now i don’t even know where it is.

i may have sold it, lost it, torn it, stored it or stained it.

and the reason frightens me.

one of the classic cliches in rock conversations is “i like his old stuff better.”

in a way it says that the artist has lost his mojo, but in another way it identifies the critic as either being 1) stuck in the past 2) unable to flow with change or 3) a lazy snob.

i plead guilty to all of the above, but that doesn’t mean that the boss hasn’t hit the wall.

tell me one album that he put out since born in the usa that isn’t full of shit.

tunnel of love, maybe.

but human touch, lucky town, the ghost of tom joad and the rising are far from fulfilling the prophesy of bruce springsteen being the future of rock and roll.

for if they are the future, rock is dead.

simple as that.

since hindsight is 20/20 one could say that the boss probably stopped wanting to be the future of rock n roll about 20 years ago when he released the river, a double album whose best moments were its dark creepy violent and regretful tales of woe captured perfectly in the title track.

springsteen hit critical and artistic homers later with the all-acoustic nebraska and born in the usa, but take two critical songs off of each record, and you have what he has now: hum drum dreck from the jersey boy who we thought would be bob dylan and the rolling stones all wrapped up in one.

take two songs off of any of his first six records and you still have solid albums.

my fear is that age hit springsteen and wiped out his young man’s desire for fast cars fast women and fast times and no longer was he interested in idealistic notions of being born to run, but more concerned with being a family man and a good citizen – both noble goals, for bankers, and bartenders, but i thought he made a deal with us, to never retreat, to never surrender.

springsteen was 35 when born in the usa, his last good album came out.

bob dylan was 34 when he came out with his last great album, blood on the tracks. when he was 35 he seemed incredibly confused with ’76s “desire” and the downright failure of ’78s “street legal”.

near the end of 1978, when bob dylan was 37, he proclaimed that he was a born again christian and subsequently whipped out four totally solid records within 5 years (slow train coming (’79), saved (’80), shot of love (’81), and infidels (’83).

from the time springsteen was 37-46 he’s given us tunnel of love, lucky town, human touch, and the ghost of tom joad.

i cant even think of four great songs from that era, and it worries me because it doesn’t look like there’s any sign of a comeback.

but there rarely is.

when neil young turned 35, he too freaked out.

when he was 34 he came out with the classic Rust Never Sleeps and Live Rust, only to follow with 8 really bad records in a row, 5 of whom were with the totally unlucky Geffen who had no idea that they were financing a ten-year creative slump.

but when neil turned 44 he released a mighty one-two punch of a comeback with ’89 “freedom” and ’90 “ragged glory.” which was then followed up with the gnarly wild live records of “arc” and “weld” proving you could still Rock well into your 40s.

bruce.

and not only Rock, but inspire the kids, like sonic youth and nirvana.

sonic youth would end up opening for young in the mid 90s.

now its understandable that not everyone wants to be smashing guitars and fronting the likes of crazy horse while in their 40s and 50s.

tom petty has definitely taken off what little edge he had in his younger days.

when he was 34 he released his most creatively diverse lp “southern accents” which featured the sitar-flavored “don’t come around here no more.” two years later he would rock for the last time with “let me up (ive had enough.)”

and even though he mellowed, as on his first solo record “full moon fever” (’89) tunes like free fallin and i wont back down didn’t completely suck despite turning 40.

if anything that record was a precursor for the subtlety that we would enjoy in his next three cds “learning to fly” “wild flowers” and the best of the bunch “Songs and Music From ‘She’s the One’“.

but the artist that springsteen should pay the most attention to, if he even cares any more, is the man who wrote the first song that springsteen ever covered on vinyl: tom waits.

bruce released a live version of waits’ jersey girl as the b-side of the born in the usa single “cover me.” both good songs. the year was 1985, both men were 36 (waits is just two months older than springsteen).

springsteen had just released his most successful record, and waits was about to do the same with the 1985 classic “rain dogs.”

where the boss had peaked at 35, waits was just beginning, starring in the ’86 jarmush film “down by law”, and in ’87 busted with the bad ass “franks wild years” (a musical play he wrote with his wife).

in the 90s when springsteen was still floundering, waits came out with bone machine, the black rider, and mule variations. those first two right there: totally amazing.

what tom waits and neil young and bob dylan did was continue to experiment.

petty just aged gracely, but the boss didn’t seem to know what exactly to do, or what it was that he wanted to do.

he seemed too afraid to make the embarrassing mistakes that neil young was unconscious about, and therefore hopeless to deliver forgettable middle of the road mush that is so fat and satiated that even dramatic topics like aids (“streets of philadelphia”) and the attacks on 9/11 (“the rising”) sound more like mumbles than thunders.

when i pay $85 for a rock show, i don’t want to be mumbled at.

which is why i wont be at dodger stadium tonight, reliving past memories with a fallen idol.

instead i’ll be seeing a band who tonight will be calling themselves steve garveys moustache.

at a secret location.

in glendale.

before they grow up and turn 35.

and die.

virginia + layne + ziboy + sean’s blog + one day in the usa

my hero. one of the reasons that i moved and have stayed in hollywood.

one of the reasons that many of you read this blog.

charles bukowski was poor, ugly, mean-spirited, tenacious and for most of his life ridiculously unsuccessful.

he was also an unabashed alcoholic who said that alcoholics were amateurs, that he was a good heavy drinker.

he lived into his 70s and when i say lived i mean lived. he fought he fucked he wrote and he wrote. he went to his stinky job year after year and he bitched but he didn’t whine. big difference.

read any of his dozens and dozens of books and if you took a shot every time you read him whine you’d barely get a buzz.

i adore that.

bukowski was also an accomplished poet. something his idol, hemingway, was terrible at. one day i will show you a poem from hemingway and you’ll be sad for him.

no need to cry for bukowski about anything. in my opinion he was the most important poet of the twentieth century. important because his poems were regularly rejected for decades by the big magazines and yet he didn’t slice his ear off or change his style or write his congressman, instead he kept to his guns and wrote more poems. he produced. and eventually the morons running the asylum died and eventually the poems that had been rejected were suddenly brilliant and the lit world opened its arms to bukowski and bukowski shook them down and went back to la and drank his cheap beer and slept with his cheap women and laughed and laughed.

as he should.

because his poems were good.

as were his stories and his novels and his american life.

if you want to read about los angeles or hollywood or california start with bukowski and you’ll be happy you did. there wont be many fables about malibu or bel air or the sunset strip which is good because that’s not la anymore than the hollywood sign isn’t hollywood.

the ghost of bukowski still stumbles down the dirty streets of hollywood. he lived very close to where i live now and when i think about the two and a half years that ive lived here i think about how ive never been more prolific, how ive never been luckier with the ladies, and how ive never made less money.

just like my hero.

minus the alcohol abuse.

here’s to you charles bukowski, the biggest influence of the busblog, next to the Bible.

my old bukowski photo essay +the faith fools

i dont care. i want out of here.

i want to be on the road. i want to be on a harley chopper with a red white and blue suede vest on and my huge lenny kravitz fake afro blowing in the wind as you and i blaze a trail between hollywood and somewhere.

im sick of tv im sick of radio im sick of everything. my soda tastes flat, my flat girlfriend feels flat, my bicycle tires are flat, even my stratavarious is flat.

tomorrow i have to cover the X-Games for a skateboard magazine who wants me to take pictures.

sunday the Boss plays dodger stadium and i dont have tickets which is fine cuz theyre $85 and i dont want to pay that to sit up in the air, so i will take the bus down sunset and buy a great ticket for probably $40 and be so close that i’ll get sprayed on my clarence.

theres very little else that i would want to do other than be at the beach with my true love cuz its hot in hollywood and its been hot. every day in the 90s or hotter, not that im complaining because chopper one is climate controlled. unfortunately my hollywood hills mansion isnt. i dont even have a ceiling fan.

my lunch sandwich didnt do me right. my lunch cheetos didnt do me right. the only thing doing me right is my ebay auction which has nearly gotten 100 hits.

the other night miss montreal was over, she brought me california pizza kitchen pizza and she saw a picture of me when i shaved off all of my hair and she loved it. looooooved it which is nice cuz one day that will be probably a neccessity.

im bored im bored im bored, america. theres no crooks who want to steal in this heat. theres no bad guys even plotting. we listened to the illegal taps that weve placed and everyone is saying that theyre going to santa barbara or frisco or oregon or anywhere other than hell-a.

i see the light at the end of the tunnel and its dim.

like me.

im so not free.

blue cad + la encantada + sexy girl + scurrility

is i just looked at it as good television.

sadly it wasnt that good of television.

today, the morning after, it has made for awesome blogfodder.

my pal amy has a wonderfully detailed description of her night in Park Slope which started with:

4:10 p.m. The subway stops. Air conditioning goes off.

4:13 p.m. �Attention passengers, we have lost power.�

4:15 p.m. �Attention passengers, we have lost power. We have lost power.�

Female passenger (to much laughter): �And�?�

she also linked to some really great pictures from the Gothamist.

im not quite sure LA would have handled the blackout with the class that it appears the east coast did.

here in LA we have problems when it rains for a few minutes.

and im sure the guys who sell generic batteries at the busstop would have tripled their prices if not quadrupled them.

anyhow, Text America has some interesting pictures here.

and i think this fellow Dean Land has a decent take too.

however, as in most national freaky deals like last night, there is rarely a better place to go to learn/gawk/read/write than Metafilter, which is consistantly good… especially on Fridays.

hi.

thanks for writing me so much.

here on earth we dont have porn ads on the top part of our emails. believe it or not, but people here will read the emails without advertisments. so naturally, i thought your emails were what we call Spam.

sorry.

youve all written so much that i feel its best if i answer you in this post.

first of all, thank you so much for reading it. i knew how i was getting about 100 hits a day, but i was always curious as to who the other 900 people were, so this explains a lot. welcome.

The United States. i live in the United States of America. im sorry that i just call it America. its a lazy american thing to do. i know that theres south america and central america and the usa is in north america, but when i write it as “america” i am sorta saying, “yes i know this is arrogant. we are arrogant. and we’re probably going to stay this way for a while.”

rock music. the cds i gave you are rock. you are hearing guitars and drums and someone yelling. what youre feeling is the bass. the purpose of rock music is to help you remember that youre a live animal. which is what we are at our core.

the best rock music is dangerous and agressive and wild and powerful. it’s also nice when it can be sensitive and subtle and insightful. but as long as it rocks it could be completely full of shit. it’s the music of the common man and the only thing that matters. next to spirituality, of course.

almost all of you asked me about either beer or cigarettes or drugs. even though we dont have fancy space machines, odds are humans are smarter than you. we just havent been around as long. one of the drawbacks to being so smart is life gets boring, so some people like to get fucked up so they can look at things with innocent eyes. other people are so smart that they outthink themselves out of doing the things they want to do, so they get drunk and let loose.

some people are just stupid.

theyre the ones who smoke cigarrettes.

but they do look cool, which is generally the point, and old age has never been marketed as being all that, so maybe these cool kids are on to something.

usually we keep our voting records private, but since so many of you asked, im going to vote for larry flynt as governor of california. at first i was going to vote for gray davis because its not right that he should have to win a second election in the middle of his term, but then i thought, fuck him. he should be bitching more and hes not so fuck him.

im voting for larry flynt for the same reason that people lie about why they say theyre going to vote for the terminator. they say arnold is a good businessman, but very few people in the world are as successful as larry flynt. hustler, the magazine he’s best known for, actually brings in just a fraction of all the monies he gets from magazine publishing. and he’s ugly, and hes crippled, and hes slightly insane, and he has set the bar for what is completely dirty. and in america, thats a tough trick.

most of the people here though are pretty nervous about how others will perceive them. they run around being a certain way so that they will have a better chance of being successful. but larry flynt has shown us that you can be the grossest frog mouthed s.o.b on the block and if you know what youre doing you can Still build a golden tower in beverly hills from all the money that you’ll end up with.

and how sweet would it be for the republicans to see that their dirty little coup resulted in hell freezing over and larry flynt ending up governor of california?

itd be enough to put the state on the map.

anyway, thanks for writing, i will answer more questions and clear more things up later.

love,

tony

p.s. my flying car is not for sale, and neither is chopper one. thanks though!

fragrant + buzz machine + clever hack + scrappleface

theres two full days left in the busblog auction to sponsor blogger pro for a year.

theres no reason to call your friends to bid for you.

and theres absolutely no reason to stand in line, east coasters, to use pay phones to have your friends bid on your behalf.

its just a simple sponsorship.

a link on a dumb blog.

a speck on the skid mark on the boxer shorts of the internet.

i just got a phone call from a sweet young woman calling from a Ben & Jerry’s on the lower east side of new york.

she says they are having a great sale there because theres a blackout happening today and Ben & Jerrys knows that their icecream is going to melt, so theyre practically giving the stuff away.

in between spoonfulls of chunky monkey she is asking if i could extend the auction until the power gets restored to the east coast.

i politely told her no.

sadly, the auction will end as scheduled, on saturday night.

so for all of you who are waiting until the last minute to get your bid in, you should probably bid now.

you never know what nuttiness will happen.

we are in mercury retrograde after all.

and the only guarantees in life are death, taxes

and a bunch of dumb shit here on the busblog.

instapundit has permalinked madpony! + sponsor blogger pro for the busblog + ouahad + coyote

i imagined dating hot young blonde models, driving a convertible, and surfing on saturdays.

at least one of those things came true.

surfing it turned out, in southern california is more of an ideal than a reality for this midwesterner, as strangely the pacific is normally as cold as a pacifico.

i have driven my share of convertibles while out here but nowhere near as many as i thought i would, and none of them ended up being mine.

which brings us to the hot young blonde models.

ive never been one to have a boundless amount of self-esteem or self-confidence but as ive gotten older i have realized that he who asks receives. even if he shouldnt have it. even if he doesnt deserve it. even if he is way out of his league.

in xbi training they poison you constantly.

one day they put lsd in our cap’n crunch and walked us over to this big ant hill next to the beach.

we watched the ants be ants and our trainers esped to us.

if you put your foot next to the ant hill and stomped around notice how the ants arent intimidated or freaked out, they just do their job. be like the ant, agents.

look at how the pretty ants arent stuck up about their ant-beauty, and how the ugly ones go on with their lives with as much outward confidence.

it took us a while to identify the ugly from the pretty ants, but the acid helped.

be like the ants, agents.

we watched how they lifted leaves and twigs twenty times their weight.

we watched how they worked until it was time to stop working, and we watched how they never fought each other, and we watched how they partied once the sun went down.

the next morning we looked at the world as if we were all ants.

we were quiet, and strong, and obediant, and worked as a team.

that night they asked us to go to some of the hot dance clubs in la and bring back to santa barbara the prettiest girl that we could.

once that mission was accomplished, the women were given jewelery and limo rides home.

and i’ll never forget the lesson of the ants.

and the incrediblly vivid sunset.

and the fact that after being in california for nearly a century, i have never been surfing.

last night a young blonde model came over and gave me a shoulder rub. im not crazy about shoulder rubs, but i was tired and not in the mood to resist nice offers.

her hair brushed against my sunburned back and it was nice.

nicer than youd think.

she flipped me over and told me i had the sweetest eyes.

and then we went to bed.

minutes later we were asleep.

dc + bored housewife + mallory

to celebrate one of my associates drove over to Versailles and brought us back some delicious cuban garlic chicken.

i dont know anything about fidel.

i dont know anything about cuba.

it is good to see elian gonzales again though.

hola elian!

i didnt get much sleep last night. i was doing that dumb photo essay till 3:30 in the morning.

i like doing photo essays if theres something new thats gonna come from it. last night new stuff happened and that made me happy.

its fun to twist a few stories together and hit a lot of topics at once and if i had to do it over again i probably would have been able to twist them together better, but when you have to wake up in the morning you have to call it quits at some point.

i also like doing photo essays because they take soooooo long, and i hardly ever allow myself 6-7 hours after work to research and write and pull pictures and deal with procrastination and deal with the clock ticking.

it reminds me of deadlines at the college newsroom and i like that feeling.

pressure and its influence on art.

time as a motivator.

i hear ozzy’s kid killed a dog the other night in his sleep.

i hear a lot of things.

i hear im having a bad day today at work.

i would like to hear from people who owe me a reply to my email.

before i forget, much love to makeoutcity.com who sent me two cds, to my buddy tom from rogue cheddar who also sent me a cd, and to my girl Bunnie who sends me the most interesting art projects.

thank you kind world, i dont deserve your attention, but i will take it and i hope i can give you back something just as nice in return.

bloopy + bunnie + makeout city

“the day president bush got impeached”

and ive been known to appreciate the dirrrty skank ho look. and yet somehow this get-up and makeup and attitude falls flat with me.

i cant really say why.

other than shes completely uglifying herself for no good reason.

sexiness doesnt always mean tons of makeup, mousekateers.

but why listen to me? if i was mtv i would have the Queer Eye guys go to Christina’s house and give her the sweet makeover. maybe she’d have some tips for her.

maybe they could exchange notes about pleasing a man.

i just ate the best chicken corn chowder soup. spicy. mmmmmm.

this morning i wanted to put the blog on hiatus for a little while, but then i re-read my astrology and saw that the discomfort and issues that im having with turning the big 3-0 in a month-and-a-half mixed with the full moon and the tides means that i should just take those negative feelings and do something creative with it.

so i wrote my girl Xtina an email and i told her that she and all her little girlfriends should come over to my house one of these weekends that theyre planning a girls night out.

and instead of dolling themselves up and singing karaoke in k*town, they should just have a sluts night out at my place and they could have a ho-off and the winner will get to be ho o’ the day, which means that she has to do anything that the losing girls tell her to do

to me.

and because life is beautiful as soon as christina gets back from her tour with justin shes gonna round up her girls and do just that.

i have a zit above my eyebrow.

anyways the cubs lost yesterday and that makes me nervous.

at least my pants fit good.

and these nice people have each linked me:

steph + tundrah + utter wonder + neens