratic party put their weight behind the party candidate, which is what happens in politics. Also, he loves War. This is the larger picture. Now: why won’t Harry Reid strip away this asshat’s chairmanship already, and why is Lieberman pretending that he has leverage? One would think that a Supermajority could shed the one 66-year-old virgin who actively campaigned against it. And with that we have today’s latest development! “Senator Lieberman’s preference is to stay in the caucus, but he’s going to keep all his options open,â€? a Lieberman aide said. “McConnell has reached out to him and at this stage his position is he wants to remain in the caucus but losing the chairmanship is unacceptable.â€? HA HA HA HA HA HA HA. Harry Reid will end up giving Lieberman a full seven chairmanships. That’s all. –JN Liberals All Boned After Obama Win Every terrible oversexed gay hedonist dildoslave recreational-abortionist Democrat in America had sex with every other Democrat in America on Tuesday night in order to celebrate the election of our emperor-clown, Barack Obama. Apparently this is common behavior among humans, this “having sex for funâ€? thing. Humans also do it when they are sad, or happy, or bored, or want to “change the topic of conversation.â€? Gazillions of American living rooms were drenched in sexual fluids by 11:01 p.m. Eastern on November 4, according to a few isolated anecdotal reports. How many times did you have sex, dear reader? If your answer is “less than 15,â€? you are probably the notorious Connecticut virgin Joe Lieberman. –SKS Brought to you by Truck Nutz and wonkette. com.

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When you lose a beloved pet, you know. You know the exquisite, agonizing loss of unconditional love, barely experienced elsewhere in this life, coupled with the incomprehensibility of its passing at what the human mind perceives to be merely a child’s age. When Al Carveth returned from WWII to find that his expected job as a mortician had vanished, he and wife Lela started Cal Pet Crematory out of love for their “children;� their many four-legged companions.

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Eclectic is the word that best describes Euphuria Pet Salon. Lisa Bodhaine, the owner, is a friendly, knowledgeable small business owner that makes every customer feel at home (that goes for the people too). She and her staff take the utmost care while shampooing and styling your best friend. The work stations are open air and welcoming. They’re famous for their hydro bath massages, pedicures and hairstyling. Shop until you drop: besides the great care your pet is given you can shop for clothing and other cool toys while you wait. And if your furry friend is hungry, you can choose from a countertop of gourmet treats that will spoil them rotten. Euphuria is an enchanted place that your best buddy will love. You and your pet will leave with a smile on both your faces.

www.theloftydog.com The premier place for dogs, a grand and noble space, and not just a daycare! This 7,000 sf palace boasts a Country Club for dogs and their parents featuring a membership-only 5,000 sf indoor dog park, Wi-Fi accessible for parents who want to visit, play, read or BBQ. Attend their once-amonth PaW-ty where parents and pets can socialize. The Loftydog offers doggie day care and overnight boarding. Book now for Holiday Boarding as space is filling fast. Our “Barker Dog Park� is conveniently located at the Barker Block! Come join the fun, Pooches. Bark back at www.theloftydog.com

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C ULT O B J E C T Tom Graeff was a charming fellow. He was handsome and chiseled, a would-be Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film Also, he was sadder.

screening of Teenagers Bride Creem

of the Monster which Teenagers

The Late, Late Show The Best Years of Our Lives or David and Lisa

PAPER CORPSE

O K A Y , W E G E T IT . L E T ’ S R O LL T HIS J OIN T K E E P W A T C HIN G T H E S KIE S

Scarlet Street

Teenagers, which could

mea culpa Teenagers from Outer Space Teenagers Mystery Science Theater 3000

CityBeat Teenagers Scarlet I Was

Street and Psychtronic Video

a Teenaged Werewolf mise-en-scene was Keep Watching the Skies, is ➤

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dorks of MST3K and many more, he’d stared long into this particular abyss. The Project (tomgraeff.com) is a staggeringly detailed, warmly sympathetic attempt to reconstruct Tom Graeff’s life as curated by Tushinski, a documentary

played Thor, and Ursula Hansen, who

offered him a job as an assistant on thriller that forms a considerable part of

and got the two of them together after

a car park attendant who gets killed by

knew. What happened to him after he left Hollywood.”

things to say about him.” Graeff’s script began to make the rounds. “He changed the titled a number of

pursuing my own agenda for a moment. What is it about this man that exerts such

announcing he’d be speaking at different churches, where he would proclaim and explain. When the editors at the it from any further copies, so it’s not in

destroyed him in a lot of ways. He wanted to things, to be somebody,

“For me, he reminded me of myself,” not pay them. Most of the actors who

TUR N M E O N, D EAD M A N

needed to be something much bigger in order to change the world. Nobody knows

were gonna get this and that from him . Tom $5000 for him and his wife to play heartache for Tom and this was on top of can’t do. That

he was gay and pretty

get the money back. There was a long,

read some of the letters he wrote and the God. He decided in order to

with some of the early gay rights groups talked a lot about killing himself for quite a long while, but the people around him thought he was kidding and saw it as bids

“That

this myself, and that really cemented me methods. He thought pills might be a good thing and he talked about the car and told could about him.” a friend of his he was carrying a hose hearing it about it all the time.”

when he was one or two years old. His father bopped around from job to job and

“but Warners changed it to

that got him. “The thing was,” insisted

bad, and though some few praised showed as a second feature, mostly in

the strength of his featurette, fraternity brothers. came after, a wooly fantasy concerning pieces of candy

I W AS A TEENAGE JESUS “What Tom would do is put out a lot of

premiered at the Lido Theater in Newport

put in the and the

and the ,

entire world would come as little children to the new messiah. “He later tried to change his name to all the documents and court records. The judge said no. There were some articles who knew him said he was perfectly

the

rumors about Tom for years, read really

often so, but Graeff would know fewer such moments as the years passed.

really thought that it said something. He’d show it with his short, .”

that, got ahold of Bryan Grant, who

church when they heard he was coming,

somewhere and remembered people howling with laughter. They snuck out of the theater. This was supposed to be Bryan’s calling card in Hollywood and

least one suicide before La Mesa police

was so excited to hear of such a wonderful thing .

make a

SH OT AT STARD O M got him noticed by

interesting little story in about this. The ad is a long, elaborate explanation of how this came to happen.

A N G E L, A N G E L, D O W N W E GO

➤

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to take classes at Pendle Hill, a Quaker school in Pennsylvania, was accepted, attended 1962-63 and caused nothing but problems.” The retreat’s elders didn’t take to their new charge telling people he was the reincarnated Christ. He’d also send tracts he’d written on school stationery to Quakers notable, who wrote back telling of receiving weird communications. “The widow of the then-president remembered for me what an awful time they’d had, since they just could not get rid of Tom,” Jim noted. “Finally, they called the police, who threatened him with arrest if he came back. He barricaded himself into a dormitory.” Tom landed in jail and stayed there about two months. Once out, he went back to Pendle Hill in spite of warnings, and was picked up by authorities and any diagnosis,” remarked the diligent biographer, but “it appears as if he was given electroshock treatments in some county hospital that’s since been torn down.” Tom was released to his parents and brought back to California. This was 1964. He wound up working with noted schlockmeister David L. Hewitt on Wizard of Mars as editor. Reports of Graeff’s doings are thin until 1968, when he’d apparently picked up a set of newer, younger friends impressed by his movie-biz connections. screenplay called Orf, which he offered for sale via an ad in Variety for the then-unbelievable price of $500,000. Tom was interviewed by Times gossip columnist Joyce Haber, who ridiculed his pretension. Tom retaliated with an open letter to Robert Wise in the Hollywood Reporter, which angered Haber, who raked up the old scandal about Tom trying to change his name to Jesus Christ years before. “Tom became persona non grata in Hollywood,” saids Jim simply. “No one would give him money.” “A number of things contributed to his suicide, including the fact he couldn’t get Orf made,” Jim noted sadly. “Instead, he made a long-playing record of a lecture he’d given about how man is truly bisexual and touted it as a cure for sexual problems. It was sold mail-order and apparently broadcast several times on local radio stations in 1968 and 1969.” Tom belonged to a number of early gay rights organizations in Los Angeles and, according to Jim, liked to spy on people

became obsessed with one, following him to San Diego before being spurned.

Mix business with pleasure.

T HIS IS W H E R E I C A M E IN “Someone who knew him in Los Angeles came down to see him and was shocked at how Tom was living,” month of his subject’s life. “Tom never had a paying job and nobody knew how he made his money, but he could sell anything to anybody and always lived well. He ended up on a dead-end street. I think at that point there was nothing left for him. He’d tried to be somebody important and couldn’t. He tried to love somebody who didn’t love him back. I don’t think he saw any future for himself. “I see Tom as one of many, many people who came to Hollywood trying to do it their own way and were crushed.” Jim said, summing up. “Teenagers has

become a cult because of its complete earnestness and because of David Love. I think a lot of people who saw that movie saw a labor of love that one person put together for this effeminate and goofy young man.” The Graeff cult has Tushinski to thank for working to preserve Tom’s at the UCLA Film & Television Library as a result of his efforts. He hopes, in time, that his diligence will result in a a man whose life is a kind of urban archeological puzzle, with hints of the weird and the fantastic tucked just below the surface. For Jim, what Tom has to say to us is simple: “Don’t put everything you are into your visions because that will end up destroying you.” ✶ Help solve the riddle of Tom Graeff. If

unhappy facility for falling in love with unavailable straight men and, in fact,

contact Jim at info@tomgraeff.com.

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Milder mouths should look past pickles altogether and instead order the raftei, two huge hunks of stewed pork belly. The blocks of belly are terrifically tender (in part because of their fine layers of fat) and made only more so by a few spoonfuls of a mirin and soy Shin Okinawa Izakaya’s foreign fruits sauce broth. In a classic pairing, there’s also a single smear of Japanese mustard BY MILES CLEMENTS hanging near the lip of the bowl that adds in a bit of heat. If bird is more your word, Shin also cooks an equally excellent fried chicken. Each order is piled high with thick cuts of mostly white meat still steaming from the fryer. But what elevates the izakaya standard is the accompanying shikwasa ponzu sauce. Shikwasa is a little citrus native to Okinawa and Taiwan that ties together the tastes of tangerine and grapefruit. The fruit squeezes out a tart, sugary juice that’s a smart cocktail combo and a logical complement to awamori, a distilled rice-based booze similar to shochu. And in the chicken’s dipping sauce, shikwasa is a great match, making for a sweeter but also sharper ponzu sauce that promotes the poultry’s own subtleties. One of the more classic Okinawan options is champuru, which translates to “mix.” In culinary terms, that means stir-fries: quick-fired meals held together with almost enough eggs to sustain an omelet. There’s goya champuru for those who haven’t had enough bitter melon, but also simpler variations like foo champuru, which right orders, Shin’s kitchen is in perfect adds wheat gluten and a whole heap of here’s a pair of shisa watching sync with that extra-sensory experience. vegetables. over Shin Okinawa Izakaya. For the quickest introduction to Perched above the door, the If you play your plates right, dishes Okinawan tastes, order the restaurant’s won’t get much more familiar with statues’ leonine manes are swirled pickled vegetable plate. It’s a trio that together in artful curls, their dogdessert, a course best represented starts first with soft sheets of green like frames positioned against any by beni imo, spheres of purple sweet papaya, then moves onto tender circles potato coated in sesame seeds and ill-willed eaters. Inside, those wards of the okra-like luffa, the same gourd seem to be working, as the restaurant given a quick fry. It’s a supremely you use to slough off that dead winter itself is in good spirits, full of diners understated dessert, and like a skin. (No word on whether it utilizes happily downing plate after plate of number of items at Shin Okinawa the same scrubbing power on your the occasionally unknown tastes of Izakaya, the sweet potato balls are innards.) But the most potent part of Okinawa’s tropical shores. works of foreign flavors. And though the plate is pickled bitter melon. The The izakaya’s style (a focus on the the menu might sometimes leave you crisp green rings more than earn their ocean most obvious in the dried-out parsing pronunciations outside the name, each so shockingly bitter that an usual Japanese lexicon, so long as you blowfish hanging from the rafters) accompanying sliver of pickled plum is a clear reflection of its Okinawan don’t end on a bite of bitter melon, it’s seems like candy in comparison. Still, inspiration. There’s even a map of the all excellent exploration.✶ the bitter melon isn’t unpleasant – it Japanese prefecture painted right on fades fast to an almost peppery punch. Shin Okinawa Izakaya, 1880 W. Carson a dining room wall that captures the Because of that initial power, though, chain of southerly islands in globeSt., Ste. A, Torrance, (310) 618-8357. the bitter melon also makes the plate worthy detail. Photos stuck up above shinokinawaizakaya.com. Open Mon.a worthwhile option near the end of the counter show landscapes of bold Fri., 11:30 a.m.-2 p.m. and daily 5:30 a meal, able to obliterate any flavors blues and emerald greens so brilliant p.m.-midnight. Vegetarian friendly. Beer, loitering on your tongue. they seem almost artificial. Given the wine. Food for two, $20-$50.

PHOTO BY ROSHEILA ROBLES

A NEW GREEN WORLD

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ALUMINUM ANNIVERSARY Downtown’s Ciudad turns 10 this month with an extended celebration of the restaurant’s pre-teen years. In honor of its Too Hot Tamales, the Latin spot will be discounting signature drinks and dishes and also doling out daily prizes like 10 percent off your next visit. Pack in a party of 10 and you’ll get a similar discount, though it’ll be one earned without the shrill thrill of victory. Call (213) 486-5171 for more info. ON CAMPUS UCLA’s Royce Hall finally succumbs to Francophiles on Nov. 20 when Beaujolais Passions takes over to relish the release of the Beaujolais Nouveau 2008. The new batch of the lightweight wine will see a party pairing it with food from the Club Culinaire, a silent auction and entertainment including the comedy of Clara Bijl. Carla Bruni was unavailable for the event as she is already booked for a prank call to Sarah Palin. Visit frenchchamberla.org for details. STIMULATED OpenTable is rolling out a program for our economic Rapture called the Appetite Stimulus Plan. The deal will promote fixed three-course meals ($24 lunches and $35 dinners) aimed at those hit by these tough times (read: everyone). Local participants include Akasha, Comme Ca, Katsuya and a number of other consumer-minded eateries. The offer is open Nov. 17-21. Visit opentable.com for a fuller list of where to save. GREENBACKED In related recessionary news, The New York Time s and other publications around the country ponder the path that the organic revolution will take during this downturn. In a surprise to no one, the Times reports that healthy foods cost more than their junky counterparts. And in an experiment to prove that point, a couple from Encinitas tried eating on just a dollar a day for one month. The husband and wife (both of whom are vegetarians) ended up living mostly on legumes and oatmeal. Though the couple saw some weight loss, the diet was so stressful the woman reportedly “almost cried” after eating a strawberry. Not to be outdone, her husband was said to have laughed uncontrollably after eating a blueberry muffin. –Miles Clements

Tips accepted … send treats to miles@ eatfoodwith.me or visit eatfoodwith.me.

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OUR CHAMPIONSHIP SEASON Nevermind the Cowboys and Chargers. Here’s our playoff pics BY NEAL POLLACK t seems no one knows what’s going on in the NFL, which is pretty strange given that anyone who talks about the NFL has been either playing in, coaching in, or reporting on the NFL for decades. Don’t they pay attention? Of course they do, but the real problem is they’re mostly jocks and therefore mostly fairly dumb, and therefore are actually paying attention to last season. Only around December do people start waking up and realizing that different teams are good now. So that’s why we had the unanimous preseason consensus that the Dallas Cowboys and San Diego Chargers were going to meet in the Super Bowl. The Chargers, said everyone, were just loaded with talent, and I remember an early Monday Night Football game where Tony Kornheiser, before Tony Romo broke what The Onion called his “wittle finguw,� blathered on about how no team in any sport, anywhere, captured the national imagination quite like the Dallas Cowboys did. I wonder if he’s saying that now that Brooks Bollinger is laying hands on center ass. Meanwhile, all it took was one Shawne Merriman injury to expose the Chargers’ defense as eggshell-thin. Also, let’s face it, LaDainian Tomlinson is now broken. There comes a time in every running back’s career, usually before his 30th birthday, where pain trumps skill, and the decline usually happens quickly after that. LT has reached the threshold, and it’s now time to put some new dude with an awesome name through the grinder. We’re probably going to have a postseason without the Cowboys or the Chargers. It’s also quite possible that the Colts or even the Patriots are going to fall short. A new era has dawned, dominated by the other Manning brother. With the NFL season at its midpoint, it’s time for those of us who care to start making our championship-game picks. Those are the real games. The Super Bowl is a carnival afterthought that you have to watch with your cousin’s dumb work friends. The first qualifying indicator, at least for me, came early in the season, when the Arizona Cardinals hosted the Cowboys. That was when a national audience first recognized the Cowboys as a group of poorly coached knuckleheads, and also woke up to the fact that former fundamentalist Christian grocery-store bagger Kurt Warner had somehow undergone another magical and possibly Jesus-based career revival. He had awesome receivers in Anquan Boldin and Larry Fitzgerald, whose names definitely spanned the entire African-American nomenclatural diaspora, and the Cards

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could boast a reasonably good defense and totally solid special-teams unit. Given that the rest of the teams in its division have been playing like walking helmeted turds, and that the many good teams in the NFC Central (Lions excepted) and South are going to spend the rest of the autumn beating the living hell out of one another, I can definitely see the Cards getting a first-round bye and end-zone dancing themselves into a road game for the conference championship. The defending champs will meet them there. Pretty much everyone agrees, at this point, that the Giants rule the NFC. That game they won over the Steelers a couple of weeks ago showed their mettle. Tied 14-14 in the fourth quarter of a brutal tooth-knocker, with their previous two points scored when Pittsburgh’s backup long snapper whipped the ball over the punter’s head and out of the end zone, the Giants had the ball at something like the Pittsburgh 40-yard line. Eli Manning, who generally looks confused getting out of his car before entering the stadium, was obviously distracted by Troy Polamalu’s flouncy hair and the screams of 75,000 drunken Western Pennsylvania hillbillies. Then after the timeout, he came back onto the field and tried to call another timeout. That’s illegal. It looked like the Steelers were going to eat him. On the next snap he staggered around like a kid just off a carousel, and then, naturally, whipped a perfect 30-yard strike to Amani Toomer, who made a miraculous over-theshoulder catch. Soon after, the Giants scored, and the rest of the NFL said, oh, shit, we’re in trouble. In any case, the Steelers came out the following Monday and gobsmacked the not-bad Redskins. They’re going to be the visiting team in the AFC Championship. They’ll be taking a trip to Nashville. After watching the Tennessee Titans totally outclass the Colts on MNF and then methodically grind down the Packers in overtime the following Sunday, I’m pretty much persuaded that Jeff Fisher has finally constructed his perfect game plan, consisting of the three-yard pass thrown by a retiree, a 17-yard run by an endorsementless young horse, a defensive line that eats quarterbacks like pork chops, and a felony-free secondary that lets nothing through. Also, the Titans have great kickers. They’ll be there at the end. Therefore, you have my predictions: Cardinals at Giants, and Steelers at Titans. I’m pretty sure that’s what everyone will be picking at the beginning of next season. They’ll probably be wrong. âœś

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KILL, BABY, KILL! The final gifts of George W. Bush BY COCO TANAKA reak out the fancy arugula, my elitist comrades, because by George, America has elected Mr. Barack Obama. Sweet Zeus, the elation! How many babies were conceived on November 4? We are changed, saved, refreshed, hopeful, better, no longer the world’s riddled archery target. Maybe that sounds Pollyanna, but who cares? I’ve been Obama-drunk for days. Our president-elect inspires in me a stirring and unfamiliar patriotism, dormant since the progressive TV tenure of Jed Bartlet. And now we’ve got a Hollywood beginning: a real, live Bartlet of our own, one who will presumably treat environmental policy with slightly more care than the last guy. This is a time for hugging strangers! Now, is your parade sunny and special, with convertibles and Snoopy floats and 76 trombones? Bask in it, Harold Hill, ’cause I’m calling down the thunder. I’m not talking about the hell-in-a-handcart crapfest Obama is inheriting, though it would be simple enough to bury this nascent sanguinity (it just feels so new!) under the steaming pile of wars, terrorist threats and lurching economy woes, a pile which Obama now gets to shovel up and sculpt into a country. No, I’m talking about sins – especially of the eco variety, because this is Eco Topic! – yet to be committed, and sinful schemes currently brewing inside what is still technically chez Bush. I keep hearing that our long, national nightmare has come to an end, but it’s more like the nebulous limbo between sleep and consciousness, when you wake up in a cold sweat and it takes you a few moments to realize that the terrifying clown doll from Poltergeist is not trying to kill you, and look, daybreak is here and it is stunning, ever so much lovelier

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than the insane world you were just in. Except that ’tween stage, unsure and anxious, lasts 77 godless days. That’s how long the Bush administration had left on their lease at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and they’re going out with a final bang – a last-minute assault on the country that could do more damage than he’s been able to muster in months. Bush has until November 20 to

issue “economically significant” rule changes and another month to issue other changes: plenty of time to giftwrap a few choice cuts of meat for his big industry buddies. His aides have been in a mad dash to alter rules and regulations affecting scads of environmental protections (and abortion rights, and civil liberties, and ... oh hell, everything there is to mess with, he’s messing with). Leave drilling for the incoming sucker – for the next few weeks, the Bush mantra is “Deregulate, baby, deregulate!” So, what else will the Dubya wrecking ball

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careen into before January 20? It’s an eleventh-hour rush to slacken or flat-out erase constraints on industry – constraints that are there for good reason, I promise. If you think the administration couldn’t possibly muck things up much more within a couple months, take it up with the gray wolves, who will once again be target practice in Montana if the renewed push to boot them from the Endangered Species list goes through. (Why, why does Bush hate the dancing wolves so?) The interior department is scurrying to free up millions of acres of untouched federal land for oil and gas exploration. The commercial scallop-fishing industry is pressing to ease catch limits. The National Mining Association is trying to alleviate rules that keep toxic coal waste out of Appalachian streams. One rule would allow power plant emissions to match the highest levels produced by that plant, flooding the atmosphere with millions of tons of Co2 every year. Another would ease limits on emissions from coal-fired power plants near national parks. Weakened pollution controls, expanded limits on airborne lead emissions, relaxed drinkingwater standards, eroded protections for endangered species ... Right this second, every single one of these is under a rush-job review, and if they meet their deadline, there’s really nothing the presidentelect can do about it. Think I’m paranoid? Flash back to a few hours after the 2001 inauguration, when Bush’s chief of staff was systematically blocking regulations drafted in the final days of the Clinton era that had not yet taken effect. Thanks to Clinton’s dillydallying, Bush’s squad was able to withdraw 254 regulations on everything from indoor air pollutants to immigration, scrapping them entirely or rewriting them to be, well, totally fucked. Last week, our largely reviled outgoing president guaranteed his successor a smooth transition. He further promised, “You are about to go on one of the great journeys of life.” How badly Bush handicaps his takeoff is yet to be seen.✶

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Edited by RON GARMON

SKETCH COMEDY: THE BRONX ZOO AT GHETTOGLOSS (SEE FRIDAY)

7 DAYS IN L.A. THURSDAY 13 THE GIRL WHO WAS GOD The ’90s were fun, what with all the flannel shirts, pre-ripped jeans and Bill Clinton playing the sax. But none of that compared to Alanis Morissette’s influence over college students and others who related to her sometimes-melancholy expressions. How time flies – Alanis doesn’t sport the dreads anymore (in fact, she’s gone New Age), and the grunge generation has gone on to bitter adulthood. This’ll be a fun night. Orpheum Theatre, 842 S. Broadway, Downtown L.A., (213) 622-1939. laorpheum.com. (Nathan Solis)

Love is All, Mika Miko and so many more will be playing all under one roof. And they know that this event also sports the return of A Certain Ratio to the U.S. And they also know that it’s a punk fest that will be going for 12 hours. In light of this recent information, you Los Angeles residents need to get up and honor the spirit of the kid from that far-off state who can’t make it. Won’t somebody think of the Red State children? 2 p.m.-2 a.m. $20. The Echoplex, 1154 Glendale Blvd., L.A., (213) 4138200. attheecho.com. (NS)

MONDAY 17 ETERNAL PASSION

FRIDAY 14 THE HAIRY APE Are there times when you just want to admire people in their underwear and not get hassled by the man? (This isn’t a rhetorical question.) If you’re still reading this, then you will like the latest installment of The Bronx Zoo at Ghettogloss Gallery. Previous installments have included bikini-clad women with gorilla masks and muscle-bound luchadors strutting their stuff. The show was originally launched at La Cita downtown and art students were encouraged to sketch the anthropomorphic beauties in attendance. Now? There will be a cocktail and banana reception. Of course there will. 7 p.m.-midnight. Free. Ghettogloss, 2380 Glendale Blvd., Silver Lake. ghettogloss.com. (NS)

SATURDAY 15 GHOST IN THE MACHINE Muzak usually denotes saccharine, easy-listening tunes we hear in elevators. Does it ever make you wish you could fit a string quartet or gamelan ensemble in with you for the ride? Machine Project beat you to it. As part of their all-day LACMA takeover event, there will be live music in elevators, workshops galore, and challenges to “find the missing nose” and solve the murder mystery. Over 60 installations and activities allow museumgoers to experience the space in a new way. It’s not too late to volunteer, either! 10 a.m. $12 (Machine Project members are free). LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood, (323) 857-6000. lacma.org. (Gabrielle Paluch)

SUNDAY 16 THREE-CHORD APOCALYPSE Somewhere in a far-off state – let’s say, Wyoming – there is a teenager who has heard about the Part Time Punks Festival at The Echoplex. They know that The Vivian Girls, The Slits, Pylons,

Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) is an oft-lauded masterpiece of late silent cinema that won Rene Falconetti durable fame for her only screen appearance. This all-time classic screens at the Silent Movie Theatre, with the two-man symphonics of In the Nursery performing the score. Brothers Klive and Nigel Humberstone call their experimental sounds “optical music,” which will tonight accompany some of the most breathtaking close-ups in movie history. 8 p.m. $14. The Silent Movie Theater, 611 N. Fairfax Ave., L.A., (323) 665-2150. silentmovietheatre.org. (Ron Garmon)

TUESDAY 18 PUSHING YOUR LUCK ON THE 405 Lynda Barry talks to Matt Groening at the Hammer and Annie Leibovitz signs and talks about her new book at The Skirball Center on the same day. Ack, the choices! Keep an eye on ticketing at the Skirball; it may fill up before you get there, in which case it looks like it might just be a cartoon sort of evening. We think you can try to hit up both at just the price of gas, since it’s all free. Lynda Barry and Matt Groening at the Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood, (310) 443-7000. hammer.ucla.edu. 7 p.m. Free; Annie Leibovitz, at the Skirball Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., West L.A., (310) 440-4500. skirball.org. 7:30 p.m. Free. (GP)

WEDNESDAY 19 HELLO AGAIN … HELLO Prolific author David Wild charts the arc of an ongoing obsession with the Solitary Man in He Is, I Say… How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Neil Diamond, his latest from Da Capo. A humorous read of the author’s fanboy self into the life and art of the “Jewish Elvis,” Wild seems serious about giving the influential songwriter some version of his due and will naturally be signing copies. 7 p.m. Free. Book Soup, 8818 W. Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, (310) 659-3110. booksoup.com. (RG)

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DANIEL CRAIG’S BOND SHOWS LESS EMOTION THAN EITHER I GUESSTHE CAR OR THE GUN

ABSENCE OF SOLACE The new bastard Bond BY ANDY KLEIN he conventional wisdom – to which I wholly subscribe in this case – is that 2006’s Casino Royale was a whole new take on the James Bond franchise. Its successor, Quantum of Solace, is both the same and the opposite: That is, it cleaves tightly to the same vision, which means it has none of the novelty. This is not merely wordplay. Part of the thrill of the last film was the breath of fresh air it introduced to the tired concept of Bond as created in the Connery films, sucked dry during the Moore years, and somewhat freshened in the four Brosnan episodes. There is plenty of room for more exploration of Daniel Craig’s brutal, nearly humorless Bond, but Quantum of Solace doesn’t really expand on Casino Royale so much as it resolves that film’s dangling plot threads. So closely are the plots related that this might better have been called Casino Royale 2: The Revenge. Indeed, Quantum of Solace picks up immediately after the end of Casino Royale; we may have lived through two years, but, for Bond and M ( Judi Dench) and the rest of the survivors, roughly an hour has passed. After a typically dazzling opening sequence – a car chase, this time around – it is revealed that British security has been compromised, along with M’s personal security. In no time, Bond is chasing Mr. White ( Jesper Christensen), Casino Royale’s remaining villain, in an action bit that recalls both that film’s early parkour-inflected foot chase and a great action set piece in Tsui Hark’s Time and Tide. (Indulge me: It’s been weeks since I’ve had the excuse for a Hong Kong citation.) Given that White and his associates were responsible for the death of Bond’s one true love, Vesper Lynd, in the last film,

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his pursuit of the shadowy organization with which White was affiliated has a more personal motivation than the usual Queen and Country. Following a fairly incomprehensible chain of leads, Bond is soon in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. (This series of plot connections is shown to us in M’s headquarters via what appears to be a 20foot iPhone.) Our hero zeroes in on Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric, who plays a very different sort of character in A Christmas Tale, also opening this week), a ruthless international corporate criminal who has managed to convince the world that he’s an ecological crusader. Bond also zeroes in on Camille (Olga Kurylenko), who sucks up to Greene in order to further her own personal quest for vengeance. As Bond and the film both hop from one country to the next, more familiar faces show up – CIA agent Felix Leiter ( Jeffrey Wright) and old-timer Mathis (Giancarlo Giannini). Bond and Camille keep getting separated, but always find each other again, often in ways that are unexplained ... though I suppose that, in this cell-phone-equipped world, no one is ever more than a speed dial away. The Bond producers, interestingly enough, brought aboard a director with no real experience in this sort of film – Marc Forster, best known for dramas like Monster’s Ball (2001), Finding Neverland (2004), and The Kite Runner (2007), as well as the offbeat comedy Stranger Than Fiction (2006). The closest he’s previously come to an action piece was the incoherent thriller Stay (2005). One might expect an infusion of idiosyncrasy from a lauded indie director with such an oddball filmography, but – outside of one interesting sequence intercutting a shootout with a performance

of Tosca – there’s no more stylistic individuality here than in Live and Let Die. If anything, Forster has trimmed away every non-action scene that isn’t absolutely necessary to advancing the story ... and a few that probably are necessary, given that the mechanics of who’s going after whom, and why, and where, are often confusing. It’s as though Forster’s goal is to boil the movie down to the essence of action. So we get a car chase and a foot chase and another car chase and a hand-to-hand fight and a shootout and an airplane battle and on and on, with only the briefest respites. Where Casino Royale, at nearly two-anda-half hours, surpassed On Her Majesty’s Secret Service by two minutes as the longest Bond film ever, Quantum of Solace, at an hour and 46 minutes, is the shortest by a sliver. In terms of pacing and style, it invokes the hyperkinetic Bourne films even more than Casino Royale did. The emotional content of the first 20 Bond films was deliberately shallow, so as not to be a buzzkill. When Jill Masterson is gold plated to death in Goldfinger, Connery seems genuinely upset ... for about two minutes. The paint barely has time to dry before he resumes wisecracking mode. (The notable exception to this is On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, by the end of which it’s even possible to get a little weepy.) Forster races through a similar, clearly deliberately referential scene in Casino Royale so quickly that it barely has time to register as a plot development, let alone as an emotional grace note. When Craig’s Bond fell in love and briefly lightened up in Casino Royale, it was part of the newer, grittier – dare we say it? – more realistic tone that defined the reboot. This time around, he’s supposedly driven by the dark result

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of that same passion; everybody keeps talking about Bond’s heartbreak, but 007 is so closed off that we never see it. The film may make gestures toward emotional content, but they feel strictly pro forma. All of which has the effect of turning the hero into something between a machine and a coldhearted bastard, with none of the drollery or charm that sweetened the mix in the old days. So, if the film is essentially all action, you may be wondering: How is the action? Well, it’s a mixed bag for sure. Forster and his stunt choreographers are way better working on a (relatively) small scale; all the hand-to-hand fights and foot chases really deliver. But the more spectacular scenes, involving speeding conveyances that can be blown up real good, are far less satisfying. The boat chase is particularly hard to follow, with confusing cutting and shtick that was tired decades ago. There is no ineptitude here: The problems feel like the result of conscious aesthetic choices that simply don’t work all that well. If Bond is no longer going to be presented as a fantasy role model – The Coolest Guy in the World – then imbue him with some other virtues or quirks to keep us interested. First time around, Craig’s performance suggested psychological wrinkles that occasionally broke through the hardness. Here he seems rigidified, with no more inner life than a mechanical action figure. ✶ Quantum of Solace. Directed by Marc Forster. Screenplay by Paul Haggis and Neal Purvis & Robert Wade. With Daniel Craig, Olga Kurylenko, Mathieu Amalric, Judi Dench, Jeffrey Wright, Gemma Arterton, and Giancarlo Giannini. Opens Friday citywide.

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D O N ATIO N & re c e ive

ALBERT R. BROCCOLI’S EON PRODUCTIONS PRESENTS DANIEL CRAIG AS IAN FLEMING’S JAMES BOND IN

BOND ALBERT R. BROCCOLI’S EON PRODUCTIONS PRESENTS DANIEL CRAIG AS IAN FLEMING’S JAMES IN “QUANTUM OF SOLACE” MUSIC EXECUTIVE OLGA KURYLENKO MATHIEU AMALRIC GIANCARLO GIANNINI WITH JEFFREY WRIGHT AND JUDI DENCHPRODUCED AS “M” BY DAVID ARNOLD PRODUCERS ANTHONY WAYE CALLUM McDOUGALL DIRECTED WRITTEN BY MICHAEL G. WILSON AND BARBARA BROCCOLI BY MARC FORSTER BY PAUL HAGGIS AND NEAL PURVIS & ROBERT WADE FEATURING “ANOTHER WAY TO DIE” PERFORMED BY ALICIA KEYS AND JACK WHITE STARTS FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14 HOLLYWOOD ArcLight Cinemas At The Dome 323/464-4226 Digital Projection Daily 12:10, 2:50, 5:40, 8:30 & 11:20 PM 4 Hours Validated Parking - $2

ArcLight Cinemas At Sunset & Vine 323/464-4226 On 3 Screens Fri-Tue 11:00 & 11:35 AM, 1:10, 1:45, 2:15, 4:00, 4:35, 5:05, 7:00, 7:35, 8:00, 9:40, 10:10 & 10:40 PM Wed 11:00 & 11:35 AM, 1:10, 1:45, 2:15, 4:00, 5:05, 7:00, 8:00, 9:40, 10:10 & 10:40 PM Thur 11:00 & 11:35 AM, 1:10, 1:45, 2:15, 4:00, 4:35, 5:05, 7:00, 7:35, 8:00, 9:40, 10:00 & 10:40 PM Fri & Sat Late Shows 11:45 PM & 12:15 AM 4 Hours Validated Parking - $2

CENTURY CITY AMC Century 15 • 310/289-4AMC On 4 Screens Fri-Sun 10:00, 10:40 & 11:15 AM, 12:00, 12:40, 1:30, 2:00, 2:50, 3:40, 4:10, 4:45, 5:30, 6:30, 7:00, 7:30, 8:20, 9:20, 9:55, 10:30 & 11:10 PM Mon-Thur 12:00, 12:40, 1:30, 2:00, 2:50, 3:40, 4:10, 4:45, 5:30, 6:30, 7:00, 7:30, 8:20, 9:20, 9:55 & 10:30 PM Fri & Sat Late Shows 12:00 Midnight & 12:30 AM 3 Hours Free Parking Additional 2 Hour Parking $3.00 with AMC Validation

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WEST LOS ANGELES The Landmark At Pico & Westwood Blvd. 310/281-8233 On 3 Screens 35MM Projection Fri & Sat 10:50 AM, 12:45, 1:30, 3:20, 4:15, 6:00, 7:05, 8:40, 9:40 & 11:15 PM Sun-Thur 10:50 AM, 12:45, 1:30, 3:20, 4:15, 6:00, 7:05, 8:40 & 9:40 PM Digital Projection Daily 11:30 AM, 2:10, 4:50, 7:30 & 10:10 PM Free Parking

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L.A./BEVERLY HILLS Pacific’s The Grove Stadium 14 • 323/692-0829 #209 On 4 Screens Fri-Sun, Tue & Wed 10:50, 11:15 & 11:45 AM, 12:20, 1:35, 2:05, 2:35, 3:05, 4:30, 4:55, 5:25, 5:50, 7:15, 7:40, 8:10, 8:35, 10:10, 10:35, 11:05 & 11:30 PM Mon 10:35, 11:00 & 11:45 AM, 12:20, 1:35, 2:05, 2:35, 3:05, 4:30, 4:55, 5:25, 5:50, 7:15, 7:40, 8:10, 8:35, 10:10, 10:35, 11:05 & 11:30 PM Thur 10:50, 11:15 & 11:45 AM, 12:20, 1:35, 2:05, 2:35, 3:05, 4:30, 4:55, 5:25, 5:50, 7:15, 7:40, 8:10, 8:35, 9:55, 10:35, 11:05 & 11:30 PM Fri & Sat Late Show 12:05 AM 4 Hours On-Site Validated Parking Only $2.00

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LATEST REVIEWS THE ALPHABET KILLER Rochester police detective Megan Paige (Eliza Dushku) becomes so obsessed with the unsolved murder of young Carla Castillo (Bailey Garno) that she starts hallucinating. Her breakdown reveals that she is schizophrenic, not a condition that inspires confidence on the part of her superiors, including soon-to-be-ex boyfriend Kenneth (Cary Elwes). Two years later, medication has made her stable enough to function in a desk job in the department’s records division ... until another murder follows the same pattern – the victim being a pre-adolescent girl with twin initials, whose body is dumped in a town beginning with the same letter. Megan manages to bully Kenneth into letting her join the investigation, supposedly as an observer. As she comes closer and closer to a solution, will anyone believe her? Director Rob Schmidt and screenwriter Tom Malloy (who also has one of the lead roles) have presumably taken substantial liberties with the true-life case that inspired the film. There is always something intriguing about a hard-boiled type trying to keep it together while assaulted by psychiatric conditions, but The Alphabet Killer never quite reaches the level of the similar Dutch film The Memory of a Killer; a big problem is the preposterousness of the mystery’s solution, which doesn’t appear to be one of Megan’s delusions. (My, though, that would make the film more interesting.) Major indie actors Martin Donovan and Melissa Leo show up for less than a minute; and most of the roster of other familiar faces – Timothy Hutton, Michael Ironside, Larry Hankin, Carl Lumbly, and Tom Noonan – aren’t around for much longer. It’s almost entirely Dushku’s show, and she acquits herself well. (Andy Klein) (Laemmle’s Monica 4)

ANTARCTICA Writer-director Yair Hochner’s sexy gay dramedy opens with a montage of several men engaging in a flurry of anonymous sex bouts – all with a handsome lothario (Ofer Regirer), who goes through men like a glutton gobbling his Oreos. The succession of tawdry trysts provides an eye-catching introduction to the film’s ensemble, who inevitably find themselves entangled with each other again several years down the line. Tel Aviv branch librarian Omer (Tomer Ilan) is a sweet, bespectacled fellow who believes in taking things slow in the hopes of finding true love. Unfortunately, the men he inevitably crosses paths with are horndogs with more notches on their bedposts than there are stars in the heavens. Omer goes on a blind date with sweet dancer Danny (Yiftach Mizrahi), but Danny is still pining for the sex pig who took his virginity (in the film’s opening sequence). It looks like Omer will have better chemistry with handsome journalist Ronen (Guy ZoAretz), but Ronen is reluctant to curtail his buck-fuddy friendship with sexy clothing store owner Miki (Yuval Raz). The themes of men’s thwarted love (and of men’s desire to fill the void in their hearts with engorged penises) that make up Hochner’s tale may have been seen before, but the piece’s relationships and developments are handled with a poignant truthfulness that is unusually believable. Although Hochner’s decision to cast Israeli drag queen Miss Laila Carry as Omer’s mother jars the realistic mood – a twist like this might work in a John Waters movie but falls flat here – the ensemble of bewilderingly gorgeous men are extremely likable as they thread their way through the debacles and chaos that their shlongs lead them to. (Paul Birchall) (Laemmle’s Regent Showcase)

zations better be good enough to hold our interest. Sadly, they’re not. (Andy Klein) (Regent Fairfax)

as we fear the next outburst or revelation and its aftermath. By the end, Desplechin has left many details unclarified, in imitation of the raggedness of life itself. The result is always gripping and perceptive, without solving anything. (Andy Klein) (The Landmark West Los Angeles, Laemmle’s Sunset 5, Laemmle’s Playhouse 7, Laemmle’s Monica 4, Laemmle’s Town Center 5)

A CHRISTMAS TALE Christmas at the Vuillards is clouded by the recent discover y that matriarch Junon (Catherine Deneuve) has cancer. All her children are showing up so everyone can be tested for bone marrow compatibility, even black sheep Henri (Mathieu Amalric), banished from the home by his older sister Elizabeth (Anne Consigny), who despises him for reasons that are never entirely explained. Third sibling Ivan (Melvil Poupaud) shows up with wife Sylvia (Chiara Mastroianni, Deneuve’s real daughter), as does everyone’s childhood best friend Simon (Laurent Capelluto). The volatile Henri drinks too much and disrupts things repeatedly, sometimes even when sober. Of course, Henri – who believes (with good reason) that his mother has never liked or loved him – is the only suitable donor match, except for Elizabeth’s teenage son (Emile Berling), who has problems of his own. Don’t be misled by the title: This isn’t Dickensian uplift or nostalgic humor about a kid asking Santa for a rifle. The latest from French director Arnaud Desplechin (Kings and Queen) is an often wrenching drama about a most unhappy family. In many ways, it’s quite similar to Jonathan Demme’s current Rachel Getting Married; but if the Demme film was uncompromising and realistic, Desplechin makes it seem like Hollywood fluff in comparison. The director throws so many characters at us at the beginning that I was confused about who was who for roughly an hour of the two-and-a-half-hour running time. Once the connections become clear, however, this often bitter story almost becomes a thriller,

JCVD Mabrouk El Mechri’s probing heist film opens with a whopper single-take action sequence, in which Jean-Claude Van Damme eradicates a nest of villains with a machete, flame-thrower, grenades, and of course, his fists. Contractual ass-kicking accomplished, Van Damme gives his feedback to the Chinese director of this film-within-a-film and is dismissed with “He still thinks we’re making Citizen Kane.” In one stroke, El Mechri and co-writers Frederic Benudis and Christophe Turpin have paraded, then banished, the JCVD we expect. The twist is, El Mechri really thinks he is making Citizen Kane, in this twisting, nonlinear deconstruction of a mythic man. He hasn’t, but it’s a heck of a curio. In reality – and here – Van Damme is both hero and joke. His fellow Belgians revere him, while to everyone else he’s a punchline and a brainless brawler; choosing him over Steven Seagal is merely a preference of ponytail. In truth, Van Damme is a man. When he’s held at gunpoint during a bank robbery, we’re aware that he’s no bulletproof savior even as his fellow hostages hope he’ll save them. Everyone outside thinks he’s the criminal: In an indictment of celebrity culture, the fans hail him as an antihero, the police as a mastermind, and his acquaintances are pressed to make public

disavowals. Ironically, the gun-waving sequences are tedious. The real attraction is JCVD emoting. He literally rises above the chaos, faces the camera, and with conviction (and tears) presents his defense of his life: He made fighting films because he couldn’t speak English, he says, and married often because “every wife had something special.” It’s a mesmerizing, guilt-inducing monologue – after 37 films, a director and an audience have finally seen beyond the biceps. (Amy Nicholson) (Nuart)

THE FIRST BASKET The only Jewish player currently in the NBA is the Lakers’ Jordan Farmar. But according to director David Vyorst’s documentary, in the early 20th century Jewish ballers were plentiful and primarily responsible for basketball’s evolution from Lower East Side playground activity to world class sport. A majority of the era’s million-plus Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe settled in New York. According to Vyorst, the youngest embraced James Naismith’s invention as a way to assimilate into American culture. They practiced in the street and in settlement houses (neighborhood hangouts offering recreation and social services) and made Jewish family attributes like teamwork, strategy, and loyalty keys to on-court success. Soon these after-

school athletes coalesced to form the BAA, the precursor to the NBA. In sometimes crowded, unscholarly settings, Vyorst interviews a few of the game’s pioneers, including ex-New York Knick Ossie Schectman, who scored the first basket in NBA history in 1946. While the doc insures that the Jewish contribution to the sport won’t disappear into history, the story of basketball’s Semitic architects has neither comprehensive archival material nor a Ken Burns-ian level of historical anecdote. And the story of how Jews and other ethnic groups integrate into larger society through sports requires deeper research and more learned talking heads. Essentially, everything Vyorst is saying is true. He just doesn’t make it all that interesting. (Mark Keizer) (Laemmle’s Music Hall 3, Laemmle’s Town Center 5)

PRAY THE DEVIL BACK TO HELL A brisk, affecting documentary snapshot of the transformative power of moral courage, Pray the Devil Back to Hell tells the remarkable story of a group of fed-up women, whose demonstrations and nonviolent demands for peace finally helped transform Liberia, their war-ravaged homeland. During a brutal, decade-long campaign that displaced one-

Special Q & A with Award Winning Teen Filmmaker Anne-Sophie Dutoit Friday & Saturday after the 8:00pm Shows

“ ! A GREAT FILM. THE SUBJECT OF ‘SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK’ IS NOTHING LESS THAN HUMAN LIFE AND HOW IT WORKS. IT'S ABOUT YOU. WHOEVER YOU ARE. YOU NEED TO SEE IT TWICE.” (HIGHEST RATING)

-Roger Ebert, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

“BEAUTIFUL, SPRAWLING AND AWE-INSPIRING!” (HIGHEST RATING)

-Carina -Carina Chocano, Chocano, LOS LOS ANGELES ANGELES TIMES TIMES

“A MIRACLE MOVIE.

NO NO FILM FILM WITH WITH AN AN AMBITION AMBITION THIS THIS LARGE LARGE AND AND AN AN ACHIEVEMENT ACHIEVEMENT THIS THIS IMPRESSIVE, IMPRESSIVE, CAN CAN BE BE ANYTHING ANYTHING BUT BUT EXHILARATING. EXHILARATING. SURRENDER SURRENDER TO TO ITS ITS SPELL.” SPELL.”

-Richard -Richard Corliss, Corliss, TIME TIME MAGAZINE MAGAZINE

PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN SAMANTHA MORTON MICHELLE WILLIAMS CATHERINE KEENER

“A young filmmaker? Anne-Sophie is sixteen going on forty.” - Susan King, LOS ANGELES TIMES

FROM THE WRITER OF ADAPTATION,, BEING JOHN MALKOVICH AND ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND

B.O.H.I.C.A. Four reservists (Brendan Sexton III, Jaime McAdams, Matthew Del Negro, Nicholas Gonzalez) are stuck at a remote outpost in Afghanistan, guarding a radio tower no one is interested in attacking. They fight the ennui with contentious banter, isolated until two slightly creepy Marines (Adam Rodriguez, Kevin Weisman) show up and stir the pot. Director D.J. Paul and screenwriter Joseph “Bo” Colen don’t bring much new to the notion of boredom being the toughest part of war – Mr. Roberts pretty much nailed the concept half a century ago. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that the amiable triviality is setting us up for something really bad to happen, as, of course, it does. (The title stands for “Bend Over Here It Comes Again.”) The problem here is that the structure for this kind of setup requires that things stay light for at least two-thirds of the running time – which means that the banter and characteri-

WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY CHARLIE KAUFMAN WWW.SONYCLASSICS.COM

HOLLYWOOD ArcLight Cinemas At Sunset & Vine (323) 464-4226 Daily: 11:15 • 2:15 • 5:25 8:05 • 10:55 Thurs.: Closed for screening BREA Edwards Brea Stadium 22 (800) FANDANGO #120 CAMARILLO Regency Paseo Camarillo Cinemas (805) 383-2267 IRVINE Edwards University Town Center 6 (800) FANDANGO #143 LAGUNA NIGUEL Regency Rancho Niguel 8 (949) 831-0446

WEST LOS ANGELES SANTA MONICA The LANDMARK at W. Pico & Westwood AMC Loews Broadway 4 (310) 281-8233 (800) FANDANGO #706 Free Parking. www.landmarktheatres.com Fri.- Sun.: 11:10 • 1:50 • 4:30 Daily: 11:10 • 2:00 • 4:55 • 7:45 • 10:35 7:30 • 10:15 Thurs.: 11:10 • 7:45 • 10:35 Mon.- Thurs.: 3:15 • 6:00 • 9:00 LONG BEACH PALM SPRINGS SHERMAN OAKS United Artists Marketplace Regal Cinemas Palm Springs Pacific’s (800) FANDANGO #509 Stadium 9 Sherman Oaks 5 ORANGE (800) FANDANGO #694 (818) 501-5121 (#392) Cinemark CineArts PASADENA VENTURA Cinemark CineArts @ Century Stadium 25 Laemmle’s Playhouse 7 @ Century 10 (800) FANDANGO #913 (626) 844-6500 Tickets Downtown ORANGE available @ laemmle.com (800) FANDANGO #938 AMC 30 at the Block ROLLING HILLS (714) 769-4AMC Regal Avenues Stadium 13 Presented in PALM DESERT (800) FANDANGO #158 Presented in Cinemas Palme d’ Or SANTA BARBARA Presented in (760) 779-0730 Riviera (805) 963-9503

VIEW VIEW THE THE TRAILER TRAILER AT AT WWW.SYNECDOCHENY.COM WWW.SYNECDOCHENY.COM

NOVEMBER 13-19, 2008 25 LACITYBEAT

AN ANNE-SOPHIE FILMSLLC PRODUCTION IN ASSOCIATION WITH 24.7 PRODUCTIONS AND FADED MEMORIES PRODUCTIONSLLC, JARBLUMENTERTAINMENT GROUP, TOWER 20

ANNE-SOPHIE DUTOIT BROCK VINCENT KELLY ELY POUGET KIM MORGANGREENE CONNI MARIE BRAZELTON ROBERT SAMPSON NICK JAMES PATRICK RYAN ANDERSON CORY “MR. SAFETY” WILLIAMS “FADEDMEMORIES” CASTING ANTHONY BARNAO LISAMIONIE COSTUME DESIGNER SHANA LORDELLINGSEN PRODUCTION DESIGNER ERIC WORTMANN DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY MASSIMILIANOTREVIS EDITOR ZACK ARNOLD MUSIC BY CARLOS RODRIGUEZ BILL CIVITELLA DAVID RAIKLEN LINE PRODUCER RAY ELLINGSEN CO-PRODUCER BARRYSCHREIBER EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS ANNE-SOPHIE DUTOIT WILLIAMJARBLUM DAVID TROY SMITH EXECUTIVE PRODUCER IVAN DUTOIT PRODUCEDBY M.S. BOUCHER BILL CIVITELLA BRUCE DEVAN WRITTENANDDIRECTED BY ANNE-SOPHIE DUTOIT FadedMemoriesMovie.com EXCLUSIVE ENGAGEMENT

S t a r t s F r i d ay, Novembe r 14 t h

ENCINO Laemmle’s Town C enter (818) 981-9811

Daily: 1:00 • 3:20 • 5:35 • 8:00 • 10:15 ATTENTION AMPAS, HFPA, SAG Film Nom Committee, and LAFCA Members:

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third of the country’s population, Liberia’s poor were held hostage between self-anointed President Charles Taylor and thuggish warlord factions jockeying for their own future power. Standing up against rape, murder, and child militias, the struggle of these women would

eventually culminate with the exile of Taylor and the ascendance of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first elected female head of state. Giving wide berth to their inspiring interview subjects, director Gina Reticker and originating producer Abigail Disney construct a

film that is heart-rending and enraging in equal measure, even if they don’t scratch much beyond the surface of some of the more interesting components of the story – which include the potentially fractious working union between Christian and Muslim congre-

gations, as well as a coercive sex strike to bend husbands to their cause. Human understanding and betterment are achieved mostly through bearing witness, and this film, similar in mission to the work of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, provides powerful firsthand testimony of the capacity for decency to eventually trump evil. (Brent Simon) (Laemmle’s Music Hall 3)

QUANTUM OF SOLACE

audience discussion with Rick Castro. L.A. County Museum of Art, Leo S. Bing Theatre, L.A., (323) 857-6010. Lacma.org. Special screening – No Subtitles Necessary – Laszlo & Vilmos, 7:30; followed by a panel moderated by author Rober t Fisher and featuring Vilmos Zsigmond, Richard Donner, director James Chressanthis, and other guests. New Beverly Cinema Absence of Malice, 7:30; Paris Blues, 9:45.

See Film feature.

“A BUOYANT HYMN TO LIFE, AND A MOVIE TO CELEBRATE.” RICHARD CORLISS

“ONE OF THE YEAR’S BEST FILMS.

WHAT I FEEL FOR ‘SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE’ ISN’T JUST ADMIRATION,

IT’S MAD LOVE.” PETER TRAVERS, ROLLING STONE

SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE Convinced that a poor, uneducated “slumdog” like Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) must have cheated to have been so successful on the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, authorities grill the boy mercilessly, instigating a series of flashbacks that reconstruct his life from childhood to the present – a potpourri of adventures both magical and tragic, heartbreaking yet life-affirming. In this wholly unconventional humanist fable, madman British auteur Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later...) has at long last delivered his masterpiece, a soaring tribute to the indefatigable effulgence of the human spirit that needs neither stars nor the usual token Caucasians to drive home its powerful emotions. Unabashedly dark yet profoundly inspirational, the picture also represents something of a quantum leap forward with respect to the mechanics of independent film production – an intimate epic elevated beyond the constraints of its modest budget by nothing less than the determined innovation of Boyle and his collaborators. Far and away the most important film of the year, if not the very best. (Wade Major) (Pacific’s ArcLight, The Landmark West Los Angeles)

ALSO OPENING THIS WEEK: Faded Memories. A 17-year-old girl (AnneSophie Dutoit) with a phobic aversion to human physical contact moves to Malibu and falls for a hunk (Brock Vincent Kelly), but their romance is thwarted by his scheming mother. Finally: A teen movie actually made a teenager – in this case, 16-year-old Dutoit who wrote and directed as well as playing the lead. (AK) (Laemmle’s Town Center 5) Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun. In World War I, a soldier (Ben McKenzie) loses all four limbs, his face, and all his senses and drifts inside his own mind, while hoping to contact the outside world. Blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo directed his own film version of his antiwar novel back in the ‘70s; in this new version, Rowan Joseph puts Bradley Rand Smith’s stage adaptation on film. (AK) (Laemmle’s Sunset 5)

“A SOARING,

CROWD-PLEASING FANTASY THAT’S A TALE OF UNSWERVING LOVE.” JOE MORGENSTERN, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

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WEST LOS ANGELES

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•IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING THE 7:30PM SCREENING AT THE LANDMARK ON FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14 •IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING THE 7:30PM SCREENING AT ARCLIGHT HOLLYWOOD ON SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 15 MOBILE USERS - FOR SHOWTIMES - TEXT SLUMDOG AND YOUR ZIP CODE TO 43 KIX (43549)

LACITYBEAT 26 NOVEMBER 13-19, 2008

SPECIAL SCREENINGS

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 15 American Cinematheque at the Aero Theatre Family Matinee – Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. New Films from Italy – Her Whole Life Ahead, 7:30; followed by Lessons in Chocolate. American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theatre Tyrone Power: Ever ybody’s Darling Boy – The Razor’s Edge, 7:30; followed by discussion with Romina, Tar yn and Tyrone Power Jr., plus Terr y Moore, Jayne Meadows, Coleen Gray, Piper Laurie and Rober t Hor ton. New Beverly Cinema Absence of Malice, 3:15, 7:30; Paris Blues, 5:30, 9:45. Sorcerer, 11:59. UCLA Film & Television Archive at the Billy Wilder Theater, Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Bl, L.A., (310) 206-3456 or cinema.ucla.edu/calendar. Moving Figures: The Animated World of Robert Breer, 7:30; with Rober t Breer in person.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 16 American Cinematheque at the Aero Theatre New Films from Italy – Talk to Me About Love, 7:30; followed by Blood of the Losers. American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theatre Tyrone Power: Ever ybody’s Darling Boy – Love Is News 6:30; followed by The Mark of Zorro; preceded by the shor t Ty and Loretta: Sweethearts of the Silver Screen; introduction by Judy Lewis, Loretta Young’s daughter. New Beverly Cinema The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, 3:35, 7:30; Jason and the Argonauts, 5:35, 9:20. UCLA Film & Television Archive at the Billy Wilder Theater, Hammer Museum The Labyrinthine Worlds of Alain Robbe-Grillet – L’Eden et Apres, 7; followed by L’Homme Qui Ment.

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 17 New Beverly Cinema The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, 7:30; Jason and the Argonauts, 9:20. UCLA Film & Television Archive at the Billy Wilder Theater, Hammer Museum Out of the Past: Film Restoration Today – His Birth Rite, 7:30; followed by The Courageous Coward and The Man Beneath; live musical accompaniment by Michael Mor tilla; free.

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 18 THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 13 American Cinematheque at the Aero Theatre, Santa Monica, (323) 466-3456. Aerotheatre.com. New Films from Italy – PA.RA.DA, 7:30; followed by The Past Is a Foreign Land. American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theatre, Hollywood, (323) 466-3456. Egyptiantheatre.com. Special Event – Attack of the Fifty Foot Reels, 7:30. CineFamily at the Silent Movie Theatre, Hollywood, (323) 655-2520. Silentmovietheatre.com. Rober t Downey, Sr.: A Prince – Pound, 7:30; followed by No More Excuses. Rober t Downey, Sr.: A Prince – Chafed Elbows, 10:30; followed by Moment to Moment. New Beverly Cinema, L.A., (323) 9384038. Newbevcinema.com. The Fall, 7:30, 9:45.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14 American Cinematheque at the Aero Theatre New Films from Italy – Quiet Chaos, 7:30; followed by A Perfect Day. American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theatre Tyrone Power: Ever ybody’s Darling Boy – Nightmare Alley, 7:30; preceded by the shor t Tyrone Power: The Prince of Fox; followed by discussion with actress Coleen Gray. American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theatre, Spielberg Theatre Antebellum Galler y Presents Fetish Film Night Hosted by Rick Castro – Zoo, 7:30; followed by

American Cinematheque at the Aero Theatre ITVS Community Cinema – I.O.U.S.A., 7:30; free. CineFamily at the Silent Movie Theatre Presented with live score by ADULT – Decampment, 8. L.A. County Museum of Art, Leo S. Bing Theatre William Randolph Hearst, Marion Davies, and Hollywood – Five and Ten, 1. New Beverly Cinema Grindhouse Film Fest, call theater for titles and showtimes.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 19 American Cinematheque at the Aero Theatre Navigating the Film Festival World: The Short Film Edition, 7:30. American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theatre Outfest Wednesdays – Ma Vie en Rose, 7:30. CineFamily at the Silent Movie Theatre Harold Lloyd: The Third Genius – Girl Shy, 8. New Beverly Cinema Man on Wire, 7:30; call for second feature.

SHOWTIMES NOV. 14-20, 2008 Note: Times are p.m., and daily, unless otherwise indicated. All times are subject to change without notice.

DOWNTOWN & SOUTH L.A. Downtown Independent, >251 South Main St, (213) 617-1033. Ryan and Sean’s Not So Excellent Adventure 2, 4, 6, 8, 10. Laemmle’s Grande 4-Plex, 345 S Figueroa St, (213) 617-0268. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa Fri 5:10, 7:20, 9:30; Sat-Sun 1, 3, 5:10, 7:20, 9:30; Mon-Thur 5:10, 7:20. Quantum of Solace Fri 5, 7:30, 9:55; Sat-Sun 1:40, 5, 7:30, 9:55; Mon-Thur 5, 7:30. Role Models Fri 5:15, 7:40, 10; Sat-Sun 1:50, 5:15, 7:40, 10; Mon-Thur 5:15, 7:40. War Eagle, Arkansas Fri 5:30, 7:50, 10; SatSun 1:10, 3:20, 5:30, 7:50, 10; Mon-Thur 5:30, 7:50. Magic Johnson Theaters, Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, 4020 Marlton Av, (323) 2905900. Call theater for titles and showtimes. University Village 3, 3323 S Hoover St, (213) 748-6321. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa FriSat 12:15, 2:35, 4:55, 7:15, 9:35, 11:45; Sun-Thur 12:15, 2:35, 4:55, 7:15, 9:35. Quantum of Solace Fri-Sat 12:30, 3, 5:30, 8, 10:30, 12:45 a.m.; Sun-Thur 12:30, 3, 5:30, 8, 10:30. Zack and Miri Make a Porno Fri-Sat 12:45, 3:05, 5:25, 7:45, 10:05, 12:20 a.m.; SunThur 12:45, 3:05, 5:25, 7:45, 10:05.

HOLLYWOOD ArcLight Cinemas Hollywood, 6360 Sunset Bl, (323) 464-4226. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas Fri-Wed 11:50 a.m., 2:30, 5, 7:40, 10:30; Thur 11:50 a.m., 2:30, 5, 7:40, 9:55. Changeling Fri-Sun 11:10 a.m., 2:20, 5:20, 8:20, 11:30; Mon-Wed 11:10 a.m., 2:20, 5:20, 8:20; Thur 11:10 a.m., 2:20. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa Fri-Tue 12:35, 2:45, 5:15, 7:55, 10:25; Wed 12:35, 2:45, 10:25; Thur 12:35, 2:45, 5:15, 7:55, 10:25. Quantum of Solace Fri-Sat 11 a.m., 11:35 a.m., 12:10, 1:10, 1:45, 2:15, 2:50, 4, 4:35, 5:05, 5:40, 7, 7:35, 8, 8:30, 9:40, 10:10, 10:40, 11:20, 11:45, 12:15 a.m.; Sun-Tue 11 a.m., 11:35 a.m., 12:10, 1:10, 1:45, 2:15, 2:50, 4, 4:35, 5:05, 5:40, 7, 7:35, 8, 8:30, 9:40, 10:10, 10:40, 11:20; Wed 11 a.m., 11:35 a.m., 12:10, 1:10, 1:45, 2:15, 2:50, 4, 5:05, 5:40, 7, 8, 8:30, 9:40, 10:10, 10:40, 11:20; Thur 11 a.m., 11:35 a.m., 12:10, 1:10, 1:45, 2:15, 2:50, 4, 4:35, 5:05, 5:40, 7, 7:35, 8, 8:30, 9:40, 10, 10:40, 11:20. Rachel Getting Married Fri noon, 2:40, 5:30, 8:10, 10:50; Sat-Wed noon, 2:40, 5:30, 8:10, 11; Thur noon, 2:40, 5:30, 8:10, 10:50. RocknRolla Fri-Sun 11:45 a.m., 2:25, 4:55, 7:25, 10:05; Mon; Tue-Wed 11:45 a.m., 2:25, 4:55, 7:25, 10:05; Thur 11:45 a.m., 1:05, 2:25, 4:55, 7:25. Slumdog Millionaire Fri 11:20 a.m., 12:15, 2, 2:55, 4:40, 5:35, 7:30, 8:25, 10:20, 11:15, 12:10 a.m.; Sat 11:20 a.m., 12:15, 2, 2:55, 4:40, 5:35, 7:30, 8:25, 10:50, 11:15, 12:10 a.m.; Sun-Mon 11:20 a.m., 12:15, 2, 2:55, 4:40, 5:35, 7:30, 8:25, 10:20, 11:15; Tue 11:20 a.m., 12:15, 2, 2:55, 4:40, 5:35, 7:30, 8:25, 10:50, 11:15; Wed 12:15, 2:55, 5:35, 8:25, 11:15; Thur 11:20 a.m., 12:15, 2, 2:55, 4:40, 5:35, 8:25, 11:15. Synecdoche, New York Fri-Wed 11:15 a.m., 2:15, 5:25, 8:05, 10:55. Twilight Thur only, midnight. Zack and Miri Make a Porno 11:40 a.m., 2:10, 4:50, 7:20, 9:50. Grauman’s Chinese, 6925 Hollywood Bl, (323) 464-8111. Private Screening Thur only, 7. Role Models Fri-Wed 12:30, 3, 5:30, 8, 10:30. Los Feliz 3, 1822 N Vermont Av, (323) 6642169. Changeling 2:45, 5:45, 8:45. Role Models 2, 4:30, 7:15, 9:40. Zack and Miri Make a Porno 2, 4:30, 7:15, 9:40. Mann Chinese 6, 6801 Hollywood Bl, (323) 461-3331. Beverly Hills Chihuahua Fri-Wed 11:40 a.m., 2:10, 4:40, 7:10; Thur 11:40 a.m., 2:10, 4:40. Body of Lies Fri-Sat 3:50, 9:50; Sun 9:50; Mon-Wed 3:50, 9:50; Thur 3:50. The Haunting of Molly Har tley Fri-Wed 9:40. Pride and Glor y Fri-Sat 12:50, 6:50; Sun 6:50; Mon-Wed 12:50, 6:50; Thur 12:50. Private Screening Sun 11 a.m., 4; Thur 7:30, 8. Role Models 11:30 a.m., 2, 4:30, 7, 9:30. The Secret Life of Bees 11:50 a.m., 2:20, 4:50, 7:20, 10:10. Soul Men noon, 2:30, 5, 7:30, 10. Pacific’s El Capitan, 6838 Hollywood Bl, (323) 467-7674. Bolt in Disney Digital 3D Sat only, 7. High School Musical 3: Senior Year Fri-Wed 10 a.m., 4, 9:50. High School Musical 3: Senior Year Sing-Along Fri 1, 7; Sat 1; Sun-Wed 1, 7. Pacific’s The Grove Stadium 14, 189 The Grove Dr, Third St & Fair fax Av, (323) 6920829. Body of Lies Fri-Wed 10:20 a.m., 1:15, 4:15, 7:20, 10:40; Thur 10:40. Changeling 12:30, 3:50, 4:50, 7:10, 8:05, 10:30, 11:25.

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa Fri-Mon 10:30 a.m., 11:10 a.m., 12:15, 12:55, 1:45, 2:45, 3:25, 4:25, 5:15, 5:55, 7, 7:45, 8:30, 9:30, 10:20, 11; Tue 11:10 a.m., 12:15, 1:45, 2:45, 4:25, 5:15, 7, 7:45, 9:30, 10:20, 11; Wed 10:30 a.m., 11:10 a.m., 12:15, 12:55, 1:45, 2:45, 3:25, 4:25, 5:15, 5:55, 7, 7:45, 8:30, 9:30, 10:20, 11; Thur 10:30 a.m., 11:10 a.m., 12:15, 12:55, 1:45, 2:45, 3:25, 4:25, 5:15, 5:55, 7, 7:45, 8:30, 9:30, 10:10, 11. Quantum of Solace Fri-Sat 10:50 a.m., 11:15 a.m., 11:45 a.m., 12:20, 1:35, 2:05, 2:35, 3:05, 4:30, 4:55, 5:25, 5:50, 7:15, 7:40, 8:10, 8:35, 10:10, 10:35, 11:05, 11:30, 12:05 a.m.; Sun 10:50 a.m., 11:15 a.m., 11:45 a.m., 12:20, 1:35, 2:05, 2:35, 3:05, 4:30, 4:55, 5:25, 5:50, 7:15, 7:40, 8:10, 8:35, 10:10, 10:35, 11:05, 11:30; Mon 10:35 a.m., 11 a.m., 11:45 a.m., 12:20, 1:35, 2:05, 2:35, 3:05, 4:30, 4:55, 5:25, 5:50, 7:15, 7:40, 8:10, 8:35, 10:10, 10:35, 11:05, 11:30; Tue-Wed 10:50 a.m., 11:15 a.m., 11:45 a.m., 12:20, 1:35, 2:05, 2:35, 3:05, 4:30, 4:55, 5:25, 5:50, 7:15, 7:40, 8:10, 8:35, 10:10, 10:35, 11:05, 11:30; Thur 10:50 a.m., 11:15 a.m., 11:45 a.m., 12:20, 1:35, 2:05, 2:35, 3:05, 4:30, 4:55, 5:25, 5:50, 7:15, 7:40, 8:10, 8:35, 9:55, 10:35, 11:05, 11:30. Role Models Fri-Sat 11:25 a.m., 12:25, 2, 3, 4:45, 5:45, 7:25, 8:25, 10:05, 11:15, 12:30 a.m.; Sun-Mon 11:25 a.m., 12:25, 2, 3, 4:45, 5:45, 7:25, 8:25, 10:05, 11:15; Tue 11:25 a.m., 2, 4:45, 7:25, 10:05, 11:15; Wed-Thur 11:25 a.m., 12:25, 2, 3, 4:45, 5:45, 7:25, 8:25, 10:05, 11:15. Soul Men 11:50 a.m., 2:25, 5, 7:35, 10:25. Zack and Miri Make a Porno 11:55 a.m., 2:30, 5:10, 7:55, 10:45. Regent Showcase, 614 N La Brea Av, (323) 934-2944. Call theater for titles and showtimes. Vine, 6321 Hollywood Bl, (323) 463-6819. Vista, 4473 Sunset, (323) 660-6639. Quantum of Solace Fri 4:15, 7, 9:40; Sat-Sun 1:30, 4:15, 7, 9:40; Mon-Thur 4:15, 7, 9:40.

SANTA MONICA AMC Santa Monica 7, 1310 Third Street Promenade, (310) 395-3030. Bolt Sat only, 7. Changeling Fri-Sun 12:30, 4, 7:15, 10:20; Mon-Thur 1:05, 4:10, 7:15, 10:20. High School Musical 3: Senior Year Fri 10:45 a.m., 1:30, 4:15, 7:05, 9:45; Sat 10:45 a.m., 1:30, 4:15, 9:45; Sun 10:45 a.m., 1:30, 4:15, 7:05, 9:45; Mon-Thur 1:15, 4, 7:05, 9:45. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa Fri 10:30 a.m., noon, 12:45, 2:15, 3, 4:30, 5:15, 7, 7:45, 9:30, 10:05; Sat 10:30 a.m., noon, 12:45, 2:15, 3, 4:30, 5:15, 7:10, 7:45, 9:30, 10:05; Sun 10:30 a.m., noon, 12:45, 2:15, 3, 4:30, 5:15, 7, 7:45, 9:30, 10:05; Mon-Thur 1:45, 3, 4:30, 5:15, 7, 7:45, 9:30, 10:05. Quantum of Solace Fri-Sun 10:15 a.m., 11:15 a.m., 1, 2, 3:45, 4:45, 6:30, 7:30, 9:15, 10:30; Mon-Thur 1, 2, 3:45, 4:45, 6:30, 7:30, 9:15, 10:30. Role Models Fri-Sun 11:45 a.m., 2:30, 5, 7:50, 10:10; Mon-Thur 2:30, 5, 7:50, 10:10. Laemmle’s Monica 4-Plex, 1332 Second St, (310) 394-9741. The Alphabet Killer 10. Call & Response Fri-Wed 1, 3:15, 5:30, 7:45; Thur 1, 3:15, 5:30. A Christmas Stor y 1, 4:30, 8. Happy-Go-Lucky 1:20, 4:10, 7, 9:50. Rachel Getting Married 1:30, 4:20, 7:10, 9:55. Loews Cineplex Broadway, 1441 Third Street Promenade, (310) 458-1506. Burn After Reading Fri-Sun 11:15 a.m., 4:15, 9:15; MonThur 4:15, 9:15. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa Fri-Sun 11 a.m., 1:30, 3:45, 6:15, 8:45, 10:55; Mon-Thur 1:30, 3:45, 6:15, 8:30. Quantum of Solace Fri-Sun noon, 2:45, 5:30, 8:15, 11; Mon-Thur 1:35, 4:10, 7, 9:45. RocknRolla 1:40, 6:35. Synecdoche, New York Fri-Sun 11:10 a.m., 1:50, 4:30, 7:30, 10:15; Mon-Thur 3:15, 6, 9. Mann Criterion, 1313 Third Street Promenade, (310) 395-1599. Body of Lies Fri-Wed 12:50, 3:50, 7, 10; Thur 12:50, 3:50, 7. Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist 12:30, 2:20, 4:30, 9:50. Pride and Glor y 2, 7:40. Saw V 11:40 a.m., 5:10, 10:30. Soul Men 12:10, 2:40, 5:20, 7:50, 10:20. Twilight Thur only, 12:01 a.m.. Zack and Miri Make a Porno noon, 1:30, 2:30, 4:05, 5, 6:30, 7:30, 9, 10:10.

WEST HOLLYWOOD, BEVERLY HILLS, CENTURY CITY AMC Century City 15, 10250 Santa Monica Bl, (310) 277-2011. Beverly Hills Chihuahua Sun 11 a.m., 1:25, 3:55; Mon-Wed 1:25, 3:55. Body of Lies Sun 9:35 a.m., 12:30, 3:50, 7:15, 10:35; Mon 12:30, 3:50, 7:15, 10:35; Tue 12:30, 10:35; Wed 12:30, 3:50, 7:15, 10:35.

High School Musical 3: Senior Year Sun 10:30 a.m., 1:35, 4:15, 7:10, 10; Mon-Wed 1:35, 4:15, 7:10, 10. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa Sun 9:30 a.m., 12:10, 2:30, 5, 7:05, 9:35; Mon 12:10, 2:30, 4:50, 7:05, 9:35; Tue 12:10, 2:30, 5, 7:05, 9:35; Wed 12:10, 2:30, 4:50, 7:05. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa: The IMAX Experience IMAX Sun 10:55 a.m., 1:10, 3:30, 5:50, 8:05, 10:20; IMAX Mon-Wed 1:10, 3:30, 5:50, 8:05, 10:20. The Metropolitan Opera: Doctor Atomic Encore Wed only, 7. Pride and Glor y Sun 9:45 a.m., 12:50, 4:20, 7:25, 10:25; Mon-Wed 12:50, 4:20, 7:25, 10:25. Quantum of Solace Sun 10 a.m., 10:40 a.m., 11:15 a.m., noon, 12:40, 1:30, 2, 2:50, 3:40, 4:10, 4:45, 5:30, 6:30, 7, 7:30, 8:20, 9:20, 9:55, 10:30, 11:10; Mon-Wed noon, 12:40, 1:30, 2, 2:50, 3:40, 4:10, 4:45, 5:30, 6:30, 7, 7:30, 8:20, 9:20, 9:55, 10:30. Role Models Sun 11:05 a.m., 1:45, 4:30, 7:20, 10:10; Mon-Wed 1:45, 4:30, 7:20, 10:10. The Secret Life of Bees Sun 11:30 a.m., 2:10, 5:10, 7:55, 10:40; Mon-Wed 12:20, 3:10, 5:45, 8:25. Soul Men Sun 11:10 a.m., 1:50, 4:25, 7:15, 10:05; Mon 1:50, 4:25, 7:15, 10:05; Tue 4:25, 7:15; Wed 1:50, 4:25, 7:15, 10:05. Twilight Thur only, 12:01 a.m.. W. Sun-Wed 1, 4:40, 7:50, 10:45. Zack and Miri Make a Porno Sun 11:45 a.m., 2:20, 5:05, 6:20, 7:45, 9, 10:15; Mon-Tue 12:05, 2:40, 5:15, 6:20, 7:45, 9, 10:15; Wed 12:05, 2:40, 5:15, 7:45, 9:15, 10:15. Laemmle’s Music Hall 3, 9036 Wilshire Bl, (310) 274-6869. Ballast Fri 7:30; Sat-Sun 12:10, 2:30, 7:30; Mon-Wed 7:30; Thur 9:45. Dear Zachar y: A Letter to a Son About His Father 10. The First Basket Fri 5, 7:20, 9:55; Sat-Sun 12:20, 2:40, 5, 7:20, 9:55; Mon-Thur 5, 7:20, 9:55. Pray the Devil Back to Hell Fri 5:30, 7:40, 9:45; Sat-Sun 1:25, 3:20, 5:30, 7:40, 9:45; Mon-Wed 5:30, 7:40, 9:45; Thur 5:30, 7:40. RomÈo et Juliette Sun 11 a.m.; Thur 7:30. The World Unseen 5. Laemmle’s Sunset 5 Theatre, 8000 Sunset Bl, (323) 848-3500. A Christmas Tale 1, 4:30, 8. Hannari: Geisha Modern Sat-Sun 11 a.m.. Happy-Go-Lucky 1, 4, 7, 9:50. Johnny Got His Gun 1, 3:15, 5:30, 7:45, 9:55. Let the Right One In 1:30, 4:15, 7:10, 9:55. Repo! The Genetic Opera 1:40, 4:30, 7:30, 10. Beverly Center 13 Cinemas, 8522 Beverly Blvd., Suite 835, (310) 652-7760. Appaloosa noon, 2:40, 5, 7:20, 9:50. Beverly Hills Chihuahua 12:20, 2:30, 4:40, 6:50, 9. Burn After Reading 1:10, 3:10, 5:10, 7:10, 9:10. The Dark Knight 12:30, 3:30, 6:30, 9:30. Eagle Eye 2:30, 7:20. The Haunting of Molly Har tley 1, 3:20, 5:30, 7:40, 10. House 1, 3:20, 5:20, 7:30, 9:20. Nights in Rodanthe 12:10, 2:40, 4:50, 7, 9:10. Pride and Glor y noon, 4:50, 9:40. Saw V 12:50, 3:10, 5:30, 7:40, 10. The Secret Life of Bees 12:10, 2:20, 4:40, 6:50, 9:20. Soul Men 12:20, 2:20, 4:30, 7, 9:30. Vicky Cristina Barcelona 12:40, 2:50, 5:20, 7:30, 9:40. W. 1:10, 4:10, 7:10, 9:50.

8:30; Mon-Thur 3:30, 6, 8:30. The Landmark West Los Angeles, 10850 W Pico Bl, (310) 281-8223. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas 11:40 a.m., 2:20, 4:45, 7:10, 9:30. Changeling 12:30 a.m., 3:50, 7:10, 10:20. A Christmas Tale 10:30 a.m., 1:45, 5, 8:15. Happy-Go-Lucky Fri-Sun 10:45 a.m., 1:25, 4:10, 7:05, 9:50; Mon-Tue 10:45 a.m., 1:25, 4:10, 7:05, 9:40; Wed 2:30, 7:40; Thur 10:45 a.m., 1:25, 4:10, 7:05, 9:50. Quantum of Solace Fri-Sat 10:50 a.m., 11:30 a.m., 12:45, 1:30, 2:10, 3:20, 4:15, 4:50, 6, 7:05, 7:30, 8:40, 9:40, 10:10, 11:15; SunTue 10:50 a.m., 11:30 a.m., 12:45, 1:30, 2:10, 3:20, 4:15, 4:50, 6, 7:05, 7:30, 8:40, 9:40, 10:10; Wed 11:30 a.m., 12:45, 1:30, 2:10, 3:20, 4:15, 4:50, 6, 7:30, 8:40, 10:10; Thur 10:50 a.m., 11:30 a.m., 12:45, 1:30, 2:10, 3:20, 4:15, 4:50, 6, 7:05, 7:30, 8:40, 9:40, 10:10. Rachel Getting Married 11:10 a.m., 1:55, 4:40, 7:20, 10. Slumdog Millionaire Fri-Wed 11 a.m., 12:20, 1:45, 3:10, 4:35, 6, 7:30, 8:45, 10:15; Thur 11 a.m., 12:20, 1:45, 3:10, 4:35, 7:30, 10:15. Synecdoche, New York Fri-Wed 11:10 a.m., 2, 4:55, 7:45, 10:35; Thur 11:10 a.m., 7:45, 10:35.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno Fri-Sun 12:15, 2:45, 5:15, 8, 10:25; Mon 12:15, 2:45; Tue 12:15, 2:45, 5:15, 8, 10:25; Wed 12:15, 5:15, 10:25; Thur 12:15, 2:45, 5:15, 8, 10:25. Majestic Crest Theater, 1262 Westwood Bl, (310) 474-7866. The Duchess Fri-Wed 3, 5:15, 7:30, 9:45; Thur noon, 3, 5:15, 7:30, 9:45. Mann Bruin, 948 Broxton Av, (310) 208-8998. Quantum of Solace Fri-Sat 11:30 a.m., 2:30, 5:30, 8:30, 11:30; Sun 11:30 a.m., 2:30, 5:30, 8:30; Tue-Thur 11:30 a.m., 2:30, 5:30, 8:30. Mann Festival 1, 10887 Lindbrook Av, (310) 208-4575. Pride and Glor y Fri-Sun 3:50, 9:30; Tue-Thur 3:50, 9:30. Quantum of Solace Mon only, 10:30 a.m., 1:30, 4:30, 7:30, 10:30. Soul Men Fri-Sun 1, 7; Tue-Thur 1, 7. Mann Village, 961 Broxton Av, (310) 2085576. Quantum of Solace Fri-Sun 10:30 a.m., 1:30, 4:30, 7:30, 10:30; Tue-Thur 10:30 a.m., 1:30, 4:30, 7:30, 10:30.

LOS ANGELES AREA NEWPORT BEACH LONG BEACH BEVERLY HILLS LAGUNA BEACH IRVINE REDONDO BEACH

WESTWOOD, WEST L.A. AMC Avco Center, 10840 Wilshire Bl, (310) 475-0711. Changeling Fri 2, 5, 8:10; Sat-Sun 12:45, 4, 7:05, 10:15; Mon-Thur 2:05, 5, 8:10. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa Fri 2, 4:30, 7, 9:30; Sat-Sun 11:30 a.m., 2, 4:30, 7, 9:30; Mon-Thur 2, 4:30, 7, 9:30. Role Models Fri 2:15, 4:45, 7:30, 10:05; SatSun 11:45 a.m., 2:15, 4:45, 7:30, 10:05; Mon-Thur 2:15, 4:45, 7:30, 10:05. Zack and Miri Make a Porno Fri 1:45, 4:35, 7:15, 9:45; Sat-Sun 11:15 a.m., 1:45, 4:35, 7:15, 10; Mon-Thur 1:45, 4:35, 7:15, 9:45. Laemmle’s Royal Theatre, 11523 Santa Monica Bl, (310) 477-5581. I’ve Loved You So Long 1:20, 4:10, 7, 9:45. Landmark’s Nuar t Theater, 11272 Santa Monica Bl, (310) 281-8223. JCVD Fri-Sun noon, 2:30, 5, 7:30, 10; Mon-Thur 5, 7:30, 10. My Neighbor Totoro Midnight Fri only,. The Rocky Horror Picture Show Midnight Sat only,. Landmark’s Regent, 1045 Broxton Av, (310) 281-8223. High School Musical 3: Senior Year Fri 3:30, 6, 8:30; Sat-Sun 12:45, 3:30, 6,

NOVEMBER 13-19, 2008 27 LACITYBEAT

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Lynda Barry ‘Comeek’ creator talks about the ocean in the back of your mind, and filthy, filthy wind energy

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ynda Barry, author of the beloved “Ernie Pook’s Comeek” and a new book, What It Is (Drawn & Quarterly), has been a voice for pained, weird little girls for 30 years. This Tuesday, she takes time away from her farm in Wisconsin, where she’s been battling industrial windpower developers, to lecture at the Hammer alongside Simpsons and “Life Is Hell” creator Matt Groening, who first published her work in the college paper. –Gabrielle Paluch L.A. CityBeat: Why write a book about writing books, or a book meant to inspire people to write? What gives you the energy and desire to draw stories out of other people? Lynda Barry: It all goes back to my teacher Marilyn Frasca, who I studied with at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, in the late 1970s. She asked a question, “What is an image?” I think it’s the thing that is contained by anything adults call the arts and kids call playing. And I would even call it a living thing. An image isn’t alive in the way you and I are alive, but it’s certainly not dead either. It’s something in-between that exists in this odd place I call the image world. It’s where Scrooge and Batman are, and Emily Dickinson’s poems, and also the thing that a toy contains for the kid who is attached to it. I don’t think human beings can exist without this image world, I think it has an absolute biological function, and I think that function is related to, among other things, mental health. So though What It Is uses writing to get us to that image world, I think it applies to all of imaginative activity. I didn’t want to write a book full of writing about writing. I wanted to make a book that would make people feel an itch to make something. To write, or glue paper onto paper, or to just cut things out of magazines – any of these things will get you into the image world in the way a smell will instantly transport you back to your auntie’s kitchen. I think of this kind of physical activity as being a small boat we can row into the ocean of the back of our minds. It’s different than thinking. It requires moving around an object with a particular state of mind – and a pen and paper qualify. The stories people come up with in my workshops just floor me. They are so

vibrant and alive that they make me feel vibrant and alive. I always feel fantastic after teaching a workshop. I always feel renewed and excited about going on in the world. That’s what I mean by a biological function. I feel better about being alive in a world full of horrible troubles. Can you tell us more about the work you do to save the environment, one sustainable energy source at a time? The work I’m doing the most of to save the environment is getting the word out about the serious downsides of industrial scale wind turbines. If the goal of using renewable energy resources is to reduce CO2 emissions, industrial-scale wind

turbines don’t do this. Because they need fossil-fuel burning power plants to function, and because those power plants are never powered up or down in response to the wind being there or not, the same amount of CO2 is going into the air. This conclusion was reached by the National Academy of Sciences and also a Norwegian study on Danish wind power. You will get more electricity to sell from wind turbines, but no real reduction in current CO2 levels. It’s the only renewable resource that keeps us completely dependent on power companies, fossil fuels (usually coal), and the grid. It’s the only one that doesn’t cause a loss of customers for the power companies. All the other renewable energy choices cause customer loss. Also, industrial wind is used as the justification for more and bigger transmission lines and use of eminent domain. Bigger and more transmission lines allow greater use of fossil-fueled power plants. So industrialscale wind energy is just another way to say “MORE! MORE! MORE!” Most people don’t realize that unless the wind is blowing at a certain speed – at least 10 miles an hour – the turbines can use more

energy than they produce. Most people don’t understand how much electricity it takes to run a machine that is 40 to 50 stories tall. Most people never even ask how the power is getting to and from the turbine. They don’t know about the thousands of miles of cables. Apart from all this, consider the impact on flying creatures. Turbines are placed in migration corridors because that’s where the wind is. It’s maddening to me that wind developers are getting away with this, siting them in wildlife refuges, national parks, and other protected areas. By the way, on-site wind turbines of the smaller scale are great. Small, on-site power generation is the best alternative, and it’s the one the power companies are going to fight the hardest against. My favorite renewable resource option is manure digesters – for both animal and human manure. It’s the only renewable energy option that actually cleans up other environmental problems as it creates electricity. It’s also the least sexy of the choices and one no one wants to talk about. How do you feel about the trend in comics to do personal narratives, basically resulting in illustrated therapy, and what this says about the position of the “hero” in contemporary culture? Well, therapy has always been about telling stories, hasn’t it? I think the use of stories to undo and untangle knots inside of people has always been around. I’m not sure we could exist without it. People may think that comics that contain personal narratives are something like therapy, but I think it’s the other way around. Therapy is something like comics that contain personal narratives. Usually the “hero” is the one who somehow restores life to a dead zone, even if he has to die doing it. For me that dead zone is a feeling that life is not worth living. When a story can turn that feeling around, it becomes a lot more than entertainment or amusement. It’s a life-saver. If you weren’t allowed to make comics anymore, what would you do? I’d still make comics. ✶ Hammer Conversations with Lynda Barry and Matt Groening. Tues., 7 p.m. Free. The Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (310) 443-7000.

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Your month in the galleries Low-Brow Goes Upscale: The Bronx Zoo summer series launched by Ghettogloss galler y was originally a Saturday afternoon cocktail par ty with ar t activities at downtown’s La Cita bar, but eventually transformed into a bona fide ar t class. Flavorpill’s own Shana Nys Dambrot curates a Nov. 14 show themed on the zoological. ghettogloss.com. Hi-Brow Goes Downtown: Los Angeles’s favorite multimedia interdisciplinar y ar t space stages a takeover of epic propor tions at LACMA Nov. 15. Be prepared to see ever ything from largescale installations to per formance pieces and esoteric workshops at the intersection of science and ar tifice, just your usual Machine Project ideas. machineproject. com. Everything Is Illuminated: When we were little, ever yone really liked that book about Eloise, who lived in the Plaza Hotel and had a nanny who said ever ything three times. In the Middle Ages, ever yone loved The Belles Heures of The Duke of Berry, an illuminated manuscript painted by the Limbourg brothers, which will be on display, with individual unbound leaves, at the Getty on Nov. 18. getty.edu/museum. Burning Woman: Ron Garmon loves Burning Man, he loves fire, he loves naked women. Enrique Martinez Celaya has car ved an ef figy type thing of wood called Empress that he has charred, and so Ron likes it. The exhibit at the L.A. Louver opens Nov. 20. lalouver.com. More Art About the War: The galler y at REDCAT presents 9 Scripts from A Nation at War, a multi-channel video installation that responds to the militar y conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. It examines the ways in which war determines and “scripts” cer tain roles such as citizen, veteran, detainee and correspondent, and the capacity of individuals to fulfill or resist these. redcat.org. ‘Solo’ Is Just Another Word for ‘Onanistic’: The ever-so-clever folks at Sea and Space Explorations are putting together a little something they’re calling the largest solo show ever, “Your show title here: your name here.” As many ar tists as possible will be packed into the galler y Nov. 29, and encouraged to list this massive group show on their resumes as a solo one. There may be spacesuits involved. seaandspace.org. The Animated Apocalypse: Master ful stor yteller Erin Cosgrove presents What Manner of Person Art Thou? Dec. 14 at the Hammer. It’s a video installation about two people named Yoder and Troyer who have sur vived catastrophe and epidemics throughout the centuries. hammer.ucla. edu. Birthplace of Humanity: We’re totally at war with Iraq, and imagine it must be a little flaming, sandy basin of miser y, with no bars. On Dec. 14, photographer Nik Wheeler brings you images from the marshes of southern Iraq created by the over flow of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, at the Fowler Museum. Taken during the mid-1970s, the images document their way of life and unusual vernacular architecture. fowler.ucla.edu. --Gabrielle Paluch

CURRENTLY PLAYING

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For All Time. Cornerstone Theater’s three-year cycle of plays about justice continues with KJ Sanchez’s compilation of material from interviews with prisoners, victims’ families, parole officers and others, staged by Laurie Woolery, and dotted with unnecessary excerpts from ancient Greek tragedies about justice. Sanchez is interested in evenhanded questions almost to a fault; the play feels a bit shapeless. Amy C. Maier’s set, in a gallery configuration, is visually striking but audienceunfriendly – maybe we’re supposed to get a tiny taste of the restrictions prisoners feel. Shakespeare Festival/LA, Beverly Blvd. west of the 110. (213) 613-1700. CornerstoneTheater.org. Closes Nov. 23.

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Los Angeles Theater Ensemble dreams an impossible dream BY DON SHIRLEY s the grim economy dominates the news, many playwrights probably feel compelled to write about it. The eruption of Iraq plays seems to have run its course; what’s a politically aware dramatist supposed to tackle now, if not the latest crisis? Still, the idea of docudramas about credit crunches or Washington bailouts sounds intimidating and iffy. Meanwhile, human interest stories on the subject are all too common. If you don’t have your own accounts of being laid off, plenty of others are readily available in journalism and in candidate infomercials. You don’t have to pay for theater tickets to see more of the same. Kit Steinkellner thought of a more creative way of handling the subject in Quixotic, at the Powerhouse Theatre. Quixotic sets Cervantes’s classic tale of Don Quixote within the current economic malaise. The play is set at “a branch of MunschLittleton Insurance. A gloomy office in a depressing building in a soul-suckingly miserable city,� notes the program. The workers spend most of their time denying claims, because the company can’t afford to pay them. Nor can the company afford to retain the current workforce. After a recent purge, another round of layoffs is expected any day now. Presiding over this tense ground zero is the bitter Allie Lawrence (Coco Kleppinger), who’s depressed not only by her job but also by her erratic romance with a heedless scion of the ownership class, Richard Munsch (Trevor Algatt). But first we meet the lower-level wage slaves: the chirpy but gossipy receptionist (Sarah Gold), the new temp (Paige White) whose business school degree hasn’t exactly paid off, a sealed-off young woman (Danielle Katz) who rejects the awkward attempts by her closest cubicle dweller (Nathaniel Meek) to ask her out. At the center of the office are the amiable Sam Panser (Ariel Goldberg) and the frequently late, mildly eccentric Arthur Quick (Isaac Wade). After an acrimonious confrontation with Allie on one fateful morning, Arthur starts hearing his own

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By the Waters of Babylon. In Robert Schenkkan’s two-hander, a troubled Austin widow (Shannon Cochran) hires an expatriate Cuban writer (Demian Bichir) to spruce up her garden – and, he later learns, her bed and her heart. He has his own tormented past, but – no surprise – they find a connection, which ends in a visualization of being cleansed. Forget the vigor and sweep of Schenkkan’s The Kentucky Cycle. This wispy duet is staged well enough by Richard Seyd. Geffen Playhouse, Westwood. (310) 208-5454. GeffenPlayhouse.com. Closes Dec. 7.

private musical score and seeing flashing lights. Soon he appears to be in the midst of a nervous breakdown. When he returns to work three days later, he’s literally a new man – a delusional knight in not-quite-shining armor who’s determined to do good deeds and to serve his lady fair, the uncomprehending Allie. His podmate Sam soon figures out that this new “knightâ€? is more efficient at processing claims than the old Arthur – as long as he thinks that his efforts serve the greater good of protecting the “castleâ€? (the office) from “goblins.â€? So Arthur keeps his job, at least for now. Steinkellner doesn’t claim that Arthur does any tangible good. But his determination to do so leads the other characters to think about a life beyond the bottom line, a world that isn’t ruled by fear. In the real world, of course, tangible results are more important than inspirational feelings. But perhaps the latter is a necessary first step to creating the former, Steinkellner suggests – which is a sentiment that seems to be shared by a lot of Americans who are still excited by last week’s election. At any rate, Quixotic is a congenial way to think about our economic perils without drowning in the details. Staged by Amanda Glaze, Quixotic is also yet another eye-opening production from Los Angeles Theatre Ensemble, which is rapidly becoming one of L.A.’s most compelling young troupes. The group already served the Iraq play genre with its wrenching Wounded, and more recently it turned out the Renaissance period piece I Gelosi, which is a far more pointed play about the historical conjunction of theater and politics than is the current The School of Night at the Taper (see adjacent review). Too bad the company’s obvious acronym is LATE, because here’s one group that’s ahead of the curve. âœś

Love’s Old Sweet Song. William Saroyan’s looselimbed 1940 oddity examines the bogus romance between an unmarried Bakersfield woman (McKerrin Kelly) and a sleazy salesman (Steve Marvel), plus the enormous family of Okies who invade her house, and several other picturesque characters. Much of it feels like satire of long-dead targets. Still, Martin Bedoian’s staging for Syzygy Theatre returns the play to about as much life as it will ever get. GTC Burbank, (323) 254-9328, (800) 838-3006. syzygytheatre.org. Closes Nov. 22. The School of Night. Christopher Marlowe (Gregory Wooddell) is the primary focus of an otherwise unfocused 1992 drama by British playwright Peter Whelan, set 400 years earlier, amid Elizabethan intrigues. Whelan offers a provocative take on the young Shakespeare (John Sloan), but more often the play remains mired in a talky bog that won’t interest non-academic audiences. Bill Alexander directs. This makes two largely irrelevant play choices out

Quixotic, Powerhouse Theatre, Santa Monica, (310) 396-3680. latensemble.com. Closes Nov. 22. See more reviews at lacitybeat.com. Click on Currently Playing.

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of two at the reopened Taper. Mark Taper Forum, Music Center, downtown L.A. (213) 628-2772. CenterTheatreGroup.org. Closes Dec. 17. Silk Stockings. Stuart Ross (Forever Plaid) has renovated Cole Porter’s 1955 musical, which was based on the movie Ninotchka, for Musical Theatre West. The romances couples are an American movie producer (John Scherer) and a frosty Soviet bureaucrat, (Julie Ann Emery), and a Russian composer (Andy Taylor) and an American movie star (Darcie Roberts), during the shooting of a U.S.-Soviet musical in Paris. The revised time is 1960. The frivolities, plot contrivances and dated satire are enhanced by the Porter gems “All of You� and “What Is This Thing Called Love?,� an oblique Sarah Palin joke, and sturdy shtick by a trio of Russians (Stuart Pankin, Nick DeGruccio, Paul Kreppel). It’s not quite silk, but it isn’t polyester either. Carpenter Center, Cal Stage Long Beach. (562) 856-1999. musical.org. Closes Nov. 23. Spring Awakening. Frank Wedekind’s oncescandalous 1890 play becomes a vibrant 21st century musical. The German teenagers still look as if they’re in 1890, but they express their feelings about S-E-X and other verboten subjects through a contemporary alt-rock score by Duncan Sheik and hectic, jerky choreography by Bill T. Jones. The story’s tragic, and a closing chorus tries to transcend all that angst, not quite successfully. But Michael Mayer’s staging is ingenious, despite a venue that’s too large. And this cast’s Wendla, Christy Altomare, is better – more artlessly innocent – than her original counterpart in New York. Ahmanson Theatre, Music Center. Downtown L.A. (213) 628-2772. CenterTheatreGroup. org. Closes Dec. 7. War Stories. The rootlessness that’s felt by many kids with parents in the military, as the family moves between bases, was compounded for Joyce Guy. Her family members were about the only blacks in some places (Taiwan, Japan). When they did move into black neighborhoods, she was still an outsider because of her past. Though her absorbing solo chronicle is marketed more as her father’s story than her own, she’s the leading character – and she seems to know more about herself than she does about him. The writing could be fine-tuned, but Guy’s a skilled performer, under Gregg T. Daniel’s direction, and she’s masterfully accompanied by protean musician Peter Walden. LATC Theatre 4, downtown L.A. (213) 4890995. thenewlatc.com. Closes Nov. 23. –Don Shirley

¥7&3: $00- BOE 7&3: 41*$: ¢

‘HOPE’ TAKES NO HOLIDAY BY CHRIS MORRIS t was the damnedest thing, watching CNN on Nov. 4. Days later, I still can’t get over it – Barack Obama acknowledging the cheers of 250,000 in Chicago’s Grant Park. Like many Of a Certain Age, I found the spectacle unfolding in my hometown overwhelming, and I cried. (I’m not so hard.) This year, Election Day offered a demonstration of how far we’ve come, and, for many, how far we still have left to go. Inevitably, those like me who lived through the 1960s calibrated the incredible distance traveled since the discordant era of the civil rights struggle. Mavis Staples’s new live album, released the day we went to the polls, makes that measurement explicit in its title, Live: Hope at the Hideout (Anti-). Staples trudged the Freedom Road with the protesters of the day. She was the lead voice of the Staple Singers, founded in Chicago during the ’50s by her father, singer-guitarist Roebuck “Pops” Staples, as a family gospel group. They played the protest rallies, sang the spirituals and gospel tunes that served as the soundtrack to Dr. King’s crusade, and spent time in Southern coolers. In the ’70s, they created original soul-pop numbers – “Respect Yourself,” “I’ll Take You There” – that carried the movement’s ethos onto the charts. Mavis Staples has hardly lost a step vocally, and, beginning with a solid 2004 gospel album for Alligator, Have a Little Faith, she has returned to the public eye. Last year, she revisited the “freedom songs” of the ’60s on her Anti- debut, We’ll Never Turn Back. The album was produced by Ry Cooder, who dutifully applied his increasingly sterile house sound to the proceedings. Except for a suitably punchy “99 and 1/2,” the record stank of the museum, and after an initial spin I never returned to it. (Surveying the liner notes now, I note with some amazement Staples’s shout-out to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the former pastor of her church, Chicago’s Trinity United.) In the interim, events asserted the renewed pertinence of these exuberant songs of conflict and liberation, and Staples decided to revisit them on stage. As Obama’s nomination as the Democratic candidate increasingly looked like a foregone conclusion, Hope was recorded this June 23 at the titular Windy City club. Staples was accompanied by three backup vocalists (including sister Yvonne) and a brawny trio familiar to many L.A. audiences – bassist Jeff Turmes, drummer Stephen Hodges (formerly with Tom Waits’s band), and guitarist Rick Holmstrom, who adeptly replicates the watery tremolo of Pops Staples and plays with a fire distinctly his own. What seemed dull and studied in Cooder’s hands comes alive here. Credit much of the excitement on Hope at the Hideout to Staples’s five decades in the gospel game. Slightly hoarse, testifying and extemporizing, she turns out the nightclub hipsters like a Baptist congregation. During “Waiting for My Child,” she steps off-mike as she works the house, raising the tension and intensity of the performance. She ups the ante on her remakes of tracks from We’ll Never Turn Back, and delivers fierce interpretations of fresh material like “Wade in the Water” and “Freedom Highway.” Hope at the Hideout is a marvelous record in its own right, as wonderful in its very different way as Aretha Franklin’s sacred stomp-down Amazing Grace, but it also seemed to perfectly sum up the essence of the moment for me in the wake of Obama’s triumph. The songs Staples sings maintain their pertinence. As I looked at pictures of last week’s protests in West Hollywood and Westwood, following the passage of Proposition 8 by many of the same people who elected Obama, I turned to her version of Stephen Stills’s “For What It’s Worth” – written in the wake of some tumult on Sunset Boulevard 40 years back – and found it woefully appropriate. It will take more than one election to expunge bigotry and unreasoning hatred from our society. The struggle continues.✶

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TANGERINE DREAM Royce Hall, Nov. 9

es, yes, if you think I’ll preface remarks on this bedrock-awesome show by this original monster of kosmische rock with my usual pharmacological recital, well, expectations do engender disappointments, dawg. I was no higher than usual and only about five minutes late when, with my date Kiki M., I threaded through a knot of latearriving analog dorks. This room is one of L.A.’s gaudier geezer preserves, hosting in the past boisterous performances by rock-snob idols John Cale, David Thomas of Pere Ubu, and the late Arthur Lee, whom I once saw extravagantly dissed by fratboys. No such crassness invaded the venue this Friday night, with nearly every seat crammed with a load of brain-stupor patron. This much I expected, as the late Lester Bangs once saw God at a Tang D. show, after taking care to slug down a bumper of cough-syrup first. I was taking no such chances, and Kiki had already assumed the familiar energized-sitting posture I know well after many years of obsession with analog psych rock. Above the scarce-twitching quintet, a series of natural and invented vistas rolled screensaver-like, this traditional concert hall or behind-the-eyelids accompaniment subtly altered by mood and song. Numbers were punctuated by intense bursts of applause, as the seeming-insensate lumps gathered comfortably around took out their libidos in pounding. The whole idea of narcotic substances at a rock show began to seem downright marginal. Formed 40 years ago – or well before the height of the post-Sgt. Pepper boom in chemically altered pop music – Tangerine Dream took the already-wackadoo pronouncements of Terry Riley and Jimi Hendrix as points of departure. Edgar Froese’s baroque-inflected ventures into what happens after you set the controls to the heart of the sun went arguably further into pure abstraction than any of their labelmates on Ohr, the German experimental powerhouse that also sported Can and Ash Ra Tempel. They had a freak international hit in 1974 with Phaedra, one of Virgin’s first releases, and followed with a series of pioneering electronic LPs in between memorably scoring films as diverse as Risky Business and Firestarter. Though revered now as godfathers of trance and ambient, the band drew little of the goa-glowstick-psytrance crowd, with most attendees looking to be oldline fans or vinyl cargo-cultists on a sessile spree. The program stuck to Tang D.’s tried-and-true whorls and chiaroscuros from their 1970s and ’80s back catalog, and the crowd applauded some well-known film-score stuff from William Friedkin’s Sorcerer. Guitarist Bernhard Beibl’s solos threaded nimbly though Irs Camaa’s muscular drumming, in rockist contrast to the ethereal keening of Linda Spa’s soprano sax. Froese, squat, white-haired, and the group’s only remaining original member, kept in the background for most of the two-hour, multiple-encore marathon, to emerge at the very end to congratulate us on attaining a Dubya-free nation at last. The psychonaut emeritus then closed the first band’s first U.S. performance in ouver a decade with the hope last Tuesday’s silver lining precedes a burst of well-earned sunshine across America.✶ –Ron Garmon

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MARNIE STERN, SHRED-O-MATIC Puppy-loving axe lady headlines the El Rey BY GABRIELLE PALUCH here is a time and a place for angry-chick-music bands like Bikini Kill or 7 Year Bitch, and it’s called: once-a-month on your way to buy egg rolls and tampons. Unless you don’t have a uterus, in which case you think that the Chicks on Speed song “We Don’t Play Guitars” is funny and true. But you’re wrong (you are always wrong), and all of that was just a really long way of saying that Marnie Stern plays guitars in a special way (woo, look at me way up here on the fretboard!), with very technically complicated finger tapping. Twenty-nine might have been a little bit late in life for her to be making a debut as a musician, but she had clearly been putting the time to good use refining her skill. It sounds like an aggressive waterfall of shredding, in a vaguely melodic sort of way, and paired with those girly vocals and quirky lyrics, it’s probably more accurate to compare her to Deerhoof than to angry-chick bands. She’s been known to do Rodney Dangerfield impressions on stage as well. She probably learned that while she was getting her journalism degree at NYU? Just a year after her debut album, In Advance of a Broken Arm, comes a record that sounds like it was named by a Taoist poet from the Qin Dynasty. This Is It And I Am It And You Are It And So Is That And He Is It And She Is It And It Is It And That Is That (Kill Rock Stars) is filled with songs she’s written over the past ➤

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Chris Morris hosts Watusi Rodeo on Indie 103.1 every Sunday at 9 a.m.

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year alongside Hella drummer Zach Hill, who also accompanies her on tour, where she has been wearing out her guitars. Venuszine recently named Stern the greatest female guitarist of all time for the new material. Songs like “Every Single Line Means Something” are surprisingly catchy for the genre, and totally relatable even when you’re not menstruating. She’ll be playing this weekend at the El Rey with Gang Gang Dance, more New York experimentalists who, like Stern, play neo-tribal electronica.✶

COMING TO SAVE THE WORLD TRAIL OF DEAD GETS FESTIVE BY NATHAN SOLIS

Sat., El Rey Theatre, 5515 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 936-6400. theelrey.com. nd You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead dropped an anvil on the music-verse in 1999. Their third album, Source Tags and Codes, had all the makings of a vital entry in the rock pantheon, with one foot in a punk boot and another on the anthem circuit (hence their formula for loud/quiet/loud). This marked a maturing process for the Austin, Texas, natives – a far cry from their second album, Madonna, where lead singer Conrad Keely screamed, “Fuck you” about 30 times on “A Perfect Teenhood.” But something happened with the 2005 follow up, Worlds Apart. Trail of Dead embraced a wider audience, ingratiating themselves with piano and classical violin. Where their previous albums had a raw/unedited feel like they’d dropped their gear out of the van a few too many times, the new sound was clean and professional. They dyed their punk roots and steered their ship towards commercial vistas with Sept. 11 metaphors and commentary on the MTV generation. The six-year gap between albums created an entirely different animal. Was this the same band? Live shows became much more intensified, with the song “The Rest Will ➤

A FREE UP YOUR SCHEDULE Charlie Wadhams takes on Tangier

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harlie Wadhams is maybe eight feet tall and 15 years old, and he makes beautiful music to sway to. It’s sort of lo-fi and low-lighted lounge, a mix perhaps of Jonathan Richman and Tommy Larkins troubadouring through There’s Something About Mary with the Circle Jerks’s atonal scatsinging stint in Repo Man. When I saw him a year or so back opening for Inara George’s the Bird and the Bee in a Costa Mesa strip mall, the audience would stand rapt for part of a song and then lose the thread, turning to chat loudly amongst themselves. Rooted to the ground and accompanied only by a laconic guy beating slowly on a snare drum (I think?), Charlie Wadhams wasn’t putting on a high-energy kind of gig. But the music itself was a celebration of love songs – pragmatic love songs without even the littlest bit of maudlin to them, but rather fun adventures with a best friend and forgetting about failures (that time in your life is now over). Wadhams’s latest, In a Goldmine, is a slight departure from his first (which played endlessly in my car, soothing aloe on the sunburn of a nasty commute); it’s maybe got a bit more fuzz to it, and the song structures feel more classic ’30s (including croony boy backup singers) with a dash of rockabilly (Wadhams wrote Walk Hard’s “Guilty as Charged”) than Seals & Crofts ’70s. Oh, did we not mention the Seals & Crofts? Well, we didn’t want to intimidate you with the awesomeness. We leave that for the show. And then maybe, postintimidation, you’ll turn and talk amongst yourselves. ✶ –Rebecca Schoenkopf

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Charlie Wadhams and special guests play this Sunday and next, 8 p.m., at Tangier, 2138 Hillhurst Ave., Los Feliz, (323) 660-1033. Through Nov. 23.

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CLUBLAND

BLAST FROM THE BLASTER

UPCOMING IN-STORES at AMOEBA! All shows are FREE and ALL AGES! For full calendar of events visit: AMOEBA.COM

LOOK DAGGERS

Look Daggers (2Mex of the Visionaries & Ikey Owens of The Mars Volta/Free Moral Agents) celebrate their new ablum, Suffer In Style (including the DVD Alive For Now In Long Beach). It’s out now on Up Above Records!

MARK FARINA:

MUSHROOM JAZZ DJ SET Mark Farina is the master of the blend! His new album Mushroom Jazz 6 features new and unreleased material from the finest in Mushroom Jazz music (funky instrumental Hip Hop, downtempo, soul, and blunted beats mixed together to perfection by Farina himself) plus a bumpin’ brand new Farina original track entitled “Life.”

SPINDRIFT

LA’s Spindrift celebrate their new CD The West — out now on Beat the World Records. “Spindrift stage experimental, epic, cinematically inspired music more akin to the textured, symphonic layers of Portishead than the chaps and 10-gallon hat–wearing Riders in the Sky….makes you feel like you’ve just been made love to by a handsome stranger, a genius visceral experience.” — LA Weekly

“I’m sympathetic, but you don’t stiff people with cancer”: I can think of a metric fuckton of better things to jawbone with Dave Alvin of The Blasters about than the financial peccadilloes of club owners, but Sam Lanni still owes the Dog & Pony Show benefit Dave hosted the $7,000 he collected from the gate. In the months since the Labor Day roots-music marathon, the owner of the now-closed Safari Sam’s has yielded up little but excuses for the missing money, intended to defray medical costs for four L.A. musicians, all longtime friends of the master Blaster. Dave never played Lanni’s celebrated Huntington Beach venue back in the 1980s, but, like the rest of us, watched the new club going up near Kingsley and Sunset with curiosity. “I met Sam when they were building the club,” Dave drawled. “I went by just to look at it when it was being built. I met him the night we played and he seemed like a good guy; passionate, you know, about music and all that, and I’ve always held to the theory that to have a great club and a music scene, you have to have visionaries. Not just musicians, but owners of nightclubs. Ed Pearl, who owned and ran The Ash Grove for about 30 years, was one. Doug Weston at The Troubadour, Brendan Mullen and The Masque, even Elmer Valentine and The Whisky, so you need people like that, who’ll do anything to make that happen. Maybe sometimes it’s a little wacky with some of these guys, but you need that. Sam seemed like one of those guys to me.” “I believe I played there the first time, in 2006, when it reopened. I don’t remember if it was the first night, but it was the first weekend. I did a New Year’s show with the Knitters and played there a couple of more times since. Then I put on the three-day benefit on Labor Day. Basically,” at this point Dave sounds as if he’s about to undergo

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The Flaming Lips Christmas on Mars (Warner Bros.) The Lips’s soundtrack to their film of the same name (and album follow-up to At War With the Mystics) extends the cosmic sigh that’s been the Oklahoma acidheads’ stock-in-trade since 2002’s epochal Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. Instead of Tolkien power struggles or manga-manques, we’re treated to a fantasia about Yuletide on the Angr y Red Planet or a sort of Mannheim Steamroller for the purple kush set. Highlights include “Your Spaceship Comes From Within” and “The Gleaming Armament of Marching Genitalia,” which, absent their runtime context, just hang in the air and shimmer like choice Morricone. Included is a DVD of the movie, condensed by helpful Wayne Coyne to “Maybe Eraserhead or Dead Man crossed with some kind of fantasy and space aspects, like The Wizard of Oz and maybe A Space Odyssey except done without real actors or money and set at Christmastime.” Shot mostly in Coyne’s basement, there are many characters with green skin and, of course, antennae. –Ron Garmon Evil Nine They Live! (Marine Parade) DJ duo Evil Nine’s second full-length release is soundtrack for an imminent undead uprising, blending crunchy breakbeats with barrack-blasting bass lines, wrapped in LP cover art straight out of ’80s zombie-movie heaven. They Live! is rave-

a root canal, “I put it together with my manager Nancy Sefton, and the idea was to raise money for some friends of ours who’ve been battling cancer and don’t have health insurance. My best friend was a guy named Chris Gaffney and Chris unfortunately died from it. I have three other friends, Candye Kane, the blues singer, Duane Jarvis, a great guitar player who’s played with everybody from John Prine to Lucinda Williams, and Drak Conley, guitar-player and bon vivant. It was overwhelming! Nancy and Drak came up with

the idea of an Internet site for music and people like this. Chris had fans from all over the world and that was kind of a way of raising the heart money. The benefit was not only to raise money to help somebody, but kind of also a group hug. So, Sam offered the place for free. Some places charge operating costs for benefits, whatever they say that is, but Sam was pretty cool about the door, thinking he’ll make money off the bar. I got a bunch of everybody’s friends to agree to play. It was successful and I was proud and kinda happy about it, but then there came a little problem.” The problem was Sam’s non-payment of almost $7,000 worth of credit card sales to the objects of the benefit, three of whom still live while

meets-John Carpenter-soundtrack material, with just enough musical punch behind the ghoulish themes to rescue it from falling into complete kitsch territor y. Evil Nine is the walking-corpse answer to Daft Punk’s robotphilia, and the title track is a vocoder-rific ode to the undead, with lyrics “They walk, they lie, they love, they live!/They wake, they fall, they cr y, they live!/ They fight, they fail, they die, they live!” After the fifth track, the quirk-value of minor-chord “scar y synth” sounds starts to become B-movie-marathon boring. Luckily, Nine switch up their styles, moving from guitar-heavy hooks to cold electro melodies, teaming up with Kitsune Record darlings Autokratz on “The Wait,” and bringing in raga-tastic MC Toastie Taylor on “Dead Man Coming.” –Ramie Becker The Annuals Such Fun (Canvasback/Ace Fu/Terpiskore) Dixie-pop hothouse sweetness in the manner of post-Beatle fleurs de mal like Big Star and Let’s Active, this sophomore album from the Raleigh, North Carolina, sextet is as smart as indie pop gets. What puts this one up there with Radio City, Repercussion, or even the R.E.M. of Murmur is a unifying tincture of the Suthrun rock underground – a place that, by rights, shouldn’t exist at all, but continues to throw off cynically utopian pop-rock. Slivers off this block o’ bliss include the Allmanesque “Hot Night Hounds,” the high lonesome honky-psych of “Hair Don’t Grow,” and the Ultra-Panavision LP-closer “Wake,” which glory-rolls into a symphonic climax expanding like a helium-inflated David Axelrod before floating wistfully away. They open for Seattle high-holies Minus the Bear (whose Coachella set this year fell but little short of the bee’s

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the fourth’s family is still paying medical bills. How the flamboyant entrepreneur got into this scrape is the subject of some lurid Clubland gossip these days, but Dave’s not particularly interested in Lanni’s troubles with his nut. “I’ve been hearing all sorts of rumors about this and some of them are pretty good,” Dave philosophized. “Every musician has been stiffed at a gig. Chris Gaffney would find it ironic he got stiffed on his last gig. It’s another thing to stiff people who are dealing with cancer. It was a frigging benefit to help these people … .” At this point, Dave’s pleasant movie-cowboy voice simply gave out and it was a long minute before he resumed. “Well, that’s a different kind of getting stiffed. He owes us $6,680. I know it’s not a million bucks or anything, and we got the bulk of the money, but this sum is off the credit card sales. If suddenly tomorrow we had the money, I’d be fine. Everybody goes through hard times and it’s hard to be a club owner, particularly in Los Angeles. The city doesn’t really want music clubs. I’m sympathetic, but you don’t stiff people with cancer. I can’t go to bat for everyone he’s stiffed, but that would make him fine with me. Sell a car or something. You owe us.” Transitions: Like the rest of this ever-reeling world, Clubland can’t be still. While Safari Sam’s is running out the last of its string downtown, with shows slated at The Regent through January, another fixture is retiring as well. For a decade, KCRW’s music director and host of Morning Becomes Eclectic has been Nic Harcourt; he steps down as both effective Nov. 30, though he’ll continue on as deejay on the popular 6-9 p.m. Sunday slot. Finally, ex-Mother of Invention (and “Indian of the group”) Jimmy Carl Black died on Nov. 8 in Germany, where he could earn an actual living playing music, something he hadn’t been able to do in L.A. since the Clubland 1960s. He was 70. –Ron Garmon

nads) at the Henry Fonda this Sunday. Yes. −RG Jefferson Airplane Cleared for Take Off (Acrobat) I subscribe to the two-and-a-half-album theor y: Most rock bands (back in the 1960s, in any case, when new acts were required to churn out multiple albums a year) would be good for two-and-a-half albums, then drop in quality. Reasoning: The group probably would have gotten that record contract after one to three years of gigs, which would have given them time to polish about 18 topnotch tracks, 12 of which would make up the first album; the second album would use the remaining six, plus five or six more the band had come up with in the interim; having exhausted the reser ve, their next few albums would suffer. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Jefferson Airplane. Cleared for Take Off has 18 live Airplane tracks from March of 1967, recorded over three days at Winterland. Twelve songs are from Takes Off and Surrealistic Pillow, JA’s first two (and way best) albums; most of the other six titles have shown up either live or as bonus tracks, in better quality. A few tracks either fade in late or fade out early; and the sound is no better than average bootleg quality. In fact, this exact selection has been released as a bootleg at least twice, not to mention having been previously released by this ver y company, with only a different catalog number. The packaging is amateurish: The title, you may note, has a spelling error; the case proclaims “Live in 1961”; and the insert, the back cover, and the slipcase include no less than four track listings, only one of which is actually correct. No bargain, even at a bargain price. –Andy Klein

BEN FOLDS

NIGHTBEAT

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Fans are calling Way to Normal Ben Folds’s breakup/divorce album, but leave it to the fortyish, piano-playing Winston-Salem native to ensure that his version of Shoot Out the Lights sounds as poppy as anything in his estimable catalog. Sure, there’s plenty of melancholy recriminations and finger-pointing, but he keeps matters mostly light, even as he allows himself to stray into outright misogyny: “Bitch Went Nuts” is about as nasty a crowd sing-along as you’ll ever hear. But that edge in his voice has helped Folds in a big way. He’s never been less whimsical than he is lately, and he’s never felt this honest. Fri., with Missy Higgins, at The Wiltern, 3790 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (213) 388-1400. livenation.com.

THIS WEEK’S HIGHLIGHTS THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 13 And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead. Austin, Texas noise-rock crew recently released the Festival Thyme EP. The Echo, Echo Park, attheecho. com. John Doe and Kathleen Edwards. X’s mainman sings and strums with Ottawa country singer-songwriter Edwards. El Rey Theatre, Miracle Mile, theelrey.com. Face to Face, Guttermouth. Reunited Victorville pop-punk band Face to Face headline over Guttermouth’s bratty, anything-goes mischief. House of Blues Sunset Strip, West Hollywood, hob.com. David Garza. Acclaimed Texan singer-songwriter unveils current material in this intimate setting. Largo’s Little Room, Los Angeles, largo-la.com. Gym Class Heroes. Ironic alt-rock hip-hoppers make a small club appearance. Key Club, West Hollywood, keyclub.com. Robyn Hitchcock. The onetime Soft Boy has made psychedelic comfort food his primary offering for the last 30 years. Largo, Los Angeles, largo-la. com. Legendary Pink Dots. Brit neo-psychedelic first-wavers return to stake their claim. Knitting Factory, Hollywood, knittingfactory.com. Alanis Morissette. Here. To remind you. Of some mess you made when you went away. Orpheum Theatre, downtown L.A., laorpheum.com. Also Fri. Alice Russell. Brighton, England soul singer plays acoustic. Hotel Cafe, Hollywood, hotelcafe.com. Joe Satriani, Mountain. Satch the shredder headlines, but ’60s Mountain-men Leslie West and Corky Lang are two-thirds of one of the best American power trios ever. The Wiltern, Los Angeles, livenation.com. Taking Back Sunday, The (International) Noise Conspiracy, 3OH!3. Long-awaited return of Long Island emo kings Taking Back Sunday. Club Nokia, downtown L.A., clubnokia.com.

Follow” calling for two drum kits on stage, pounding marching rhythms and a signature wall of percussion. But this was a rough transition. Keely stopped screaming the f-bomb, but he scaled it back a bit too much. It was tough to see ToD performing on David Letterman in 2005: The vocals were off and the band tried to exit the stage as fast as they could. Dave said, “Don’t neglect your studies.” Ouch. Their 2006 album So Divided was Trail of Dead screaming “philistines” into the spotlight. The band listened to Yellow Submarine and incorporated Tahitian drum works, seeming bent on either alienating every fan who ever uttered their name or winning the hearts of everyone. If the previous album was the band’s boat changing course, then this album was them finding port and inviting everyone on board. Tracks off their new album Festival Thyme sounds like what Tom Petty would be doing if he was invited to sit in with the band. Keely has said that he plays a lot of Final Fantasy and other video games that involve bands of heroes fighting to save the world. This is nothing if not a season of hope.✶ Thurs., 8:30 p.m. The Echo, 1822 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14 Dead Confederate. Nirvana meets My Morning Jacket in the grooves of this Georgia-based quartet. Spaceland, Silver Lake, clubspaceland.com. Deerhoof. San Franciscan indie rockers celebrate the release of latest album Offend Maggie. The Echoplex, Echo Park, attheecho.com. Vicente Fernandez, Shaila Durcal. Mexican ranchera legend Fernandez headlines three nights at this spacious venue. Gibson Amphitheatre, Universal City, livenation.com. Also Sat. and Sun. Mason Jennings, Zach Gill. Singer-guitarist Jennings is signed to Jack Johnson’s label; Gill’s a member of surf-rock jammers ALO. Music Box @ Fonda, Hollywood, henryfondatheatre.com. H2O, Bane. New York hardcore. Safari Sam’s at the Regent Theatre, downtown L.A., safari-sams.com. Hanson. Eleven years later, they’re still best known for “MMMBop.” House of Blues Sunset Strip. DROID BEHAVIOR: HUMAN AND SKIN-JOB ALIKE Motley Crue. Ironic that Hollywood’s bad boys have endured to play a venue that has had more facelifts than themselves. Hollywood Palladium, Hollywood, livenation.com. Mudhoney, Model/Actress. Grunge grandpas still give good Stooges-style garage rock. El Rey Theatre. tarfucker hail from Portland, Oregon, but they’re really Uh Huh Her. L.A. electropop duo. The Avalon, Hollywood, avalonhollywood.com. three robots from outer space, mixing in vinyl, cassettes, Tyrone Wells. Local folkie made good, Wells is promoting major-label debut Hold On. The Troubadour, West Hollywood, troubadour.com.

STARFUCKER

Spaceland, Nov. 8

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 15 Calle 13, Kinky. Puerto Rico’s Calle 13 joins forces with Mexico’s Kinky for a night of exciting dance rhythms. Club Nokia. Castanets. Raymond Raposa’s solo project mixes indie folk, electronics, and highly personal verses. McCabe’s Guitar Shop, Santa Monica, mccabes.com. Gang Gang Dance, Marnie Stern. Brooklyn avant rockers meld primitive and electronic beats. Plus guitarist Stern. El Rey Theatre. Junkyard, Jetboy, Rhino Bucket. Late-’80s Strip rockers join forces. Safari Sam’s. McQueen. British all-femme metallers attempt Hollywood success. Whisky a Go Go, West Hollywood, whiskyagogo.com. OneRepublic, Augustana, The Spill Canvas, The Hush Sound. Mainstream rock from balladeer types. Hollywood Palladium. Q-Tip, The Knux, Pacific Division. Former Tribe Called Quester Q-Tip brings out promising new wordsmiths on tour. House of Blues Sunset Strip. Torche, Black Cobra, Clouds. Stoner metal and canyon-sized grooves. Spaceland. Underoath, Saosin, The Devil Wears Prada, The Famine. Roaring metalcore from some of the genre’s biggest bands. UCI Bren Events Center, Irvine, bren.uci.edu.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 16 B-52’s, The 88. Definitive U.S. party crew the B-52’s still going strong after three decades. Plus local popsters the 88. Club Nokia. Blues Traveler. Long-running jam crew with the still-blistering harmonica of John Popper. House of Blues Sunset Strip. Minus the Bear, Annuals, Helms Alee. Seattle’s Minus the Bear continues to get progressively proggy on latest disc Planet of Ice. Music Box @ Fonda. Part Time Punks Festival presents a Certain Ratio, Pylon, Savage Republic, Vivian Girls, Mika Miko and many more in a 2 p.m.-2 a.m. affair. The Echo/Echoplex.

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 17 The Breeders. Kim? Is she still a big Deal? The Wiltern. Lordi, Lizzy Borden, Stolen Babies. Finland’s masked and caped monster rockers Lordi recapture the essence of classic KISS. House of Blues Sunset Strip. The Shys, Army Navy, The Takeover UK. Indie blues rockers the Shys play a homecoming show. The Troubadour.

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 18 Everest. Country rock from youthful Angelenos. The Echoplex. Hotel Cafe Tour presents singer-songwriters Rachael Yamagata, Meiko, Thao Nguyen, Kate Havnevik, Lenka, and Emily Wells. Music Box @ Fonda. Matisyahu, Flobots, Chester French. Reggae and hip-hop from hasidic Jew Matthew “Matisyahu” Miller; plus more hip-hop. Club Nokia. Jon McLaughlin, Delta Goodrem. Nashville piano-man McLaughlin (not that Mahavishnu guitarist) teams with Australian singer-actress Goodrem. El Rey Theatre. Misfits, D.I. Old-school and horror-punk, not necessarily in that order. House of Blues Sunset Strip.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 19 Ohgr, American Memory Project. Industrial pioneer Ohgr takes sabbatical from Skinny Puppy. El Rey Theatre. Portugal the Man, Earl Greyhound. Alaskan crew PTM creates lush prog and soulful vocals on latest disc Censored Colors. The Troubadour. Night Horse. Heavy retro rockers featuring members of Blue Bird and Ancestors. The Echo. Miranda Lee Richards. Breezy singer and ex-model Richards plays folk and pop. Tangier. Usher. The R&B superstar is now playing just tonight, and not Nov. 20 as scheduled. Club Nokia. –Joshua Sindell

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and drum machines to create the illusion of a small army on stage, armed with only lo-fi synth and duel drum kits. Their set was charged with a vibe that slowly crept up on the audience, like Starfucker astral-projected dance partners to tap everyone on the shoulder and move their feet. You can’t put this type of show into a category, because it was a group experience, with everyone doing the shamble-around. They opened with some ambience-creation and quickly jumped into “Isabelle of Castille,” which comes at the end of their latest album, so they were not following any particular order except the order of the cosmos. “Rawnald Gregory” swooned us, and we all sort of swayed to the opening bass line. Then the chorus started – “All my life/there you go/oh please stay/just this once” – causing us to become intimate with the dancing person next to us. Starfucker’s show ended an exciting week, what with all the politics and demographics hating on each other, and it felt good to turn off the brain for a while. The band employed the minimal approach all the way through – starting with “Hard Smart Beta,” which transitions into “Pop Song” on the album. In studio, it’s the usual seamless shift, but onstage, Shawn Glassford had to put down his bass, get behind the drum set and count off to go into the next song. It was good to see that machines can’t do all the parts. It was a fairly quick set, and when Starfucker said that it was their last song, there were the traditional “boos.” Not once did anyone in the band say, “C’mon dance” or anything cheesy like that and we all know how hard it is to get L.A. hipsters to move. But the holy spirit of Spaceland was with Starfucker.✶

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conductor mezzo-soprano Grant Gershon, Music Director

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We ek of N ov. 13 ARIES (March 2 1-April 19): “You can’t know fire unless you play with it,” says Mark Finney, a math whiz who develops computer models for fighting forest fires. I of fer that as a motto for you in the coming week, Aries. I’m not saying you should purposely ignite a conflagration for the sake of impulsive experimentation. I’m not saying you should kick smoldering embers around like soccer balls or light a cigarette while you’re pumping gasoline or buy yourself a flame-thrower. What I am saying is that it will be in your interest to learn more about how to play safely with intriguing, useful fires. (Finney’s quote comes from the July 2 008 issue of National Geographic.) TAURUS (April 2 0-May 2 0): The time for keeping the doors closed is passing. But it is not yet the right moment to fling them wide open. According to my reading of the omens, your best strategy is to keep doors ajar -- open just a crack, letting some air in and allowing a hint of your light to trickle out. This will discourage unfocused wanderers from barging in, while at the same time it encourages wor thy candidates with a healthy curiosity to sneak peeks inside. GEMINI (May 2 1-June 2 0): “There is a rose in Spanish Harlem,” sings Ben E. King in his old pop ballad. “It is a special one / It’s never seen the sun / It only comes out when the moon is on the run.” King is fantasizing with longing about an alluring woman from a hardscrabble neighborhood. The rose is “growing in the street / right up through the concrete” -- a delicate beauty blooming amidst tough conditions. Your assignment, Gemini, is to cultivate a connection with your equivalent of that rose. CANCER (June 2 1-July 22): Every second of your life, your bone marrow produces 1 0 0 trillion molecules of hemoglobin, the stuf f that carries oxygen from your lungs to the rest of you. Meanwhile, every minute, your immune system begets 1 0 million lymphocytes, which are key players in your body’s defenses. These are just two examples of the endless marvels you produce, Cancerian. You are a creator of the first order. You’re a supreme maker and a generative genius. Remember that in the coming days. It will help you be confident and purposeful as you bir th

minor miracles and intimate wonders. LEO (July 23-Aug. 2 2): For decades the U.S. government has handed out far more welfare benefits to big corporations than to poor people. Companies like IBM, General Electric, Boeing, and others rake in over 1 00 billion dollars of subsidies each year. In other words, socialism has been a prominent feature of our so-called capitalist system for a long time. Recently, Karl Marx’s influence has made even deeper inroads into the American way, with the government becoming par t-owner of many banks in order to keep them solvent. Will any of this fantastic largesse be extended to us regular citizens, like maybe in the form of nationalized health care? I can’t answer that. But I do know this, Leo: In the coming months, you will get help from powers that you regard as above and beyond you.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 2 2): Ruminate a minute about the people who don’t see you for who you really are. Some of them are enemies, but others may be loved ones or allies. Consider the possibility that you have unconsciously bought in to their beliefs about you; that you are at least par tially trapped in the habit of acting like the person they think you are. Now visualize what it would be like to free yourself from the images and expectations they have of you. Imagine the exhilaration you’d feel if you answered only to the still, small voice of your own lucid intuition. The coming weeks will be a good time for you to practice this high ar t.

psychosudoku@hotmail.com

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Check out this excerpt from “Those Who Do Not Dance,” by Chilean poet Gabriel Mistral: “God asked from on high, / ‘How do I come down from this blueness?’ / We told Him: / come dance with us in the light.” I love this passage because it reminds me that nothing is ever set in stone: Everything is always up for grabs. Even God needs to be open to change and eager for fresh truths. Fur thermore, even we puny humans may on occasion need to be God’s teacher and helper. Likewise, we can never be sure about what lowly or unexpected sources may bring us the influences we require. What do Mistral’s words mean to you, Capricorn? Imagine you’re the “God”

SCORPIO (Oct. 2 3-Nov. 2 1): The New York Times ran a story about philosopher Nick Bostrom. He believes there’s a significant chance

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Fill in each square in this grid with a digit from 1 to 9. The sum of the digits in each row or column will be the little number given just to the left of or just above that row or column. As with a Sudoku, you canít repeat any digits in a row orcolumn. See the row of four squares in the upper-left of the grid with 28 to the left of it? That means the sum of the digits in those four squares will be 2 8, and theywon’t repeat any digits. A row or column ends at a black square, so the four-square row in the upper-right with a 2 7 to the left of it may or may not have digits in common with the 28-row to its left; theyíre considered dif ferent rows because thereís a black square between them. Down columns work the same way. Now solve!!

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 2 1): In his book Signs of Success, astrologer Steven Weiss says “The question ‘Do you believe in astrology?’ is like asking someone if they believe in ar t.” I agree. Picture a no-nonsense physicist gazing at a Kandinsky painting, with its teeming blobs of mad color and exuberant shapes, and declaring it to be a superstitious eruption of delusion that’s not based on a logical understanding of the world. Like Kandinsky’s perspective, astrology at its best roots us in the poetic language of the soul, and isn’t blindly submissive to the values of the rational ego. It’s here to liberate our imaginations and encourage us to think less literally and to visualize our lives as mythic quests. I bring this to your attention, Sagittarius, because right now it’s crucial that you spend some quality time in modes of awareness akin to Kandinsky’s and astrology’s.

VIRGO (Aug. 2 3-Sept. 2 2): For many people, 1 0:3 0 a.m. is the single best time of day to come up with fresh insights and new ideas. But that won’t exactly be true for you in the coming week. I mean, 10:30 will be a time when you’re likely to be really smar t, but then so will 11:3 0, 1:05, 2:37, 3:46, and 4:2 0. For that matter, 6:35 may also bring a gush of high intelligence, as well as 7:27, 8:19, and the last ten minutes before bedtime. What I’m trying to tell you, Virgo, is that you’re in a phase when being brilliant should come pretty naturally.

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our world is actually a computer simulation. In his scenario, you and I are living in a version of The Matrix. Our “brains” are merely webs of computer circuits created by our posthuman descendants, who are studying “ancestor simulations” of their past. I bring this to your attention, Scorpio, because it’s an excellent time for you to find out, one way or another, whether Bostrom is correct. Right now you have a special talent for knowing what’s real and what’s not. You’ve also got a knack for escaping what’s illusory and gravitating toward what’s authentic. So even if you do find out that we’re living in The Matrix, you could become a kind of messiah with resemblances to the character that Keanu Reaves played in the film trilogy.

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2 5 What there’s not one of during a tearjerker movie 2 6 Contributes 1 0% 2 7 Unlike this entry 2 8 Typing instructor’s concern 3 0 Barry White, notably 3 1 Sgt.’s underling 3 4 Suffix meaning “follower” 3 5 Hur ting 3 6 In unchar ted territory, so to speak 3 8 ___ Lingus

referenced in the poem. What blueness are you ready to come down from, and who might invite you to dance in their light? AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 1 8): All of the good works you do in the coming week will send ripples far and wide, but not all of them will be recognized and appreciated. I hope that’s OK with you; I hope you won’t get obsessed with trying to get all the credit you deserve. The fact is, your influences will be more ef fective and enduring if they are at least par tially anonymous. Ironically, your power will be greater if it’s not fully noticed. PISCES (Feb. 1 9-March 2 0): Describing his writing class at Sarah Lawrence College, Jef frey McDaniel says: “There are two kinds of humor: ha-ha humor that is light and airy and floats into the sky like a balloon, vanishing as the giggling subsides; and then there is a darker, heavier humor that is still there when the laughter stops, a humor that must be reckoned with, a humor with teeth.” I suggest, Pisces, that you make the latter your specialty, your passion, and your medicine. Consor t with belly laughs and sublime guf faws that rouse the ferocity you need in order to penetrate deeper into the hear t of the Great Mystery.

In addition to this the horoscopes you’re reading here, Rob [Editor: Here’s week’s homework:] Brezsny offers EXPANDED WEEKLY

Homework: NameHOROSCOPES two ways you think thatText everyone AUDIO and Daily should be more like you. Go to FreeWillAstrology.com Message Horoscopes. and click on “Email Rob.”

To access them online, go to RealAstrology.com. ---------------------------------------The Expanded Audio Horoscopes are also available by

phone at 1-877-873-4888 or 1-900-950-7700.

Ro b Bre z sn y Fre Rob’s e Willmain A s t rolo g y is at FreeWillAstrology.com. website fre e willas t rolo g y@sb c glo b al.n e t 4 1 5Check . 4 5 9out . 7 2his 0 9book, Pronoia Is the Antidote for ParaP.O.noia: BoxHow 4 8 the 9 Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower Mill Valley, CA 9 494 2 with Blessings. You

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3 9 “WALL-E” production company 4 7 Printable format 4 8 Fox News Channel CEO Roger 4 9 Gush 5 0 Taking to cour t 5 2 Run ___ of the law 5 4 “___, meeny, miney, moe...” 5 5 1 96 0s campus protest gp. restar ted in 2006 5 6 LGBT-themed network owned by CBS 5 7 Like lots of items posted on

Craigslist 58 Generation ___ (1970s babies) 59 Friend’s counterpar t 60 Actress Gardner ©20 08 Jonesin’ Crosswords (editor@jonesincrosswords.com) For answers to this puzzle, call: 1-90 0-226-2 800, 9 9 cents per minute. Must be 18 +. Or to bill to your credit card, call: 1-80 0-655-6 548. Reference puzzle #03 87.

4

28

Find week’s PsychoSudoku Sudokuanswers answers on page page 37 Find lastlast week’s Psycho 35

“’Tis the Season”--for once, I hope you don’t catch on by Matt Jones

Across 1 Pre-1 9 95 NFL player now based in St. Louis 6 Teensy 9 The Mars Volta guitarist ___ Rodriguez-Lopez 1 3 Actress Massey of “Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man” 1 4 Newbie’s Internet pages 1 5 Little thoroughbred 1 6 Major League Baseball commissioner Bud 1 7 Hair color that makes you look like former NFLer Doug? 1 9 The urge to go to a school dance? 2 1 Green prefix 2 2 Helper (abbr.) 2 3 It’s taken on a trip? 2 6 “___ and the Power of Juju” (Nickelodeon car toon)

2 9 What Spider-Man slings 3 1 Burn on the outside 3 2 Frappe need 3 3 Diarist Nin 3 6 Knock-of f board game suffix found after “Dino,” “Dog,” or “Ocean” 3 7 Get in the way of a log ride? 4 0 Swindled 4 1 Letter flourish 4 2 Milk source 4 3 Prefix used with some hormones 4 4 Abbr. after a phone number, on a business card 4 5 Weather vane dir. 4 6 Armenia or Azerbaijan, once (abbr.) 4 7 Make it through 5 1 “Now I get it!” 5 3 Tragic Greek figure with stomach acid problems? 5 9 The blue liquid used in diaper commercials, perhaps? 6 1 Animal hunted by Sarah Palin 6 2 Pizzeria fixture 6 3 Sea eagles

64 65 66 67

It really gets boring “No sweat!” Abbr. describing British pounds Moves heavily

Down 1 Have trouble with “sisters,” maybe? 2 Ray, Jay, or A, e.g. 3 Nestle caramel-filled chocolate candy 4 “Princess Mononoke” genre 5 Imaginary item that fixes everything 6 When doubled, a Washington town or onion 7 Shaf fer play currently on Broadway 8 Rob of “90 210” 9 Car tel that includes Iraq and Venezuela 10 First draft of a McMansion, maybe 11 “Is it ___ wonder?” 12 Deli bread 14 Really, really loud, on sheet music 18 Passbook abbr. 20 To ___ (incessantly) 24 Smoked fish

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