|
|
| 06.08.04 Via Wonkette, 'Bush should have died, not Reagan': Morrissey, Manchester News. Gipperporn: Four Days In, Reagan Still Deceased. See also sister-in-blog's MY RONNIE, MYSELF, at no home-like place. See also brother-in-blog's "Win One for the Gipper" Edition at Bears Will Attack, Campaign Blog. Also, the goddam coffin's being paraded about our hazy city, which means even worse traffic in the nation's second-worse commute: "Officials also asked people to use mass transit tomorrow through Friday, try to leave work early tomorrow and even take time off, if possible." Right. And the trains have already been packed to the gills this summer. wapost. Christian Hosoi, the subject of the SI story I posted on Saturday, has been freed from prison. Hello to all you guys from the skater message boards. Scroll down to Skate and Destroy. Thanks to various sources for distributing the pics.
Congrats to Avenue Q, The Lightning, and High Times, now with more legitimacy. Little Bits: Gay Couple Feels Pressure to Marry, the onion. And VICE DOs, better this month. 06.07.04
ANYWAY. Reagan was the muddy edge of the slippery slope that led us to this hellswamp we're in today, but there's no debating, in my opinion, how much more devisive, more dishonest, more fear-mongering, simply more inhuman the GOP's current King is. I know Reagan did lots of bad shit. I was probably the best-educated 13-year old in the country on Iran-Contra. But the guy was far and away better than that punkass satan robot they've got now. Here's a good one: Yet Another
Ronald Reagan Retrospective from Something Awful, RT. Speaking of peace love and understanding, Come Together a flash video, by way of Sharpeworld, RT. Honda 160 Racing In The Northwest. Some crazy people actually still race my little Bitty. 06.05.04 Turning Sour Grapes Into a Silk Purse, nytimes. David Sedaris takes Minnesota. Says it, "In the end, Mr. Sedaris said, he has decided that he prefers success to being poor, whatever the complications for his public persona. And he said he has been pleasantly surprised to learn that having money suits him. "It's like discovering a talent you didn't know you had," he said. "Like if someone gave you a sewing machine, and all of a sudden you could make a shirt that fit you perfectly. You would think, 'I didn't know I had that skill.'" No shit, Sherlock. That seriously must be the dumbest thing he's ever uttered. 06.04.04
DALE BUNKER: I'm Dale Bunker, investigative reporter. And you're
watching...The D. Bunker Report®! A quick shout out to our new
affiliate, airing our broadcast for the first time: jennymiller.com,
a.k.a. Heck's Kitchen. Welcome aboard. Of course you know on each
episode of The D. Bunker D.BUNKER: "Desai"? Is that Greek? That's Greek, right? DESAI: It may be Greek to you - I'm sure quite a bit is, Dale. But it's actually Indian, from India. D.BUNKER: India-that's great! Just great. That'll be great for ratings. And thanks for choosing America. Now, D-Lux...You don't mind if I call you D-Lux, do you? Great. So now, D-Lux, you own and manage this super-sized gas station and food mart. What's your top seller here? And if I told you I could afford to pay ten to twenty bucks for it, how much would you, as the proprietor, charge me? DESAI: Please call me D-Lux. All my friends and people I hardly know do. I am the proprietor, although you should know that this is not my entire life's work. I have a Ph.D., you know. It's in twentieth century American poetry, focusing on the post-Korean War, pre-Vietnam war era, with special attention to the topic of birds-mostly in flight but also "sur la terre" as they say -in Northwest New Mexico. It's a surprisingly under-studied area but ripe with insight on the American story. But, back to your question, my top seller here at "D-Lux Market and Fill Up" is Combos chips, as well as the extra meat chili. Oldsters and youngsters can't get enough of those. For $10, you could get a large chili and a bag of Combos. I would probably charge you $9.50, since it looks like you're hungry, and I feel sorry for you. Now, if you want my recommendation, I would go for the nacho cheese Combos, since the cheese goes well with the chili. Or, you could spend your $10 and get two gallons of super-unleaded. It's really up to the customer.
D.BUNKER: Right. So choice is important to you. Could I get that nacho cheese combo or my two gallons of gas, or those birds you mentioned, could I get them delivered? DESAI: Delivery - interesting concept. Did you know that one of the most important functions of birds, until the invention of the fax machine, was delivering sheets of information across short, typically outdoor-situated offices. It's a real shame about those fax machines. And don't get me started on email. But birds are much more than "tools for the Man." They represent our quest for agency at a time of global uncertainty. How often have you looked up in the sky and said, "If only I was that bird up there, life would make so much more sense, and I wouldn't have that nagging pain in my left ankle." I'm sure quite often. So, we don't deliver solutions to the existential crisis posed by man's limited life span with a late-modern era, but if you wanted a pizza, we could do that. D.BUNKER: Right. So pizza is important to you. Me, too. I love pizza with pepperoni cups that holds in the oil while my pizza cooks. Pizza is the best, especially at your price: ten bucks! But here on The D. Bunker Report®, I'm interested in…the truth behind the truth.™ So how much would delivery run me? And in in your experience, D-Lux, is delivery good or evil? DESAI: I can see you are getting to your hard hitting questions that
have made you famous to your relatives. Good or evil-yes, I see what
you're saying.
DESAI: Well, for customers outside of my delivery area, my advice is to move. In terms of parting thoughts, I would simply quote one of the English language's classic clichés that holds true today, "To err is human, but to forgive is bird, especially circa 1958."
************* Click the title for the stuff. And thanks, D-Lux and D. Bunker. That was very informative. Here, read about this bullshit: The FBI's Art Attack (wapost). See the Critical Arts Ensemble Defense Fund for more. From JC. And now, for the last time this week, I'm posting yet another SI profile, this one on the fascinating Christian Hosoi. Click the title to read. In the outlaw world of skateboarding in the '80s, young Christian Hosoi was seen as a god: fearless, peerless and blithely confident that he'd never fall. And then he did. Skate and DestroyBy Karl Taro Greenfeld He puts his right hand against his side of the bulletproof glass and I place my left palm on my side, and we pray. He thanks the Lord for another day and asks that I be enabled to put down on paper the life he has led and the things he has done so as to edify those who will read about him. He also asks that he be allowed to continue to serve God and to lift up those in situations like the one he finds himself in -- those who have come to such a purgatory and are now seeking salvation. And then Christ nods, hangs up the phone, turns away and walks back into the San Bernardino (Calif.) Central Detention Center, where he was serving 10 years for possession of 1.5 pounds of crystal methamphetamine with intent to distribute. Christ is the nickname of Christian Rosha Hosoi, 35, one of the greatest skateboarders in the history of the sport. He has not stood on a board in more than four years. Christian was up a tree. The six-year-old had climbed far up a tree, and no one on the school staff could coax him down. He was just sitting there, bare legs dangling from a narrow branch. "And you know how delicate eucalyptus trees can be," a teacher was telling his father, Ivan (Pops) Hosoi, over the phone. "One wrong move and the branch could snap...."
When the teachers would call Pops, he would already have smoked his first joint of the day, and he'd just sigh and say, "Lady, look -- if the kid ain't scared, he ain't in any kind of trouble." Sometimes, though, the teachers would be so freaked out from watching Christian swing from one branch to another that they would insist that Pops retrieve his kid. (Christian's parents had separated when he was two.) Pops would then have to slip on some flip-flops, start up his '59 Volkswagen bus, drive to the school and get Christian to come down. But Christian never wanted to come down. When the boy was 12, in 1979, Pops, an unsuccessful painter who had assisted Sam Francis and Ron Davis, among other artists, took a job managing a skatepark in part because he marveled at his son's unique ability to stay aloft on a skateboard. Pops let his son skate the park all day, and very quickly even the top skaters took note of this kid with long, black hair who was already going higher than any of them. "Christian was this teeny little kid who just had it," recalls Stacy Peralta, a skateboard pioneer, director of the documentary Dogtown and Z-boys, and screenwriter of the upcoming Heath Ledger and Johnny Knoxville film, Lords of Dogtown. "He had impeccable form even when he was 10 years old, just beautiful to watch. It's weird to see a kid at that age with that understanding of how to move his body through space." The first photo of Christian published was in Skateboarder in 1980. It shows him blasting a frontside aerial out of a pool. His arms are extended up and back, like a ballerina's in midleap. He stares impassively at the camera, lips clenched. Nearly everyone who was skating then recalls that photo. Something about it -- the eerie lighting, the fact that some kid no one had ever heard of was blasting huge air (and looked like he never wanted to come down) -- made it memorable. "The first time I ever heard of Christian Hosoi was that photo," says Tony Hawk, an amateur skateboader at the time. "My friends and I thought he was a girl, but we were like, Who is this girl? She rips!"
Christian's arrival on the scene coincided with the decision by a few of the sport's primary movers to market it as an outlaw pursuit. It's hard to remember a time when skateboarding was ever anything but a counterculture activity, but during the 1970s boom skateboards were sold primarily in sporting goods stores, next to the fishing rods and lawn darts. But as skateparks shut down because of high insurance premiums and low turnout, Powell&Peralta, the skateboard company run by Peralta and aerospace engineer George Powell, and Independent Trucks (trucks are the plates and axles that connect the wheels to the board, or deck) were among those industry leaders who redefined skating as a beyond-the-pale activity for rebellious kids. Thrasher magazine started up in 1981 and portrayed skating as an almost nihilistic activity. Thrasher, Powell&Peralta and other skate companies began holding contests such as Terror at Tahoe and Shut Up and Skate at backyard ramps from California to Connecticut. "It was just a bunch of kids rolling up in a van and ripping some ramp in the middle of nowhere," says Peralta. "We knew skating had to become a more underground activity to survive, that mystique was good for the sport." The credo of those still skating in 1982 was summed up by a sticker that began appearing on decks nationwide: skate and destroy. "We just wanted to be outlaws," says Fausto Vitello, founder of Independent Trucks and Thrasher. "The mainstream thing hadn't worked, so we just terrorized. That was how we saw we could promote the sport." Skateboarding, second perhaps only to hip-hop, was the greatest influence on American youth culture of the late 20th century. There is no sport as inextricably linked with America's alternative subculture. Seminal punk-rock pioneers like Black Flag's Henry Rollins and Suicidal Tendencies's Mike Muir (brother of Dogtown Skates owner Jim Muir) were serious skaters, as were members of the Beastie Boys, The Germs and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Even the sport's graphics, which came out of the gang graffiti endemic to Venice in the early 1980s, became the jumping-off point for a visual style later co-opted by MTV and mainstream magazines. Any number of sartorial trends, from hoodie sweatshirts to baggy pants to fat-soled sneakers, also came out of Southern California's skateboard community.
Throughout the early 1980s, starting when he was 13, Christian dominated amateur skateboarding contests. "Christian was the best pool skater I have ever seen," says Adams. "He could make any trick look really easy or really critical." During outlaw pool sessions, when Alva or Adams or another of the former Z-boys -- skaters associated in the late '70s with the surfboard and deck manufacturer Zephyr -- would man the backyard gate of a drained swimming pool, very often the only grommet (young skater) they let in was Christian. The genealogy of skating, in the minds of purists, went from Alva to Adams to Hosoi, like some alternative culture Ruth to DiMaggio to Mantle. Christian's repertoire already included bigger, higher, smoother versions of every aerial move in the sport. His first sponsorship deal was with Powell&Peralta in 1979, when he was 12; a year later he left them for Dogtown Skates. "I was a professional skater by the time I was 14," Christian says. "I was already on the covers of mags and stuff. When I went to school, everyone knew who I was. I already had a couple of thousand dollars a month coming in. I could do anything I wanted." Simon Elbling, a former Venice skater who is now a sunglass distributor for Black Flies in Honolulu, recalls sitting in his 10th-grade class in Venice and seeing Christian outside, holding two skateboards and a bag of weed. "He was jumping up and down, showing me the baggie. He'd be like, 'Let's go to the beach!' I'd be like, 'Don't you have school?' and he'd be all, 'I'm finished with school.'" A typical day for Christian entailed riding his skateboard to the Venice Beach boardwalk. He'd lie on the beach with a bikini-clad girl or two and soak up some sun and some weed. Sometimes he'd skate, and sometimes he wouldn't, but whenever he was on the ramp at Venice a buzz passed through the crowd. Watching him launch aerials was breathtaking. His deep tan, black hair, high cheekbones, long nose and strong jawline made him look like an updated version of those faces carved into Mayan stelae. "Christian was so fluid," says Hawk. "Everything he did, he did it with his own signature." That signature was a combination of power, balance and grace -- it takes amazing strength and coordination to control a skateboard and your body as you are hurtling six feet above an empty swimming pool. Built low to the ground, with exceptionally strong thighs, chest and upper arms, Christian might have been a good shortstop or soccer midfielder, but it was his exceptional sense of balance that allowed him to pull off aerials that left other skaters shaking their heads. "He made skateboarding an art," says Cesario Montaño, a photographer and fellow skater. The only thing Christian lacked was a foil, a rival who could push him to a new level. Finally, in the mid-'80s, that skater emerged: Hawk. He had started appearing in the magazines around the same time that Christian had, but he'd been dismissed by hard-core skaters as a lanky circus freak who did innumerable flip tricks -- turning the board over in his hands during aerials -- but lacked Christian's style, power and charisma. However, by the mid-'80s, Hawk began winning major contests, especially at the notoriously difficult skatepark in Upland, Calif., and the skate world had to take him seriously.
The two skaters came to represent divergent cultural strains in the sport. "There was starting to be a division between the hard-core punk skater and the skatepark skater," says Vitello. "Because Tony's dad was always around, Tony had the reputation of being a goody-goody guy, while everyone else was getting stoned all the time." Consider, for example, the precontest ritual of the two skaters: Frank Hawk would have his son doing calisthenics in the parking lot, while Pops and Christian would alternate sucking pure air from an oxygen tank and taking bong hits. (Pops was smoking marijuana with his only son from the time Christian was 10.) In a sport where the badder you were, the more highly you were regarded, Christian's popularity was enhanced by having Hawk as a rival. The two of them would engage in an epic battle through the '80s for contest titles, sponsorship deals and fame, earning hundreds of thousands of dollars while traveling around the world. It is 11:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning in Kahala, Oahu. It's flat off Diamond Head, no waves, so seven surfers (and skaters) are hanging out in a shabby living room, flopped on sofas that smell like wet dogs. The blinds are drawn. Spread out on the cracked, glass-top coffee table are a few skate and surf magazines, empty beer bottles, dirty coffee mugs, a bong and a ziplock baggie of red-haired buds. Elbling, an old friend of Christian's from back in Venice, has already rolled and smoked five blunts. Every few minutes, preposterously-proportioned women in tiny Lycra bikinis wander in from the bedroom and sit down on the sofas. They cross their legs and wait to become the center of attention. When they realize they can't compete with the skate videos the guys are watching, they push themselves off the couches and leave. At first we are watching recent videos, compendiums of street-skating tricks or pool sessions somewhere in California, New Jersey or Virginia. The rhythm of these tapes resembles that of pornography: quick shots of skater after skater doing sick trick after sick trick. Money shot after money shot. "Yeah. Yeah! Stop it. Dude! Stop it right there. Dude, rewind that." "That's sick." "And he lands a fakie! No way." "Backside! Oh, s---!" After about 20 minutes, and another two blunts, Elbling slips in a 1991 video of Christian and Hawaiian legend Kali Selfridge skating in a pool not far from this house. The tempo is different from the earlier footage. Instead of ruthlessly editing each run down to one trick, the director let this session play out in real time. The skaters and surfers watching this video -- most of whom first met Christian in Santa Monica or here in Hawaii -- stare at the screen in reverential silence. Christian's run is the fluid opposite of the jerky contemporary pool sessions we had been viewing. Though his tricks are not as complex as those of some of the modern pool skaters, his style transcends eras and technical virtuosity. He puts his moves together with such flow it is as if his run was choreographed. "He was just so beautiful to watch," says former pro Grant Fukuda, shaking his head. "There will never be another skater like him. He had it all, the best moves and the most incredible lifestyle." Christian was famous for enjoying the considerable perquisites of being the best in a sport that defined counter-culture cool. He changed sponsors several times before finally starting his own company, Hosoi Skates, in 1985. (His logo, his name over a rising sun, winked at his Japanese heritage.) That year he was making, by his own estimate, a few thousand dollars a month on the sale of decks alone. He also had endorsement deals with Jimmy Z, Oakley and Swatch; Converse put out a poster of him with Magic Johnson. Perhaps the steadiest money Christian made came from traveling around the world giving demonstrations -- to promote a local skate shop or company -- for up to $5,000 per day. He appeared in Coke and Pepsi commercials, in music videos for the Beastie Boys and in the skate-sploitation movie Thrashin'.
Louanna Rawls, the daughter of soul singer Lou Rawls, met him in an L.A. club in 1987. She didn't know who Christian was, but "when he walked into the room, the room stopped, and it had nothing to do with skateboarding. He was a hot, charismatic guy." That evening marked the start of their 3 1/2-year relationship, during which they would live together in a house in Echo Park formerly owned by W.C. Fields, where Christian had a wooden halfpipe constructed in the backyard. He would fly a half-dozen skaters with him to Hawaii or Rio and pick up every check that came near him. "We would go out to get sushi and there would be this posse of 15 boys around us," Rawls says, "and Christian would pay for everyone." Once, after a demo in Hawaii, Christian stopped his white Lincoln Town Car -- he always rented a white Lincoln Town Car when he was on the road -- and asked a bunch of young skaters if he was going to see them later that evening at a nightclub. "We were like these little groms and we didn't have any money and I told him that," says Fukuda, who would later skate for Hosoi Skates. "And then on the down-low, so nobody would see it, he gave me a bunch of twenties so I could buy beer and food for all us kids who didn't have any money." Even as Christian reigned as the preeminent skateboarder in the industry, a revolution was unfolding on California streets in the late '80s. Young skaters, frustrated by the lack of skateparks and unable to get access to abandoned swimming pools, began to exploit the terrain they found on the streets. They began to incorporate almost every feature of the urban environment -- handrails, steps, pylons, loading docks, park benches -- into what was called street skating. By the early '90s the magazines and videos devoted most of their coverage to these young skaters, and the prize money for vert contests virtually disappeared. Christian and Hawk, the two most famous vert skaters, could still pick up small demo fees and sponsorship deals, but they quickly saw their lifestyle go from rock-star level to what Hawk calls "just eking it out. In the early '90s I spent a week in Dallas doing three demos a day at Six Flags for $100 per day. That could be discouraging if you're used to making thousands for one appearance." Christian claims to have been undeterred by the revolution that toppled him. "I've never been someone who dwells on the past," he says. "I could skate anywhere. If street skating was it, then I could skate on the street." But the new players in the industry, companies like World Industries or H-Street, were not about to pay some aging pool skater to do a signature model. In 1991 Rawls dumped him, and as his sponsorship money dried up, Christian was forced to move out of the Echo Park house. He moved in with his mom, making the drive home in his silver McLaren. Christian had always been a spendthrift, and Pops, who made most of Christian's business decisions, did not take a long view when it came to managing his son's money. (Hawk's father, Frank, on the other hand, prudently guided Tony's affairs and insisted that Tony invest some of his substantial earnings.) "Most corporates would have paperwork," Pops explains, "but we weren't into that. We didn't have contracts. We didn't want to create this paperwork-lawyer thing. This is a sport that's done underground." Typical of Pops's management style was his one-sentence explanation to Peralta for Christian's decision to leave Powell&Peralta in the early '80s: "The bird has flown." By the early '90s Christian was down to making a few thousand dollars a month, mostly from international demos. "It killed him," says Montaño. "He was such the Man, and it was hard for him to admit he wasn't anymore." Skateboarders have always been exposed to underground -- and illegal -- temptations. Whether Christian's downward spiral was exacerbated by drugs is impossible to determine. He insists that it wasn't drug abuse that destroyed his career but dumb luck, a couple of bad business calls, a few rash decisions. Perhaps there is some truth in this, but it is certain that when Christian began using large amounts of hard drugs in the early '90s, in particular crystal meth, the act of defying gravity, in a halfpipe or in life, no longer seemed so effortless. In 1993 Christian moved again, this time to Orange County, closer to the clubs and drugs he craved, and farther away from skating. "He could have progressed as a street skater," says Montaño. "He was doing handrails, stairs, but it killed him so bad being out of the magazines. Then he moved out of the neighborhood, and we couldn't keep tabs on him. If we had known he wasn't skating, we would have killed him." Christian acknowledges that his drug use accelerated in 1995, when he went from snorting speed to smoking it. "Coke was out, speed was in," he says. "I was partying and going to clubs, doing a bunch of meth and Ecstasy. I was flying, and you know I was never afraid of flying high." He grew a ponytail, stopped shaving, got a few more piercings. He recalls that this was the first time in his life that he had to pay for a pair of shoes: steel-toed biker boots. Before that, he had always been paid to wear one or another company's sneakers. One afternoon in '95 Christian was pulled over in his McLaren for a traffic violation and police found a meth pipe in his glove compartment. He was arrested and charged with possession of drug paraphernalia. Friends bailed him out. Facing a possible 30-day jail sentence if convicted, Christian didn't show up for his hearing. "Christian was scared to death of going to jail," says Montaña. The judge issued a bench warrant for Christian's arrest; he then faced a potential nine-month sentence. Christian now entered what he calls his "outlaw phase," during which he went from being an underground hero to living underground. As a wanted criminal he couldn't skate at contests for fear of being arrested. He would still occasionally do demos outside the U.S., particularly in Japan, where vert skating was still popular and where Christian was assured a steady supply of good shabu, as speed is called in Japan. Without professional skating, there was no longer any reason for Christian to get off the pipe. "He would have four strippers come over, party with them and do more speed," says skateboarder Tony Converse. "And before we knew it, that scene extinguished what Christian Hosoi had been." Tony Hawk lounges by a kidney-shaped pool in the backyard of his five-bedroom home in Encinitas, Calif. This pool is full of water, and two of his sons are jumping in and out of the heated, chlorinated soup. Behind us, on the other side of the guesthouse, is where the 36-year-old Hawk hopes to build another pool. This one will never hold water, though -- it will be his private skatepark. Inside the house and parked in his driveway are other manifestations of no-worries wealth: a giant plasma TV, Italian furniture, Lexuses and SUVs. Hawk is as humble as any superstar athlete you will meet, and as he plays lifeguard on this April morning, he says Christian should also be enjoying this lifestyle. "We were all so young, making a lot of money, being rock stars.... You don't think it's going to end. But when the sport took a dip, a lot of guys couldn't handle it. I didn't fall into the trap of celebrity and partying and burning out, so when things turned back around, I was one of the only guys from that generation still skating hard."
ESPN needed personalities to sell the X Games, as the Extreme Games soon came to be called, and very quickly singled out Tony Hawk and Christian Hosoi as the main characters in the "drama" of vert skating. A crew was dispatched to collect footage of Hawk and Hosoi, interviews were conducted and then long profiles of each athlete were aired repeatedly on ESPN to hype the first X Games, in Newport, R.I. Both skaters had, of course, agreed to compete in Newport, and both were eager to revisit their rivalry. It had been a long time since anyone had cared this much about vert skating. "We knew this was going to be big for all of us," says
Hawk. "It was televised, so even if the actual competition was
going to be lame, there was huge prize money and exposure. But then
Christian said he wasn't going to go." Christian didn't explain why he wasn't going to Newport, but he had a very good reason for skipping the event: He knew that bounty hunters were on his trail, and had he shown up in Newport, he would have been arrested. "Christian should have been the rock star of the X Games," says Duncan. "If he had been there, he would have become a media star and been making millions of dollars today." The games made Hawk a household name -- announcers called him the "Michael Jordan of skateboarding" -- and a mini-industry. His skateboard and gear company posted revenues of more than $50 million a year throughout the late '90s, his autobiography became a bestseller and Tony Hawk Underground was one of the top-selling video games of 2003. "Christian should have been there," Hawk says, shaking his head and helping his son Spencer out of the pool. "He would have been the star of the X Games, and he could have ridden this wave with me." A pound and a half of crystal meth looks like a slice of greasy Lucite the size of a paperback novel. Christian picked up the slab and weighed it in his hand as the dealer said, "Haul it to Hawaii for me, bro -- a little aloha from the mainland." It was January 2000, and Christian had been thinking about heading back to Honolulu. For several months his friends had been telling him, "Dude, you don't look so good," and he had convinced himself that it would be easier to get off speed in Hawaii, away from all the negative influences in Orange County. He could carry this package to Hawaii, and with his cut could afford to chill out for a few months. Who knows? Maybe he would even start skating seriously again, see if the Japanese were interested in flying him over for some demos. Never mind, for a moment, the logic of trying to sober up just after delivering enough speed to wire all of Oahu. It never crossed his mind that maybe he was finally flying too high. If you had been on that United Airlines flight from Los Angeles to Honolulu on Jan. 26, 2000, you would have been praying that this gaunt, unshaven, pock-marked, wide-eyed Asian-American walking down the aisle with a skateboard in his hand wasn't seated next to you. His cheekbones, always starkly defined, now seemed to be on the verge of pushing through sallow skin, and his cheeks were flecked with scabs from picking at himself during long meth jags. Christian had smoked a few pipes of speed on the way to the airport, and when he got on the plane, he locked himself in the bathroom and snorted another line. He waved away the flight attendant when she offered him the in-flight meal. When the plane touched down, Christian practically sprinted to baggage
claim and then ground his teeth as he waited for his bags to come
tumbling down the chute. As he absentmindedly picked at his face,
Christian reminisced about climbing tall trees when he was a kid.
That had been liberating, he recalled wistfully. You're up there,
nothing in the world to be afraid of because it's just you and the
tree, your weight on the branch, and you can feel, almost instinctively,
whether a branch can support you, and as you step out -- "Excuse me, sir, where did you fly in from today?" A stout man in a blue T-shirt and tan slacks interrupted Christian's reverie. "What do you do for a living? May I see your ticket? Can you hear me or what?" "I left my ticket on the plane," Christian told the plainclothes officer. "I.D.?" "Sorry," Christian said, "I don't have to show you that. And I have to go now." "Without your bags?" Christian shrugged. "You are being detained," the officer said. He put a heavy hand on Christian's shoulder and led him to a barren security office on the airport's lower level, where Christian was seated on a bench next to a desk on which someone had left a Styrofoam takeout box with chicken bones and some unfinished potato salad. A few other agents gathered as the arresting officer began to search Christian, who was still holding his skateboard and wearing his new signature-line shoes. (He had just signed a deal with a distributor in Japan.) The agent found the meth in Christian's hipsack and held it up to the light, letting it hang in the baggie like a prize fish he had caught. "Do you have any idea how much trouble you're in?" Christian Hosoi was finally coming down. He pleaded guilty to possession with intent to distribute and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. He was 32 years old. To see Christian in prison, I have to drive east from Dogtown through downtown Los Angeles, then West Covina, Azusa, Palmdale and Upland, past dozens of Del Tacos and strip malls and long-closed skateparks to a desolate exit where the only hint that you are near a jail is the sudden riot of signage offering bail-bond services. At the reception window I fill out a visit request form for booking number 0402301190. Then I pass through a metal detector and wait in a large room lined on three sides by plexiglass, with partitions that divide the perimeter into semiprivate cubicles, like open-air confessionals. A chubby mother in a Simpsons T-shirt tells her two rambunctious boys to keep quiet. Two men with shorn heads are warily looking around. Finally, a line of orange-jumpsuit-clad men file into the room -- on the opposite side of the glass -- and sit down. Visitors scurry from booth to booth until they find whom they've come to see, then both visitor and prisoner pick up the intercom phones and start talking. Christian is one of the last prisoners to sit down. His thick black hair has thinned and his face is fleshier than it was in the '80s. He has put on weight in prison, and with his dark hair and complexion he looks like yet another Mexican father doomed to catch only glimpses from behind bulletproof glass of his children growing up. At 36 he is more than a decade removed from his athletic prime. Though he totes a Bible and launches into long discourses on how he's blessed to be doing God's will, and says that he has no regrets because this was the path that put him in touch with Jesus, there is a weariness in his eyes.
Christian Hosoi will skate again. Within a few days of being released, one of his friends will take him to a pool or a ramp or a skatepark. (A group of fellow skaters in Santa Ana has already built a 40-foot-wide halfpipe in preparation for the resurrection of Christ.) He will be tentative at first as he becomes reacclimated to the feel of the grip tape under his sneakers, the urethane wheels rumbling over wood or concrete, the way his body feels as it moves through the transition to vertical. Whenever he skates, wherever he skates, word will spread and a crowd will gather. Fathers and mothers will explain to their children, and older siblings will tell younger brothers and sisters who this is. And Christian, inspired by the crowd, and still a showman, will push himself. And after a few runs, a few carves and then grinds and then rock-and-rolls, he will once again launch aerials off of a ramp or out of a pool. He will again take flight. And then, he insists, he will gather the children around him and tell them about Christ -- Jesus Christ -- and he will start his parable by talking about a boy who was not afraid to go too high. Issue date: June 7, 2004
06.03.04 Ode to a Blocking BackIn his defense, when my father dropped his pants in the bar of a
Minnesota country club last Friday night, it was during a discussion
of the respective benefits of boxers and briefs, which he illustrated
by showing off his preference for an ingenious innovation called "boxer-briefs."
These are, as the five strangers at the next table now know, tighty-whiteys
that extend to mid-thigh. The answer is yes, for my father is a great indoorsman. He and my mother, the wind beneath his wingtips, worked hard for our Midwestern comforts, which included an aluminum house and a wood-paneled station wagon, so that they really did have, while raising five children in the 1970s, two problems peculiar to suburbia: a rusting house and a car with termites. Last summer, when my father chauffeured me to Hazeltine National Golf Club in suburban Minneapolis to watch the world championship of amputee golf, he obliviously, and illegally, drove onto the grounds of the tony club using an access road reserved for maintenance trucks. Nevertheless, he forged ahead in search of parking, driving the length of Hazeltine's cart path, past several miles of manicured fairway, periodically pausing to give -- with an impatient wave of his hand -- mortified golfers the right-of-way. As we rolled past the 1st tee, you could actually hear monocles falling into soup tureens throughout the mahoganied clubhouse at Hazeltine, which hosted the 2002 PGA Championship. "You can only get away with this in one of two vehicles," said my father, his car stereo tuned to Lite-FM. "A broken-down pickup truck or a Cadillac." And Dad has indulged, in retirement, a single extravagance: his pimped-out, champagne-colored Cadillac DeVille. It has, as he frequently notes, the turning radius (and gas mileage) of a Panzer tank. My father, too, is built like a Panzer, but only from the waist up. He has comical bird legs, as thin and smooth as Nicole Kidman's, the hair worn away by four decades of knee-high black socks. Taken as a whole, he looks like one of those square houses on stilts that you sometimes see in coastal areas prone to flooding. But those legs served him well as a blocking back in college, first for the 1952 Big Ten co-champion Purdue Boilermakers and later, after he transferred to Tennessee, for the great Johnny Majors. My father always taught his children -- even my sister, Amy -- that "short, choppy steps" are the key to blocking, the key to opening holes. And I've come to realize, with each passing year, that they are also the key to life. Today, golf is his primary athletic pursuit. In the winter he lives on the 17th fairway of a south Florida condo complex very much like the Del Boca Vista depicted on Seinfeld. Among his regular playing partners are Bernie Flowers (Purdue All-America who went on to catch passes from Unitas with the Colts) and former Notre Dame football coach Gerry Faust. On the driving range my father once blasted a ball directly perpendicular to his body, so that it ricocheted off the metal stall divider and rocketed back at him, nearly striking him in the nuts, a blow that would have killed him instantly. Try keeping a straight face while delivering that eulogy. He still spends his summers in suburban Minneapolis, where he enjoys idling away evenings watching the Twins on TV. This ardor briefly cooled last winter when the team traded his favorite player, catcher A.J. Pierzynski, who makes the sign of the cross before every at bat. One of the two TV stations that carried the Twins had no qualms about showing the gesture, but the other channel would always abruptly cut away -- as part of a blatant, anti-Catholic conspiracy, to hear my father tell it. He taught his children always to crush a man's hand when shaking it (he calls his own vice-grip the Knuckle Floater), the proper way to tie a necktie (in advance of a job interview or a night of Alpine skiing) and how to smuggle, into any ballpark in America, a one-pound sack of cut-rate peanuts convincingly concealed in your pants. (Hint: It helps to wear boxer-briefs.) Every Sunday he puts fresh flowers on my mother's grave, while Canada geese crane their necks at him from behind a nearby tree. The moment he drives away, they eat the flowers, a Fare-for-Fowl food program going strong in its 13th year. In a closet of his small condo, he has stashed several hundred issues of SI, each with a colorful thumb tab indexing every article I've ever written, a ritual he evidently performs every Thursday, when his magazine arrives. And so I thought I'd say to him on this Thursday -- June 3, 2004 -- Thanks, Dad: I have noticed. And happy 70th birthday. Issue date: June 7, 2004 THIS JUST IN, from Mr. Dunlap: "The brothers Weinstein formed their own company, named the Fellowship Adventure Group, to release the film." Fellowship haha... it says fag. and it does sound like an even dirtier version
of the boy scouts, doesn't it. Etc. Etc. Etc.
06.02.04 And you all know that annoying title style means McSweeney's. In other news you've probably already heard, the Weinsteins are bringing us Fahrenheit 9/11. For the love of puppies, may it please aid a couple percentage points toward the downfall of the unholy Emperor. Strangely, good things sometimes still happen: Ban on Late Term Abortion Reversed. The Great Liz Penn has been busy writing about movies, and we know you'll like Girl Movies '04, The Good, the Bad and the Sparkly. Finally, from Ms. Amanda MacKaye (now of the routineers): house shows make music feel better 06.01.04 I remain fascinated by Wonkette, one reason being the virulence with
which she is loathed by the herds of redfaced spitting piggies. Luckily,
our girl's humor arsenal consistently puts the sticks and stones of
the hatahs to shame. What
One Conservative Woman Thinks of Washingtonienne Buy this for me: 1967 Honda CL 160. Thanks. Tristan Taormino at the Village Voice: Porn Faces Reality: HIV outbreak in California porn industry highlights risky business. Tristan's friend Rachel Kramer Bussel makes an appearance at THE BLACK LIST: IN MEMORY OF MEMORIAL DAY. Starting today in D.C., the geek capitol of America, and tomorrow on ESPN, the 77th Annual Scripps National Spelling Bee! Also in Sports, the Williams sisters tanked again, the f*cking unworthy Lakers closed out the T-Wolves, and hockey has suddenly become the best competiton on television. Besides the Bee, of course. And most importantly, a very fond farewell to one of our favorite true Lesberados, the great Missy "The Missile" Giove, retiring from downhill mountain biking: Missy, We're Gonna Miss You, Austin Murphy, SI. And check out the pics. If you can't get into SI.com, click the title below. Murphy's
Law
|
 |
 |
 |
Welcome to Monday, where you will be harangued and All System Apps Are Down. Also, this coffee sucks.
This may be as hot as D.C. can get: Wonkette and Washingtonienne. From CZ, some hope for the bloggers, A BOOK IN YOU.
I'm back from playing rich in New York. The Farm Sanctuary Gala was gay-la. We had the best table in the house, thanks to old friend and recent major philanthropist Kathy LeMay. We were fed and watered and feted all night, and only once were we forced to watch the Mary Tyler Moore narrated Life Behind Bars. I met Anya from Buffy. She (Emma Caulfield) and Ally Sheedy kept suspiciously running off together, giving me heart attacks of curiosity. Corey Feldman dresses funny, but he and his wife are having a "veggie baby." Let's see...Chrissie Hynde has the same haircut she's always had. She sang "I'll Stand by You" to a video about Liberty the cow. She was great. The B-52s played for us, and I was aggressively fondled on the dance floor by a sexy socialite. And as at any event, the cool kids could all be found out on the smoking porch.
I want but don't want to harangue you guys about continuing to buy and eat factory-farmed meat. I know you're all smart enough to find and read the avalanche of evidence as to why the practice promotes environmental degradation, famine, bad health, and of course, the horrific suffering of millions of sentient beings. Smart enough if you want to, that is. If I can do it - and I love meat, and rarely deny myself anything at all - anyone can do it. It's not like quitting drinking. You're not addicted to meat. It's just a habit. A willfully ignorant bad habit. Anyway, every little bit helps, you know, so think about it.
But why listen to me when you can listen to Lincoln, Jefferson, Shaw, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Einstein, Twain, Edision, and DaVinci? Or, Ja Rule, Brandy, Shania Twain, and Pamela Anderson?
OK! We need some filler here. From Sarah, "Here's a column from the VERY CONSERVATIVE Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinal."
Vote For A Man, Not A Puppet
Americans should realize that if they vote for President Bush's re-election, they are really voting for the architects of war - Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and the rest of that cabal of neoconservative ideologues and their corporate backers.
I have sadly come to the conclusion that President Bush is merely a frontman, an empty suit, who is manipulated by the people in his administration. Bush has the most dangerously simplistic view of the world of any president in my memory.
It's no wonder the president avoids press conferences like the plague. Take away his cue cards and he can barely talk. Americans should be embarrassed that an Arab king (Abdullah of Jordan) spoke more fluently and articulately in English than our own president at their joint press conference recently.
John Kerry is at least an educated man, well-read, who knows how to think and who knows that the world is a great deal more complex than Bush's comic-book world of American heroes and foreign evildoers. It's unfortunate that in our poorly educated country, Kerry's very intelligence and refusal to adopt simplistic slogans might doom his presidential election efforts.
But Thomas Jefferson said it well, as he did so often, when he observed that people who expect to be ignorant and free expect what never was and never will be.
People who think of themselves as conservatives will really display their stupidity, as I did in the last election, by voting for Bush. Bush is as far from being a conservative as you can get. Well, he fooled me once, but he won't fool me twice.
It is not at all conservative to balloon government spending, to vastly increase the power of government, to show contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law, or to tell people that foreign outsourcing of American jobs is good for them, that giant fiscal and trade deficits don't matter, and that people should not know what their government is doing. Bush is the most prone-to-classify, the most secretive president in the 20th century. His administration leans dangerously toward the authoritarian.
It's no wonder that the Justice Department has convicted a few Arab-Americans of supporting terrorism. What would you do if you found yourself arrested and a federal prosecutor whispers in your ear that either you can plea-bargain this or the president will designate you an enemy combatant and you'll be held incommunicado for the duration?
This election really is important, not only for domestic reasons, but because Bush's foreign policy has been a dangerous disaster. He's almost restarted the Cold War with Russia and the nuclear arms race. America is not only hated in the Middle East, but it has few friends anywhere in the world thanks to the arrogance and ineptness of the Bush administration. Don't forget, a scientific poll of Europeans found us, Israel, North Korea and Iran as the greatest threats to world peace.
I will swallow a lot of petty policy differences with Kerry to get a man in the White House with brains enough not to blow up the world and us with it. Go to Kerry's Web site (www.johnkerry.com) and read some of the magazine profiles on him. You'll find that there is a great deal more to Kerry than the GOP attack dogs would have you believe.
Besides, it would be fun to have a president who plays hockey, windsurfs, ride motorcycles, plays the guitar, writes poetry and speaks French. It would be good to have a man in the White House who has killed people face to face. Killing people has a sobering effect on a man and dispels all illusions about war.
05.21.04
What can we at Heck's Kitchen possibly add to the Truth, the Myth, the
Legend of Claire Zulkey? We could talk about her smartly-attired new
book, Girls!
Girls! Girls!, but we are lazy, and the reviewers over at Amazon
are like, trained and stuff. We could make her show off her famous wit
by posing a series of clever questions, but the
hoi polloi have that covered, too. She's extraordinarily prolific;
she's masterfully interviewed everyone
from Dave
Barry to Janice
Zulkey, and she's been capably interrogated herself by Facsimilation,
Reinventing
the World, Lucky
Dip, Arriviste
Press, and Word
Riot. She fixes up something daily at Zulkey.com.
She's even on Friendster.
In short, the Great and Generous Claire Zulkey is everywhere, and we
have nothing to add. But we've always got more photos than the other
guy, and we can try to get her to talk about US. So let's see what happens
when
05.20.04
The
Orgy in Your Backyard, nyt. This morning I tried, again,
to convince my stubborn housemate that the noise we are hearing is not
"some generator somewhere," but the Bugs, and it's the same
sound, sort of like a constant low car alarm siren, all over the entire
city. Also this morning I found a set of deer antlers in the park. They're
smallish and spikey (6pt?), I guess from a young whitetail buck, and
still attached at the skull plate. Yay! I have to work all day, but
here're two stories from Ms. Jaime Shaffer, Boss Extraordinaire:
#1. JM says: can i post your loosiana story?
jaime says: oh shit, sure, but have i even got a better one for you
this morning! so we were eating at juan's
flying burrito last night with kristen and rimus. we were in a booth
right next to the door. all of a sudden, a dude snatches kristens purse
and runs out. i'm the only one to see this, so i run after him, shouting.
then jacob and rimus start chasing him. then this car full of indie
kids. then these total crazy motorcycle dudes!! the guy was kinda old
and pudgy and ended up tripping about 6 or 7 blocks away. he threw kristens
purse and then the motorcycle dudes started beating him up while the
indie rock kids sprayed pepper spray on him! when we got back to juan's
with the purse, the whole restaurant erupted in cheer! and, we got a
25% purse snatching discount from our bill!
#2. dear friends,
i have a small story that might warm your hearts that i'd like to share
with you.
today
jacob and i went with our louisiana-native friend kristen to the dmv
to get our drivers licenses (this was kristen's third attempt, but she's
from louisiana, so maybe that explains it?). we drove to this industrial
waste of a town in the boondocks because we figured there would be no
line (it just so happened that no one we saw had a full set of teeth
either).
well, we failed miserably. i needed a license and to register my vehicle,
jacob needed a license and a placard, and kristen needed just her license
- we failed in every aspect due to lack of proper documentation. anyway,
kristen was nervous about the eye test; apparently she has something
called asstromyoplasia or something crazy and it makes vision in her
right eye effed up. she was talking to the man behind the counter (who
could have been a manly woman, or a man who wanted to be a woman) talking
about her problem, and the man/womans says:
"ma'am, ya ohnly need one aaah to draahve ee-in loosiana."
translated, "lady, you only need one eye to drive in louisiana."
louisiana. that's where we live!
05.19.04
The din of a million horny bugs is ringing through my neighborhood,
and we're starting to see live cicadas lumbering around. Below is a
picture of the first one I saw alive. It was sitting on the porch in
front of the door, oblivious to the major foot traffic about to end
it's short stay in The Overworld. What's up with these bugs? you might
ask, if you were a shitty comedian. Well, they're slow, and apparently
delicious to birds and dogs. They're ugly. And you
shouldn't eat too many. Got more questions? Here's
a little FAQ&A.
I've rearranged the Kitchen a bit. You'll find the chattering loiterers over to your right, by clicking on "The Kitchenette." Today, Underblog interviews Susan Synarski, Liz Penn/Dana Stevens says farewell to grown-up comedy at Slate, Dear Zulk Tackles TV. In case you missed it, Wonkette woman Ana Marie Cox wrote Pimping the Vote™ for In These Times.
Friday I'm going to this in NYC. If you have any messages for Corey Feldman, Linda Blair, Fred Schneider, Ally Sheedy, Emma Caulfield or Chrissie Hynde, let me know. I plan to sleep with all of them. No, I plan to get them all to autograph my breasts. For the animals.
HK Special Advisory: Party at Bob's and Caryn's, hide the children.
When? Saturday, May 22, from around 11 PM.
What? Once again, caryn and bob would like to take this opportunity to invite you round for drinks, hijinx, and cicada-based delicacies from home and around the world.
Where? caryn and bob’s apt, 1948 3rd St NW apt #3. 202.210.3450 for further info.
Whyfor: We’re gathering to celebrate the coming of summer and the passing of caryn’s student life—she’s just finished three grueling years at Catholic Law School and is now studying her dick off for the bar. If you don’t show up, she plans to sue.
Bonus! For talent, we’ll have john (how’d he get his pants so tight?) and adam (the first fully- realized CGI character in a major motion picture) spinning to make your boo-tay say boo-yay. There will also be a special guest appearance by a mysterious woman known only as DJ Law & Order: don’t make a sound w/out your lawyer present. Can ah git a wit-ness?! Good Gawd!
We’ll also be raffling off many exciting gifts. Bribes are encouraged.
As always, please forward this message on to those who may have missed it and, remember, more booze is good news. Love.
05.18.04
I'm doing some things...please excuse the mess. Sharpeworld made The Morning News' 2004 Editors' Awards for Online Excellence. She pointed me in the direction of the incredible Internet Archive, where many, many hours should be lost. Check out the Prelinger Archives (1,902 movie files Over 1,200 "ephemeral" - advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur -films made from 1927 through the present), where you can watch classics like Duck and Cover, Boys Beware, and Are You Popular? (No, you're a slut.) More later.
05.17.04
At long last, from the man who brought us All About
the Whiskey Rebellion, and complete with his suggested illustrations,
HK is very proud to present...
Today is truly historic: Massachusetts Performs First Legal Gay Marriages. More in a bit. Oh, while we're sort of on the topic, check this out: Childless couple told to try sex.
06.16.04
I take it all back. This administration rules. Barney
Cam II: Barney Reloaded (win, or real),
starring George, Laura, cuddly Karl Rove, Ari Fleisher, and more! Notes
Sarah, "They are NOT actors!"
Smarty Jones whupped some ass yesterday.
05.02.03
Patient's name: Us. U.S. You. Political
bloggers.
Diagnosis: Information Saturation Poisoning
Recommended treatment: Does this hurt? Stop doing it then.
Outlook: Bad. Patient is longtime daily, weekend, and binge Newsoholic.
Adult child of Newsoholic.
Statement: "Just give us some Newsohol Lite, please. Like, Fox
Puts Foot in Its Mouth, Kicks Self, and This
Date in Gossip, from yesterday's Reliable Source, in which Nixon
talks about that episode of All in the Family when Archie finds out
his old macho pal is, you know, a homosapien."
Next Up! Let's turn the mic over to Sherman, who's got a Top Notch interview with editor, publisher, and whipcracker, Ms. Suzanne Fox! An HK woman of mystery, few have met the rurally-located Fox, but I have had the pleasure, along with Sally, of being invited out to Accoceek for dinner at the Suzanne/Ranger Ted ranch. We ate scallops and homemade nachos, drank margaritas, and talked long into the night after Ranger Ted passed out. Then we smoked his fancy cigars.
05.13.04
The interviews keep pouring in, but like many good things, they are
rather labor-intensive, and today requires my labors be directed toward
the needs of my employer. Someone's got to make that half-billion. But,
let's see what mom can throw together.
Dave Dunlap's Pick for tonight. From the Washington City Paper:
Young people, is this talk about bringing back the draft making you a little nervous? Wondering if Miss Canada is as indiscriminate as she was in the '70s? Well, get your priorities straight there, Roger Dodger: How's the partying up there in the Great White North? First, let's examine the honeys: You've got Avril Lavigne and a bunch of apple-cheeked lasses in pigtails and fisherman sweaters. Party supplies? Labatt Blue, Crown Royal, and Vancouver "coffeehouses" should work. Then there's the music scene: Rush is celebrating its sesquicentennial this year, but there's not too many of the aforementioned betties at those shows. What about Sloan? Not only is Sloan one of the few modern bands that deserve to be classified as power pop, but the group just released Action Pact, a disc as beautiful as anything it's done in its career. The harmonies are as sweet as a Tim Horton's maple-glazed, and the hooks are as catchy as the SARS that gripped Toronto last year. So moving to Canada may help you avoid dying a pointless death in the sand, but Sloan offers nearly as solid a reason to start practicing your "How's it going, eh?" Sloan plays with the Kicks at 8:30 p.m. Thursday, May 13, on the Black Cat's Mainstage, 1811 14th St. NW. $12. (202) 667-7960. (David Dunlap Jr.)
05.12.04
Writer, musician, best man, hopeless romantic, relentless defender of the American Way, Mr. Bears Will Attack is part invincible superhero, part little girl twirling in a field of sunflowers. Readers may have noticed the nearly obscene heapings of love he gets here in the Kitchen, but I say, it's almost all warranted. He's a Renaissance Man for our troubled times, the D&D master himself.. *extended, deafening applause* HK PRESENTS:
05.11.04
Welcome to Heck's Kitchen, where the pantry's nearly bare. Last week
I found nothing but dust bunnies, lima beans, ketchup packets, and beer.
I thought, this is a hell of a spread. What will my worthy guests eat?
Then I wondered, What would I do if I were a Tlingit tribesman of the
Northwest Coast? And then I thought, I believe I'd make it a potlatch.
And, bonus, if successful, a potlatch can serve to raise the social
rank of the host...if there follows a resultant raise in prestige for
him/herself and his/her clan, it will be considered well worth the price
and effort. So, dig into what CC brought:
wherein
who are
05.10.04
Quite a weekend we had. Friday night was the very successful
Art Night, featuring belly dancers, funny films, bluegrass, Allison
Wolfe, some things I missed, and Ms. Claire Zulkey of Chicago. Claire
and her cohorts were excellent, and now we're all best friends forever.
At least that's what the whiskey told me. The VIF conference Saturday
was equally neat. There was a humor/politics workshop with funny DC
WIT woman Leah
Rader, the Tepid Fish Productions
ladies, the head of Fluid Movement,
comedian Sara Polin, and the great Ana Marie Cox (Wonkette),
to whom I could listen for hours. If you ever get a chance to see her
speak, go. The craft workshop (and art show) were also warm and fuzzy
and inspiring. There were a buncha craftivists there, including Leah
Kramer, of Craftster.org, the adorable
and talented Ms. Melissa Dettloff (Lekkner),
writer Laura
Vogel, and lots more, but this is turning into a pretty boring post,
so I'll just say, mazel tov to VIF and Sally Feminist and everyone,
and go make things, and always, always, go for the funny.
SUNDAY my housies invited Sarah and I to a bike messenger party, to benefit their emergency fund (which exists to help messengers, who are uninsured, when they get hit by trucks and stuff), featuring a WRESTLING CHAMPIONSHIP. This was one of the coolest parties ever! and I took pictures. You're welcome.
Last week, when I posted Birdy's interview of Sherman, I forgot to post Sherman's interview of Birdy. So that's what I will do right now. Unfortunately I used all the pictures last week. So, go back for illustration. HK is honored to present...
05.07.04
I AM REALLY ALL WORKED UP THIS MORNING. But I don't want my
rant to distract from today's truly exceptional interview, as Mr.
Underblog takes on The Great Deb Schwartz! Debs is one of those celebrities,
whom, if you were a late night talk show host, you would invite again
and again because her awesomeness might rub off on you. (See the
first HK interview with Deb.) Deb is an outstanding bloggist, humorist,
jurist, self-interviewer
and self-photographer. She claims I'm her greatest creation. Bob and
I went to her wedding. She taught my whole family the Pretzel Pose.
In short, to know Deb is to be groupie.
Ahem. I hope all those people who have dismissed Friends over the years, for whatever half-baked reasons, ooooh...it's so UNREALISTIC! Because in my life I have a perfectly multi-culti set of close friends! Ooooh...we never see them WORK, because as everyone knows, there's nothing more exciting than watching a sitcom character WORK! Oh, and it's so SELF-ABSORBED...LIKE YOU'RE NOT! Blah fucking blah fucking blah. I hope all the Friends Haters are pumped for a steady diet of hot girls handcuffed in morgue drawers and covered with buckets of worms, because the age of the well-crafted and warm-hearted sitcom is over. Between NBC's endless promos for crap like Fear Factor were their promos for the series finale of their other long-running, intelligent sitcom, Frasier, itself a spinoff of Cheers.
How long ago it seems, when America was happy to watch All in the Family, M*A*S*H, The Cosby Show, Family Ties, Roseanne, The Golden Girls. Or stuff like Three's Company, Alice, Mork & Mindy, Welcome Back Kotter, One Day at a Time, Facts of Life. Even Married with Children. Does it make no one deeply uncomfortable that Americans appear to have a growing lust to see people degraded, dehumanized, and humiliated? Can we continue to look at those images and not think of very recent criminal humiliations inflicted by our grinning brethren servicemen and women? IT'S DISGUSTING, PEOPLE! STOP!
Happily, I found Tom Shales to be somewhat more eloquent on my topic this morning: A Big Hug Goodbye to 'Friends' and Maybe to the Sitcom. And may Jeff Zucker get hit by a bus.
05.06.04
How fortunate that this is Interview Week here in Heck's Kitchen, because
if I had to even acknowledge current events I think I would cry like
a baby. Luckily, we can leave that business to the news-hardened, tough-talkin'
BWA Campaign
Blog. On the sweeter side, BWA's also documented his cupcake
outing with our own Constance Chang, aka, Ms. Cupcakes.
Next orders of business: More interviews, please. In other solicitation news, our long-time favorite sister-in-blog Debs is enduring something like, her ninth week of jury duty, and would appreciate some guest entries. AND, don't forget tomorrow is Art Night, featuring, among others, Claire Zulkey!
And now for our Feature Presentation: Suzanne interviews Marcel, on a subject I've never had reason to consider. I'll let Suze do the honors:
05.05.04
Welcome back to Interview Week, loyal, talented, good-looking readers.
Let's keep those interviews coming! I was
very pleased to find this on my desk this morning. Especially since
it was accompanied by darling naked baby pictures. And Jill singing
with the neighbors at Club 88 in LA in 1979. And because it's all about
long-time HK denizens Jill and Jennifer! *wild applause*
Memo: Interview No. 2, of the Great HK Interview
Week
Today's interviewer: Jennifer
Robin
Vitals: aka Birdy; songstress of the Southwest; sister to
Today's Interviewee: Jill
McElmurry.
Vitals: aka Biting Shrew, pp, Sherman; significant other of Underblog;
author, illustrator, and HK VIP. See also no
home-like place
05.04.04
Hark! I hear a stirring and heartfelt ovation for Wendy and Shauna,
our first Interview Week interviewees. And interviewers! You too can
receive a big round of imaginary applause by interviewing someone and
sending the results here. Without further
ado, HK proudly presents our favorite editor, Shauna! and the third-grade
teacher we all wish we'd had, Wendy!
Hey! Me and Wendy Jane-interviewed each other. Here are:
05.03.04
In Columbus, where the radio isn't dominated by hiphop and craprock,
you can listen to CD101,
which has billed itself as The Alternative Station since around 1988,
and you can hear Morrissey's new
song (hooky, political and mature-like) and the Loretta Lynn & Jack
White duet off her new album
(a rocker about drinking pitchers of Sloe Gin in Portland, Oregon?),
and Postal Service, and Bowie, and Bonnie "Prince" Billy, and the Shins,
and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (Maps!),
but also an alarming amount of emo,
which I find loathesome, and you can walk down to the neighborhood
bar and see some rockabilly bands from Southern
Ohio, and Finland,
and maybe a very fine-looking dame will tell you you're "the hottest
thing that's ever walked into this bar," but fortunately (because
you are girlfriended) she thinks you're "with" the woman sitting
next to you, which is your stepmom-like person, so, you are now feeling
very fine, and walking out to the car to grab your shirt, for the bar's
a/c is on, and although
If
you came of political age in the '80s, as I did, Reagan was a great
villain, the outsized, all-powerful Teflon President. (To young Republicans,
of course, he was a savior, and the Clintons would be their embodiment
of all things Evil.) I remember in high school a bunch of us on the
newspaper staff went up to Bowling Green University for a journalism
conference, and Reagan was speaking to a huge crowd. We stood in the
back yelling stupid stuff, and a) someone threw gum in Tessie's hair,
b) a very hateful woman hissed at us, "Obviously you're too young
to remember when gas was $1.25 a gallon." (HA fucking HA), and
c) The Gipper actually addressed us, calling out "the hecklers
in the back" but I can't remember what he said.
Report®,
I ask the tough questions to debunk the so-called truth-the way they
expect us to see the world-and expose…the truth behind the truth.™
Tonight's report? "Home Delivery: Good or Evil?" Tonight
I'll be talking to...Your name, what's your name again?
D.BUNKER:
"Bread"-that's a pun for money. I dig, man. And it goes
directly to my point: Delivery has made us fat! And…"the
truth behind the truth?"™ There used to be a time in this
country-and I'm talking in the first world here, D-Lux-when kids had
to go out and catch their own chicken if they wanted McNuggets. Now,
though, you can get a pizza delivered to you in less than an hour!
D-Lux, I'm afraid our time is about up, and I see you've got quite
a line of Navigators and Escalades out there at the full serve pump.
Any parting thoughts you want to add? Advice for customers outside
your delivery area?
D.BUNKER:
Yes, exactly: delivery is good and evil. Birds can fly, but fat chickens
taste best! Wisdom of the Greeks, my friends. From a Greek himself.
I thank D-Lux, and remind you to always ask the tough question, to
expose…the truth behind the truth.™ Until next time…I'm
Dale Bunker, investigative reporter, and this has been…The D.
Bunker Report®.
But
Pops wasn't concerned. He knew there was nothing to worry about as
long as his boy wasn't spooked. And Christian, surprisingly well-coordinated
for a six-year-old, was never afraid. He had been climbing almost
as soon as he could walk, and he'd often get other boys in his kindergarten
class in West Los Angeles to follow him up a tempting trunk, but the
other boys would quickly give up, too weak to gain much purchase.
By then Christian would already be two stories up, and rising. His
classmates would gather at the base of the tree to gawk, and then
the teachers would come running. 
Christian
would soon be anointed the second coming of skateboarding. L.A. natives
Peralta, Jay Adams, Tony Alva and Shogo Kubo had established vertical
skateboarding -- in which the athlete rode the vertical walls of pools
and halfpipes -- as a sport in Venice, a.k.a. Dogtown, in the 1970s
(the region and era so lovingly documented in Peralta's films), but
the sport went through a painful contraction in the late '70s and
early '80s. It was the half-Japanese Christian Hosoi, sometimes just
called Christ, who resurrected and then transformed the sport into
the aerial spectacle it would become. He was joined by several other
notable athletes: Steve Caballero, Lester Kasai, Lance Mountain, Mark
(Gator) Ragowski and the one who would become the most famous of all,
Hawk, a weed-thin trick machine. "We invented going out of the
pool and doing aerials," says Peralta, "but for guys like
Christian and Tony, the swimming pool walls were no longer for riding.
They were for launching." If Christian hadn't squandered his
great gifts, it is very likely that you and your kids would be watching
him blast huge air every year at the X Games and that video game on
your PlayStation would be called Christian Hosoi's Underground. "Dude,"
says Dave Duncan, a professional skater and X Games announcer, "as
far as I'm concerned, every dollar that Tony Hawk has made is really
Christian's money." 
By
1982 the sport was synonymous with outlaw cool at precisely the moment
when its athletes, taking advantage of huge improvements in equipment
-- uniform deck sizes, hard plastic knee pads, flat-bottom ramps --
were pushing the sport into far more complex and radical endeavors.
The skater was emerging as a cultural antihero, and there was no one
better suited to that role than Christian Hosoi. 
Christian
and Hawk were as different as two boys could be and still share a
passion for skating. In pools and halfpipes, their wildly divergent
styles made them natural antagonists. "Christian was the air,
the showman," says Hawk. "I was the technician. I could
go high, but I couldn't do it consistently. I always wished I could
go as big as he did." 
With
his $350,000 annual income -- when the average NBA salary was $300,000
-- Christian bought a Mustang, a Harley-Davidson, a tricked-out Jeep
and a McLaren sports car, all before he had a driver's license. He
hung out with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Beastie Boys, Ice-T and
the actors River Phoenix and David Arquette. "I was just a teenager,
but I was living the full rock-star life," says Christian. "I
could have anything I wanted, do whatever I wanted. Girls. Cars. Clubs.
Drugs." 
Hawk's
reversal of fortune can be traced to a programming decision made nine
years ago by ESPN, which was looking to tap into the thriving alternative
sports market. The networks had noticed that the skateboarding demographic
was the audience every company from Mountain Dew to Nike was looking
to reach. In 1995, in an effort to tap into this elusive market, producer
Ron Semiao created the Extreme Games -- a showcase of alternative
sports: BMX, inline skating, rock climbing and, centrally, skateboarding.
Most skaters ridiculed the Extreme Games concept as yet another lame
attempt by the mainstream to cash in on skating, and said that ESPN's
decision to prominently feature vertical skating instead of street
skating proved just how whack these so-called Extreme Games would
be. Yet vert skating, ESPN correctly predicted, was more telegenic
than street skating, and easier for nonskaters to understand. Anyone
who had watched Olympic gymnastics or figure skating could appreciate
the aerial tricks of the best vert skaters. 
He
insists he never thinks about whether it should be him sitting by
that pool in Encinitas, banking those fat video-game royalties. "I
don't dwell on the past," he says. "That was Tony's journey,
and God bless him. This is the path the Lord has set me on, and I
am grateful that I will be able to use my name and my skating as my
key." [Because of good behavior, he could be released in early
June.] He says that when he gets out, he will use his skating to preach
the word of God. "I can't wait to skate again. Kids will see
me, and I can represent Christ. I want to acknowledge him in everything
I do." 
There
you are, dear reader. Problem solved!
