website coming soon

Things are kicking into gear, personal and professional projects are piling up and I need my own fucking website. Despite my hesitation about fully giving into the Internet’s powers, I realize that anyone who wants to be taken seriously as a creative needs to have a firstnamelastname.com where they compile all their bragging rights so they have a reason to start accepting work emails through their name@firstnamelastname.com email address. I think my life would be made easier, especially now that I have used up my brain’s limit of Google folders. And since I also have an impeccably-kept physical portfolio—where despite my junior-year homelessness and un-parenting encountered in my mid-teens, a copy of every single article is still ruber cemented to a piece of paper and encased in a sheet protector-full folder—I feel that I should share it digitally. Who could forget my horribly un-researched, entirely heresay-based account of why Taking Back Sunday broke up in May of 2003 (“deaths in the immediate families of 3 of the band’s 5 members”)? Or my 2006 rage against Britney where I called her then-husband, “Kevin ‘The Sperminator’ Federline”??? All these and more of my articles, poetry, short stories, word vomit, opinons, designs, photography, collages, Adobe illustrator attempts, crafts projects and more can be shared through a domain name I already own if I could only get through these rudimentary HTML help lessons faster.

So, for now, it’s a coming soon thing with a link to my email but it took me about 4 hours to figure out that alone (half an hour of that was spent trying to remember my ftp password), but if you know of anyone that would like to have their work cut out for them, I would appreciate some CSS help so I can start uploading all this crap. I have money (a little)!

music tuesdays

Ever since their PR guy got back to me about having a Barrio Sweat cologne review for the DT, I have been obsessed with The Bronx’s new mariachi album. Well, I was obsessed when the hardcore/punk/post-hardcore/post-punk, genre bending rock band nabbed two hispanic members (one of the guys from Los Lobos’ sons will do) and started playing self-written oompa music while decked out in full mariachi gear, but that was last year and the actuality of a Bronx mariachi album seemed further off than Chinese Democracy. But after some song title changes and a stop at Brando’s Paradise, Mariachi el Bronx, will finally be released on August 17, as not only an interesting new case of cultural mixture, but a great fucking album. The Bronx infuses acoustic Bronx-punk and a variety of traditional Mexican sounds like an Echo Park sidestreet and the mix is so right-on, you’d think they were actually playing at your table during a romantic dinner (it makes me wish my neighbors in the alley would spin it the next time their quinciniera party goes past midnight).

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?