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Month: December 2010

Obama and the Congress. Presidential Challenge

        Howard Fineman        Howard Fineman–    Thu Dec 9, 12:13 pm ET
WASHINGTON — The tax-bill fight is revealing a crucial fact about President Obama’s new, post-”shellacking” White House: it is increasingly being run by veterans of the Clinton era.
House Democrats, who voted in caucus today to oppose the tax deal, are in essence at war with the Clinton years — with Obama in the middle.
Barack Obama swept to power promising a new day and a new way, and he brought with him a cadre of top aides forged in the fire of the presidential campaign and the politics of Chicago.
The most visible Clinton alum, Rahm Emanuel, returned to Chicago to run for mayor.
But an array of other Clinton vets has stepped up to handle the sales job on taxes on the Hill and in town. Key names include: Lawrence Summers, Gene Sperling, Ron Klain, Jack Lew and John Podesta. Austan Goolsbee, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, is an early Obama advisor, but he’s philosophically in tune with the economic views of the Clinton types.
Meanwhile, campaign honchos David Axelrod and Jim Messina — two Obama Originals — will soon be headed back to Chicago to lay the groundwork for the president’s 2012 campaign.
The significance of this staff shift is beyond the operational. The Clinton-era alums, by outlook and experience, represent a centrist, pragmatic, pro-business “wealth-creation” wing of the Democratic Party that flourished during the Clinton presidency in the 1990s.
For tactical and substantive reasons, Barack Obama ran for president largely ignoring the economic record of Clinton’s time. Obama, after all, was running against Sen. Hillary Clinton, and he also admired the game-changing sweep of the Reagan presidency.
But now the president finds himself in the same kind of environment that Clinton — as governor — encountered (and learned to thrive in) during his rise in the 1980s. It is one in which conservative Republicans control the terms of debate, if not all the levers of power.
It is therefore not surprising that Obama would turn to the Clintonites to sell some $800 billion worth of tax cuts to his fellow Democrats.
The Clinton people share certain traits: they are brilliant, like a lot of the Obama folks, but they also are cold-blooded and now have many years’ experience at the intersection of money and power.
Attention has focused on Vice President Joe Biden’s role as the new “enforcer,” but the key to that operation is his chief of staff, Ron Klain, who once ran the Senate Judiciary Committee staff and who then served as chief of staff for Vice President Al Gore.
(Klain could become Obama’s chief of staff if interim chief Pete Rouse doesn’t want the job.)
Much of the substantive sales spin has been handled by Gene Sperling — who began his career in the Clinton campaign war room and who essentially did the same job in the Clinton White House — and Jack Lew, who was working for Hillary at the State Department before coming back to the White House to head the Office of Management and Budget, an upgraded version of the budget work what he did in the Clinton adminstration.
Of course there is also Obama’s chief economic adviser, Dr. Larry Summers — who is essentially playing the Dick Cheney role of scaring the bejeezus out of anyone who dares oppose the president.
Summers was a Clinton Treasury Secretary.
Outside the White House per se, the president is getting key support from John Podesta, whose Center for American Progress has placed dozens of staffers in key positions inside the administration.
CAP supports the tax-cut deal, perhaps not surprising given that Podesta was once Bill Clinton’s highly regarded chief of staff.
And what about Obama Interim Chief of Staff Rouse? He’s an Obama guy. Before becoming Obama’s top Senate aide in 2005, he’d spent much of his career with then-Sen. Tom Daschle, the South Dakota Democrat who was the party’s skilled leader in the Senate.
Rouse is a popular consensus builder, and several cabinet members have told the president that they want Rouse to get the job permanently. They include, according to a cabinet member who declined to be named, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis. “Pete has made a big effort to involve the cabinet and many of us want him to agree to stay on.”
No one has worked for Obama longer in an official governmental capacity, and he is well liked — even adored — by the Obama originals.
But it is not clear that Rouse, 64, wants the job on a permanent basis.
If he doesn’t, it’s not clear which Obama original could or would step in.
Related blogs: Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson: America’s Hostage Crisis: Day 3,500 — And Counting,                                     Chris Weigant: Obama Poll Watch — November, 2010
Read More: Bill Clinton Obama, Clinton Crew, Clinton Obama, Clinton Team, Clinton White House, Pete Rouse, Rahm Emanuel

Copyright. 2010. HuffingtonPost.com. All Rights Reserved
Easter 1916 William Butler Yeats

Easter 1916
I HAVE met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
That woman’s days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone’s in the midst of all.
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
William Butler Yeats
Keith Richards at Gramercy Park with Louis Vuitton Hosting

Keith Richards
Photo By Steve Eichner
Keith Richards wasn’t taking much responsibility for his personal celebrity Friday night.

“Things just…happen,” he said with a grin. “I never wanted to be a ‘somebody,’ I just wanted to be a good musician. And those two things go together…you realize that you have to be famous to be able to make good music. Double trick.”

He gestured with a loose hand at his surroundings — a private, 40-seat dinner Louis Vuitton was hosting at the Gramercy Park Hotel’s Rose Bar in honor of his recently published autobiography, “Life.” The family Richards struck a surprisingly cuddly pose, considering their rock ’n’ roll cred. Richards’ wife, Patti Hansen, repeatedly pet their daughters, Theodora and Alexandra, and referred to them often as her “babies.” Richards —- bandana, eyeliner and skull-scarf in place — switched tables halfway through the meal in order to sit with the missus.

And what of the text at hand?

“I haven’t finished ‘Life’ yet,” Hansen admitted. “After 30 years of marriage, you kind of figure you know the story. I’ve got it on my Kindle. It’s a little tough. There’s some things…like him having sex with [former love interest] Anita [Pallenberg] and then smelling the orange? Man, it breaks your heart a little. You don’t want to read that. Because that’s deep!”

New York luminaries and Vuitton executives were among those who joined the family for the three-course dinner. Fran Lebowitz posted herself at the bar to receive visitors, and Alec Baldwin, Jimmy Fallon, Charlie Rose, John McEnroe and Patty Smyth all sidled up to chat. A midnight toast for the man of the night found Richards seated next to McEnroe. Both men sported a style of wire-rim spectacles generally favored by the senior set, as they intently peered at a video on the tennis legend’s iPhone. The duo might have been mistaken for any old pair of sixtysomethings were it not for Richards’ enduring patina of cool. He laughed when asked on casting preferences should “Life” become a movie.

“I’d leave it to somebody else to look around for someone like me,” Richards said. “I mean, good luck!”

Copyright. 2010. Womens Wear Daily. All Rights Reserved.
Pearl Harbor survivors gather 69 years later

Pearl Harbor survivor John Hughes, left, and Lance Cpl. Zackary Morphew attend the 69th anniversary ceremony marking the attack on Pearl Harbor, Tuesday, Dec. 7, 2010, in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. (AP Photo/Marco Garcia)

By Audrey McAvoy
Associated Press / December 7, 2010

PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii—Aging Pearl Harbor survivors on Tuesday heard reassurances their sacrifice would be remembered and passed on to future generations as they gathered to mark the 69th anniversary of the attack.

“Long after the last veteran of the war in the Pacific is gone, we will still be here telling their story and honoring their dedication and sacrifice,” National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis told about 120 survivors who traveled to Hawaii from around the country for the event.
Merl Resler, 88, of Newcastle, Calif., was among those who returned. He remembered firing shots at Japanese planes from the USS Maryland and standing in the blood of a shipmate hit by shrapnel during the attack.
“My teeth was chattering like I was freezing to death, and it was 84 degrees temperature. It was awful frightful,” said Resler.
On Tuesday, fighter jets from the Montana Air National Guard flew above Pearl Harbor in missing man formation to honor those killed in the attack, which sunk the USS Arizona and with it, nearly 1,000 sailors and Marines. In all, about 2,400 service members died.
Sailors lined the deck of the USS Chafee and saluted as the guided missile destroyer passed between the sunken hull of the USS Arizona and the grassy landing where the remembrance ceremony was held.
After the ceremony, the survivors, some in wheelchairs, passed through a “Walk of Honor” lined by saluting sailors, Marines, airmen and soldiers to enter a new $56 million visitor center that was dedicated at the ceremony.
“This facility is the fulfillment of a promise that we will honor the past,” Jarvis said.
The Park Service built the new center because the old one, which was built on reclaimed land in 1980, was sinking into the ground. The old facility was also overwhelmed by its popularity: it received about 1.6 million visitors each year, about twice as many as it was designed for.
People often had to squeeze by one another to view the photos and maps in its small exhibit hall. In comparison, the new center has two spacious exhibition halls with room for more people, as well as large maps and artifacts such as anti-aircraft guns.
There was a minor disruption on the center’s first day when the discovery of an unidentified bag inside one of the galleries prompted the Park Service to briefly evacuate the two exhibit halls and a courtyard. But the rest of the visitors center remained open, and everyone was allowed back in the galleries after the object was determined to be a medical bag carrying oxygen.
U.S. Pacific Fleet commander Adm. Patrick Walsh said the new center, which has twice the exhibition space as the old one, would tell the story of those who fought and won the peace.
“This museum gives a view into their lives, a window into the enormity of their task, an appreciation of the heaviness of their burden, the strength of their resolve,” Walsh said.
Assistant Secretary of the Interior Thomas Stickland said the events of Dec. 7, 1941, were so traumatic and marked by heroism that they had become ingrained in the nation’s consciousness.
“That day is now fundamental to who we are as a people. Its stories must be preserved. They must be honored and they must be shared,” Strickland said.
USS Pennsylvania sailor DeWayne Chartier was on his way to church that day but never made it: “I got interrupted someplace along the line,” the 93-year-old recounted.
He returned to Pearl Harbor from Walnut Creek, Calif., to mark the anniversary and see the dedication of the new center.
“It is my duty. It is not just a visit,” Chartier said. “I felt I should be part of it.”
© Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved.
The Internet Matures and the Business Shapes Up Quite Differently.

7 DEAD ISPs: A Field Guide
It’s amazing how easily a person can tell stories about the early days of the Internet and make it sound like they went to school in a barn using a horse-drawn carriage to get there.
It was not that long ago that CD-ROMs flooded snail-mail boxes promising 1,000 free hours, the lowest price or the fastest speed on your 56k modem. Whatever happened to this practice, these companies, or those annoying start-up CDs?

1. Juno
Juno was one of the first clients to offer free email service to those who would install the Juno program onto their computers. By luring customers in with free email, Juno knew that they were more likely to get paying customers once those customers saw how fantastically amazing this new-fangled interweb was.
After providing free email, Juno provided free web browsing service (paid for by advertising revenue). Unfortunately, this was an idea that NetZero had patented. The two companies fought over it, before making sweet, sweet merger love in 2001. NetZero (and subsequently Juno) still exist today as a monthly dial-up provider.

2. NetZero
NetZero was the first internet service provider to offer free internet service. This concept was mind boggling at the time, as most users had spent the previous 5 years carefully monitoring their internet use in an attempt to not surpass their 30 hour per month limit.
By holding the patent on the first URL search-based advertising technology (advertisements would be personalized and targeted to the user based on their web searches, sites visited, etc), NetZero was able to charge advertisers the money they would have charged users, thereby being able to offer free internet service to over 1,000,000 users within their first 6 months of operation.
NetZero still exists today as a dial-up provider, which is important to note since it seems to be the destiny of several of the old ISPs. There are large parts of the country that still don’t have broadband internet connections, even today. While dial-up may sound old fashioned to those living in or near big cities, for many people it is still the only way to get onto the Internet.

3. PeoplePC
PeoplePC not only offered Internet service to the masses, but it also offered them an entirely new computer.
For just $24.99 per month (for 3 years), PeoplePC would supply you with your very own computer and dial-up Internet service. While this sounded like a fabulous leasing option, it was really more of a purchase plan, and while it still was a pretty fantastic deal for the consumer, it was a razor thin profit margin for PeoplePC.
Eventually they removed the free-computer clause from their offer, which was apparently the only reason anyone used PeoplePC. They were purchased by EarthLink, and continue to operate as a monthly dial-up provider.

4. Prodigy
The Pepsi to CompuServe’s Coke in the early 90’s, Prodigy was one of the earliest and largest Internet service providers during the first “growth spurt” of online technology. Although it was a true pioneer, its age is ultimately what led to its demise.
Prodigy pioneered internet portals, being the first service to offer message boards, news, weather, sports and more all in one online location. This served them well in the beginning, as they developed and implemented the technology. However, as the Internet began to catch up around them, they found themselves on the outside looking in.
Prodigy’s network became too much of a drain on profit to operate. By the time they began retrofitting their system, other ISPs like AOL had already overtaken them in the market share, never to look back. Like a swimming pool with a leak, the former Internet titan began to shrink gradually. It was finally purchased by SBC in 2001 and sentenced to a quiet, peaceful death.

5. CompuServe
CompuServe was the original. It was the pioneer. How original? It was the only Internet company founded in the 60’s.
CompuServe’s original job was simple: hired by an insurance company, they were to create an information network that can be easily accessed by any office in the system. What started as a simple office task ultimately proved to be a major catalyst for change 40 years later.+
When it came down to the wire during the mid to late 90’s, the two horses leading the race were AOL and CompuServe. Although AOL was ahead, CompuServe still controlled a large share of the market. Eventually, CompuServe was purchased by WorldCom, which then sold the company to AOL the following day.

6. Netscape

Netscape was the first powerhouse Internet browser, accessible to everyone on the Internet regardless of who they paid to access the Internet. Netscape paved the way for Firefox, the current browser of choice for millions, and also helped to bring about the death of the ISP as we knew it.
Netscape was the beginning of the Internet as it exists today. People would sign online (using whatever monthly ISP they preferred) and then head straight to Netscape to browse the web. Eventually, Netscape was purchased by AOL and phased out of existence, but not before it changed the way consumers viewed the Internet.

7. AOL
America Online is the undisputed heavyweight champ of the ISP war. Powering over 30 million customers at its height, AOL enjoyed its reign as king.
Offering private chat rooms, the best in news, entertainment, “AOL keyword searches” and most of all, instant messaging, AOL provided its subscribers with the most expansive and complete internet browsing experience imaginable.
As other companies failed to keep up, AOL would devour them, adding the customers and strength to their network. AOL was king for many years, but as with all things technological, their time in the sun was brief, and their ISP dominance is no more.

Conclusion
As the general consumer becomes much more computer literate and the Internet becomes much more universally accessible, the need for an Internet browsing “experience” is no longer important. Websites are just there… the way we access them is more a reflection of preference than anything else. While these ISPs were once the only way to experience the Internet, they now serve as a stark (and entertaining) reminder of the way things used to work.

Copyright. 2010. aol.com. All Rights Reserved
Wiki Leaks and Secrets.

December 2, 2010
Dangerous Liaisons
By DAVID KAHN
Great Neck, N.Y.
A BRITISH ambassador to Venice in the 17th century observed that “a diplomat is an honest man sent abroad to lie for his country.” But for centuries, diplomats did more than lie. They bribed, they stole, they intercepted dispatches. Perhaps this will come as some consolation to the many American diplomats whose faces have been reddened by the trove of diplomatic cables released this week by WikiLeaks: whatever they’ve done cannot compare in underhandedness with what ambassadors did in the past.
In 16th-century London, for instance, a French ambassador paid another diplomat’s secretary 60 crowns a month to read the dispatches to which the secretary had access. By the 1700s, a large part of the British Foreign Office’s annual expenses of £67,000 was allocated for bribery.
But as a scene of diplomatic misbehavior, London could hardly measure up to Vienna. Prince Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz, an 18th-century Austrian foreign minister, took no monetary bribes, but he accepted expensive presents like horses, paintings and fine wines from people who wanted to influence him. Viennese prostitutes also enjoyed unusual access to the diplomatic corps; one such woman, during the Congress of Vienna in 1815, received a salary from an adjutant of Czar Alexander I, and provided him with information she learned during her visits with other envoys.
These practices had begun in the Middle Ages, when negotiators of treaties would gather information about the host nation. They continued in the Renaissance with the advent of permanent embassies. And the belief that the ambassador was a legalized spy never left the hosts’ minds.
Accordingly, governments intercepted the correspondence of diplomats accredited to them. Specialists in curtained, candle-lighted “black chambers” slid hot wires under wax seals to open letters. Those in foreign languages were translated; those in code, decrypted. Their contents were then passed along to kings and ministers.
The black chamber of Vienna was the most efficient. It received the bags of mail going to and from the embassies at 7 a.m.; letters were opened, copied and returned to the post office by 9:30. When the British ambassador complained that he had gotten British letters sealed not with his seal but with that of another country — clear evidence that they had been opened — Kaunitz calmly replied, “How clumsy these people are.”
When the French ambassador to Russia, the Marquis de La Chétardie, in 1744 protested an order for him to leave, an official began reading him his intercepted letters, showing his meddling in Russian affairs. “That’s enough!” the marquis said — and began packing.
The mores of diplomacy began to change in the 19th century, pushed first by the spread of democracy and republican government. Public opinion came to regard it as wrong and unbecoming to a democracy to do anything illegal — in particular when representing itself abroad. Other factors in that change, according to the British diplomat and writer Harold Nicolson, lay in the emerging sense of the community of nations and of the importance of public opinion. As Lord Palmerston, the mid-19th-century British prime minister, maintained, opinions are stronger than armies.
This shift was exemplified by a growing belief that mail shouldn’t be tampered with. In Britain in the 1840s, there was a huge public outcry over the post office’s opening of the mail of the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini; at the time, the English historian and politician Thomas Babington Macaulay declared that it was as wrong to take his letter from the mail as to take it from his desk. And when the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations was passed in 1961, among its prescriptions was that “the official correspondence of the mission shall be inviolable.”
Ambassadors now regard themselves as ladies and gentlemen. They do not lie. They do not steal. But in some ways, diplomacy has not advanced beyond the old ways. And diplomatic cables can always be intercepted or revealed — as WikiLeaks has demonstrated.
David Kahn is the author of “The Codebreakers” and “The Reader of Gentlemen’s Mail.”

Copyright. 2010. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.
Echo Park evolves into hipster destination. So Cal Destinations

Bartender Danielle Weig, 24, from Silver Lake, holds court inside the Short Stop in Echo Park. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
Echo Park evolves into hipster destination
Upscale bars, restaurants and live-music clubs draw young crowds.
By Jessica Gelt, Los Angeles Times
December 3, 2010
It’s late on the night before Thanksgiving, and the stretch of Sunset Boulevard through Echo Park, from Mohawk to Douglas Street, is littered with young revelers. Lines form in front of bars, including the Short Stop, the Little Joy, the Gold Room and El Prado; taco trucks and gourmet food trucks idle curbside; and laughter, shouts and the occasional breaking of glass can be heard in the apartments above the street.

Ten years ago this bit of road was a no-man’s land at night — at least for the kind of hip party people that now consider the area their stamping ground. Once a largely working-class Latino neighborhood, Echo Park is now home to one of L.A.’s most densely packed night-life corridors, with more than 15 popular bars, clubs and restaurants drawing crowds each weekend and often on weeknights too.

Changes to the area have reached a tipping point in the last two years as a new wave of upscale destinations opened their doors to the area’s ever-increasing population of artists, musicians and loafers.

“Maybe in the summer of 2008 or 2009, I was thinking, ‘This is going to be the last summer where it’s sort of lawless,’” says Liz Garo, who books the area’s popular live music venues the Echo and the Echoplex and co-owns the independent bookshop and cafe Stories just down the street. “A few years ago, it was the playground that nobody was noticing, and I think that in the last two years people are starting to take it more seriously.”

Serious, indeed: The neighborhood’s most anticipated opening is a 10,000-square-foot bar and restaurant named Mohawk Bend that is slated to open in February and occupies the nearly 100-year-old movie theater across the street from Nicole Daddio’s cozy wine bar City Sip.

The space, which includes a large bar, a front patio and a room for private parties, is being built out by Kristopher Keith — who has designed many of Hollywood’s hottest nightclubs and bars — and owned by Tony Yanow, who recently opened a bustling Burbank beer-and-sausage pub called Tony’s Darts Away. It will have 73 California craft beers on tap as well as a large variety of California wines and California craft spirits. Just a few years ago, a monster bar like Mohawk Bend would have been thought unsustainable for the area.

Yanow experienced some pushback from residents concerned that more alcohol would degrade the area and bring in an unsavory crowd. Elizabeth Fischbach experienced similar resistance when she opened a low-key beer-and-wine bar called 1642 on the edge of the party scene just south of Echo Park Lake earlier this year.

But as more and more places plot plans to open — including a craft beer store called the Sunset Beer Co. that hopes to stock as many as 1,000 bottles of beer and operate a tasting room, and is run by the couple who own Eagle Rock’s Colorado Wine Co. — the protests have become less vociferous.

“We’ve gone from residents and neighborhood groups trying to close down bars due to narcotics, prostitution and shootings to the chamber of commerce and the neighborhood council endorsing more alcohol establishments,” says Jesus Sanchez, a resident of Echo Park for nearly 20 years and the author of a comprehensive and well-regarded neighborhood blog called “Eastsider L.A.”

Yanow, who says he has received a lot of support for Mohawk Bend, thinks that may be because “people who like to lurk in dark corners don’t like to lurk in places where there are thriving businesses.”

Sanchez agrees but also points out that the Latino character of the neighborhood is slowly being changed. “I never thought prices would rise so high,” he says, adding that when the Starbucks opened in Lucy’s Laundromat in the late 1990s, “people were like, ‘Wow, the neighborhood is gentrifying,’ and now you go to Fix and wait 10 minutes for a $4 cup of coffee.”

Still, Sanchez remembers a time in the ’90s when he ran a gallery on Echo Park Avenue and only scheduled openings for the afternoons because “we thought nobody wanted to come to Echo Park at night. Now crime has dropped; it’s been pretty dramatic.

True, says Mike Taix, whose family has owned Taix French Restaurant at Sunset and Park Avenue since 1962. “In the ’70s and ’80s, the neighborhood experienced a degradation of sorts. Everything began to close up earlier and earlier at night. We began to see a turnaround in the early 2000s. Nowadays we’re often busier at 11 o’clock at night than we are at 7 p.m…. It’s a drastic difference from a few years ago.”

Taix, along with many others, traces the initial change to December 2000, when the Rampart Division cop bar called the Short Stop was bought by a cool group of young investors including rock ‘n’ roll royal Greg Dulli, the frontman of the indie band the Afghan Whigs.

Dulli and his friends shot pool at the Short Stop before they bought it, so they knew very well what kind of cultural shift they were about to introduce.

“We weren’t going to be a cop bar anymore,” Dulli says. ” Garth Brooks is not going to be on the jukebox anymore. The foosball tables are leaving too, and electric darts — what were you thinking? But if you’re cool with Johnny Jenkins and Black Flag on the jukebox, you’ll be fine.”

Dulli and company’s timing was perfect; they opened with a finger-meet-pulse concept just as the starving-artist types were being priced out of Silver Lake and migrating east.

“To this day I’m confused about what exactly a hipster is, but I’m sure we’ve served a few based on our sales of Pabst Blue Ribbon,” says Dulli, who grew up in Ohio watching his grandmother drink Pabst on the rocks.

A few years after the Short Stop opened, the Latino dive bar called the Little Joy became the province of all things hip, and the Gold Room, Barragan’s and El Prado, also working-class Latino bars, succumbed to the thirst of the New Wave masses.

By January 2009, when a friendly, upscale (for the neighborhood) restaurant and bar called Allston Yacht Club opened next to the House of Spirits with a menu of small plates and an inventive mixology program, it seemed to many people that Echo Park had finally become a capital “D” destination: a mini-Sunset Strip East.

“I thought years ago that some day this strip will become pedestrian friendly and people will feel comfortable walking from the Echo to the Short Stop,” says Short Stop manager Terril Johnson. “And now they do.”

jessica.gelt@latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, Los Angeles Times

ART BUYERS BEWARE: IS IT REAL OR FAKE?

When Fred Sampson first happened upon works by Miami artist Romero Britto last year, the bright colors and crisp lines sparked the joy that Britto has said he aims for with his chipper works.

“It’s just bright and it’s usually got a good feeling to it,” said Sampson, who purchased about a half-dozen Britto paintings last year from a Coconut Grove art gallery that told him they were originals. “It’s a happy art work.”

Except now, all Sampson is feeling about Britto is mad. After Sampson, who lives in the Pacific Northwest, bought the art online from Max in the Grove in 2009, he contacted Britto’s company for authentication papers. A few days later, he got them — from the gallery.

“I thought they were interconnected somehow,” he said. But when he went to sell one of the paintings, he learned from Britto’s company that the pieces weren’t Britto creations.

A judgment in Oregon small claims court found that Sampson is owed at least the roughly $8,000 he spent on one of the works, and the judgment was recently accepted in Miami-Dade circuit court. Sampson said representatives of the gallery did not show up in Oregon court.

OFFERED A REFUND

All together, Sampson said he has spent tens of thousands on the supposed Britto works. At one point, he said, the gallery offered him a refund if he sent the pieces back. He returned a few of them, but he said he is still without his money.

A message left for gallery owner Les Roberts was not returned.

Sampson’s story serves as a warning for art buyers, thousands of whom are descending on Art Basel Miami Beach this week, some with an eye on buying in the hopes that a tucked-away find could someday be worth millions.

Generally, buying at an art fair is less risky, said Siobhan Morrissey, an art appraiser with Austin Morrissey in South Florida.

“When you’re buying something on the Internet it’s sort of like a grab bag: You never know what you’re going to get,” Morrissey said. “If you’re serious about buying art, you should look at it or have somebody that you know go look at it.”

She also suggests buying from living artists. In that case, “you can go back to the artist and say `Is this yours?’ ” she said.

In Sampson’s case, “it would have been better for him to buy a JetBlue ticket and have a good vacation on South Beach and go directly to whatever gallery he wanted to buy from,” she said.

Alan Bamberger, author of The Art of Buying Art, said if buyers are determined to buy online they should ask for documents that authenticate the pieces upfront.

Reputable galleries will gladly share this information, he said.

Corroborate the piece’s authenticity by contacting those listed on the documents. Compare prices between websites. If one price is particularly low, don’t assume you’re getting a deal. Other websites list works smaller than those Sampson bought for as much as $50,000.

Like Morrissey, he suggested getting an expert involved who can research a piece you are considering buying, through the Web or otherwise.

Too often, Bamberger said, buyers “hire me after it’s all over and the damage is done.”

BRITTO WOES

Max in the Grove owner Roberts has been connected to other Britto-related woes.

Scarcely two months ago, Roberts and another person, Silvia Castro, acknowledged they sold forgeries of works by Britto, according to court documents. The settlement names Coral Gables Galleries Inc. among the defendants, but it doesn’t specify whether Max in the Grove was involved in particular.

To settle a federal lawsuit Britto and his company filed against them, Roberts, his son, Castro and the galleries settled for an undisclosed sum, but they didn’t admit to knowing they were selling fake versions of the pop artist’s work. Messages left with a Britto spokeswoman were not returned.

The gallery owners also can’t claim to be authorized representatives of Britto or his company, according to the settlement. And they can’t say they are getting Britto originals from Brazil, where Britto is from.

Sampson said he is an experienced collector who knows what he’s doing. Or so he thought. He said that as far as he knows, he hasn’t been burned even when he bought works online.

So he didn’t think the colorful hearts rising over the horizon, emanating from the sun, would end up being such an eyesore.

“I’ve come across many interesting situations but nothing like this,” he said. “I’m usually pretty careful.”

Michael P. Whelan

Michael P. Whelan.
Las Vegas, Nevada. November, 2010.

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Month: December 2010

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Michael P. Whelan

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