The bloat head brothers are out at Miramax. The Weinsteins have made a truckload of good movies at Miramax, or at least have purchased them from the makers, but the amount of those that have been legitimate moneymakers is slightly less. They have received ever-growing budgets from Disney, and their pockets have been getting fatter all along.

Harvey Weinstein seems like kind of a dick to me, just from what I read around, but he is well respected in the film industry, as is his brother, and I’m sure both of them will be totally fine in the future. They will probably continue making movies and probably won’t find it too hard to find distributors. They can just go where Dreamworks and other washouts go. No real problem for them.

The deal is pretty basic. Disney keeps the Miramax name and the catalog of films while the brothers Weinstein get the Dimension film label and a bunch of cash. They also get some future money tied to the films they are making now but have yet to be released. They also have the opportunity to buy several projects outright, it seems.

Disney gets what it wants too. It gains more control over the budgets of the Miramax projects and can make the entire unit run much more lean. This is a good idea, and something I have long proposed.

I like this whole plan, and it will help Iger to start with more of a clean slate. I think there may be good things for the future of Disney, but we’ll know for sure in the next couple of years.

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Over this weekend the Disney board decided to name Robert Iger as its replacement for Michael Eisner in the CEO position at the company. The actual transition will take place after the shareholder convention in September, but they will supposedly be working together between now and then to ensure a smooth transition.

The news comes as a relief for many investors and Wall Street types. Less so to Stanley Gold and Roy Disney. We know what I think of them. Nothing personally against them, I just think they lack the vision for how things must be played. What do I know though? They each have millions of dollars, and I have dick. I think that the urgency to replace Eisner is a little premature, even given his recent troubles. It probably is true that he needs to get gone sometime soon anyway, so on to the future.

I don’t really know too much about Iger, other than what I have recently read. He seems to be a competent manager, and has risen through the ranks in a responsible workman like style. He spent most of his career over at ABC before they were conquered by Disney. Since then he has also risen to president of the combined company.

I think that he is as good a choice as could be made on short notice. It is true however that the board didn’t just have short notice. Three things are important in picking a successor to run the company. First of is a knowledge and understanding of Disney culture. I think Iger probably fits this as much as any high ranking executive type. Second is an ability to get deals made. From what I hear, Iger seems like he would be alright here. He is said to have an easy charm. The third, and most pivotal, is the ability to be a creative visionary for the future. It is this area where Iger is most suspect. As far as I can see on such a short inspection, he seems to have nothing creative or visionary about him. I may be wrong, but if I’m not he needs to discover it quickly. All is not lost, and he could still be a very effective leader for the company. It is possible that all he requires is someone to balance him. Few people are both creative and dominant in the business world. Walt Disney himself relied heavily on his brother to handle money matters. Perhaps All Iger has to do to be effective is pick the right subordinate. And honestly, I’m just the man for the job.

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Wondering what Isiah Thomas was doing way before basketball?

Today in History: March 13

Enoch Brooks’ Curious Book

A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible, Worcester: Isaiah Thomas, 1788.
American Treasures of the Library of Congress

A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible is one of sixty-five children’s book titles printed by Isaiah Thomas (1749-1831). A preeminent early American printer and pioneer publisher of children’s literature, Thomas began his apprenticeship as a young boy. By age seventeen, he was considered an excellent printer in his own right. Over the course of a long career, Thomas published numerous popular titles for children and adults. Also a bookseller, at one point he owned more than twenty bookstores in the Boston area.

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We have heard the voices crying in the wilderness. We have heard the cracked and garbled testimony of those kind enough to unbushel their lamps, preparing beacons in the darkness of the gathering storm. It is time to bestir ourselves, and seek shelter before it is too late.

I don’t know about you, but I want to enliven my faith with deeds.

I want to rise up as called and strip off the winding sheet with which the Enemy has prepared my beloved for burial. For my beloved is not dead, but merely sleeping – numbed with pain and drugs. And while I may be maudlin at the moment, I cherish always the assurance that I may call upon my friends, my wonderful counselors, to help me and my beloved, to grant us sanctuary from the wrack and thunder.

As you will note from the above, I have done with pussy-footing around on issues of language. If mine enemies would blaspheme the liberating message of the Gospel, then I shall take up the challenge and quote them chapter and verse.

For I have discovered a funny thing about myself these past few months, wandering here among the cities of the plain, this wilderness of sin and perversion that happily calls itself the buckle in the Bible Belt. All these years I thought my liberalness, my liberality, my liberation was grounded in a kind of class treason. As privileged as my childhood was – and those of you who know me know well just how ample was the bosom of my upper-middle class upbringing – I thought my sense of justice grew out of an understanding of the injustice of class exploitation. And for those of you who know my father, you can well imagine why I thought this.

But I was wrong. My father may articulate his own rage in largely class terms, but there is another source for my (and, I believe, his) active anger at the injustice of the world. It is, to be quite blunt, Biblical.

What I saw then, and darkly, through the lens of class analysis, I now see face to face.

For we live in a fallen and trivial world, my friends. And we are called, each and every blessed one of us, to live with respect in Creation, to love and serve others, to seek justice and resist evil. To do otherwise – to know that you are called and to decline that calling – is to sin.

We as people of faith must resist the blandishments of Mammon every blessed day of our lives. We must stop up our ears to his secret whisperings, his filthy gospel of temptation and wretchedness. The Philistines have invited the money-changers into the temple of our Lord, and it is up to each and every one of us to drive them from the tabernacle of our heart. To do otherwise – to succumb to the wheedling of individualism, to be seduced by the terrible, utterly inhuman, entirely Satanic logic of the market – is to forsake our obligations to God’s beautiful creation. It is to condemn ourselves, reject our brethren, befoul this very Eden we have been given and from whence we shall be cast out unto the outer darkness if we persist in our hard-heartedness.

If you consider yourself a Christian, then you have no business supporting a man who led us into war upon the basis of a damnable lie. A man who would defend the blasphemous doctrine of pre-emptive strikes is no Christian. He is a bloody, vicious, and heathen war-monger – a slaughterer of innocents and a reaper of death for our own most precious 1500 men and women.

If you consider yourself a decent human being, then you have no business supporting a party that would take our parents and grandparents, take those who built this country up and then freely gave it to you and me as a gift, take our elders, cast them out uncharitably upon the tender mercies of The Street, and let them starve.

If you consider yourself an ethical person at all, then you have no business supporting an agenda that would enrich the great, enslave the poor, and threaten each and every one of us with permanent debt servitude. An agenda with no place for sanctuary, no schedule for jubilee, nothing but a displayed centerfold of the naked and shameful workings of power.

We as people of the Book must rise from our slumber, heed the cries of the watchers in the night, and defend the gates of our New Jerusalem, or we will be lost to a new captivity.

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Every day I wake up, brew my morning coffee, and open the newspaper to yet another chapter in the rape of our nation.

There is no other image I can come up with, really, to express the nauseating, blinding rage that engulfs me every time I indulge what feels increasingly alienating and voyeuristic: reading about a literally obscene assault being perpetrated every fucking day on my own, my beloved, my one true love: America.

I am enraged that this monstrous crime is happening at all. I am enraged that the gang of punks responsible works with such calculated brutality, such obvious pre-meditation, such sadistic glee at the damage and the pain their assault accomplishes. I am enraged that I am witness to this crime in the company of literally millions of my fellow citizens, and that we find ourselves passive; cowering in our private hovels as did the apartment-dwellers of Queens that bloody spring evening in 1964, hearing the screams and doing absolutely nothing. I am literally choked with bile because the appointed guardians of our peace and liberty, the safety-managers of our lives and of our fortunes, those we freely elected as the wardens of our collective household, participate actively in the bashing, alternating between taking their turns at the gang-bang and bidding onlookers to “move-along, there’s nothing to see here.”

Are you listening Joe Biden? I am talking to you! Are you listening Joe Lieberman? I see your bloody nightstick! Are you listening, Zell Miller? I see you leering and slobbering lasciviously at the spectacle! Are you listening, Colin Powell? I see you with your back turned, skulking away from the scene of this crime! Are you listening, Mary Landrieu? I see you hesitating at whether to join in the fray! Are you listening, Ken Salazar? I see you sidling up to the thugs, proffering your services!

I will not dwell at this time upon the specifics of what is happening this day and every day to my darling nation: to re-tell is to re-imagine. To re-imagine is to re-live. And to do that is to pour salt into the wound, to grip and pick at the rawness until my nerves are chafed and deadened to insensibility. Besides, you can see for yourself what is happening. Go to the tattle-sheets of our great city — the LA Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Manchester Guardian — and read for yourself the police report. Log on to the latter-day gossip-mongers — the seething hoard, ever growing; the rising chorus, ever louder — who are our only hope of moral boundary-marking in this lonely and anomic place.

But do not ask me to tell you what I have seen, for I have done testifying to the awfulness of this world.

Next week: what to do.

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Los Angeles television station K-CAL 9 has unveiled its list of top sandwiches in the Southland!

#9 PHILLY CHEESESTEAK
South Street
117 N. Victory Blvd., Burbank.
Phone: (818) 563-2211.
and
1010 Broxton Ave
Westwood, CA 90024
(310) 443-9895

#8 CORNED BEEF
Jerry’s Famous Deli
(818) 980-4245
12655 Ventura Blvd
Studio City, CA 91604
www.jerrysfamousdeli.com/

#7 FRENCH DIP
Philippe The Original
1001 N. Alameda St.
Los Angeles CA. 90012
(213) 628-3781
http://www.philippes.com

#6 TORTA SANDWICH
Santa Fe Café
353 N Pass Ave, Burbank, 91505
(818) 563-2233

#5 ITALIAN BEEF
Taste Chicago
603 N Hollywood Way, Burbank, 91505
(818) 563-2800
www.tastechicago.biz

#4 THE GODMOTHER ITALIAN SUB
1517 Lincoln Blvd, Santa Monica, 90401
(310) 395-8279
http://www.baycitiesitaliandeli.com/

#3 BEEF BRISKET
Tam O¹Shanter Inn
2980 Los Feliz Blvd
Los Angeles, 90039
(323) 664-0228

#2 PASTRAMI SANDWICH
Langer¹s
704 S Alvarado St, Los Angeles, 90057
(213) 483-8050

#1 PASTRAMI BURRITO DOG
Pink¹s
711 N la Brea Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90038
http://www.pinkshollywood.com/

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