there is a large forest fire in glendale, to the north of my place. it was burning last night, and it was pretty fucking bizarre sitting out on my balcony watching a mountain on fire. although, in this time of rememberance and resolve, i must admit that i've really got nothing on my new york people re: fires near where you live and bizzare-ness.

and LA seems to catch on fire a lot. probably 4 times this summer i've been driving along the freeways and passed a brush fire that's belching up a lot of smoke and flame and maybe people will slow down a bit on the freeway but for the mostt prt noone bats an eye.

as promised, annotated mohawks:

this guy got the first mohawk of the weekend. he was really quiet, barely saying anything. he just nodded, sat down, got his haircut, then left.

this guy said he was "OP" -- original punk -- from back in '76-'77, and he just wanted a buzz. it would have been tough to give him a good mohawk, anyway.

this girl was great. she just wanted a touch-up. the guy in the picture was hanging out all day and helping us heckle people into getting mohawks. here's how she turned out.

the guy with the clippers in this picture was also there all day. he was pretty drunk by the time he started cutting peoples hair, and he was just taking wild swipes at people's heads. i was getting nervous, and you can see the worried looks on the faces of people in the background. he puked later.

this girl was sure her parents were going to kill here. she had a court date coming up sometime this week for a curfew violation. she wanted a checkerboard pattern on her head.

this guy was really serious about being punk rock and once he got his mohawk he ran around screaming shit in a british accent like "you're all blokes." he came back on sunday with a riding crop trying to spank people. i wonder what he'll be when he grows up. i actually do, that's not a sarcastic statement.

this guy was my crowning acheivement of the weekend: a "Mr. T" style mohawk, on a white guy no less. check out the results here and here. I was so fucking proud. his girlfriend was crying, though, and not because she was happy.

this girl was a real sweetheart. her hair was clean and it smelled really good. we chopped about a third of if off, just on one side, because that's what she wanted. look at her eyes in this picture. I want to marry her.

this kid's mom came with him and convinced him to get a mohawk. she made him get it, and he didn't really want one. which is weird because his two brothers were with him, and she asked if they wanted to get them, and they sad no, and she left it at that, but she harrassed this one till he did it.

tri-hawk. word.

she wanted a chelsea, that sexy skinhead girl haircut. you know a girl with a chelsea is going to be screaming dirty shit in bed. it's not a mohawk, but the spirit was there, and you could do it with clippers. she got hers in the end, although you can't really tell from this picture. sorry.

i don't know if you know anyone who, no matter how hard you try, will never, ever, look normal in a picture. kerri is one of those people. they're fun to know.

there was actually a point when there were like 10-15 cops standing around watching me cut hair and trying to convince each other to get mohawks. none of them did. that sucks.

monkey man, the guy who runs the pirate radio station in hollywood (pirate cat radio), was about to get a 'hawk, but he decided not to. which is a bad move, because he's rocking a faux-hawk right now, and i think that's a cop-out. also i've heard that the only people in NYC that rock the faux-hawk style these days are gay guys. i wish all the indie-rockers and pseudo-punks in LA knew that if they go to nyc rocking that style people would just think that they were h-mo's.


cute girls with mohawks.

i cut this guy's dreads off. so he went from being a hippie to one of those incubus-type guys. he still smokes pot though.

this guy almost got a mr. t but chickened out and had us keep cutting until he had nothing left on the side. bad move in my book, brah.

this girl got talked into her mohawk by her friend and basically deciided it was a bad idea the moment after i had started chppoing her hair off. which was bad because that meant she was fighting it the whole time in a passive-agressive way. and her hair was the dirtiest and clumpiest of anyone out there except, of course, the guy with the dreads. so it didn't turn out so great. it was her own damn fault. wash your hair.

this guy didn't want a mohawk, he was really, really proud of his mullet. it's amazing hou much mullet pride these folks have, the people who've been rocking mullets the whole time, because they're really excited that it's finally "hip" and that they're excited about being on the cutting edge and they don't realize that it's still a big joke and that we're not laughing with them. it was a great mullet, though.

there was a place down the street "selling" mullets (actually hair extentions) for $10. our mohawks were free. and does that mean that guys were walking around with hair extentions in their hair? what the fuck is with that?

last to be annotated is this new-wave fellow, who had great 'hawk hair, then spiked it up, took of his shirt, wrote on himself, then stood in front of the store, quite proud of himself.

ladies love mohawks.

free mohawks, ladies and gentlemen. free mohawks.

this happened at the sunset juction street fair in the los feliz/silverlake area of los angeles.

I'll give details and comments later. I might annotate each individual mohawk if I'm feeling ambitious.

for now, though, i do laundry.

why the fuck is the comments server always busy. that honks

free mohawk pics will be up tomorrow. i am exhausted.

i trust everyone had a good weekend.

also bizzare/opressive was, near the end of the show, he was talking about coming back, and staying for like 2 weeks or something, and this girl, in the back, is like "yeah this is a great club, isn't it" but for like 30 seconds, there was some back and forth, you know. and it was this very girl who 20 minutes earlier had climbed over the back wall of the club, like in the back, in the smoking area outside, it's 10 feet tall probably, and she climbed over it, and broke it, the wall, but got in.

i feel weird about going to see jonathan richman 3 nights in a row. especially because i ended up standing in approximately the same place at/near the front each night. like i was becoming one of those creepy guys that goes to shows alot and stares and is greasy and shit. i don't want to become one of those guys.

it was also a bizzare night. the other two shows were pretty laid back, fun, and not really really crowded or really really hot. which is weird becuse all 3 sold out.

anyway dengue fever opened. i think they set the bizzare/opressive tone for the evening:
1) just before they started to play, one of the afforementioned guys (greasy, wearing all black but not in a stylish way, more a stagehand/programmer sort of way, long hair to shoulders but badly balding, did i mention greasy?, alone, sweating, and with a multi-pack of earplus that he's had and reused since 1987) comes up and stands directly in between the group of 4 people I was part of, and we have to look at each other and sort of mouth to each other "hey should i come over there, do you want to come over here?" for a bit, and it took a while to decide my group of two would join the other group of two to this guy's right, on the side of the stage, and he deffinitely noticed, and i think he got offended in the quiet "i know i'm creepy but i didn't think i was so creepy that you'd move away" sort of way, but dude, if you're reading this, I'm sorry, but you were pretty creepy.

2. it was a pretty tall crowd. i have no way to explain this. maybe it's because the dengue fever bassist is like 6'8" and he's part of a tall pride support group that comes out to see him every show. i don't know. but i'm short, and i ended up directly behind one of 5 or 6 people there that were above 6 feet. tallness is not bad in this context, just weird.

3. the singer for dengue fever is an incredibly attractive vietnamese girl.. she looks like an erotic ceramic doll. maybe this is why the front 3 rows of the crowd were all sketchy guys by themselves. including one guy directly in front who must have taken 150 pictures during the 40 minute set. like this band was breaking news and he worked for life magazine and was going to get an award for photojournalism because one of those shots would be perfect. but no he was just creepy standing there going 'click''click''click''click''click''click''click''click''click''click' the entire fucking time.

so jonathan richman goes on. the weird/opressive atmosphere continues:

4. it's really hot....and really packed. so everyone's so close together that it's difficult to clap during or after songs or even get into it at all. so people are reduced to standing and staring. weirdly quiet, and opressively hot and quiet. at times.

5. one of the aforementioned tall guys behind me was alternately heckling jonathan or singing all the words pretty poorly to his songs. wierd that he'd do both, opressive because he did it the whole time, and it was also pretty quiet in there (see above, and also it was an acoustic performance in a small space so it was naturally quiet so people could hear, so everyone could hear him going off, and everyone knew that jonathan could hear him going off, and at least i felt bad for mr. richman, and i bet other people did too).

more later.

on saturday night a tarot card reader told me that i should keep writing. that that's where my money will come from and that i would get published. this was out of the blue and not in response to a particular question. she also told me that i would soon have an affair with a married woman with strawberry-blonde hair. and that it would be fun and i should go for it.

this was at a party where, as soon as i got there, there was a wet t-shirt contest, with 80% really, really unattractive contestants, and about halfway through the girl next to me turns around to the guy tending bar and screams "Dad! Don't Look!" It was his daughter's turn. another daughter of his was also in the contest. he turned away then as well.

new less-tits background, workers.

new fake blog.

new job? i just found out that the powers that be at the company i work for isn't going to hire anyone permanantly at my position for a while. I am a temp and my position is dues-payer/production-assistant/bottom of the totem pole. and they've been telling me since the end of june that they were going to hire me on. it would have meant a raise, which i need badly, and benefitts, which i can't even spell because i never have had them. so back looking for a new job i go. fuck.

still broke from vegas. this sucks.

tetris is so unrealistic.

so here are a few things.

first off if you click on the 'flying rebholz' picture below you go to the vegas pictures.

second, does my new post-apocalyptic-erotic background mean that you feel weird reading this page at work? if yes, let me know and I'll change it to something with less tits.

third, doesn't being a blockhead and misinterpreting your alarm clock usually lead to more sleep and being less responsible? i pulled into work this morning, then looked at the clock in my car. i was a full hour early, somehow. i checked my cell phone. yup, a full hour early. what the fuck. i don't remember doing anything weird to my alarm clock. . i just managed, somehow, to only look at the last two digits of every single clock i looked a this morning between getting up and pulling into the parking lot. at least i've gon from being a complete bum who's late for everything to a completel nucklehead who's really responsible. or something. i'm tired. i need more sleep, like say one more hour, and i'd be feeling great.

happy fucking monday, people.

what the fuck.

this morning: listened to slant 6's soda pop * rip off for the first time in a while while driving in to work.

this evening: going out to dinner with my dad

this weekend: gypsy party in long beach. it was at this annual party, last year, that i met the hedgehog (ron jeremy).

next weekend: sunset juction festival. 2 days in my hood featuring: sonic youth, mary wilson, sleater kinney, the lords of altamont, arlo, and max, matt and i giving out free mohawks in front of destroy all music on sunset.

the weekend after that: my friend dan's wedding in philly.

what the fuck? comments don't work. i'm on it people.

q:
a: not much. i was working most of the time. well, on saturday at least. came in to work at 9 am, left at 6:30. came in at 9 on sunday too, but then realized that my boss was there and left after an hour. you see, i came in for two reasons. the first is that i lost all my money last weekend in las vegas, playing roulette and casino war, and i desperately needed some overtime in order to make rent --

q:
a: yeah, but what can you do? it was a lot of fun at least. i had never been to vegas before. anyway so the second reason was that they're upgrading the dubbing room at work and in order to replace downtime during the week the powers that be decided to have the engineers come in on the weekend and do the real serious plugging and unplugging of all the wires, etc., on the weekend. and they needed someone to let these guys in and lock up when they were done. so i volunteered. i needed the money.

q:
a:ok, so my boss was there, and i can't waste time as efficiently when he's here, and i was tired, and i wanted to have some time off this weekend, so i got the hell out of there and called some friends (woke them up, sorry bout that) and tried to get them to come out to the beach. couldn't get them going, so i went back to the east side of town (20 min drive) to bother them and throw a football at them while they were sleeping in order to wake them up. which pissed my firend matt off because he was dreaming about this tank that he had which had been stolen by a crazed biker gang and he had come to a sit-down meeting to find out where his tank was so he could get it back and just then i throw a football at him and wake him up and he never finds out where his tank was, or gets it back.. this pissed him off for the rest of the day, this missing tank, and had i woken him up 5 minutes later I'm convinced my sunglasses would still be in one piece.

q:
a: yes, my sunglasses.

q:
a: well we eventually got to the beach at 2 or so, after numerous stops (getting food, renting a surfboard, juggling cars, picking people up, etc. just stupid shit). and we get to the beach and. actually what's cool is that i sucessfully stood up on a surfboard for the first time.

q:
a:thanks. i could have done better if the waves were better and i get some more practice, but still, i'm pretty proud of myself. and i'm a much more effective paddler now that I've been using my pull-up bar and excer-

q:
a: oh yeah, sorry. actually, i'm not sure how it happened. matt, still retaining some anger from the tank incident, decided it was time for sand wrastling or something, and started whipping me with my t-shirt. and i get pissed (i wasn't in the mood for sand wrastling. it's a rare mood, often brought on by tank-anger) and somehow my glasses come off and after the wrastling i pull them out of the sand and they're broken. which sucks, because i really liked those sunglasses.

q:
a:well, you know the cover of the 'best of the velvet underground & nico' cd where they're all wearing sunglasses? that has always been my personal benchmark for sunglasses cool. since i got that album, probably. when i buy sunglasses, that's what i want them to look like. i'm not the only one who has this particular sunglasses/album cover relationship, i'll have you know. i'm no freak. and only once had i gotten sunglasses more velvets-cool than these, and that was from a vendor on the streets of rome, and for $5. and that's never going to happen again. but these sunglasses, they were -- well, you know those old-folks, glaucoma wraparound glasses?

q:
a:ok, these were like those, but sort of updated for the millineum. sleeker. with actual frames, while retaining the full-eye protection from harmful uv rays. and they're polarized, so if you tilt your head from left to right certain things, like car windows and other polarized glass, change brightness. which i always liked. sort of monochrome-psychedellic. and so boxy-weird-velvets that i loved them.

q:
a: at the last k-mart before the entrance to joshua tree national park. i realized i had no sunglasses for 2 days caming, and i needed something, so i go in, and there they were. i was in love. but not in love enough to go back there for another pair.

q:
a: i forget. around $12.95. not much.

q:
a: actually, i did, a month and a half ago. it was during the walkmen tour. we stopped at a strip mall, for water and sundries, and walt, the keyboardist, comes out with almost the exact same pair.

q:
a: well, they were like the newer model or something. like i had the 2k1 model, and he scored the 2k2s. i guess he has similar sunglass taste. we also share an appreciation of dub reggae (augustus pablo, king tubby, etc.)

q:
a: actually, they probably do. but i haven't been to a k-mart in la for a long time. there just aren't too many. it's like "strip malls, strip malls everywhere, but no k-mart in sight." and i'm still pretty broke.

q:
a: yeah, but i won't get that check till friday, and I'm worried that my rent check will bounce, so I'm trying to spend as little money as possible. haven't you read my blog at all?

q:
a: that's right, i didn't ok here goes: no money spent friday or saturday, except gas used. then on sunday, $4 for a sausage sandwich, $2 for a pint of apple-cherry-pomagranate juice, $9 for dinner, then $3 for a late night flapjack. and i think i spent another $5 in there somewhere.

q:
a: yeah, but i had worked all weekend, raking in overtime, etc. it's better than the hundreds of dollars i blew in vegas the previous weekend. i'm not worried.

spent $9 on dinner wednesday, but this is acceptable because

a) it was out of $10 that matt owed me from vegas, not figured in to my rent calculations

and

b) it was at phillipes, a 94-year-old lunch-counter-type place downtown that originated the french dip sandwich.

tihis is acceptable, right?

i'm out of gas, and it costs damn near $60 to fill up the machine. fuck. there is a way to make this work.

liz found some of the old-school footprints i have left on the internet. can you? there will be some sort of prize for whomever unearths the most awkward or embarassing record of my early days on the internet (think 92-97) and puts a link to it in the comments section. good luck.