The View from Here

Since my last blog entry I've had some great shots and some not so great shots on my barely 3 year old camera. Apparently, it has decided to quit working at 100% when it works at all. However, when it has functioned in a useful manner, I grabbed these photos.

Also, a few friends have asked after us since the horrible fires of the past several weeks in Southern California. Thankfully, we are okay. A little choked up from all of the smoke, but okay. I have attached a series of before and after type shots for comparison.

This is what the view from my rooftop should look like...
(Click on any of the photos below to embiggen them.)




But, after the fires, this is what it looked like - UGH!


This is looking NE towards the San Bernardino Mountains, although you can't actually see them in this photo.

No sooner had the fires ended, and the Hollywood types were out in force again in my hood, trying to capture some last episodes before the big actors strike? Who knows, and mores imply put, who fucking cares if these self-important douchebags cut their own throats or not? Remember that the sickening endless supply of shitty "reality teevee" got a jump-start after the writers' strike in the 90s.

Setting up the scene for a "CSI: New York" episode. Note the logos on the vehicles, which were/are parked in DTLA, not in NYC.

NYPD police HQ in your neighborhood in Los Angeles? More likely than you think!

I found this sign on the ground on my way home recently. Pretty much sums up life in these harsh times. Hell, the other day I saw a pimp driving a Volkswagen. Man, that's rough!

I swear, the sticker was already there when I found it, honest...

It's O-fficial - Obama is President

Who knew that when my buddy got these posters in January, 2008, that they would become the iconic image of our 44th President's successful campaign.

These terrific images were "bombed" (or plastered with wheat paste to be technically accurate) to the side of this building across the street from my loft in Downtown Los Angeles, California, on the Saturday night before Super Tuesday's primaries in January. They were the FIRST to be put up ANYWHERE and I am honored and blessed that I was asked to document their arrival not only on the street art scene but also on the political scene.

Shepard Fairey's image has been seen around the world and it is generally the one most recognized with the campaign. Much like Andy Warhol's portrait of Richard Nixon with maniacal eyes and "Vote McGovern!" scrawled across the bottom, this image of Barack Obama will only gain in popularity and legend.



Here's a close up of the same image. For additional perspective, this building is 3 stories tall and each poster measures 24 x 36 inches. A month ago, originals of this poster were selling on eBay for $500 - $1,000, I wonder what they'll go for now.

We All Have to Duck When the Shit Hits the Fan

When I talk to people about my fascination of all things zombie or zombie-related, I often neglect to mention that what I really mean is how fascinated I am with human beings and their response(s) to any situation they either put themselves in or get put into through disasters and the like. As I like to say to anyone who will listen and even a few who won't, every time you see the word "zombie" think "ill-prepared suburbanite" and the context will instantaneously become that much more frightening. Why? Well that's the easy part actually: zombies don't fucking exist!

But, you neighbor, who goes from his air-conditioned house (that he can't afford the ARM adjusting payments on) in his air-conditioned leased BMW (see "house" above) to his air-conditioned office where he downloads pornography and sports scores all day while intermittently typing numbers into a spreadsheet that no one will ever use DOES exist. And, he doesn't just exist, he's real and he's real fucking angry when he can't get his Marlboro's and Natty Light from the 7-11 before the "big game" starts. Imagine how he'll be when the real shit hits the fan, that is beyond minor inconvenience to severe deprivation. Sure, why worry though, he's a good Christian/Jewish/Muslim/Buddhist man, right?

Maybe. But are you going to rely upon the thin layer of humanity and civility that invented color photography and the flame thrower prior to WW2? "Hey, there's someone over there that I really want to set on fire, but I don't want to have to get that close...hey, Bob, did you get that shot? The orange in the fire ball as it cooks this guy alive is really spectacular!" (RIP George Carlin)

My point is that preparedness is its own reward. Get educated. Get healthy. Learn a trade. If you already know one, learn another that is completely or even somewhat alternatively related. If you are able, legally and otherwise, buy a gun and learn how to use it for self-defense. Having a $2,000 Bushmaster AR-15 with laser sighting and night optics on it won't help you at all if you've never fired the thing in the dark! LOL WUT?!? In fact, you're actually more of a threat dead than if you had just died unarmed because now I have to also deal with the SOB that has your fancy rifle and can probably use it. If you own it, use it and use it regularly. That $40 a month gym membership that your chubby ass ain't using could be better spent on 2 hours of range time (which you should be biking or walking to,) 200 rounds of your favorite pistol ammo, 5 pounds of rice, 5 pounds of beans, and 6 10 oz cans of chicken or tuna.

A website that I've recently become a fan of put it this way:

You take your average urbanite or suburbanite and get him excessively cold, wet, tired, hungry and/or thirsty and take away his television, beer, drugs, and other pacifiers, and you will soon seen the savage within. It is like peeling the skin of an onion—remove a couple of layers and it gets very smelly.

Here is a mental exercise: Put yourself in the mind set of Mr. Joe Sixpack, Suburbanite. (Visualize him in or near a big city near where you live.) He is unprepared. He has less than one week’s food on hand, he has a 12 gauge pump action shotgun that he hasn’t fired in years, and just half a tank of gas in his minivan and maybe a gallon or two in a can that he keeps on hand for his lawn mower. Then TEOTWAWKI hits (the end of the world as we know it, Thanks Michael Stipe!) The power grid is down, his job is history, the toilet doesn't flush, and water no longer magically comes cascading from the tap. There are riots beginning in his city. The local service stations have run out of gas. The banks have closed. Now he is suddenly desperate. Where will he go? What will he do?

Odds are, Joe will think: “I’ve gotta go find a vacation cabin somewhere, up in the mountains, where some rich dude only goes a few weeks out of each year.” So vacation destinations like Lake Tahoe, Lake Arrowhead, and Squaw Valley, California; Prescott and Sedona, Arizona; Hot Springs, Arkansas; Vail and Steamboat Springs, Colorado; and the other various rural ski, spa, Great Lakes, and coastal resort areas will get swarmed. Or, he will think: “I’ve got to go to where they grow food.” So places like the Imperial Valley, the Willamette Valley, and the Red River Valley will similarly get overrun.

There will be so many desperate Joe Sixpacks arriving all at once that these areas will degenerate into free-fire zones. It will be an intensely ugly situation and will not be safe for anyone. In some places the locals may be so vastly outnumbered that they won’t survive. But some of the Joe Sixpacks will survive, and then the more ruthless among them will begin to fight amongst themselves for the few remaining resources. They will form ad hoc gangs of perhaps 6 to 30 people. Once the Golden Horde has been thinned (and honed to ferocity) and they’ve cleaned out an area, the thugs at the pinnacle of ruthlessness will comprise the most formidable rover packs imaginable. They will move on to an adjoining region, and then another. But the inverse square law will work in your favor: Imagine that you take a jar of marbles turn it upside down on a wooden floor and then lift the jar suddenly upward. The marbles will spread out semi-randomly. But the farther from the mouth of the jar, the lighter the density of marbles.

Hence, the rover packs will attenuate themselves into a huge rural expanse that is peopled with well-armed country folks. By the time the looters work their way out 150 miles from the big cities, they will be thinned out considerably. The rover pack is your primary threat in a total collapse, no matter how remote your retreat. Here are your potential adversaries: A squad to company size force (12 to 60 individuals), highly mobile, moderately well armed with a motley assortment of weapons and vehicles, and imbued with absolute ruthlessness. Be prepared.

Put succinctly: Power - water - food distribution - law and order - arson fires - full scale looting

Yeah! That makes me want to get up and go to work to support a bailout for billionaires!

What's CURRENTly Happening in LA

People ask me frequently about Bedlam. What it was like, what the scene was like, what the people who used to come out after 10PM on Tuesday nights were like. Here's an independent film maker's take on our happy little home away from home. For some background, the Bedlam Drawing and Live Model Sketch Workshop (it's official title, not that anyone ever used it) was free to all comers, which generally fell into 3 or 4 categories. Those who came to draw/paint the models in the various stages of undress, the people who came solely to drink at our speakeasy, the people who came because it was scene and weren't really tied to any particular activity, and the pool players. You can see the pool table in one of the shots towards the end.

Oh, and if you look closely, you can see Yours Truly at about 30 seconds into the video, walking up on the sidewalk with TV Terry, who is interviewed near the end of the video.

Enjoy!

http://current.com/items/86890841_living_muses

Happy 17th Birthday Doolittle!!

Wow. The little black ball of fur I adopted way back in 1991 turned/turns 17 today. My cat, Hunteresse Doolittle, more commonly known as Doolittle, was the runt of her litter of 7 or 8 kittens that were found abandoned in an alley on the Westside of Los Angeles in the late fall of 1991.

She was eventually brought along with her litter mates and Mom, Sheba, to the awesome folks at Friends of Animals, also in WLA. Her mom, from all indications of the volunteers and from reports of the people who found her and her litter was a master hunter. In fact, they used the term "hunter/killer" to describe her bird hunting and squirrel destroying prowess. I thought, man, I hate fucking pigeons with a passion, and having a descendant of a known h/k on my balcony certainly couldn't be a bad thing, right?

But before all of that could even take place, a little history is in order. My interactions with cats was essentially OP, other people's cats and up until I was 20 years old and in college, that was fine by me. At the time, I was living with my girlfriend who had had a couple of cats when she was a child, but she hadn't had significant contact with any in years either. That was not to be for long and our neighbor, Crazy Betty the Cat Lady, would be seeing to that.

My girlfriend and I were sharing a two-bedroom place that was fairly large by all standards. At the top of our landing, we were on the 2nd floor of a 2-story 9-unit complex, was our apartment and CBCL's. On most occasions when we saw her, she was surrounded by this purring, figure-eighting posse of fur and claws. She was seriously the closest thing I've ever seen to being a pied-piper of the feline set. At any rate, we got to know her over the first couple of months we lived there, and by association, all of her wonderful cats. It was really funny to see her walk down the stairs and go around the corner and down the side of the complex to the back where the laundry was, the whole time this little trail of 5 or 6 cats following behind her. With some practice, I began to remember names and meows of the various group that she kept and over the months I began to notice a different calico here and a new white one there, but never said anything to her about it.

Her young and quite cute cousin, Julie, who would visit periodically, was an altogether different story. You could hardly get her to shut up once got started and she was "like-omigod!-letz goto the mall now!" kind of LA-crazy, rich and spoiled by negligent parents to be sure. One day as we were passing the time on my balcony I just couldn't resist and I asked her, point blank and in a not so subtle way, "What the fuck is up with your cousin Betty?" I inquired. "Oh, her? She's crazy, that's all. She inherited a ton of money back in the 80s and lives alone in a huge house in Palm Springs, with fountains and pools, you know she even has a Japanese landscaper?"

"No shit? Wow. So she's got it like that, eh? Why does she spend most of her time in that little ass studio apartment in this shitty little has-been neighborhood in West LA?"

"You heard me say she was crazy, right?" Julie replied.

"Oh, right. I see," I said in response, although I didn't really see the point of any of it. And I still don't, but I certainly guess it is more than possible, hell even probable, that some nice fairly well-to-do woman snapped and went bonkers when her wealthy attorney/banker/white slaver husband died in police custody in Fiji, or something like that.

What does this have to do with my beloved cat of 17 years? Everything, actually, because Crazy Betty is the one who convinced me and my girlfriend to go down to the shelter and adopt a kitten. The rest is history, which is currently sitting on the floor chowing down on a fresh can of tuna and salmon chunks.

When we arrived at FoA, I knew next to nothing about cats, much less what I was ultimately getting into. When the volunteer asked us in the lobby, "What kind of cat are you looking to adopt?" my response based on hours of casual contact with the local cat population was simply, "A grey one." Without skipping a beat the lady turns to my girlfriend and says "You must be the brains of this operation." Well, all kidding aside, the volunteer walked us back into this large room full of cats in cages, cats on the window sill, cats on tables, it was just cats cats cats.

In the back, built up onto a little stand was a cage that was 8X16 feet and split down the middle with thick wire. On one side was a very tired looking momcat (Sheba) and on the other was this enormous pile of kittens, all moving around and climbing over each other. On further inspection, I could see that their tiny eyes had opened and they were playing around with each other. Sure enough, kind of off to one side, was a little grey one. I even toyed with the idea of naming him/her "Lego," short for little grey one, but it wouldn't matter. With a little encouragement from the volunteer I gingerly opened up the cage and began to reach over to the side where the grey kitten was, but before I could reach it, this almost microscopic dot of fur jumped up and latched onto my BumEquipment sweatshirt and instantly started to cling. "Well," said the great volunteer, "that pretty much settles it. She chose you."

It's awfully hard to argue with logic like that, and I didn't. After I detached this adorable black fur ball from my sweatshirt and put her back in the cage I knew that I had experienced something wonderful if not altogether magnificent in the truest sense of the word. Now, looking back on those 17 years of torn paper, stray turds in the hallway, hairballs the size of your hand and on and on, I'm certain of the specialness now more than ever.

Last week when I had Doolittle into hospital for a routine check-up I noticed that the Vet had a sign on the wall with comparative ages from humans to dogs to cats. It isn't really 7 years to 1 year human to dog years ratio like is commonly thought but what really struck me as powerful was the top age on the chart for cats: 16 years, which was shown to be 96 in human years. So, by my best guesstimate, Doolittle is around 103 or 104 today. Yeah, kitty!

And Now Rick is Gone Too

From the day Syd Barret died.




July 11, 2006 - Tuesday

The Great Gig in the Sky
Current mood: crazy
Category: Religion and Philosophy

Crap. I'm going to drink and listen to "Wish You Were Here".

It's morning, but I don't need a day starting like this.

Freakin' Tuesdays.--- grabs CD and wine ---

So long, Roger Sydney Barrett, resquiate in pace.

Currently listening : Wish You Were Here By Pink Floyd

What Would Bucky Think?

I was inspired by this poem in college. I came across it again when I was reading more of the ever-inspiring works of R. Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller. What a difference almost 3 years can make.  I am so glad I have the dates and times of these little gems of creation.

-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-

February 22, 2006 - Wednesday

Cosmic Plurality by R. Buckminster Fuller
Current mood: giddy

Environment to each must be
All there is, that isn't me.
Universe in turn must be
All that isn't me AND ME.

Since I only see inside of me
What brain imagines outside me,
It seems to be you may be me.
If that is so, there's only we.

Me and we, too
Which love makes three,
UniversePerme-embracing
It-Them-You-and-We.

Currently reading : Critical Path By R. Buckminster Fuller Release date: 15 February, 1982