Hmm. I do like BBQ. And maybe if a bunch of us from different generations all arrived at once and confused the hell out of them it would be fun.
COME HOME FOR HOMECOMING!!!
Newport Harbor High is celebrating its 75th Anniversary!! Friday, OCTOBER 21, 2005 & Saturday, OCTOBER 22, 2005
After having my fourth conversation in a week about the provincial pathos of the local music scene, I agreed tonight with Movie Dan that someone needs to make a “Waiting for Guffman”/”Spinal Tap”/”American Movie” film about the South Coast scene around Detroit Bar. What a cast: The skinny, fashionable boys in the mediocre bands, the pretty girls who sleep with them, and the armies of not-quites who end up sleeping with each other instead after the insiders reject them. What a scene: The sadness of an elite hierarchy of rock gods fifty miles south of the real thing. What a golden phrase for the whole mess: “The Costa Mesa 500”. What a lot of beer Detroit sells with this genius marketing strategy.
And of course, the people who don’t give a fuck, or as Dan said don’t even give a fuck about giving a fuck, who are just cranking out music on their own terms.
I imagine it set as the last gig of some local hot-boys-in-tight-pants band, hair dripping into their eyes. They’d lost their clothing company sponsorship maybe, or one of them got in a real band in L.A., so this was their last big hometown hurrah. They think it’s “The Last Waltz”, but you know it’s “A Mighty Wind”.
That scene deserves a good long hard sarcastic razor-born look. Some of the music is good, but every time I’m in with that bunch again I keep thinking “What the HELL are you guys going on about? You’re not all that! If you are, what the fuck are you doing in Costa Mesa?”
Fascinating, frightening missile launch trail I shot tonight outside D’s. When Vandenberg AFB shoots off a big rocket we get these, usually in the early evening. As a child I was terrified of them because I thought it was the beginning of a nuclear war. Now I’m just pissed off because they’re testing a dumb expensive antimissile system.
In any case, it stops everyone in their tracks for a bit to consider the huge thing in the sky we just made.
dberg refers me to an OC Register story (genital/genital or bugmenot to read it) about Garden Grove’s hometown hero, who is a genuinely admirable guy.
Anyone who picks maggots out of a prison latrine to clean the sores of his friends deserves the Medal of Honor and free beer for life. Especially when he’d already been in a Nazi death camp before he went to another war and got thrown in a prison camp again.
The army’s official site about him is more descriptive of his life in combat and has background on his life and a video of him which has some very affecting testimonials from his fellow inmates.
And now he’s the “Jewish Santa Claus” and gives out candy to the kids in his neighborhood.
He has MISFIT tattooed on one leg, and MENTOR on the other. “Back in the day” when things were crazier and Tom was drinking, G.G. Allin crashed on his couch. He has a ’33 flathead Ford truck and a variety of impractical motorcycles. He can make metal do whatever he wants it to. Tom rides a dirt bike at night in the desert, and broke his leg doing it. He skateboards when he can, too.
Tom lays tile for a living. He’s not happy when he has to work weekends, because he’s not going to get any retirement. He’ll work until the day he dies. Until then, there’s the weekend and the thrill of speed and danger.
Tom walks stiffly and sits down with a grunt, but he’s quick to smile and loves swapping stories about punk rock, motorcycling, hot rods, and the fuckin’ mess the world’s in.
The rest of the series came out pretty damn well too.
My town is being invaded by sea lions.
“On Wednesday, the Newport Beach Harbor Commission debated the situation, which has taken on added urgency since 18 sea lions piled onto a 37-foot sailboat and sank it over Labor Day weekend.”
bark bark bark bark
until you could hear them all over the park
I got a good start on my Borges tonight before Fliptop Pegleg showed up. In the intervening period a Christian men’s group was meeting to plan a “Men’s Breakfast” event. One guy was clearly the alpha and leading the meeting, and he browbeat the others in a brisk, upbeat way about a shockingly long list of items that had to be prepared. He spoke rapidly about food, music, chairs. Periodically he’d come to a decision point and obtain consensus in a flash: “So we’re looking at Wednesday for that, about 7. Is that okay for you Craig? Ryan? How about you, Bill?” The other men responded in respectful monosyllables. I wouldn’t want to hang out with this guy but I bet that breakfast is going to be planned like the Invasion of Normandy.
They closed with the classic O.C. White Guy Evangelical Prayer, which is always slightly too long, full of catch phrases, and begins “Heavenly Father, you are awesome…” Alpha guy stayed for about an hour afterwards talking to another man. Again he was in charge, banging out paragraphs while looking intense and leaning forward; the other man nodded, agreed, chimed in occasionally.
Fliptop Pegleg arrived and ignored my book, sat down, made himself comfortable. The monologue wasn’t as painful this time, because he was talking about diabetes. He has to be real about that stuff, and it leads him to talk about other real things. He told me his father died of diabetes and TB when FTPG himself was only six, in 1949. He saw his father the day before he died, but couldn’t be in the same room; he got to talk to him from outside the hospital window on an outdoor bridge to another building.
I can’t forget that he’s unethical, creepy, probably criminal, and certainly unpleasant to be with, but it humanizes him a bit when he stops talking about video hardware or girls’ butts.
When I got home tonight the neighbors had abandoned a child seat on their front driveway so I took some weird, horror-movie style night shots of it with my house in the background. Baby stuff is generically spooky.
Got stuck with Flip-Top Peg-Leg tonight on the patio. He came and sat at my table and talked at me about his home electronics. Listening to a known Peeping Tom/psycho girlwatcher go on and on about his video setup makes me want to sleep in an autoclave tonight. Also, boring. Very, very boring. I gave up on getting rid of him and concentrated on admiring his toupée, which is a perfectly oiled 1963 pompadour in steel grey.
He also showed me what high-quality video you can get on his camphone. OH CHRIST I did not want to know that.
Movie Guy Dan showed up later and we traded punk rock stories. I guess he booked Club Fetish around the time I was working for the Reader. I must have met him back then. I told him this story: The other day I was entering the supermarket and a guy coming out had a Hell Comes To Your House II T-shirt. I almost physically stopped him. “What the hell is that shirt? That was a GREAT album!” He smiled delightedly and told me there were only 75 of the shirts ever made, and that his friends who had them all kept them in collections, but he liked to wear his. We traded a couple of stories and shook hands warmly.
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