how to know when youre old

by tony pierce, 113 years jung

one of my favorite music promotion agencies Filter is throwing a four-day rock fest starting today. meanwhile all these hot babes keep raving about The Black Lips (who i always confuse with The Black Keys, cuz im old, and thats what happens)

so i got to the secret place and pick up my wristband and talk to the nice people who have turned me on to some of my now favorite bands (the grates, the go team, the format – now Fun – and sea wolf) and they tell me the cool bands to check out

and they too are going gaga over The Black Lips and tell me that they’ll see me at the show tonight. right on i say, oh btw, when are they gonna play. and they tell me Midnight. and its sold out, so get there a tad earl.

now a super hot babe has been telling me she wants me to go with her. and things turned out in such a way that i actually Could go with her cuz now i have a wristband. and its at a small place. but its at midnite. and i really truly AM olde.

and when you get to my age and when youve lived in LA longer than many people have been alive you get the feeling that you’ve “seen it all”. so you know youre old when a midnight show is too late for you.

which is why im gonna be at the echoplex tonight, drink in hand, in the pit, cuz if theres one thing i fear worse than being boring, its THAT GUY who says omg thats way too late to see a rock show cuz i hafta be at work in the morn.

so suck it father time.

now pardon me as i soak my chompers and take a disco nap.

although i appreciate the California DMV for trying to make it harder

for underage drivers from drinking, i dont think this new vertical license is going to do it.

first of all most people dont just use White Out and a typewriter to create fake IDs from existing licenses the way they did it in my day.

they are going to use a real ID and alter the photo.

or use a real ID and not alter the photo since we all know our drivers license photos rarely look like us.

just the other day i was drinking with a young lady and upon entering the establishment the bouncer looked at me, looked at my ID, looked at my age, looked at me, and said BARNEY YOU HAVE TO SEE THIS! they were shocked that i was nearing the age of retirement but looked so. damn. good.

part of that was the fact that i looked so damn bad on my license.

the kids are going to drink no matter what we do, and if the state really wanted to crack down on underage boozing the first thing they should do is crack down on fraternities and sororities where binge drinking among minors is rampant and has been rampant since the times Greeks ruled the earth.

you know what else would slow down on underage drinking? the legalization of weed.

but thats another blog post for another day.

matt welch, not typically one to defend the acts of The Man

did just that last night

welchie’s bro David Carr of the new york times took a magnifying glass to some of the practices and accusations of the management of Tribune Corp, the company that owns the Chicago Tribune and LA Times. there were many unnamed sources, old stories, and questionable actions.

welch, a libertarian, and the editor of the libertarian Reason magazine, asked the simple question “Does it Matter That the Tribune Co. Is Run By Frat Dicks?

while there are many in the blogosphere and media world who are rooting against Trib management and cheered on the NYT’s 4,000 word shot across the bow, welch says that there were several angles to the Sam Zell-led Trib that the Times conveniently left out.

And the most undercovered L.A. Times media story of all? The paper, as Brian Doherty, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and even a reluctant Tim Cavanaugh have all recently noted here, has been bringing it of late, plunging into real and impactful tough-nosed coverage of local power structures, while taking the whole “website that publishes a newspaper” thing seriously enough that both traffic and quality have grown through the roof.

Did that happen in spite of Zell? Because of him, at least in part? Now that would be a media story that would interest me beyond the rubbernecking pleasure of hearing about frat-boy antics by managers who never bothered learning the native dialect.

welchie as always reminds us that life is not a black and white ansel adams photo of a pretty tree in front of a mountain, but often its a cubist abstract with many sides and intricate details whose nuances are just as rewarding to study as is the overall image. and for that he rules.