Big D's younger brother is a man of few words so when he speaks, the room quiets and settles onto him. One evening several years ago while the room was flipping through channels, Young Bro stated, "Celine Dion is the perfect woman."
But Heart Rocks!
Hey M, the next time your in town we so have to K this song. I promise to try to not be sick and lack voice and be dripping snot.
Despite her immense wealth and privilege, I feel bad for Paris Hilton. She is not entirely a monster of her own making. Certainly, she contributed to her persona, but her parents are there every step of the way. Did they cut off her monthly check when the sex tape surfaced or the tape of her getting high and using the big N? Oh hell no they didn't. And you know why? They are participants in her celebrity. They feed off of it as much as the paparazzi and you and me. Did you see how her daddy jumped the seat of the SUV when she was released from jail so Paris could have the good tabloid view or how her mother rolled down the window so all the sleazy photographers could get their shot in?
An acquaintance of mine taught Paris in middle school. She told to me that at one point during the year, she called Kathy Hilton into a conference because Paris was not doing any work required for the class. She said that Kathy responded that Paris would be making money off her looks and not her brains. And then, at sixteen her parents apparently condoned her moving to NY to be a model. So I believe Paris when she says she wants to drop the dumb blonde act. The problem is that behind the dumb blonde is just another dumb blonde--and she can thank her parents for that.
Al Sharpton recently met with the Los Angeles County Sheriff to discuss his concerns that Paris Hilton is getting special treatment in jail. Of course she is getting special treatment in jail--she is a celebrity and this is Hollywood, baby. This is not about race, it's about class, wealth, privilege, and the power of celebrity. In this town, every male celebrity is allowed one murder--it's the rules. And we are worried about the special treatment Paris gets? Wow, I wonder how the families of these women feel: 
Back in the seventies, the son of sam killer had fearful brown-haired women of NY changing their hair color to avoid being a target. So my suggestion, my fellow Los Angeles blondies, next time any one of us dates a celebrity--we must dye our hair brown before strapping on the Manolo's and heading out the door. We need to look out for each other because the law certainly won't.
To help out my dear friend Bee, I spent Friday evening watching the Dewster who lives on the Venice Canals. Venice Beach is without a doubt, my favorite place on this here planet. So after a couple of weekends chocked full of noisy gangsta pounding base in which I had to call the police that never arrive to my corner of Eagle Rock, I was more than happy to spend an evening on the quiet quiet quiet canals. But the Dewster (a dog did I mention that) is a mess. He is happy to see you when you arrive, happy to have a walk, happy to have dinner---but then he gets angry. Like Jekyll and Hyde angry. Oh, he has some sort of skin condition and wants to be itched itched itched. So, he starts barking at you, not a friendly bark, mind you. A I want to kill you bark. Then you must ignore him until he falls asleep. Then you try to get out alive in the morning (before stopping in at the French Market Cafe on Abbott Kinney--a little piece of paradise in a very french/ industrial sort of way).
So after the much needed respite from the 'hood, Big D and I spent a relatively quiet ER day out in our new Target gazebo followed by a side trip to Los Feliz to eat some PINKBERRY and walk little M De Cuba around the Silverlake reservoir. It was pretty wonderful despite the argument we had because Big D had me playing chicken to get back to the car rather than walking a few extra steps to the crosswalk to be all proper and stuff.
This was followed by what I really want to post about which is Marty's in Highland Park. Marty's is the new bar/restaurant of Rudy Martinez who I think just may be a genius and made a simple menu with most of my favorite comfort foods on it--mac n cheese and caprese salad, shoestring sweet potato fries and big D's Kobe burger. And washed down with dirty martinis. Rudy Martinez deserves an award for not only thinking outside the box by opening a zen like bar in Highland Park (not to mention a sushi restaurant in Eagle Rock) but also for reminding us all that we are only as ghetto as the ghettos in our own heads.
http://www.mia-sushi.com/
When I envision a radical I imagine some paranoid guy living out in the backwoods of Montana, stashing cans of food and piling up machine guns, making homemade bombs in his basement to send through the mail to the folks that are "after him" and pacing impatiently for the end of the world. However, I am wrong. A radical individual is someone who thinks striving for world peace is the correct course of action for humanity. A radical believes that diplomacy should be policy. A radical wants to be educated about world cultures and history and use debate, communication, and discourse as a means to solving the global issues.
Bill Maher Interviews Dennis Kucinich (04/27/07)
In other news, cause you know how I love me some urban renewal, blogdowntown, one of my favorite blogs about Los Angeles, is quoted in an article about downtown Los Angeles by Susan Pigg, a travel writer from the Toronto Star.
One of my least favorite slogans: Guns Don't Kill People, People Kill People. When I hear this moronic statement I want to kill someone, with a gun. No not really. I want to use my fists--- no wait I'm not very strong---I'll use my psychic powers---oh wait I don't have those either. Oh well, I don't really want to kill anyone anyway. But if I did want to kill someone it sure is comforting to know that I can quickly purchase a gun, isn't it?
If you want to have a gun have a gun...but unless you need to kill something or someone really fast you shouldn't be worried about gun control. Well, unless there is something on your record that should prevent you from obtaining a gun...like your a psycho. Or, maybe you are just an idiot and actually believe in the slippery slope (oh but then you probably also believe that the US invaded Iraq to fight terrorism).This was forwarded to me as an e-mail and I think it is important...
Friday, April 20, 2007
Poetry is Dangerous by Kazim Ali
On April 19, after a day of teaching classes at Shippensburg University, I went out to my car and grabbed a box of old poetry manuscripts from the front seat of my little white beetle and carried it across the street and put it next to the trashcan outside Wright Hall. The poems were from poetry contests I had been judging and the box was heavy. I had previously left my recycling boxes there and they were always picked up and taken away by the trash department.
A young man from ROTC was watching me as I got into my car and drove away. I thought he was looking at my car which has black flower decals and sometimes inspires strange looks. I later discovered that I, in my dark skin, am sometimes not even a person to the people who look at me. Instead, in spite of my peacefulness, my committed opposition to all aggression and war, I am a threat by my very existence, a threat just living in the world as a Muslim body.
Upon my departure, he called the local police department and told them a man of Middle Eastern descent driving a heavily decaled white beetle without of state plates and no campus parking sticker had just placed a box next to the trash can. My car has NY plates, but he got the rest of it wrong. I have two stickers on my car. One is my highly visible faculty parking sticker and the other, which I just don't have the heart to take off these days, says "Kerry/Edwards:For a Stronger America."
Because of my recycling the bomb squad came, the state police came. Because of my recycling buildings were evacuated, classes were canceled, campus was closed. No. Not because of my recycling. Because of my dark body. No. Not because of my dark body. Because of his fear. Because of the way he saw me. Because of the culture of fear, mistrust, hatred, and suspicion that is carefully cultivated in the media, by the government, by people who claim to want to keep us 'safe.'
These are the days of orange alert, school lock-downs,and endless war. We are preparing for it, training for it, looking for it, and so of course, in the most innocuous of places-a professor wanting to hurry home, hefting his box of discarded poetry-we find it.
That man in the parking lot didn't even see me. He saw my darkness. He saw my Middle Eastern descent. Ironic because though my grandfathers came from Egypt, I am Indian, a South Asian, and could never be mistaken fora Middle Eastern man by anyone who'd ever met one.
One of my colleagues was in the gathering crowd,trying to figure out what had happened. She heard my description-a Middle Eastern man driving a white beetle with out of state plates-and knew immediately they were talking about me and realized that the box must have been manuscripts I was discarding. She approached them and told them I was a professor on thefaculty there. Immediately the campus police officer said, "What country is he from?"
"What country is he from?!" she yelled, indignant.
"Ma'am, you are associated with the suspect. You need to step away and lower your voice," he told her.
At some length several of my faculty colleagues were able to get through to the police and get me on a cellphone where I explained to the university president and then to the state police that the box contained old poetry manuscripts that needed to be recycled. The police officer told me that in the current climate I needed to be more careful about how I behaved. "When I recycle?"I asked.
The university president appreciated my distress about the situation but denied that the call had anything to do with my race or ethnic background. The spokesperson of the university called it an "honest mistake," not referring to the young man from ROTC giving in to his worst instincts and calling the police but referring to me who made the mistake of being dark-skinned and putting my recycling next to the trashcan.
The university's bizarrely minimal statement lets everyone know that the "suspicious package" beside the trashcan ended up being, indeed, trash. It goes on to say, "We appreciate your cooperation during the incident and remind everyone that safety is a joint effort by all members of the campus community.
"What does that community mean to me, a person who has to walk by the ROTC offices every day on my way to my own office just down the hall-who was watched, noted,and reported, all in a day's work? Today we gave in willingly and whole-heartedly to a culture of fear and blaming and profiling. It is deemed perfectly appropriate behavior to spy on one another and police one another and report on one another. Such behaviors exist most strongly in closed and undemocratic and fascist societies.
The university report does not mention the root cause of the alarm. That package became "suspicious" because of who was holding it, who put it down, who droveaway. Me. It was poetry, I kept insisting to the state policeman who was questioning me on the phone. It was poetry I was putting out to be recycled.
My body exists politically in a way I can not prevent. For a moment today, without even knowing it, driving away from campus in my little beetle, exhausted after a day of teaching, listening to Justin Timberlake on the radio, I ceased to be a person when a man I had never met looked straight through me and saw the violence in his own heart.
http://www.kazimali.com/
I work at a school. I live near a school. I spent most of my life in school. My opinion of school is this...schools should be considered the temples of our society and the ground around them should be considered sacred. It seems, at least in Los Angeles, that living near a school is considered a detriment, the bad part of town. My boss's neighbor was recently robbed. When I said, "but you live in such a nice neighborhood" she responded, "Yeah but we are close to (name withheld) high school" to which I responded, "oh".
I am not sure exactly how this connects to the massacre at Virginia Tech only to say that my heart hurts for the families, for the school, for everyone who works or lives near this school.
My sister's husband is a Virginia Tech alumnus. She said he knew those buildings and he said "it was such a peaceful place."
...just don't preface it with a racial slur cause then it's not acceptable. I can bet you, oh, say my house, that CBS would not have fired Don Imus from his radio show if he had merely called the Rutgers Basketball Team "ho's", a term I hear from radio, TV, and movies on a daily basis. That is because there is no women's issue leader ala Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson, to invoke public outrage on behalf of women that can sway the likes of Procter & Gamble to pull advertising from the likes of Imus, Leykis, etc.
This could be because we as women are ambivalent about the use of derogatory terms used in the mainstream media to describe women. In fact the overt misogyny in mainstream media may have something to do with female appropriation of the language of the oppressor--an ideology that become very popular in the 90's. Perhaps as we became more comfortable as women referring to ourselves as dirty whores, bitches, pussy posses, and even cunts (I have to admit it felt pretty powerful to deflate these words through usage) we also became more comfortable hearing them from the media to describe us--now are we doubly bruised?
Furthermore, women's groups tend to be, like I am, intensely pro freedom of speech. Having fought so hard for our voices to be heard and accounted for, it is antithetical to the women's movement to squelch others. However, public opinion does have the power to dictate public discourse and I often wonder, where is our Al Sharpton, our Jesse Jackson...would anyone have heard this Imus comment or cared if he had said "viking ho's" or "giant bitches"?
Yes, two youtubes in a row makes me a bit of a cheeseout bloggie, but I love that this exposes how totally lame and demeaning the lyrics of this song are. It's something you don't really think about when it's set to it's limpy dancebeat.
I've never been much of an Alanis Morisette fan for several reasons:
Aside from that I think this is funny even if it is in a slightly weird alish sort of way.
Alanis Morisette Video for Fergie's My Humps
Do you ever hear kids sing pop songs and cringe a little at the words that come out of their mouths as they obliviously sing their little hearts out? Moms around the country must draw their fingernails into their minivan seat cushions every time they hear their daughters sing along to My Humps.
Bill O'Reilly cuts mic of US Colonel Ann Wright
Is it just me or is he getting crazier by the minute? Anyway, love to see him get his ass kicked by a woman.
There's a lot of writing as of late about Los Angeles as the center of the cultural universe. These people aren't talking about just pop culture such as the possibility of Paris Hilton going to jail for DUI or Winona Ryder trying to make a comeback. Los Angeles has become the art mecca of the 21st century--where NY and everywhere else look to to see what's goin' on, so to speak. I can dig it, I get, and I've been gettin' it since I moved here in '97. Here are a few recent tidbits...
Werner Herzog (from this Esquire article)
Los Angeles is the city with the most substance in the United States--cultural substance. There is a competition between New York and Los Angeles, but New York only consumes culture and borrows it from Europe. Things get done in Los Angeles.
Caryn Coleman (from this abLA article)
Sometimes I read articles on the art world and, in particular, Los Angeles that make me wonder if I'm living on a totally different art world planet than the people writing or quoted in the piece. Last week there were two such things that made me feel this way...
On Artforum.com's diary Painting the Town by Andrew Berardini, says:
Los Angeles loves to hate painters—whether homegrown or imported.Really???? I don't think I've ever had that conversation or if that opinion (if partially true) is strong enough in LA to make such a bold statement.
And then the New York Times had the article The Art’s Here. Where’s the Crowd? about LA art scene (downtown, the Hammer, you know the drill) and Gary Garrels is quoted as saying:
“The rest of the world is promoting the city as well or better than L.A. does,” said Gary Garrels, the chief curator at the Hammer Museum, who moved here two years ago from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “All of the curators and galleries that are dynamic are coming to Los Angeles and looking at what’s going on here.”Ok, so I'll admit that I actually do a bit more business with people on the east coast than in LA sometimes but I can't imagine that the rest of the world is promoting LA as much as LA is let alone more. I mean, even this NYT article is about a year after the fact.
You've probably already read about Thomas and Nancy Andrews. They went to a fertility clinic for in-vitro fertilization treatments and ended up with a baby that was too dark for their liking and DNA tests confirmed that the baby, now a toddler, was not the biological child of Thomas. While I totally understand that they did not get the service that the clinic was supposed to have provided and it seems perfectly legit to sue in this situation, I am bugged by the overt racism of their complaint. They worry that their "daughter will be the object of scorn and ridicule by other children, both in school and as she grows up." I'm not sure I understand this. Ridiculed because she is half African American? Ridiculed because she is half Dominican? Ridiculed because she is darker than her sister (who she looks just like, in my meager opinion)? I'm not sure these are the right people to raise this child.
I know this is not a PC statement, but maybe not everyone should be parents. I acknowledge that we live in a if a want it, and I can afford to buy it, then I have the right to have it culture, but maybe, just maybe, snafus like this are a little nudge from the universe reminding us who really is boss. I mean these people had a beautiful, healthy baby. There are so many parents who look to adoption after infertility and I wonder if another couple could give this innocent child the unconditional love that she deserves. Just a thought.
On a weird side note, their attorney's name is Howard J. Stern--I know, there are probably a lot of Howard, Initial something, Stern lawyers out there, but I still think its weird in a funny kind of way.
I have a love/hate relationship with our mass-marketed, tie-in obsessed, hyper-commercialized media culture.
On the love side--John Water's 'Til Death Do Us Part. Remember when he was so underground, it was almost taboo to openly admit you found him amusing or liked his movies? Now he is the shining star of Court TV. This is the weird part, Big D and I have been OBSESSED with Forensic Files for about a year--and then John Waters comes along with this totally campy murder drama show where he plays the "groom reaper" a kinda Vincent Pricesque character that appears throughout each episode--and I'm thinking, I must be getting old because no corporation used to market to me, the tail end of the gen-x nobody nothing group. And now here I am watching several good murder shows (and not that crappy law and order shit my parents and every other baby boomer consume like lines of coke spread out on the TV screen). So even though I no longer have Six Feet Under, I now have Dexter, Showtime's mind-fuck serial killer show, and Forensic Files (love this shit, love it) and 'Til Death do us Part, to fulfill my death fascination TV, no make that TIVO experience.
On the hate side--Anything Paul McCartney. He is such a has been--even before the turkey neck idiot married the pegleg. I wish he would just go away. I'm perfectly fine with Starbucks though I think Pete's is better as far as a chain is concerned. But I always tend to set celebrities up against each other and I'm on the John Lennon side. And, aside from that, I think of Bob Dylan was the true music innovator in the pop/rock genre of the previous century. However, I did love The Beatles Love Songs album (cassette to be exact). So, if this merger doesn't help me download Beatles on i-tunes then I frankly don't give two shits about it.
