destination procrastination

While those at UCLA only have a weekend to buffer between the end of instruction and the first day of finals, USC insists on giving us two extra “study days,” apparently crucial to my success on a test I will never be prepared for.

But as far as I can tell, everyone has already checked out. My classes are empty, notetaking has ceased and visions of sugarplums seem to be dancing in everyone’s head. So what are we really supposed to do with those two extra days?

In my years of ignoring responsibility and trying to postpone the inevitable, I have become a master of finding things to do instead of writing essays and opening textbooks. And nowhere is this more useful than the four-day weekend before finals week.

Coming off of one of the laziest, inverted sleep pattern-filled Thanksgiving breaks on record, giving me extra time off will not promote healthy study habits. It will just give me more hours of daylight to get a head start on the list I created for winter break leisure. After three months of school-induced chaos, I don’t quite yet deserve a break, but I’ll take any opportunity to pretend I do!

Here’s a minor list of things everyone should try and do in those extra days, half for the sake of the California winter and half for the sake of procrastination:

• Go to the beach! Venice, Laguna, Manhattan, Long. Whatever! Especially if you’re flying back home to the Midwest for the holidays, you should soak up the California coastline in December. Better yet, get a hotel room on the beach. Rates are cheap and tourists are non-existent. Last year, I got an early-December poolside sunburn at the Hyatt in Huntington Beach and as I peeled off the dead skin into funny shapes, I laughed at New York’s snowy streets.

• Disneyland is the ultimate way to waste a day. Living anywhere near Orange County allows you to blow $300 on an annual pass (use it three times and it pays for itself!), but if you can only afford one day at the happiest place on Earth, it should be in December. The Haunted Mansion is redone with a Nightmare Before Christmas theme and the Christmas parade—which replaces the boring Summer one—is glitzier than a night at the Oscars. After Santa goes backstage and the carolers stop singing on Main Street, fake snow shoots from the rooftops near City Hall and everyone is awed as it disintegrates on the ground. Ahh, California holidays.

• Find your favorite restaurant patio and—go ahead—eat that meal outside. We might be famous for our scantily-clad Summers, but there is no exquisite sin greater than people watching the Los Angeles winterfolk. Try Urth on Melrose, Swingers on Beverly or Birds on Franklin. Even if it’s (for some weird reason) cold outside, make the busboy turn on those butane heaters and enjoy the open air. Hey, at least it’s not sleeting!

• Use the crisp air of December to catch a sweet view of the city from a vantage point of your choosing. Summer means heat and heat means that our ever-present smog hangs low over our heads like a blank page the night before your final paper is due. But winter! The cold air after a cold night (or, even better, cold rain) is like kryptonite for smog (or maybe it just blends in with the marine layer?). Either way, if you drive Mulholland from Cahuenga to Malibu and pull off on any street with a cool name and you’ll come face to face with a city you never knew existed. Last winter, I waited until the day after a major storm to hike to the top of Runyon Canyon and from my outlook in the Hollywood Hills—no exaggeration—I could see the buildings of downtown Long Beach, the greenery on Palos Verdes and the distinct shape of Catalina Island. It was like God Photoshopped reality and downloaded the .jpg to my eyes.

In a land of no real seasons, it’s important to enjoy the one we have. Happy days off!

close encounters of the moz kind

I am not without a conscience, however. When the rain got harder, the whole car erupted into “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” in honor of the probably-sopping singer. Also, new letterhead (click to enlarge if you can’t read it)!

thanksgiving

Of all the things I can be thankful for at this exact moment, I am most appreciative for Choke in Silverlake for fixing my moped (or, rather, fixing a miniscule mistake in my mechanic attempt) so I can ride it to work tonight and, mostly, this article about what it’s like to hang out with Prince for an hour and a half. It almost makes me miss my subscription to The New Yorker, except for all the crap that you have to be a New Yorker to “get.”

Here’s a few things you may not have known about Prince’s pad, but could probably have assumed based on his record of not knowing (or not caring) what decade it is:

• His house sticks out from all the others in his Beverly Hills gated community because of the bright purple fucking carpet spilling down the front steps.
• “…a Lucite grand piano with a gold-colored “Artist Formerly Known as Prince” symbol suspended over it…”
• “New Age music played in the living room, where a TV screen showed images of bearded men playing flutes.”
• Purple thrones stand perched on either side of the fireplace like it’s the temple of Amman.
• And down the hallway, he had “hung photographs of himself, in a Moroccan villa, in various states of undress.”
• Prince is a Jehovah’s Witness and attends a local Kingdom Hall and even knocks on doors to pass out those obnoxious newspapers. Could you imagine opening your door at 8am and Prince is there with “The Word.” I might even listen to his schpeel about God and crap!

plagerize this

First read this review from the LA Record from last May.

Then, read this review of the same band from the UK Guardian in September.

Then read my angry letter to Paul Lester, probable child molester:

Dear Paul,
As a music writer myself, I know how annoying it can be to make an effort. Our job is easy—we listen to music and write about it. And aside from deciding which band names to drop in our witty comparisons, the hardest part of what we do is to somehow motivate ourselves to leave the house or get off our computers and obtain legitimate information to back up our obviously-correct, but basically-useless opinions.

But plagerism?

I can understand that being across the pond from the few examples of decent American music is a little isolating—and maybe I have an advantage because my cousin is the drummer—but in September 22nd’s “New Band of the Day” featuring Portland, Oregon’s Hockey, you not only admitted to getting information from their Myspace, but also used that Myspace to read reviews written by other people, which you then stole descriptions and exact adjectival phrases from and passed them off as your own.

I should know: my words are in your subdeck.

Sure, maybe you could tell from the photos that the Hockey guys are scruffy motherfuckers, but I find it hard to believe—given their personal privacy with details and the fact that I only found out my cousin had given up on eggs and cheese last Thanksgiving—that without making contact with them whatsoever, you deduced that they are “bike-riding vegans.” Or is it just coincidence that I refer to them as such in the first sentence of a show review I wrote earlier this year?

Don’t get me wrong, Paul, I think you’re a master wordsmith. “Hi-hat harangues”? “Funky verbosity”? That shit is gold! But if you find information that you obviously did not obtain yourself, it’s best to edit it out before proud parents mass email your article to a bunch of family members and it ends up staring back at the original writer with its little beady, emotionless word-eyes.

I have attached a copy of both articles for your reference and records. Thank you.

Sincerely,
Sarah Bennett
Managing Editor | L.A. Record

There, that feels a lot better.

no on H8

When I left for work last night, I couldn’t even get past the light at the end of my block because all I saw was this:

Over 2,000 pissed off Long Beach liberals marched down Broadway from Redondo to Alamitos where they stood in front of the now-lavender painted Hamburger Mary’s bar (great kareoke on Sundays) to chant about equality, start fights with the cops in riot gear and make me late for work and I wasn’t even invited.

I understand the need to protest such an aggregious oversight to basic human rights as the passage of proposition 8, but aggression and malice will not help the cause. Although a proposition is a pretty wiley way for the Mormon Church to have their moral agenda put on the ballot, it forced people to genuinely think about their opinion on homosexuality for legal purposes. And the state’s “yes” vote proves that most people’s opinions are still rooted in America’s conservative beginnings.

At work, I ended up talking to a customer who was irate at the passage of prop 8. He didn’t understand how a country could overwhelmingly vote for a black president but one of the most liberal states couldn’t allow gay marriage to stay legal.

And so I explained how a regular at my work perfectly exemplified the ideological shift in the country that helped elect Obama but will be of no use to the gay community. He is a proud conservative who had never voted for a democratic candidate. But with Bush officially the worst president in the history of the country, the long-time businessman realized we need to switch things up a bit. Without thinking about Obama’s skin color, the regular told me that he voted for his first democrat ever. Growing up in a liberal state (California) with a well-integrated school system, he didn’t have to think about Obama being black because all that racist stuff is behind us, right?

Well, it’s not that far behind us. But as the passage of prop 8 shows, full societal acceptance takes time, even generations. The African-American civil rights movement has, technically, been going on for 150 years. Maybe our parents didn’t grow up with separate drinking fountains, but some of our grandparents did. And their parents definitely did. The concept of segregation is so far in the past that I literally can not fathom laws that explicitly alienate people and detract from their quality of life because of their skin color.

But what about their sexual orientation? How many gay people did our parents know growing up? How about our grandparents? I have tone of gay and lesbian friends. It’s normal to me, but it wouldn’t be for that regular, who is still a man of religious convictions. To him, being gay is like being a part of a subculture; as if they skateboard or listen to The Smiths. Get over it, he says. Can’t you just be happy with domestic partnerships? In a word, no. Of course they deserve to get married. They deserve to breathe air and use the internet to look at porn and get arrested if they murder someone. Being gay is not a legal issue, it’s a religiously moral issue. And, hopefully, the ignorance will continue to die off so an open-minded generation will finally be able to separate church and state and make sure that California’s 18000 already-married same-sex couples are not infintely stuck in pergatory.

DMV fiasco

Today must be Shitty Personalized License Plate Pride Day because while out and about in (where else) Long Beach, I ended up tailgating behind three of the worst speciemins known to to state of California: WAN2CHL, 2DUHMAX and COKECAN.

Here’s a pictoral reenactment of my day:

Innocent driver

On a dirty white truck (make whatever inferences you will).

Sad driver, concerned American.

On a Honda CRV. And no, I don’t.

An even more disgusted, disturbed and publicly-embarrassed-for-you bystander.

Falling out of the ass of a gold Nissan 350z

Oh, the horror of men with insecurities about their small penis!

Seriously, people. You realize people judge you based on these? I now know everything about you that I ever need to know because your gold Nissan sports car tells me you are to “duh” max. How could you hand your application to a government worker with a straight face knowing that it says “WAN2CHL” (unless you were attempting to hit on the DMV chick which might be the only excuse)? The personalized license plate system is made for people who want to share a snippet of information about themselves to strangers on the road through their car’s registration number and today’s examples are giant blue and white flags that say, “hey, let’s never be friends.”

block the vote

McCain is down in the polls but that doesn’t phase him.

Eight points is nothing when you have GOP-sponsored voter suppression and an unverifiable, possibly-hacked electronic voting system on your side.

In order for a McCain victory on Tuesday the maverick war hero needs to win all of the swing states and then some. But how is an out-of-touch governor supposed to do that when he is already posed to lose most of them? Hint: it’s the same way Dubya won the last two elections.

By taking advantage of both the easily-misused and wholly out-of-date electoral college and the easily-misused and entirely too-new-for-comfort electronic voting systems, the GOP is setting up for another stolen election that, regardless of its success, will force us to reevaluate how we choose our president.
Since early voting began last week, complaints of Democratic disenfranchisement have been pouring in from those teetering states McCain needs to win.

West Virginia, Texas, Illinois, Colorado and Nevada are experiencing Democrat-to-Republican vote flipping on electronic machines. Democratic voting precincts in Colorado and Florida prepared for the expected rise in voter turnout by cutting the number of polling places in half. And some voters—both new and long-time—are showing up at polling places in key battleground states to find that their names are one of the hundreds of thousands that have been purged from the local rolls, victims of an unjustified effort to “reduce voter fraud.”

Every vote counts, my ass!

Despite video documentation and requests for alternative options, these complaints have been met with zero action and haphazard solutions.

If you’re vote is flipping, officials say, maybe you need to cut your nails or you’re pressing too hard or the screen should be wiped down because the latent fingerprints of McCain voters are messing up your vote for change. If you’re name isn’t on the list, maybe you shouldn’t go by your nickname or you need to get more legible handwriting or that hyphen in your last name really threw off the election officials.

It’s never the fault of the Republican heads of the precincts in question. It’s always, somehow, the voters’.

But tactics like these aren’t new, just more obvious to an increasingly suspicious populace and, hopefully, frustration at the polls during the general election will show that the open pussy flesh wound in our electoral process needs some stiches, gauze and a lot of Vicodin.

The most aggregious error lawmakers have made with regard to our electoral policies is assuming that the voting process should be advancing parallel with our technological progress and it has proven to be a fatal—or perhaps intended—fallacy.

With its use on a steady incline from its first U.S. appearances in the 1990s, electronic voting systems (or DREs), mostly made by “securities” company Diebold, are showing to be more trouble than their worth. First and foremost, as investigative website BradBlog says, “it is strictly 100% impossible to verify that any vote ever cast on such a Direct Recording Electronic voting machine for any candidate or initiative on the ballot during any election, has ever been recorded accurately, as per any voter’s intent.”

The University of California recently conducted a study that proves the ease at which a polling place computer can be hacked to not only change the tabulated votes but to also change the “paper trail” to match the falsified information and validating BradBlog’s claim that there is no way to know for certain if the machines have given us any truthful information.

By the mere fact of them existing, the security of Electronic Voting Systems is in jeopardy. Even if it only took one person to manufacture the machine and one person to write the voting-software code, then there are at least two people in the world who know how to get around the system’s intended methods.

And judging from the confusion associated with the 2000 and 2004 elections in areas using DREs, those two people are working for the GOP.

Relying on technology to “save paper” and make the electorate process more efficient is backfiring as the cost we could have used to make more verifiable physical ballots is being used for recounts and more control mechanisms.

But if we eliminate the suppression and thieving tactics illicited by the power-hungry Republicans, then we can finally begin restoring documented, verifiable democracy in America and put an end to the faith-based voting that is coming to define our democracy.

begging for the youth vote

No matter how many times NOFX rocked against Bush or Paris Hilton was seen wearing a Rock the Vote t-shirt, the young voter turnout in 2004 sucked. And despite printed-on-sample-ballot warnings of crowded auditoriums and convalescent-home lounges for this November 4th, much of our generation remains as uninformed as ever, forcing this year’s candidates to capitalize on our apathetic lifestyles by spoon feeding us political activism through the lowest of brow’d mediums.

Starting with rumored sightings and confirmed by a spokesman last week, Barack Obama’s campaign has done the most ingenious thing to boost our interest in the presidency since the blowjob—Xbox Live in-game subliminal advertising——which includes (so far) early-voting reminders placed on billboards in Burnout Paradise and stadium banners in NBA Live ’08 and Madden NFL ’09.
It’s the first marketing campaign of its kind and with its employment comes the ultimate manifestation of our McDonaldized culture. It’s disgusting that the valuable demographic of young adult males is so passive about their democracy that a candidate will buy out eighteen video games just to remind them what month it is.

But when we—as the future of the country—are unwilling to alter our lives for these elections, the elections have no choice but to alter for our lives and present candidates not as politicians but as products, advertising a prospective president as if he were the season premiere of Grey’s Anatomy or a new ACDC album..

The advantages, of course, are great—increased voter turnout, more politically involved youth, the ever yearned-for “cool” factor, etc—but they are ephemeral.
The problems—and the long-term social message—are much greater. Long after 18-34 year-old slackers take advantage of early voting registration and Mitt Romney’s e-strategist dies in vain, our democracy—or as I like to call it, our democrazy—will forever be pandering to our malaise.
The precedent this election is setting will ensure that in 2012, being able to friend a candidate on Facebook and conducting an interview in a virtual world will be the norm. All of our debates will be conducted with video questions submitted on YouTube and anyone who is indecisive can set up a website where people sway his opinion with their own ignorant opinions because the only thing people will have heard about the candidates came through a video game.
Candidate websites will be neon, flashing keywords to hold our goldfish-length attention spans long enough to convince us to vote for them, which we will do as long as we don’t get distracted by something shiny on our way into the polling booth.
From here on out, status and lineage won’t matter because the winners will merely have implemented better, more effective, more persuasive marketing strategies and in the end, our vote will be worth the same amount as a purchase of a CD or a count towards a Nielson rating.

Although my description of the prospective future is exaggerated (and, granted, McCain probably doesn’t know what a website is), we are definitely being sold to. In order to keep up with this trend, however, Obama devised a way to inject information without knowledge, opinions without wisdom and votes without questions; it’s scary to think people are going to vote for president as if it were a decision about which upcoming movies they’d like to see.

We have become so disseminated from our democratic process that instead of being proactive about our political-information intake, the only way we can feel engaged with what is going on is to turn an unappetizing photo of McCain from the third debate into a Photoshop contest (where the winner is a gif of the two in a sexual position).
So instead of trying to sell themselves through our mind-numbing escape mechanisms, candidates should inspire us through art, reading and real, actual, in-person human interaction (just like the old-fashioned times!). Like Shepard Fairey’s already-iconic Obama posters—wheat-pasted like movie bills across the city—or community-organized discussions so we can engage with our neighbors IRL (in real life).
It’s alright if a candidate calls it “The Myspace” or if they give high fives as awkward as my father’s because video games and social networking sites are no place for presidential elections. These things are popular in the first place because they help us avoid responsibilities, not guilt trip us into acknowledging them and, boy am I glad it’s election week because don’t think I can handle the real world infiltrating my pop culture cocoon for much longer.

zach and miri make an inconsistent marketing campaign

I hate to hate a Kevin Smith movie before it comes out (although I wish someone would have told me that Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back wasn’t worth it), but this whole Zach and Miri mumbo jumbo is really starting to get obnoxious. First, I see this poster at a bus stop:

And I think, “another Seth Rogan movie with weed, sex and fat jokes. But this time, there’s so much nudity that they can’t even make a real poster for it!” Man, I’m already excited because watching Katherine Heigl give birth to an unwanted child in Knocked Up was so not enough to conjure eternal mental images of Seth Rogan having sex.

I get it, he’s overweight and irresponsible and still gets laid but do we really have to bring Kevin Smith into this? Maybe he relates to the overarching message of Rogan’s films: that the heavyset guy that can make me laugh is better than the dreamy guy that is good in bed (which is false because what every girl really wants is the middle ground: a moderately attractive guy that makes me laugh while we’re in bed and smokes weed in moderation).

Anyway, the poster I saw enticed me with stick figures and the claim that the movie is so “titillating” that they can only show me stick figures acting out the filming of a porno. That whole elusive marketing campaign where you sort of know what it’s about but not really so you want to go see the movie thing might have really worked out for Zach and Miri if they hadn’t sponsored FX’s primetime lineup last night.

While trying to catch up on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (“Who Pooped the Bed?“) and realizing how much I hate their new show, Testees, commercials for the above-mentioned movie came on at least 20 times. And I wish I was exaggerating. They played the preview that they play in the movie theaters that’s really long-winded and only really gets to the point at the end when it all comes together and then you get to whisper if you want to go to see it or not before the next one comes on. Then, right after they played that one, without even a Billy Mays buffer commercial, they played an entire scene from the movie with no movie title, motion graphics or explanation. Just Zach and Miri at a bar drinking and deciding how they’re going to make rent money when Miri suggests they make a porno and Zach takes her seriously.

I saw so many different Zach and Miri commercials last night that I am not going to go see it because I already know what happens (Zach loves Miri but she doesn’t know it and so when they go broke and decide to make a series of pornos, they end up doing the acting themselves and after a hilarious cast of sexual freaks–Traci Lords, Jason Mewes, Justin Long–help them on their adult-film quest, the two main characters end up doing it for real and fall in love). THE END.

IRONY ALERT: Instead of not being able to show me anything about the movie, as your poster claimed, I’ve already seen the whole thing. So now that you’ve forced me to spoil the plot for everyone, here’s the poster that got banned in America that led you to come up with stick figures and an ad campaign based on false secrecy:

C’mon, America. Scared of a little blowjob?

presidential debate #2: a tally

This time around, I watched the whole thing and an hour and a half of by the minute commentary would have been pretty boring, although hilarious when making fun of people stuttering over their own questions.

The evening’s final markings:

Questions actually answered by Obama-10
Questions actually answered by McCain-3
McCain shit-talking Senator Obama’s “record” instead of answering the question- 15
McCain bragging about his “record” and “judgement” instead of answering the question-21
Times uncommitted women Ohio voters’ positive vibes went off the chart for Obama (if you were watching CNN)- 16
Awkward shoulder adjustments, elbow flaps and finger waggings from McCain-35
Dubya-esque “heh hehs” from McCain-5
Times in American history that candidate-hugging blocked Tom Brokaw’s script-1

Keywords of the night!

“Holocaust”-3
“hair plugs”-1
“middle class”-6
“home loan-buyout” -3 (McCain)

Fun facts:

• There was so much bald in the room and I occasionally had to look away and let my eyes readjust.
• McCain also called everyone “my friends” an astounding 16 times! Go McCain!
• Two of the questioners had heavy Southern accents. One was black.
• Tom Brokaw had to continually remind the candidates to watch their time limits.
• There is a star-shaped non-hair growth on the back of Obama’s head. Is it a sign from God or his hairdresser?
• The town hall meeting-themed presidential debates exist exclusively to make people REALLY uncomfortable about their democracy. Because we still technically run on the government that we fought like blimey hell to instate, but one of the only ways to make actual use of the system—to, literally, have your voice heard—is one of the most embarrassing thing to do and painful things to watch.
• Obama “won”!
• Everyone is pissed about the economy.