I would like to thank both of kitchen_life for stuffing salome_st_john and myself with food tonight, including about 1/3 of a cow, mashpo tatoes, and completely perfect asparagus. What a totally wonderful evening! You’re great hosts.
Did your neighbor, like, die? I tripped on a newspaper on the stairs and they had about a month’s worth of various delivered stuff on their doorstep.
Saturday evening I opened my door to see a large, bulbous package on the step. It was addressed to me, but I couldn’t think of anything I’d ordered that would look like a sack of potatoes. I dragged it inside and inspected it. Playa del Rey return address. Who the honk do I know there? Maybe it’s a UNABOMB!
I opened it up and out fell a stack of Spy magazines from 1988 to 1990, with a note from mcpino saying he was just dragging these around from place to place and he hoped I’d enjoy them. GOD DAMN YEAH I WILL.
Ann Hodgman eating dog food! Celebrity garbage! The New York Times fatality column inches calculator! MAKE YOUR OWN TWINKIE! THANK YOU!
changeng brought us the debut this weekend of this device. It’s a lot of things. A split keyboard. A dual-neck flying-V keytar. A “Sound Mixer”. A light show. $9.95 at “Big Lots!”. A really big mistake. An aleatory composition device that produces unpredictable sound patterns RIGHT OUT OF THE BOX! Ladies and gentlemen, the device Stuart affectionately calls “THE HUMP”: THE HMP-288!
Went to the LA Auto Show with zebulon_y and friendly_bandit and had a good time. It was about equal parts “Wow neat!”, “Wow, that’s kind of..” and “Wow, that’s just fucked-up”.
All the car manufacturers were showing off their golf carts. I will complain about golf carts some other time.
I got a dirty look from the Dodge spokesdroid when I said “Check this out, 14 miles per gallon in 2006!” loudly at the Charger SRT. “Guess you’ve got to really like that cruisin’ lifestyle!” I bellowed at him cheerfully. I sat in my future girlfriend, the Mazdaspeed 6, and in my other future girlfriend, the Subaru Legacy GT. I was surprisingly impressed by some of the big campervan things. That mercedes van that Dodge brought over from Europe is nicely done. We did not go into the Hall of Supercars because it was stuffed with hu-mans.
The best thing there was in the aftermarket hall. Someone has made the ultimate spinner, and it wasn’t even on the wheel. It was in the back of an SUV on display. It had lights on it that made patterns, nice, but then when it started spinning the lights made pictures! Like the American Flag, and Famous Art Type Pictures, and Hip Hop Lifestyle Imagery. It was one of those things that went so far into stupid that it wrapped right back around into art. It needs to go into a museum right now.
We went to Kappo Honda and had good japanese food with Lisa. I consumed: Tonkatsu,, hamachi sashimi, special toasted onigiri with eel, and some chicken udon. It was very, very, very, very, very good.
torgo_x is my hero for a number of reasons, but the other day he reaffirmed his status by sending this IM to my hiptop:
TorgoTen: THERE’S NO I IN “WIN!” REMEMBER, DON’T ASK YOURSELF “CAN I?”, ASK YOURSELF: “I CAN?”
From Phast Phreddie, via my friend Julie DuBrow:
Dear Friends,
This morning my brother, who works in the Richmond, Virginia area, called and asked me if I knew Bryan Harvey.
I was familiar with The House of Freaks when the group was based in LA, and Gutterball with Steve Wynn; and I ran into Bryan and his wife from time to time when I was down in the Richmond area visiting my brother and/or Stephen McCarthy (of The Long Ryders, who has played in several bands with Bryan since they both moved back to Richmond in the late eighties). Twice I saw Harvey dressed as Presley when he sang in the band Fat Elvis–with McCarthy (it may have been Fat Elvis’ only two shows).
My brother told me that he had just read in the paper that Bryan and his family were found dead in their home.
Many happy returns. I’ll make a suitable donation to the Louis Reggit Foundation.
brianenigma and sakkaranoush were visiting, and are gone tomorrow, so there was a SOIRÉE.
The rest of the shots are in this Flickr set, mostly of drunk men and incredulous women.
Talked to Trout at length last night. He showed me some of his photos from Vietnam, including him looking 40 at age 18, various sandbags and weapons, and the view of the landscape south of Da Nang that he looked at from his guard post.
I also saw the “welcome back” letter from Reuters giving him his job in Manhattan again, in March 1969. That didn’t last.
Bob saw a lot of stuff that stays, even now. Mostly kids. “Those little black-haired kids, I still see them.” He told me about an orphanage he and his partner went by a lot, run by a convent. They’d bring food over for the kids every time, huge quantities of stuff from the base. The French nuns would whack them on the head for looking at the teenaged girls, and everyone was delighted at the stolen food they brought.
One time they came by and everyone was dead and dismembered. The VC had made a point, as their guerrilla manual told them to. There were a lot of points like that made, and a lot of dismembered kids. After 30 years and lately, some happy pills Bob can tell that particular story without crying now.
Later on he and his buddy were sent into the jungle, heavily armed but not uniformed, to “fuck shit up” within certain map quadrants. They were dropped by helicopter near some people who needed to be blown up, or by boat near some people who needed to find out how well our new night sniper scope worked. A lot of “heavy shit went down”, as they said.
But it’s the kids he still sees. When he got back to New York he didn’t last too long at Reuters. He got a job working construction because he’s a big strong guy who doesn’t mind picking up joists all day. And he drank for 30 years, and other things. By the time he came out west in ’75, Bob was in full swing as a PTSD poster boy. A lot of other “heavy shit went down” in those years.
Bob has some advice for guys coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. “Paxil,” he says, “therapy. Happy pills and talking. Don’t drink, don’t smoke. It’s hard to really enjoy cocaine and heroin without a drink and a smoke. Mostly don’t drink. I spent thirty years drinking and denying, but the kids didn’t go away.”
Bob’s house up in the hills has roses and razor wire around it real tight.
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