Electrocles-la-LAshing (Rock over Cali, pt.2)

Excuse me Angelenos, but how many of you woke up this morning with a re-newed Miss Kittin fetish, the sweat and the spilled milk from last night's Key Club gig soaking the sheets? Big woman ina grey mini-dress and thigh-high black leather stompers, "inhale" and "exhale" tatooed on either arm, dropping industrialized Berlin-born techno bombs, mixing like she's a seceret UR member, while singing songs of sex and strength...and having the capacity crowd of frat-kids, goths, gay boys, punters and puntettes singing right back at her. Thank goodness Larry Tee's ridiculous marketing campaign, which rounded up talent under a ridiculous musical tag that became a punchine before it had a definition, has only worked on the 4th estate gullibles. Consider the decks taken back, motherfuckers!

The Burning of Los Angeles

The first thing that made Nathanael West's The Day of the Locusts stand up and be counted was the inclusion of an oafish character named Homer Simpson in its pages. (Funny that, Groening's genius score drops a tenth of a point -- or should it rise? Hmmm?) But its permanent impression was left on me by the venom West sprayed in every direction of Thirties Hollywood Oasis, which is the novel's subject matter. Old Nate doesn't spare hisself in the process neither, though as the overseer he is much kinder when he's looking in the mirror than when he's observing the lower casts. I can see Hubert Selby injecting a little bit of West in his literary vein a few cycles later, when he started dragging already dirty Brooklynites through the gutters.

Day was one wise Cassandra's recommended read upon my move to Les La LA. Appreciated as another Amerlit pebble in an exponentially growing beach, its sense of entitlement and high air also made me kinda nuts. Whatever assumptions Day made about "people who come to die in California" that still make sense years later -- and don't get me wrong, it gets a lot of star-fucking, bottom-dwelling, blind, blond, illiterate ambition quite right, and I'm gonna steal from it for years to come -- the novel also betrays Left Coast Fitzgerald's hollow, how-high self-esteem. It's like what Fox News always accuses Northeast liberals of being -- without also mentioning that people in the red states are shiningly, happily ignorant -- squeezed into 200 page album of horrid human behavior. Lacking any real empathy but feeling like his prankish honesty with himself is a saving grace (Not!), the narrator/artist seeks to be the documentor of his doomed, scummy mates. His detachment's mirrored in the author's, as though the mansion on the hill is all in the mind, and he doesn't have to interact with the valley-dwellers.

Which it, to some degree, is, and he doesn't, I guess. But I still felt like I was prosecuting myself when reading the book and getting mad at it. I mean ... jeez, just read the tone of this blog [still in development, ed.]. So, maybe, 6 months in, it's re-evaluation time? Continue to skewer the dim bizzers and hipsterati, the Valley residents impervious to their own desperate states, the overachievers who've sold the soul but think it reappears every time the tie is unwound? Or admit that you have joined them, in a state that is different than the one you left. For better or worse, but certainly not til death do us part.

Palms on my Lawn

The history of palm trees in the Los Angeles valley, and their dire prognosis.

This Land is My LAnd

Freedom weekends have the free will to last three days. Sometimes four. If you're free from the stresses of labor, they last even longer. Though you may end up feeling not nearly as free to feel celebratory.

My first July 4th on the Left Coast, and I was getting all nationalistic, ready to fly my freak flag, and expose myself to more explosions in the sky than these immigrant eyes have simultaneously beheld (on my own rooftop, no less). This not-quite overdose of red, white & blue kool-aid was played out in three acts, and may have been caused by the bad taste Michael Moore's liberal pornography left on my tongue the night before. (Good intentions not being enough to save pissed off grannies and grieving mothers from resembling propoganda messengers.) Fear not: the colors were foreign, faded, filled fith frivolousity...

Sky Blue: "Hellas! Go-o-o-o-o-o-L! Hellas!"
You may have heard: the Greeks won Euro 2004, a futbol tournament which monopolized most of my June gloom mornings. And, in fact, the mid-day of L'America's 228th anniversary was spent in brain-lock-down, focused on the sporting rites of the Old Continent. (At first) hoping the overachieving Hellenes weren't handed their cleats and jocks by Portugal -- (then) caffeinatedly hoping that their lone goal would stand. It did, and was deserving, creative well beyond the sports-page reviews, and the biggest international team-sporting upset since Carter's hockey team beat Brezhnev's in the media battle for Whose Afghanistan is it Anyway? (No one at the BBC had Al MIchaels' old script, cause Disney copyrighted it .) At 2pm, I wasn't thinking hot dogs and apple pie, so much as souvlaki -- but guide-less and clueless to the location of Les La LA's Greektown...

Fleshy Pink Areola: "In the Groodies of the Standard (Downtown)"
Instead, Katie G and I consumed booze by the rooftop pool of a swank hotel, which was celebrating Freedom Weekend by encouraging its omnipresent media-ratti guests and hangers-on to go let it all hang out...errr, waist-up. Finally gave me the chance to study up on another famed LA past-time: real or fake? "Freedom from" made this country great; "freedom to" has made its philosophic relevance a faint glimpse (or maybe even a sham). Dirty Dirty Deitz played tech'd up versions of hits by late-century masters, the tits flapped with design-perfect (nee, Matrix-like) circumferance, and the muscle-bound dork with the red, doo-rag headband and the Born in the USA jacket made us laugh. The tyranny of the righteous, it seems, has seeped down from the DC Federales to the fawnish, pop culture mouth-pieces who mimic them even as they vote the other way, culminating in fun (no fun!) with $10 vodka/rocks. At least there's the reliably good pours.

Foggy Gray-White of Smoke: "I'm Getting Used to it Now"
So, rather than drive into the hills to sweat the Hollywood Bowl from above, KG and I decided to join our chiller-than-comatose neighbors on the roof, and see what we can find in the night-time sky. The ensuing visuals were Les La LA to a fault. No single fireworks display up close, but dozens scattered on the horizons, in, yes, a veritable sprawl. I wish I could say, "I love the smell of gun-powder in the evening," but that'd be a lie.

July 4th PS: Michael Ignatieff on America's promise and American dellusions, hysterics not included.

Home entertainment PPS: Video choice for the weekend, Katie's introduction to The Kingdom .

LA Metro PPPS: So I took LA's version of the subway downtown to MOCA on Thursday 7/1 -- to see Olympia, WA ambient, quadro-delicists Growing play at the Minimalism show -- and it acts an awful lot like Washington DC's. Except for the oh-so-Euro lack of turnstyles, a spatial freedom that forces every rider into adhering to an honor code enforced by a city whose very existance and thirst-quenching survival is based on doing an end-around honor.