More tangential references to Friday afternoon blog-reading.

This is an article about how the McCain campaign dreamed up Sara Palin's line about Obama palling around with terrorists. (Shocking? Wait, but wasn't she on the campaign? At least sort of?)

But more important: the article references a book by a gentleman named Dan Balz.

DAN BALZ!

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Works great as motor oil!

Tastes sort of like bread-paste, if memory serves.

Anonymous Cayman Photo

Anybody else come across this on the Internet and download it back in 2005?

Thinking of ways to appear really cool.

My ten year high school reunion is next weekend. While I don't typically get excited about expensive nostalgia trips handed down by the ages as compulsory, I gotta say this one brings out the joiner in me. High school was of course miserable at times, but after Catholic school for nine years it felt liberating every day to be around 2,000 people who weren't keeping track of how many times I wore the same shirt on free dress day. I miss a lot of those people, and why not say hi to who I can after ten years, right? After all, the event promises "heavy hors d'oeuvres," which sounds excessive and weird.

I've spent weeks lobbying for Joe Pulido to come with me and he has finally agreed to do so. And it occurred to me for the first time: maybe I should dress up like King Diamond just to mess with people who haven't seen me in forever. What happened to the thirteen year old kid who only listened to Eazy-E and Green Day and Nirvana? Oh, Melissa.

How are you? Fine thank you. See you later.

So I saw Le Tigre perform once and oddly, this is exactly how it felt at the time.



A few thoughts:

1. Does she really say "More crackers please?" "Linoleum floor?"

2. My sister Lisa liked Jem. I remember those earrings. The bad guys (girls) were called the Misfits if I recall. Is it a problem that my favorite Misfits songs are the misogynist ones? How appropriate is it that those were the ones that sounded extra-Phil Spector-y?

3. I love the parasol at 1:29 and 1:52.

4. That song from this album, "Les and Ray." I love that song.

5. Also, if I knew how to play any musical instruments, I would play them like these ladies.

6. If you play the video in two separate tabs, and start them 1/2 second apart, the drums sound all death metal.

7. Altogether this is the best thing I have seen in recent memory. This is like the best thing since Election Night.

Via Feministing.

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I'm An Elvis Impersonator . . . Get Me Out Of Here

So originally I was really excited when not one but two people told me that Rod Blago is going to have his own reality TV show. Then I found out that he's just playing some bit part in a bootleg Survivor ripoff called, "I'm a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here." The court has to give him permission to go to Costa Rica for filming. Failing some sort of confrontation with Flavor Flav, I don't see how this could be remotely compelling television, but either way Blago isn't going anywhere soon. If MC Serch shows up, I'm plugging in the HDTV conversion adapter box thingy.

Does anyone else find the "let's come up with a plan to battle the pirates" thing really lame? It just seems sort of like we got caught unawares and are pretending to be on the ball now. Hillary has a "four-point plan" three days after the attack is over? That seems a bit rushed, no? I mean, they've been slapping new names on the Bush/Paulsen bank bailout for three months now - we might as well just be going into the Treasury and setting new bills on fire at this point. But less than a week after some broke down Somali pirates take over an oceanliner, we have a comprehensive plan? Not a good look.

Seems like the original plan was pretty effective: wait until some pirates take a vessel, then kill them all and have warm and fuzzy press events since no Americans died. Doesn't make me very comfortable ethically but I have a sinking suspicion that this could be the end result of Hillary's plan too. Or am I totally off on this one?

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Gitmo: "Soooo beautiful!"

Apparently Miss Universe toured Guantanamo Bay last week and just did not have enough good things to say about the place. Creepiest quote: "We also met the Military dogs, and they did a very nice demonstration of their skills." Geez. Someone please kill us all.

Related: it has come to my attention recently that many people have not seen Miss Teen USA 2007's rambling discussion of why we Americans don't technically know anything about where anything is in the whole entire world. Please watch this. Special guest appearance by AC Slater.



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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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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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"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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A Charlie Horse, Of Course

Unrelated: Pulled up YouTube to satiate a minor Leonard Cohen fixation . . . does anyone have strong feelings one way or the other about Jeff Buckley's version of "Hallelujah?"

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Our Lady of the Leaking Overpass, Chicago, 2006

Chicago folks, remember when the Blessed Mother stopped by the Kennedy Expressway?

Shouts go out to Gil, caught taking a photo in this very photo. Meta.



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Random LA Shot, 2006

Sitting around on Important Business (waiting to pay the school) and ran across this. Shortly after I moved to LA I decided I liked it because I kept seeing things like this:

Sorry about image size and quality. Thanks to Danny for the heads up on changing photo size.

Oddly Romantic Non-Sequitir Spanish Lesson

Today I was with my teacher Saul and I heard this song that I recognized floating in from from the other room. I asked why I recognized the song and we went into the other room to listen. Saul immediately recognized the song and said with a laugh, "Perhaps you were in love with a woman."

????

Not sure what that meant but it did not qualify as a reason to remember the song. I recognized the song because it was Vicente Fernandez.

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Dinner Hour, Fatima

This is Juanito. Juanito is the youngest son in the family that fed me for a week at the mountain school that I went to in late-January. Juanito has a six-month old niece who sometimes sends him into fits of jealousy, but otherwise he is always charmed and always wants to know everyone's name, even though he never remembers. "Como te llama, vos?"

This kid on the left in the green shirt: I don't know his name but I'm partial to him, in part because all the other kids his age make fun of him and try to force him out of the pictures, and he weathers it with a certain quiet dignity. On this particular day he and his friend/brother asked me to take their photo, and when I agreed they very quickly moved together and adjusted for the shot. Check out the subtle pinky hand-hold. I love that the little kid in the red shirt, all of three or four years old, looks like an old man. He's dressed for retirement.

The girl on the left asked for a photo, and the girl on the right was certain that she was out of the frame. Check out lefty's identical pose in every photo.



Juanito is everywhere you turn in Fatima.

Not sure who this other kid is.


Kevin is Juanito's older brother, and he showed up with what appears to be a box of cigarettes, wanting to be in all the photos.



More than anything, Kevin wanted to be in his own photo.


These kids wanted bike shots.

Once again they didn't want to let dignified pinky kid (orange shirt) in the photo.

When he finally got in, he also got bunny ears.

One of the kids wanted to take a photo, and when he did he accidentally cut off dignified orange shirt pinky kid's head.

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Non-Violent Bottle Opener, Santo Domingo

I can't say enough good things about this bottle opener. More fitting still that he stands in front of a liter of Brahva - I'm told that in Brazil this beer goes by the name Brahma. What.

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Blago vs. Whoopi

Ken informs me via email that Governor Testicular Virility was on The View recently. I won't be able to check it out since the reputed-to-be-fast satellite is giving us 1996-ish webbing speeds in Colomba today, but if anyone who reads this happens to have seen it, please do tell. Who would ever have dreamed of such a thing back when Ghost was the Titanic of 1980-whatever?

Big thanks to Mike Sweitzer-Beckman for sending me the above picture, the best picture to ever grace the occasionally-esteemed pages of the Chicago Tribune.

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Blago Reportedly Considering Hiring Hitler's Barber

Okay, so we already know Governor Blagtastrophe has retained R. Kelly's lawyers, raising questions as to whether Fitzgerald caught Blagojevich on tape while peeing on a 14 year old girl. Now he has hired Drew Peterson's PR firm.

For those of you who don't recall this story or never heard it, Drew Peterson is your average suburban Chicago cop. "Average" in a region where suburban cops randomly pull over teenagers in love and force them at gunpoint to strip naked in a ditch. Carrying on the proud tradition, Drew Peterson killed two of his wives during the last few years. Unable to quite explain his actions, Peterson got Publicity Agency to represent him to the media. (Then he promptly landed himself a new fiance, which is weird and creepy.)

And now Blagojevich has hired the same company, probably because he wants the opportunity to recite Walt Whitman to the nation on Larry King Live, thus launching his 2009 campaign for President of the United States.

Thanks to Persky for the heads up, and to everyone who emails me Blagonews or indulges my interest in this greatest of soap operas.

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I'm very sorry that I used the F word when I tried to sell Barack Obama's Senate seat to Jesse Jackson Jr.

Rishi sent along this summary of a recent interview with The Poet Laureate of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich.

I really hope this guy stays in the news for awhile longer, or forever. You couldn't write this stuff.

Appears as well that Pat Quinn is actually a deft hand in the realpolitik game. According to Governor Coif, "This is about raising taxes. Pat Quinn has cut a deal with Democratic leaders....It's all about getting rid of me to raise taxes on people."

And to the end, you get the sense that Blagojevich believes this nonsense even though he most certainly needed some help in coming up with it.

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