visualkaos

Last week, Linda and I were surfing around through the 80 or so movie channels we subscribe to through ATT UVerse – UVerse by the way, is another story altogether – and we stumbled on Scosese’s film “Casino” and since it had just started we decided to watch it, yet again, for the like the 5th time.

We have pretty eclectic taste in film and as a rule we’ll watch and enjoy nearly any movie, with a few exceptions. To me, “Rescue Dawn” has no reason to live.

But for us, “Casino” has just about everything we like in cinema. DeNiro, Pesci, Frank Vincent, Kevin Pollak and Sharon Stone – who was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress – all favs. The plot, crime-drama with mob overtones. Another fav.

And it’s directed by Marty. What more do you want?

According to Wikipedia, when the film was released in 1995, it had the most uses of the “f-word,” 398, in a feature length film. But if Marty was trying for this somewhat provocative distinction, at 178 minutes, he kind of cheated.

Another favorable quality of the film that I don’t think I ever noticed before is the amazingly diverse soundtrack. Appearing on the official soundtrack are the likes of Louis Prima, Muddy Waters, Otis Redding and Ramsey Lewis as well as Cream, The Jeff Beck Group (more later,) Roxy Music, Fleewood Mac and The Moody Blues.

Oh, and somebody named J.S. Bach.

Unofficially, you also hear a bunch of Rolling Stones (whatever,) Derek and the Dominoes, even Devo. And although I can’t find any reference to it anywhere, there is one scene in the Tangiers casino where “Stone Cold Fever” by “Humble Pie” can be heard playing in the background.

Humble (effing) Pie. Read the rest of this entry »

Disclaimer: if you are currently employed by the Los Angeles Daily News, LANG  or any other MNG newspaper property, the following content is not meant for you. I recommend you go directly here.

Wednesday, 11 a.m.

Will Flash save my life?

I’m sitting in my home office, in green, striped boxers and a v-neck t-shirt. My v-neck t-shirt is tired and a bit gamey and has seen better days.

The invincible morning sun is throwing back the drapes, forcing it’s way into the room and splashing across floor. The temperature is already 87 and heading for 105.

Outside I can hear the sounds of SUV’s racing past my house carrying soccer moms to Yoga sessions.

As I sit here, this is what I’m looking at:

I have two hours before I have to get into the car, drive 32 miles through the Newhall Pass and then from north to south from one side of the San Fernando Valley to the other to get to my job at the Los Angeles Daily News.

Tonight I’m working a night shift repurposing copy, photos, video and graphics – all of which somebody else has created – to be posted on the Daily News’ website. I do this every Tuesday and Wednesday night now.

I’ll probably start tonight by locating the features cover story for Thursday’s paper and any associated sidebars, art, graphics and links and pummel it into submission by coding it up for the web.

Thursday’s feature section is always health-related, which means I’ll have a story about somebody who wrote a book about fitness or maybe some family dealing with the ‘disease of the week.’

This material will have been created by a freelancer who lives in Torrance or maybe a staff writer at the San Gabriel Valley Tribune.

Later, I’ll code up news stories written and photographed by staffers at the Daily News.

There will likely be something about LAUSD, some LA City Hall stuff, a couple of crime stories, a couple of stories about economic woes and I already know that tonight there will be a “comprehensive” piece about LAPD Chief Bill Bratton stepping down half-way through his second 5-year term.

I’ll open, crop, tone and otherwise enhance photographs of somebody holding up a widget while staring into the camera, kids running through sprinklers and generally, people dealing with hot weather, people eating corn dogs at opening day of the Ventura County Fair and likely, Bill Bratton and other politicians standing behind a podium.

These photographs will have been taken by staff photographers who have been employed by the Los Angeles Daily News for no less than 15 years.

At some point tonight, just as I did when I woke up this morning and as I do nearly every day I will ask myself, how did I get here? Read the rest of this entry »

Last weekend Linda and I attended a wake, for a kitty cat.

This might sound somewhat out of the ordinary but it wasn’t the first funeral that we’ve been to for a creature with more than two legs. Over the past few years we’ve held more than a couple of memorial services for bunny rabbits that managed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and ended up, literally, on or near our property. We have a bunny burial ground a couple of blocks from our house. It’s on a hillside and has a nice view of the sun setting behind the mountains.

During the drive to Ventura for the wake Linda and I were discussing how many people just don’t get how devastating it is when you lose a pet. Sometimes you’ll hear them say something like, “It’s not like it was a person.” Paaaaaleez. There are a number of persons that I could do without.

I told her, again, about how I lost a kitty named “Saturn,” (don’t ask) back in 1979. That puddy loved me like no thing or no one before or since ever has and the feeling was mutual. I still haven’t gotten over her 30 years later. Then there was “Spike.” A big, fat, orange tabby that lived with me for about 9 years before a coyote got him back around 1990. I still think of him. He loved broccoli.

Jean Claude, the kitty whose wake we attended, left this world last week and took with him the broken heart of our dear friend Alexis who had the privilege of watching over him during his stay on Earth. He lived nearly 19 years. He was jet black and very lovable.

Claude was known for many things but one of his characteristic traits was his bullwhip of a tail. You needed to be wary when walking past him or he might cut your legs clean off at the knees. He could wake you from a dead sleep slapping that tail on the floor and he would flog you with it when you pet his back sometimes leaving welts that hurt but healed soon enough.

Claude loved the sun and just hanging in the garden. He liked salmon and stretching out across in the bed.

He also enjoyed a good Cuban cigar and a single malt scotch while sitting poolside with the New York Times. He liked the music of Cat Power and was a fan of Pink Panther movies.

All this past week I’ve been watching the moon. The moon is my planet and I like watching its mood change from month to month and year to year. But for the past 10 days or so the moon has been particularly beautiful.

Last week I rushed home so I could try to get a photograph of the moon juxtaposed with Venus. They were so close they seemed to be holding hands as they dipped below the horizon in the west.

Watching them through the viewfinder in the darkening sky I could have sworn I saw the silhouettes of Saturn and Spikey chasing each other around the moon and Venus. I often see them, up there, dancing with the stars, but this time there was a third kitty silhouette, his tail whipping up little clouds of stardust.


Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

I‘ve seen this a lot lately. The title of this post, –30–. Mostly I’ve seen it at the end of farewell pieces written by journalists who are leaving their newspaper jobs because the companies they work for are downsizing or cutting expenses or closing down. And after 26 years in journalism I can’t say, with any certainty, exactly what it means.

I can venture a guess though.

Back in the days of the typewriter, writers would have to put certain characters into their text that typesetters could understand, markup actually. Things like quad left or CR or em space.

Although the first newspaper I worked for did use typewriters, I didn’t. I was a photographer and had no need to learn typesetting code. But I did see a hell of a lot of hard copy going in and out of the backshop. Different typesetting systems used different types of code but there was some similarity overall.

I’m going to guess. –30– means end. The end. Stop.

So, yesterday as I sat at my desk at work looking over a newsroom that has been picked away at like carrion on a dry lakebed, and doing the work that just a few weeks ago would have been scheduled for two individuals, on an election night, I get an IM from my wife Linda.

“Bad news,” she IM’d.

“Oh shit,” I replied.

I pretty much knew what that meant. Earlier in the day she was chatting with me that she had a bad feeling, that there was just a dreadful vibe permeating her workplace. Now, she told me, her boss had held individual meetings with her and her co-workers and that he’s having to cut everybody’s pay by 20% and that one person, and a damn talented one, was going to be let go.

This after having to cut all their hours just a few months ago by another 20%.

At least she wasn’t the one that was being let go. At least I’ve managed to dodge that layoff bullet for the past year. Our newsroom which was at 125 last February is now at 65. Somehow, I’m still there. I think it’s because I’m invisible.

Invisible is good. But my shields are getting weaker.

Last night, one of our reporters asked me if I had watched the video at the Rocky Mountain News yet. I said that I hadn’t and she told me that I must. So this morning I looked it up, found the HD version on Vimeo and watched the whole 20 minutes with a lump in my throat the size of a fruitcake. I don’t think I know a single person that worked in that newsroom but my heart was breaking anyway.

My heart was breaking for the loss that every one of those people at the Rocky are feeling and the loss the entire industry that I’ve loved for 26 years is feeling and the loss that Circuit City employees are feeling and the loss the auto industry is feeling and the loss anyone who owns stocks is feeling and the loss that Linda is feeling … and on and on.

At the end of the video, as the music melted away and I sat alone at my desk in my quiet house, a very hard rain began to fall.

It was, kind of, beautiful.

It was devastatingly beautiful.

Fade to black.

–30–

iPhono pic of my favorite ax.

Oh gawd! They messed up my double, short, non-fat cap again!

Recently, the Daily News’ Kevin Modesti wrote a piece called “Nine Things to Look Forward to in 2009.” You can read that along with a goofy, collage thing that I made to go with it at the bottom of this page.

Kevin is just a damn fine writer and I am no match for his pithy (the most overused word of 2008) wit, but it did make me think about some stuff. So, I’ll try to put that stuff into some 2009 kind of context.

Disclaimer: The following may well be somewhat less-than-Modesti-optimistic and you might rather go here.

Read the rest of this entry »

I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit and back then, I won’t give away my age here but it was sometime during the last ice age, we pretty much counted on a white Christmas every year.

It was a time when sea levels were much lower than they are now and there was a land bridge between North America and Asia.

And it snowed in the winter. A lot.

It snowed so much that we never wondered if we would have a white Christmas or not. We rarely wondered if we would have a white Thanksgiving.

We just did.

For some reason, even though there was already snow on the ground on Christmas Eve, the universe would dump another foot or two overnight as if to make sure that six-year-olds, with brand-new sleds, would have plenty of virgin power to test them out in.

Nearly every memory I have of Christmas, as a kid growing up in that great, white north was just extraordinary, bordering on supernatural. I’m sure that’s true of most kids growing up in middle class America during the last ice age. But there is something otherworldly about waking up on Christmas morning before the sun, standing in the twinkling light of the Christmas tree, looking out the front door and not being able to see the steps up to the front porch.

There are no streets or curbs or sidewalks. There is only a single, unbroken blanket of fizzy brilliance as snowflakes the size of silver dollars fall silently and constantly straight down, as if in slow motion.

This morning, Linda and I went out to a local Starbucks for coffee and just outside the door was a young girl, probably about 13-years-old, sitting on what was clearly a brand-new Christmas bicycle and guarding a second one nearby, likely belonging to her older sister.

As I passed her I asked, “Is that a new Christmas bike you have there?”

“Yes!”

Of course it was. Once inside Linda and I talked about how a new bike had to be one of the ultimate Christmas presents a kid could get. I told her that we never got bikes for Christmas because you couldn’t use it for another 6 months. You’d just sit in the basement and look at it and dream about summer as an ice storm raged outside.

Standard Christmas gifts for kids growing up in the great, white north during the last ice age were, sleds, toboggans, ice skates and usually some new mittens or boots or a scarf.

The way I remember it, we weren’t rich or even as well off as more than half the kids I knew at school, but the economy was pretty good during the last ice age and we all loved Christmas.

One of the things that has stayed with me for all these millennia was the excitement of dragging all the boxes of Christmas lights and decorations down from the attic. Opening up those boxes and taking out all the ornaments meant Christmas was finally and officially here and it always slammed me back to the year before.

I would remember putting those things away the year before like it was yesterday and then, there was the smell.

The scent of last year’s Christmas tree still lingered inside those boxes as if you’d just cut it down and rolled around in the sap.

Inevitably, in the haste to put an end to Christmas and return it to it’s tomb, some pine needles or maybe a small bit of a branch still attached to a bulb or an icicle would get packed away. I grew up loving the smell of the remnants of last year’s Christmas tree. It is still one of my favorite memories of Christmas as a kid.

Now, and for the past few years, Linda and I purposely take a piece of our tree from the current year and pack it away with all the ornaments and decorations.

The photo above is of the top of our tree from last year and a small slice of the trunk which we packed away on January 5, 2008 at about 4:45 p.m.

When we took it out of it’s storage tub a few weeks ago, it smelled awesome and as always, slammed me back to Christmases during the last ice age.

The last Christmas photo of the year.

I’ve said this before but, we don’t belong here, not really.

For some reason, I not sure how, we ended up on this street, in this town. A place we sometimes like to call Vanillaville. Sometimes we call it Stepford.

We like to give it those names because really, only white people live here. And they’re all the same age and have the same number of kids and the same Lexus SUV with the little, white, silhouette decals of their family and their pets on their rear windshields.

Most of them have McCain/Palin stickers.

And they all seem to have the same kind of unconscious awareness. They robotically careen their Lexus’ around the wide avenues at high rates of speed, oblivious to anything around them, desperate to fill a prescription before the soccer game ends.

Some have cell phones which have actually merged cellularly with the subcutaneous tissue just under their scalp and will eventually have to be surgically removed, when their plans expire.

Freud would have a field day here.

We call this place Vanillaville and we call it’s residents oblivioids.

But one thing that the oblivioids of Vanillaville do well is Christmas.

The above photo is not the best representation of Vanillaville’s holiday zeal, it’s just one that I like and was taken directly across the street from my house on what could arguably be called Candy Cane Lane.

Driving around this town during Christmastime it’s hard to tell if it’s night or day. You don’t have to turn on your headlights and you may even reach for your sunglasses on some streets.

There are entire neighborhoods that you know, it’s really a competition. It’s a competition to see who can drain the power grid in Los Angeles County the fastest. Sometimes neighbors even join forces creating Christmas light block parties by stringing lights across the street from one house to the other, sharing the electric bill and showing up the Jones’ down the street.

They put huge Christmas trees at the end of the block complete with lights, ornaments and even presents. You actually have to drive over the extension cords to get around them.

It’s all really, quite, beautiful.

People decorate their houses with every imaginable kind of spangle and ornamentation. Most houses have those lights hanging from the rain gutters that are supposed to look like icicles and white, wicker reindeer grazing on the lawn.

But the trend for the past few years in Vanillaville at Christmastime is inflatable snowmen and Santa Clauses.

In addition to icicles and wicker reindeer my neighbor has both inflatable snowmen and an inflatable Santa Claus. One of them, I’m not sure which, actually has a motion detector built into it that plays “White Christmas” sung off key and at a too-slow tempo by what sounds like a wino on his second bottle of Thunderbird, whenever a leaf blows past in the yard.

The singer puts emphasis on the wrong beats so it sounds like, “I’m dREEEEAMMing of a whIIIIIte ChrismAAAASS!”

And as for Linda and I, well we go more for the retro, minimalist look.

We have a single strand of the large, old-style, teardrop shaped lights that accent the roofline of the house.

That’s it. All one color. Red.

We love Christmas too but we really don’t belong here, not really.