Of all of the pretentious things I did in college, “Art in Deep Koma” was one of the few things that stuck around. Well I’m officially killing it off.
For a little bit, it will mirror the new site here at JimmyBramlett.com before becoming just a link then going into the ether.
There was a blog I was obsessed with in 1998. Scratch that, back then they weren’t called blogs. Website, journal, whatever. DanteWoo.com It no longer is alive and merely lives on in piecemeal form thanks to the Wayback Machine.
I was obsessed with it and the nom de plume of the writer. Like me he was a queer half Asian mutt, so I decided I would give myself a pretentious name. I decided “Antonin Devon Ko” – “Antonin” for Antonin Artaud, “Devon” just because and “Ko” for my mother’s maiden name that means “high” in Korean/Chinese/whatever.
As an extension, to make things look cute in the copyright section of the blog, I came up with a pseudo-company name that fit with the initials ADK. And in 30 seconds “Art in Deep Koma” was born.
Dante Woo went away, even Antonin Ko did. But for some reason “Art in Deep Koma” stuck around. And with that years of having to spell it out when giving out my email address, years of telling people, “It’s a long story,” when they ask about the meaning of it.
I’M FREE!
Now it’s just JimmyBramlett.com. Easy. No probing questions. Also since there’s a pentecostal preacher-man author who writes about all of our souls going to hell by the name of James Bramlett, hopefully I do my part as a queer sports writer to subvert that name.
For some reason I get obsessed with little things from time to time. I was looking at Google Maps while doing my pieces about Peck Park and Point Fermin Park for LAist in July and noticed these missile sites at the end of Western Ave. in San Pedro.
It floored me because I grew up in the area and I had no idea about the missile site. The Sunken City? Yes. Fort McArthur? Yes. But missiles that had the capabilities of carrying nuclear warheads? Au contraire, mon frère.
So I went to the White Point Nature Preserve that contains the site. The launch site is in complete disrepair, although with a little imagination it’s possible to see the missile launch and shoot down an enemy.
Also on the site is a battery named after Paul D. Bunker, a halfback and tackle for the Army football team in 1899-1902. A college football All-American in 1901 and 1902, Bunker had a 40-year military career that sent him to the Philippines, Panama and New York. He was stationed at Fort MacArthur in 1937 before heading back to Corregidor in the Phillipines in 1940.
It was at Corregidor that General Douglas MacArthur (the son of Lieutenant General Arthur MacArthur for whom Fort MacArthur was named) recognized Bunker before leaving the Philippines. Bunker, at the age of 61, was captured when the Allied Forces were defeated in the Battle of Corregidor and died as prisoner of war in Taiwan.
What made Bunker transcendent was his determination during the surrender of Corregidor. When ordered to burn the American flag by General Jonathan Wainwright to prevent it from getting into Japanese hands, Bunker cut off a patch and hid it in his shirt. Before he died, Bunker tore a piece of the flag and gave it to Colonel Delbert Ausmus and commanded him to give it to the Secretary of War.
Ausmus hid the piece and after the war handed it Secretary Patterson in 1945. Patterson unveiled it during Flag Day in 1946 and it is on display in the West Point museum.
Meanwhile Bunker died clutching the other piece and was cremated with it in his hands. Bunker was honored by having the Battery in San Pedro named after him and was inducted into the college football hall of fame in 1969.
It really was amazing to walk through the trails amongst the serenity of flora and ocean and see the evidence of cold violence. The Nike missile site was built in 1955 and was decommissioned in 1974. Although the site is rusted due to disuse, it is probably the most intact site in Southern California.
After checking this out, I decided to head a little bit east on Paseo del Mar to the Korean Friendship Bell. After you walk past the bell, there is still evidence of some sort of bunkers or batteries from Fort MacArthur. That prompted a walk to the fort to peek around.
Anyhow it was really fascinating to walk around and see the remnants of the coastal defense. None of the walking around was all that difficult, but it is advisable to watch out for the seagulls when your mouth is wide open in awe.
The Dodgers hate Hiroki Kuroda. After all, how else can one explain the lack of run support Kuroda this season?
“I think it’s him being unlucky,” Dodgers’ Manager Don Mattingly said directing the propaganda. If “unlucky” means “unworthy of getting any runs from us,” then that quote is spot on.
Coming into the game the Dodgers scored an average of 2.9 runs per games that Kuroda has started. Only the San Diego Padres’ Dustin Moseley has worse run support in the National League among pitchers who have started at least 13 games. As a comparison Chad Billingsley has 4.4 runs of support per game, Clayton Kershaw has 4.2, Ted Lilly has 4.1 and Rubby De La Rosa has 3.7.
“When I was stretching I was looking at his record,” Kemp said conspiratorially. “He should have a better record than that. We should score some runs for him. We just haven’t done it when he pitched.”
They keep saying that, but the story never changes. Like a broken record it happened again Wednesday night. While Kuroda’s six innings might not have been the most stellar pitching performance of the season, he limited the six hits and three walks to only one run.
But by dropping his earned run average to 3.11, just outside the top ten for starters in the National League, it still wasn’t enough to get him the win. With only Rod Barajas’ solo shot in the ninth inning as support, Kuroda’s record fell to 6-13 as the Dodgers lost 3-1.
“You do feel bad for him,” Mattingly said. “He does exactly what we ask him to do. He’s doing his job every time out.”
Of course the last three times out were speculation that each game would be his last.
“I really haven’t decided anything,” Kuroda said through translator Kenji Nimura. It’s a sentiment he repeated to reporters after the game despite the animosity shown to him by his teammates in the guise of run support.
“My honest feeling right now is I cannot fathom thinking about wearing another uniform.”
To be truthful there is no animosity in the clubhouse. In fact there is a lot of camaraderie amongst the players, and the thought of a play leaving is hard on them.
“I know it is part of the business,” Mattingly said. “Anybody that would have him would know that this kind of guy is going to keep them in every game.
“But you’d hate to lose one of your guys from the standpoint that he’s been here for four years and pitched really well for us. You really want what’s best for him more than anything.”
Despite how taxing all the trade talk can be for Kuroda, getting no support still tops the frustration list for him.
“Every time you go on the mound you go out there to win. So it’s frustrating and disappointing each time you lose. I’ve now experienced that disappointment 13 times already this season, so I think this is more frustrating.”
I’m fully aware that this has turned into a sappy nostalgic mess. I do have chunks of vomit lodged in the back of my throat, somehow stuck after attempting to swallow back down.
I became really good friends with Nicole from The Manifolds and was all over the place. Fortunately I was on the list for a lot of these shows, so I didn’t go poor as a result. But it was tons of fun. Seeing Rainbow Blanket, Amps for Christ, Year Future, Xiu Xiu, Blood Brothers, Rose for Bohdan, Cold War, Experimental Dental School, Deerhoof, Noxagt, Vaz and on and on and on. Being at The Smell, it was like party after party.
I fell out of the scene around 2005 as things started to get a bit monotonous. Maybe it was when Drew of The Manifolds moved up to Bay Area. Or when The Manifolds disbanded. Or when Ezra left The Mae Shi. Something was missing. I moved onto the sports world and now do what I do. But there are times when I really miss those days in the early Naughties.
The summer of 1996 was a difficult one. Earlier in January I had come out to close friends having been tired of trying to pretend to be straight. I did have a girlfriend at the time of coming out which didn’t make things easier. But it needed to be done.
However it didn’t need to be done to my family. I knew how such a revelation would be received to a Korean family. I didn’t want to have to deal with the fallout and felt more comfortable with my family thinking that I was a fuck up. They could deal with that. An atheist queer, not so much.
During the summer I decided to visit Cathi at UCLA where she was doing a summer program thing where she would receive college credit for taking summer courses while living in the dorms there. So it was a nice time to go out to Westwood for the day.
I got home late, and all hell broke loose. My mom laid into me, and I stupidly blurted it out: I’m gay. It’s not anything you can take back. My mom promptly went into the proper Korean response to crisis: wailing, hysterics and melodrama. She was going to kill me and then kill herself if this subject was ever brought up again. So yeah, it was just another healthy Korean household with a teenager.
With all of this in the foreground, the problems with my dad were simmering in the background. Thanks to his excessive drinking, in 1995 my dad had a series of three strokes at our house in Zachary, LA (outside of Baton Rouge) that rendered him paralyzed. Since he refused to come out here, we put him in a nursing home. Imagine that, being in your early-50’s and being in that environment.
And to top things off because of his two-pack-a-day cigarette habit, he had severe emphysema. It was so bad that at times in the humid heavy Louisiana air he would be unable to breathe forcing him to constantly be ambulanced over to the emergency room.
In the summer of 1996, just weeks after the atomic bomb I unleashed to my mom, we got word that he had a pretty bad spell and probably would not make it. So my mom and I had to travel out to Baton Rouge. Since we’re not the rich type, of course that meant a road trip which is a great environment for two people as strained as we were.
We left Los Angeles just after dinner time to hopefully avoid the traffic and the heat of the desert. By around midnight we were in the Arizona desert on the I-10, and I decided to turn on the radio to see what was out there. I found a college station that was playing “That’s What I Get.” As if driving in the isolated desert wasn’t David Lynchian enough, the surrealism kept pouring.
“This is a good song,” my mom noted. Huh? I was in love with Nine Inch Nails at the time (going so far as wearing a trench coat into the summer months), and my mom likes the song?
I realized that my mom made an effort, and that she did what she could with what she was equipped with. Having her only son tell her he was gay was something she had no coping mechanism for. We were mostly silent throughout the road trip, but that moment in Arizona while listening to Nine Inch Nails was probably the most civil discourse we had in a year.
Anyhow, my dad didn’t die that summer. In fact we took him off the tubes the day after the bombing at the Olympics in Atlanta. He made it through another year before dying the week before my high school graduation. By then my mom and I were more at ease with each other. Like the Korean War even though there was no peace treaty signed, we did have our demilitarized zone. I never talked about being gay – even to this day. And my mom was just resigned to the fact that I was too far gone for her autocratic control.
Jamie Stewart’s music is very difficult to absorb. The beating heart of Xiu Xiu, his music is a depressing explosion of teen angst and horrific life circumstances with little regard to pop music structure. In fact Xiu Xiu can be said to be one huge hissy fit against pop music.
Up along the rocks
It’s good. It’s not so hard.
I bite my tongue.
Who cares? This chance to drop off.
“Apistat Commander” starts out with a quiet pulsing beat topped with a forlorn melody whispered ever so quietly by Stewart. After the first verse and chorus, a burst of popping percussion pierces the serenity hinting at the chaos that is to come. Even though the chaos of the chorus is expected, what happens is completely out of left field.
Instead of a tirade that destroys the world, what we get is a Spector-esque wall of sound with Stewart wailing ever so melodically. Instead of a jarring experience it’s the epitome of catharsis rarely accomplished in music.
All that you left, you left for someone.
All of this life that’s wilted on.
Oh this relief it’s the hardest thing.
Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god.
This song was perfect when it came out in February 2003. We were already in Afghanistan and were getting ready to invade Iraq. The world was a very polarizing place to be in.
Just days before the album was released, millions of people around the U.S. and the world rallied to protest the inevitable war and the level of deceit that polluted the world. I attended the protest in Hollywood marching down Hollywood Blvd. before snaking to the corner of Sunset Blvd. and Vine St. for a rally featuring Gore Vidal, Susan Sarandon and other celebrities.
I hadn’t eaten the whole day and during the rally looked to walk back to my car. As I was walking out there was a splinter protest group filled with wannabe anarchists who started clashing with the police. The police were starting to arrest people, and I just made a bee-line the other way. No way I was going to be arrested on an empty stomach.
As I was walking away, I heard a policeman scream, “Hey you! In the red Che shirt! Get back here!”
Fuck. But I figured if they really wanted me, they would run and grab me. They didn’t. So I went through a side street and managed to get to my car.
With all the media coverage that night, it felt a bit empowering. I was a part of something that made a statement, made an imprint in this huge world of ours. But then to hear the Bush administration dismiss it and plunge head-first into war, I realized just how impotent we really were. Politics is just a farce giving people the illusion of having power. See Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
So Xiu Xiu’s music really touched me. It was a cathartic way to yell against this machine. It probably is just as effective as the protests, but at least it was more fun.
There is something cool about Cibo Matto’s music beyond the kitsch of writing about food that the media seemed to be fixated over when their debut album Viva! La Woman came out in 1996. The songs were mostly about love set to the soundtrack of broken English and samples splashed with a spoonful of surrealism.
How else do you describe lyrics such as, “Let’s eat carrots together until…” in “Beef Jerky”? Or, “White pepper ice cream / It’s like a line drawing / It snipped my heart / White pepper ice cream,” in “White Pepper Ice Cream”.
They graduated on their second album Stereotype A with more disparate sounds that somehow felt cohesive at the same time: the bossa nova of “Moonchild”, funk of “Lint of Love”, hard rock of “Blue Train”, psychedelic rock of “Sunday Pt. 2”.
But “Birthday Cake” was a different. It was a blast of punk rage demanding to be heard. Something has to be said of the shouting screeching of Miho Hatori while saying, “You know my love is sweet.”
I first heard this song while watching a PBS show called “On the Road” or something like that. It sounded so different to Garbage, Hole, Nine Inch Nails and everything else that was going on, it just blew my mind. I would have liked to say I was addicted to them, but I didn’t buy their albums until I moved on to college.
It was one night at a nondescript party somewhere in Isla Vista. I saw Wifey, and for some reason at one moment he was the only person I knew there. This was at a time when we didn’t like each other and would rather have had a testicle removed by an ice cream scooper than deal with one another. He was listening to his discman, so I went up to him snidely and asked what he was listening to.
“Oh you wouldn’t know them,” he countered just as snidely.
“Oh yeah? Just tell me.”
“Fine. Cibo Matto.”
“Oh my god. Cibo Matto? I love them!!”
And I start doing the breakdown to the song “BBQ”.
That was the first time we really bonded and could tolerate one another. And we became the bestest of friends.
So it really was appropriate that I went to see Cibo Matto at the Hollywood Bowl with him on Sunday. They were part of a program put together by KCRW called “Big in Japan” headlined by Yellow Magic Orchestra and also featuring Buffalo Daughter, Towa Tei, kabuki and taiko drum performances. Take a minute and see what is wrong about the last sentence.
If you answered “none of them were actually big in Japan,” then you win.
But it was a good show. The traditional performances were nice. Buffalo Daughter was good. Towa Tei did a great job keep a continuity throughout the show.
And Cibo Matto. OH Cibo Matto. They started out with “Beef Jerky” and transitioned to “Sugar Water”. Like heaven. Then some “Spoon” and “Sci Fi Wasabi” which, I don’t care what anyone says is awful live. Then a new song that was groovin. Then the drum beats. “SHUT UP AND EAT!!!!! TOO BAD NO BON APPETIT!!! SHUT UP AND EAT!!! YOU KNOW MY LOVE IS SWEET!” And I was in heaven for three minutes.
The painfully short set ended with “Know Your Chicken”, but I can now say I finally saw Cibo Matto live.
Now the bad part of watching a show entitled “Big in Japan” at a place like the Hollywood Bowl is being around a bunch of people there for a “cultural experience.” These are the people that take things way too seriously and have no critical abilities in their own head, so if KCRW says it’s good then it must be good.
While Yellow Magic Orchestra were playing, Wifey and I were nonplussed and we expressed that to one another. We weren’t screaming at all. Just talking just a smidge over a whisper. But this raving cunt in front of us snapped at us! “Can you guy shut up please?”
Shock! It’s a fucking concert not a damned library!
So we just got up and left.
But I did get to see Cibo Matto live, and really wasn’t that all that mattered?
Fans look at smoke from a fire that broke out at Dodger Stadium during the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball game against the Florida Marlins, Saturday, May 28, 2011, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)
On Saturday night the awful stench emanating from Dodger Stadium wasn’t merely the Dodgers in their 6-1 loss to the Florida Marlins.
During the game a small fire broke out in a storage warehouse for paper products for Levy Restaurants between the top deck and reserve levels near Section 13 on the right field side of the stadium. Billowing smoke emanated from the stairwell of both levels forcing fans on the right side of those levels to be relocated. The Top of the Park Store was also evacuated.
The fire was contained and extinguished by the Los Angeles Fire Department within 20 minutes with no injuries reported. Unfortunately for the Dodgers there was also no stoppage of play.
“It was something different,” Manager Don Mattingly said.
Unfortunately what wasn’t different was the play of the Dodgers. Despite missing Marlins’ ace Josh Johnson, who is on the 15-day disabled list with right shoulder inflammation, the Dodgers still could not capitalize on the procession of relievers they faced all night.
“I don’t know why there were so effective,” Mattingly said. “Obviously we weren’t able to scratch anything together.”
The only damage they did was against the starter Brian Sanchez in the third inning. Sanchez, who was close to hitting his 50-pitch count limit at that point, gave up a leadoff walk to Dodgers’ starter Hiroki Kuroda. With Andre Ethier on first and Kuroda on third with two outs, Matt Kemp hit a double to score Kuroda for the lone run.
Against reliever Edward Mujica (W, 5-2) who in 16 appearances against the Dodgers had given up a .329 batting average and 17 runs? Nothing for two innings.
Against reliever Burke Badenhop who gave up seven runs in four appearances against the Dodgers? Also nothing for two innings.
“You’ve just got to have a plan, stick with it and try to execute,” Casey Blake said. “We just didn’t have enough runners on base, didn’t get enough big hits tonight. A team can be effective like that sometimes throwing four, five guys out there like that.”
The Marlins had no such problems against Dodger pitching. Every Marlins position player reached base safely and only Mike Stanton went hitless. That of course meant that Kuroda (L, 5-5) wasn’t able to rebound from his poor performance on the South Side of Chicago on May 22. The Marlins touched him up for five runs in 5 1/3 innings on 10 hits.
“He’s tough,” Marlins’ first baseman Gaby Sanchez said about Kuroda. “His ball moves a lot, moves all over the place. We just went up there and tried to hit his mistakes.”
“He didn’t seem to have command of his fastball tonight,” Mattingly noted. “That always puts you in a little bit of trouble.”
Kuroda acknowledged the poor locations of his fastball but attributed it to his sliders.
“One of the reasons I gave up a lot of hits tonight was my slider didn’t have a lot of movement,” Kuroda said. “I went to challenge a lot of hitters in the strike zone, and they got the best out of me.”
Minnesota Twins defeat LA Angels 1-0 (10).
Chivas USA tied Columbus Crew 3-3.
LA Galaxy defeat New England Revolution 1-0.
TONIGHT’S ACTION
LA Angels at Minnesota Twins. 11:10 a.m. FSWest, AM 830 KLAA.
Florida Marlins at LA Dodgers. 1:10 p.m. FS Prime Ticket, AM 790 KABC.
In a rare show of sociability for me, I went over to Brendan’s for an impromptu punch party. He posted on Facebook earlier in the day, and having had his punch before I was more than willing to make the trek to Highland Park for the goods.
The punch was filled with citrus goodness, vodka goodness, champagne goodness, syrupy goodness with proportions being haphazard at best. Basically it was a good way to get pretty fucked up.
We ended up watching Starship Troopers and Richard III (the Ian McKellan version) and having a nice talk on nonsense. Of course being around new people I busted out with my charming Lord of the Rings is merely visual masturbation talk. Sorry. Hated those films.
At one point I started talking about one of my favorite late-night television shows “Weird TV.” According to Wikipedia it aired in Canada, Los Angeles and Seattle on Saturday nights. Here’s a clip from one of the episodes. (Sorry. The embed link doesn’t seem to want to work.)
I’m just wondering who else caught this back in the mid ’90s.
I first met Jonathan Moncrief after the 2010 Winter Olympics when I decided I wanted to cover hockey. Aside from casually watching hockey here and there, I was very wet behind the ears when it came to hockey. In fact I had been to only one live game before.
We quickly became friends, and I really used him and the other writers to help me learn to analyze hockey – something I’m still not 100% comfortable with. And he in turned used me for Dodgers information when he covered them for the Examiner.
I didn’t hear until pretty late in the game that he was hospitalized earlier this year. While it was concerning, he seemed upbeat as he was tweeting and writing Facebook updates from the hospital. And of course all of use razzed him saying that all the Coke in the press box was safe from his pilfering. Yuk yuk yuk!
He contacted me last night wanting a ride to Dodger Stadium from Union Station today – Kings’ players Brad Richardson and Jarret Stoll were going to be at the game throwing the first pitch. I told him last night to be there by 2:40. This morning I realized that I would be a little early, so I texted him this morning to be ready by 2:30. But I never heard back.
At around noon I was farting around and a Facebook notification popped up on Tweetdeck from Andrew Knoll of Hockey’s Future saying, “RIP Jon Moncrief.” Apparently he had another pulmonary embolism and died this morning.
I’m still in a state of shock. The press box at STAPLES Center will not be the same. And I am just saddened by the death of someone I was happy to call a friend.
