Company Town

This is the name of the column Rambler writes for the LA Times (yes, it still exists). It is also how one writer summed up Hollyweird to the rest of us rubes in "Rolling Stone."
Hollywood really is a company town, he said. The people go to bed early, watch their weight, and talk about one thing: the industry.
There's probably more exciting night life in Iowa City, he concluded.

I heart Rape-Man

Rape-Man is real. Rape-Man is found in Japanese comics. What Rape-Man does it very specialized and labor-intensive.
Rape-Man avenges jilted (male) lovers by finding their ex-girlfriends and raping them.
That'll teach them.
I imagine the end of such comics. (Jilted lover) "Thanks, Rape-Man." Rape-Man, "no ploblem."

Please don't drunk and post

It's just after ten in the morning and I am wasted. I blame the drug companies, which I took some of their product this morning. Trying to start exercising regularly, eating right, and dying
anyway.

Time to start lashing out reuglarly. First is for the NRA, who have 20,000 handgun deaths a year (or maybe it was 12). Time for the rest of us to storm with guns, even fake ones, because, hey the lawmakers think it's a good idea to practice anywhere. So why can't I bring one to the Capitol or the Supreme Court? They voted on a law intended to protect militia-members and made it an individual right.

Even fukin' Obama has to scrape and bow before this group, talking about "Second Amendment Rights." But it was the court's 5-4 decision to come out against DCs handgun legislation that really turned the tide. Before, there was only speculation on the law's meaning.

Notwithstanding Viginia's great sport of exporting death (in DC, up the NY), lawmakers in Virgnia and other backwoods peckerwood places have interpreted that they can as many guns as they wan't.

It's not their fault, said one supporter, if clients use the guns in crimes. They import guns for sporting reasons altogether. Anyone up for a pheasant hunt?

Under the Broken Sky

The train tracks that led into Auschwitz end in a gatehouse, that, despite the millions killed in and around it, is surprisingly small and not nearly as threatening-looking as one might think. That's how people who have been there describe it and how it looked in the NYT today.

All my life, I have been fascinated by places where huge numbers of people breathed their last. I looked once at the rolling farmland and woods of Antietam, the bloodiest single day of the Civil War, and couldn't help thinking that for thousands, this was their last landscape of the planet Earth.

Earlier I had seen the shrapnel-filled fields of Verdun, where a million soldiers died in World War I. The day was misty, the earth winter-barren, and the thousands of crosses of the dead climbed the hills into the far distance. With the pill-boxes still there, and the outlines of the trenches never to be overgrown, it looked for all the world like "All Quiet on the Western Front."

But most places of mass death are not like that. The fields of Manassas, as a matter of fact, are beautiful and have had to be protected from the rampant development of Northern Virginia.

I went there and laid on the ground, the blood long since absorbed by the rich soil. I looked at the sky, the same sky so many looked up at before death. It hasn't changed, just as the sky at Auschwitz is not forever stained Crimson. God isn't evil, only indifferent.

New People to Harass and Bore!

I finally stole Rambler's list of links and made them mine. Read me and justify my existence. At the very least, check out the rise of "Sharking," a new and extremely disturbing/sickly fascinating trend from Japan and now, of course, LA that I have somehow missed. Start with "Fear the Shark" and see what the globe's finest voyeurs have come up with now courtesy of the Internet.

Rambler can now only be contacted through Ryan Seacrest, or, God help you, picking up a phone, thereby setting off an earthquake when/if all that weight is picked up on the other coast.

Walsh McGuire is Out to Get Me

I've now figured out the mysterious phenomenon of Asian-characters appearing in my blog responses: It's Walsh McGuire.

When Walsh was studying Chinese in Washington, Lux and myself would leave pidgen-Mandarin gibberish messages on his answering machine. Soft-hearted tortured-poet Haverford grad Walsh was the perfect target, and we of course thought that line of study was the equivalent of bird-call analysis in the Aleutian Islands.

Now Walsh is a business mogul in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and I'm now certain he's handing me verbal dunce-caps at every chance possible now that Hari-Kari is starting to look like a good career move for me.

A thousand pardons, Walshire.

From the Land of the Rising Moon

Apparently "Sharking" originated in Japan! Yes, this practice of raising a girl's skirt and pulling down her panties (or "bottom sharking") can be found in weird vids from that land of totally restrained people. There's a lot of footage in rail and subway stations, though I have not seen the related phenomenon of ejaculating suddenly on unsuspecting women (the trains are too crowded to even let your shark out to play anyway).
What would Shamu say? (wait, he's actually a whale).

Barrage of the Asian Blog-Spam

I don't know whether Confucius has become a fan of my blog, but I keep getting these weird Asian-language responses to my entries. I have no idea what they say, but thanks to my new friends in the Far East.

Hollywood for Ugly People

This is one of the greatest descriptions of DC I've ever heard, but it strikes at something that gives me hope in my waning years. Washington is one of the few places left for wise old men.

Yes, you can look, like half the Senate, like Deputy Dawg, but your opinion is actually respected more as you grow older (hint to the hedonist left coast - it's called experience. Land of the Lotus Eaters, sycophants - a lot of big words and phrases to throw at what is some degree of the Good Life out there, and we know it.

But someone has to be the grown-ups here, and like the Roman Senate, it's left to a lot of rich old men, still, mostly. (hint to the West Coast; Rome was an empire and Republic sometime before 1979, before which the earth consisted only of Sea World and was ruled by Shamu the Whale)

Still, DC's attempts at hipness often verge on the pathetic. The fact that new restaurants in the old downtown (I know it sounds strange)were starting to use a lot of glass and chrome was seized upon by the NYT as evidence that the city now was starting to have places just like those in real sophisticated big cities.

But at least, unlike LA, we don't measure time as the space between face-lifts, provides some solace to the old and in the way in a society obsessed with youth and superficial beauty. Now if only we could get some Supermarket rags dedicated to the fabulous, hot stars of the Ways & Means Committee.

Fear the Shark in LA

A clicked-on mail entry in Yahoo got me to the most bizarre site I'd recently seen; one about "Sharking." Sharking is apparenty going up to strange women and either ripping or taking down (or up) their clothes in public, or it is the practice of approaching strange women, with you covered in a hoodie, and jacking off on them at a Starbucks or wherever.

Needless to say, this sounds pretty illegal (assault, public lewdness, indecency etc. (assault with a deadly weapon?)) even in LA, where there'll probably soon be an industry built around it and girls from Indiana lined up to volunteer for the part.

Between making sex videos and public sex, I don't know how anyone can get any work done out there. Rambler, between your hanging out with Ryan Seacrest, or however you spell that cheesebag's name, please explain the roots of this phenomenon. The only way I can explain it is that the girls wear so little in the first place that "Sharking" becomes um, a release.

Years ago a former girlfriend had a man sit next to her on the Washington Metro and start wacking off. She just got up and left the pervert to his own attentions. Now that guy can become a celebrity in LA (Ladies and Gentlemen, tonight we have a real treat: the country's greatest "Great White" Mr. xxx yyy. Let's have a big round of applause")

The bigger question is still whether LA remains a lifesyle cultural innovator or just a holding pen for extremo-narcissists of every stripe. "Alternative lifestyles" are LAs biggest contributor to modern American culture. Would you like a shot of "cream" in that Latte?

try again

Check it Out in DC (if you can find it)

A new hipster district has emerged in DC in the most unlikely of places: H Street NORTHEAST, between about ninth and 12th. There is no public transportation here, but somehow the entrepreneurs (some of whom are responsible of the transformation of 14th/U streets) have come up with a geniune nightlife stretch in the middle of freakin' nowhere.
Don't try to walk here from Union Station, you'll only get mugged, warn the signs inside the clubs. Take a cab.
The only obvious reason that this district is working is one: space. H Street was one of the so-called "riot corridors," a stretch of black businesses that burned in the 1968 riots. That means large department-store type layouts that converts well into nightclubs and whatnot.
The only thing familiar about it is the DC hipster strategy: outflank the preppies and the squares by moving East of them, further into the formerly threatening ghettos.
How this area does remains to be seen, as they say in lame broadcast journalism.

Basketball battle of the lefty schools

Today Cornell plays Wisconsin in the NCAA tournament. Cornell, though an Ivy League school, is quite good. But the similarities in the match-up are actually more socio-political than sporting.

Cornell was founded late (meaning 1860s') for an Ivy. Its founder, the Simpsons-sounding Ezra Cornell, was of course anti-slavery, and pro-womens rights (it was to be the first Ivy to admit women).

My aunt and uncle live up there, near Lake Cayuga, and I've been for a visit. Very much like Madison or Ann Arbor. A little San Francisco in the hills. Crystal shops, new age stores, and all manner of whole earth/natural food co-ops.

But few blacks live there, and that contributed to one of the most notorious incidents of the 1960s.'

Black students decided to take over the student union. A largely while fraternity tried to rush the building and kick them out. Needless to say, they had their butts kicked.

Fearing a further attack, the black students armed themselves, then demanded concessions from the university (ie a black studies department, their own on-campus "house.") The administration caved, and there is that famous photo of black students leaving the building with rifles and bandoleers across their chests.

At Madison, black students had already called for a strike that Winter, in which mostly white students were supposed to block people from going into buildings at all. The National Guard was called, complete with helmets, rifles, and bayonets. The strike eventually ended.

But this is ancient history for the NCAA. Go Badgers, eh?

The Three Coreys

It was sitting outside the Fox in DC when Rambler had a great idea: we would all be Coreys: Corey Rambler, Corey Tourguide, and Corey Dlamini.
If any females actually wandered over to our section, that's what we'd tell them. Corey's all the way.
Haim and Feldman eventually went their separate ways, but the name will live on. I'm planning to name the next dog I have Corey.
Now, with one of the two dead, the world is ripe for more Coreys. In Rambler's LA every day they would have forgetten, since life is lived only in the present and Jimmy Carter is considered a historical feature and thus not worth learning about.
But think of the glory of being a Corey ("no, I'm not the one who's dead"). What are the chances of two teen movie stars named the same name?
So try the Corey thing at the next party in the Hills, Rambler, you just might get lucky (or forgotten.)

Rainbow Party

Has "Rainbow Party" been proven bullshit yet? As you may recall, a recent fiction book claimed that girls would orally please boys while leaving a ring of their lipstick color around the boys' penis'.
"Rainbow Party" raised hackles from coast to coast by claiming our adolescent sweet young things are actually human Hoover 2000s. They leave lipstick traces every time the go down on some guy (which is often).
I am therefore going to have my own Rainbow Party at my place. Plus a grand prize for the winner of a giant stuffed unicorn. AAhhh. What could be sweeter?

Omigod! Teen Girl Party at my Place

Since my father is going to be gone for awhile, I'm taking the opportunity to throw a massive Kegger for the neighborhood's female teens.

Hey! I'm promising them free weed and free beer just for showing up. There's also a hot tub which I hope to get running by Friday. All I ask in return is that they not bring parents or boyfriends.

There's already a group of guys (in their 40s-50s) who'll be glad to welcome them in whatever way possible. I've paid off the local loser cops, but some of them still want in on the action.

I've turned part of the attic into a mattress-floored space which will be called "The Special Room." I had to buy red light bulbs especially for the occasion.

Then there's the house punch which will consist of 90 percent grain alcohol and 10 Tang! Roofies available upon request (shee!).

So spread to the word (and other things). This is going to be the sickest party of the year. Just don't tell where you've been. That's a no-no. And besides, we already have video cameras around the place for when you drunkenly flash us. Wouldn't want that to get around, would we?

Be there or b L7 (square).

In a Frozen Lake

I wish I could be a chocolate cake. Every one would want to eat me. It's clean its mean it surreal a career. Can't put them together nouns, verbs, adjectives. How could it be what did I do? Punisment forever for no reason, no cause, no reason. Someone tell me what I did to deserve this?

I can't get this thing for one more Spring.

Flowers in the Desert

I thought that pain and truth were things that really mattered
But you can't stay here with every single hope you had shattered
Big Country

The Suburbanization of New York?

The second half of the title is "Is the World's Greatest City Becoming Just Another Town?"

I have just dipped into this book so far, but it is almost completely Manhattan-centric. Chain stores, fast food, and Starbucks replacing everything that was unique about the island, which was especially its intense and next-door close mixture of low-and-high end stores, bars, and restaurants; and the rich, middle-class (emphasis) and poor living in close proximity. Every three blocks or so, wrote EB White in his famous "Here is New York" essay, was like an entire town elsewhere in the country.

Living in the outer New Jersey suburbs, but connected by both frequent rail and bus, I grew up vicariously in New York in the late 70s and early 80s. (This included being threatened by various Ratso Rizzzo dirtbags when my teen friends and I went to get fake ID's in Times Square).

One of my favorite places was a magazine store on 43rd just off of Eighth Ave. that sold old "National Lampoons" from the early 70s that were absolutely hilarious and dirty as hell. Their fake news section was a precursor to "the Onion" and helped me construct an entirely bogus and funny newspaper for my fraternity at Tulane (before leaving for Madison, where the uber-serious lefty Daily Cardinal wouldn't even print an April Fool's paper).

The last time I took the misnamed "New York Express" bus into the Port Authority, the New York Times had replaced the "massage parlors (read whorehouses) on Eighth.

But this is begging the question: to be authentic, does a city have to cater to vice, crime, and the needs of the poor and working class? No, the point of most of the essays in the book is that blocks that used to contain a local business squeezed into every doorway now have been taken over by block-long Duane Reade's.

But everything else in the world has been changed by technology and the global economy, so why not Manhattan's mom-and-pop businesses? A city is organic, constantly changing, especially in world economy command-and-control centers like Manhattan, London, and Tokyo.

What needs to happen is for western Brooklyn to congeal. Hipster Williamsburg needs to connect to yuppieish Park Slope, Carroll Gardens et. al. There needs to be a new center of youthful discontent, a square that served the purpose of Tompkins Sq. Park in the 1980s.

One last note, to Rambler especially, is that 75 percent of Harlem is either rent controlled, regulated, or public housing. 125 St. will never be upper Madison Ave.

Looking out from the top of the bluff of Morningside Park in the 1980s (when a cousin and a friend were at adjacent Columbia), you saw below you a cityscape of abandoned buildings. When I went back about 7 years ago, everything was occupied. Is this so bad? Is Harlem not "real" unless it's black and poor?
More later when I've actually read and digested the book.

A Romantic Gets His Due

Do you remember that movie ("Say Anything?") where John Cusak goes after beauty n brains Ione Skye? He held up a boombox and plays "In Your Eyes" outside her house. Well, I learned the hard way that kind of "romantic" move usually gets you labeled a stalker or worse.
Some magazine I was reading had a list of these kind of bold, heart-full-of-soul maneuvers in movies. The girl is invariably persuaded to love the seemingly hopeless, out-of-his league protagonist. The magazine (and me) have some advice,: the girl will not be won over; she'll run to the hills and maybe get a restraining order on your scary, addle-brained ass.
Nevertheless, Hollywood keeps pumping out this wish-fullfillment pablum, much to the detriment of suckers who believe it. If they're male, they'll think that red-hot passion and soulful devotion are the ticket to finally get their unrequited love. If they're female, they'll believe that most boys and men actually behave that way. Both are in for big dissapointments.
So what's the ticket? Patience, complete casualness, joking, and never letting on how much you like a woman until you've landed your personal big one (not quite the old the more you ignore them the more they want you, but close). For women, put your respective money where your mouth is. You don't want passion, you want the opposite: responsibility, dependability, respectability and emotional and financial security. Daddy will take care of it.
(See the Onion story on "World's Most Emotionally Strong Man" and how he knows exactly how and when to comfort his mate).
As Jimi H. said "Oh, well I've still got my guitar."

Vacate is the Word

Cannot find the spark
Running in the dark
Cannot find the comfort in this world

snow and death

"It snowed upon the living, it snowed upon the dead" - James Joyce, in some short story.

The snow was melting yesterday, the water running into the drains like the blood in "Psycho." I thought of the Beatles "Here Comes the Sun" as winter strains against Spring. But I want everything frozen and covered over, like the real me that has been suffocated by pain, yet leaps to life the minute the terrible pressure in my body abates. For now, I want everything frozen until I can live again.

I can't breathe, I've found out. I have what is called sleep apnea, in which the throught is cut off from breathing by soft tissue which blocks breathing during sleep when relaxed.

That's right, relaxation is bad, and will kill me if I continue trying to sleep with blocked airways. Another doctor told me I had massive cholesterol levels. I am not long for this world, it seems.

This is too bad, for when I can get enough oxygen, I feel like me again. Confident, competent, and joking. The difference is night and day. If I had the confidence to know I could maintain it, what a wonderful world it could be. Otherwise, I have to resign myself to an early death or a nightmare half-life of suffering sleeplessness and pain. This is what I've dealt with for 20 years. I've had enough.

The real me, though, comes back so quickly when I can breathe that I miss normal life so much. To sleep deeply, to make love with enjoyment. To exist without pain, the ability to relax without penalty. This is all I ask. Yet somehow God or whomever above has chosen to deny it to me. What did I do to deserve this? I guess this is the eternal question of man.

So, with my 44th birthday approaching, I find nothing to celebrate. If and when I recover, will it be so late that anything approaching family, career, and children are out of the picture, or even a female mate? The sands of time, like the melting snow, are disappearing down the drain. Bring on the night, bring on the winter until I can feel a springtime in me for real this time.

John Barleycorn Must Die

Barley is one of the chief ingredients in Beer and Whiskey. The British reformers who attacked it forgot that it is also a chief part of Bread.

In the personification of the struggles over alcohol, John Barleycorn was Beer and Whiskey. In the folk song, revived by some band in the 1960s, there is the central lyric:

"And these three men, they made a solemn vow
John Barleycorn must die."

Is this now the central aim of AA? After all, it is said that if alcohol were just discovered today, it would be outlawed. I wonder about Rambler, going against the great social lubricant of today. How to do it? Outdoor climates like Southern California make it relatively easy by providing alternatives to bars and pubs and the like, but there is still the temptation to supplement the high one gets from the relatively unobstructed freedom of the West.

I can imagine being on the beach at Santa Monica, watching the sun set over Malibu. What could be better than a cool one to ice the day? Or should you just plunge yourself into the Pacific?

Money and Menace

There's a new book out (I'll find out the name later) that I flipped through that said New York has lost its character because of rampant real-estate development.

I must admit, Manhattan has lost much of its sense of place due to chain-development and the like. But it was an accident waiting to happen.

Real-estate pressures on Manhattan are immense, owing mostly to the lack of it and idiotic real-estate land-stealing through rent-control and rent-stabilized units.

But the real land-burst came with the city's plummeting crime rate. All of the sudden, neighborhoods that had been off-limits became open for development.

Anyone who knew NY in the 1980s knew the palpable sense of menace that started to overcome you, say, as you went further into Alphabet City. I remember my college roommate, an Upper Westsider, turning back on St. Mark's at about First Ave. because it supposedly got too bad "down there."

As I got bolder, I went more and more "down there" and enjoyed feeling like a badass simply by being in Tompkins Square Park with the "Anarchists" (read, apartment redevelopers before their time). My favorite place in the city was the intersection of 2nd and Ave. B, where there was this post-apocalyptic "gas station" where noise bands would play, surrounded by empty buildings.

So none of that is left. But a city is an organic creature, constantly reinventing itself. It is left for succeeding generations to create a new lefty/non-conformist-center, probably in Brooklyn. Don't look back.

Winter Light

A classic from last year, and one of the best things I've written. It's to my love, a majestic maple in the backyard.

Reaching up toward the pale light
Branches grasping it
Is perfect
Bridges the whiteness
Between ground and air
earth and sky, unified
It is a child's picture of a tree
Painted by a master artist
When the leaves come
They are lush and full
For now it is asleep
Its towering majesty undiminished
It yearns to the sky
stripped to the bones
and for a moment,
brings my eye to heaven high

Teens Send Blowjobs to Haiti

A pack of US teens, struck by the devestation in Haiti, has vowed to travel to the be beleaguered country to give blowjobs in the earthquate-battered nation.
Southern California, where the teen blowjob craze begun, has offered its adolescent girls up to give comfort to the males of the storm-wracked island.
"We saw on the news that people are suffering here," said Mandy Pepperidge, 17, of Simi Valley, " we thought that it's the least we can do, given the fact that we're on our knees pretty much 24/7 here."
The teens realized that the oral sex would not guarantee them a place in Showtimes movie of the week. Nontheless, they were rushed to Catholic hospitals in hastity put-together schoolgirl outfits.
"They said the uniforms would be a huge turn-on on the net, so we all changed into the skimpy tartan outfits," said Auruara Snow, sex kitten of the next 24 hours on Justbarelywithmuffschool.com.
The males of Haiti were reportedly appreciative of the unexpected attention, and posted their activities on the net with the girls as soon as possible. "It is, how you say, unusual for California teens to treat us with such great respect and comfort," said Pierre Jones-Hugenout, beneficiacy of the US aid.
Some on the island said that men had been praying to the Voodoo Goddess Angelique Boutique for the aformentioned favors. "Angelique has answered our prayers," said one man, "the entire island has gained release with appreciation."
However, Elaine Mables, author of the book "Don't Go Back to Cocksville," has maintained that showcase projects like the Haiti effort simply reinforce the status quo.
"For God Sake,we've got an entire generation for whom the blowjob is equivalent to a firm handshake," she said. She suggested alternatives such as bowing and scraping.
"Someday soon in this country the assfuck is going to be the greeting of choice," she said. Let's make sure everyone is safe in performing this soon-to-be-pleasantry, she said.

Our Place in History

I like to name a post something portentous, like that above. That being said, I can witter on like a crack-headed bird-brain for the rest of the post.
But I'd like to say about Gen-X, are we finished already? Is Nirvana the best we can do? Technology has turned the world upside down (or is it right-side up) since we graduated from college. Most of it sucks.
Don't take me for a Luddite, but Facebook? Porn for all for free? Even mapquest is redundant if you take the time to study a decent map. But Google, god of all and everything, has turned your ordinary barroom controversy into certitude.
But everything subservient to technology, even books? This is the Roman empire being sacked by the Visogoths. People with e-books swear they are the best, but will they last? Will they be treasured by generations to come? Will they gather dust as prestige items its owners never read anyway? Trophy cases for the urban upper=middle class? Civilization teetering on a bookcase, over the extra-large screen TV?
Egalitarianism sucks. There were reasons that newspaper and magazine pundits could weigh in on quite quite weighty subjects. They knew what they were talking about.
And no, any jack-off king in his basement reading blogs is not the same as George Will. And Will benefited from this arrangement, meaning that those in high office responded to his request for interviews were returned asap.
When I worked for the Trenton Times, state officials would get back to me whenever I told them to. This was not because of me, but because I represented 100,000 people, and they damn well better get back unless they wanted someone else to crucify them.
The power of the press, it was said, belongs to those who own one. Now that everyone has one, who'll grant power to the powerless?

I can't help it

Nobody reads anything, that's for sure, but it doesn't slake the subconscious compulsion. I like the written word. I thought I was through it but I'm not.

Goddamn it, Rambler, explain to us your love affair with LA, a city we'd always thought you'd hate for its superficiality and its population of known idiots, vacuous muttonheads, birdbrains and morons. Is Jay Leno only joking when he finds these people who don't know what century the civil war took place in, and where is the Indian Ocean? (bad grammar, I know).

And paper cuts on her hands (I can't help it), how do I goddam link up to people? I know I'm a techno-moron but somebody throw me a line. Just because you're better than me at these idiocies doesn't mean you're smarter (hint to everyone: I can quote political theory from the ancient Greeks onward; Am I smarter than you or just chose something archaic to study?)

Because in the end, political theory is about how to best govern societies. Is everyone staying home and broadcasting their stupid and untested theories really the best way to do so? Let's all stay in our basements, wack off to mass produced and ultimately boring porno, and offer lame shots across the political bow instead of really working for change.

Fuck You,
Tourguide

If the Phone Dont Ring it's Me

please help us we cannot exist beyond your posts. Helpless , helpless help us. If the phone doesn't ring, it's the whole world beyond your office.