Here is a mixtape I made several weeks ago that can also be found on MixCloud:

1. Dear PMRC – Karen Finley
2. Rebel Girl – Bikini Kill
3. Such a Beautiful Girl Like You – Pizzicato Five
4. 보라빛 향기 (Violet Fragrance) – 강 수지 (Kang Su-Ji)
5. Satisfaction (I Can’t Get No) – Otis Redding
6. Good Vibrations – Psychic TV
7. Teenage Lightning 2 – Coil
8. We Fenced Other Houses with Bones of Our Own – Liars
9. Glory to Jesus, I Am Free – Rev. Utah Smith
10. Baby’s Insane – Diamanda Galas
11. Crackhead Waltz – RX
12. Like a Little Bitch – Mu
13. Salvo – Skinny Puppy
14. Ten Pounds of Shit in a Five Pound Bag – Retox
15. Love Comes in Spurts – Richard Hell and the Voidoids
16. Price Yeah! – Pavement
17. Fucking Hostile (Biomechanical Remix) – Pantera
18. Fabulous Muscles – Xiu Xiu

There are movie clips in there too from Female Trouble, Billy Jack and lord knows what else.

For those of you who are illiterate, here you go.

Bless their hearts. Koreans try their best to drive like normal people, but something in their DNA makes this impossible. The kids think they’re speed racers with their stupid fucking mod-ed rice rockets, and their parents don’t pay attention to anything around them when they drive.

Twice a week I take my grandmother to the acupuncturist in a Korean plaza in Gardena, and I know that I’m taking my life in my hands each time I enter this plaza. From drivers going the wrong way of traffic and ignoring signs written in both English and Korean, it’s a wonder I haven’t died at the hands of Kim Jong-somethingorother by now.

So you see the photo above? Let’s see it annotated below:

Sure, the building is not the best designed building. In fact, I’m convinced both the architect and the owner both require soft helmets while riding a short bus. But this asshole White Lexus thought it was okay to drive over a CLEARLY MARKED WALKWAY for a handicap parking space and park in the unmarked no-man’s land. Just like that.

This is probably not the most outrageous thing I have seen in this plaza, but this is the first one I documented. I’ll do more to show people why the Koreans, like the Armenians, should all have their drivers licenses revoked.

Upon leaving, there was a lady in a Honda Accord attempting to park in a marked parking space. Hey, she’s got one leg up on the competition there. However in attempting this move, she parked right next to a Jeep Cherokee that was parked correctly in the marked space. RIGHT next to it, as in she scraped up the Jeep.

I love my peoples.

And that is exactly what a bow tie says. Not that you’re powerless, but that you’re impotent. People offer to take you home not because you’re sexy but because you’re sex-less, a neutered cat in need of a good stiff cuddle.

— David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, “Buddy, Can You Spare a Tie?”, 2008, p. 62.

Reading
– The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
– The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami
– Bitter Orange by Marshall Moore
– Watch Me: A Memoir by Anjelica Huston
– Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
– Girl in a Band by Kim Gordon
– Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris

Music
– Nine Inch Nails
– Ladytron
– Sonic Youth
– Depeche Mode

Watching
– I’ve been watching more and more sports recently now that playoff season has arrived. The first round of the NBA playoffs was mostly rubbish, but now they’re getting interesting. I guess I’ll write more about that.
– I watched the original Star Wars movie for the very first time. What a painfully mediocre movie. I don’t quite understand how people lose their shit over this movie. Barbarella was a far better movie.

Here are random pictures of a shoe, a gopher snake and clouds.

I’m a grown-ass man. I covered baseball, specifically the Dodgers, from 2009 to 2013. Yet here I am watching the Dodgers home opener completely excited and enthralled.

Of course with Clayton Kershaw pitching for the Dodgers, it had the making of a perfect day. I still remember the home opener in 2013 against the Giants as he dueled against Matt Cain. They exchanged 0s for six innings when Cain parted for George Kontos in the seventh inning. Kontos got through one inning unscathed. In the bottom of the eighth inning with the game still a scoreless tie, Kershaw led off. The first pitch he saw, Kershaw deposited it over the centerfield wall opening the floodgates. The Dodgers scored three more in the inning to support Kershaw who pitched the ninth for the complete game shutout.

I didn’t quite envision that happening today, but I certainly didn’t expect to see Kershaw’s slider being an enigma. The reigning Cy Young and MVP winner looked mortal, and it was a bit unsettling as the new-look Padres kept fighting off pitch after pitch they saw. Perhaps it’s because it’s so early in the season, but Kershaw didn’t have these hitters under his spell.

Matt Kemp, now wearing a different shade of blue, had a single and double off of Kershaw and was responsible for driving in the three runs the Padres scored. Meanwhile the Dodger hitters were kept under control by James Shield. While his game wasn’t big, his only hiccup came in the fourth inning when he gave up a homer, triple and double to Adrian Gonzalez, Howie Kendrick and Carl Crawford respectively that gave the Dodgers their two runs.

With the bullpens entered in the seventh inning, it’s ridiculous that I felt miffed by the 3-2 deficit. Again: grown-ass man, sportswriter’s cynicism. I shouldn’t be getting so grouchy over one game that wasn’t even over. I know better than this!

Then the newcomers did their job. Kendrick doubled home Gonzalez in the seventh to tie the game, and the palpitations stopped for a second. And in the eighth inning to save the fingernails of all of us in the Southland, Jimmy Rollins — who killed the Dodgers in 2008 and 2009 in the playoffs alongside his Phillies teammates — puts the game on ice with a three-run bomb to right field for the 6-3 lead.

I stood up and cheered. And even though this was the first time since 2005 I wasn’t in attendance at Dodger Stadium for the home opener, there were plenty of folks in my ‘hood who were whoopin’ it up just the same.

In 2007 when I started writing for LAist, I was a big Dodger fan. The more I covered them, the closer I got to them, the more I saw how the sausage was made, the more cynical I became. There’s plenty there to be upset about. The new television deal that has heaped tons of money upon the team but has ripped the team away from 70% of the televisions in the Southland. Lon Rosen’s decisions in hiring shrill deafening in-stadium hostesses for between-inning entertainment, for getting mascots “unique performance characters”, for continually reducing organist Nancy Bea Hefley’s workload year after year against her wishes.

But there I was in the eighth inning cheering that MY DODGERS had the 6-3 lead. The Dodgers are more than Time Warner Cable, more than Lon Rosen, more than any individual or issue. They are the blue, the team of Jackie Robinson, of Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Don Newcombe, Fernando Valenzuela.

Not only did the Dodgers win the game, they have won me back as a fan. This is going to be a fun season.

On my 35th birthday I spent the day in bed watching Netflix, unable to face the world in a wallowing self-indulgent haze that I do tend to get in when I allow myself to think about things. This past Friday on my 36th birthday was nothing like that.

I’ve never been particularly overjoyed about my birthday. I remember my 16th birthday when I locked myself in my room wanting to be left alone to read and listen to music. But 36 here filled me with happiness. Not just resignation at the fact that I am unable to stave off Father Time. But there I was smiling.

Friday itself was pretty nondescript. I had to take my grandmother to her acupuncture appointment, went to Souplantation for lunch, catcalled shirtless guys and guys in tank tops screaming out, “AY! PAPI CHULO!!!!!!!!” Picked up grandmother, made dinner and watched movies. It didn’t matter that I was not in the middle of a raging orgy filled with all sorts of snortables spread in a hedonistic buffet. That I wasn’t being plugged in every orifice with oozing turgid penises ready to explode its life force into me.

I am past that now. That is to say, I am too damn lazy to plan anything like that. If I happen to fall into such a situation, I won’t turn it down by any means.

On Saturday after getting steaks at Damons, I went back to Catherine’s and Tyson’s homestead for cake. We looked around, wondered if we should go out to a bar, decided sleep was better and I was home by 11. The scary part was that I am all right with this. This is 36.

On Friday, we lost a friend in Joe McDonnell. Tom Hoffarth did a great job of eulogizing him in his Sunday column in the Daily News, an effort I’m not going to try to duplicate. But I did want to talk about what he meant to me.

I first really got into sports in a big way in the early 2000s. Listening to “The McDonnell-Douglas” show he co-hosted with the Press Telegram columnist Doug Krikorian really educated me in the history of LA sports and what was going on in the scene. He was among the first people in town to pick on Frank McBankrupt McCourt and his lack of actual money when he tried to buy the Dodgers.

It was fun listening to him kick people out of LA, razz Doug and his producers, bemoan about everything and anything. This show was a must-listen for me everyday. Then there was a change in management at KSPN, they fired Joe and Doug and in an instant it felt like all of the passion in sports radio left the airwaves.

When I started getting into the Dodger Stadium pressbox in 2009, I had seen Joe around, but I was too shy. I bought into his “Big Nasty” persona and was scared of irritating him. I heard his on-air near fight with Petros Papadakis. Joe was only around sporadically at that point, so I didn’t have to worry about him all that much.

But by the time he started coming back regularly in 2011, I finally had that balls to talk to him. I was sitting next to him in the back row of the Dodger Stadium pressbox. One of the challenges was waiting out the throngs of people who would stop by to talk to him: Bill Plaschke, Lon Rosen, Steve Futterman would be the regular visitors. Finally, around the seventh inning, he had a moment alone, and I reached out and said, “Excuse me, Joe. I’ve been a huge fan of yours for years. This is a thrill.”

We had a proper conversation, albeit short since we both had to work. I found out what a lot of people in the sports media already knew. Joe was not nasty at all. He was perhaps the nicest person you could meet in the industry.

He was working with FoxSportsWest.com at this point, which meant he was coming to the games regularly again. Most horrifyingly, however, was that he was reading my stuff regularly. He liked it. He told me he loved my bio blip on the LAist website:

There is nothing to know about Jimmy. He is a filthy whore who has ODed on every drug possible. The fact that he has the will to wake up every morning is a miracle unto itself. His love for the Dodgers came back in 2001 when catcher Paul LoDuca hired him for a blowjob. He aspires to be that lady in the anti-smoking PSAs who smokes through her tracheotomy hole. He’s an Aries who enjoys crossword puzzles and calculus problems.

One day, I forget what the hell he were talking about, but I told him that my mom as a typical Korean owned a liquor store in North Long Beach. He asked me where exactly. I told him it was on the corner of Del Amo Blvd. and Long Beach Blvd. “Was it called ‘Del’s Liquor’ by any chance?” Yes, yes it was.

It turned out my mom used to be his liquor dealer!

I told my mom about his death on Friday, and she told me this nugget. One night my uncle was closing up the store. He was slowly doing his thing while Joe was in the store getting his booze. Somehow my uncle didn’t notice a 700-pound man still in the store and locked up. Joe realized he was locked in the store, so he found the telephone and dialed the police. They called my mom, and she came to get him out of the store. Yes. The Big Nasty got locked in my mom’s liquor store.

Sometimes life folds neatly upon itself, and I’m still astounded by this coincidence.

I know he had a tough time with his health over the last several years. Yet he kept on with his head down and kept trying to plow ahead.

I know he loved his wife Elizabeth and always felt he was a lucky man to have married her.

I know he loved the Lakers, the Dodgers, his friends, his fans.

I know I will miss the man.

I really wanted to like Maps to the Stars. David Cronenberg is a genius, and even some of his “misses” are compelling to watch. But Maps is a flat trite story that is saved by the performances of its actors.

The movie opens with AGATHA WEISS (Mia Wasikowska) asleep on a bus going from Jupiter, Florida returning to Los Angeles. Having been committed to an institution after setting her house on fire with her little brother (Evan Bird) drugged up and locked in his room, she returns to seemingly seek forgiveness and atonement as one of her steps to recovery. Thanks to a Twitter friendship with CARRIE FISHER (herself), she gets a job as a personal assistant (chore whore) for HAVANA SEGRAND (Julianne Moore) who is trying to reprise her dead mother CLARICE TAGGERT’s (Sarah Gadon) role in the cult classic “Stolen Waters.” Agatha’s brother BENJIE is now an enfant terrible child actor who has just gotten out of rehab whose father is a television psychologist DR. STAFFORD WEISS (John Cusack) and mother CHRISTINA (Olivia Williams) is his manager.

Bruce Wagner’s script wants to be a biting Hollywood satire with all the predictable ingredients. Pretty ingenue travels to Hollywood. Bitchy actress whose career is in decline. Self-absorbed psychologist. Child star who’s starting down the road of excess. Liberal drug use. All of this paved with the work of enablers.

What makes this aspect of the story remotely bearable are the performances of the actors. Julianne Moore won the best actress prize at Cannes last year for this role. While she could have taken it to camp, she injected some new blood into the role by channeling a little of Lindsay Lohan. There is a charming scene where Havana calls Agatha upstairs to her bathroom and asks her to go to Whole Foods to get some laxatives because she was “backed up because of the Vicodin.”

Wasikowska is the glue to this film as Agatha connects all the strands together. Her Agatha is alternately vulnerable, innocent, scheming and psychotic. Rather than being over the top, she hits the right notes in every scene.

What makes the film disappointing is the supernatural thread that is treated superficially. Havana is haunted by her mother. Benjie is haunted by a girl he visits in the hospital at the beginning of the film who dies shortly thereafter from non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Halfway in the movie when Agatha finally meets Benjie, she says, “Benjie. There’s this script. I can’t explain but you’re a part of this beautiful mythological script.” While Benjie thinks this is yet another script he’s being pitched, Maps probably would have been better if it focused more on that rather than a convenient plot device.

Speaking of plot devices, I’m still wondering why Towncar driver JEROME FONTANA (Robert Pattinson) was written into the script. Was his function only to serve as point of conflict between Havana and Agatha?

This could have been a much better movie, and with Cronenberg, I was expecting a lot better.

9. What are your musical tastes? Provide examples.

My musical tastes can be all over the place. Lately they’ve been a bit more experimental with COIL and EINSTURZENDE NEUBAUTEN. I’ve also been listening to a lot of industrial music like SKINNY PUPPY and FRONT LINE ASSEMBLY. The rock-and/or-roll does move me too, like SLEATER-KINNEY and PJ HARVEY. The only time I really touch pop music is when it really challenges society and genre like MADONNA’s Erotica or anything by DEPECHE MODE. Of course there were the 90’s-00’s indie bands like UNWOUND, MILEMARKER, DEERHOOF, LIARS. Oh and 80’s college rock like BUTTHOLE SURFERS, SONIC YOUTH, BIG BLACK, SACCHARINE TRUST, MINUTEMEN, HUSKER DU.

“FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCK!”

“FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCK!”