Stakes Is Weird

Went to Fresno this past weekend to visit the family. Sold a million CD's I never listen to anymore, and armed with a princely sum in store credit, I went on an Elton John binge. I also bought the Dead Kennedys Frankenchrist album because I have not heard "MTV Get Off the Air" since I was a fifteen year-old of much smaller physical frame and much larger optical frames. Frankenchrist is still really good and the intro to "Soup Is Good Food" still sounds weird and great. And as every last person in this country loses his/her job and finds no safety net, the words are disappointingly relevant again. It's officially the '80's, but worse. We're dying again folks.

But on to more important things. Brother-in-law Matt stumbled across something strange at the used record store: an LFO record. You know, "I like girls that wear Abercrombie and Fitch." The Lyte Funky Ones. Those guys.

Or rather, these guys:


They had another album, post-Abercrombie & Fitch. Three high-profile cameos. Sit down for this. The following all actually did verses on an LFO album.

De La Soul

Kelis, "the loud screaming chick with the hair."

And the ever-scary M.O.P. Huh? (This means they went into the studio with LFO right around they went into the studio with Pharaohe Monche for Internal Affairs. Simon says think about it.)


The weirdness crown obviously goes to the MOP appearance, but these are all sufficiently horrifying to ruin your day one by one. I remember this period of time well, from about 1997 to 2002, where everything in the entire world went insane. Does it surprise anyone that a country that could produce such an unsettling musical collaboration would be sending innocent men to Syria to be tortured indefinitely within a year?

P.S. I just put tags on this post, and it earns six: photos, hilarious, politics, celebrities, hippy, music. This is probably two or three more tags than any other post I've done, and I think only a musical-collaborative-nightmare of this scale could cast such a wide net.

P.P.S. I just reread this post and I think only Eric will be even remotely interested, and he's probably not aware that I'm still updating this here weblog. Apologies, but it's already done.

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Only welcome for our drink and smoke.

Related to the last post.

Turns out that Neil Young plays harmonica on Joni Mitchell's Hejira, "Furry Sings the Blues." I find this strange. Why try to coax a perpetually messy and unpleasant circa-1976 Neil Young out of his puddle of vomit and down the hill from Topanga, just to play his shakey-at-best harmonica? Seems like it'd be easier to just learn the harmonica part yourself.

The lesson here is that 1960's and 1970's LA scene rock acts were essentially rappers: "Hey, let's find an excuse to get all our friends in the studio to phone-in some completely unnecessary cameos. Then we'll get high."

Tangent: Brother-in-law Matt and I went to the Hollywood Cemetary in Memphis last summer to find Furry Lewis' grave. We walked around in the mid-southern hot-ick for over an hour looking for the tombstone, while a man with a hole in his throat did general weed-whacking. He had no idea where Furry Lewis' grave was, but assured us that his brother would know. His brother was off fixing a punctured tractor-tire, but "should be back soon," which in the South means, "eventually, or not at all, or we'll see, or let's have a beer." The man sounded like he was speaking a foreign language, but he was in fact speaking English.

We gave up and got back in the car and turned on the air-conditioner. Worried that the unpaved and rocky cemetary roads would puncture my tires, we drove slow. For reasons I don't actually remember, we soon rolled to a stop . . . right in front of the final resting place of "Walter 'Furry' Lewis: Blues Man."



I think the story is that Furry Lewis hated Joni Mitchell's song and maybe even sued her. To be memorialized in song is to be treated like a dead man, of course, but presumably Furry's beef was less that and more the fact that "Furry Sings the Blues" is an incredibly boring Joni Mitchell song. Not being about California and all.

Here are some other gravestones from the Hollywood Cemetary. Cemetaries down there remind you that in some ways, the American South remains a developing nation even today.



And the prize for most depressing tombstone ever:



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Couldn't let go of L.A.

This is the was the coolest person I met when I was at Lago Atitlan.

S/he was obviously completely uninterested in hanging out.


This dog wanted so badly to sleep with me the next night that I had to go find another bed.

This is Linda, she was my host-sister-bird for three weeks. She is a cotorro, not a parrot, but she does do some mimicry. I wanted to teach her Neil Young songs because I thought it would be funny, but soon I learned that she really only mimics the chickens. Which is boring.

Auri, the lady who ran the hotel across the street from the school in Xela, has an actual parrot. She took me and Joel, another student, to her house one day to meet the bird, and dogs, and two guinea pigs, and other things too.

It was a big hateful bird. It called me a whore and then laughed like a man.

Listening to Joni Mitchell this morning. I always like Joni Mitchell in theory but get bored with her very quickly. Really I only love her California songs where she talks about missing LA and stuff. But some of the other songs clicked this time, too.

Here's something though: did you know that Cheech and Chong did background vocals on Court and Spark? Picture Joni Mitchell, David Crosby, Graham Nash, Robbie Robertson, and Cheech and Chong all in the studio together making mediocre half-jazz. OMG. The song Cheech and Chong are on, "Twisted," is actually the worst song on the album. They do sort of faux-scat: "Man the chick is twisted . . . crazy boop shoobee hip flip city." That's actually Cheech's line. It's horrible, the stuff of nightmares.

Jose Feliciano sings too. Weird. I really like living in LA, but I would've preferred to live here thirty or forty years ago. Or twenty. Or whatever.

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"totally uncivilized"

I don't know who made this flyer, but it was something of a constant companion while I was at the language school. In Xela, the school had at least three identical signs up around the building, and there were more at the mountain school. This is a reference the Iraqi journalist-hero who threw an oxford at a phoning-it-in-at-this-farcical-press-conference George Bush. "Another for Guatemala!"

It's funny the first time, less funny the second time, and eventually a lesson in the difference between "por" and "para," those tricky word-cousins that discourage all spanish-learners for, I imagine, their entire lives. Before this sign, I would have said "Otro para Guatemala," and whenever I'm trying to think of which of the two words to use, I think first of this sentence to see if it tells me anything.

Related: Here's a picture of the departing asshole moving to suburban Dallas in an airplane.

The dying LA Times brought news this week that prosecutors in the Phil Spector trial closed their arguments by calling Spector a "demonic maniac." I would love to see this phrase enter into everyday use for people like Bush, or that crazy Sheriff from Arizona, or, yes, I guess Spector too. "Demonic maniac" is a near-perfect phrase, both descriptive and fun to say. Who is with me?

Listening to Mecca Normal this morning. Is it acceptable to consider the following a song-lyric, let alone a fitting album-closer? "It's a truly uncivilized nation that treats medical care as a commodity to be sold; take it, it's yours." If so, I guess that is one part of punk's legacy, which is neat neat neat.

Clearly I'm all over the place today. I'm putting photos from my trip on Flickr over the next couple weeks, so I'll probably still post some to this here weblog with my half-formed thoughts about them.

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18th Street Gang, Los Angeles, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala

No, really, there's a Los Angeles in Guatemala too.

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"Everyone there is a terrorist."

Haaretz started publishing testimonials from IDF soldiers involved in the Gaza attack last month. They say they will be publishing accounts for the next few days. It's worth reading.

The squad leader said: "You do not get the impression from the officers that there is any logic to it, but they won't say anything. To write 'death to the Arabs' on the walls, to take family pictures and spit on them, just because you can. I think this is the main thing: To understand how much the IDF has fallen in the realm of ethics, really. It's what I'll remember the most."

You can catch some of it in the LA Times today also.

At first the specified action was to go into a house . . . with an armored personnel carrier . . . and start shooting inside. . . . I call this murder. . . . We were supposed to go up floor by floor, and any person we identified, we were supposed to shoot. I initially asked myself, "Where is the logic?"

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Help me make a new turntable housing?

Once I get an income rolling in again, I think I'm going to make a new housing/plinth for my old record-changer turntable. (I also need to fix the return on it, but whatever.) Anybody out there secretly work with wood and want to help me? We get to take a field trip to a gunshop in the San Gabriel Valley to buy lead shot.

"There may be a kennel somewhere, or the dogs may be coyotes."

Back in LA, still dreaming Spanish lessons. Doing some Southern California reading - the first story in Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem is called "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream." In it she has this to say about San Bernardino County: "This is the California where it is possible to live and die without ever eating an artichoke, without ever meeting a Catholic or a Jew."

Elsewhere, "It is the trail of an intention gone haywire."

While nowadays you can't walk too far over there without stumbing over a Catholic of some sort, I think the latter part is still such a perfect and accurate description.

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If You Ain't Got the Do-Re-Mi

I'm flying into LAX tonight from Guatemala City.

I return speaking obnoxious Spanglish, having dreamed about the subjunctive tense three nights in a row. Addicted to mineral water in returnable glass bottles, more for the ritual than anything. Magically fifteen pounds lighter and according to one source, a little bit taller. Basically jobless. Missing my cats. Wanting to listen to hear the Minutemen Paranoid Time EP, excited to revisit that old Juvenile album with his huge single, Depeche Mode for some reason. Accustomed, once again, to upwards of eight cups of coffee a day. Perfect.

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"Rara y apestosa."

Here's what I've been up to the last week and a half or so.

Caught a production of the Vagina Monologues in teeny-tiny-town-Colomba . . . second and final presentation today in Xela. More on that later. It was really cool and I'm looking forward to it tonight.


A hard rain a-fell.

I went back to the mountain school for my last week here, since I like it so much that I want to die there. We all sang on the porch. This is "Lover Lover Lover" by Leonard Cohen, which nobody but me was really into at first, but this guy with the guitar, Kavour, made it singable. Kavour dresses like a Flying Burrito Brother and he lives in Lake Tahoe and he's just about as cool of a person as you'd want to meet.


Here we are during his 45 minute long ghost story with no point.


My spanish is at the point where there's not really much more grammar for me to learn, and it's more of a question of practice. I have shoved the four subjunctive tenses into the little remaining room left inside my head, and as a result, I have actually started having trouble with tenses I've known well for ten years. I consider this progress.

I'll be back in LA on Friday.

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