LA1984 + 25 = 2009

Since the Coliseum hasn’t didn’t get enough action with the Laker’s championship parade and the Electric Daisy Carnival, it’s time to, again, thank City Council that the 90 year old landmark has withstood their need for a new football stadium for another year and throw a huge fucking party for the 25th anniversary of the 1984 Summer Olympic Games!!!!! The celebration (which boasts legendary broadcasters Keith Jackson and Jim Lampley hosting and many gold medalists in attendance, including Peter Vidmar, Evelyn Ashford, Bart Conner, Al Joyner, Paul Gonzalez, Valerie Briscoe-Hooks, and Greg Louganis) should feature lots of pyrotechnics and representatives from one country—ours.  So instead of wasting your time driving to downtown L.A., let me share with you some relevant gems I found going through boxes of my mother’s things that I inherited when I was 8. Throughout the 70s and 80s, my mom worked as a secretary at MGM/UA and since they were huge sponsors for the games, she and my grandmother volunteered as ushers at the 1984 Olympics. And, judging by the amount of memorabelia she saved from her two-weeks work (think cases of Olympic pins, photos from every event she went to and a 100 page-long tearoff dotmatrix printouts of her conversations with a sexy Italian swimmer from some archaic inter-office email system), she is, like me, hopelessly nostalgic. Enjoy.

There were so many of these bumper stickers that I finally had to throw some out

Official Levi’s uniform jacket worn by the ushers. Currently in my closet. The track pants do not fit me.

Tickets

Cover of MGM/UA Olympic coffeetable book that is on my coffeetable

The page everyone in my house turns to first

and the first page of my mother’s article for L.A. Tourist Guide which was distributed at the Olympics

urban outfitters + fixed gears = ugh

another chunk of my thoughts as reposted from The District’s staff blog:

Remember back in 2007 when those Middle Eastern scarves went from political symbol to fluorescent-terrorist chic in about a month? That was Urban Outfitters. Or last year when assholes with perfect eyesight started wearing giant black-rimmed glasses without any fucking lenses? That was UO, too. And, now, everyone’s favorite corporate purveyors of ignorant hip has done it again, simplifying the urban bicycle subculture into a re-appropriated accessory and selling the watered-down image of integrity to anyone with a credit card. May they present, the Urban Outfitters Bike Shop.

In light of fixed gear bicycles’ popularity growth in the last year, Urban Outfitters has teamed up with Republic Bike (or, rather, allowed Republic to sell their only model—the Aristotle—through the UO website) to bring the joy of track bike customizability to those who need the image boost more than a worthwhile bicycle.

For only $399 you can have the bike company’s only offering (a front-and-back-braked bare minimum bike with a flippable fixed/freewheel hub and one name-brand component) custom built per your selection of their awkward color options (lime green frame, Fallujah-sunset orange rims, canary yellow chain and dirty-ocean blue handlebars?) and shipped to your door within the week along with whatever leather man-satchels and acid washed skinny jeans you threw in your online cart.

Or, you can do some research and discover that real track bikes are more expensive (and don’t weight 24 pounds) because they are meant to be ridden more than during a catalog photo shoot by a girl wearing leather ankle boots with six buckles apiece and have a cultural history behind them that stretches far beyond what Urban Outfitters could print on an informative price tag. Maybe this bike is a good place to foyer yourself into being a “fixie kid” if you don’t know any better, but ask anyone working at a bike shop about your siqq Wasabi-colored Aristotle and you’re another rolling cliché with a newfound attitude of righteousness giving the community a bad rap. Urban Outfitters can’t make you a fixed gear rider anymore than Hot Topic can make you punk—they just sell the image. Wise up.

tasteless halloween costumes

I think that now is as inappropriate a time as ever to share the only remaining photo of the night my asshole ex and I desecrated the King of Pop and his children by dressing up in gas and masquerade masks and walking up to a party of a friend’s friend in Laguna Beach. So for any of you frat boys trying scheming now for your ironic Michael Jackson costume for Halloween this year, just know that it was already tastelessly done back in 2005 just months after the ‘not-guilty’ verdict, so you should probably just reuse that Dick In A Box thing you whipped up last year (or buy an OxyClean shirt off of one of Billy Mays’ pallbearers).

My costume was modeled after the imfamous zoo-outing photo from 2003:

Boy, if I didn’t feel like enough of an asshole then, I sure don’t now (the next day at work, I dressed up like Macauley Caulkin from Home Alone–get it?!).

the MJ service and why the internet freaks me out

This is insane. I just woke up (yes, I know it’s almost 2 in the afternoon—I work graveyard shift!) just as the MJ Memorial Service was ending. But never fear future of media coverage, I can find every second of the service already pieced out and separated into minute-by-minute blog posts. Everyone’s got a live stream, a Liveblogging page (or, in the Wall Street Journal’s meta case, a liveblog of all the other liveblogs), a Twitter feed, a Facebook status update or a fucking newspaper article already written about the thing and the Range Rover-sponsored motercade (no shit) is barely in San Fernando. Having one of the largest news events in history happen right after the Internet’s Twitter tipping point is showing the world the potential of our creation of immediacy. It’s almost surreal to watch how modernity has rewritten the five stages of grief and turned the aftermath of MJ’s passing to a spectacle almost as bizarre as the performer himself. Acceptance is no longer last, it’s first. And numbeness is, I suppose, is now the ultimate goal.

But even though the rest of the world seemed to be okay with the progression of collective sadness into website hits, I can’t figure out how I truly feel about the whole thing. Am I really sad that he’s dead or do I feel obligated to be sad because he was such a prolific figure? Am I only caring because everyone else cares? If it wasn’t on the front page of the newspaper every day would I care at all? I liked Michael Jackson as much as anyone that went to Club 82 back in 2004 liked Michael Jackson, which is probably in the most uninformed way possible. Do I have a right to mourn? Growing up, he was the once-famous singer who wanted to be white so badly that he bleached his skin, sang the song from Free Willy and hung out with that dreamboat Caulkin from Home Alone. But now that he’s gone, do I weep for pop music? For movies that will forever have shitty soundtracks? For the misunderstood? Do I weep at all? I watched Captain EO everytime my mom and I went to Disneyland and own Moonwalker on VHS but does that make me a fan? Did I deserve a ticket to his memorial service?

I am frustrated that the death heard-’round-the-world is the first to make full usage of our balls out Internet because there’s no turning back. Everything from now on will have to be more accessible, updated faster, replayed quicker, written about before it’s even over and relegated to the past before anyone can even get back into their cars. Not allowing news to run its formerly-”natural” course of time is a shame to the public who are receiving immediate opinions, thoughts and images that are spontaneously determined from thousands of news sources received on dozens of different electronic devices. And we wonder why our kids can’t concentrate in school? We are not asked to actually understand things, just watch and read and comment and talk shit and say the first thing that comes to our mind instead of analyzing what it all means and how it might fit into the scope of your week or month or—gasp—year! We disseminate knowledge without education and immediacy without real content. A Michael Jackson memorial service with 8750 luckily-ticketed citizens who are going to walk out of the Staples Center and still not know what the fuck just happened. How is anyone supposed to maintain the patience of getting through a book when in the 10 minutes it took me to write this blog post, what I’m saying has already become outdated?

Back in the 80s, Ferris Bueller had some advice for us ‘09 Internet fiends: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

UPDATE: Finally read my copy of Sunday’s L.A. Times and apparently, they have my sentiments exactly (and express them with much more hilarious and less depressing wording!). I must not be the only one resisting the future.

men in black part 2

Oh great now Billy Mays is dead. Seriously, what the fuck is going on?

the day everything died

As everyone knew within an hour of it happening (thanks TMZ), Michael Jackson is dead. The next few weeks will expose the facets of his personal life that may or may not have lead to his cardiac arrest, but mostly people that were born after Thriller came out will weep openly at the UCLA Medical Center until he gets put underground somewhere and then they can all flock to his grave like a sobering Jim Morrison fan. But while everyone who was not convinced that Jackson’s weirdness overshadowed his pre-whiteification talent might be mourning the loss of a pop icon, I’m more worried about the simultaneous deaths of other entertainment icons. Sky Saxon, Ed McMahon, Steven Wells, Farah Fawcett and MJ all died within 48 hours of each other and I can’t help but think that this is going to be a Mother Theresa-Princess Diana simultaneous-death moment where Diana’s unlikely passing made an imprenetable news wall that no Carmelite nun’s lifelong advocacy of good could break through (which, I’m sure, is how that humble old broad wanted it anyway). But this time, it’s more upsetting because the losses from psychedelic music, late night television, punk-fucking journalism, babe-dom and pop supremacy are of great importance in their own right that’s it’s a shame to make the media choose between coverage (guess who they’re going to pick!). First Dom Delouise leaves a hole in my jewish-humor’d heart and now five more of the best are out of here. If Men In Black were true and an advanced alien race came down during the Bronze Age to inhabit humanoid bodies, then they must have decided we’re not worth it and are just heading home (which means we should probably get out of here, too).

Anyway, R.I.P to all the celebrities that have died since the beginning of June because, fuck, it’s a lot: David Carradine (Bill of Kill Bill), Bob Bogle (of The Ventures), Ed McMahon, Steven Wells, Farah Fawcett, Sky Saxon and MJ.

Patrick Swayze, put down those cigarettes, dumbass, or you’re next!

this revolution will be televised

Sitting in the quiet backyard of my grandma’s San Marino home, it’s hard to imagine the chaos pictured on the front page of her morning paper. A grainy still from a cell phone video lies above the fold, showing a woman bleeding to death in a Tehran street. She is already declared an icon of the protests, government force and civil unrest that has plagued Iran since its presidential elections on June 12th and the widespread Internet sharing of her civilian-filmed death video exemplifies a new era of communication for political activism.

After the declared “landslide victory” of incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmajinedad, supporters of reform candidate Mir-Hossein Mosavi called shenanigans on the government’s count and took to the streets to demand a recount, using text messaging and social networking websites to organize themselves and distribute information about their cause. This election created a very important moment in the globalization progress. With our past November’s election showcasing the Internet’s untapped political potential—and Obama’s win signifying the triumph over a corrupt administration through usage of a small percentage of that potential—minorites as far away as the turbulent middle east finally have a fighting chance.

And in a country like Iran, headed by an extremely confining government, Twitter, Facebook, cell phones and the Internet are the only arena where democracy is upheld. These open modes of communication give Iranians a forum to express their beliefs and be agreed with (for once), solidifying and empowering their opinions so that when the Ahmajinedad victory was announced, impromptu crowds of angry Mousavi supports organized themselves through the quinticentially 2009 rapid-fire information exchange.

Demanding a recount like untrusting Americans did in 2000, Iranians gathered in plazas, parks and streets in such numbers that the regime severed cell phone reception and restricted Internet access, a move that acknowledged its importance to the revolutionary cause. But determined citizens got around those road blocks and used the online tools to bring to life the massive, non-virtual movement present in Iran.

As compared with wars in the past, this is the first where information filtered through the Internet-accessible, not the news organizations that report it. And in the way that television coverage gave images of the destruction wrought during the Vietnam War, the overflowing usage of the Internet from within the political battle zone is ushering in a new era of information dissemination. But where Vietnam’s news reports were the product of several camera crews and former Internet communications were that of computer nerds, the rise of the social networking sites used in the recent Iranian protests gave everyone in the country a chance to share their perspective of the situation—and the rest of the world an opportunity to respond.

News of the election protests in Iran spread around the world nearly instantaneously, giving Americans access to this once-sheltered conflict and allowing more support to pour in. Since Obama’s winning experiment with Internet-use as a marketing campaign tool last year, the global village took notice. And with a maybe subconscious boost of morale after the win of a black president in a country formerly known for slavery, Iranians realized that victory over the status quo is possible and the Internet is the site for that revolution. Quickly turning the small politically-active community in Iran into part of the global community that is on these social networking sites, the possibly falsified reelection of Ahmadinejad called to action those against the Supreme Leader of Iran and his oppressive ways. Although the results will be upheld and Mousavi will go back to his humble artist life, Iran will not be the same and the impact of these protests will ring in all future elections.

lakers

Another year, another Lakers championship, another excuse for fairweather fans to dust off their car flags and oversized Kobe jerseys and get wasted after a fucking parade marches down Figuroa. At least Mayor Villaraigosa had the wherewithal to ask for private donations instead of dipping to his large cache of set-aside reelection funds and made a statement along the lines of: “L.A. deserves to revel in itself for a day” as if we don’t every day by going to Coffee Bean and hiking to the Hollywood sign. Los Angeles is the city that invented decandence (which we passed onto Vegas) and our movie industry, Rodeo Drive, obsession with plastic surgery and 80s Sunset Strip metal scene prove it. Why do we need a parade? Are we really rewarding all the asshole Lakers fans who burn cop cars and trash cans and looted local convenience stores while screaming “Lakers won! Everything is free!,” giving them an excuse to call out of work and march towards South Central like they own the place?? At least Dodgers fans are docile enough to end up at the Short Stop in Echo Park while my girlfriends and I drank whisky gingers and danced to James Brown last night while all the Kobe-philes were back at Barragans’ margarita night with their dress-jerseys embroidered (in purple) with the previous night’s winning score. God bless the Raiders for getting out of here. God knows what kind of civil unrest our complex city would have to deal with if we had a winning football team.

Let it also be said that organized sports are a distraction from what is really important. People are rioting in the streets of Tehran because of a botched election to overthrow a dictator and we would prefer to riot because our basketball team won. How much more backward can America get?

what the fuck: orange county

What the fuck Orange County? Cutting Planned Parenthood funding because you don’t like abortions??!?! You understand that they do other stuff besides surgical abortions, right? Stuff like PREVENTION and WOMEN’S HEALTH. You’re upset that so many unwanted babies are being killed, but are ensuring the rise of said unwanted babies my removing family planning and forcing low-income women to remain unhealthy and ignorant. The logic is tantamount to suspending a student for ditching school and I am outraged at the stupidity.

Planned Parenthood is the closest thing we have to some form of socialized medicine and it’s only right that it is demonized for both it’s teachings and its methods, but so far, it’s the only fucking system that has gotten it right. Yesterday, I went to take care of my annual womanly-needs test at the Planned Parenthood and decided to travel south to the less-crowded, less-awkward Costa Mesa location. After an hour-long wait with an eclectic group of patients (a bro, a girl with her mother and an old guy whose presence confused me) and sometime after they demanded a piss test but before they handed me a bag of condoms and birth control pills, I noticed a slip on the nurse’s desk that read “I support Planned Parenthood of Orange County!” with a space to sign if I beleive that breast health education is important enough to keep around (because the county supervisors do not).

Then, I remembered Lila Rose, the 20 year-old UCLA student with the perfect hair and a website centered around calling out institutions that don’t agree with her who decided to make herself a martyr for her anti-choice cause by recording visits to an Los Angeles PP pretending to be a pregnant 15 year-old with a 23 year-old boyfriend trying to get an abortion. Her YouTube footage filmed from her purse’s netherregions shows an admitted-wannabe actress coming across as a scared underage girl who knows that she is in a boatload of trouble if her dad finds out. She doesn’t fill out any paperwork, but asks how to fill it out and the woman tells her that depending on what she writes, charges may have to be filed against her boyfriend. She explains the Planned Parenthood policy of calling the police and reporting anything illegal that is reported to them, but NOTHING WAS REPORTED TO THEM. Lila Rose just stated her age during a quick talk with an employee, she didn’t provide it in a manner that requires PP action since she is NOT EVEN A FUCKING PLANNED PARENTHOOD PATIENT. Identity (including age) is never verified when you go to the clinic and whatever information is provided on the forms you fill out when you register is what they go by. But, even without Lila’s questioning of the non-profits “rules of reporting,” I would think that any 15 year-old that is smart enough to figure out how to get away with having sex under their parents nose would be smart enough to lie about their age (or the boyfriend’s) to avoid pressing charges.

But unfortunately, the people that agree with her improper findings of “investigative journalism” are turning it into a new voice for the anti-choice movement (even though age-of-consent has nothing to do with what you see as killing a human life) and are using her “evidence” to enduce sweeping setbacks for Planned Parenthood’s crucial services. Back in March, the Orange County Board of Supervisors denied $300,000 in sexual education funding because the company performed surgical abortions. This logic has so many errors that I cannot begin to elaborate on the idiocy behind it. If you’re anti-abortion, cut abortion services, not methods that prevent the need for abortions in the first place. Duh.

Anyway, I signed the slip at the Planned Parenthood because general women’s health is more important to me than fear of socialized healthcare, and I got sent on my way with a year’s supply of birth control pills, stoked for the opportunity to protect myself from a child I am not ready for, but more importantly, exercsing my right to choose what happens to my body before a created life comes into play. Orange County is making things worse for themselves for trying to take that away because instead of saving themselves $300,000 right now, they are going to need double that to ensure county-funded care for the unwanted children produced from their decision. This isn’t a religious debate anymore, Supes, it’s a social one, so drop your moral beliefs and start doing what’s right for your constituents.

new n00z

So this is way super belated since I just received my issue with crying Oprah on the cover (what are we up to now, three?), but I fucking love the new Newsweek layouts. I’ve been subscribing to to the slightly-liberal news weekly for nearly a year because a) it makes me look smarter and b) I hate my ex- stepmom—but more on that later—and finally they noticed that the stuffy old newsprint-looking layouts and blah blah blah “My Turn” columns about house foreclosures and adopted Chinese daughters mourning dog death (I think I was the only one who found it ore ironic than touching) needed a major revamp-ment (at the end there, I was barely smiling at the Dignity Index).

Announcing their plans for a redesign back in February, Newsweek cited the magazine’s decline from a mass audience to a niche on, but instead of folding like so many struggling schmucks, they decided to go with it. And by catering to the specific demographic of leftover newsweek readers—educated 30-40 somethings obsessed with being politically aware and modern chic—they’re keeping the subscribers they want. My ex-stepmom, of course, told my dad she hates it and has now cancelled her subscription (so basically, I win). Anyway, I’m proud of Newsweek for keeping their head above water and bringing their logo font to the inside (pretty ballsy to use the light version for basic copy–Georgia is that youuu?!) and focusing on great photography to introduce readers to the story. The magazine is now separated into four distinct sections (which is helpful when I skip over the pointless opinions of their columnists—ugh enough with the Fareed!) which have thought-provoking stories andcleaner layouts (fear not the white space!). Thank you Newsweek for going easy on the eyes. ILY.

introduction to pointless opinions (but damn it looks clean!)

clever way to present information in the culture section

they even interviewed nico muhly and wayne coyne!!!!