March 08, 2004
bob the builder
there was all sorts of home improvement work going on in st. elmo this weekend. here you can see bob demarco cutting up sheets of drywall for some work we did at his house over the weekend. we hung a couple of doors and then some sheetrock on saturday morning. on my way home from bob's, i ran into the roes moving from one apartment to another in st. elmo, and then stopped by to see the progress on the martin's new place. on top of all that, the weather is reaching that point where all i want to do is sit outside and stare into space... which i did all sunday afternoon, and got a nice pink sunburny sheen on my (ever-expanding) forehead.
...
i watched the sopranos season premiere last night with josiah, aaron, and a few others. i don't think i'd ever really seen it before, but i have to say i enjoyed it and i can understand why people get so excited about this show. there's something very realistic and almost mundane about the lives these mobsters live and i think the genius of the show is probably the fact that most viewers can personally identify with some element of the show, even though its ostensibly about organized crime.
tonight we're going to see in america, 7:15 at the bijou, and according to mesh, its one film not to be missed this season.
Posted by andy at March 8, 2004 10:50 AMbattery man-
you haven't seen 'in america' yet? mi and i loved it. in all our house-hunting we really just long to live in the neighborhood and place the characters end up, you'll know what i mean after tonight. and i have a small confession: you have pretty much become my sole movie-going criteria. "if the dude-man likes it, it's gotta be good" - spoken in the voice of john sweet. (not a small weight to pull.) maybe i've been hanging out with littlejohn too much - he was in rare form last night on our piano with the les mis book open and all the lyrics his own . . . j
Posted by: jes at March 8, 2004 11:03 AMAndy,
A couple weeks ago, I met and interviewed a private defense attorney out here in L.A. whose father was the L.A. head of La Cosa Nostra (you know, huge Sicilian crime syndicate) in the '70's (before he was convicted of trying to bribe a federal judge and sent to prison, where he eventually died in the mid-80s).
Anyway, talk about mundane: this attorney tells me "Organized crime in L.A. is nearly impossible: the weather's too nice to shake people down (i.e. there's no disincentive to leave your house, like cold weather, which apparently is helpful for a shakedown to be effective), and it's too big to "control" any areas (L.A. county is 4000 square miles), there are few "neighborhoods," and the traffic is too bad to be able to manage your toughguys (i.e. you can't get somewhere fast if you have a problem.)
I thought that was a pretty funny, and quite mundane account of why OC doesn't work as well in L.A. as it might, say, in Trenton.
-Rick
Posted by: Rick Quinn at March 9, 2004 03:21 PMOmg thats right! Please come see me and my friends! ;)
Posted by: watch moi at March 17, 2005 06:27 PM