Thursday, July 03, 2003

404 for the 4th

stop me if you've seen this already....
here's a game: go to google, enter "weapons of mass destruction", and press the "I'm feeling lucky" button. Clever......

come see me spin psych rock, blues, gospel, and soul 45s in echo park tonight. e-mail me for the info/address. it's ok if i don't know you. you're still invited.

tomorrow, at the party barn, there is a party. if you know what that means, you are welcome to do it up for america. if you don't know what that means, don't get caught sleepin'. superhits of the 80's for the ladies, and damn, my lumidee record isn't here yet (f UPS ground) but it'll get spicy nonetheless.

Wednesday, July 02, 2003

f a title

from walls all around my office the airbrushed faces of celebrities (made up as pirates, rock stars, and revolutionaries) stare out at me from movie posters. Each movie star looks directly at me, like a dead uncle from a haunted oil painting. The men on the posters want to fight or tell me a bit of hidden wisdom, depending on their age. The women want to fuck me, or make love to me, depending on their character. There is a strict formula for these one-sheets. I have a poster on the cramped wall of the closet that I work in, but there aren't any people on it. It's for the movie Volcano.

Some of you might remember the movie Volcano. It was a Tommy Lee Jones "vehicle" about, remarkably enough, a volcano that erupts under Los Angeles. The great thing about the movie is that the volcano destroys the Beverly Center, a truly hideous mall in West Hollywood, in the last 10 minutes of the film. I hate the Beverly Center. There are two great things about the poster. the first is that no one is staring out at me, as it shows a wide shot of Los Angeles being engulfed in lava, and the second is that LA doesn't really look like the city on the poster. I mean, it's got our landmarks, but the city just doesn't look like the one on the poster. You can't see the Capitol building, the Hollywood Sign, and downtown at once from the north. The 101 doesn't cut through them like that. It's just so wrong it's fun.

Also, slate's Adam Kirsch has this article about the lack of great writing about los angeles. He mentions, citing Mike Davis' numbers, that since 1909, there have been 138 books or movies that "have dealt with the destruction of the city by fire, flood, earthquake, nuclear holocaust, or alien invasion." It's not that bad.

Tuesday, July 01, 2003

at least it's an ethos

I looked out my balcony just now and saw the big dipper sitting in the sky between the treeline and the bottom of the balcony above me. I'm exhausted. But I need to mention a few things.

The first is that Howard Dean just raised almost $4 million dollars in 9 days, $3 million of that over the internet. The truly bizzare line from his campaign site: "he [Dean] knows we made $7 million and will blog shortly from the car." The democratic race is now looking like a 3-way contest between Dean, Kerry, and Leiberman, with Edwards next to out of it already and the other 5 already footnotes to the campaign. And the frontrunner is a blogger.

The second thing I want to mention is that I'm going to try and keep politics off Affordable Justice for most of the rest of the campaign. Instead of talking about it here, I plan to write a weekly column about the presidential campaign for The Realist, the online journal of Realistic Records. It hasn't launched yet -- that's probably a few weeks away. If you've checked out some of the links over on the left, many of the people writing for the realist will be familiar to you. Hopefully it'll give all of us a chance to get focused and write some longer-form articles. Hopefully it'll be interesting.