Essentially LA

What's essential to Los Angeles and the Southland? Why, driving of course.

And what's more essential to LA driving than our criss-crossing collection of freeways? Nothing, I'm guessing.

Here's some "neat" shots of the various locations and names of highways in an around LA county, and even a non-LA county destination. It's not Orange County, and good luck finding which one it could be.

First up on our non-exhaustive list of area highways is the Artesia Freeway, in the numerical nomenclature it's CA Hwy 91, Redondo Beach to Riverside. This is an actual freeway, bigger than US 101 in San Luis Obispo.

Here's a buy spot getting near downtown LA, where the arteries break apart like the branching aorta, 101 heading to downtown LA, I-5 heading to the mountains and north out of the city, and I-10 heading west to Santa Monica. The eastbound section of 10 is less than a mile away.

Here's where the 101 splits off just north of the city on it's way to Hollywood and Ventura, with the 110 becoming Interstate 110 heading south, through LA all the way to San Pedro, becoming the Harbor Freeway, and becoming CA Hwy 110 going up to Pasadena (that's probably more like "over to Pasadena" at this point).

CA Route 27 is also known as Topanga Canyon Road, and it dies/begins at the ocean into/from the PCH. I made sure I got the sign notifying the location: 4 miles to Santa Monica, 7 miles to Malibu.

Having seen CA Hwy 91, we see CA Hwy 90 here, the Marina del Rey Freeway. This seems to be a freeway link from the 405 through Culver City to Marina del Rey, a coastal community immediately south of Santa Monica. This is also the first picture of the famous CA Hwy 1, also known as the Pacific Coast Highway. Calling something "the Pacific Coast Highway" doesn't make as much sense when it's an urban street like Lincoln Blvd here, or Santa Rosa Rd, in my old college town. But it is what it is; weird things happen when it's an almost thousand mile long road.

Briefly we see the 405, the San Diego Freeway on the way to Long Beach, as the spur 105 shoots off in two directions, one to Norwalk, and one to El Segundo. Norwalk is in the South-Central section of the city, while El Segundo is north of the Rancho Palos Verdes peninsula and even north of Torrance, but south of Redondo Beach (which itself of south of Santa Monica and Marina del Rey).

CA Rte 107 heads from Inglewood to Lawndale, to mostly forgotten communities in Central LA; neither is violent enough to become famous in the hip-hop arts, nor wealthy enough to influence politics.

Here we see the Harbor Freeway, I-110, again, as it crosses the 405 far south of where it originated, heading off to San Pedro.

And, getting back to where we started our journey, we meet up with the Long Beach Freeway, which heads south to Long Beach and north to Pasadena, while the 405 heads down to Orange County, where it meets up with I-5 and heads down to San Diego.

Lastly, here is the classic picture with the classic name, seen together. Oddly, this exit represents easily the ugliest stretch of this road. Before this crossing of the 710, the road signs in Long Beach all say "PCH", but it's really 18th street, a few miles from the ocean. On the west side of the 710, it stretches between refineries and industrial wastelands. At least the sign gives the right idea.

Public Votes for Movie Characters--Resulting List Heavy with Whitey

I came across a list of the top 100 movie characters as voted on by readers of the magazine, or site, or whatever. I didn't keep really tight notes, but they were tight enough for me.

I made some observations I wanted to put up somewhere, and here seemed like the best spot.

Cutting through the treacle:

10. Vito Corleone
9. Ripley
8. Cpt. Jack Sparrow
7. the Dude
6. Indy
5. Hannibal Lecter
4. Han Solo
3. the Joker (Heath Ledger version)
2. Darth Vader
1. Tyler Durdin, Brad Pitt, Fight Club

To start: Tyler Durdin? Okay...wouldn't have been my choice, but what can you do? It's not the worst choice, now that I think about it, but...wow.

I was kinda bummed that Charles Foster Kane isn't there, or Jake Gittes, but I guess I didn't really expect that, especially with today's voters.

Also: Harrison Ford twice, Star Wars franchise twice.

One girl, Sigourney Weaver as the badass alien killer. And, this is a pretty white list. Very white. All you have is James Earl Jones' voice, but it is number 2.

The next black face? Which is actually the first black character on the list? Clocks in at #19: Jules Winnfield, Samuel Jackson in Pulp Fiction.

The list is so white that a computer character, Gollum, ranks higher, #13, than Jules. This list is pretty light on the minorities, and I'm trying to figure out if it's just because the voters were mostly guys my age and skin color, or if there's just a dearth of good roles for the non-white actors and actresses.

Well, shit, it's gotta be both. That, and the institution of the cinema in this country is inherently racist, but...that's fodder for another post.

So, I move on with the observations. Sticking with the minorities:

19. Jules
22. Red, Morgan Freeman, Shawshank Redemption
33. Tequila, Chow Yun-fat, Hard Boiled (I saw this in a theater in Sacramento in 1996 or '97)(badass)
47. Blade, Wesley Snipes
78. Axel Foley

Wow. 4 black guys and Chow Yun-fat. Tony Montana was on there somewhere, but since that was Al Pacino, I didn't write it down, but I guess you could make the case that a Cuban should count.

Does this put into perspective the three computer animated characters, two puppets, 1 actual computer and 1 cell animated character?

13. Gollum
25. Yoda
63. Wall-E
74. ET
94. Buzz Lightyear
99. HAL

I didn't mention the cell animated character because it's Jessica Rabbit, a lady. The Ladies are better represented in the latter half of the list. Some of these should rate way higher, and I'm sure any of the few people reading this might agree. Here're the women:

9. Ripley
41. Mary Poppins (32 spot wait for Mary Poppins?)
45. Amelie
56. Juno
62. Mathilda, Natalie Portman as a young lady in movie of the same name
66. the Bride (fucking number 66?)
75. Marge Gunderson, Fargo
88. Jessica Rabbit
89. Princess Leia
90. Wicked Witch
91. Scarlet O'Hara
97. Carrie

Random "Luke" observation:

53. Luke from Cool Hand Luke
54. Luke Skywalker

Right next to each other. Go figure.

Jake Gittes, Jack Nicholson, Chinatown

Where's his number? Oh yeah, he was left off the fucking list. Who was that other guy I mentioned earlier...CITIZEN fucking KANE himself?

98. CharlesFoster Kane

I guess this is what you get when you let regular folks vote for something as important trivial as a movie character list.

The Really Real Ghostbusters

On one of the free digital signals we get down here in the Southland seems only to play at night, later night anyway, and is called Qubo.

Qubo has all sorts of cartoons that are designed to get the viewers like me specifically into waxing nostalgic over and leaving the channel tuned to Qubo. They are the 'toons of us early-30s guys' childhoods.

They show He-Man, She-Ra, something I never heard of called BraveStarr (it sounds cool enough: a Native American sheriff-type on an alien world with a laser blaster and maybe a mechanical horse), and, of course, the show from which this picture's taken, Ghostbusters:

This is not the Ghostbusters that most of us know and love, but I'll get to that in a second.

First let me say that all these shows suck sweaty balls. Holy shit are they bad. Poorly animated, poorly voiced, poorly written, trite from every angle. I suppose the fantasy-meets-and-drunkenly-humps-sci-fi universe that He-Man and She-Ra romp around in is novel---in theory...but goddamn. These Ghostbusters do go in and out of some netherworld dimension, but I wasn't drunk enough to give half a shit.

So, the Ghostbusters...There was the 1984 smash hit Ivan Reitman movie. It's canon for being a kid in the '80s. It spawned a sequel, which was also beloved by us stupid kids, although there have been plenty of worse sequels out there. It also spawned an animated show, starring the same main four characters from the movie. And Slimer. It was great.

Another show arrived around the same time, in between the two movies, in 1986, calling itself "Ghostbusters", and starring an ape, a fat idiot, and the blond hero. Their car was ghostly, had a mind of it's own, and was a scaredy-cat like C-3PO. 

This show surfed on enough of the attention and buzz created by the "main" franchise that they caused that "main" franchise to rename themselves "The Real Ghostbusters".

I remember thinking, even at that time, this seems weird. How can this show be getting made? There were things about it I preferred to the Real Ghostbusters, namely their frequent trips to the ghost-lands. But even as a kid, it just seemed illegal somehow to make a show and call it the exact same name as a different highly popular franchise.

The very first episode was on the other night, and I caught a little bit more that I had of the other shows I'd surfed through before going to bed. The fat idiot and the blond hero both were reluctant to become Ghostbusters, but were forced into it by the Gorilla after the original Ghostbusters, both guys' fathers, had been kidnapped. They showed the fathers, and I remembered a picture I'd seen somewhere:

Each of those two guys were animated, and were supposed to be the fathers of the young men who are in the animated cell from above.

See? Who was the real Real Ghostbusters?

There was a television show 1975 called the "Ghostbusters". Larry Storch was the star. It turns out that they sued, and won (or it was settled) Columbia Films over the name of the 1984 movie kids my age consider classic, and somehow were able to retain enough rights over the name of the property that they could produce an animated show pretty quick after that '84 movie.

While I preferred the fake "Real Ghostbusters" to the real "Fake Ghostbusters", I never hated the one with the Gorill, like some of my cohorts did. Maybe it was easier for kids to hate and talk shit, but for me, that show had some neat aspects lacking in the other, more popular show.

I always imagined them coexisting in the same universe, going about their ghostbusting business in separate circles, as there were enough ghosts to go around.