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When a Cartoonist Landed in L.A. County Jail, She Drew What She Saw, Using Only a Golf Pencil [PDF] [Extended Online Version]

A longform, graphic novel-style story written and drawn by a cartoonist who spent two months in the L.A. County jail system on a misdemeanor charge. This story led the women's section of the L.A. County Jail system to implement improvements, including:

• Inmates offered showers every 24 hours while in temporary housing
• Monitors on the lights, to prevent guards from turning off the lights during the day for no reason
• Inmates getting seven pairs of underwear a week, instead of four or five

After Recovering a Famous Nazi-Looted Painting, Randy Schoenberg's Life Became a Movie

Randy Schoenberg in his office. Photo by Steve Anderson for PAW

Published in the Princeton Alumni Weekly [PDF]

THE FIRST TIME he was in Berlin, E. Randol Schoenberg ’88 was a junior at Princeton, spending six months studying math and German. It was 1987, two years before the wall dividing East from West would fall. The Brandenburg Gate was impenetrable, surrounded by guards.

In February of this year, he was back, marveling at the changes. As a student, he had lived in a tiny room in an apartment building; now he was staying at the fancy Hotel Adlon Kempinski, with a view of the open Gate. When Schoenberg had lived in Berlin as a college junior, the city had not yet truly grappled with its history; now, it had both a Jewish Museum and a Holocaust memorial.

Schoenberg had returned to the city for the premiere of the film Woman in Gold, the story of a woman’s quest to regain artistic treasures seized by the Nazis — a battle in which Schoenberg played a central role. In the evening, he would put on his tux and walk down the red carpet. But before that, he took a gloomier path, wandering through the Holocaust memorial, a rolling field of rectangular gray monoliths that looks like a graveyard. For Schoenberg, there was a deeply personal connection: Members of his own family had perished.

Woman in Gold recounts how Maria Altmann’s family fled Vienna after the Nazis marched into the city in 1938, leaving behind valuable paintings by the Austrian artist Gustav Klimt. After the war, the Austrian government kept the paintings and displayed them in a museum for six decades. Schoenberg was Altmann’s attorney, and in 2006 he shocked the art and legal worlds by winning back five Klimts for her and her fellow heirs. One of these, the 1907 Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, portraying Altmann’s aunt, would sell for a reported $135 million — at the time, the highest price ever paid for a painting. The other four — three landscapes and another portrait of Adele — would sell for a total of $192.7 million.

The sales made Schoenberg a very rich man, and made the case worth the professional risk. He had given up his steady job at a law firm in part to work on this case, though the only promise of payment was the 40 percent of the paintings’ value at sale he’d get if he were to win.

But Schoenberg also wanted the case to convey a personal message. His great-grandfather died in the death camp at Treblinka. His grandfather, the composer Arnold Schoenberg, had to flee Berlin. Even if Randol had lost the case — as most people expected — it would have been worth it. He wanted to show what had happened to his family, to Altmann’s family, and to all the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe.

“You feel like you’re representing the whole community of people who were kicked out and that are now being welcomed back,” he says of his trip to Berlin. “It’s not always that the people who have been vanquished get to return.”

L.A. Weekly's April Fools Day Issue 2015

Yesterday we brought back L.A. Weekly's annual April Fools Day issue — a screen shot the home page is above.

This year's stories were:

 

• With Head Start on Senate, Kamala Harris Will Run for President Too
  
• L.A. Votes to Move Santa Monica “Closer”
• New Art Walk Consists Entirely of Food Trucks
  
• Kanye West Interrupts Kanye West Concert
  
• New Study Says You Would Have Been Late Even If There Had Been No Traffic
  
• L.A. Actors’ Friends Sitting in the Audience Want Minimum Wage, Too
  
• Student Film Crew Promises to Be Out of the Way in 5 Minutes
  
• White Guy Won’t Shut Up About “Inspiring" Trip to Watts

The stories were written and designed by Michael Ciriaco, Brandon J. Sornberger, Stephen Perlstein, Kaitlin Beauchemin and me. I edited the project, and our web editor Ali Trachta put the home page together.

Also see our past year's issues:

2014 April Fools Day Issue
2013 April Fools Day Issue
2012 April Fools Day Issue

Stories With Two Titles, or Why People Should Maybe Just Make Up Their Minds

Published in L.A. Weekly

If Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) wins the Best Picture Oscar will we hear the whole title?

To address your puzzled look, yes, that is the title. These words — “or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)” — are there, at the bottom of the poster. Director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu says it's the title. A publicist for the film assures me it's the title.

And the name will, indeed, read Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) on the Oscar envelope if it were to win. Come Sunday, it has the chance to become the longest-titled Best Picture winner of all time.

And yes, to address your now squinty-eyed expression of disgust, that is the punctuation — or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance).

The filmmaker's intention probably was to place the whole subtitle entirely within parentheses, as in (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), so that this second title issue read as an aside. But the “or” fell out somewhere along the way. The fact that someone let this pass means that perhaps no one was really taking this second title thing too seriously anyway.

What to make of a second title that no one uses?

Since we all call it Birdman, as in the sentence “Let’s go see Birdman,” this second title exists in name only. Even Wikipedia seems to be confused. Iñárritu, of course, isn’t being revolutionary — Stanley Kubrick famously named his film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, and similar titles show up across media.

I've always had trouble with these titles, thinking them to be lazy or disingenuous, trying to have it both ways. But after a journey down the dual title rabbit hole, and a more nuanced picture, I'm ready to be accepting — to a point.

KCRW appearance: India

Today I appeared on KCRW to discuss my article on how television is a force for social justice in India. Feel free to read the KCRW article accompanying my segment, or listen here:

Can TV Save India?

Published in L.A. Weekly

As a teenager in Bombay, Aamir Khan was a tennis champion. When he came home from a match, his mother would ask if he'd won. Usually the answer was yes. She'd give him a hug.

After five or 10 minutes, though, she'd come back and sit next to him. She'd say, "The boy who lost to you, he must have reached home now as well. And his mom must have asked him the same question. And he would have told his mom that he lost." What is his mom feeling, he wondered?

The first time it happened, Khan thought: Did I do something wrong? Should I have lost? But over time, Khan started to look at his opponent differently. He would still try to win. He just would try to connect with him, somehow.

Decades later, Khan is watching a video to prepare for an episode of his first talk show,Satyamev Jayate. A woman has been gang-raped, and the rapists later tracked her down and burned her. On her hospital bed, she speaks her dying words.

Looking for Comedy in the Hindu World

Published in L.A. Weekly

On a Friday night in September, Aditi Mittal paces on onstage at the Canvas Laugh Club in Mumbai. She's talking about sanitary napkins.

"Saying the words 'sanitary napkins' in public is like standing in a Hogwarts common room and saying 'Voldemort,' " quips Mittal, who's 27, with hair down to her shoulders and large, dark glasses.

The crowd is mostly 20s and 30s, dressed in jeans and button-downs. They're laughing in between sips of McDonald's sodas and Kingfisher beers.

"Each pad is individually wrapped, which is then placed inside a plastic packet, which is then wrapped in a newspaper by the chemist and then placed inside a black plastic back. I have seen more careless cocaine smugglers," she continues. "By the time you get to the first pad you're, like, 'But I've already reached menopause.' "

The World Pun Champion Defends His Title

Published in L.A. Weekly

After Ben Ziek won big at the 2013 world pun championships, his life didn't change. He kept the same job he's had for 13 years, as a night auditor at the Burbank Airport Marriott. He gets in at 11 p.m., helps balance the books, does wake-up calls and deals with guest complaints before leaving at 7:30 a.m.

Co-worker Angelique, who sits at the desk nearby, does not appreciate his punning. "She doesn't like it all," Ziek says. "For 13 years I've joked that she doesn't have a sense of humor."

A 38-year-old gentle giant with a dark crew cut, Ziek has the fortune and misfortune of being among the best in the world at something many people disdain.

John Ridley: The 12 Years a Slave Oscar Winner Isn't Just a Black History Screenwriter

Photo by Ryan Orange

Published in L.A. Weekly

John Ridley is on his cellphone, talking to his sister for the first time since he won an Oscar for writing 12 Years a Slave.

"It's like Excalibur. I should give it to the Lady of the Lake," he says, dismissively: The statuette has ended up in a drawer. When it was in the kitchen, "We had to dust around it."

It's not that he's ashamed of the honor. But he wants to force himself to focus on the future.

In recent years, Ridley has been pegged as a black-history specialist. In addition to 12 Years, he wrote a still-unmade L.A. Riots script. A Jimi Hendrix song, "Sending My Love to Linda," inspired him to write and direct Jimi: All Is By My Side, starring Outkast's André Benjamin; it comes out in June.

Jimmy Kimmel: L.A.'s King of Late-Night

Photo by Ryan Orange

Published in L.A. Weekly

Jimmy Kimmel shops at Costco. The Hawthorne Costco, near his beach house, is different from the Burbank Costco, near his Hollywood Hills home. "There are beach things there, like volleyballs and surfboards, that they don't have at the Costco in Burbank," he says. He's been to Costco in Hawaii, in Cabo San Lucas.

He also goes to the Hollywood Farmers Market. The Cheese Store of Silver Lake. Surfas restaurant supply store in Culver City. (He owns a paella grill, a La Caja China pig roasting box, a tandoor oven.)
"People assume that I have someone that goes shopping for me," he says. "I have such an odd job that it's nice to go into Smart & Final.

"I almost never relax," he adds. "When I'm running errands I'm only doing one thing, and that's why it's a nice little break."

L.A. Weekly's April Fools Day Issue 2014

Yesterday brought the return of L.A. Weekly's annual April Fools Day issue. To re-live the experience, click on the image above to see it larger, and click on these links to the stories:

• L.A. Man Solves Drought With "Just Use Ocean Water" Plan
• 16,751 People Found Using One Westside Rentals Account
• Man on Date at Griffith Observatory Fakes Incredible Knowledge of Science
• Friend Visiting From Out of Town Would Like to Go to "the Bar From Swingers," Tonight
• Edward Snowden Leaks Drastic New Coachella Security Measures
• L.A.'s Coolest Music Venue Is This Guy's Self-Storage Unit
• New App LikeGrandmaMade Tells You Which Ethnic Foods Are Authentic

The pieces were written and designed by Ben Westhoff, Stephen Perlstein, Lindsey Barrow, Rachel Hastings, Kaitlin Beauchemin, Paul Bradley and Tien Nguyen, and edited by me, Zachary Pincus-Roth. Our web editor Ali Trachta put the home page together. Thanks for all your help.

Also check out:

• L.A. Weekly's 2013 April Fools Day Issue
• L.A. Weekly's 2012 April Fools Day Issue

 

When You're On Your Way Home, and You Come Upon an Opera

 

Passersby look on, as the opera "Invisible Cities" is performed at Union Station in November

Published in L.A. Weekly

It's 10:20 p.m. on a Friday in November when Kevin walks into Union Station, pumped for his bus ride home and a little buzzed from beers with dinner. That's when he stumbles upon an opera.

The show, Invisible Cities, involves 175 audience members wandering the station, following singers and dancers as they weave around unsuspecting travelers.

Kevin joins the crowd standing in the south patio courtyard, eyes wide. The audience, clad in fancy jackets to ward off the chilly night, paid up to $75 to be there. Kevin stands out in a white T-shirt and white sweatpants. He's tall and burly, with a hard-edged, rectangular face framed by a gray backward cap, mustache and goatee. Not a guy you want to mess with.

One performer, a large bearded man with a backpack, strolls as he sings: "I must go to another city. I must go where I find another past awaits me."

"You ever experienced the term 'surreal'?" Kevin says. "I think this is the first time I've ever seen a surreal moment in my entire life."

L.A. Weekly Podcast: Alien Abductions

I created a pilot version of the L.A. Weekly podcast, where we plan to conduct interviews with our writers about their stories, along with other L.A. figures.

The episode is an interview I conducted with staff writer Gendy Alimurung about her two-part series on alien abductions.

Click on the play button below to listen to the podcast via Soundcloud:

KPCC appearance: Slash Fiction

Today I appeared on KPCC's morning radio show "Take Two" to discuss my L.A. Weekly cover story about slash fiction.

You can read the article at KPCC's website that accompanies the segment, and the audio file is below -- click the play button to hear it, or right-click on my name and click "save as" to download the mp3.

Zachary Pincus-Roth on KPCC

 

Slash Fiction: A Fantasy World in Which Male TV Characters Find Romance — With Each Other

Cover design by Darrick Rainey

Published in L.A. Weekly

Racked with pleasure, it was all Obi-Wan could do to keep his feet as he came, that large warm hand milking every drop of semen from his body. —Keelywolfe, "Sacred Flames Within"

Calysta Rose discovered slash fiction in 1998, when she was 23. In her office at an oil company, she followed a chain of links online and came upon a sexy short story involving characters Obi-Wan Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jinn from Star Wars: Episode 1 — The Phantom Menace participating in a sort of "summer solstice" celebration.

"I knew what kind of happy, fun times happen at summer solstice, and Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor, they're attractive dudes," she says. "So I read it and I thought, 'Oh my God, I shouldn't have read it at work. Oh my God.' My face burning up. It was really, really hot. I thought, 'Oh my God, I can see the appeal of this.'" A 15-year obsession began.

You've probably heard of fan fiction — eager amateur writers using fictional characters from books, movies or TV shows to create stories of their own. Slash is a subset of fan fiction, sticking those characters in gay romances, regardless of their actual sexual preference.

Two Young Guns Attempt to Bring Meaning to Magic

Published in the Village Voice

What do you picture when you hear the word magician? Maybe David Copperfield. Or a birthday party.

"Magic suffers from the people who do magic," Derek DelGaudio says.

DelGaudio and Helder Guimarães, two of the world's best young card magicians, are trying to change such perceptions with their show Nothing to Hide, which opens October 23 and runs through December 8 at the Signature Center. The duo brings the show to New York from the Geffen Playhouse, one of Los Angeles's most respected theaters, where it became a hit and extended its run several times.

Nothing to Hide features some mind-bending illusions, but its popularity stems mostly from the fact that DelGaudio and Guimarães aim to do something more than fool people: They want to raise magic from a craft to an art, from something nerdy to something cool.

They want to make magic that means something—magic that, like art or poetry, relates to the real world.

How USC Grads Freddie Wong and Ryan Coogler Became the Future of Filmmaking, Via Two Very Different Paths

Fruitvale Station

Published in L.A. Weekly

A road diverged for two 27-year-old USC film school grads, and each went a different way: one the Sundance/Harvey Weinstein path that has been a young filmmaker's dream for two decades, the other through new-media outlets such as YouTube and Kickstarter.

One became the toast of the indie-film world after winning two top prizes at January's Sundance Film Festival. Another is an icon to a core group of Internet experts and millions of teen fans.

These days it seems the latter has the advantage — YouTube is the new frontier, and it can be more lucrative, even if top indie-film projects still enjoy more prestige. But as the two release wildly divergent new projects this month, it's possible both of them represent the future of filmmaking.

Anna Kendrick: She's Just a Girl and She's on Fire

 

Anne Kendrick in "Pitch Perfect"

 

Published in L.A. Weekly's People Issue

From a booth at the restaurant Birds, actress Anna Kendrick eyes a TV commercial across the room. "How about that pocket hose, huh? It's a little tiny hose and it gets big. It's a real space-saver," she says. "If you have a yard that needs watering, I think you've got enough space for a hose. Sorry."

In addition to ridiculing infomercials over lunch in Franklin Village, Kendrick does many other things that adorkable, 27-year-old Angelenos are supposed to do — not because they're cool but simply because she wants to. She frequents hole-in-the-wall Thai restaurants and art-house theaters like Cinefamily and the New Beverly, sometimes by herself. She uses Instagram, and Snapchat, the latter of which is perfect for celebrities since the images disappear in seconds. She obsesses over the hoarding phenomenon, even hanging out in the Reddit community devoted to discussing the gory details.

She's done most things right in her career, too, rising to a level of welcome ubiquity that rivals Neil Patrick Harris and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, fellow actor-singer-dancer-comedians who are so likable and of-the-moment that they can do no wrong. Kendrick effortlessly bounces from a Twilight sequel to Joe Swanberg's upcoming micro-brewing indie,Drinking Buddies, to the in-production film version of the cult musical The Last Five Years. Her solo in the a cappella movie Pitch Perfect — which involved a 75-year-old Appalachian folk song and a cup used as a percussion instrument, a trick she discovered via a video posted on, yes, Reddit — hit No. 64 on the Billboard Hot 100.

L.A. Weekly April Fools Day Issue 2013

The L.A. Weekly home page on April 1

This year I helped organize L.A. Weekly's second annual online April Fools' Day issue, a tradition I helped stat last year. See above for what the website looked like on April 1.

Here are links to the stories:

• L.A. to Build Football Stadium at 405-10 Interchange
• West Hollywood Bans Flannel
• MOCA to Merge With Pinterest
• Street Parking Sign Examined Thoroughly, Inconclusive
• Venice Drum Circle Goes Digital
• New Restaurant Golgugi Burger Claims to Have Discovered 6th Taste

The pieces were written and designed by Stephen Perlstein, Eve Weston, Kai Flanders, Jacy Wojcik, Eva Recinos and me, Zachary Pincus-Roth, and our web editor Ali Trachta put the home page together.

Also check out last year's April Fools Day Issue.

MOCA to Merge With Pinterest

The new MOCA

Published in L.A. Weekly as part of its April Fools Day issue

Beset by financial troubles and a series of staff departures, the Museum of Contemporary Art has announced a surprise move: It will merge with the social networking site Pinterest.

Effective today, MOCA is closing its brick-and-mortar locations, including its Grand Avenueheadquarters, Geffen Contemporary building and Pacific Design Center space. The museum's collection will exist only online, where Pinterest users will be able to "like" or "re-pin" its artworks.

"We are very excited to be merging with Pinterest, a company that perfectly embodies the definition of term 'contemporary art' in the 21st century," said MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch at a news conference at Pinterest's San Francisco headquarters. "We feel they have a lot to offer MOCA when it comes to bringing in new audiences. And funding."

The art world had been speculating about MOCA's future in recent weeks, as LACMA made a formal proposal to acquire the museum; a partnership with the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., also was discussed. "We are happy that MOCA has found a partner that matches its level of artistic scholarship," said LACMA director Michael Govan.

As part of its new partnership, MOCA has already programmed a number of upcoming exhibits, starting with "Gift Wrap Ideas," running May 5 through Sept. 3, followed by "too cute for words," "Can I go here ... please???" and "Bundt Cakes!"

For the position of chief curator, which has been vacant since the museum ousted Paul Schimmel last summer, the museum has appointed Jennifer Charles of St. Paul, Minn., who has more than 16,000 Pinterest followers and is a self-described "food lover, gardening addict, surface pattern designer and mother of three."

The museum's annual gala, now scheduled to be held online, will be organized once again by performance artist Marina Abramovic, who said in an interview that she plans to "break new ground in Internet art" by creating web videos of nude performers having sex with each other. MOCA also has enlisted James Franco to create a Pinterest board called "James Franco," where he plans to pin "photos of James Franco," he said.

Philanthropist Eli Broad had to sign off on the merger, as stipulated in his agreement to donate funds to save MOCA from an earlier financial collapse, in 2008. "I had hoped that MOCA would be a partner for the Broad, my new museum across the street, but frankly it's kind of great that I'll be the only museum on Grand Avenue now," said Broad, who added that he hadn't heard of Pinterest before this development. "This is all very new to me. I was having a hard enough time with the Twitter."

The Pinterest-MOCA merger drew immediate criticism from art-world insiders, who charged that Deitch, a former gallerist, was continuing his overly populist approach to running the institution. "MOCA doesn't seem to realize that art is more than just categorizing random images that you happen to find somewhere," said famed L.A. artist Ed Ruscha, known for his series of photographs Twentysix Gasoline Stations.

 

Watch My Standup Comedy Video

My standup comedy performance at the Westside Theater in Santa Monica on March 14, 2013:

Theater Review: The Nether Takes Placein a Virtual Reality of Sexual Fantasies

 

Dakin Matthews, left, and Jeanne Syquia in The Nether; Photo by Craig Schwartz

Published in L.A. Weekly

Jennifer Haley sets much of her new play, The Nether, in an elaborate virtual reality — think Second Life, where you wander about as your chosen avatar, but a hyped-up version that allows you to see and feel the experience happening around you.

It's a fantasy world that shares a striking similarity with one portrayed in a buzzed-about film that also opened last week: Spring Breakers. Like The Nether, the film shows characters trapped in a life of drab buildings and sexual repression who escape to a realm of decadence, ruled by a man with a one-word name, sometimes crossing ethical and legal boundaries along the way. While Spring Breakers has more of a knowing smirk — you won't see girls in bathing suits and ski masks holding guns and dancing to Britney Spears at the Kirk Douglas Theatre — both engage the question of whether to indulge our innermost urges, sexual and otherwise.

Its ability to dovetail with the movie of the moment is part of what makes The Nether such a rare gem. Big-budget theater rarely has this kind of hip factor and hardly ever addresses issues in cutting-edge technology with as much sophistication as we see here. Plus, it's not every day that the elite L.A. theater company (Center Theatre Group) offers the world premiere of a play by an L.A. playwright performed by L.A. actors and shaped by L.A. designers. All of this is cause for celebration — making it easy to ignore the fact that this thought-provoking work, in its current form, does not ultimately offer enough of an affecting emotional ride.

Kate Burton and Michael Ritchie: L.A.'s Theater Power Couple Keeps the Drama Onstage

Photo by Star Foreman

Published in L.A. Weekly's Couples Issue

Kate Burton and Michael Ritchie spend a quarter of their time living in different cities, a situation that can be difficult for any couple. But they feel it shows the strength of their relationship. Besides, for the first few days of each trip, they can indulge the habits that drive each other crazy. She can leave copies of the New Yorker around the house, for instance, while he can throw away plastic bags.

"Kate will save plastic bags from the grocery, and we'll have 80 of them," Ritchie says, in a voice that meshes his Worcester, Mass., accent with the nasality of Ray Romano. "There's not going to be a moment when we have to pack 80 plastic bags. Can we go down to 10?"

The couple sits in the living room of their impossibly charming though surprisingly low-key house on a narrow, curvy road in Los Feliz. The front door and garage door are a matching light blue, and there's a yard out back, where Ritchie's domain is the potted plants and Burton oversees the garden. Running around somewhere is their excitable lab mix, Phil.

That "surprisingly" is because of their high-profile careers. Ritchie is artistic director at L.A.'s powerhouse Center Theatre Group, which controls three stages, the Ahmanson, Mark Taper Forum and Kirk Douglas, and regularly prepares shows for Broadway. Burton is one of the country's most celebrated theater actresses, once earning two Tony nominations in the same year (2002), for Hedda Gabler and The Elephant Man.

Burton initially resisted the profession, in part because of her parents: her mother, actress and theater producer Sybil Williams (now Christopher); her father, Richard Burton; and her stepmom, Elizabeth Taylor. "As much as my parents were delightful and rambunctious, I didn't want to have their lives," she says.

The bizarre job of the sitcom warm-up comic

Photo by Star Foreman; Design by Darrick Rainey

Published in L.A. Weekly

Mark Sweet has warmed up the audience at more than 4,000 sitcom tapings, and he almost always begins with the same joke, the one he's using tonight at CBS' Mike & Molly, as it gets under way at 6 p.m.: "Turn to the person to your right and shake that person's hand."

The joke — and it is a joke, which becomes clear when you see what happens next — accomplishes something more than mere laughter: It gets audience members comfortable with the people around them. The message is that this isn't the L.A. Philharmonic, where an errant cough requires you to shrink in humiliation. "I've been in a warm-up where I started a show and people said, 'Is it OK to laugh?' " Sweet says. "They're not sure what to do. They think they're in a movie set."

On television, sitcoms are a slick, breezy 22 minutes. But a sitcom taping is an absurdist, theatrical event of Wagnerian length. The actors do two, three, four or more takes of every scene. Between takes, as the cameras and props are reset, the writers convene on the sidelines to rewrite jokes that didn't work.

During the lag time, Sweet keeps the audience not just occupied but primed to laugh. On a raised platform in front of a bleacher full of spectators, he emcees a variety show of jokes, magic tricks and competitions. One standby, a dance contest, typically involves a frisky audience member using the mic stand as a stripper pole while gyrating to a song like "Bust a Move." It can be corny, yes, but it's impossible not to laugh.

Some comics warm up for talk or reality shows. But it's sitcom tapings that bring the greatest difficulty and biggest paycheck. A network gig goes three hours or longer (Friends sometimes went seven) — and can pay $4,000 per night.

This odd, behind-the-scenes vaudeville is something of a dying art: The number of sitcoms shot in front of an audience — called multicamera comedies, because many cameras shoot at once — has dwindled in the last couple decades. But the handful of top warm-ups who are still around are in high demand.

Mark Sweet, who has steady gigs on Chuck Lorre's three platinum CBS shows (Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory and Mike & Molly), is at the top of the profession.

Two Magicians Created the Magic Castle's Most Popular Show in Years. But They're Not Finished

Photo by Kevin Scanlon; Design by Darrick Rainey

Published in L.A. Weekly

I ran out the exit door and down an alley behind the Magic Castle, clutching a wooden box. Two magicians had picked me as a volunteer during their show at the private magic club, with instructions to hide the box somewhere on Castle grounds. I panicked — the trick seemed to depend on my hiding place. Finally, I stuck it in a concrete ditch, behind a pipe, then ran back to bang on the exit door and rejoin the audience.

The rest of the box trick will not be revealed here. There will be no description of what happens and no explanation of how it works (even if I were somehow able to find out). It's better just to see it. If music writing is said to be dancing about architecture, magic writing is figure skating about castles in the sky.

Suffice it to say: "The piece with the box was just awesome," says Bill Goodwin, the Castle's librarian, who saw the show. "They don't do like other magicians, where [they say], 'We're going to do this or that.' They just do it and they respect the audience to get it themselves. So you get to the point as an audience member where you're thinking, 'No way, this can't be possible!' " But then it happens.

The magicians in question are Helder Guimarães and Derek DelGaudio, who performed together at the Magic Castle's Peller Theater during a weekend in January. The show proved so popular that they brought it back in June, and then again in August and September. Celebrities like Ryan Gosling and Eva Mendes could be found milling around the bar outside, clamoring for a spot in the 50-seat theater.

Goodwin has been a Castle member since 1978. Other than a couple instances, like performances by celebs such as Steve Martin or Jason Alexander, "I cannot remember people waiting two hours in line show after show after show," he says. "Sometimes you hear, 'Oh, you got to see this show!' and you do and you see it and it's great. But there is something different about this one."

Mike Pisciotta, a manager at the Castle and a friend of DelGaudio's, says, "I've been in magic for over 20 years and it's the best magic show I've ever seen."

American Idol Meets the Museum

Published in L.A. Weekly 

"BlackBerrys, Turkish garlic, baby food, chocolate bars, perfume, fuel ... ." Artist Liz Glynn is fumbling through the multicolored wooden drawers in her installation at the Hammer Museum, pulling out lead sculptures.

The objects are life-size versions of banned or difficult-to-find items that Palestinians have imported through the smuggling tunnels between Gaza and Egypt. The idea is that museumgoers can play with these things, taking them from the drawers and arranging them around the room. The exhibit includes a wooden tunnel that gets smaller and smaller, like a sideways pyramid; a round, white section of another tunnel, made of reinforced concrete bricks; a box of white gloves for handling the sculptures; and a closet with a wedding dress — brides have been smuggled, too.

Museumgoers particularly like the lead crabs. "People like to put them in funny places that have sort of a narratively suggestive" quality, Glynn says. "Peeking out from behind something, or the crab with a cellphone next to its claw." Some visitors have tried on the dress.

People are technically allowed to take the objects anywhere in the museum, though guards sometimes stop them. Glynn once found a lead BlackBerry stuck in a planter. She pictures people walking around with these items in their pockets, feeling their weight, simulating the experience of sneaking something where it's not supposed to go.

Glynn, 30, a graduate of Harvard and CalArts, grew up outside Boston, obsessed with the mummy display at its Museum of Fine Arts. The idea for her exhibit began with the great pyramids, where pharaohs were buried with belongings to use in the afterlife — and then got more complicated.

"I try to start with something any fifth grader would know," she says, but adds, "You aren't expected to know everything. It's better if you don't, and have your own story of the time you put something in your pocket or having been in a mine shaft or something else."

Whether people can relate to her work is a particularly important question for Glynn, one of five finalists for the Hammer's inaugural Mohn Award. The prize — which pays out $100,000 over two years and includes a book published about the artist's work — is given to the top artist in the museum's inaugural biennial, "Made in L.A.," featuring new work from 60 young or under-recognized L.A. artists and running through Sept. 2.

The twist? It is museumgoers who vote to determine the prizewinner — a process that has angered many L.A. artists and fueled a discussion about whether popularity is an appropriate goal for visual art.

At LACMA Collectors Committee, Art Acquisitions Is a Battle Royale

The object of Robert T. Singer's affections: Fudo Myoo: The Indomitable Foe of Evil

Published in L.A. Weekly

Robert T. Singer stands in a LACMA gallery holding an envelope with a list of words scrawled on the back, in a combination of English and Japanese: "condition, value, function, age, male, female..." Each talking point helps express his love for the 12th-century, $550,000 wooden Buddha several steps away, which he first spotted in a Kyoto gallery.

Singer, LACMA's head curator of Japanese art, is about to give a speech at the museum's annual Collectors Committee event. Ten curators have each picked an artwork they want the museum to buy, and have shipped it here for the occasion. On this April morning, they'll present it to donors, who vote that evening on which works will be purchased — after paying at least $15,000 for the privilege.

Begun in 1986, Collectors Committee is an atypical tradition, modeled after a similar event at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. It's especially important for LACMA, a relatively young museum where most departments don't have an endowment for acquisitions.

LACMA director Michael Govan calls Singer the event's Ty Cobb, who holds baseball's best-ever batting average. In 22 presentations, he's been successful 21 times. The one time he lost, he picked a set of screens depicting flower carts. "I was too clever by half," he says. "I was thinking, 'This will appeal to the group.' No, it has to appeal to me." He later learned that in sophisticated New York circles, where many of the donors grew up, homes often had copies of similar screens. To them, he says, "It was a cliché."

Singer spots a 60-foot Robert Rauschenberg print — his biggest competition. Many attendees are contemporary collectors. Plus, doesn't the fact that it dramatically fills the wall bias people toward it? "If that's your thing," he says.

How to Succeed on YouTube: Goof Off in Your Basement...Only Better

Dane Boedigheimer's Annoying Orange just made the transition from online series to cable TV.

Published in L.A. Weekly

Also check out the rest of our L.A. Weekly YouTube issue, which I look the lead in editing

Daniel Grimes, a high school student from Ypsilanti, Mich., flew to Los Angeles last July for the YouTube convention Vidcon. He came to see his favorite YouTubers, including Toby Turner, a comedian known in part for his "literal trailers."

"He'll take a video game trailer and sing over it, describing everything that's happening in a painfully obvious but very funny way," Grimes told me, as we sat in an audience of hundreds in a ballroom in the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza hotel.

As I blogged at the time, Turner took the stage to perform his literal trailer for Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, playing the keyboard and singing exactly what everyone saw on the screen, e.g., "Mysterious hooded man joined by other hooded people."

I had a flashback to a family road trip listening to my brothers spoofing the opening song from Disney's Beauty and the Beast: "There goes the toilet cleaner with his plunger/The same old plunger as before."

My family is weird. But as we've learned from YouTube, a lot of people are weird — and don't mind sharing the evidence. The sort of goofing off that once took place in the privacy of your car, basement or backyard has become a form of entertainment, even a profession, whose practitioners will gather at Vidcon this weekend at the Anaheim Convention Center.

COUNTERINTUITIVE COVER STORIES IN THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE

Published in McSweeney's

“Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

“Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?”

“Is Pinterest Making Us Blind?”

“Is the Kindle Making Us Illiterate?”

“Are Houses Making Us Homeless?”

“Is This Dress Making Us Look Fat?”

“Are Paperweights Making Our Papers Fly Away?”

“Is Mom Making Us Dinner Tonight?”

“Are Inner Tubes Making Us Sink?”

“Is Artisanal Coffee Making Us Douchebags?”

Why Clybourne Park Is Overrated

Published in L.A. Weekly

I have a dirty theater secret: I thought Clybourne Park was pretty good. As in merely pretty good. As opposed to the modern classic it's now perceived to be, after its premiere Off-Broadway brought it the Pulitzer Prize, followed by runs at the Mark Taper Forum, a hop to Broadway and, finally, on Sunday, the Tony Award for Best Play.

It's obvious why Clybourne is a good bet to win in your Tony Awards pool or Pulitzer Prize for Drama draft (and I'm not ashamed to admit I've participated in both such things). It's a well-made play, along with the perceived edginess that comes with a play that talks about race, written by a playwright, Bruce Norris, who had been on the rise and was considered due for such consideration.

Quick plot summary, for the uninitiated: In the classic 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun, the matriarch of the African-American Younger family purchases a house in the white Clybourne Park neighborhood of Chicago, with the hope that it would bring the family a better life. Clybourne Park is set in that house, and in the first act the white family living there is visited by neighborhood busybody Karl Lindner -- who also shows up in Raisin, with the same agenda he has here: stopping the Younger family from moving in.

In the next few decades, the neighborhood becomes a black neighborhood. And in the second act, set in the present day, a well-to-do white couple buys the house and plans to make some renovations, while their black neighbors -- sensitive to the historic nature of the house and the neighborhood -- try to change their minds.

It's a clever conceit: the last half-century of American race relations played out through real estate. So why did I, along with a number of friends who have seen it, come away surprisingly disappointed?

Bill Simmons: He Writes, He Scores

Published in L.A. Weekly

Bill Simmons has lost 15 pounds. He's sleeping less. His hair has gone gray. All for a website. "It's more work than I thought it was going to be," he says.

Last June, Simmons raised eyebrows by starting Grantland, an ambitious sports and pop culture site, named for legendary sports reporter Grantland Rice. It's a literary, experimental subdivision of ESPN.com, with a quarterly print journal and contributions from such nonfiction-writing hiperati as Chuck Klosterman and Malcolm Gladwell.

The 42-year-old Simmons is in jeans and a dark blue polo, sitting in his new office in the L.A. Live complex, which looks like a dorm room on move-in day -- a phone on the ground here, a Boston Celtics hat there. The place is meant as a staff hangout -- Simmons writes his column from coffee shops. That column, often topping 6,000 words, made him the definitive sportswriter of the Internet age. It's written not as a fly on the wall but with the subjective passion of a fan, often answering reader questions and drawing meaning from a single free throw in a Celtics-Lakers Game 5 with a kind of Talmudic fervor.

Jenna Marbles: The YouTube Star

From Jenna Marbles's video "How to trick people into thinking you're good looking"

Published in L.A. Weekly

One Friday in July 2010, Jenna Mourey drove home from her job at a tanning salon in Boston; she had to shower and change for her night gig as a go-go dancer. As she walked into her apartment, she decided to film herself getting ready.

She enjoyed go-go dancing (getting paid to dance -- in flats!). But she had a master's degree from Boston University in sports psychology and counseling. Her life was, as she says, "ridiculous."

"I went to school, tried really hard, did everything I was supposed to do, and now, like, what the fuck is this mess I'm in right now?" the 25-year-old recalls thinking. "I'm going to work dancing in my underwear, making myself look like a whore on purpose."

That night she edited together a video called "How to Trick People Into Thinking You're Good-Looking" and posted it on YouTube. By the time she got to her night gig, the other dancers had already passed it around Facebook. It has since been watched 38 million times.

Jenna Marbles, as she now calls herself, eventually started posting weekly to her YouTube channel, which has 2.9 million subscribers (No. 6 on the site), and almost half a billion views. Most of her fans are teenage girls, who relate to her foul-mouthed, brutally straightforward comedy sketches on the plight of young womanhood.

L.A. Weekly April Fools Day Issue 2012

L.A. Weekly's home page on April 1, 2012

If you visited L.A. Weekly's home page yesterday, you might have noticed a few stories that seemed a little off -- our contribution to April Fools' Day.

For those of you who want to relive the moment, click on the image above to see it bigger, and links to all the stories are here:

• Mayor Villaraigosa Invited to White House, Refuses to Leave
• Honda Accord Takes Last Parking Spot in Westwood
• MOCA to Import 'Heavier Rock' From 'Much Farther Away' 
• Skrillex Opens Grillex, the First Dubstep-Themed Food Truck
• Gwyneth Paltrow's Quick Recipe for Busy Moms: Quail Egg Pasta With Black Truffles
• "I Hate You Too" By The 405

The pieces were written by Simone Wilson, Wendy Gilmartin, L.J. Williamson, Paul T. Bradley, Jacy Wojcik and me, and our web editor Jake Swearingen did a lot of the graphics and put the home page together. Thanks to everyone for helping out.

Honda Accord Takes Last Parking Spot in Westwood

Published in L.A. Weekly (April Fool's Day edition)

A Honda Accord driven by James Duffy, 27, claimed the last parking spot in Westwood on Saturday afternoon, witnesses reported, a discovery that sent shockwaves through the neighborhood near UCLA.

Duffy drove up Westwood Boulevard and circled the neighborhood for more than 20 minutes before locating the space, which was next to the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf on Gayley Avenue. He was parking to meet his friend Scott for pizza and maybe a movie afterwards, according to sources close to him.

The spot at first appeared to be too small. "I thought it was impossible," Duffy said, "but when I cut the steering wheel to the left and pulled back, I knew I had it." Duffy later admitted to Scott that he slightly bumped the Subaru Impreza in front of him.

Kevin Spacey in Richard III: The Winter of His Content

Kevin Spacey in the movie "Margin Call"

Published in WSJ Magazine

"If there was one play that we really, really didn't want to f— up, this was it." Kevin Spacey curses a lot, which is especially startling since we are walking through the stately public gardens of Greystone Mansion, the English Gothic–style estate in Beverly Hills.

We're having about as British a day as you can have in Los Angeles, starting with breakfast at the London Hotel. Spacey likes to stay there because the hotel offers free calls to London, where he lives and works his day job as artistic director of the storied Old Vic Theatre.

Spacey, who is strolling along in gray Converse All Stars, is headed out tonight to Avilés, Spain, a tiny northern port town, the next stop on the global tour of the play in question, "Richard III."

"The expectations were so high," he explains. It was, after all, the first time he would be working with director Sam Mendes since both won Oscars for "American Beauty." The production is also part of the duo's ambitious Bridge Project, in which a play debuts at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) or the Old Vic, takes an epic world tour to places like Hong Kong, Sydney and Greece. Richard the III lands in New York on January 10 at BAM, a co-producer of the project.

Howard Braham's 11-11-11 Party at 1111 Olive Ave. in Burbank

​Published in L.A. Weekly

On November 11, 1998, when Howard Braham was a student at Columbia University, he realized around 10:30 p.m. that it was about to turn 11:11 on 11-11. He knocked on the door of his friend Steve Schwartz and they decided to gather 11 people, head up to the 11th floor, turn on the television and watch channel 11, which, Braham recalls, was the 11 o'clock news.

Since then, Braham hosted 11-11 parties almost every year, spacing them out so that the 11th of these parties took place last Friday, on on 11-11-11. The venue was George Izay Park, selected because its address is 1111 Olive Ave., in Burbank.

Braham, who now lives in Glendale and works as a Disney Imagineer, arrived just before 11:11 a.m. and stayed until the final moment of truth -- 11 seconds after 11:11 p.m.

Lights! Camera! App!

Published in Los Angeles Magazine

Like most camera assistants, John Reyes, w ho works on the MTV sitcom The Hard Times of RJ Berger, stores his equipment on a four-foot-tall aluminum cart. Among the lenses and tripods is a viewfinder (a short telescope-like device that helps directors see how a shot will look from a certain angle) and a depth-of-field calculator (a rotating instrument that calculates what portion of the shot will be in focus). Lately, however, the gizmos have started to disappear.

“Slowly each of these pieces of equipment is being replaced by apps,” says Reyes. “If you go on our set, it’s 90 percent iPhones. Pretty soon we’ll probably just use the camera on the iPhone to shoot our shows.” That last part’s a joke. Sort of.

The story of technology in Hollywood has long been one of a few early adopters fighting against the status quo. Each advance in the Industry, from talkies to Technicolor, took a while to catch on. Movies may be flashy and fancy, but movie sets are old-fashioned places, filled with apple crates (for actors who need a boost) and spotlights that have hung from the rafters since David Fincher was in diapers. But the iPhone and the iPad are propelling casts and crews into the 21st century, fundamentally altering the way people collaborate while saving time and money. Recently South Korean director Park Chan-wook went so far as to shoot an entire 30-minute short on his iPhone 4.

“Everyone’s looking to create a standard that will unite every department,” says Taz Goldstein, a director who blogs about production gadgets at Hand Held Hollywood. “That’s the holy grail.”

A Circus That Lets Its Freak Flag Fly

Published in The New York Times

Los Angeles — Does a circus seem more dangerous when one of the performers confesses that he’s clumsy?

“When I’m not focused, stuff happens,” said Mason Ames, the performer in question, in an interview between shows at the Ricardo Montalbán Theater in Hollywood. “I bump into people.”

Unlike the mega-productions of Cirque du Soleil, which employ dozens of godlike athletes hiding behind costumes, “Traces” asks its seven performers to reveal something of their real selves.

The show, which closes in Los Angeles on Sunday and opens in Denver on March 11, is the creation of the Montreal-based group 7 Fingers, founded in 2002 with the mission of bringing circus to a human scale. The British newspaper The Guardian called it “circus for the Facebook generation.”

Combining circus acts with emotion and intimacy to win over the audience is a tenet of the new circus movement that started in the 1960s as a countercultural departure from the stunt for stunt’s sake philosophy of traditional three-ring circuses like Ringling Brothers.

But “Traces” goes deeper in its relationship with the audience, as the performers open up about their personalities, vulnerabilities and obsessions. One cast member’s parents are revealed to be psychologists. Another hates when people don’t put the cap on the toothpaste. The show is “really trying to connect with the audience members as if we’re just like them,” said Bradley Henderson, one of the performers. “We’re not superheroes.”

Oscar nomination predictions 2011 - How did I do?

I got 39 out of 45 correct in the major categories.

X = wrong answer [the actual nominee is in brackets]

BEST PICTURE
1. The Social Network
2. The King’s Speech
3. The Fighter
4. Black Swan
5. True Grit
6. Toy Story 3
7. The Kids Are All Right
8. Inception
9. 127 Hours
10. Winter’s Bone

My Oscar Nomination Predictions 2011

My Oscar nomination predictions:

BEST PICTURE
1. The Social Network
2. The King’s Speech
3. The Fighter
4. Black Swan
5. True Grit
6. Toy Story 3
7. The Kids Are All Right
8. Inception
9. 127 Hours
10. Winter’s Bone

Not motivated? Make a game of it

Published in the Los Angeles Times

Michael Pusateri is a 43-year-old senior vice president at the Disney- ABC Television Group, but he still doesn't eat his vegetables. So in October he joined Health Month, an online game that allows him to compete against 16,000 other users in striving toward his goals — which include cycling 80 miles a week and going on a weekly date with his wife.

When he made progress, he earned life points and raised his ranking. When he failed, he lost points but could ask other players to take pity and "heal" him by giving him virtual "fruit." The game prepared him for his first triathlon. "My wife has been after me for years to eat more fruit and vegetables and bring my lunch to work, and it was, 'Next week, I'll do it next week,'" says Pusateri, an avid video game player and father of two. "Just because it was on this dumb website I actually did it."

Companies such as Health Month have begun to harness people's innate craving for competition to turn the world into one giant virtual summer camp. Now that 97% of teens and more than half of adults play video games, companies have caught on to the medium's addictive powers. Websites and apps are using virtual points, levels, leader boards, badges and challenges to motivate people to stay healthy, watch television or read a newspaper. "Games are starting to creep into every aspect of our day," says Jesse Schell, a game designer who teaches at Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center.

In the tech world, gamification is now a full-blown movement, and the first Gamification Summit will take place in San Francisco in January, organized by Gabe Zichermann, author of "Game-Based Marketing." But while some believe this phenomenon is a motivation machine that will dominate lives in coming years, others think it's a manipulative fad that does not acknowledge how humans' brains really work.

When to Quit?

Published in Los Angeles Magazine

Steve Gabriel works as the script coordinator on $#*! My Dad Says, the new CBS sitcom starring William Shatner. The show is based on the Twitter feed of a guy who is 29. Gabriel is in his forties—he’d prefer not to reveal his exact age.

Gabriel wants to be a TV staff writer—and at times, he’s been one. Soon after graduating from college, he got a job as a writers’ assistant on Carol Burnett’s 1990 variety show, Carol & Company. He worked with the writers of the Home Improvement pilot and went on to write a script for the series that was produced during its second season. The Home Improvement creators promoted him to staff writer on their next show, Thunder Alley, starring Ed Asner and Haley Joel Osment. His next job was another promotion: story editor on the Dave Chappelle sitcom, Buddies. But the show was canceled in 1996 during its first season.

“That’s kind of when the rails came off the tracks,” says Gabriel, whose graying, close-cropped hair makes him look more like a colonel in the Air Force than a proofreader of other people’s jokes. “I didn’t get a job after that and had to start over.”

This is the reason that Gabriel, at forty-something, is an assistant to writers instead of a writer himself. To pay the bills he became a script coordinator, first for the short-lived 1998 Fox sitcom Costello, then the following year for ABC’s Norm MacDonald vehicle, Norm, and later for Will & Grace. Toward the end of that hit’s eight-season run, he was promoted to staff writer. But then it, too, was off the air, and he went back to script coordinating on the 2008 NBC comedy Kath & Kim (canceled) and this year’s 100 Questions (canceled).

Generic arts and entertainment headlines

Inspired by Slate.com media columnist Jack Shafer's piece about generic news headlines that we see over and over again, I thought I'd compile my own list of generic headlines, an arts and entertainment edition (disclosure: I'm sure I've been guilty of a few of these):

Is [Insert Artistic Medium Here] Dead?

Are We Living In The Golden Age Of TV?

Movie Star To Appear On Broadway

Movie Star Who's About To Appear On Broadway: "Live Performance Is More Fulfilling Than Film And TV"

A-list Celebrity Or Filmmaker To Do Web-Related Project

A-list Filmmaker Who Just Did A Low-Budget Project: "I Like It When It's Not Such A Huge Crew And No Studio Breathing Down My Neck And It's Just Me And A Camera And I Can Do What I Want"

Burlesque Or Other Vintage Art Form Enjoying A Revival

Underage Celebrity Does Provocative Photo Shoot

Oscar Ceremony May Move To Different Date

Racist Remark Made On Radio

Awards Show Gets Disappointing Ratings

Lots Of New Films And/Or TV Shows Address The Subject Of Our Bad Economy

Play Or Musical Revived On Broadway Because It Relates To War Or Bad Economy

Facebook Or Other Social Networking Site Bigger Than Ever

YouTube creative artists pride themselves on being a separate breed

Published in the Los Angeles Times

Every week, Dane Boedigheimer drives to the Ralphs near his home in Riverside on a specific mission. One time he bought 10 kinds of apples. Another time he bought avocados and walnuts. He recently bought a cheese plate.

Other shoppers probably don't realize that Boedigheimer is conducting a casting session for "The Annoying Orange,"the YouTube channel he started a year ago. He voices the title character, an orange who badgers his guest star with insults like "you look fruity," until a knife slices the guest in two. These videos consistently get at least 3 million views.

"There's something to the knife moment," he says. "There's almost become an expectation to it. If I don't have it in those videos, people get upset, because 'What happened to the knife? Why didn't the character get killed?'"

YouTube is a chaotic heap of video content, and Boedigheimer is one of a core group of comedy stars who have clawed their way to the top, leading a burgeoning and bizarre form of American entertainment. These digital auteurs aren't interested in flash-in-the-pan viral hits or polished Web series with narratives — they create videos in their apartments on pocket-change budgets, post consistently, and turn their YouTube channels into fan magnets.

"YouTubers," as they call themselves, serve as director, producer, star, editor and marketing director and can earn six-figure salaries through their share of the ad revenue. As they've become celebrities in the 25-and-younger demographic, they increasingly face the quandary of whether to give in to the lures of Hollywood and risk giving up their scrappy authenticity.

The videos are some combination of sketch comedy, reality show, video blog, song parody, animation and 3 a.m. activity at an over-caffeinated slumber party. Their comic sensibility is irreverent, surreal, self-deprecating and fixated on lampooning cultural touchstones like Lady Gaga or Miley Cyrus. "It's the sort of the comedy that you would get on television if there wasn't an infrastructure for filtering it, vetting it," says Tim Hwang, a founder of the Boston-based research group the Web Ecology Project and an organizer of ROFLCon, a conference on Internet comedy. Some think these videos are hilarious. Others find them mundane, sophomoric or crude, and wonder: Why would anyone want to watch this stuff?

'The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers' is ready to battlewith flips, spins and dance steps

Published in the Los Angeles Times

It's your classic western pastiche: The good guys saunter through the saloon's double doors. The bad guys put down their whiskey. The brawl begins.

But in this scene, rehearsed at Melody Ranch in Newhall a week ago, the two sides compete not with fists and guns but with flips and spins. "What if dance was actually a weapon?" asks the director, Jon M. Chu. "They can use it for good or for evil."

Chu was filming an episode of "The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers," a.k.a. "The LXD," a new Web series in which hip-hop dancers are portrayed as superheroes. It's dance crew meets "Fantastic Four" — ordinary people discover their exceptional powers and decide to join the Legion, which then faces off against mysterious enemies. But instead of specializing in firepower or invisibility, it's breaking, popping, locking, finger tutting or boogaloo.

"These guys have absolutely amazing powers — real powers, not fake superpowers," says Chu, 30, the series' creator, who also directed Disney's "Step Up 3D," which comes out in August. "You can show, in your living room, what they do."

2010 Southern California Journalism Awards Winner

My article in Slate, "Best Weekend Never," ended up winning the 2010 Southern California Journalism Award in the Online Entertainment News/Feature/Commentary category (it was previously named a finalist). 

At the July 27 ceremony, speakers included Sean Penn, Anderson Cooper, a Sarah Palin impersonation, and the governor (see photo).

For a full list of winners, click here.

2010 Southern California Journalism Awards Finalist

My article in Slate, "Best Weekend Never," which won a 2010 National Entertainment Journalism Award, was just named a finalist for a 2010 Southern California Journalism Award in the Online Entertainment News/Feature/Commentary category. The award winners will be announced June 27. Apparently, Sean Penn and Anderson Cooper will be there.

Download the full list of finalists by clicking here or by visiting the LA Press Club website here.

Is location-based social networking practical in spread-out Los Angeles?

Published in the Los Angeles Times

This article was the lead story on the front page of the Los Angeles Times website:

In early May, Mark Ghuneim was sitting in his hotel room at the Four Seasons near Beverly Hills. He discovered, via his iPhone's Foursquare app, that a friend was at the Echo, a concert venue in Echo Park about eight miles away, about to watch a concert. "I'm realizing that even if I got in my car and drove there right now, I'd miss the set," he said.

At that moment, Ghuneim did not find Foursquare as useful as some of its 1 million users do. Location-based services are the hot new form of social networking, allowing users to tell their friends where they are and what they think of that place. Loopt has more than 3 million users and MyTown has more than 2 million, while Twitter and Google also have location-based features.

But as Ghuneim discovered, these services might not be an ideal fit for Los Angeles, a city that has always had anxiety when it comes to locations. Angelenos tend to spend too much time in a location we don't want to be, driving to a location we're trying to reach, along with a bunch of other people fighting to do the same. The city's spread-out geography and car dependence might make it particularly inhospitable to the spontaneity that these services thrive on.

Robin Hood Psychology

Published in Slate

Most summer movie heroes have an uncontroversial moral mandate: Beat the bad guys; save the city; "With great power comes great responsibility." Robin Hood's crusade is more divisive: He steals from the rich and gives to the poor, redistributing wealth in favor of a more equitable society.

On opening weekend of Ridley Scott's film adaptation (starring Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett), the climate for Robin Hood's moral brand seems bleak—"socialism" has become a dirty word in America. But while Robin Hood's ideals are politically controversial, researchers in psychology and related fields are finding that humans seem inclined to engage in Robin Hood-like thinking, which they often call "egalitarian motives," "inequity aversion," or "variance reduction." In fact, there's a growing body of evidence that, despite appearances, we're Robin Hoods at heart.

To measure our attitudes toward inequality, researchers conduct "ultimatum games," a form of experimental economics frequently cited by journalists and pop psychologists to debunk the idea that we always act rationally. In an ultimatum game, the first test subject is given money that he must divide between himself and a second subject. The second subject then gets the opportunity to take the deal or to reject it—leaving both subjects with nothing. It turns out that people are inclined to reject the deal when the split is very unequal, even though they'd be better off taking what they can. The conclusion: People are willing to sacrifice their own income to punish those who don't distribute incomes equally.

To continue reading, click here.

2010 National Entertainment Journalism Awards Winner

I wanted to let you all know that I won a 2010 National Entertainment Journalism Award for first place in the Online Feature category for my piece in Slate, "Best Weekend Never." The awards were given by the Los Angeles Press Club at the Steve Allen Theater last night.