We were completely blindsided by this, we must admit. Rebecca Schoenkopf, one of the roughly eight good things about Orange County (and the only one with an eye patch) abruptly announced her resignation from her perch as seer-of-all-things-strange at the OC Weekly.

The woman who once described in detail her uncle’s vagina (you didn’t read that wrong), brought a level of dirty/gross/hysterical/wonderful wit to the Weekly. We have no idea why she left or where she’s going.

Ever the cryptic little c**t, she gives her fans only this:

Today I turned in my two weeks’ notice at the OC Weekly.
I was escorted from the premises an hour later.

Love you all,
Beccalou

FBLA found this interesting item in our tip box:

To: Editorial Staff
From: Peter Bart

Dana Harris will assume her new duties as editor of Variety.com, effective January 29. She has done an outstanding job in several roles here at Variety and I am delighted to welcome her to her new position. She joins Michael Speier and his growing team, which includes Phil Gallo and Stuart Levine, in spearheading our assault on the web and accelerating our formidable progress in that arena. Unlike the Los Angeles Times, we do not need to apologize for a “bunker mentality” nor do we need to appoint an Innovation Editor.
All of our editors, and reporters, are “pro Innovation” and both our newspaper and Variety.com reflect that.

FBLA wonders if Variety will publish this exactly as written. Knowing Bart, we bet yes.

Christmas only comes once a year, but luckily for Angelenos, the KCRW Pledge Drive comes twice. Really, does anything make you smile during your morning drive like the sound of longtime producer Matt Holzman giving away Macs and Hawaiian vacations to adoring and grateful Angels? But the curator of Matt’s Movies is not just generous, ladies. He’s sensitive, too. You have a heart made of a very special kind of stone if our favorite drive-time moment doesn’t reduce you to a puddle of tears.

We asked Holzman for the 10 top Web sites he visits daily. Here, for the second time this week, Matt gives us “The Business“:

KCRW
“KCRW Presents, music playlists and DJ picks make me seem a LOT hipper than I actually am.”

Je Suis Supercool
“My friend Alex’s blog is never relevant but always interesting and thoughtful. Thanks to her, I’m now a fan of ghost towns.”

Interactive Hank
“Photography is my interest but my friend Hank’s livelihood and obsession, and what is the web but a place for the obsessed? Plus, you can see what’s happening with his kid Jack. They have an awfully good time together.”

Time and Date
“YOU try arranging for a call with a reporter in Nairobi or London without a tool like this! Not only can you find out what time it is anywhere, but you can compare your time zone to their time zone to see where your working hours converge. God bless the web.”

Read more

Vanity Fair might want to rethink having the office boy write the Oscar blog. Julian Sancton tries to sell us the old canard that comedies can’t win Best Picture, and then tosses most of those that have won aside, so he can make his point that Little Miss Sunshine is doomed. You Can’t Take it With You is DQ’ed as being adapted from a play, Annie Hall is too bittersweet, Going My Way is a musical, which it’s not, and his film history class must have skipped The Sting. Whatever.

Fortunately, Johnny Lopez explains exactly what’s wrong with Little Miss Sunshine and why it’s not winning anything close to Best Picture:

That Steve Carell’s character would dash his nephew’s Air Force Academy dreams on the spot by telling him they don’t let in guys who are color blind. REALLY?! You mean you wouldn’t google the Academy rules first to be sure or at least wait until you get home.REALLY?! And since when are rebellious goth teens clamoring to get into the Armed Forces? Do they not make Dungeons & Dragons anymore?

He’s got whole list.

Singer Brandy has hired Allan Mayer, the crisis-management guru. She’s being sued for $50 million by the parents of the woman killed in last month’s crash.

The wrongful-death suit claims the actress-singer was driving recklessly when her Land Rover struck the back of a Honda driven by Awatef Aboudihaj, whose car hit another vehicle, slid sideways into the center divider and was then hit by another car.

Celebrities involved in car accidents usually end up apologizing, which Brandy has already done, and then letting their lawyers take over. KCAL 9 has a handy reference guide.

Read more

Forgive our bleary eyes this morning for passing over this story from the LAT: “Former public relations and newspaper executive Douglas R. Dowie was sentenced Tuesday to 3 1/2 years in federal prison for defrauding city taxpayers, adding a painful coda to a career that once scaled the heights of Los Angeles media influence and political power.”

By costing taxpayers million in over-billed fees, Dowie brought the kind of shame to Fleishman-Hillard that would call for self immolation if he were in a kung fu movie. But he’s not in a kung fu movie. So he’s going to appeal.

Virginia Heffernan of the NY Times reviews E!’s new spin-off from True Hollywood Story, Blvd. of Broken Dreams and compares it unfavorably to VH1′s Behind the Music. The show’s just not mean enough. However, Niki Taylor has slapped the network with a federal slander suit, alleging emotional distress. The suit, which also includes fraud, breach of contract and invasion of privacy, said that

E! falsely claimed that the show would focus on Taylor’s current life and professional endeavors, including her signature fragrance, clothing line, upcoming cosmetics line and charitable foundation

Instead (surprise, surprise) the network and its producer focused on Taylor’s past hardships and characterized her as a celebrity

who risked everything … and lost.

Nothing like a lawsuit to get an producer noticed. THS is basically cancelled, and EP Suzanne Ross needs to develop something, anything to either solidify her position on the quicksands of E!’s executive offices or have an original series on her resume when she leaves. Any show at E! has to do three things: make use of the existing footage, come in under budget, and not piss off anyone off. To quote Meatloaf:

Two out of three ain’t bad.

If there is a pecking order to the sending of press releases, then some of L.A.’s blogs are beating the big boys. Six days before CBS announced the breaking news that KCAL-9 would be broadcasting all Lakers games (not just the big ones) in HD, LAist had the story.

Strange that a blog would beat a network, especially as CBS shares the same corporate parent as Time Warner Cable, which made the announcement.

(For further illumination of the hierarchy, the announcement landed in our in-box eleven minutes after CBS’s announcement went up. But that’s probably because they knew sports talk makes our eyes glaze over).

Bob Saget was graced by the presence of those adorable all-growed up moppets, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olson at the release party for his DVD spoof, Farce of the Penguins. The parody follows two penguins hot for hook ups as they trudge through frozen waste. The disc also features a twisted making-of featurette. Saget told reporters

I talk about all the things we did to the penguins to make them work better. It’s really wrong.

FBLA wonders if he tried same those techniques on the twins, back in the day.

Make/shift a magazine “representing contemporary feminist culture and action around the world,” is launching here in LA. It’ll include fiction, interviews with activists, photo essays an analysis. And, did we mention it’s launching here?

Jessica Hoffmann, one of make/shift’s three editor/publishers (along with Stephanie Abraham and Daria Yudacufski)tells FBLA, “While we aim to represent a variety of feminisms (plural), we do see ourselves as specifically representing feminist work that is consciously antiracist, informed by queer theory and its challenge to binary gender norms, and rooted in an intersectional analysis that sees the connections between feminism and, say, environmental justice, economic justice, imperialism, and more.”

Hoffman, clearly, is smarter than us. So we asked her to dumb it down — way down. Down to the East Coast-West Coast culture war. With magazine editors as smart as her, why doesn’t LA have a better rep in the literary world?

“There’s an exceptional group of LA-based contributors: Erin Aubry Kaplan, who is also a columnist at the LA Times, is doing a regular column for make/shift called ‘Centrally Located.’ Staff writer Irina Contreras is a brilliant local activist/artist/writer who has contributed a photo essay and interviews of hotel workers near LAX for Issue 1. Local writer/performance artist Raquel Gutierrez (who performs with Butchlalis de Panochtitlan) wrote a smart, funny piece about children of immigrants’ love for Ugly Betty. There are so many smart and talented writers in LA; it’s really a silly myth that they’re not here,” Hoffmann said. “And when we’re talking feminist writers and artists, there’s a thriving community — several of them, really, that overlap and do different things. You should see the list of events planned to happen in this city around the huge feminist art retrospective that will open at MOCA in March (WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution) — wonderfully exciting work is being done here by very talented feminist artists, writers, and thinkers.”

Who knew?