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12~18~01
The cars have been carefully
stowed away in locations where the rampant ticketing ticketers known as
the parking police can't justifiably touch them. Why? We're
off to Maine tomorrow, bright and too damn early, and if the cars are left
unattended on the street until next year, well, there'd be hell to pay.
There'd be tickets, there'd be towing, there'd be impounding (that's legal
grand theft auto performed by the state by the way) and that all adds up
to a handbag full of hell. The last time the police stole my car
was in Madison back in 1998. I paid the tickets, yes indeed, to avoid
a warrant, but I let the pigs keep the yellow hatch-backed piece of S-H-I-T
since I had no valuables in it unless, that is, you have a thing for dirty
undies. Which, I know, some people do, and most of them are probably
cops.
I utilized free passes
to the Viper Room last night, damaging myself thoroughly. The L.A.
Guns were playing upstairs, I'm not sure if anyone in the band was an original
member, but regardless, I think I enjoyed myself. It's really hard
to say do to the state I was in. The clientele are mostly feculant
gobs who shouldn't be given the time of day, and I made sure not to give
it to them. The customers break down into two categories: creepy
stalkers looking for bisexual swinging couples and cocaine addled lunatics.
I prefer the latter, but it's like choosing between Bush and Gore really.
The Metal radio show will begin again on January fourth at 8pm and follow
every Thursday thereafter. The Viper Room wants their Metal Club,
CAMARO, advertised on the air so they're giving the station free passes
to hand out to the winners of whatever lame contests we stage.
Well, Kirsten bought
me the first season of the Simpsons on DVD so I don't know what I'm doing
wasting my time writing when there's TV to be watched. The site will
resume, in full, next year when Kirsten's vacation comes to a close and
her teaching of South Central Middle Schoolers starts anew. Until
then, have a Merry whatever the hell it is you celebrate. Okay?
12~12~01
Fast: Day two
Oddly enough I'm not
hungry. Yes, I want to eat, but not out of hunger pangs as I expected.
Primarily, I want to eat because my brain feels bogged down, sluggish and
out of pace with the, um, (not the rest of the world), but just the usual
pace it has set for itself. The melancholy slowness of my mind could
also be caused by my recent defecit in writing output as opposed to my
mini-fast. I do want to pick up the threads of my everyday writing
habit where ever I left them off some time ago, but there always seems
to be a distraction. This lack of writing is an episodic occurence,
the longest single episode being the entire time I was living in Madison
when my literary output slowed to a trickle. Of course, during the
time of that trickle I did get the basic idea behind one of my screenplays.
In that sense the diminutive stream of my imagination was a good thing;
in another sense it was downright terrible since I was in a continuous
funk along with what always seemed to me to be nigh 100% of the rest of
the city's inhabitants. It begs the question as to if Madison is
a breeding ground for depression? Quite possibly, but I do remember
feeling pretty good once or twice.
12~11~01
"Denuding," now that's
a nice one to plant on a double letter score, plus of course the bonus
fifty. Pretty much cinched the game for me right there, it did.
I'm on a little fast
and/or cleansing (depending on how you define the terms) that I have laid
out no particular expectations for. I mix forty ounces of hot water
with the juice from one whole squeezed lemon, eight table spoons of grade
B maple syrup and, here's the topper, as much cayenne pepper as tolerable.
I take this mixture and drink it down, twice a day, for as many days as
I can handle it, which will probably be one, but who knows. The drink
itself isn't all that bad. This is the second time I've tried the
concoction; the first however had nothing to do with a fast; it sure is
delicious with vodka. The vodka is detectable in the mix when the amount
of vodka reaches between 35 to 40 percent of the drink.
Today is a good day for
the fast since I misbehaved yesterday and sucked down a Pink's chili dog
with kraut and an entire chili cheese fries. When this shit hits
the exit it'll be none too pretty. Kirsten and I went down to the famed
hot
dog vending corner of LaBrea and Melrose to meet up with the Juggler and
Co. We seated ourselves around one of the tables outside, under a
big red umbrella, adjacent to the Pink's valet parking lot. In the
parking lot a nasty shrill voiced man started harassing the valet who needs
to take your keys if you park somebody else in which is precisely what
the distasteful gentlemen holding an ugly dome headed chihuahua, and wearing
a red wind breaker, broad wrap around sun glasses and shorts that exposed
his tattoos had done. But this guy sure as shit didn't want to hand
over his keys. In fact he became quite hostile and took up an adament
anti-key-handing-over agenda, using the small hot dog stand's parking lot
as his soap box. He was incensed that this was the way the world
worked. He spat, muttered and screamed. He wasn't going to
let this go by without making a big jackass of himself, no sir.
"Oh what do you do?"
he asked the valet. "You park fucking cars you pathetic piece of
shit. Why don't you get a real job? This is America.
This is America! Get a real fucking job you loser!"
I feel bad and weak that
I didn't knock the son of a bitch on his ass and kick his racist teeth
straight down his bigoted throat. But I was worried that that was
exactly what the miserable cock sucker was looking for judging by the way
he kept hounding the poor valet, staying right in the guys face and following
him around the parking lot. The valet didn't stand up for himself,
and didn't take that first swing the racist shit was seeking, but he probably
knew the score on that one too.
It was the Juggler who
recognized the jerk. He recognized the voice that screamed, "Don't
treat me like a fucking child! Don't tell me where to park my car!,"
he recognized the tattoos and the chihuahua dog too. The asshole
was positively I.D.'d as Puck from The Real World. How about that?
12~06~01
 The
Nicotines
Burn It Down
Nicotine Records
If musical influences
are like fathers creating a host of progeny to carry on in their name,
then Burn It Down by The Nicotines is a fiery bastard of an album
seeking to slit its many fathers’ throats and rifle the corpses over for
pocket change so they can buy their whore of a mother for a quick once
in. But who are these slain influences? One could chart the
courses of the influences from all over the map; their convergence upon
The Nicotines having a wide variety of affects from the brilliant, oft
discordant and creepy, soloing to the passionate, hoarsely shouted and
sung vocals. The Nicotines are their own machine.
Burn It Down is
the band’s first effort. Unlike many first outings, this one has
not skimped on production values. Recorded by Tim Mac (sound man
on the road for Nashville Pussy) who gave the album a clean, polished sound
that is absolutely necessary in order to capture the many minor elaborations
and decorative dressings thrown into the songs’ guitar arrangements.
But that isn’t to say the band has a nice clean sound, the songs themselves
have a layer of L.A. street grime no producer could cover up; reeking of
sleaze, pathos, pity and daring their attitude towards music comes strongly
across with a dangerous passion not commonly found in today’s rock scene.
I smell Gothic rock without
the idiotic pretensions, Glam Rock without the boners and ignorance, punk
unafraid of its own self-afflicted restraints, jazz seeking order, compositions
unafraid of the jam and the jam fearing not structure and direction.
This is an album to seek
out; you’re not going to find it at the Virgin Mega Center. To quote
Steve Tulipana from Season to Risk in last month’s Modern Fix interview,
“There needs to be people who seek out culture and art and not just buy
what’s easy to get. If you care about modern culture, you are going
to have to seek it out if it has any worth or value.” Well, here’s
your chance, and here’s a fucking road map: www.thenicotines.com
Review taken from forthcoming
issue of Modern Fix.
12~04~01
True to slacker form
I haven't been jotting down word one of anything. I wanted to take
a break from this daily journalizing, and ostensibly, judging by last month's
number of entries, it's evident I have been taking that break. However,
there was supposed to be a point to laying off this clodhopperish cockamamie
balderdash and that point was precisely to serve up a different sort of
spuming nonsense, namely short fiction or quite possibly another script.
But every time I set about getting down to the nitty gritty, I create a
diversion. This time the diversion is a head cold, even though, now
follow me here, I don't actually believe I have a cold. Are you getting
this? I think I'm becoming a hypochondriac for the express purpose
of avoiding doing that which I very strongly want to do. My brain
is finding pathways around my need to write by putting forth diversions
both sublimely subtle and as ostentatious as a baroque homosexual choir.
Speaking of Baroque Homosexual choirs, Green Bay plays tonight and I'm
not about to let a make believe rhinoviral attack divert from my enjoyment
of the game as it is diverting me from engaging in any true writing.
I've noted that's been
quite sometime since I've posted any pictures of friends or random Los
Angelean crap so, in lieu of any formal inditing, here's a couple of pictures.
Anthony Wayne enjoys
Scot's Turkey day feast.
Old man Scot terrorizes
the masses with a crooked steel phallus on his 30th.
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