The decline of the LA Weekly is a particularly depressing thing for your contributing editor, and I imagine for a good number of us Arthur contributors. Though your contrib editor’s arrival in Los Angeles in the late ’90s post-dates its true heyday as a bastion for long-form journalism, checks from LA Weekly put plenty of food in this freelancer’s refrigerator. The editor I worked with most — regular Arthur contributor and heroic Diamanda Galas profiler John Payne — still contributes, but is long gone as a staff editor, and many fine editors, writers and fact-checkers have fallen since.

Political columnist Marc Cooper left a couple months ago, and though he’s been kinda “meh” lately, dude used to report from Central American warzones and managed to weather several years under the noxious heel of New Times management. He finally spilled all the beans on his blog just the other day. Even if you’re not from Los Angeles it’s a worthwhile read when it comes to laying out how shitty newspapers have gotten in the last decade. As Cooper points out, the Weekly used to be mentioned in the same breath as Harper’s and The New Yorker. What’s this week’s cover story? Something about porno dudes and their dumb meth-erection feud with a headline that I can’t even bother to decipher. If genius food journalist (and the author of the 1989 NWA cover story up top there) Jonathan Gold would just start his own web-log we could be done with that fishwrapper forever (via LA Observed).

Choice quotes after the jump, or go read the whole infuriating kajillion word account over at Cooper’s blog.

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“And then you can carry on with business as usual, quietly stealing their homeland.”

Via.

The Vigorous North, a “Field Guide to Inner-City Wilderness Areas,” has this great thing up right now about another wonderful side effect of the current economic slowdown. From The Foreclosed Backyards National [Skate] Park:

… thanks to the passage of the massive bailout package and the “troubled asset relief program,” the American public now owns a substantial portion of these over-mortgaged backyards.

America’s foreclosed backyards are a lot like a newly-created national park.

It’s a good survey of recent articles from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, focusing in particular on how drained swimming pools are such a wonderful resource for those with skateboards and a few cleaning supplies.

The skateboarders have even developed their own code of ethics, which is strikingly similar to the “leave no trace” principles that are promoted among backcountry hikers and climbers.

This is of course quite similar to the water shortages of the ’70s that drained so many Southern CA backyard pools, inadvertently helping birth the era of modern skateboarding. Yet another way to survive the coming economic depression in high style.

Counterpunch, the political newsletter edited by swashbuckling muckrackers Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, has a brief essay from Brian Eno on Israel’s current war on Gaza (via The Daily Swarm). Get more Eno from Alan Moore and Kristine McKenna in their epic appreciation/interview from the July 2005 issue of Arthur. Order a hard copy here. Read online here.

An Experiment in Provocation
Stealing Gaza
By BRIAN ENO

It’s a tragedy that the Israelis – a people who must understand better than almost anybody the horrors of oppression – are now acting as oppressors. As the great Jewish writer Primo Levi once remarked “Everybody has their Jews, and for the Israelis it’s the Palestinians”. By creating a middle Eastern version of the Warsaw ghetto they are recapitulating their own history as though they’ve forgotten it. And by trying to paint an equivalence between the Palestinians – with their homemade rockets and stone-throwing teenagers – and themselves – with one of the most sophisticated military machines in the world – they sacrifice all credibility.

The Israelis are a gifted and resourceful people who fully deserve the right to live in peace, but who seem intent on squandering every chance to allow that to happen. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that this conflict serves the political and economic purposes of Israel so well that they have every interest in maintaining it. While there is fighting they can continue to build illegal settlements. While there is fighting they continue to receive huge quantities of military aid from the United States. And while there is fighting they can avoid looking candidly at themselves and the ruthlessness into which they are descending.

Gaza is now an experiment in provocation. Stuff one and a half million people into a tiny space, stifle their access to water, electricity, food and medical treatment, destroy their livelihoods, and humiliate them regularly…and, surprise, surprise – they turn hostile. Now why would you want to make that experiment?

Because the hostility you provoke is the whole point. Now ‘under attack’ you can cast yourself as the victim, and call out the helicopter gunships and the F16 attack fighters and the heavy tanks and the guided missiles, and destroy yet more of the pathetic remains of infrastructure that the Palestinian state still has left. And then you can point to it as a hopeless case, unfit to govern itself, a terrorist state, a state with which you couldn’t possibly reach an accommodation.

And then you can carry on with business as usual, quietly stealing their homeland.

from myspace.com/wattfrompedro:

friends,

I’m thinking of ron asheton, a beautiful man who I learned from much and shared many joys w/and always played my heart out for him. he was a pioneer w/a guitar sound all his own and was very very kind to me… “you’re a good sailor” he would always say. I can’t find the words to really put it right here but he was truly a righteous brother, much deep respect. I miss him so so much.

big big love from watt

Three Stooges bootlegs for you to put on blast while pondering the loss Ron Asheton.

The first, My Girl Hates My Heroin, is a wonderfully rough and dirty document recorded in Detroit sometime in 1973. Get it here.

Next up are two crisp and sweaty live recordings of the Stooges’ reunion tour. The first, from 2007’s Glastonbury Festival, also features a 10 minute interview and some sorta annoying interstitial commentary from British TV host Jonathan Ross. The band sounds amazing though, and the audience is roaring its appreciation, going absolutely bonkers. “We are the fucking Stooges,” indeed.

Live at Glastonbury, 2007

And finally here they are going nuts at a Spanish rock festival thing in 2006.

Live at Spain’s Azkena Rock Festival, August 31, 2006