This is the letter from the president that our office received on behalf of the school. It came in a self-adhesive script envelope with a return address of “THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON D.C.” Postage was pre-paid. Even though my grandmother’s contribution gratitude postcard was a mass-produced black and white mailer with an .eps signature layed over a pensive photo of the commander in chief, our letter was beyond legit, with a huge DO NOT BEND stamp on the packaging and a piece of cardboard to ensure frame-ability upon arrival. Notice how the authenticity-proving embossing of the president’s seal messed up the scan of the letter so that now you can’t tell—as I could when I was holding it—that Barack Obama’s signature bleeds through the silky-soft 24-lb. cotton bond paper, proving that a felt-tipped pen held by the president actually touched the paper. I bet Bush never would have personally signed such petty notices to institutions of the arts. Thank god we voted for change.

I met Ann Powers at a workshop at my school paper last spring and was so stoked that a living, breathing female music critic was actually talking to me (much less thinking I was the next Daphne Carr) that I held onto hope that our vague plans to get coffee and talk about summer writing prospects would eventually come true–even when summer ended. But then I found out that her husband got relocated and she moved to the deep South somewhere, inevitably getting lost in the thicket of backwards thought like the rich half of my family, which explained not only her lack of post-American Idol finale communication with me, but also her missing weekly musings printed in the Calendar section of the L.A. Times. Since her July disappearance, she has used her several returns to Los Angeles to write up expert assessments of big-time concerts (such as Pearl Jam at the Gibson and Thom Yorke’s recent dance party at The Orpheum), but today’s discussion of Sunday’s U2 concert at the Rose Bowl (which is so amazing, it’s not even posted on the Times’ website yet) is the most insightful yet.

Instead of writing about good-concert-bad-concert or “I love Bono” review fodder, Ann instead dissects what erecting $25 million dollar stages across the country means for the future of arena tours (creates a “welcome den”) and what the streaming of Sunday’s event on YouTube does for the concert experience (nothing compares to the real thing). I love Ann Powers because her dissections are infinitely more interesting than the concerts themselves and she never ceases to amaze me with her evaluations of the vast cultural web and finding important intersections that I see, but fail to find the words for.

Also worth playing around with: the Times’ interactive graphic of U2’s in-the-round stadium modeled off the LAX Theme Building. There are 12 guys that sit in its futuristic legs to control the spotlights and the LED screen expands to create a light show shower curtain that goes crazy during “Vertigo.”

Brendan Mullen died on Monday and with it, a piece of LA punk history. Not only did he skip out on the UK to co-own Hollywood hardcore-hole the Masque which was in 1978 what dingy-homegrown-music haven The Smell is today, but he also used that to catapult himself into a lifelong career as the only booking agent in town who actually gave a shit about the music. We interviewed him back in 2007 for our Masque 30th Anniversary Issue and discovered that New York sucked even back then and he still owns 95% of his old records. Flea wrote “an appreciation” of Mullen for the LA Times and it made me cry openly on the blue line as it rolled through South Central. I obviously didn’t know him personally, but his is a name that comes up again and again when talking of the underground’s don’t-give-a-fuck early days and because of him bands like X, The Germs, The Dogs and The Zeroes are still (in one incarnation or another) playing shows.

RIP Brendan Mullen

Dear Long Beach Transit,

You’ve really been on a roll lately. And yes, that pun was intended. I haven’t been on your cheap, urban bus system since that summer I was homeless and even then, it was only the 4th Street crawler to get me from downtown to Taqueria #4 at Redondo. But yesterday, you became the highlight of a trek that took me from the bus stop outside my apartment all the way (sorry to bare my soul here) through the Orange County of my past and into the arms of my simultaneous future–Long Island Iced Teas and bypassing hospital visitor hours included.

Anyway, what I realized on my mandatory ride on route 91 to PCH is that where Metro went wrong in its most recent bus upgrades, you went right and your board of directors is reveling in what I see as more model-proof that effective public transportation is possible in Southern California. But you’ve always been licking at new technologies, like the water taxi that blasts through near-stagnant ocean from the Alamitos Bay to Belmont Shore and your 2006 implementation of real-time satellite bus tracking available online or from bus stops.

Your newest fleet-vestment, however, tops it all!

In April, a new batch of hybrid-electric buses–Passport shuttles on Prius technology slathered in USC-pride steroids–were added to the fleet. In addition to windows tinted on the outside and acceleration that sounds like a fucking Tomorrowland ride, the new buses have extra butt-friendly seats (like the best motel bed you’ve ever slept on) and a route-specific recording of hypnotizing upcoming-stop announcements (in a Bond-lab-of-the-future sort of way).

My bus driver was barely out of high school and smiled even though I was unprepared for the 20 cent fee hike to ride on the eastbound clean-air machine. A balding ginger wearing a Lakers-jersey and green patent leather Dunks sat across from me. He had so many bags (one on a stick) that I was convinced he was The Hip-Hop Hobo Leprechaun I’d been dreaming of writing screenplays about. More people got on. There was no graffiti etched into the windows, no shitty tag names scrawled into the seat backs. The crackheads sang to themselves, the high school girls texted their 20 year-old boyfriends. Everyone said “Thanks” to the bus driver as they got off, even the ones that didn’t speak English.

It was a pleasant experience and I hate that word and never thought I would ever use it, especially in reference to something in Long Beach and especially not about a fucking bus ride, but it was. Everyone on that thing is a typical Long Beach freak–even me–and the experience of us freaks engaging in some form of civilized urbanity provided an uplifting feeling that betrayed the surrounding decay like a night at the Queen Mary Hotel.

So, I’m throwing up words here because I’m glad someone acknowledges what Metro never will: that even weirdos who ride the bus deserve privacy from the  gawking public, comfortable seating and a lulling directional voice reminding us of where the hell we are because sometimes, who knows?

Oh yeah, Long Beach.

–Mandy

Dear Newsweek,

I should have guessed by the wording of your cover story this week, but your “exclusive” ranking of The Greenest Big Companies in America is more structurally unsound than the US fucking economy. Anyone mindlessly flipping through your beautifully-colored rankings wouldn’t think twice about the recognizable names that made the top 50—Intel, McDonalds, Microsoft–but when Wal-Mart comes in at 59 (under companies founded on eco-friendly principles like Whole Foods Market) it becomes apparent that something else is at work here. How is it that you scored these corporate giants to come up with a grossly misdirected, arbitrary ranking and how is it that corporate image has somewhow been mistaken for actual results?

Although you attempted to “design a ranking system that makes sense,” you failed to make sense on many levels, firstly with your failure to even define what “green” means in the context of these rankings. Furthermore, with the Green Score being based off three arbitrary factors (Environmental Impact, Green Policies and Reputation Survey),  you also failed to prove to me that any of these companies have done more than sign theoretical letters of intent to “go green” (and convince their peers of the same good intentions).

The calculations of your index (above) is flawed in the following ways:

• Environmental Impact Score: Above everything else, the information that you received in order to conduct these rankings were not even your own, but instead were obtained through a third-party surveyor, Trucost, whose only achievement in the world of providing environmental impact data is for this very ranking. They work off of questionably reliable financial and emissions data provided by the companies themselves, churning it through some algorithm they concocted so that the information becomes readable in “the one currency that business managers are comfortable with: dollars and cents.” For the purposes of your Environmental Impact Score–which is a company’s supposed worldwide footprint “based on more than 700 metrics” provided by Trucost–what does dollars and cents have to do with it? Moreover, who the fuck is Trucost lobbying for?
• Green Policies Score: Your “comprehensive assessment of environmental initiatives” is as useless as a love letter from an ex boyfriend. Analyzing green policies is just tallying up the number of rules that the companies have in place, announcements of good intentions that give no indication of actual enforcement mus less results. If everyone got fucking gold stars for promising to be good, we’d have a lot of assholes out on parole.
• Reputation Survey: This logistic was the most infuriating to see on your list of calculating factors. Since when are the opinions of CEOs “and other green experts” in any way shape or form relevant to a company’s actual “greenness”? The opinions of CEOs are not based on actual performance, but on inside opinions and the drama of capitalism that only the rich white men on top could ever understand. Who knows if Wells Fargo’s 38.96 rating is truly because they have a reputation as a non-green company or if they jilted those asked in a past business deal? But moreso, why does that matter anyway?
• Green Score: In addition to the faulty scores given in the three previously mentioned categories (that are twice-removed the actual impact of the companies), the Green Score is the most misguided yet. As the main number by which all the companies on the list are ordered, the Green Score is “a statistically weighted average” of the three meaningless numbers before it. What the fuck does that mean?! When you statistically weight stuff, that means that you have, again, arbitarily created a formula by which one of the previous faulty scores means more than the other, but I can’t decide which is less important to a green ranking: public image, internal image or an unconfirmed “environmental impact.” Despite your scrambled wording to justify these green rankings, I tried to find a pattern in the incongruous number jumble and figure out which of these factors was weighted more, but I could find no method in your madness. How is it that Owens Corning’s impact of 15, policy of 66 and reputation of 47 comes out to a green score of 80, a number much greater than any of the previous?
• Greenhouse Gas Emissions: The most frustrating thing about your “statistically weighted average” is that the one thing that should be statistically weighted above any of the other bullshit was not even included in the rankings evaluation. A company’s greenhouse gas emissions is an actual representation of its impact on the environment and yet, these numbers remained in a column to the right of the green score as an anecdote to the already-decided company grade. By not factoring in the physical impact of these companies, you are judging them based on their corporate image more than the actual realization of that image.

This leaves companies like Wal-Mart (above, with 21.4 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions, the most of any company on the list) with high rankings despite their unreasonably high contribution to atmospheric decay and their public reputation as professional policy bullshitters. Did you miss the whole New Age of Wal-Mart documentary on CNBC where they dedicated 2 hours to exposing the company’s lack of reliability with manufacturer sustainability audits and spent another hour talking about how their new marketing campaign demonstrating a more environmentally-friendly approach is a great cover-up for a company that would still sell out its own planet for the bottom line. Let’s not even start on Wal-Mart’s rapid expansion in emerging markets (like China’s 300-and-counting stores) which negates installing energy-saving LED lights in American stores by exponentially expanding their horrific global impact. Can we really give the world’s largest corporate producer of greenhouse gas emissions a thumbs up for intentions to make each store a little more green when they’re building 50 new ones every year?

The main point of my rant against your inaugural green rankings is not to say that corporations are bad and we’re all going to hell (we are, though), but more to enlighten whoever created this defective ranking to the scary truth behind bullshit numbers. Intentions to not equal results and I would be hardpressed to believe that your pages of concocted numbers show anything more than whose PR people can paint the prettiest picture. Wake up, Newsweek. Dig deeper (I know you’re good for it). There is a way to do this properly, but you might actually (GASP) have to work for it. The answers are there, my dear favorite slightly-liberal news source, just don’t go to Trucost looking for them.

Sincerely yours,

Normandie Rawlins

I wrote a few reviews for CDs coming out today. Blahhhh.

Thrice
Beggars
Vagrant Records

Irvine post-punk band Thrice has been at it for almost a decade, but its stalwart status makes no apologies for its seventh studio album, Beggars, which takes a step back from the band’s increasingly conceptual work to revisit the upbeat sounds of its past. After its first two albums — Identity Crisis and Illusion of Safety — introduced the fast, spastic guitar-driven songs that defined its initial popularity, Thrice slid into its softer side. Vheissu turned Thrice’s mosh-inducing hardcore into ambient, almost spiritual sounds by incorporating electronics, strings and a Rhodes piano. And with four separate CDs — each with an earth, wind, fire or water theme — released in two bouts of double discs, The Alchemy Index served as the climax for the band’s lofty conceptual goals.  But after four discs filled with various experimental techniques and ambiguously religious lyrics, Beggars comes in to showcase that Thrice is capable of meeting the two personalities in the middle. Singer Dustin Kensrue fluctuates between scratchy screams and soaring high notes, drummer Riley Breckenridge keeps 4-4 as often as he goes off conventional time signatures and the band as a whole presents on Beggars a more mature version of the sound that won its first fans nine years ago. After going to the extreme with an ambitious concept album, the members of Thrice have been able to hold back enough to make an album that isn’t too hot or too cold, but just right.

Pete Yorn and Scarlet Johansson
Break Up
Rhino Records

Three years ago, actress Scarlett Johansson and singer/songwriter Pete Yorn recorded a string of catchy duets in 48 hours without much thought of the outcome. Inspired by the 1968 actress-musician duets of Brigitte Bardot and Serge Gainsbourg, Yorn asked Johansson if she’d like to record some songs with him and, unfazed by outside influences or expectations, the two laid down the tracks that were to become their album, Break Up. Although Johansson released a solo album of awkward Tom Waits covers last year, Break Up was recorded almost two years prior. The dreamy banjos and throaty soul vocals take listeners on a sonic journey though a mutually self-destructive relationship. Even though the story arc is depressing, the songs are upbeat. Even in moments when the lyrics threaten imminent relationship disintegration, one can’t help but bob along with the catchy guitar work. But while closer in concept to the Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward collaboration band She & Him, the Johansson-Yorn album varies in one major respect — Yorn wrote everything. Johansson lends unexpectedly sultry harmonies — like a more baritone Amy Winehouse — to Yorn’s crisp pop-rock songs, but she fails to demonstrate that she understands any of the musical technicalities gone into the album’s creation.  Great for the celebrity novelty — they even cover Big Star — but unfortunately, Break Up pushes little boundaries for either party involved.

Big Star
Keep an Eye on the Sky (Box Set)
Rhino Records

Big Star is the one band that everyone knows, but no one has heard of. Although the Memphis foursome self-released two albums during their three years as a band, they played only a handful of shows, received little radio play and were virtually unknown when they disbanded in 1974. But after a 1978 release of the previously recorded — and musically darker — album Third/Sister Lovers,  Big Star’s ragged-guitar, country-tinged power-pop slowly gained a cult following and the short-lived band has since inspired an eclectic list of subsequent generations’ alternative rock musicians from The Replacements to R.E.M.  Recognizing its influence on indie bands around the world, Big Star reunited in the early ’90s, and has been actively touring, releasing live records and keeping a presence greater than in its heyday (think That 70’s Show’s theme song and Adventureland soundtrack). And to demonstrate its evolution from refined British Invasion wannabe rock-n-roll to the meticulously textured pop finesse that fuels modern alternative music, Rhino Records has compiled a four-disc box set titled Keep an Eye on the Sky. With nearly 100 tracks of rarities, remixes, live recordings and unreleased tracks packaged together with liner notes, unseen photos and essays about the band’s history, Big Star is celebrating its belated popularity by giving its now-massive fan base the definitive resource for its cultural legacy.

Above my desk in the DT Lifestyle office, there is a letter-sized glossy press photo of everyone’s grandma’s favorite lesbian, Ellen DeGeneres. She was a stand-up comedienne before Comedy Central was thought of, successful as a sitcom star during the reign of observational comedy, has been winning over middle-American housewives with a mid-day talk show since 2001 and as of Wednesday, is going to be sitting in Paula Abdul’s seat as a judge on American fucking Idol. In addition to further solidifying Ellen’s status as the non-obtrusive celebrity lesbian (that makes homophobes less homophobic for accepting–go Portia DiRossi!), her position on the judging panel is meant to give voice to the “everyman.”

As Idol’s super-huge-number-one-fan (have you seen how many contestants have performed on her show?), Ellen is offering her opinion as that of every asshole sitting at home that doesn’t know shit about music, but feels that they have a valuable opinion about the contestant-choosing process (as if talent matters anyway!). But this presents me with three problems and one positive note:

Problem 1: Isn’t the point of charging for cell phone votes supposed to give opinion to the everyman? It’s called American Idol, people, meaning that the premise was not that unlike our actual democratic setup: three “experts” judge hopefuls in a way that would garner ratings then the rest of the country “votes,” feeling that their opinion was heard, but in the end, who the fuck knows! Throwing Ellen on the panel is like electing Joe Plumber to congress.

Problem 2: Even in her most coherent moments, Paula Abdul was never full of the entertainment experience one would expect from a Patrick Swayze-screwing former Laker girl-turned American Idol judge? Sometimes it seemed as if all her years of singing with cartoon cats and “Straight Up”-ing had no effect on her ability to recognize talent in others and maybe it was the xanex making the whole world around her a part of her lucid dream, but everything she said could have easily been fed into her ear by an overweight mother of two from Witchita. Ellen’s place on the judging panel is only to give a sober validity to Abdul’s slurred comments.

Problem 3: Ellen’s sexuality makes her new position as judge proof of the entertainment industry’s progressive ideals, but wouldn’t the idea of a lesbian’s opinion representing that of the everyman piss off the same sweeping demographic of assholes that wouldn’t vote for Obama simply because he’s black?

Positive note: At least she won’t sleep with any of the underage male contestants.

Here’s a sneak peek at the art that almost made it to the top of this rant!!!

Jim Breuer fell off my radar for just long enough to become a humorous nostalgic memory to bring up at parties (“Remember when we thought that was funny?!”), but apparently, he’s back (but maybe never really left–who knows?) with a Pizza Hut commercial where he is traipsing around a high school party mumbling about stuffed crust pizza and screaming “Jackpot!” every 3 seconds. Technically, he was back last week when a clip surfaced of the 42 year-old comedian “flipping out” on the commercial set (at the P.A. who was determined to remove the prop pizza between takes), but Pizza Hut admitted their viral marketing team was behind the attempt to ride the post-freakout negative publicity coattails of Christian Bale and we all tried not to ask ourselves “Why Jim Breuer?”

But tonight while watching some obscure straight-to-DVD Van Wilder sequel, the final commercial aired and somewhere between the miraculously unscathed pizza box and the splash-free hop onto an inflatable pool raft, the question, again, emerged: Why Jim Breuer? Why is a 40 year-old man pretending to be high by squinting all the time a worthy spokesperson for pizza? Maybe all the college kids who smoke pot will remember his role in Half Baked and equate his face with 450 calorie-per-slice pizza (yum?)? Is it because he was funny back when the company first introduced their stuffed crust pizza (1995)? Or that Pauly Shore was too busy doing Pert Plus spots? I guess I’m just confused because Pizza Hut seems to have been dying for the youth vote in recent years and all of their Twitter points have been negated by this epic marketing fail. And a “what the fuck” to Jim for not telling them of this obvious formula for disaster.

School has started and so has my 14-hour days on-campus shredding out Daily Trojan gnar and begging writers to pick up art stories.

Nevermind the damn fires ripping through the hills above my grandma’s house (don’t worry—she’s safe) or the fact that DJ AM died with a bag of crack stuck to his chest, because the most disturbing thing in the news recently (DJ AM is dead?!?) is the case of Jaycee Lee Dugard and the “failing” of “the system.”

Dugard was kidnapped when she was 11 and lived as a sexual prisoner in soundproof tents in the backyard of a man neighbors in Antioch called “Creepy Phil.” Because he was a registered sex offender and for some unfuckingknown reason has been out of jail since 1988, his parole officer visited the house often, but noticed nothing unusual besides his equally as creepy wife and mother. Neighbors did, though. One called and complained three years ago, saying children were living in tents in the backyard. An officer came to the house but, not knowing his history as a sexual offender and seeing nothing amiss, did not go inside (or out back) to investigate.

And now that the truth has been ousted by a university cop with “mothers intuition,” Antioch police are kicking themselves for not noticing the horrors happening not only in plain sight, but entirely within their legal reach.

But is it really the parole officer’s fault? Is it the cop who failed to go in the backyard’s fault? Is it the team assigned to Dugard’s case’s fault for not finding her to begin with? We try to point fingers at specific people or institutions, but we created these institutions; their practices and protocol reflect our society’s constant struggle with the ever more-intrusive role of government services and the amount of power we choose to bestow upon them.

Back in June, L.A. Times ran a great news feature about the deaths of children due to ineffective information sharing between L.A. County agencies. It cited 32 children that had died from abuse or neglect in 2008 and many of them had evidence mounted against their parents to prove they were in danger. But before anyone could care enough to put the pieces together, they were already dead. And at the end of July, the Times got their poster boy for this year’s child abuse inequities, six year-old Dae’von Bailey, who was beaten by his mother’s boyfriend despite repeated reports of his abuse.

But social services and parole officers can only go so far and the limits of their responsibility remain undefined. We could say that every allegation should be taken as if it were life-threatening, but the “every man for himself” mentality that America holds so dear contradicts the invasive tactics necessary to see the sick things people are truly capable of.

The sad truth is that there is no way to fix this. No interlocking database of information will ever help county workers see the bigger picture and no amount of policing will stop people capable of hurt. It is ignorant to think that we can save every child or stop every rape with an updated system and Big Brother tactics. There will always be mentally ill mothers and disturbed, perverted sex addicts. Cases will always fall through the cracks of an overwhelmed system, because the system is overwhelmed with people that it has already failed. It’s a vicious cycle that we will never be free from and the only thing we can do is be good to the people around us and hope for the best in return.

I have been waiting since I was 11 to receive this email.All those blue envelopes I sent to Zac Hanson have not gone to waste! Long live 6th grade!!!!