Hollywood

"Hollywood comeback continues" is only one of a thirty-year-plus series of almost identical popular press reports on all of the wonderful things that the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency has brought to the area.  The LA Times loves this stuff and there are just enough red carpet events and tourists milling around Graumann's theatre to obscure the reality.  But Hollywood is still mostly a nasty place that attracts large numbers of hookers, hustlers, druggies, runaways, pimps and other predators that usually follow. 

"Budget crises" have a silver lining, including the possibility that California may lose some of the redevelopment scam.  The Insitute for Justice elaborates.

I have always cringed at the misleading (polite term) boosterism that surrounds talk of the Hollywood "comeback" and this is why I looked at the Reason.tv interview with Nancy Rommelman as she discussed her new novel The Bad Mother.

It is one of those short, spare and honest stories that follows the misadventures of a pathetic bunch of Hollywood street people.  None of it is pretty.  But it quietly explodes the official "Hollywood comeback" fantasies that are a staple of LA media.  It's very short and I hope it gets a wide reading.