A Very Unhappy Birthday To You (Planet Earth)! aka, the list to confuse all lists (Demolish)

this Walt Whitmany image courtesy of Jessica Hundley.
Pinkman blows away 2011!
2011 was a pretty strange year personally, not great, not terrible- I will come to view it I believe as the year I was in between- waiting for folks to get back to me, for me to apply for things, for hard work to crystalize into something substantial. Maybe 2012 is the year all this, what seems at times endless work and waiting, comes home to roost? In any event, as usual and how I suppose most of you as well view the day to day, I don't experience life as a series of newly unfolding events, many things I discovered for the first time were in fact old to the world, as Thom Anderson says in Los Angeles Plays Itself, the present is a combination of the future and past come to rest. Here is a list in no particular order of what I enjoyed the most for the first time in 2011.
Crazy Band

After waiting for things to happen, 2011 might go down as the first year since High School I didn't go to that many shows. In fact most of what I discovered music wise came from reading other critics I like instead of just seeing bands live. This was weird but also strangely normal feeling. I'm more worried that my creaky old lady styles aren't bothering me more. I love music but this year I let it take a backseat for the first time in a long time. I don't know what this means to me personally except that I hope to see more music in 2012. I'm back in the saddle at the Weekly so perhaps that will move things along. I think I experienced a depression or weird kind of PTS surrounding music last year that made me question my work in a way that was frightening. I might now just be lifting my head above ground to sniff out whats new. In any event, I really liked this short video snippet by Crazy Band.

Yotam Ottolenghi's Plenty and cooking!
Have you seen Yotam's vegetarian cookbook Plenty? It has completely revolutionized my life. I literally cannot express the joy I have from looking at it's luscious pictures. This year I got a nice wok, a super duper blender, went to the Framers Market regularly, gardened a few small but vital veggies and renewed my commitment to a mammal free diet- I eat seafood, dairy products and eggs- and continued to try new recipes. 2011 was the year I cooked. And I'm not ashamed to say that a few things I made were AWESOME.








Los Angeles Plays Itself
Speaking of Thom Anderson if you haven't seen his 2004 film essay Los Angeles Plays Itself, do yourself a favor and see it. It is liquid brillz.

LA Plays Itself,
Not to dethrown the former but it's predecessor LA Plays Itself by Fred Halstead is no less incredible. I saw it this year too and it blew my mind. No pun intended. Maybe a little. Here's a snippet of it.

Movies:
I saw Drive and LOVED it, I love this a little more: click here for maximum awesomage

Which led me to The Thief with James Caan, Michael Mann's first and only good movie. Holy snakes this shizz was good. The soundtrack is by Tangerine Dream.


Bridesmaids!!
Im a broken record:
EMA best of best.

Best thing I missed but wished I could have seen:

Cowboys and Angels from machine project on Vimeo.

my tape recorder was in the show though! The same one I used for our LA Times interview. Google it if you're interested.
New new new not broken record faves:
Zola Jesus, Ke$ha, Austra, Men:

Off our backs was my second most played record of 2011
Adele/ Man, I loved Adele something fierce this year.

Game of Thrones!!!!

I watched the entire first season in three days.
Also, Breaking Bad!!! Jesse Pinkman is my new TV boyfriend.

The murals of Ramona Gardens. I rented American Me from the library because I was bored and couldn't find Double Indemnity and also because I hadn't seen it since elementary school. It was as schlocky as I remembered but the DVD version came with this amazing documentary put together by EJO about the White Fence and Hazard gangs of Boyle Heights in the early 1990's, arguably when they were at their most active. Afterwards I did a little research and came across Ramona Gardens, the oldest public housing project in Los Angles and one of LA's most dangerous areas. Literally hundreds of people have died in it's confines since it opened in 1954. What was remarkable to me however- aside from being half Latina and having a vested interest in it's subject matter, also as an Angeleno- was the incredible art that proliferates there as well. The murals are famous and have been living and breathing for almost as long as it's walls have held inhabitants. More are panted all the time, the old ones are restored annually by local artists and for the most part left tag free. There is a culture of respect within Ramona Gardens to keep the murals safe and intact. They are in some small way, East LA's version of Watts Tower. Folk art created to uplift and brighten the community. The documentary was by far superior to the movie.



It then led me to this amazing short film made by the LA Times about this exchange program that happens with Homeboy Industries and a Pritchard Alabama church group.

These documentaries really got me thinking about my role as a feminist. While intellectually I know that the treatment of women in this world depends on both sexes I have primarily to this point been female focused; focusing on their self esteem, sense of bodily self worth, and their autonomy as individuals. These documentaries for the first time really opened my eyes to the fact that reaching men in a healthy way and filling them with the same feelings of importance, devoid of violence and entitlement is equally as important. That men cannot simply be asked to comply, but must also be shown compassion and understanding. I will try to be a better human to all people in 2012.

Sir Didymus

Clearly I should just change the name of this blog to "I wish I was still 12 years old" because looking back at the last few posts I have some sort of early life yearnings happening. Maybe it's the Holiday season? Who knows. In any event, Sarah's room was always a place I wanted to be. It's so cozy looking.

You're What the French Call, "Lazy, Imcompetant"

One of the greatest movies ever made.

Casa De la Nikki. I might have a Home Alone/Christmas Story double feature sometime soon. Bake some cookies, curl up with the cats, make some cider and enjoy the the Holiday spirit. Everything is better when there's no one there to pester you.

Mozel!

Exsqueeze me, but are you blue?

Actors Evan Peters and Ezra Miller should start a band called Daughter Bang and their first album should be called Too Cruel for School. That or Columbine Coffee, Freshly Ground.
Apparently it's taken 11 years for mass school shootings to become en vogue. Once again, Gus Van Sant was ahead of his time. Too bad Elephant sucked donkey ballz. I like to pretend that GVS and Tim Burton's careers are like the Godfather 3, after a certain point in each they just don't exist.

Also, this movie was the biggest bummer EVER. It was goodish, but man, it was bummtown USA.

Fantastic Voyage

This used to be my favorite band and this was my favorite song and I was at this show. We lived a few blocks away and walked to Maccaren every weekend those two summers to see the free shows in the pool.



As a young woman in my teens and early 20's I had fantastic tits. In fact I had a fantastic body, and I say that with all humility. I was thin as a grasshopper, had long legs, large C's and high cheekbones. I never exercised or dieted and was just, thin, I guess. I was a total obnoxious dick about it. I was so vain and nobody stopped me, I thought I was the most beautiful person in any room and I had white teeth. I faked stupid and unaware until my head fell off. I tried briefly to be an actress, had head shots, talked with a few agents, made the rounds. I did it as a kid too, with my mom, being lugged from banquet rooms in Hotels by LAX and down to small Hollywood bungalows that had been converted into kiddie casting offices. I had mild success. I often feel like I've lived a hundred lives. I've been rich, poor, brown, white, a chola a snob, the worst kind of white girl, a drug addict, an alcoholic, a New Yorker, a Brooklynite, a hippie, an only child a sibling an outsider a friend, a slut and a liar. I've been an asshole and shithead. A poet, a patient and a beginner. A name dropper and girlfriend. I've been a chronic cheater to a fat girl with no sex drive, I've been a prude and a pursed lipped workaholic. I've walked away from five friendships and have had more than six best friends.
Things I know: I will never be a wife, I'm in love with a woman I can never love fully because I have the sad misfortune of being a heterosexual, my best friend is Nick, but for how long? Till what? Maybe nothing, maybe he's the next long time. I've been the same person more or less for the past five years, boring, a go getter, getting fatter, happy, regular. I don't skip down alleys anymore splashing in midnight puddles or run through Washington Square park trying to buy heroin from homeless guys selling AJAX in plastic bindles. I don't try to fashion syringes out of baby droppers or hang out with girls who have babies and remember working in Texas roller rinks when they found out their first boyfriend's sister died in Waco with all the other crazies, their big pregnant 16 year old belly pressed against the roller rink glass. I got out of that place, I was never in that place actually, it was just a story i heard one day when that girl and I were smoking weed in the backseat of my car in a parking lot at PCC. She visited me when I moved to NY. Her parents were rich and there was a big article about her and a bunch of her best friends from high school that had been involved in a heroin epidemic at their private Texas high school. Her parents had put her on a plane to Sweden to go to some fancy rehab. She dropped acid as the plane took off and shattered a glass in her hand and bled the entire flight over. We went to Washington Square park for her. She slept on the floor next to my bed. She's a lawyer now. Sometimes when you've been sick and then you get better you feel like you've been through a long selfish war and you miss that part of yourself and you say, hey, that wasn't so bad. I've always been cursed with wanting to crawl back and hide in the past.
None of this was about me, by the way, so don't get the wrong idea. I'm just the same ol' person you've always known.

Ressless Energy

How cool would it be if Justin WAS the father?!
How much more exciting would the world get if Christopher Walken actually did it?

I am better than my best self ten years ago, and that's still not saying much. I am lazy and filled with fear and stuff. Procrastination creeps in on every corner, debilitating me from every angle. I get it done but it takes the involuntary flexing of each toe a thousand times an hour, the stranglehold of my own fist by the other, the biting, gnawing and chewing of my inside cheek until the metallic taste of spoons mingles with my spit. I will stuff it in my mouth, I will heat it up, spit it out, lean down on my one bum knee that is spongy and numb until it is not and then it's a violent searing pain of a thousand needles racing toward my shoulder blade, and puke it out. It's teeth grinding in the middle of the night and two hour stare-a-thons at my blank TV wishing I had invested in the free box. It's checking e-mail, creating user ID's, baking cookies, making chili, taking holiday portraits of the cats. The closer it gets the tighter I wind. My mom was a long distance runner, marathon winner, athletic get up at six in the morning obsessive compulsive make sure the ovens off weirdo. Now she drinks champagne in the morning and walks on the treadmill while eating dinner. I can unflex this muscle all day long but I know it will get done. Don't ask me to do anything in the meantime, I'm paralyzed and not so much the good person you're hoping for.
Here is some delightful internet gristle.








Blog highlight: Video Deathray has taken an exciting new direction and it's being taken there by the wonderful Nicholas J. Katzban. Don't you wish you knew what the J stood for? Clicka me and and me for the first two. If you like this Ahnold commentary you will like Deathray.

My sister got married and we stopped in Joshua Tree on the way back. Oh sunset, oh underwater wasteland, beautiful mountains turned to a fine thin powder, you entrance me so.

Monkey suits.

My sister and her maidens. True story, the first time i ever went bra shopping I was 11 and with my mom at Macy's. We were in the dressing room and she was trying to harness me in. A sales girl came by and asked if she could get us anything else from the floor. I was trying on a Maidenform bra and needed a size up except I got the name of the bra confused and responded, "Yeah, I need a new Maidenhead."










The portraits in question.