Tag: local

Election notice: Costa Mesa, CA

Attention all who are eligible to vote in Costa Mesa:

Your city council election is of international importance.

Please vote for Garlich and Scheafer and against Mansoor and Leece.

The choice is between typical Costa Mesa small-business conservatives, who are concerned with things like where to put roads and how many more athletic fields the city might need, and insane power-hungry racist demagogues who hang around with Minutemen and white supremacists and want to wage war on Mexicans.

Garlich and Scheafer are backed by the police and fire departments, the newspaper, the ex chiefs of the police and fire departments, and business people all over town. Mansoor and Leece are backed by Minutemen nuts, local neo-nazi Martin Millard, and lots of dubious out-of-town money.

Please vote. I don’t need a race war in the town next door. Thanks.

As goes the nation, goes the LA Weekly

The neocons take over in the expected putsch after the New Times bought them.

I assume the OC Weekly is on the list for the same treatment. Should be easier here, since finding someone who isn’t a right-wing loudmouth is nearly impossible.

Nothing is enough for these people. They’re not satisfied with owning the national news media outlets, the cable TV news, the newspapers, the magazines. They have to go after the free weeklies where seldom-read lefties tag along after the entertainment listings, and root that out too. It’s not like Harold Meyerson et al. were hugely influential — everyone reads a paper like that for the listings and the ads — but the Big Right-Wing Crusher Hand has to get everyone.

And now the New Times neo-con talk-radio-style tabloid monster has eaten almost all the notable free weeklies in the country.

These people want more than a voice. They want to reverse and destroy every single thing about the rebellion of the 1960s, go back and win every argument they lost about the war and Watergate and race and gender, eat and shit out every pop culture item that might contain subversion, and burn down the universities where their professors confused them with suspiciously foreign intellectualism.

Welcome to Talk Radio Nation: Boomer sell-outs, ignorant neo-cons, privileged post-literate suits, and their slaves.

Long live the LA City Beat.

Happy… thing!

Halloween time is funny nowadays.

Businesses desperately need Halloween, since holidays mean spending, so they want to make anything they sell somehow orange, spooky, or candy-related. The boom in “adult” Halloween celebrations means that slutty costumes and spooky alcohol are a huge money deal now.

The children’s holiday of my childhood continues, which means big money selling candy and party favors and pumpkin-oriented merchandise. And less slutty costumes, although some parents seem to have forgotten that pimp ‘n’ ho outfits or slutty nurse costumes aren’t too great for the little ones.

But then we have the Christians. There are a lot of very conservative evangelicals around here, and they’re wealthy too. If you get too spooky and devilish, they complain and you can lose their business. Since they’re stuck with the evangelical ghetto version of the holiday you can sell them stuff too, but it has to be for some neutered “harvest” holiday: squash, orange things, candy corn, centerpieces made from um sheaves or something. They’ll have a party and eat pumpkin pie and pray a lot and talk about Fall, and no demons allowed. It’s goofy but I understand. If I really believed in demons and evil witches, I wouldn’t want to play around about it and have my kids dressing up that way.

So, a lot of stores talk about “the season!” or “fall” or just have orange things, and it’s funny to see which ones do this and how they get around using the H word. The combination of hypocrisy and greed is always good for a laugh.

I saw a hilarious example at one of our local churches this week. They’re having a fun celebration for the kids and there was a big sign and display outside for it. They wisely sidestepped both “Halloween” and “harvest” but their choice was, wait for it… pirates. So there was a big pirate ship display and a “Pirate Fun Party” sign.

I agree with them that demons, devils, lost souls, ghosts, witches, and the Undead are not cool in their world and shouldn’t be celebrated. But what exactly is the difference between trivializing the terrors of Hell and whitewashing the rape, murder, pillaging, alcoholism, prison-sex sodomy, Vitamin C deficiency, and sociopathic greed of piracy? Maybe you guys should just go back to the sheaves-as-centerpieces thing and have some pumpkin seeds. Pumpkin seeds are tasty.

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!

Borders on the border

I was at our local Borders bookstore the other night rediscovering how crummy it is even for a Borders. It’s also right on the east-west divide of town, where the haves meet the have-nots and a few of the latter live in desperate circumstances in motels.

Surrounded by soccer moms, clip-art cute college students, and red-faced businessmen, I looked through the map section. Next to me an undergrad-aged East Asian-American guy was thumbing through a Parisian travel book, and next to the computer books a nerd of some kind with a shoulder bag and headphones was peering at an ASP howto book.

Suddenly the bathroom door next to us burst open and out lurched the other Costa Mesa: a 35ish tweaker with long dirty blond hair, sweaty t-shirt, bad acid-washed jeans, and a wild 1000-yard stare. He looked around with that bus crazy bugeyed face that says “look me in the eyes and I own you,” so I studied a map of Turkey carefully. Without a particular victim to address, Motel Guy emitted this statement to the bookstore in general:

GOD DAMN, I HATE THE SMELL OF ASS!

He left, so he couldn’t see me giggling helplessly into the maps, or the soccer moms blanching.

Catalina vision

Catalina Haze

I grew up in a hazy place.

“The Bay of Smokes” was smoggy before anyone brought a car here. The inversion layer in the atmosphere holds everything in, and the higher humidity near the coast adds a Vaseline glaze to the air. Most days the mountains are barely visible.

Twenty-six miles off the coast is Catalina Island. It’s a small tourist destination for a day outing, and pleasure boats sail to its coves and isthmus. There isn’t much on the island.

On a typically hazy Newport Beach day, the question is always: can you see Catalina? On the beach, or up on Cliff Drive, or at the top of the big escalator at the Fashion Island mall, there’s a clear view of the Pacific. Does it just fade into blue-gray out there, or can you pick out the island?

As a kid I always wanted to see Catalina even when no one else could. I’d mistakenly pick out the Palos Verdes Peninsula north of us and my father would gently correct me, or I’d just pretend I could see it. I always wanted to see the island and was delighted whenever it was clear enough that the whole length of it, including the isthmus and the smaller secondary island past it, could be clearly seen. On very rare days when it was completely clear, Catalina looked alarmingly close. I remember on one such day asking my father if the island was coming closer. I must have been very young.

We had a 28 foot sailboat, just big enough to hold the family, and we sailed to Catalina many times. It’s an all-day trip in a sailboat. We had access to moor at White’s Landing in Hen Rock Cove. There are bison and wild pigs on the island, and I was languidly pursued by a bison once when I was about 9, terrifying me. But in general I loved our visits to the island and the cove.

The picture at the top is shot from the beach at Laguna, and Catalina is just barely visible. There’s a gradient between two shades of blue-gray, and there’s the island. The detail below might be easier to see:

Catalina Haze (detail)

There’s your Southern California coastal haze, and there’s the island. Can you see it?