If you’ve ever been to an event (and I’m betting you have, because you’re reading an events blog) then you’ve probably seen a party flyer or two. They’re those little pieces of paper with all those words and colors on them that tell you when and where you have to go and how much you will have to pay to be cool and/or have fun.

They are written in a form of gibberish only fluently spoken by party promoters and club rats, out of tune with the rest of the world and the languages spoken there.

I want to create a party flyer madlib:

[ADJECTIVE] [NOUN]//////[CITY]

///[Adjective] with [adjective] [noun] presents [verb] [adverb] [verb ending with -ing] [day of the week].

[adjective][noun]///the [plural noun]///[animal]///[girl's first name]///DJ [exclamation]

21+ :: [number] presale

It gets even more complicated when bands decide to have clever names like “Open Bar”. Here’s a party flyer. Can you read it?

Translated:



Maybe one day we’ll discover the Party Flyer Rosetta’s Stone and then all of this stuff will make sense. In the mean time we’ll just have to take our chances.

Oh PS: White Lies Everyday Control Fridays Avalon: Electro, Bloghouse, Rony’s Photbooth, Special Guests. Be there or be square! Presale $10.

If I only describe myself as “concerned” in regards to Los Angeles’ current budget cuts in Education, it’s because my “outrage” has clouded my diction with euphemisms.  I’m tired of letting confusing bureaucracy pacify my “discomfort” (still, not the right word) with the current economy.  It does not make any sense to cut resources and funds from education.  The three “R”s, reading, righting, rithmatic, that resonate as important parts of any childhood, seem to have lost their perceived significance.

For every tax dollar, the city of Los Angeles puts 27.5 cents into “Crime Control” and  1.7 cents into education (LA City 9).  LA financially supports crime control over 16 times more than education.  We’re all freak’n criminals, apparently.  I’d hate to jump to conclusions, but this is my Rant — perhaps crime in LA would decrease if we supported our education system more.  It seems as though we’d rather arrest each other than read to one another. That’s basically how Governor, and now Doctor Schwarzenegger (thanks to USC), justified his decision to cut from education [as well as health care, law enforcement, and social programs] after the recent vote in California.  He said that because we didn’t want to pay more taxes and borrow money, he needed to step in and respond to California’s projected 21.3 billion dollar budget deficit (LA Times).  The ballot proposals that we turned down, however, would only give us about 6 million dollars.  I’m offended that he’s making us into the bad guys here.  Yeah, we decided not to follow his half-hearted proposal to raise 6 mil, but that in no way explains the 5.3 billion dollar cuts from education.  The ballots wouldn’t have raised enough money.  Dr. S needs to better explain his decision making process and stop saying that we asked for it.

People are “outraged” and are trying to do something to defend Los Angeles youth from larger class sizes (the result of the projected firing of 2,500 teachers) and curriculum streamlining.  Though Los Angeles Education may never have the support that the Los Angeles Lakers have, some people are taking (at least symbolic) action.  A few LAUSD teachers went on a hunger strike!  There was some impressive rallying in Pershing Square in January.  In May, students threatened walk-outs.  Obama gave us some money, but maybe some of that bank bail out money should go to the youth so they can grow up and not screw up like their older, whiter counterparts.

Raise your hand if you know someone that education budget cuts have effected.  Raise your hand if you teach in LA, are a student in LA, or give a damn about the future of LA.  Raise your hand if you know the square root of 689 or the motivations of the protaganist in Cat’s Cradle.  Just kidding.  Seriously, though, LA’s kids need some help.  Dave Eggers’ 826LA is pretty sweet.  These time-travel store fronts have non-profit writing/tutoring centers in the back.    There is one on Sunset and one in the SPARC’s building in Echo Park.  Do you know of more after-school/school programs that can help fill the gap that budget cuts have left in LA education?  Post it! There have got to be more options out there.  And, if anyone finds 5.3 billion dollars lying around, or is opening a new school and looking for teachers to hire, I’m sure the city would be very interested in getting in contact with you.

What’s your LA Rant or your LA Rave?  Post your opinion, or share with me at jane@boredLA.com

What is this an ad for?!?

The purpose of a billboard, as I understand it, is to convey a message, usually commercial in nature. EAT AT JOE’S, and the like. But I’ve been noticing the trend that billboards in my neighborhoods are increasingly, well, ineffective on me. The simple reason being that I have no idea what COMA A JOSE’S means.

It’s like, I look up in the sky, and I see a tasty burger. I’m sold. Please. Let me buy your burger. But unfortunately, the sign has no subtitles, and I am left to starve another day.

Most billboards in my neighborhood are in Spanish or Korean. Now, let me be clear, I’m not some jingoist xenophobe here, I’m just making an observation. The billboards wouldn’t be in other languages if they weren’t reaching an audience. In fact, they must be reaching a larger audience than they would be if they were in English. That’s how advertising works.

Lately, I’ve even been noticing that the two groups are teaming up. Kogi Korean BBQ taco trucks patrolling the street, La Taquiza is serving kimchi and short ribs… the advertisements, it seems, are really secret messages, coded to instill peaceful relations that begins with the merging of cuisines. Just like Louisiana Famous Fried Chicken, Chinese Food and Donuts.

And seriously, have you seen written Korean? That shit looks complicated. I read online that it’s actually a phonetic language, and that each ‘character’ is actually a consonant-vowel combination. And now you know!

So what does that mean for you and me, babe? You are reading this English language blog, so I will (illogically) assume that you are a native English speaker, and therefore are also in this predicament. Basically nothing, except that we can assume we are vastly outnumbered in this crazy world, and if you want any hints as to what to buy, what to eat, etc., you’d better fend for yourself, or learn Chinese.

Man or soon-to-be mutant?

Now let me preface this whole thing by saying that I am in no way a baseball fan, nor do I know anything about the sport, the players, its history, or any of that stuff. But I did hear that dear old Manny Ramirez starts his 50 day suspension from the Dodgers today, and I can’t help but feel bad for him. His crime: performance enhancing drugs.

Put yourself in his shoes. If there was some blogging-enhancement drug, don’t you think bloggers would take it? They’re under so much pressure by their mean editors to get people coming to the page, to keep coming out with original authentic material and witty commentary, to post every Wednesday with something new and exciting – frankly, sometimes it feels like too much. I’m sure that’s what dear old Manny felt. Hey, one little needle prick and you’ll be writing like the pros, kid! You’ll be a regular David Sedaris!

In any case, I think performance enhancement should not only be decriminalized in professional sports, but should actually be encouraged. I’ve heard attendance is dwindling. Makes sense. I mean, baseball is boring as shit. The fun involved with baseball is in getting drunk and eating hotdogs, and when people realized they could do that by themselves at home for free, then they stopped going. But if we were watching not men, nay, but monsters take the field – freaks of science with bulging eye-neck veins and seven fingers for throwing double-knuckleballs – well by Joe I’d pay to see that circus.

Did anyone ever watch the show Mutant League? I think that show was way ahead of its time. Toxic waste turns pro sports players into mutants. All about monster athletes and how much more fun they are to watch than normal ones. Apparently there was a game too, which sounds damn awesome. If anyone still has a Genesis hit me up. In any case, maybe that game was a prophetic vision of the future!

My favorite Mutant League player. One time their plane crashed in the snow somewhere and they had to eat his tail to survive, but that's okay, because it grows back.

The highest paying player on each team would be the chemist. They’d go fresh out of college, first round draft picks, the league plucking up kids that otherwise would be bound for med school, curing AIDS and the like. There they’d be, sitting in the dugout, juicing up the players before each inning, giving them just enough to have that edge over the other team, but not quite enough to kill them. Now that’s baseball.

What do ya’ll think? Which sport would benefit the most from mutant-creating drugs? Which med schools would become the powerhouses? What would Manny Ramirez’s mutant name be? What mutant abilities do you think would prove the most awesome at winning games? Would Nike endorse a performance enhancing drug / chemist / pipettes and other chemistry equipment?

So I just read in the news that a measly 3.8 earthquake “rocked” Orange County today. No big deal, but it did remind me of the fact that, one day, probably soon, the Big One’s gonna hit LA.

It’s totally inevitable; science says so. I feel like that knowledge is always at the back of our minds, like when you smoke a cigarette and you know that one day it might kill you, but who cares because that’s something future-you can worry about. But any day now, the San Andreas fault is gonna blow and this whole town is totally f’d in the a.

The movie “Escape From L.A.” is set in the future, after the Big One, and the writers of that movie predict that the quake will be so big that Los Angeles will break off from the mainland and become an island (and Jaws’s family is finally reunited at Universal Studios). While that might be a little bit of a stretch, I can tell you this much: traffic will be a nightmare.

When the Big One hit San Francisco in 1906, like literally one-hundred percent of the city burned down. I foresee the same thing happening in LA: when the 10, 110, and 405 collapse, everyone will be forced to take Pico and Highland, and none of the fire engines will be able to get to any of the fires! People will look out upon their city and think, what a waste, all that good schwag is going to burn up. So they’ll go out the the stores and take all the stuff, which police will confuse with looting. Then after a controversial police brutality youtube video hits the net, riots will start, which will cause more fires, more looting, and before you know it this dear city will be nothing but dust and ash.

And into that city, I will emerge. Clad in leather, I will step into the charred wasteland, and the city will be mine.

But... but...

Plenty of people smoke in LA. It comes with the territory – big city, depressing concrete blight upon the face of the earth, inhabited by “creatives” in the music and show business – so naturally there is smoking. It’s not like we’re in San Francisco, people.

But many factors also weigh in against smoking. One, since this is not a walking city, there really isn’t an appropriate time to smoke (unless you smoke in your car, which is a cool option). Secondly, the hot weather here makes it kind of yucky to smoke, because nothing’s worse than hot smoke down your gullet when there’s hot sweat on your bod. Third, we are still in California, people, ever-progressive and health conscious, and, as we all know, smoking kills you, so that’s a no-no.

Despite all those factors, people were still smoking happily, albeit in back rooms at bars or secretly on their lunch breaks (but be sure to have a mint before going inside if you want that promotion!). Until now. Now they are all smoking unhappily, because of that new tax bill. Cigarettes are now certifiably expensive. Not only that, but the coveted two-for-one deals have all but disappeared!

It makes perfect sense to me to tax people’s vices and addictions. After all, what can they do about it? Quit? So for California to decide to get more money off of people who are essentially paying a fortune for a slow, yet admittedly very cool looking, suicide, well hey that’s just genius. Here are some more things that should be taxed:

-gasoline
-booze
-condoms
-sex between consenting adults
-television
-text messaging
-twitter and / or Wikipedia
-illegal music downloads

How will this new tax affect smokers? How will it affect Los Angeles? Honestly I don’t think it will affect either, in the long run, except to give us more street cred with NYC, since they’ve been paying ten bucks a pack for some time now. The one upside: you’re just that much happier when you run into a free cigarette guy at a bar. Score!

Now don’t get me wrong, I adore Craigslist. Craigslist is like my shady older brother. Craigslist is legit. But I do have a bone or two to pick with Craigslist, and they will be picked presently.

First of all, and I guess this is really just a gripe about LA, but LA is damn big. It’s hard to “deal locally” as Craigslist advises/promises when my supposed trade partner is in the goddamned Antelope Valley. Where is the Antelope Valley? When is it? As far as I know, antelope have been extinct since the 1800s, or, more properly, habitat degradation forced them to mate with other species, and they evolved into the jackalope. I looked up Antelope Valley on Wikipedia, and it told me that the two principal cities there are Lancaster and Palmdale, which I thought were in England and Arizona, respectively. Either way, I’m not driving to the Antelope Valley just to sell some concert tickets. So fail, Craigslist.

Second, everyone knows what the best part of Craigslist is: missed connections and (dare I say) casual encounters. But the problem there is that the only posts near me are a) gay dudes trying to, and from what I gather, succeeding at getting laid in the gym, and b) creepy straight guys trying to, and again from what I gather, failing at picking up slutty chicks. And both types use the same, unappetizing bait: webcam dickshots.

Sometimes I think that if I were gay, I would be on Craigslist every night, because they have it so easy. It’s like all the creepy guys that are looking for girls, except they’re all looking for each other, so it makes it a hundred times easier.

The only girl posting around me is this one, and to be frank she sounds a little scary, and since I’ve seen her post a couple of times (not that I look regularly or anything), I’m guessing that the other guys in our neighborhood probably feel the same way. Or maybe she gets lucky every time she posts, which is why she keeps doing it, which is both encouraging and depressing at the same time.

The only instance in which I almost had a “casual encounter” with a girl from was up in San Francisco, but in the end it was back to our first problem: like I’m gonna drive an hour north to Santa Rosa to hook up with some random girl I’ve seen one picture of. The drive to Santa Rosa is not something I would describe as “casual”. What if I get there and she has, like, unshaved legs? Or no teeth or something? I’m supposed to “casually” drive my ass back to San Francisco? I guess it’s better than her driving to me, because if I’m in control of the car at least I can bail when I want to. It’s not like just kick her out of my house once she got there, can I? If she was into it I would have had to do something, just to be courteous.

Anyway, Craigslist isn’t all bad. I ended up selling those concert tickets to a cute girl from LA Trade Tech, and remain blissfully ignorant as to the Antelope Valley’s whereabouts to this day.

Rivalries, man. They’re killer in this town.

We’ve got NorCal v. SoCal, East Side v. West Side, LA v. New York, East Coast v. West Coast, USC v. UCLA, USC film v. NYU film, Blood v. Crip, just to name a few! And if you think they’re just “friendly”, then you’re looking to get shot, my friend.

For instance, people who were once legitimately my friends are now my “west side friends”. And when I hang with them, we do “west side” stuff, like shop and go to expensive bars. I’m sure they refer to me as their “east side” friend, and when they come here, we vintage shop and go to cheap dive bars. Sometimes, we meet in the middle and go to strip clubs. Common ground, you see.

And when I was over at UCLA my freshmen year, I distinctly remember some dude telling me, “Because you’re a friend of a friend, you can chill in my room, but you can’t have any of my fucking pizza.” The nerve! Later, I stole much of his pizza, and then just threw it all away in the hall, because I wasn’t even hungry, it was just the principle of the thing.

And the whole Giants against Dodgers thing: first of all, baseball sucks hard, because it’s mad boring. Second of all, they’re both from New York back in the day anyways! We’re like twins separated at birth!

And if you think this rivalry has no casualties, then why don’t you tell that to Tupac and Biggie. Oh that’s right, you can’t, because they’re dead.

It’s time for LA to start focusing on the real rival here: China. Let me lay it down for you: China has a population of 1.3 billion people. Mensa takes the top 2% of the population, IQs around 130. Geniuses, basically. That means that there are about 27 million bonafide geniuses in China, right now, working away. There are only 17.5 million people currently enrolled in colleges in the US. And take the top 20%, that’s still damn smart. Well, there’s more of them in China then there are people in this entire country. You do the math.

Los Angeles is a city that is obsessed with money. From the clubs to the shops to the restaurants to the homeless people, everyone is trying to get my money. And boy, have they gotten it over the years. I’m poor. Not, like, dirt poor or anything, but broke. See, I’m a starving student, and, with any luck, in a few months time I’ll be a starving unemployee. I can’t even go to the Grove anymore due to feelings of terrible, horrible envy and inadequacy (which is why I go to the Americana). At least I have $300 unemployment checks to look forward to!

Luckily there are ways to survive cheaply! For instance, I get all my clothes for a dollar. And did you know that some MacDonald’s offers free “taste tests” of certain items at certain times during the week? The one by me (on Fig and 28th) had free Quarter Pounders with Cheese (that’s Royale with Cheese to you international readers) last Friday during lunch time. Couple that with free grilled cheese, tomato soup, and a cocktail at the Edison and you’ve eaten for free one day of your week!

Besides that, one side effect of a city obsessed by wealth is that sometimes people throw out perfectly good things, right there on the street! For you to enjoy! Like last year, in my alley, I found a giant industrial display-case style refrigerator in perfect working condition. It weighed five hundred pounds, and we brought it up to our apartment, put our TV on it and filled it with beer (Caguama, of course).

And just this week in the Home Depot parking lot I came across a slot machine. It even works (mechanically, in that the wheels spin when you pull the lever) and when you plug it in it lights up and everything! Haven’t quite gotten it up to casino standards yet, but I’m sure with some tinkering I can figure it out (I’m a crafty guy — and handsome). And I’m sure that electricty at least goes to all the electromagnets and semiconductors because I got a little shock as I was poking my finger around inside.

See! I bet I can flip that on craigslist and make a bundle! Worse comes to worst, I can just drag it back out to the street from whence it came. So I guess the moral is that Los Angeles is truly the city of plenty, even if you’re poor, if you know where to look.

So a friend texted me the other night asking if I wanted to go see Coraline in 3D. Duh, right? Looks awesome, plus it’s in 3D, which kicks ass, so no brainer. And I went and it was tight. But that’s not what this post is about. (Additionally, did you know that Tim Burton did not direct the Nightmare Before Christmas?)

We saw it at the “Americana at Brand” in Glendale, which I had never been to. At least, I thought I’d never been there before. As it turns out, I had, except when I went there the first time, it was called the Grove, and it was on La Brea.

It’s seriously freaky, they have the huge Barnes and Noble, the Cheesecake Factory right around the corner from the movie theater, the dancing fountains, the Disneyland clock-lampposts, even the darn cable cars! The parking lots even have that annoying two lane circle thing that should theoretically encourage traffic to flow more nicely but probably just leads to a lot of low-speed collisions. And just now I discovered that their websites are practically identical!

My confusion and bewilderment was compounded by the fact that Coraline, enhanced and realitified by the three dimensions I had experienced it in, was a movie dealing with (and I hope I’m not giving too much away here) parallel worlds (gasp! What a spoiler) and I, for all I could tell, was inside of one. That’s right, I had seen a movie about parallel worlds in a parallel world. The “meta” of the situation blew my mindskull.

Had parallel Ratscratch just seen Caroline at the Grove in negative 3D? What are the rules? I liked Coraline; did he hate Caroline? I found the title character to be hot, did he find her to be fugly? And since I found the glasses mildy cumbersome and annoying, did he (she?) only find them mildy comfortable and acceptable, in essence also finding them mildy cumbersome and annoying?

What else is there to be discovered? A 1/3rd Street Promenade? A Staples-Remover Center? A University of Northern California located in North Central (right near Volts)?

But then I remembered it was just a movie and just a shopping center that was probably built by the same mogul billionaire who was laughing it up with his models in the loft above the Cheesecake Factory. But that moment of existential terror, that’ll be with me for a long time.

Now I’m not what one would call a terribly religous man. I was baptized (in the Montana River) but never went to church, except when I was with my religious cousins.

Nevertheless, freshman year I found myself in the Religions of Latin America class with a few hundred other saps, unwillingly learning about all that boring crap. Boring, that is, until we got to the part about Voodoo and Santeria. Now that stuff, that sounded interesting. Killing chickens, speaking in tongues… damn cool. So when the time came for a class project, the choice was clear: visit a botanica. [Ahem, botanicas are the places where practitioners of Santeria go to purchase all their mystical whatnots]

So me and a classmate went up Vermont until we found a place (and I took this picture of a mural of Edward James Olmos), and it was weird so we bailed pretty quickly, but not before I picked up a few candles and a Jesús Malverde amulet (he’s the patron saint of drug dealers).

I didn’t think anything of the candles I’d bought until about a year later, when, on a whim, I decided to light them up. And, as my whims are often long-lasting affairs that can span months if not years, I continued to light the candle and speak the little incantation on the back, in English and Spanish, pretty much every day. And you know what my friends? It worked. La Divina Chuparrosa, the Divine Hummingbird itself, extracted all misfortune from my life, in the same way a hummingbird extracts sweet nectar from a flower, and as a result I got way more play, which was the intended effect. And like I said, I’m not a religious man, but hell, what works works, dig? The only thing is, I didn’t realize it worked until after the candle burnt down all the way and it stopped working. The only way I could see out of my dry spell was to run out and buy another candle, which I soon did, a nice pink one that the man prepared for me in the back room, especialmente.

My problem? The damn holy thing cost me fifteen bucks. And that was after I negotiated him down from twenty! How dare they, taking advantage of the real magic that they somehow possess and my own religious devotion in order to turn a profit… Well anyway, that candle’s almost burnt down too, and I can already feel the dry spell looming in the distance – guess it’s time to shell out another fifteen. Damn expensive botanicas.

As tired and trite as this complaint is, it’s still a valid one: LA’s infamous traffic indeed sucks. I don’t think this requires an explanation. One either wants to be where one is, or where one intends to be, and not stuck in the limbo (see: 405) in between. The only upside to this is getting to listen to 106’s “Traffic Jam”, which rocks rather hard.

However, along with the great enemy of traffic comes the glee and glory of defeating it. For instance, I was stranded at my job in Santa Monica when people took to the streets as part of the Prop H8 Riots (my gay boss’s friend: “The gays are taking over Santa Monica Boulevard!” My gay boss in response to this: “Didn’t we already have it?”). Google maps had every freeway in the red-black, which means that I would be moving anywhere between zero and ten miles per hour. I don’t know if you’ve ever driven anywhere at zero miles per hour, but believe you me, you don’t get there very fast. Not very fast at all.

Enter: Pico Boulevard. Nothing quite compares to the feeling that I got when I was cruising at 45 and making every light during what was essentially a state of emergency. I was a god amongst insects.

And if you can’t beat the traffic, hell, join it. Do you really need to go where you’re going? Really? Right this instant? Nah, hey, take a seat, pull over, pick up a pack of cigarettes, grab a drink. You’ll get there eventually.

So we’re all used to the traffic, inoculated. When there’s simply just too many cars on the road, everyone trying to go to the same place at the same time – I get it. Or when there’s a natural disaster, like the gays taking over the streets to protest Prop H8 and it feels like a zombie movie – I get it. I can work with that.

I will not work, however, with those freeway signs that tell you how long it will take you to get somewhere else on the freeway.

Thank you for telling me that it will take me twenty-five minutes to get to the 10/405 interchange, and that, therefore, I will be seventeen minutes late for work. Thank you for causing at least five minutes of said reported traffic when slow readers slow down to read you. Thank you for ruining my little game, the one where I lie to myself and pretend I’m not late up until the time I was supposed to be there actually comes and goes, thereby making me “actually late” and not just “probably going to be late”; you have effectively added hours more of “time spent being late” to my life. Thank you for being incredibly inaccurate, so that even if I show up on time, I still have the stress of having been late (according to you) for the entire car ride.

Also, how can it take twenty minutes to get to the 405, but twenty-five to get to PCH? That’s ludicrous, sign. Ludicrous.