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Starting today, California-based journalists at ⁦‪the Los Angeles Times

“Starting today, California-based journalists at ⁦‪the Los Angeles Times  are shifting to a 32-hour workweek under a work-sharing program that will run through July. Our D.C. bureau joins soon. This was a plan proposed by ⁦‪LATimes Guild that will avert at least 84 newsroom layoffs.”

London Conservation Society Clashes with Disney

“London Conservation Society Clashes with Disney over Missing Historic Letters; Campaigners Call for Return of 1930s Wording to Twentieth Century Fox Film Co Former Soho Offices

As U. S. Faces Chernobyl-Like Meltdown Nationwide, Ted Cruz

“Top Gun is an American classic, and it’s incredibly disappointing to see Hollywood elites appease the Chinese Communist Party.”
As U. S. Faces Chernobyl-Like Meltdown Nationwide, Ted Cruz Gets Bad Public Haircut, Distracts With Attempted Spat With China And Its Movie Release Standards

John Waters on Little Richard

John Waters: “Little Richard scared my grandmother in 1957. I was 11 years old, on the way to her house for dinner with my parents, and had just shoplifted a record in the five-and-dime. Mom and Dad hadn’t even noticed. Easy pickings – the 45rpm of “Lucille” on the Specialty label. My favourite tune. I felt happily defiant in the back seat of the car with the sharp edge of the single jabbing my stomach beneath the sweater. Once inside Mama’s, I made a beeline to her out-of-date hi-fi and let it roll. “Lu-CILLE! You won’t do your sister’s will!” came blaring through the house like a pack of rabid dogs. It was as if a Martian had landed. My grandmother stopped in her tracks, face ashen, beyond comprehension. The antiques rattled. My parents looked stunned. In one magical moment, every fear of my white family had been laid bare: an uninvited, screaming, flamboyant black man was in the living room. Even Dr Spock hadn’t warned them about this.”

Little Richard by David Ramsey

“What Little Richard saw overhead in Australia was in fact Sputnik, the Russian satellite traveling 18,000 miles an hour in the night sky. Picture Little Richard, far from home, drenched in sweat. “He made an impressive entry,” according to Australian newspaper the Age, “wearing a brilliant red coat over a canary yellow suit, topped off with a bright green turban. But he discarded all the trimmings until he was left with only pyjama pants and the turban.” Pounding on the piano and then dancing on top of it and then throwing his bedazzled clothes into the crowd. And Richard saw the bright yellow burn of the satellite, or probably the rocket casing trailing it, perhaps streaking past the vibrant Alpha and Beta Centauri stars of the Southern Cross. A star who mistook a satellite for a ball of fire. And we might pause here to note that whether or not it was a message from God, something like a miracle was afoot. A freaky-deaky bisexual black man who grew up poor in the Jim Crow South in Macon, Georgia, singing a wild, sexy nonsense song that changed music forever, everywhere—even in a packed stadium halfway around the world, as shrieking Australian teenagers nearly started a riot, scuffling to touch the man’s discarded clothes. Fire in the heavens and fire on earth. There are miracles everywhere if you know where to look. And know how to listen: A wop-bop-a-loo-mop-a-lop-bam-boom!“

Little Richard RS

“Yet he pressed on, determined to give the audience what it came for, struggling to belt ‘Long Tall Sally.’ For a moment, it seemed as if the beautiful Little Richard was going to perform himself to death -until finally he was carried offstage. Fifteen minutes later, he was sitting alone in his wheelchair. ‘I’m sick,’ he said apologetically, as if disappointed his body could no longer keep up with his spirit. ‘Stay close to Jesus,’ he advised, dabbing blood off his nose and mouth with a tissue. ‘The world is getting close to ending very soon. I need a cup.'”

The speed, volume, salaciousness and raucousness of Rock & Roll ALL came from Little Richard.

“Think about it. The Beatles basically started as a band playing Little Richard music. Jimi Hendrix started at Richard’s guitarist. Jerry Lee Lewis stole Richard’s entire act. The speed, volume, salaciousness and raucousness of Rock & Roll ALL came from Little Richard.”

“Little Richard’s Traumatic Black, Queer Childhood Helped Mold Rock ‘n’ Roll”

“Little Richard’s Traumatic Black, Queer Childhood Helped Mold Rock ‘n’ Roll”

“To be a queer person of color is to witness how the aggressive sexuality ascribed to us over centuries frightens regular people when it isn’t heterosexual; we’re not dangerous anymore, we’re just scary. Scary they can dismiss. Richard understood this, as the frequency with which he expiated for his venal sins in church. These visits replenished him too. The urge to immolate himself, a constant in those two decades after the late fifties heyday, doubled as another performance. Frightened of this spectacle, the biz limited him to Down and Out in Beverly Hills and the oldies and award circuit. Fires are spectacles.”

NPR Fails To Identify The Buyout Culprits In Neiman Marcus Bankruptcy

NPR Fails To Identify The Buyout Culprits In Neiman Marcus Bankruptcy

Dallas Producer

Dallas Producer Charged With Sexual Assault Of Teenage Girl

Friday the 13th At Forty

Friday the 13th At Forty

Robert De Niro: “We of course could have survived this much better if the idiot had done the right thing, listened and heeded all the warnings, there were many, many warnings, and we are all paying for it now. It would have been bad in some ways, but never like this. Everybody knows what his game is, it’s all about him getting re-elected. It’s crazy, I have no words for it any more… As an actor, I say this is like Shakespeare. No one has the balls to stand up to this guy. They all have a platform… they’re just not doing anything. What could be worth it for them, to sacrifice their souls to make this deal with the devil to work with this guy? It’s crazy.”

Uptown Records Founder Andre Harrell, 59

Uptown Records Founder, Former Motown Exec, Andre Harrell Was 59

Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein: “It’s a future in which our homes are never again exclusively personal spaces but are also, via high-speed digital connectivity, our schools, our doctor’s offices, our gyms, and, if determined by the state, our jails. In the future under hasty construction, these trends are poised for warp-speed acceleration. This is a future in which, for the privileged, almost everything is home-delivered, either virtually via streaming and cloud technology, or physically via driverless vehicle or drone, then screen “shared” on a mediated platform. It’s a future that employs fewer teachers, doctors and drivers. It accepts no cash or credit cards, under guise of virus control, and has skeletal mass transit and less live art. It’s a future that claims to be run on “artificial intelligence” but is held together by tens of millions of anonymous workers tucked away in warehouses, data centers, content moderation mills, electronic sweatshops, lithium mines, industrial farms, meat-processing plants and prisons, where they are left unprotected. It’s a future in which our every move, our every word, our every relationship is trackable, traceable, and data-mineable by unprecedented collaborations between government and tech giants.”

LOST: Roy Uwe Ludwig Horn, 75, Half Of Siegfried & Roy

LOST: Roy Uwe Ludwig Horn, 75, Half Of Siegfried & Roy

IV AV OO

 “Joe started around then. He was a kid with translucent skin, red hair, and an encyclopedic knowledge of all things X-rated. I guess he looked even more like a vampire than Brian then, but it was the 2000s, and a lot of people were trying to look like vampires. Joe was almost as much the face of the store as Brian for many customers. He pretended to hate a lot of things, but was protective of his adult-movie auteurs, guys like Chuck Vincent and Shaun Costello, who might have had unrealized ambitions beyond making skin flicks and hardcore one-day wonders. Our heroes tended to be marginalized or misfit, and there was probably some amount of projection going on. When Brian called me to talk about the end of the store, neither of us could figure out how many people had worked or volunteered at Odd Obsession over the years. It could’ve been as many as a hundred.”

House Burning Down Productions

“Prior to the virus, an actor getting sick would be a risk insurers would assume. But not now, the broker confirmed. In fact, it’s safe to say that going forward, and at least in the foreseeable future, productions will not be covered for any virus related claims, whether they relate to cast insurance or not. As I heard secondhand from the mouth of another broker, ‘You can’t get fire insurance when your house is already burning down.'”

Spike Lee Goes Super 8 On The Abandoned Streets of New York For Three Minutes

Spike Lee (And Frank Sinatra) Go Super 8 On The Abandoned Streets of New York For Three-and-a-Half Minutes; It’s a MFer

Music Venues

Chicago Metro’s Joe Shanahan: “You can stream all you want and Zoom all you want, but it’s not the same as standing in a room with an A-level DJ — or even a C-level DJ for that matter — and feeling that experience of being in a place where music is being made or produced by artists, that energy is gone. I’m not crying about it, but it’s very difficult that all of a sudden, Friday the 13th came and the brakes were hit. My call sheets now are alderman, congressman, legislation, mayor’s office, governor’s office. I approach it in the same creative strategy with a heart. I still try to look at it and say, ‘What can I do today to make a difference?'”

Scott Feinberg: “The organization should disqualify

Scott Feinberg: “The organization should disqualify from the Emmys any project that even goes through the process of qualifying to receive an Oscar nomination.”

LA Jobs

“California’s relatively early and aggressive response to the pandemic, coupled with its mix of industries that rely more on tourism, entertainment and international travel and trade, suggests that the state is likely to see proportionately bigger job losses than most of the rest of the nation in the short term. Motion picture and sound recording businesses, for example, shed 216,500 jobs last month in the United States. Governor Newsom’s administration projected Thursday that California’s 2020 unemployment rate will be 18%, compared with a peak of 12.3% during the Great Recession. The governor said that more than 4.3 million Californians have filed new claims for unemployment benefits since March 12. “These numbers are jaw-dropping. It is alarming,” Newsom said. “We’ve never experienced anything like this in our lifetime.”

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