Â
I’ve been battling a demonic cold. It’s half my fault. My status as a smoker has come back to haunt me in all kinds of way. I tried to quit, but it’s hard. I suppose though that dying would be harder. Anyways when I get a cold it becomes this thing where my body tries to drown itself. I have to think about breathing.
I took the Purple Line to the 720 to an art event on Sunday.
And this happened:
I was pouring myself some wine and a woman said, “That’s a beautiful dress you have on.â€Â I said thanks. She went on to say it was the first time she had been at this particular establishment on Wilshire Blvd. I told her I went to this particular establishment all of them time, well rather used to.
I said the place had lots of events. Art talks, poetry, jazz…she then stopped me.
“Oh I like jazz, but I don’t like rap music, sorry. I don’t like it.â€
Continue reading
I had written this serious post about crap you already know. Coupons, going back to school, roommates, moving back in with your parents and then I thought of something. We’re in La La Land.
Image is EVERYTHING!!!
This is why so many of us get in a hole in the first place, so I decided to give you advice on how to survive economic harsh times, yet keep your rep firmly in place. Being eccentric and bat-shit crazy always sounds better on paper than just poor.
If you are going down the economic ladder, do it with insane style!!!
One thing you can do is join a cult. Cults are always accepting new members. And many cults have a crash pad. When you have no money you isolate yourself from your friends and family anyway, so you’re ripe for a cult. Yeah you might have to do animal sacrifices, but if you aren’t a vegetarian this won’t be a problem and also there are animal friendly cults that just sacrifice people, though those kinds of cults are Continue reading
Gustavo Dudamel (Photo: Marco Anelli) from NY Mag
(Retraction: A reader has confirmed my wrongness. It was Jayce Ogren with a shaved head.)
My boyfriend and I went to a free LA Phil concert at Disney Hall and we got a real treat, Gustavo Dudamel was conducting! (Or someone who looked alot like him with a shaved head.) How very generous of him. Jayce Ogren was scheduled to conduct and from where I was sitting it looked like Gustavo. Gustavo conducting at that event would be like Brad Pitt introducing one his movies at the Arclight on a random Tuesday matinee.
This weekend I came upon a gem of an article in the LA Times that described what steps you should take when you’re unemployed.
And here are a smidgen of some of the great tips:
“Leftovers are also great — I have barbecued chicken today, and tomorrow it’s in my enchiladas and then it’s in a chicken salad,” said Marguerite Womack, director of economic and workforce development for United Way of Greater Los Angeles.
I’ve seen the United Way office. It is next to the Starbucks where a policeman harassed me for looking homeless. There is a big sign by that building around 5th street in downtown and on the building it says: Don’t give the homeless money, because they’ll just ask for more…ok it doesn’t say that exactly, but pretty close.
Here’s another crumb of advice:
Jessica Hodgdon, 24, was out of work recently for six months. To save money, she moved into the East Los Angeles apartment of a friend, who waived rent in exchange for Hodgdon’s help cooking and cleaning.
Free rent please.
“Last night, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin accepted the nomination to the vice-presidency at the Republican National Convention.
Originally the buzz about Palin, focused on her having a vagina. Her presence was analyzed as a calculated McCain strategy to lure disgruntled, hard core Hillary Clinton supporters.
Then the shift went internal, to her uterus, her identity as a mother to five, the youngest with some form of developmental delay, and a 17 year old daughter, unmarried and pregnant.
So what does this Palin parranda of information and analysis mean to mamis of color, Latina mamis like me? Not surprisingly, nada.
Sarah Palin wants to put herself out there as “every womanâ€. She wants to be seen as “just your average hockey momâ€, and other mommies see themselves and their reality reflected through Palin, except, mamis of color, that is.”
excerpt by Maegan “La Mala†Ortiz, Racialicious from the post: Mccain’s VP pick Palin and the Politica and Privilege of White Woman’hood/ Mommy’hood
I was going to go to the SiteLA’s (SiteLA is a Quicksilver marketing campaign) Heya party on Friday, August 22nd.
The transportation event sponsored by Toyota??!!!! I know. How could I NOT comment on that? How can I NOT make fun of SiteLA (I’ve got nothing to lose I’m not in Quicksilver’s demographic. Black girls don’t surf.) I think it’s fab that inspired people who are getting nonunion wages to make a very long commercial are doing inspiring things, but come on.
On Friday evening I was going there to make fun of the “random†coolness (and get free beer,) but then I got an email with a bit from Tina Dupuy.
Also take a look at this yesterdays FT(7/29) article pg 18 “Shells sets pace as big oil lifts R&D spend” in the Financial Times by Ed Crooks to see how they are apparently price fixing, which I deduced sense the oil companies are spending far less than they should on R&D. And the article pg 2 “US Treasury blames supply and demand for oil prices” by James Politi that shows how they even have the US Treasury Department in on this deadly game.
Facts from Conde Nast Portfolio, Crude Reporting by Howell Raines 08/08
Hey they pay less of a percentage of their income on taxes than I do? I’m a human being that works.
Exxon Mobile Oil formerly Standard Oil was started by the John Rockefeller and his descendants still sit on the board (puts it all in an interesting historical perspective).
Now Rockefellers is synonymous with arts and NY and some odd looking guy running for various offices and another one who was VP, but that was just a great PR campaign. Pretty easy for them, since they own pretty much own either indirectly or directly everything we read.
I found a new phrase.
Hipster Racism, I found it at Racialicious, the ladies over there are so smart.
“I define hipster racism (I’m borrowing the phrase from Carmen Van Kerckhove) as ideas, speech, and action meant to denigrate another’s person race or ethnicity under the guise of being urbane, witty (meaning “ironic†nowadays), educated, liberal, and/or trendy.â€
AJ Plaid, Racialicious
I used to just call it the “tattooed, pseudo progressive, over-educated, asshole” problem, but this is much better.
Back in the day (the 90s) an ethnic minority in Los Angeles only had to stay away from Republican areas and never visit the Southern part of the United States (or the South Bay, oh let’s throw in Covina and Tujunga too) and they would be shielded from being openly mocked owing to what they were ethnically (not from being harassed by the cops, they will always be a problem), but those days are over.
We can now enjoy being mocked by Obama supporting, vegetarian diet, Ivy League graduate liberals, with “multi-colored” sex partners. Well thank god. We’ve come so far.
Continue reading
“And_then_there_were_none With so many good people leaving the paper, it seems unfair to single anyone out. But readers of this blog have come to know Jesus Sanchez, to seek him out for his sly and dry wit, his knowledge of the city where he was born, and his uncanny ability to find and tell the quietly great story. It would be wrong to have his photo vanish from this page without letting you know Jesus has been laid off. “ Veronique de Turenne, LA Now, LA Times, Thank you Jesus.  July 15
It to me is amazing in regards to who is staying and who is going, this is a sad time for LA print media.
Browne
Â
Did you wake up one day and realized that you weren’t the most valuable living being on the planet? No, neither have I, but I am making a real effort at getting there.
Maybe you can’t change the world, but you can change a piece of it for at least twenty minutes and if you changed twenty minutes and another person changed twenty minutes, possibly all of you together could have an impact on someone’s day.
If you believe in that kind of concept and you think patchouli smells good here’s a list of your things to do.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Continue reading
“Tesco is to stop importing about £1m ($2m) of fresh vegetables from Zimbabwe, reversing its previous stance that the trade was essential to support the families of the farm workers who grow crops such as mange tout and baby corn.†By John Willman in London and Tony Hawkins in Harare at the Financial Times.
Tesco owns the recent upstart in the organic food game, Fresh & Easy (which for some odd reason the blogosphere is obsessed with.)
Not that I believe that Tesco was only trying to help, but how far is too far in regards to “helping†and what’s not far enough?
On Friday I went to a get together at MacArthur Park’s Mama’s Hot Tamales in support of the ongoing carwash boycott that first came to the attention of the media with the boycotting of the Pirian-owned Vermont Hand Wash in Los Feliz.
At the event Barbara Ehrenreicht (author of Nickle and Dimed and the new book This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation) gave the boycott organizers and their supporters her encouragement.
“America has forgotten it’s own history of organized collective action and outright rebellion…†Barbara Ehrenreicht.
That to me is the key. You can’t go too far, but you can screw yourself if you don’t go far enough.
