bad haircut

I have a job interview tomorrow, so I decided I needed to get a haircut. I head over to some spot on Beverly after work, and the guy is like, "Regular sideburns?" Yes. Regular sideburns please.


"I'm here for my job interview."



I want to take this moment to send a shout out to Gracie. Not that she reads this. But no one but Gracie has really cut my hair for about three years or so. Except once or twice, my ex-girlfriend did. And last winter, I cut my own, which was a disaster of its own, resulting ultimately in a complete shave of the head. Hence my reluctant trip to the barber shop today.

But now I have learned my lesson and I will never see a professional hair cutter again. I will only have Gracie cut my hair.

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this is a non sequitir.

Works great as motor oil!

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

Indeed, angry urinating man.

Ever just be in the port-a-potty at the Louisiana State Penitentiary Angola Prison Farm and just need to get something off your chest so bad that you write it in #2 pencil?



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This is what Louisiana is like.

Of course it's a watering bucket for the tree.

That makes perfect sense. A garbage bag-lined watering bucket for a tree.



Props to brother-in-law Matt for clueing me in to this one.

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I remember Halloween.

I guess a lot of Halloween costumes have to do with wearing boxes.

Joe Pulido: Gangster of Love

Anonymous Cayman Photo

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

Leonard has seen better days.

And so has Fresno in some ways. In some ways not, I guess.

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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.

Too many words devoted to Robert Smith.

Been listening to Pandora Radio at work. I never really got into Pandora Radio before: you say you like the Misfits, you're stuck listening to the post-Danzig schlock that Jerry Only put together; you say you like Bob Dylan, eventually you're listening to way too much Mason Jennings; you say you like Eric B. and Rakim and suddenly every third song is from The 18th Letter album, which could technically be quite good, but are you prepared to make that assessment when all you want is to be passively entertained while typing a memo? But anyway, it's there on the Internet, it works for the temporary-ness of a job where I'm not going to load CDs onto my computer.

The other day it came up with "Mint Car" from the Cure's 1996 album Wild Mood Swings. I imagine this is the record that most once-fans associate with the end of their career, but there was a time when you couldn't escape "Mint Car," a short eight weeks after which radio play petered out, the song disappearing altogether after a year or so, never to be a part of the culture again. I really liked this song, I even remember where I was the last time I heard it: Coelee's old house, in the little space between the living room and kitchen, must've been about 1998. I've thought about the song off and on since then, and I have to say hearing it after all this time made me really happy.

So happy, in fact, that on my way out of town to Phoenix, I swung by Amoeba and picked up the album for five bucks. Trudged west to Hollywood in rush hour traffic, trudged back east through the hour-and-a-half of idling that you must do to get out of the LA area in the early evening. It felt triumphant, the sort of inconvenient and not-worth-it detour that still reminds me that I am an adult, I can waste two hours if I want to thank you very much.

I'm embarrassed by how much I like the somewhat maligned "Mint Car." I don't understand what a mid-period Cure fan can find missing in this track. It's a great example of the manically happy Cure songs ("The sun is up! I'm so happy I could scream!") where you think Robert Smith should feel guilty about writing songs that remind people how they never ever feel this way. It's got the rest too: the guitar sounds bright, the music during the chorus picks itself right up, his voice disappears into a wheeze when he hit the vowels mid-word. He makes the kind of sounds those Sesame Street nose-honker muppets made. It's close-to-perfect if you like this version of Robert Smith, and if you can accommodate the occasional lyric about vanilla smiles and strawberry kisses.

The video is something else too. An old-West high stakes poker game, and Robert Smith wearing a sheet underneath Magic Johnson's getup from the Michael Jackson "Remember the Time" video.

As for the rest of the album, well, it's a lesser version of Wish. There's the longwinded and dirge-y opening track. There's half of a lyric in "Round & Round & Round" that seems taken directly from "Doing the Unstuck," and "Mint Car" itself ends in a rush during the last two seconds of the song, this being lifted straight out of "Friday I'm in Love." There are a bunch of songs with one-word titles. He even does that from-the-throat "I'm absolutely mad" thing where he sounds like a bootleg Louis Armstrong and/or a bootleg Moz.

There are also more singles. "The 13th" falls a little flat and sounds too deliberately Latin. I think that was the follow-up to "Mint Car," and I like it too despite its flaws. "Strange Attraction" was yet another single, but I don't remember this one as well. It's growing on me, but it sounds like a mid-tempo Paula Abdul song. Something in the drums does it. "Gone!" was a single too, but the best thing about that song is that it has an exclamation point in the title.

This post sounds really album review-ish, and I don't like that. I think I just have a lot to say about the Cure, and when is there ever occasion to talk about the Cure in 2009? Sorry Lauren.

This blog is turning into an apologies-to-Lauren blog. Because Lauren is a the faithful reader.

So, for your trouble, here are photos of Robert Smith looking like a fat and confused Alice Cooper. The last one is priceless - he looks more like a Bob than a Robert. I think he's starting to disintegrate. Get it?

Souter intends to retire, sort of looks like he'd be good in a Western

Justice Souter today announced that he's moving on to greener pastures, wants to "return to his native New Hampshire." This on the heels of the NH General Assembly legalizing gay marriage (possible veto pending) this morning.

Maybe it's not a coincidence, maybe he too has been waiting to gay marry?

Anyway, this is sort of ambivalent news I guess, since we're still a few retirements from changing the composition of the stupid stupid Supreme Court. However, I am really excited about the Republican circus that could result from this week's newly filibuster-proof Democratic majority. Assuming that Barack gets through his first choice, I think it's obvious that soon all marriages will be at least 65% gay by law.

Have you seen Souter recently, by the way? I'm used to this photo, which makes him look sort of sprightly, if a bit gray.
Well, apparently this photo is circa 1990, because today he looks like he has been partially reconstructed from pieces of an old baseball mitt.

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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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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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"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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Part 2: Pescador de Hombres, San Andres Xecul

On the way back down the hill from the chapel, we caught San Simon. San Simon is not a saint in the Catholic sense . . . but people are very enthused. I believe his more famous shrine is in a nearby town called Zunil, and another version named Maximon at Lago Atitlan.

Best I can understand from what people have told me, San Simon was an English doctor a few hundred years ago who helped a lot of people out. So for this, he is now venerated as something of a Catholic saint/Mayan deity. I forget the specific Mayan deity, and again, he's not an actual Catholic saint, but in San Andres the Virgin of Guadalupe appears to be quite comfortable up on the wall next to him. People bring candles . . . different colors for different things. I was told that red is love, black is for some variety of ill wishes, and purple is for prostitutes who want more work. Green and yellow were the most popular candles but no one said what they were for.

There were actually two San Simons in the same room at the spot in San Andres. This might sound weird until you consider how many crucifixes you'll see in any given Catholic church, or how many Steely Dan records I own. (All of them, thanks.)

Here he is:


Here's the more traditional and more important figure of San Simon. People bring him cigarettes and aguardiente and whisky. He has a permanent cigarette holder on a chain around his neck, so you can give him a lit cigarette if you like, and you can actually pour the whisky right down his throat as well.





Anyway, it feels dirty to take pictures of and make jokes about something that people really believe in, so I hope none of this lightheartedness comes of as disrespect. It's just that it seemed sort of surreal to me. When we got there, there was a family there. Dad/granddad was bringing each kid up to San Simon one at a time and twirling a cane around the kid's head several times. I really wanted to know what the significance of it all was, and I thought about asking. But then I thought maybe it would've been disrespectful to force someone to respond to my robotic "how's my subjunctive coming along" childspeak at that moment.

San Simon moves to a new house every year. At first I thought this made a lot of sense from a social welfare standpoint: at 5Q per visitor for 365 days, San Simon rakes it in for whichever family hosts him. If everyone in town got San Simon once in a lifetime, it could be a big help and sort of an economic bedrock of the local community. But ours is not that kind of world, and it turns out San Simon is basically owned by a group of rich people, and if you pay them enough money they will let you keep him around for a year.

There's nothing much to say about the actual church except that it's great. It's a pretty run-of-the-mill Catholic church for the most part, except that about 50 years ago someone decided it would be a good idea to coat it in primary colors. It's repainted every three years.


Again with the mix of religious tradtions: the jaguar is a Mayan deity (someone told me the sun deity), and there are jaguars hanging out near the cross at the top.


Inside they have really gone all out with neon, including Christmas lights on the various saints' halos. The neon banner above Jesus reminds me of the one at St. Sabina's in Chicago.



More Leonard Cohen: Check out this old PBS video of him and Judy Collins singing "Suzanne". There's also a good version of them doing "That's No Way to Say Goodbye," but I like "Suzanne" better because Judy Collins mispronounces the word "drowning" at the 1:50 mark. Supposedly there's a performance of "Famous Blue Raincoat" as well, but I can't find it. Incidentally, this non-sequitir YouTube link is actually relevant to the post, thanks, because Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water.


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