A renewed rivalry between Texas and California heats up, Tesla produces its first mass-market, lower-priced vehicle, KSCI switches to paid programming.
The political rivalry between Texas and California intensifies
The political strife between liberals and conservatives may be best represented by the rivalry between California and Texas.
Between California's travel ban to the Lone-star state and Texas's criticism of the West Coast's liberal policies, animosity between the two states is heating up.
"There's been tension between the two states for a long time," said David Siders, senior reporter for Politico. "I think what's new and different now is that Texas and conservatives there no longer have a Democrat in the White House to use as a foil."
Siders says that California fills the void of a criticism target that used to be reserved for the Obama administration.
On how Donald Trump has helped stoke the rivalry
"Since he's a Republican that's the first thing. Having a republican in the White House means that Texas doesn't have an Obama presidency to bounce off against. We used to see them file all sorts of lawsuits with Obama. But Trump is a special case and has fueled so much Democratic activism on the West coast."
On the criticisms Texas has about California
"It's about tax policy and jobs. They love to point, accurately, to statistics that show Californians moving out of California. For years California has had a net-loss of people leaving the state. And then [Texans] point to people moving to Texas so that's always kind of the primary thing they talk about. But also in this case, climate change. They say those policies are job-killers."
On how California responds to the claims from Texas
"There's a fair statistical response: Yes while people are leaving California, California is gaining more college educated people. And the unemployment rate just ticked up a little bit in Texas, so California now beats Texas on the unemployment rate. Wages tend to be higher in California. And then they also point to the beaches and say, 'Would you rather live here or in Texas'"?
Answers have been edited for clarity
To hear the full conversation, click the blue player above.
Tesla surprise - first Model 3 to roll off line this week
The President isn't the only one who likes to announce things on Twitter.
Late Sunday night, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced, in a series of tweets, that the long-awaited "electric car for the masses," will go into production two weeks ahead of schedule, with the first one rolling off the line on Friday.
Our motor critic Sue Carpenter notes that the Model 3 is the culmination of Musk's long-term plan. He said he would start with a small but expensive sports car, and released the Tesla Roadster in 2008. He followed that with an expensive sedan, the Model S. But both of those were just warm-ups for his real goal, building a sort of Model T of electric cars.
The Model 3 has a base price of $35,000 before state and federal credits. It promises a range of more than 200 miles on a single charge, is equipped with a small army of sensors, scanners and cameras, and will do zero to sixty in six seconds.
Musk's plan is to start of slowly, and ramp up production exponentially, hitting half a million cars by next year. If he pulls it off, that means the 400,000 people who pre-ordered the Model 3 will have them in their driveways sooner than many imagined.
On the Lot: Is it the end of the R-rated comedy?
The fourth of July weekend saw the opening of “Despicable me 3”, “Baby Driver” and “The House." Take Two looks at the expectations for these movies and how they actually fared? Unlike its counterparts, "The House" starring Amy Poehler and Will Ferrell, tanked. So, is it the end of the R-rated comedy as we know it?
Then we look into the Academy's diversity and inclusion efforts. In total, 774 new members were invited to join the Academy last week, if all accept that would bring up membership to 8,427 members. But is this the big move needed to fix the problem?
Rebecca Keegan is off this week, so we have Brent Lang via Skype. He’s the senior film and media editor at Variety.
To listen to the full segment, click the blue play button above.
‘The Big Sleep’: The noir classic that defined Los Angeles
Before Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall made "The Big Sleep" a noir film classic, it was a little novel by Raymond Chandler. Centered around private eye Phillip Marlowe, it's set against the backdrop of pre-World War II Los Angeles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-K49CUaeto
It ranks among the most highly regarded pieces of fiction ever written about Southern California. That's why it's the first book kicking off Take Two's new summer reading series: The California Canon, a guide to great, local literature.
Every week,
will share another highlight from our state's literary timeline. He's an L.A. native, book editor, L.A. Times critic-at-large and the founder of the Libros Schmibros Lending Library in Boyle Heights.
"'The Big Sleep’ and I think Chandler in general have colored Angelenos' perceptions of the city that they live in more than the writing of just about anybody," said Kipen. "And anybody who aspires to be an Angeleno has no business ignoring him."
Hired to get to the bottom of the case
"The Big Sleep" is about the detective Philip Marlowe who, in the first chapter, calls on General Sternwood — who is this almost dead character, under a blanket in this glass greenhouse, because the life is just ebbing out of him. He has two daughters. Both of them a little bit debauched, one of them much more than the other. The more debauched one is being blackmailed and [General Sternwood] wants Marlowe, the private eye, to get to the bottom of this.
Private detective Philip Marlowe: 'Shabby yet romantic'
Marlowe is the prototypical L.A. private eye. There had been private eyes before, but Chandler gave it a distinctively Southern California twist. There are all these wonderful moments when you're with him, alone. He's kind of shabby and yet romantic. Underneath all the hard-boiled exterior, he can be hurt. He wants to help, and it doesn't always work out that way.
Los Angles 1939: A city at a turning point
L.A. in 1939 was at this kind of turning point. And you can see that in the character of General Sternwood in "The Big Sleep." He is presumably a Civil War general. We don't know if General Sternwood was anywhere near the front lines, but he was a pioneer. He was one of the buccaneers of California — and with oil, made a mint. His daughters represent the thinning of the bloodlines. They were born rich, as opposed to making or stealing it.
One of them who Marlowe becomes a little sweet on — although not as sweet on her as Bogart got on Lauren Bacall in the movie — even so, you get a sense of the second generation. The second generation which is building up Los Angeles, but at the same time, not really keeping faith with the first generation with, in some cases, perfectly reprehensible founders who built this place with their bare hands.
Author Raymond Chandler 'knew he had great material on his hands'
Chandler was not a native Angeleno. Chandler was born in, of all places, Chicago. In later years, he professed to be disillusioned with Los Angeles, which completely obscures the point that he never loved the place. I think as a writer, he knew he had great material on his hands. And he was like Columbus — he thought he had among the first opportunities to plant his flag on it. And he did so beautifully, but never adoringly or blindly. He saw the place's flaws. He exaggerated the place's flaws.
Marlowe's driving tour of L.A. doubles as a landmark checklist
Chandler uses classic L.A. locations which we would recognize. Whether in their former form or completely obliterated but in the back of your mind, you can still remember what's going on. For example, General Sternwood's mansion is pretty much the Greystone Mansion of Doheny in Beverly Hills.
But in the climactic scene, there's this wonderful moment where his oil fields, the disgusting, smelly, revolting fields on which his great wealth is based, still visible from his beautiful mansion that he's built in the intervening decades — those are the oil fields around La Cienega, just north of the airport. And Marlowe spends so much time driving around that it could be like a kind of checklist. And that's one of the most delightful things that an Angeleno can bring to the reading of Chandler, even though people have been reading from him and stealing from him around the world for decades.
Quotes edited for brevity and clarity.
To hear David Kipen on "The Big Sleep," click on the audio player above.
Author Jonathan White speaks to the 'Science and Spirit' of the tides
Jonathan White's new book is a sailor, diver and fisherman. He was also born in Malibu so it's no surprise that he knows a few things about the ocean tides.
But even though he knows more than most, he decided that he needed to learn a lot more if he wanted to completely understand them.
To do that he traveled the world to learn more about not just the physics of tides, but also how people felt about them. He collected his findings in a book entitled 'Tides: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean.'
On where he traveled and why
"Basically what I did with the book was take some element of the tide, whether it be tidal bores or tide energy or sea-level rise or whatever, and go to where that element is most dramatically at play in the world. A Tidal bore is when the tide goes up a river in the form of a wave, a solid wall of water. The largest in the world is in China. I went there to study that and talk with fishermen there and scientists and all kinds of different people ... about their relationship with this tidal bore. I did that for all 9 chapters of the book."
On whether the tides as a clean energy can work
"In some ways, it has been [used] for quite a while. Taking a half-step back, we think about tide energy as something that's fairly new, but actually, there were tide mills all over Europe and the Eastern coasts in the United States in the 1600's. The newest efforts are really what they call instream... I spent my whole adult career in marine conservation and land conservation and I was a naysayer about tide energy when I started! But I completely came around in my studies and I am an advocate of tide energy now. I don't think it's a silver bullet, it's not renewable energy that's going to solve our problem and our reliance on petroleum. But I think it's a viable part of the puzzle."
On what he's learned about the tides
"There are so many fascinating facts, mind-blowing facts about the tides. It just kept drawing me further and further in. For example, the tides create friction by rubbing against the ocean floor. So much of it that it's actually slowing down the rotation of the earth. So by a very little amount, the earth is turning slower and our days are getting longer because of the tide. So 400 million years ago our days were 21 hours long not 24. So the tides have this huge impact on the solar system, on the universe, for the matter. Not just the beaches that we walk on."