Edit: Two things. First aaaak! That distended image of me is horrible. And I’m too lazy to find something to change it. So forever it will be.
Second, I know it’s not downloadable like my first run of 19 podcasts. Unfortunately I don’t have all of the old ones. I think I have five or six of the 19, but oh well.
Yesterday on Facebook I asked if anyone wanted to go graveyard hopping. I know, how very goth of me. Blah blah blah.
Well instead of graveyard hopping, I just went to one: the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery. Yes, it’s the one with Marilyn Monroe, John Cassavetes, Billy Wilder, Farrah Fawcett, Don Knotts, Mel Torme, Mr. Howell and his real live Lovie, etc etc etc. And yes that is one of the main reasons I went. And no I wasn’t wearing a stitch of black.
As I walked through looking at the headstones surrounded by the skyscrapers of Westwood, I couldn’t help but notice the old headstones. The oldest graves I found here dated back to 1906. I don’t know whether they were buried somewhere else then moved to this cemetery at a later date, but I doubt that. There were also quite a few undated headstones.
These people lived through the Civil War, Spanish-American War, the Gilded Age, Reconstruction. These people died before WWI. They might have never owned a car. What’s a telephone to them? Freeway? F. Scott Fitzgerald?
I kept walking around looking at these old headstones. And as I tried to reconstruct their histories, what they might have seen it got me thinking what exactly were their stories. Which side of the Civil War were they on? Did they come out west to get in on the gold?
It’s easy to know the histories of Eva Gabor, Eve Arden, Rodney Dangerfield and Minnie Riperton. But what of Emily Ball? Eunice Wetherel? Frank L. Smith? Did they have a lot of kids? How bad was the smog in those days?
Being a megalomaniac (after all I do maintain a personal blog), I wondered about what happens to my own story when I die. Will I have annoying megalomaniacal assholes walking six feet above of my decayed body in a box wondering how I survived the Reagan and both Bush eras?
I know, it’s not terribly profound. It’s nothing like the where-do-people-go-after-they-die sort of tripe you expect from New Age-y cunts or ignorant religious asswipes. Being a devout atheist, I really don’t care about an afterlife.
But what is a life if not a narrative? And without a narrative what is a life?
This is getting very close to being a bunch of solipsistic mess.
Anyhow that’s what was coming to my mind as waves upon waves of tourists descended into the cemetery looking for Marilyn and Janis.
I just hope my final resting place won’t look like this forgotten grave. Then again, they just ran the sprinklers so that’s why it looks like a mess. But still.
Then again I’m dead so gives a fuck?
One other thing I noticed that was less self-serving: Persians really treat their dead well. Those were some of the gaudiest gravestones I have ever seen. I could hear the funerals for each of them.
Another more self-serving thought: There are a lot of people my age who have died in the last five years. Aren’t I supposed to the feeling of an impending scythe when I’m 70 and not when I’m 32?
By the way, the rose garden at the very beginning of this post is where the great Edith Massey resides.
Went traipsing around the dead this afternoon, and saw the perfect tombstone. Don’t worry. I have more.
Now this is one for the memory banks. Seth at Dingers Blog tweeted earlier tonight about a new Hella album Tripper.
Eh? They’re still around?
Now talk about one for the memory banks, this takes me back to 2003, 2004 where Hella, Lightning Bolt, XBXRX, Arab on Radar and other noisy avant-garde bands went all around the country deafening the youth bit by bit. Whether it is age that has crept up on me unwittingly, time commitments elsewhere that has taken my attention away from the music scene or just a complete disintegration of that scene, I completely lost touch. Don’t even ask me who’s where much less active and still touring.
But it’s good to see they’re back to a two-piece and making good music again. After all it’s a familiar name in a sea of unfamiliarity for someone that’s been out of it for quite some time.
It’s also making me think I should have gone to FYF Fest this year. Oh well.
I decided to take a quick little jaunt to the Ocean Trails Ecological Preserve this morning. After watching tons of college football yesterday, I was feeling a bit sedentary to say the very least.
Overall it’s an easy jaunt. After parking right where Palos Verdes Drive South turns into 25th Street there’s a trailhead clearly visible. Head towards the ocean, hook a right at the edge of the cliff and you’re off.
There is a nice little vista with benches to look at the scenery. From there is where things get difficult. Continuing along the trail, there are stairs lined with cacti. Up and up and up and my chest was burning going up and up and up those stairs.
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But that’s the only real challenge. No big whoop.
Whenever I go on these jaunts, I always stupidly imagine the man of my dreams to just stumble into me. Instead there are old men trying to keep active and women what I imagine escaping from their men for a little bit. Like I said, it’s stupid.
The trail goes on behind Trump National Golf Club — a blight on the serenity of nature however contrived it may be. I eventually turned around and went back to the car.
One thing that was a bit troublesome were the cacti lining the trails. Being a bit of a klutz, I was paranoid about falling into the bed of cacti. Fortunately it never happened, but it was something that weighed heavily on my mind.
It’s the first day of college football, and I’m not writing because of it. Okay, it’s not for this game in particular. But football has started!
Everett True is a music critic. I fucking hate him. It’s not because he introduced Courtney to Kurt. It’s not because he’s had nights of black-out inducing drunkenness with Kim Deal.
I fucking hate him because of his wit and writing. It makes me very jealous and petty.
Here’s an interesting ten-minute interview on Style.com with Robyn and Mary Fagot talking about the release of the Body Part trilogy last year and the multimedia artwork associated with it.
On a completely different note, do you ever get the feeling you’re trespassing on someone’s front yard unknowingly?
Edit: I got rid of the embedded video. It autoplays, and I didn’t know how to turn it off. Fuck that shit.
Here are Crocodiles covering Elton Motello’s “Jet Boy Jet Girl” and a medley of Deee-Lite’s “Groove Is in the Heart” and Beach Boys’ “California Girls”. Very shoegazey. Yes it’s a year old, but it beats my 1990’s nostalgia-fuck that I’ve been going through this summer.
As for me, two more days of the Dodger homestand. And as luck would have it after tonight’s game, we have a day game tomorrow. I will be a zombie, zombie, zombie eh eh eh oh oh oh oh oh…
Oh! And happy birthday to Joe Mc.
