| Podcast #3: Pure Moods 7 |
[subscribe to the podcast in iTunes] Right click and save to download Podcast #3 Greetings to the people of cyberspace. I’ve been working a lot lately, whoring myself out for the patriarchy on Bratz: The Movie, partying with a bunch of bland white kids and The Black Eyed Peas for Pepsi and Doritos, and facing extreme temperatures for Rob Zombie’s blasphemous remake of Halloween. The downside to all that surreal nonsense is that I’ve hardly had time to update my blog! Well, I come bearing an offering of apology to my dear readers in the form of a brand new podcast. Here’s a helpful guide, followed by some unrelated topical announcements: Track Listing 1. Casiotone For The Painfully Alone - It Wasn’t The Same Somehow
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I’m sitting in the makeshift audience of a small theater space nestled somewhere in the thick of Hollywood near Melrose. The audience is comprised of me, Rudy, my friend Mimi– who’d invited us to join her in this mysterious shindig– and an Australian tourist. There are also two assistants in the theater, and a bored documentarian. Incidentally, I had met one of the assistants, Shauna, half a year earlier when we’d played the prom king and queen on the climatic prom night/school shooting episode of Noggin channel teen soap South of Nowhere. The room is darkened, and we’ve been waiting about half an hour, unsure of what to expect. Briskly, without warning, Miranda July walks straight into the room. She seems pre-occupied, staring off at a distant spot on the floor. Suddenly, she faces the small audience, and says to no one in particular, “Did you know you can wash your mouth with soap?” Everyone laughs, and I can’t tell if this is the beginning of the performance or a genuine question. “No, really,” she says, “You don’t swallow the soap, you just swish it around in your mouth and spit it out. It works just as well as mouthwash or gum.” “Wouldn’t that make your mouth feel dry?” asks my friend Mimi. |
I’m standing close enough to study the hair on his cheek. I guess most teenage boys would be more excited about working with Lindsay Lohan, Jaime Pressly, or even Drake Bell, but it’s Ethan Suplee that does it for me. And I’m sure there are a small legion of teenage boys out there who would scratch out my eyes to get this close to the man. The studio is an anonymous warehouse in a nondescript quadrant of the San Fernando Valley called Van Nuys. This might be the same place where they flimed 90210. Inside the studio, Ethan Suplee and I are standing on the second-floor walkway of a fake motel, in front of a printed backdrop that’s two times the size of an ordinary billboard. It’s a ginormous photograph of the motel parking lot. There are a couple dozen extras and crew members crowding the platform with us, rushing back and forth, constantly re-lighting the scene from different angles. One enormous light is set in front of the backdrop. It floods the motel room, emulating sunlight. The rest of the studio is shrouded in stale darkness. continue reading |
Rudy is a huge fan of The Germs. Honestly, I didn’t know much about them before meeting Rudy, and I’m not much into punk music. But I think the story of Darby Crash is a fascinating one, and that he’s an important figure in gay history who is often overlooked. Rudy works at a video store in Silver Lake, where one of his customers is “noted fashion photographer” Mark Segal. Mark is making a spread based on the life of Darby Crash, so Rudy invited him over last week to watch his bootleg copies of The Decline of Western Civilization and The Germs playing live at The Whisky. Yesterday I had the day off, after defecting from the production of Bratz: The Movie– a story I’ll get to as soon as I’ve recovered my senses– so I was happy to join Rudy and Mark as they visited the site of Darby’s death and his grave. continue reading |
This weekend Rudy and I went up to Santa Barbara to visit Jeppe, Rudy’s co-DJ at Break-A-Way, a.k.a. “Senior” of Junior Senior. Jeppe had been wanting to take a break from of the fast paced party-all-the-time world of Los Angeles for some months, so he finally decided to rent a cottage by the sea, surrounded by exotic flora and tropical birds. We arrived in the early afternoon on Saturday, right before Jeppe left for a behind-the-wheel American driving lesson. To kill time while he was gone, Rudy and I sauntered about on the main drag of town, crowded with bored Laguna Beach hos and their rich mothers, pansy gangsters and shirtless hobos. In the Sak’s Fifth Avenue of Santa Barbara, a grandmother of tired glamour informed the shopgirl, “Everyone gives me compliments on these earrings. But they just look good because I’m wearing them.” Outside, a lackluster anti-war group marched down the street, rousing little interest. At a record store sale, there was nothing but copies of Labouche and Salt-N-Pepa and Jewel and every other 90s pop act you can vaguely remember. I did manage to find a Carpenters four-disc box set for $16. When Rudy asked one of the employees to get it from behind the counter, she sassed, “Are you sure you don’t want the Barbara Streisand box set?” Bitch. We also purchased a Slumber Party Massacre double feature. continue reading |
Bob and I went downtown last night to take some pictures. He just got a Canon Rebel XT and wanted to take it for a test drive. I love downtown L.A. because after 9:00pm it practically becomes a ghost town, as all the commuters retreat to the sprawl. Downtown ceased to function as the center of Los Angeles in the 50s, as the suburbs pushed toward the west, and eventually, the San Fernando Valley. As the upper class deserted, a low income immigrant population took over and converted the forgotten vestiges of wealth into swap meets, independently run shops and churches. These days, gentrification is bringing affluence back into the area. A new Famima is opening next week, and overpriced lofts are pushing the homeless to the east side of downtown. But the new developments are leaving the lower and middle income families that have been living there for decades without many options. For developers, it makes more sense to sell trendy, well-designed living spaces to yuppies at inflated prices than trying to accommodate everyone with mixed-income housing. “Live Above Los Angeles!” says one banner enticing travelers on the 110 Freeway. Sky Lofts promises to “fulfill downtown Los Angeles’ destiny as a new urban metropolis” and demonstrates its meaning with a photograph of a sharply dressed businessman entering a luxury town car below the washed-out skyline. Whatever the destiny of downtown, I love it as it is, with its post-apocalyptic emptiness at night. Here are a few pictures to help remember it that way. continue reading |
