The Hills Are On Fire - Hollywood Sign In Jeopardy

At just after 1pm today, a fire ignited in the hills above Burbank, threatening the famed Hollywood sign, the Los Angeles landmark since the 1920's. The sign, visible from all parts of the L.A. basin sits at the top of Mt. Lee, in the Hollywood Hills.

By 2pm Los Angeles County arson investigators were seen questioning a maintenance worker from the Oakwood Apartments on Barham Blvd. regarding the origin of the fire. According to witnesses at the Oakwood, maintenance workers at the apartment were seen attempting to extinguish a small fire in the north parking lot of the large complex.

Estimates of the size of the area involved in the fire, as of 2:30pm, were between 50 and 100 acres.

Temperatures in the Burbank area today reached the low 80's with humidity levels below 15 percent. An afternoon onshore weather flow was hoped to bring relief to fire crews in the hills, as the flow typically brings heavy, moist air in from the Pacific Ocean most afternoons.

Travis Caldwell, a resident of the Oakwood Apartments and a witness to the initial attempts of Oakwood maintenance workers to put out the fire, said that two minors were involved in the discharging of fireworks in near-proximity to the north parking lot of the apartments.

At the time of this writing, Sheriff's investigators were seen questioning these two possible persons of interest.

No names of any who might have been involved have been released as yet.

Copyright © 2007 Bill Friday

With This Muse, You Lose

Writers are freaks.

Capable of reaching deep into the creative void, searching for light, and, as if from nowhere they, seemingly, can pull entire worlds out whole.

And sometimes in their search they, along with the worlds they've drawn from the darkness, bring back the very darkness itself.

And sometimes, writers are bullies.

A few days ago, I got an email from another writer inside the Los Angeles Edition. In the note were concerns about criticisms expressed in the comments section at the end of our articles for BrooWaha.

One thought in particular stood out,

"I appreciate the fact that people can give feedback and constructive criticism, but I don't think it should be condescending and pointlessly mean." (emphasis mine).

After a few words from me (which I'm sure didn't help), I got to thinking about these two sides of the writer, and about the fragile nature of each. Because even the schoolyard bully is just one good ass-beating away from having to embrace his own inner freak.

What is it about staring deep into that empty, dark place where ideas take shape and then draw breath, that brings out the best, and worst, in the writer? I thought a little more, and my thoughts turned, well... dark.

Really dark.

In the film Wonder Boys, James, the budding, brilliant writer (played by Tobey Maguire), recites a list of celebrity suicides he's memorized, in alphabetical order no less. At a very young age, James is a freak who gets it. He already sees what comes with the literary territory. It's morbid. Funny morbid. But when the lights come up again in the theater, James is just a character in a movie. He isn't real. Movies aren't real.

Real is what happens between kids (the freaks and the bullies) on any playground, any day, between lunch and the 5th period bell. Real is what happens in the comments section at the end of the articles in BrooWaha, where the writer plays critic, and the rules of the playground still apply.

Writers search for light in the darkness of their own soul. And when that light can't be found, other writers write about it.

Literary history is the story of writers - freaks - so damaged from staring into the black hole of their own inspiration, that they can no longer cope with what's real.

The world loves a winner, and everyone loves a story about a thick-skinned writer. But in a world that's real, thick skin is just a cover for the freak that lives inside. And only in a business where the workers must daily look into the void of darkness in their own souls, is insanity accepted as an occupational hazard.

Real.

"Paint me an angel, with wings, and a trumpet, to trumpet my name over the world." - Thomas Chatterton.

Thomas Chatterton was real.

Born in England in 1752, Thomas Chatterton was a freak. Withdrawn as a young child, some thought he might even be mentally handicapped. Before the age of six, Thomas lived as a recluse in the home of his parents, sitting alone for hours and, at times, crying without a reason. When not staring into space or crying, he would tell family members of his desire to be famous.

By age eight, if given the chance, he would read and write all day. By age eleven, he was a published author.

However, during the next six years, Chatterton, while writing for various journals in England, also perpetrated an elaborate and ill-conceived series of "forgeries". He claimed the documents were original poems by the 15th century writer Thomas Rowley.

They were original poems, alright. Originally written by Chatterton on two-hundred-year-old parchment scraps he had taken from a chest inside his local parish church.

After the fall-out over the Rowley poems, Chatterton began writing political satire under various pen names, selling little and sinking deeper into depression. Finally, in 1770, at the age of seventeen, Thomas Chatterton wrote a rambling "Last Will and Testament" and moved on to the big city - London.

Two months later, unemployed, hungry and disgraced, Chatterton tore up any writings he had in his possession, drank arsenic, and died.

"Dance no more at holiday, like a running river be; My love is dead, gone to his death bed, all under the willow tree." - TC.

Real.

"I must now prove that I even exist." - Jerzy Kosinski.

Jerzy Kosinski was real.

An acclaimed author, Kosinski, was the survivor of a childhood spent hiding his Jewish identity from the Nazis who occupied his native Poland during World War II. As an adult, this period of his life was recounted in the 1965 novel The Painted Bird. Though Kosinski never claimed the book was a "biography" as such, he did say that the story was both a representation of his life at the time, as well as a retelling of a Polish folk tale about the dangers of non-conformity. Later in his career, Kosinski also wrote the 1972 novel Being There, and co-authored the screenplay for the 1979 film version starring Peter Sellers.

However, as early as 1969, with the publishing of the book Steps, whispers within the writing community began to be heard about possible plagiarism in the stories of Kosinski. Over the next dozen years, countless accusations, newspaper articles and broadcast stories pointed to the same thing.

Finally, in early May, 1991, ostracized by the literary world that had made him famous, Jerzy Kosinski, 58, committed suicide in his New York apartment.

"I need an internal light, as not to fall prey to the things which cause my spirits to sag. This is true water from the heavens." - JK.

Real.

"That's nice talk, Ben - keep drinking. Between the 101-proof breath and the occasional bits of drool, some interesting words come out." - Sera to Ben in Leaving Las Vegas, from the novel by John O'Brien.

John O'Brien was real.

A Midwestern kid from a stable, two-parent home, John O'Brien was married just a year after graduating high school. Three years later John, and his wife Lisa, moved to Los Angeles. During the next few years, John wrote and worked various jobs around L.A.

According to his sister Erin, John became a heavy drinker in his mid-twenties when, she said, "John's drinking problem started as soon as he started drinking. By the time he was 20, he was taking a clandestine flask to work. By the time he was 26, he was chugging vodka directly from the bottle at morning's first light in order to stave off the shakes. I know. I saw him do it."

By 1990, O'Brien's first novel, Leaving Las Vegas, was published. The next four years saw O'Brien complete just one more work, Stripper Lessons, and begin one other, The Assault on Tony's.

In 1994, in the wake of the controversy surrounding the true origin of the Sheryl Crow song Leaving Las Vegas (a song Crow co-wrote with O'Brien's friend, David Baerwald), O'Brien sank to the deepest depths of alcoholic depression.

On March 21, 1994 Crow appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman, performing the song and answering questions about it's origin. During the course of the interview, Crow took biographical credit for the lyrics.

A week after the Crow appearance, production began on the movie version of LLV, starring Nicolas Cage and Elisabeth Shue. Two weeks later, on April 10th, O'Brien was still upset about the Crow interview, complaining to his literary agent in a phone conversation.

Later that day, John O'Brien put a shot gun to his head and killed himself.

Later, his father said that the novel, Leaving Las Vegas, was John's suicide note.

The final paragraph of John O'Brien's unfinished manuscript of The Assault on Tony's, summed up his life.

"For the first time in his life Rudd found himself wishing for death, hoping (praying?) that the walls came down before the liquor ran out, that they were stormed, bombed or shot in some truculent surprise attack, some irresistible force, divine intervention." - J.O.

Writers are freaks.

And if you're reading this, you're probably a writer.

Real...

Copyright © 2007 Bill Friday

Once Upon a Time in Norte America: The Rise of Carlos Slim

"You don't tug on Superman's cape, you don't spit into the wind, you don't pull the mask of that old Lone Ranger and you don't mess around with Slim." - Jim Croce.

1902. A young man flees persecution in his home country and travels half way around the world to find a new home and a new way of life. How many times have we heard that one? But what if the young man was born in Lebanon? And what if the country he emigrated to wasn't the U.S., but Mexico?

Here begins the story of Carlos Slim.

Carlos Slim is the son of Julian Slim (Yusef Salim) Haddad, a Lebanese Christian (non-Muslim) who left his own country for a better (read: longer) life at the southern end of North America. Through hard work and shrewd investments - yes, Mexican investments - buying land in downtown Mexico City following the revolution of 1910, the elder Slim became a successful businessman.

And the son picked up right where his late father left off.

By the age of 26, Carlos Slim had an accumulated wealth of $400,000. He had married the future mother of his six children. Armed only with a degree in civil engineering and a big pile of money (Mexico in 1936 money), he began buying things. Lots of things. Businesses.

Skip ahead forty years.

Carlos Slim is rich.

Sorry, I may have understated that a bit. Carlos Slim is RICH!. Ridiculously, excessively, non-stop, stinking, light your cigars with million dollar bills RICH! So rich, that his cumulative wealth is estimated somewhere between thirty billion (Forbes) to FIFTY BILLION DOLLARS (Reuters; Fortune). So rich, that in 2006, he saw his wealth increase $2.2 million per hour (Belfast Telegraph).

Although the majority of his money has come from the telecommunications industry, Slim's holdings also include five insurance companies (valued at $1.5 billion), a Mexican retail chain (pretax annual profit, $500 million), a mining company, an auto parts manufacturing company, a bank, a tobacco company, oh, and another mining company. All told, Slim's companies account for almost one-half of the value of the Mexican stock exchange.

And before you think Carlos Slim's empire stops at the Mexican border, south-of-which 4 out of every 5 cell lines and 9 out of every 10 land lines are owned and operated by him, think again. Have you ever bought anything at Comp USA? The computer you're reading this article on, maybe? You just added to the man's not-so-slim portfolio. Designer purses? How about Saks Fifth Avenue where the slim pickins aren't so slim? Cha-ching! He owns them both. In the time it took you to read this paragraph, Carlos Slim just made $18,000.

Now before you jump from your Comp USA computer chair and shout, "Bastardo Codicioso!" (that's "Greedy Bastard!" en Español), hear what else this man, who one day soon will be the richest in the world, has done. In 2006, from endowments to and through his foundations, Carlos Slim donated $1.8 billion to charitable cause including giving away 95,000 bicycles to children of poor families to ride to their schools, 70,000 pairs of eyeglasses, and scholarships to 150,000 university students.

Similar donations over the last ten years start to read like a box score. They include 66 million bikes and 10 million pairs of contact lenses.

He even donated thousands of laptop computers to students, thus providing them access to the Internet. As early as next week, Carlos Slim plans to announce a new plan to donate upwards of 10 billion more dollars over the next four years to help fund Mexican health and education programs.

Add to it the fact that Slim's companies also employ 250,000 Mexicans.

So how come a large segment of his own people don't trust him?

Remember the laptops? When the students accessed the Internet, whose ISP did they use?

Do you own a PC or a Mac? If you own a Mac, do you trust Bill Gates? The very fact that you can own a Mac allows you to rest a little easier even while knowing that Bill Gates is the richest man in the world. Do you like Coke? No? Well then, at least there's Pepsi.

If you're a Mexican citizen, Carlos Slim is Microsoft, Apple, Coke, Pepsi and GM all rolled into one. In spite of all of Slim's charitable contributions, Mexico's working class just doesn't trust him.

In the last year, this distrust took the form of satire. A cartoon of Slim, depicted as a boxer lying flat on his back in the ring as he crushes a tiny opponent appeared in the Mexican newspaper La Reforma. In the drawing, telephone lines make up the ropes around the ring. Beneath the cartoon a caption reads, "Billion Dollar Baby".

Around the same time, in a segment on the Mexican TV show, "La Verdad Sea Dicha" ("The Truth Be Told"), a mocking news anchor shoves a pie into the mouth of a papier maché effigy of Slim.

But this attitude is also found in the academic community, where many find the practice of making giant public donations a questionable cover for something else. One professor, Denise Dresser of the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico, points out, "In Mexico, the perception is that public deeds are done for personal gain." In another interview Dresser adds that "a growing public consensus that Slim's attempts to block competition are hurting the Mexican economy." She goes on to say, "He wants to ward off those criticisms."

Dresser is not alone.

George Grayson is an expert on the subject of Latin American politics. For the last 38 years he's been a faculty member of The College of William and Mary. When interviewed by the L.A. Times on the subject of Mexico's lack of economic competition, Grayson said, "It is still full of public and private monopolies and bottlenecks."

In a country where the power of wealth is controlled by a relatively few tight-nit grupos, all of which together are known as "The 100 Families", the largest monopoly by far is controlled by Carlos Slim.

Once more from Dresser. "Mexico has a dense, intricate web of connections between the government and the business class. This ends up creating a government that doesn't defend the public interest... It is rather willing to help its friends, its allies and, in some cases, its business partners thrive at the expense of the Mexican people."

So, what of the monopoly created by Carlos Slim? If Slim has done this much for his own people, whether some trust him or not, shouldn't we rise from our Comp USA computer chairs and applaud?

Economists say that Mexico actually loses money due to the monopolies controlled by Slim and The 100 Families, causing Mexico's per capita income to fall to less than $7,000, leaving the country in poverty. Ask the 10 percent of the Mexican population that currently lives in the United States why they left home. And why, by working for the decidedly low wages generally available to "illegals" in this country, remittances sent back to Mexico by these workers totaled a record $20 billion in 2005.

So what will it take to, once and for all, bring Mexico to a place where its own citizens will want to return? Slim himself defines his own role in the process.

"My new job," says Carlos Slim, "is to focus on the development and employment of Latin America."

If he means employ at a working wage commensurate with the rest of Norte America, he doesn't say.

So what more will it take for Slim and, for that matter, the rest of the wealthiest of Mexico's power brokers to satisfy the skepticism of the Mexican working class that distrusts him so much?

Denise Dresser calls it a wish list. One that, "every Mexican committed to his country would ask from Santa Claus." And that is?

"The day that you (Slim) give 80 percent of your personal fortune to an unselfish cause is the day that I will become your champion."

Oh. Is that all.

Early next week, Carlos Slim plans to unveil another expansion of his vast charitable, educational and business infrastructural plan to the world.

Will it satisfy his biggest critics?

I guess we'll see it in the funny pages.

Copyright © 2007 Bill Friday