As I type this from my living room/office in Long Island City, on the Southeastern tip of Queens, through the window I’ve got a prime view of the luxury real estate company setting up shop in the abandoned paper factory immediately across the street. Yesterday, they boarded up the upper windows and hung signs; today, they’ve parked three pedicabs with their logo on the sidewalk–because buyers who have been priced out of the Manhattan condo market are apparently so humbled by the experience that they couldn’t bear to walk a block and half from the sales office to the property.

Yes, the neighborhood’s changing, which is not altogether a bad thing–after almost a year and half in this apartment, the novelty of having to take the subway into another borough to get to the supermarket, the gym or a halfway decent bar has worn off completely. So I’m comfortable with the forward motion of gentrification. I just never thought Lloyd Kaufman would be one of the gentrifiers.

Yeah, THAT Lloyd Kaufman.

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• Hollywood’s sexiest Lefties, George Clooney and Leonardo DiCaprio, may be teaming up to bring the, um, tragedy of Howard Dean’s presidential campaign to the screen. Clooney would direct and DiCaprio would star in Farragut North, based on a play written by one of Dean’s former aides, about “an inspiring, though unorthodox, presidential candidate [whose] career is done in by more seasoned politicos who thrive on poisonous partisan politics, dirty tricks and back-stabbing.”
• In other liberal disappointments, a British judge ruled yesterday that Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth contains “nine scientific errors”, and can only be used as a teaching tool in classrooms if accompanied by “fresh guidance notes to balance Mr Gore’s ‘one-sided’ views.”
• Troma’s Lloyd Kaufman is hardly sleeping on his new job as chairman of the Independent Film and Television Alliance. In the three weeks since his election, according to Variety’s DaveMcNary, he’s already made a trip to DC to lobby on behalf of IFTA and push his three-part plan: “continuing IFTA’s campaign against media consolidation; focusing on new technologies, such as protection of copyright and keeping Internet access on a level playing field (’net neutrality’); and stepping up international outreach.” He’s been so busy that he apparently hasn’t had time for a new headshot–the Variety story features a pic of Kaufman on the set of Poultrygeist.

I got a press release this afternoon informing me that Lloyd Kaufman, the co-founder and public face of Troma Entertainment, has been elected to a two-year term as Chairman of the Independent Film and Television Alliance, “the global trade association of the independent motion picture and television programming industry.” In the release, the genius behind Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead and The Toxic Avenger clearly outlines his leadership agenda:

The independent community today faces rampant media consolidation and challenges to copyrights in the digital universe, and I will work closely with the IFTA Board of Directors, member companies and IFTA’s executives to give our fellow independents more control and opportunities in both the U.S. and abroad. New technology will continue to be our new frontier.

Kaufman is a fierce supporter of net neutrality. Earlier this summer, he responded to Hillary Clinton’s Sopranos spoof video with his own made-for-YouTube rant against the candidate, which I’ve embedded above. In the clip, Kaufman compares the current state of the web to the home video industry “before Blockbuster came and bought up all the mom and pop shops.” He warns that if Clinton is elected president, she’ll aim to appease her friends in Hollywood and will eventually “screw up the internet.” “We’re all going to be p0wned!” Kaufman cries.