Hit and Run No. CLI

It's a formula that was tried and true when The Day of the Locust author Nathanael West was still drinking bathtub gin: 1) Make dire statements about the city of Los Angeles. 2) Predict impending and abundantly deserved apocalypse. 3) Collect paycheck. And nobody has followed the pattern of connecting disappointing weather and divine retribution more effectively than Mike Davis, the universally adored author of 1990's City of Quartz and this year's Ecology of Fear. After all, who doesn't want to hear the moralizing bedtime story of how "Southern California has reaped flood, fire, and earthquake tragedies that were as avoidable, as unnatural as the beating of Rodney King and the ensuing explosion in the streets."

Friends of Suck who have been saddled with the task of fact-checking the MacArthur Genius' work over the years have been lifting their eyebrows, screwing up their faces, and muttering about suspicious discoveries. But since that's what most of them do most of the time anyway, we paid little attention to their contortions. Meanwhile, Davis has rested comfortably, in our book anyway, atop his abundant footnotes, tornado conspiracies, and claims of a city invasion by dispossessed mountain lions. But the Getty Fellow's own mudslide may finally be at hand.

"[Davis] needs to make it sound as if LA is worse than every other city in every category. So he writes about wild animal attacks and doesn't pay any attention to traffic accidents. He's a weird guy," said New Times Los Angeles columnist Jill Stewart, whose critical column on Davisteria hits the streets Thursday. Even better is a long email we received Monday from intriguingly named Malibu resident Brady Westwater. Unlike Davis' global network of adulators, Westwater plays off of the author's strength: his fabled footnotes. While we can't vouch for Westwater's prose style, his footnote explorations are enlightening. Westwater highlights places where Davis cites sources that contradict him, instances where Davis cites only his own work, and best of all, a case where Davis cites himself contradicting himself. Of course, the whole point of a footnote, like a helpful link, is that you know nobody will follow it. So Westwater's effort would really just be nit-picking if not for his legwork in disproving, among other things, Davis' claims that LA rainfall is more ferocious than a monsoon, the Northridge quake was the costliest natural disaster in American history, and the Bunker Hill development is a steel-walled fortress of plutocracy.

"The only ghetto I experienced was the one in Mr. Davis' mind," Westwater zings. (Actually, we're starting to warm to his prose style.) If you want a copy of Westwater's manuscript, you'll have to email him at WWMALIBU@aol.com. Of course, Davis' own work is far more readily available. Which makes sense. Fact-checking is dull, but there will always be new LA haters eager to hear about how it's just like Blade Runner.

It probably doesn't speak too well of our half-remembered careers as actual reporters that the one piece of solid advice we got from our hard-bitten editors was, "Read the whole press release." But apparently this bromide may have been wiser than we knew.

Last week investors sent stock of AvTel Communications Inc. up a modest 1,200 percent, from US$2.25 to $31 a share, on news that the company was providing high-speed online access. Only after trading was halted did it become clear that AvTel's technology was not a new high-speed modem but, rather, a fairly common, high-speed modem access, with service limited to the Santa Barbara, California, area. It's not that the information wasn't in the press release. Clever traders managed to extract only the news they wanted to see and fill in the gaps with stuff they wanted to hear. One thing's for certain, though: AvTel was doing some kind of Internet thingy. The AvTel fiasco was somewhat like the case of poor ITEX Corp., which got a similar bounce when one of its press releases was confused with a more exciting press release from Integrated Telecom Express, a completely different company that recently got a cash injection from Intel, a company that we believe does some sort of computer thing-a-ma-jig.

How many people were fooled in this case we can't say, but it probably has something to do with the impending doom of Los Angeles. We're expecting to see stock in theglobe.com (down 57 percent and heading south at press time) being offered in an MLM spam any day now. But then, we suspect the whole company may be just a press release.

Meanwhile, we're hoping to send out an announcement of our own within a few days, and while we're figuring out what our story will be, you're welcome to mail cash directly to this address.

You'd think there would only be so many ways you could spin the Cold War, what with the way it turned out and all. But that's never stopped anybody from trying. We can't help thinking there's a common thread linking Kenneth Branagh's icy narrative of the US-Soviet Great Game, Joe McCarthy's rebirth as an unsung American hero, and this week's report that the Soviet Union duped the United States into believing it was a ballistic missile powerhouse. According to the Moscow magazine Vlast (or power), in 1965 the Mighty Integral led American intelligence to conclude that the USSR had developed the GR-1 missile by parading dummy rockets in a May Day Parade.

Of course, we already know that a similar failure to recognize the Russian space program's collapse in the mid-'60s spurred America to put a man on the moon. Which makes us wish the Russkies might try bamboozling us a few more times. If Vlast is to be believed, this attempt at spy mastery "scared the West into an expensive response" (i.e., allowed us to maintain a military-industrial complex that employed millions of Americans and helped fund the most comfortable way of life in the history of the human race, while the Russians bankrupted and dismantled their country trying to keep up). What a clever battle plan. No wonder they make such great chess masters.