weak end update

This has been a good weekend, full of unexpected social delights and fatty foods.

I have had totally heterosexual man-dates two nights in a row. Friday, burntcurtis took me for Chinese (and I hardly look it) at China Palace, where I ate round-eye delights like orange spicy chicken. Great conversation with him in a romantic booth. Last night threepunchstuff spirited me off to a G(r)eek restaurant where we ate flaming cheese, etc. Thanks to both of you for being wonderfuli and totally heterosexual man-friends!

I also got to see all sorts of people I never see, and purely by chance, including the reclusive handstil and godforesaken who are rarely observed since their natural habitat is fifty feet underground.

And! Other people had sent me books recently so I read a pile of them, including two graphic novels about hellholes. Guy Delisle’s Pyongyang details his time in North Korea working on animation projects, and Ted Rall’s half-graphic Silk Road To Ruin is a combination “comic book” about his travels there and history/backgrounder on Central Asia. Both good. Rall’s is particularly useful and full of the sort of black humor that only places like Turkmenistan provide.

I’m enjoying the Halloween season this year for the first time in forever. I managed to recapture that childhood sensation of anticipation about costumes and haunted houses and candy skulls. I was never big into candy, although acquisition itself was a huge high on the actual night, but I loved the way neighbors did up their houses into “scary” haunts. People around here really get into that, and there are some dark and creepy strobed-out houses with hands reaching out the windows, etc. already. I like that way better than the adult beer-bash version.

Speaking of which, the costumes for kids are turning me into Old Conservative Guy. Nick and Nicole found a set of wrist-and-ankle bondage cuffs in the Halloween store, complete with unambiguous drawing of bound hussy, that included the instruction they were not for children under six. Meanwhile, a young teenager was being urged into a Slutty Nurse Outfit by her mother, as Junior complained “Mom, they won’t allow this at school!” No.

The Santa Ana winds make my eyes and throat dry and are kind of a pain in the ass, but it’s so BEAUTIFUL here right now with that very clear light we never get. I took a load of pics in Santa Ana yesterday and maybe some of of them are salvageable. The “camera out the window at 40 mph” style isn’t conducive to great art.

Maybe I’ll drive out to the desert tomorrow.

I guess I hadn’t considered the Thrill of Mortgage as an option

DUUUUDE

But this job ad in “Squeeze OC” is convincing. Speaking of Squeeze OC, they were having a fashion show in the strip-mall denim store next to Kean as I left there tonight. It was just starting to roll as I fled. They were blasting “Lust for Life” and the DJ was instructing everyone to “gather round the runway.” Bro and ho types were sipping wine from plastic cups and gazing across the street at… the other strip mall. I left before America’s Next Medium To Low Models began striding about in $500 jeans.

The O.C. Weekly’s Best of the O.C. Weekly’s Staff’s Drinking Buddies Issue

I shouldn’t expect too much from the free weekly paper in a rich flat right-wing suburb fifty miles south of Los Angeles, but I’m very disappointed in the Orange County Weekly’s “Best of O.C.” issue. It’s an unreadable mess of office in-jokes, arch post-ironic snark, inaccuracies, logrolling, and delusions of grandeur. It is, in short, the Waiting for Guffman issue.

It begins with a bizarrely academic leader which is precious as hell but probably the best-written thing in the issue. It belongs in a painfully literary college humor magazine.

Almost all of the rest of the issue is devoted to an in-group of 25ish partyers. This leads to “My Favorite Things” spreads for a fundraiser party organizer who like Lhasa Apsos and those old 90s records, some random community college student with one of the new-fangled “blogs” who is therefore a social critic, an activist stereotype straight from the pages of The Onion, and a Chapman prof who is claimed to be a novelist but appears to be Adam Sandler playing one in a bad movie. Oh, and an apparently very nice guy who is a computer dude and DJ and stuff but is oddly described as a Renaissance man. Maybe he buys drinks for them a lot. He does seem pretty cool.

About a third of the items are in Long Beach, which is not in Orange County. However the 25ish partyers all live and hang out there and this issue is for and about them, not about their readers.

Clearly the ad salesmen did way too good a job. The issue is big and fat, and even with the high ad-to-editorial ratio they run, that was a lot of inches to fill. But they do have two or three good writers. Arellano and Moxley are of national quality, and Nick Schou is capable and talented. But instead of letting some people with skill work on this thing they just dumped in a load of garbage they could giggle to each other over. They compound the problem by adding on a few “I beg to differ!” items to the end of each “best of” item. This gives you the charming sensation of being next to their group as they pass in-jokes back and forth. I fail to understand why anyone would care which El Pollo Loco these people prefer, much less be present at a cute little fake argument about the choices available.

I suppose it doesn’t matter that my local weekly paper blows so hard. People read it for the listings and the ads, the same way they read the L.A. Weekly. The good writing goes as unnoticed as the bad by almost everyone, and this particular crowd of drunk scenesters is fooling themselves about their importance as much as I did 20 years ago at a free weekly paper, myself. But it could be good, and I wish it was. There are a lot of great things to write about here, enough to fill a Best Of issue with, some Worst Of, and with a lot more cultural and political substance and way more actual fun.

I sincerely wish these people saw their opportunity and took it.

As they say in their own post-everything bad-is-good ode to cosmetic surgery, truly it is another nail in the rational coffin.

P.S. No one thinks you’re badass for hanging out in Santa Ana at night except your mom. They’re all going to laugh at you! They’re all going to laugh at you!

Scout’s Honor

L.A. Boy Scouts new merit badge: ‘Respect Copyrights’

patchLOS ANGELES (AP) — A Boy Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, etc., etc. He is also respectful of copyrights.

Boy Scouts in the Los Angeles area will now be able to earn a merit patch for learning about the evils of downloading pirated movies and music.

The patch shows a film reel, a music CD and the international copyright symbol, a “C” enclosed in a circle.

The movie industry has developed the curriculum.

“Working with the Boy Scouts of Los Angeles, we have a real opportunity to educate a new generation about how movies are made, why they are valuable, and hopefully change attitudes about intellectual property theft,” Dan Glickman, chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, said Friday.

Scouts will be instructed in the basics of copyright law and learn how to identify five types of copyrighted works and three ways copyrighted materials may be stolen.

Scouts also must choose one activity from a list that includes visiting a movie studio to see how many people can be harmed by film piracy. They also can create public service announcements urging others not to steal movies or music.

The world of drug ads again

Another visit to the doctor means more scanned-in drug ads! Hurray! First off we have the “Healthy Lifestyles” brochure from the Lilly company. It’s actually not for one of their drugs but for a “stop eating so damn much” plan that is no doubt intended to go with a diet pill or something. They were attempting to show the bountiful beauteous cornucopia of joy that is a HEALTHTY LIFESTYLE! but the cultural resonance of the picture they chose is unfortunate. I cropped it to the “good part.”

eden who

Next we have

The Lilly people are also advertising their antidepressant Cymbalta. Men have ADD and women have depression, so their model for this ad is the typical middle-aged middle-class woman considering her symptoms. I cropped off the top which asks which of these are symptoms of depression? and the bottom that tells you to talk to your doctor about all of your symptoms, no doubt because the list they have adds up to a prescription for Cymbalta. I like it with just the middle bit:

symptoms of buying our stuff