I was a candidate

I'm back.

not yet, at least

HST is back. I, alas, am not.

IV

pacific sunlight stretches through the room
and gives the plant nearby the door a glow
of holiness: it smiles through the gloom
this thursday eve'ning's newscasts have to show.
four shots across Korea's DMZ
did echo all the way to washington
but there the thun'drous noise happened to be
Prime Minister Blair's words with Bush the son.
Blair's oratory beautifully laid out
the Western duty to the modern world,
while gath'ring clouds of war again blot out
the sun that dries all bloody flags unfurled.
when comes the morning of this awful night,
too short the pause will be 'fore the next fight.

III

we're halfway through this week, but yet i feel
as if it's just begun, and that my days
will amble on forever 'fore a break
and i must find my rest in other ways.
our president, it seems, has lied to us,
and whether this misstep was purposeful,
administrative dull incompetance,
or freak snafu, i hope we'll learn in full.
one thing I know about our boy king george:
our press will just ignore his bolder lies.
inspectors?: "[Saddam] wouldn't let them in."
at this reporters barely showed surprise.
but UNMOVIC was in Iraq, no doubt,
and Bush's ultimatim forced them out.



"a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in."

I.V

tonight my DSL is down again --
not down, per se, but stumbling and lame,
i guess. in random fits and starts the lights
will blink, and i can check e-mail. It's good
to have a break sometimes from life's routines
and force one's self to get old business done.
i hate tv. i just won't watch the thing,
except for one program, the Daily Show.
it's on right now, and once it's done or at
the breaks I'll find a way to wrap this up.
my roommate's dog just died. I think she should
adopt a puppy to replace her dog.
the emptiness she feels will go away
like charcoal's black combusting into grey.

I

i guess i might just write my blog like this
a sonnet every day 'till the week's through
it might not be a sure-fire path to bliss
but 'tleast to try will give me tings ah do.
my weekend, not much diff'rent than the rest.
take friday: quiet, ate out with some friends,
we all watched movies (joe dirt was the best),
then with a raucous beer fight that night ends.
on saturday i spun the hottest wax --
new lumidee, pharell, and ODB;
the room, too warm from all the lech'rous acts,
the walls, the people: sweating, just like me.
the lotus festival in echo park
was beautiful on sunday, before it got dark

not even i can remember (the cocktails made me a little forgetful)

a) the internet is shit.
b) there will be some live songs on the CD version of the recoys album.
c) metalshop @ the viper room is a much more metal way of spending your monday evening than PMK @ arlene's.

ring ring, ha ha, hey hey

i hope each and every american reading this used their long weekend to take advantage of freedom.

some liberties I enjoyed:

-the freedom to DJ such a hot classic hip hop set at the 'party barn' friday night that some dude puked on the dance floor because he was dancing so hard.
-the freedom to participate in late sat. night cell phone shenanigans.
-the freedom to engage in friday afternoon slip-n-slide
-the right to sucessfully drink a beer while sliding-n-slipping down the slip-n-slide
-the freedom to sleep almost all day sunday

and a treat, rock and roll photos: Bedroom Walls and Seksu Roba @ silverlake lounge, 7/2/03.

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.

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.

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.

do the funky penguin pts. I & II

i'm starting to get over the jet lag. i had part two of my root canal this morning. it was great, or, it wasn't terrible and painful.

i'm spinning next thursday night in echo park. I want to put together an "america" set, since thursday night is the night before july 4th. some things in the crate so far:

'star spangled banner' - jimi, probably the rainbow bridge one, not woodstock
'the americans' - a canadian talks about how great americans are, "even though they've been kicked around a bit lately," over an orchestral march, off a 45 on westbound, early 70s?
"we the people" - the soul searchers
"funky president" - james brown
"american justice/fight" - scream

this is a bar without a dance floor, just cats playing pool and hanging out, so these dont have to be disco killers. the hipster vibe is heavy, though. it's hard to tell if it's 83 or 2k3 in this place sometimes, so i can't/won't play 'born in the usa,' because it'd be way too easy. but still: help! suggestions...I'm doing 12-close, and it's a holiday that friday.

nyc

wow. what a weekend. i'm still recovering. thanks to everyone who came out to the recoys show on friday. thanks to noah for putting me up most of the weekend. thanks to liz, alissa, pico, haylz, and jinners for having friendships with me where links count. it was great to see all of you. it's pretty silly that i don't live in new york.

there's a couple things going on behind the scenes that i can't talk about right now, but they will be good.

oh, yeah, my friend nuria is the literary editor of a tattoo/piercing fetish site, evilBADevil, and it just launched a few days ago. check it out. it makes my hoohah go woohah!

The Scrum

the scrum steals my point about governors vs. legislators becoming president. or makes the point that i was hinting at.

whoa

thanks to everyone who came out to the recoys record release party. it was the most people the band ever played for. here are some pictures from the show and a few from later that weekend. click the image below to go to the photo gallery:


some things to look for:
1) the recoys disappearing in some of the photos like marty mcfly in back to the future.
2) a profesional rodeo rider in a hugh mcintosh t-shirt.
3) max and I popping a bottle of Moet to celebrate the release of the record. attmittedly the bottle is 'independent record label' sized. we're still going to make the 'coys recoup it. suckers.
4) notorious rockers and rock-bloggers all up in the crowd shots.
5) the love. look for the love.