¡Sounds Like Burning: Play From Your Fucking Heart!

¡Sounds Like Burning is about psychos, angels and psychotic angels. Who else deserves mention?

Mister Bill Hicks introduces the series because he is… Bill Hicks. He condensed the first law of all the Arts: Play From Your Fucking Heart!

The performances to be aired here are rigodamnediculous. The biblical scholar Bon Scott once commanded: Let There Be Light. And There Was Light.

Bask in it.

Can one make the unknown known? Tune in and Trip out.

Bill Hicks “Burning Issues”
[audio:https://laeastside.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/flag.mp3]

Ron Shock remembers:

Other than the drunken orgies… we (Bill Hicks and I and the rest of the Comedy Outlaws) were pretty wild, we did a tremendous amount of drugs and we drank a tremendous amount of whiskey, and usually we did the drugs and the whiskey together. But there was one show we did… Hicks is on stage doing his impression of Elvis where he uses toilet paper instead of handkerchiefs and he would wipe his forehead with toilet paper and throw the toilet paper into the crowd. Jimmy Pineapple who was just drunk as a skunk comes running from side stage and tackles Bill, for no reason, just to do it, right in the middle of a show, in front of 900 people and tackles him and as Bill is laying on the ground without missing a beat, keeps on with his act, he’s still Elvis…

Lucha Libre in East Los

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It’s no secret that I am a HUGE Lucha Libre fan. The sport of the working class folk. The little people that are the salt of the earth and make the world go round. This ballet of high flying, explosive acrobatics is some of the best entertainment on the face of the earth. I’m not talking about that stuff you see on American tv, even though it has its moments. No. Lucha Libre is beyond those theatrics of male soap opera and is an entity all of it’s own. Blue Demon Sr/Jr, El Santo & Hijo del Santo, El Perro Aguallo, Tinieblas, El Rayo de Jalisco, Atlantis, Octagon, Mascara Sagrada, Conan, Super Porki and Mil Mascaras are just some of the legends I grew up on because my father was a luchador in his day. I don’t care what anyone says about Lucha Libre. If you don’t have anything great to say about it then shut your pie hole !!! That goes out to all the mensos that don’t know better when they preach that it’s fake. OF COURSE IT’S FAKE !!!!! I can walk you through a whole match and explain the dynamics of this eloquent dance, but that’s not the point of it all. It’s a show. Entertainment. Escape from a weeks worth of busting your ass at some dead end job, trying to put food, clothes and a roof over your families head. It’s an escape from the realities of life because you don’t know where your next meal may come from. This is where families come to bond and share precious moments as they yell out profanities in Spanish and flip wrestlers off with great gusto. I almost lost my voice yelling my head off at the ref for cheating and helping Los Rudos win and you know what ? It’s all part of the show. The experience. The life style of the lower class. Horse racing may be the sport of kings, but Lucha Libre, that’s the sport of the working class. A class I’m proud to be a part of. All of the pics were taken by the GF who was a trooper and took one for the team because we ended up going to the show spontaneously. She has a great eye right ?For those of you interested in going to the next revancha, here’s the info. See ya there. Arriva los technichos !!!!!

M.F.W. Presents Goodrich Hall Lucha Libre

Every Sunday or every other Sunday at 5-5:30 p.m.

1239 Goodruch Blvd in the city of commerce. Entrance on Olympic and Union Pacific

Free parking. Tixs $7 Adults Kids $3

For more info (323) 812-8749 / (323) 812-8003

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Fiestas Patrias: Lompoc Style

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It’s 16 de Septiembre, Mexican Independence day, and there’s still no mention of it on LA Eastside? Isn’t that the Mexican blog anyways? Some people seem to think so. But until they start calling all the other blogs the White people blogs, I refuse to think of it that way. Were just more diverse than the rest. So no, we don’t need to mention this holiday. We don’t need no stinkin’ Fiestas Patrias!

That being said: why has nobody mentioned it? What, all you Eastsiders took a long siesta this weekend? A trabajar cabrones!

Not to worry, I got your requisite stereotypes covered: Let’s go to the Fiestas Patrias! In Lompoc! Uhh, where?

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Who hid the Mexicans?

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From the great blog Mex Files the question is asked “Where are the Mexican or Mexican American Chefs on the Food Channel Network cooking or explaining or visiting Mexican Restaurants and kitchens?” Always a sous-chef, never a chef

Paul Campos (Lawyers, Guns and Money) on U.S. television celebrity chef, Rick Bayless.

“… it struck me that in a country where the actual cooking in high-end restaurants is dominated by Latin Americans in general, and Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in particular, the “celebrity chef” doing the Mexican cooking against his French and Italian-American competitors was a very WASPy-seeming fellow. Nothing wrong with that of course — it’s not like you have to be a member of an ethnic group to be a great cook in that genre — but it also reminded me of the point Anthony Bourdain makes in Kitchen Confidential that almost none of the thousands of superbly skilled Mexican and Ecuadorian and Peruvian etc, cooks manning the lines ever seem to end up as head chefs or sous chefs at the fancy places they work, let alone with TV shows on the Food Network.”

Rick Bayless is a good Mexican cook and very respectful of the cuisine but he’s not a Mexican.


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Eastside Clothiers

So this is what it looks like when the Eastside becomes a demographic. I first spotted this campaign in a men’s magazine and I was like “Whoa, finally representing the kind of people who actually wear Dickies!” Thanks to LA Eastside reader Perry who passed on the video link, much appreciated!
When I was a teen, I was into the hardcore punk scene and interestingly our fashion wasn’t all that much different from the vatos in the neighborhood. We’d wear Dickies, those canvas shoes you could buy at Woolworth’s or Thrifty’s (both stores now defunct) and plain black cotton jackets. The difference was, we were all a lot scruffier looking and had colored hair. I’ve shopped many a dime store aisle with a vato/vata next to me.
Nowadays, my friends will head to Cesar Chavez, North Broadway, Figueroa, Huntington Park or swapmeets for their Dickies wear. You can cut them off at the knee for the classic vato look, wear them to work a la your favorite mechanic or even pass them off as dress slacks. I remember once Dickies even had a “Working Class Hero” contest which I thought was hilarious! As for me, I’ve since moved on to girlier clothes.

Separate but Equal Treatment via Rail Lines in L.A.

The Rail around Indiana

If you look at this photo you wonder what is this? And how did anyone think this was safe?

Why is the safety method on the Eastside going to be of the “pull yourselves up by the bootstraps” variety via cameras to blame personal drivers and old men in yellow vests reminding people to “be safe,” while the City of Los Angeles west of LaCienega get the “silver spoon” variety of safety with expensive barriers and elevated stations?

Why will there will be no testing out Darwinism theory of survival of the fittest on the Westside?

Only the neighborhoods with higher concentrations of poor people and brown and black people are tested with sink and swim theories.

The rail dips just one mile into the magic dividing line of LaCienega and the people on that side of LA who don’t walk or even use public transit as extensively as people on the Eastside get all of our tax dollars spent protecting them from being hit by a train that most of them won’t even take or even be near outside of driving by its protected barrier.

(This is an excerpt of a very long post entitled “Cameras Aren’t Going to Make Fewer People Die.”)

by Browne Molyneux

Bone-shaking volume

CDs by Mr. Sánchez. Mexicans know him as a valiente, a brave one: armed, dangerous and doomed (he was ambushed and executed after a concert in Mexico in 1992). Comparisons are superficial, but you could think of him as part Billy the Kid, part Bill Monroe. Photo: Eric Grigorian for The New York Times

Photo: Eric Grigorian for The New York Times

This past weekend, the N.Y. TimesTravel section revisited Los Angeles, focusing on narcocorridos and venues that play an important part in its spread throughout Los Angeles. It went better this time than the last time they visited L.A.

Narcocorridos, and by extension, any form of Mexican music that is born and nourished in Los Angeles, are not covered much in the United States. Almost every time narcocorridos are mentioned in media, it’s tied with the current Mexican Drug war fiasco and spoken about negatively. I once sat in on a discussion with a well-known Mexican journalist at a university and she all but blamed the whole situation in Mexico & the Americas on narcocorridos. The whole time I sat there, I shook my head, unable to comprehend how someone could explicitly blame corridos for the “drug war” in México.

Coverage of narcocorridos in the U.S. is much different than in México. The United States is much less subjective than México in its coverage of narcocorridos. Mexican journalists have bought the Mexican government’s argument that narcocorridos are to blame for the drug trade and must be banned from radio play. American journalists have gone further into narcocorridos, documenting its rise and popularity among Mexicans in the United States and the constant airplay in radio. It’s a musical form that allows the children of Mexican immigrants to become immensely popular, though the singing is sometimes sub-par. Continue reading

The last few years

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First they came for our taco trucks. Then they deported some family members, a few friends, and some other paisas that lived down the street. On the weekend they went to TJ and had some fun, it wasn’t so bad. Yeah, One Love. Then they paid us to mow the grass and wheel out their fucking trash cans. Sometime way before any of this they threw out some po-mo ramblings and tossed the Eastside moniker up in the air, up for grabby grabs, but I just remembered so this timeline might be off by a month or two. Afterwards they demanded we bring them the food already, cuz they’ve been sitting here for 10 minutes. Right around this time some asshole ran for mayor under the English Only/ Down with the Wetters platform. But the chittichangas were good with guacamole and they decided to forget that foray into the Old Ways. Then they decided that taco trucks were actually a good idea, maybe even kinda cool, and the proper people also liked them, so yeah, lets not enforce that arbitrary law. Then they wanted to do that whole 187 thing against children of immigrants again, you know, for old times sake. It’s part of that grab bag of ideas they put into rotation when things go bad; they’re just not that creative.

And now, dipping back into said bag, they want to ban roosters, again. This shit has got to stop. No pasaran. Stand for California. The buck is in the sand, the line stops near here, or something of the sort.

Let the chickens be.

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