FIVE POINTS!

Please join the beautiful Kate Wolf and I for the final Five Points of the season. Woot! Let's go out with a bang!

Sister Christian

People always ask, Nicole, why are you so cool?- no one's ever asked me this- and I say- I never say this because I've never been asked- because I have an older sister. A significantly older sister- not THAT much older but we spent high school in different decades- I am the young person in an older family- it was strange in high school to be friends with people who were the oldest person in a young family. A sister who dressed me up as Siouxsie Sioux, left me standing outside her blue 70's mustang in a Sacramento mall parking lot when I complained that I didn't want to wait in the car, who slept in while babysitting me forgetting-or not caring- that I was too short to reach food in the cupboards- I constructed elaborate chair sculptures, showed me how to feather my hair, then tease it, then rat it, then blow it out. When i was six she had short cropped to the face hair and the coolest fucking rat tail I've ever seen. I thought she was the most beautiful woman alive- I still do-and coveted her clothes and music, even when she would catch me in her room tying her tye dyed silk scarves around my head like a Russian house wife, and she would shriek at me to not 'touch my fucking stuff!' My sister was an artist and into fashion and a goth, then a punk, then an androgynous sexy waif. My mom has amazing photos of her. But here are a few. I'm also pretty sure she hates Night Ranger.

Her hair metal wedding from 1989. My ex brother in law who's still sort of like my brother even though he and my sister are remarrying this year- wore all leather and had a Slash looking top hat. They were high school sweethearts, junior high school best friends. They are still best friends and he is my moms other kid pretty much.

Amazing photo collage she made of herself. She was also the first weirdo I ever knew.

Anna Banana today. This is seriously the tip of the amazing photo iceberg of my sister. She has so many fucking awesome styles caught on film, but alas these are but the few I have on my computer. My mom has an archive f 80's/90's gems. She was so goddamn cool.

Blonde on Blonde

Golden suns and valhalla nights.

via Rachel

Jennifer Egan 1977.


via Jessica

Take What's Yours

Sometimes I get sucked into these dark holes of sadness and in this weird gross way it's cleansing. It reminds me of all the shit that is okay in my life and to not be such a whiny brat. I spent a good deal of this evening reading about Ann the elephant and Patrick the dog. If you don't know who they are, you can just google those phrases and believe me, you will find out. Their stories are gross and sad and don't involve cheezeburgers. Just a warning. OR you can take my word for it and believe me when I tell you that you are blessed. Blessed to be the dominant species, have opposable thumbs, autonomy. Blessed to be able to depend on yourself, it sort of makes me feel like an asshole for not getting more done on my own. The victim card, I plays it sometimes.
ANYWAY a nice getaway from all of that is to just run in the opposite direction and get lost in your own vanity, take refuge in materialism. Oh pepsi cola, oh google, oh apple, oh America. I'm talking to the universe on this one. My birthday is less than a month away, galaxies, boyfriend, friends, distant admirers, these are the things i crave.
But first, an anonymous christmas list fallen from the pocket of a rich, whipped man found on the DC train by a stranger, and then promptly sent to Gawker for collective ridicule.


Birthday Galaxy Wish List:
Trip to Disneyland
New black jeans
Bike rack for the top of my car
A yoga membership
Paid visits to the vet for each of my cats
A crab dinner at Newport Seafood
An early morning trip the flower mart
A gift certificate to Skylight
Hand made mix tapes
Art made by my artist friends
A dalmatian from a rescue
A certificate to Amoeba
A visit to Riad Maison Bleue in Fes- seriously, google the place, it's insane.
A trip to Mexico City
A massage
A pedicure.
And now for the racist portion of our show, this classic scene from Dumbo, the film that both terrified, confused and broke my heart all at the same time. This movie is single handily responsible for some sort of emotional break that occurred during my childhood and in some backwards messed up way, responsible for a good portion of my compassion. Oh if those crows could fly away from those Topsy, Uncle Tom stereotypes and if only elephants really could fly, far away from our ideas and empty pockets, away from our greed and callousness. Away from us altogether so that they may inherent the earth the way we always should have but never could.

Hang Your Hat

This month marks three years back in Los Angeles and three years in my little house. In that time I have completed my masters in critical studies, written for the LA Weekly and now the LA Times, made terrific life long friends, rediscovered my home through adult eyes and fallen in love with a total great zero douchebag dude. Not bad for three little years that seem to have flown by, if I don't say so my self. I am cat mom to three terrific hairy bad boys who leave their fur in my mouth and find their way onto the clothes of the babies I watch. It feels good to be good.

Golden Years

Osama Bin Laden is dead. Yay? I don't know, is that how I should feel? I feel sad. I feel angry. I feel angry that I was born into a culture of war, that war effects us on a daily basis. Seeps into the core of our anatomy until we can no longer separate it from our organic selves. The past ten years we have been at war. Since the planes hit, we have been living in a state of trauma. During the nineties we were at war. I was born in 1980, five years after the end of Vietnam. My father served in Vietnam and this is not usually the shit I get into on my blog, but every living male in my family over the age of thirty, on both sides, has served in a war. My grandfathers all served in war. Vietnam irreparably changed and hurt my father. Not a day goes by that he doesn't think about what happened not just to him, the country, the people of Vietnam and to his friends. At my grandfathers funeral they hung a photo of his WW11 platoon. Of the 50 odd men standing in the photo, he was one of two to return. My same grandfathers nephew committed suicide in 1976, after he returned from War. There is nothing romantic, valiant or beautiful about war. It is an ugly way to die, it is an ugly way to bring death. It hurts everyone involved and for the most part, much of its has been unnecessary. Watching these Tea Party racist assholes spout bullshit about going back to ' the way things used to be, old American values' makes me wonder what old American values do you speak of? What golden age have you hallucinated yourself into, in order to go on?