Four years ago, I threw some cold water on the celebration that ensued here in California. The nation had just elected its first non-white President by a considerable margin, but the state of California voted to ban gay marriage.
Last night Americans reelected President Barack Obama and Californians raised taxes to the rich to fund schools and revise that idiotic three-strikes law. All of that sounds good, but they continued to assault the rights of sex workers in the state by passing Proposition 35 and Los Angeles County Proposition B.
I’ll give some credit to the people who wrote up Prop 35. They titled it “Californians Against Sexual Exploitation Act” which upon a cursory glance sounds good and everybody should vote for that.
With the vague definitions used in this initiative, your normal run-of-the-mill sex worker could be locked up and forced to register as a sex offender. And the provisions of this initiative will force all registered sex offenders to report all of their activity on the internet.
All of this to protect human sex trafficking victims who more often than not will not testify against their traffickers, and which this initiative does nothing to help provide more support. Nothing about this initiative focuses on the victims.
The media outlets that endorsed this proposition did so with some reservations. We can all agree that human sex trafficking is bad. But the gnarly bits of this initiative is where there is a lot of problems. And if something is flawed, why vote for it? Let’s get it right from the get-go.
And in LA County, voters have now forced porn actors to wear condoms. Never mind that the porn industry has the most stringent testing requirements. But now we want to spend our tax money to force them to wear condoms?
Some people say that if people in porn wear condoms, it will spread the message of using protection. Think about how stupid that statement is especially since almost no productions that actually uses condoms show the condoms being put on. Yeah, great education potential there.
It’s easy for people to force their will on sex workers because it’s seen as degrading and is often illegal. No one is forcing all women to get mastectomies because of how bad the breast cancer crisis is. We still haven’t outlawed cigarettes even though it’s proven to cause lung cancer. No one is forcing men to have anal sex even though studies have shown that stimulation of the prostate significantly reduce the chances of prostate cancer.
This is an all out assault on sex workers, and it’s time for them to fight back.
I’m not known for being good about getting my car washed. Several weeks ago, a bird must have had some bad indigestion and flew over my car because it took a walloping shit right on my driver-side windshield wiper. I took it through a drive-thru car wash, and it’s still there in all of its glory. I think it’s time to get a proper car wash.
Especially since I have all the time in the world with the Dodger season done and the NHL in lockout mode. This is my first extended break from covering a sports team since the NHL came back from the Winter Olympic break in 2010 when I started covering the Kings. I suppose I’ll figure out some way to pass the time. As you can see in the picture above, I do have a parking pass for Santa Anita so there’s that.
Perhaps I’ll have time to finish Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Perhaps.
“The media are only too happy to celebrate the difficulties of the rich and famous. We in L.A. love nothing better than when a celebrity gets in hot water or doesn’t get his or her way. It’s an equalizing kind of thing, the not-very-attractive flip side of our usual genuflection before the stars in our midst.”
– Anne Taylor Fleming. “Slippery Slope.” Los Angeles Magazine September 2012: 92.
I went ahead and gotten digital subscriptions of Los Angeles Magazine and Harpers today. Years and years ago I had print subscriptions but had them lapse since I didn’t really read them. For some reason I wanted to get them again but don’t want the physical issues. Gotta love technology.
I’ve been doing my impression of a murse the last several days. My grandmother had surgery to resurface her left cornea, so I’ve been making sure she eats, takes her medicine and what not.
My grandmother is caught between the guilt of having me take care of her and her actually needing my help. At 83 years old, she’s not quite used to being dependent.
She has learned that I’m a good cook even when having to deal with her dietary guidelines.
She is getting a lot better. She was able to heat up her own lunch today while I was out picking up her medication and going to the gym. That’s a good sign.
While I love doing this and helping my grandmother, and while I love not having to be chained to a 9-to-6 (or 7, 8, 9) desk job, I do have a lot of resentment to my mom for not helping out a little. I would have thought that once the wave of teen angst had passed that these feelings would dissipate.
It hasn’t.
So children, keep that in mind as you grow up. If you hate your parents when you’re 16, you’ll still probably have problems with them into your 30s.
I was incredibly depressed last night when I got home. The constant image of the second plane hitting the building completely devestated me. I was in a constant loop of anger, depression and fear. All of this can be noted in yesterday’s entry, but I was feeling this with more intensity. I decided to go out jogging and overheard a group of walkers talking about it saying, “those protestors in Seattle are involved. They want nothing more than destruction.”
Wow. That threw out my concentration during my jog. How many more ignorant ideas must we all hear regarding this incident? I’m just flabberghasted at all the words being hurled yesterday and today.
For the 10th anniversary, I was completely away from the television. As the NFL, MLB and everything else had their pregame ceremonies, as every church did a whole thing, I was busy covering the Kings Fest at STAPLES Center to usher what would turn out to be a Stanley Cup Championship season.
But this year is different. No game to cover, so here I am.
Being 22 and in Los Angeles when all of this happened, I was detached from the mourning. I was well aware of the magnitude of the situation, but the sorrow wasn’t there. There was a lot of anger and a lot of fear of where this country could be headed with George W. Bush leading the way.
The rest of week was filled with tension, so I decided mid week that I wanted to go dance. Off to Club Cherry. For the uninitiated, Club Cherry was an omnisexual dance party that was very dirty, very sweaty and very boozy. A lot of people will think of A Club Called Rhonda, but Cherry was more glam than hipster. Less beards, more vinyl.
It was packed. It seemed like others also wanted to dance the pain away, and there was much dancing to be done. But it was different. The pall of what happened that Tuesday hung over the dance floor. Even the go-go boys and girls weren’t dancing with that full abandon that they usually did.
During their midnight stage show, all of the go-go girls and boys went on stage with a large American flag and Jimi Hendrix’s version of “The Star Spangled Banner” played. For a place that was always irreverent, the reverence was striking.
I shocked a lot of people when I told them that this year’s FYF Fest would be my first music festival I have attended. I’ve done Sunset Juntion and the early incarnations of the FYF Fest when it was still known as the “Fuck Yeah Fest”, but an actual music festival, no. I haven’t been to Coachella. I’ve never done Lollapalooza. I didn’t even go to This Ain’t No Picnic during its only incarnation in 1999. Since I’ve been a music junkie most of my life, it comes as a surprise to most people.
But the lineup came out, and for some reason I decided that this was the music festival I had to be at. Perhaps it was M83. Or maybe it was Dinosaur, or the Vaselines, or Simian Mobile Disco, or Liars, or James Blake or whatever else I wanted to listen. All I knew is that I had to drag my bloated sack of fluids, fat and bones to this thing $90+ be damned.
One of the things I learned is that this business of music festivals is best left for the youth. They’re the ones who can tolerate crowds, the tons of bad music and the dehydration. They have no problems dealing with the mixture of cigarette and pot smoke combined with dust and sediment and whatever animal excrement left on the ground constantly creeping into your sinuses.
It certainly is a sad thing when age creeps up on you. Words like “blood pressure”, “sciatica”, “aching” and “naps” start invading their way into your vernacular. It’s awful and absolutely barbaric. I have eased my way into my 30’s, or to more accurately phrase it, my 30’s have crept into my life like the succubus, and this FYF Fest certainly made me feel it.
Of course it started nicely on Saturday. Despite the near 90-degree weather, a steady breeze blew through the LA Historic Park making it suprisingly pleasant. Being the old fart, of course, I stood and waited to see The Vaselines after giving myself a grand tour.
The Vaselines did their thing playing the crowd favorites “Molly’s Lips”, “Jesus Don’t Want Me for a Sunbeam”, “Turnaround”. For some reason there was a heckler to which Frances in her Scottish lilt said, “You’re being a bad boy. You need a spanking. Then I’m gonna shit on you.”
Seeing The Vaselines brought about the same emotions as when I saw the Pixies back in 2005. I kept wanting to cry but managed to hold on to a small shred of dignity and merely bobbed my head back and forth to the tunes.
I made my way over to see Pains at Being Pure of Heart while sitting at a safe distance on a shaded hill which was fine. I had more than enough exposure to the sun while watching the Vaselines, and despite the distance I still felt like I should have been in the middle of a Gregg Araki movie.
Most annoyingly though all my fault was making my way over to see the Chromatics play at the northern-most stage. For some reason I get them mixed up with the Coachwhips. So instead of lo-fi noisy punkish bullshit, there was lo-fi dancish stuff. Oops. I met up with a friend and we went over to see Hot Snakes play which reminded me of Blonde Redhead if they went hardcore.
I cut out of there right before they allegedly played a Drive Like Jehu song to go see James Blake. In hindsight I had no regrets.
James Blake was an epiphany, a cross between Antony and the Johnsons, D’Angelo and an electronic cocoon. I first came upon James Blake thanks to a local gay porn/experimental film collective and now defunct Black Spark. For the uninitiated, the films were a travel to the underworld of the psyche, a battle between good and evil, and, most importantly, hardcare gay sex between almost mythical chiseled twinks. Sadly all of the videos have disappeared into the ether, and no word has been heard from them since.
The last time I felt this moved was when I saw Ladytron for the first time at the John Ford Amphitheater. Then I felt I was a part of a gothic rave. For James Blake, I felt like I was getting ready for a good all-night orgy although I did conveniently close my eyes so I didn’t have to see any of the double-x chromosomes.
I ended up going back on the knoll where I saw Pains of Being Pure at Heart to take in M83. I then realized how boring that band is despite the couple of head-bobbing songs they have in their repertoire and decided to take off.
I felt great leaving the park and walking to the Gold Line Chinatown station. The energy of the festival was still brimming inside me, and I couldn’t wait to come back on Sunday.
When I woke up Sunday, it seemed that every dust particle I inhaled on Saturday decided to attack every part of my sinus. I sneezed and sneezed and was just a snotty mess, which also happens to work well with a beard. I felt attacked my every cell in my body, but I still felt determined to go.
As I was driving to the Artesia Transit Center so I could Metro it up the festival, I thought about the line to get in, having to deal with my camera, sitting in the sun, being around people and the pain I was feeling.
I figured the bands I really wanted to see were Dinosaur Jr., Liars and The Faint. I’d seen Liars several times already, and the thought of catching the two other bands didn’t outweigh me wanting to return home and become a vegetable. So I made a detour to the market and went back home.
I really try to keep age at a distance, refusing to let it get the best of me. But it has started to claim me.
I’ll live I suppose. I also suppose I’m spoiled since I am usually separated from the unwashed masses occupying the press box in local arenas and stadia. But fuck it. No matter the aches, the pains, the age, the allergies, the dust or what not. I had a shit ton of fun on Saturday. Fuck yeah!
As I went down to the Dodger clubhouse after the game yesterday, I kept thinking of my little post I put up here last night. I kept thinking how shitty it was. There was no context to it. I didn’t even identify what was in the fucking sandwich. Not even a link to Primanti Brothers.
For that I apologize and give you this picture I snapped months ago of the White Point Landslide. This was taken on the east end of the closed off area. (Click on the picture above for the full sized picture which is more impressive methinks.)
The City of LA published the findings of the geologists which was interesting to go through. Basically what ails this area is the same that ails the Portuguese Bend Landslide area.
But that’s it. I’m just idly killing time before this final Dodgers-Giants game in which I have nothing to write about.
I was talking with Fox Sports West Dodgers reporter Courtney Jones on Monday about her piece on Primanti Brothers when the Dodgers were in Pittsburgh. I wondered about travelling over to the Steel City just to try it out.
Fortunately for me, and my wallet, there was a Pittsburgh food truck where I got an imitation Primantis with capicola. I understood the appeal of it, but I still wonder how the real one tastes.
By the way, Courtney had to take a bite of the sandwich on camera for the segment. She told me she ate the whole thing. She had a huge grin as she told me that.
Of course I’m writing this in the middle of a game I don’t really want to write about since it’s P-U! But whatever. Maybe another player will apologize for calling me stupid.
Sitting in the bathroom stall at work doing my business, I suddenly realized that they don’t have flushable baby wipes to make sure your bum is shiny clean. Because, as a gay man, you never know when you’ll need a clean bum.
My face is shoved in pillows that are ripe
The scent of him so drives my ass up higher
To meet the thrusts he shoves me on his pipe
And sweat that drops, unable to quench the fire.
He grunts and moans the expletives flowing
I scream and growl — oh so degenerate
And feel the heat the sets me a-glowing
With no care of how tomorrow I’ll sit.
We climb we climb up higher to the edge
He claws and growls — what is it blood or sweat?
No care is places as we jump over the ledge
Ending so sticky, exhausted and wet.
He collapses atop what’s left of me
To think that at last I’m finally free.
— a first attempt at a dirty Shakespearean sonnet.
When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one.
— Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2007), Kindle edition.
I forget how fucking aggravating corporate life is. My family begged me to have a steady job in Corporate America that will be comfortable, have a 401-k and all of that bullshit.
In other words, they actively wanted me to have this life filled with passive-aggressive torture that crumbles the toughest of people. Only the weak and ignorant are rewarded in an environment like this.
Fuck my family. What kind of sadistic motherfucks are they that they wish this upon their kin?
I have learned that being open about my disdain for marriage and coupling and the sorts is offensive. But when I get offended hearing about people’s boyfriends, girlfriends, spouses and what not, it doesn’t matter.
Corporate America is about fitting in, being mainstream, boring and devoid of personality.
No matter what you try to do, you cannot change it. You can either drown yourself in booze and heroin, or you can drop out.
