yesterday, if you didn’t see it.
he raised several intelligent and thought-provoking points.
greg suggests that there could be no better place for tony pierce than on tonypierce.com
i totally disagree.
this blog is something that i get to do on the 15 minute breaks at work and the time that i find during halftime shows after work while watching basketball on my satellite dish.
i would love a good designer, a good editor, some contributors, photographers, illustrators, fact checkers for my ass, etc. etc.
sure, working at a paper would make me tone it down and i would be able to say fuck fuck fuck all day long, but to be honest, i don’t even want to say fuck fuck fuck all day long.
i want to write about los angeles.
what people don’t remember is that out of punk comes pop. janes addiction spawned lalapalooza. the red hot chili peppers spawned “under the bridge.” henry rollins spawned some thick necked dude i now see playing cops in movies.
i see ice-t on law and order, i see ice cube in barbershop, i see dr. dre formerly of nwa on trl.
why cant we see tony pierce every day on latimes.com?
i am dying to sell out.
except i would sell out like andy warhol did. the joke will be on you. not you you, but them you.
the joke will be, i cant believe that you paid a million bucks for a painting of a soup can or for a xerox of a photograph.
i want to be surrounded by great writers and artists and playing in the major leagues.
i love the history of writing and the rules and the structure, for without them what can you play off of?
i have so much to learn when it comes to writing and how to present a page and i think everyone agrees that this web page thing has yet to begin to rock.
why cant the la times lead the way?
must it always be ten paces behind the ny times?
maybe it must.
i agree with greg, there will be editors who will want to complain if i get too much freedom, or exposure, or money, or book deals. even in college i had an editor who was jealous. theres nothing you can do about that.
but any attention that i get will bring more traffic to latimes.com and more traffic means more ads and more ads means more money.
unfortunately mo money, mo problems.
i just want to learn to write better.
i want to be able to knock out a 40 inch sellout feature in a day. i cant do that right now. i have no clips. i don’t have shit.
all i have is this blog and this site which isn’t a reflection, necessarily, of me, but of what someone can do who knows very little about writing and even less about photoshop.
if the la times said, pierce, heres $40k, write obits for a year like royko did. i would do it. i love obits. they’re just features. they’re just profiles.
i love being timely. i love having the scoop on everyone.
that winona “exclusive” interview was posted seconds after the verdict.
there was only two things that coulda happened, guilty or not guilty. tell me which post to put up there and click the button and boom.
you. cannot. do. that. in. newsprint.
you also cant write and write and write and write and not sweat it.
all these pictures that i have on this blog could be ads. sell me out. the kids don’t care.
cobain sold out with nevermind and those who were yelling sellout were nothing compared to the kabillions who cheered and bought that record as the floodgates of grunge were parted and everything came pouring out.
the next revolution could be televised or bloggerized.
television has overhead, this shit doesn’t.
if the times wanted me to stop using certain words, fine. it’s their paper, not mine. im so unattached to what i write these days that if i get paid for it it’s not mine any more. you can do with it what you want. if you want to paint over your warhol soup can, go for it. if it turns out better, it’ll reflect more on me than on them so whatever. and if it makes me look dumb, whatever. i look dumb pretty easily on my own.
the only bad thing about the la times proposal that i didn’t mention when i wrote it is that i would stop the busblog.
i would want my “career” to be the center of my creative universe.
maybe i would write about stuff in this space that is either super personal, like friends’ birthdays, or poems or stuff that just wouldn’t work in the times, or maybe, if i had the time, i could use this space to give you some behind-the– but no, i’d probably just end it.
just like how im ending this post. quickly.
but before i do, greg requested a photo essay of Christian statuettes like the ones above.
as a Christian i’m a little shocked that figurines like these are being sold at places like catholicshopper.com, but religion doesn’t surprise me much any more.
i’m shocked because a lot of these pieces seem to poke fun at our idea of the Messiah, it doesn’t lift it up.
and some look downright pedo-erotic. no, thanks.
but the two that im showing here are okay, i suppose.
i’d rather not see Jesus in modern day themes with his old robes. to be honest i’d rather see a black Jesus, but that’s just me. but i don’t want to see him with his legs crossed smoking a cigarette and reading the newspaper.
i think the story of Jesus is plenty just as it is. most people really don’t understand much of what he said when he was saying it, myself included, so why throw him into mundane situations like this? would elvis fans buy statues of the king taking a dump while eating corn on the cob?
that’s what i see when i click on a picture of the Messiah driving the lane on two little white kids.
with that said, i will be looking around the web for more of these weird statuettes, if any of you know where i can find them, email me the urls.
yours in rock,
tony