thats not normal for the wintertime in southern california no matter what you might hear on you oldies radio stations.

ive run across two sorts of attitudes about rain here in hollywood.

“wow, we really need this rain.”

and then there’s mine, “if i wanted rain i would move to seattle.”

LA is an arid desert. we get our drinking water from northern cal. when i was in santa barbara they built a desalinization plant to turn the sea water into drinking water. it cost a bunch of money but so what? what good is being the richest country in the world if all youre going to do is build billion dollar stealth bombers?

i wouldnt mind the rain so much if it didnt fuck up how the subway runs. we’ve gone over this. still somehow despite the fact that the subway is a mile beneath the ground, the shit always gets fucked up when it rains.

people typically look glum in the morning on the subway, but get them all wet and have a bus speed by soaking them with a good splash from a cold puddle and you have a gloomy few cars of wet drippy souls.

normally half the train is asleep as they rollick beneath this fair city, but this morning nobody could sleep because everyone was wet and cold and cranky and pissed off that they were poor and doomed to the depths.

things werent any better above ground. somehow drivers in la think that rain provides a liquid safety buffer and on mornings like these people speed and splash and spiral and smash into each other.

all of them.

im pretty sure i heard on the radio this morning that every car on the 405 freeway got into an accident at 7:30am, and the 10 was even worse.

the 720 dropped me off at la brea and i had to run two blocks in the rain with one shoelace untied to catch the 21 santa monica. it could be considered pathetic to some, but not to me because i caught that motherfucker.

what was pathetic was the bum that i ended up sitting across from me.

at least he wasnt foolish enough to pass up the dude at wilshire and western who was selling umbrellas for $5 a pop.

last night an eighteen year old girl sent me an email inviting me over to her house in the good part of town to watch porn with her.

shit like that will bring an extra skip to your sprint in the early morn.

the photobloggies

how to people live like this?

for fashion week sean john asked me to do something different. i said, diddy, everyone knows that fashion, just like fucking, is all attitude. you present it right and you could do a whole line made from burlap bags. he must have been digging into the right bag because this morning i got an email that included the picture on the right with a long message that said that any time i wanted to stop this dream of writing that i could work for him making fashions.

beware the burlap revolution, the subject header read.

any time i try to screen a film after 11pm i am bound to fall asleep because im a crankity old man trapped in a crankity old lesbian’s body.

so last night when i finally got around to popping in “about schmidt” i knew that the film was in deep trouble because its audience was going to pass out any minute since the clock had struck twelve nearly an hour ago.

how good is the film? besides being an incredibly subtle feature, it kept this reviewer awake until nearly two am.

i will finish the rest of it tonight. after the osbournes.

my maid finally showed up. early this morning. too early. do you like knowing about my real life? i dont. normally i get out of the house around 8:15am. she told me that she would arrive around 8am and i was hoping it was on the later side of around instead of the earlier.

but because she and her sexy step daughter know that they have a tough mountain to climb each time they venture into my stanky lair they do themselves the favor of showing up as early as they can.

now i am not a rich man. far from it. but i am messy. messier now that ive returned from hell. but i like to take what the universe gives me. sometimes. and while i was talking to my 90 year old land lady last year she said that she had an au pair who only made minimum wage.

i said that doesnt seem possible. she said i pay her minimum wage, tony.

i said, i would pay her twice minimum wage to clean my house and she doesnt even have to bathe me.

the old lady laughed, then stopped laughing, quickly.

the first few times she cleaned my house i didnt even meet her. i arranged everything via the phone, the old lady had my key, i left a check on a table, and when i arrived home i was greeted with a sparkling new home and the aroma of orange scented pine sol.

all of my dishes were clean.

the bathtubs and toilets were happy and white.

the sculptures were polished.

and the love swing had been repaired.

i had given her a ten dollar pre-tip.

isnt it strange how ten dollars can change everything?

some guy yesterday said that i had invented a new form of blogging.

lots of people, actually, have said that over the years, and every time it makes me happy.

except for today.

he said that i had invented blegging.

dude, this is just an art project.

an entry in the science fair.

performance art at the talent show.

competetive magic.

here i have a top hat, empty.

and as you can see, i have nothing up my sleeve.

and if i can type the correct keystrokes on a keyboard

could there appear a brand new car?

of course.

of course theres 1,500 people who could end up clicking that silly picture of anna kournikova and flowing ten measly dollars.

with 1,000 people cruising by every day, theres no reason why some of them wouldnt want to join in on the fun, the cheap thrill of it all, simply because some fool asked.

blegging.

how dare you.

theres no desperation here.

life will go on fine with or without this double dare coming to fruition.

but i would rather take part in something fantastic, as opposed to just another failure

regardless, no one should feel any pressure, or guilt or anything bad.

if you just want to watch it happen, be my guest.

sometimes it is fun to just watch for a little while.

tabsco guy gave me a buck today.

thank you tabasco guy!

moxie

discussion thingies, but this one is in Chinatown, and you cant beat that.

Plus it will star the Inventor of Blogger, Evan Dando, or Evan something, who looks like kd lang in his picture, maybe he sings pretty too.

Plus it will star the mighty Doc Searls who pulls the ladies much better than I do.

Plus it stars the inventor Boing Boing, Mr. Mark Frauenfelder which kicks ass.

Plus it stars the super foxy amazonian Reverse Cowgirl who hopefully has some black and white glossys that she will be signing with ruby red lipstick with sparkles of glitter.

and if that wasnt enough, it also stars my long lost lust the Rabbit, Heather H. who hopefully can break out of her shell and form an opinion about something… anything.

organized by xeni and beverly tang!

attended by vous?

blog panel LA in Chinatown!

edited it right there at neverland, use more of his music, had his lawyers look at it first.

and he should have gotten me to interview him.

it was so obvious that he knew what he was going to reveal about his plastic surgery and his house and his spending habits and his childhood and about his sex life as a teen.

and why on earth would you go to the british press who arent really known for paiting a pretty picture of their subjects, jacko?

they stopped the train this morning because some guy barfed on his seat.

the driver mumbled something into the microphone and then said that he was going to shut the doors so they could isolate the problem, and then he shut the doors.

it was eight thirty in the morning.

we sat in the subway station on the subway with the doors closed for what seemed like a half hour.

trust me when i tell you that the xbi isnt exactly thrilled with the idea of one of their employees who was given a flying car riding a subway train and two busses to work.

late is late and theres no excuse for it.

sir, a man vomited in a subway car near santa monica and vermont and the conductor stopped the train for twenty minutes and thats why im late.

my bosses boss just calls me hippie.

hows your hippie? he’ll ask my boss in front of me.

i have a million comebacks, but i have to swallow them until a million people flow me ten bucks

and since chopper one costs a half billion i know hes right when the old dude says im lucky to even touch her.

ive watched every episode of joe millionaire and even though he was a total idiot, i was still able to enjoy the show completely.

between the bondage blowjob chick who knows how to order wine, and the virginial esp girl, i liked the sweet girl the most.

i think joe does too.

earlier karisa had me change to fear factor, where couples where competing. the dude had to dip his head into a heart shaped tin of giant roaches take as many as he could in his mouth and pass it to his girl via a kiss and then she took the roaches and put them in a jar with her mouth.

network prime time television.

eight pm.

now, please explain to me why we can show that and not titties?

or say fuck?

if fox wanted to really make a lot of money, they would have a special where a famous guy will say fuck at the end of the show.

it would be the first time that millions of people have heard that word on national tv.

call it Who Wants to Hear the F-Word?

but just like Joe Millionaire, this show would have a suprise, because a famous guy isnt going to say the word fuck at the end of the show, after all.

whats going to happen is, after a half hour you will hear one famous and non-famous person after another say the word fuck in different settings, different accents, different intonations and with different results.

the best result is, of course, that the world wouldnt have exploded, children didnt suddenly grow fangs and attack us, and millions of dollars would have been made for the broadcasting company.

edit it properly and you can call it art.

florence henderson, betty white, rupaul, barbara walters, serena williams, jenna jameson, shirley temple black, aretha franklin, madonna, hillary clinton, courntney love, willie nelson, weezer, kurt vonnegut jr., michael jackson, f.lee bailey, oj simpson, gary coleman, pat sajeck, mike tyson, and elvis costello would deliver some of the best performances, i would imagine.

and it wouldnt cost much money.

and it could get done fast.

and you could give half the money to some good cause.

thats how you get the stars.

madonna, will you say fuck for the united negro college fund?

i fell asleep listening to animals last night.

i havent done that since college.

off wing opinion

there is nothing about this girl that im not in love with.

just look at her.

if she was my girl i would do anything for her.

id work at a gas station again, be a millionaire, stop doing drugs.

cut my hair

so many good things happened today and still i was paying attention to the bad, and i was just done being the bad.

sometimes the devil voice in your brain isnt just saying “you’ll never make it, youre not enough.”

it’s throwing its voice, pretending it’s your boss repeating and repeating something not great, or pretending it’s you repeating super bad things that you’ve thought.

then i talked to karisa who just got back from vegas living the life of a superstar. she told me that she saw mamma mia and played craps at the hard rock but ate the biggest shrimp she’d ever seen at the palms and after an hour i felt one hundred per cent better.

then clipper girl came over to drop off some of her magic cookies, but had to run so she kissed me on the forehead and zoomed away in her chevrolet.

and i ate the cookies and felt another one hundred per cent better.

then this not attractive woman at all knocked on my door with an academy screener of about schmidt.

and she was not nice to me.

and she mumbled something mean about my apartment to which i said, its not my fault, my maid didnt come.

shes coming tomorrow though.

kobe bryant totally missed a free throw at the all star game, which isnt as easy as it seems.

he missed it cuz he wanted the all star game to go into double overtime so everyone could play basketball a little longer with michael jordan.

michael gave the sweetest smile when kobe hit the free throw that went in.

raymi

somebody sent me one hundred and ten dollars

25. chris s.

(not my old girlfriend)

but it’s okay because the carrier pigeons send me sweet little notes from her, and i attach pez dispensers to them and send em back on their way.

the last one was a wonder woman one and she liked it very much. so much so that she sent me a naughty little picture of herself along with a tiny lil note that said

what are you doing for valentines day?

i wrote back, “im gonna eat some ecstasy and let you molest me.”

she sent back a pigeon with two capsules of x and a locket with her name engraved on it.

for some reason i always take a whiff of the pigeon to see if she squirted a little of her delicious perfume on them, but she never does and the pigeons always look at me a little cockeyed and try to poop on my hand.

anna has been nursing a sore back. her pal martina hingis retired last week at the ripe old age of 22 and on one hand i would love it if anna quit too because i would get to spend more time with her, but on the other hand i would really like to see her win a tourney before she hangs the adidas up for good.

my weekend was spent pretty much blowing my gnose into toilet paper. right now my cleaning lady is putting a deep scrub on everything. i did my best to rid her of nasty kleenexes and empty soup cans.

i did enjoy the all-star game last night. especially when mariah nearly made mj cry because she sings so wonderfully.

i know a lot of people talk shit about her, but whatever. no matter whats going on in her life, the one thing that matters is that mariah’s a great singer.

which is exactly why i have her poster facing my bed.

which i will probably have to take down, temporarily, if anna really does come over on valentines day.

hopefully i wont just pass out as soon as i eat it, which is what happened last time, only to be woken up by her slamming the door knocking over the x-rated polaroids she left behind of her in lingerie with a post-it that said, “this is what you missed, old man.”

trust me, i know what i missed.

i am feeling better today, if you’re scoring at home.

and if you’re scoring at home, remember not to be selfish.

scott rosenberg

and put most of them in the laundry hamper, then put that in the granny cart, then took a pillow case and threw the rest of the dirty clothes in, and rolled the whole thing behind me down the filthy streets of hollywood on a warm sunday afternoon.

warm if you didnt have a cold.

like i did.

so i had on cords, a thermal shirt, a flannel, and karisa’s grey sweatshirt, and a cubs hat, and a frown.

passed an old man kicking a can as he walked down the street, except he wasnt kicking a can, he was kicking a pacifier.

passed a dog in a small yard, a yard that smelled of dog doo and i wondered if that particular dog’s heightened sense of smell was haunting him. my sense of smell was fuct due to the cold, yet the doo cut right through.

passed four men playing poker on a fold out card table in someones front lawn. they were old men and they spoke armenian to each other and smoked cigarrettes and drank wine from water glasses beneath the shade of a cherry tree.

made it to the coin laundry. had everything with me except cough drops and you.

my favorite row of washers were ready for me. got colors in the first one, got colors in the second one. two mexicans showed up a little younger than me. one had a good little moustashe going. the other did just as he was told. he was told to put clothes in the fifth machine. hey pedro, what if i wanted to use the fifth machine i esped.

put whites in the third. put colors in the fourth. stuffed the rest of the clothes in the first and second and wished for the ins to arrive.

no such luck.

some high school girl with big juicy tits, her little sister in one hand, and nathanial hawthornes the scarlet letter in the other hand sat down next to me. i look up to see whats on tv. some spanish program. i look at the other tv and not only is that a spanish program too, but its the same one as over here.

i get up, ashamed that im undressing this high school sophomore with my eyes and walk past the winchells donut store and pass four men two whom are sitting on a parked car, two who are leaning against the store looking at every single woman who walks past, not discrimanatory against age, weight, or hair color.

theyre speaking spanish and they look at me pass and i look like a freak with all my layers but im sick and im xbi so dont fuck with me, amigos.

i poke my head into a girlie store where everything is red and pink and white for valentines day and everything is wrapped up in plastic like grandma just got a plastic wrapping machine and went crazy. even the dozen roses have plastic covering them.

grandma looks like a great-grandma and i aint got no valentine so i move on.

pass by an armenian record store. bunch of people ive never heard of, but the store has six cds of this guy, six of some lady, six of another guy. all in the window.

i dont even think the virgin megastore has six led zeppelin four cds and thats like the greatest cd of all time.

i move on to one of the many mini markets on this street. this one has a good meat department, a lousy vegetable department, and lots of minute made orange juice and apple juice so they have made a sale here.

buck thirty nine for tweny ounces of oj? sure its a rip off, but what the hell.

rappers delight is playing on his radio, still sounding as good as it did when i first heard it back in the day.

sometimes it pays to be as old as the hills.

get back to the coin laundry and theres only a few minutes left on machine #2 and then none. my favorite row of dryers are empty.

i put in a load, then el jag off puts in a load two over from me, leaving me with just three to use. i will definately need four.

when i get to the fourth i have to go clear across to the opposite end of the laundry mat.

i think about the fact that even though my dick hasnt been sucked properly in weeks, im still way ahead of the game than this guy, and let him have what he wants, which is to irritate me.

i sit down and watch a philipino woman with a tshirt of a racooon that says “no matter what happened, i didnt do it.”

he’s laying on his back, hands on his belly.

big titted high school girl’s sister is begging for change from her older sister. the little girl is maybe 4. her sister says she only has a dime. the little girl insists “change!”

she whines and whines and girls are nicer than boys would be. eventually they both exit and soon return with a sticker from a machine down the street and the little girl is happy again.

before i know it my laundry is done and racoon lady sees another lady taking my dryers as i take my clothes out, but insists on ruining her shit by taking the one last dryer near the door, fucking up everything, its hard to explain, but, at least more than one person was being selfish.

pass a man getting out of a market with a can of beer in a brown paper bag.

i thought about one of my highschool art teachers who taught me how to look at shadows and then draw them.

i wonder if i was todays shadow as i unlocked my backdoor, pulled the granny cart into the kitchen and powered on the tv which was about to show me the all star game.

slow blog

he’s 59. im sick as a damn dog and ive been up all night watching an academy screener of Gangs of New York which i totally loved.

clipper girl brought it over with four of her sexiest girlfriends and they all watched it at my place cuz i have such a huge

tv.

afterwards they went home and i played grand theft auto because i was so psyched after the movie.

but now here it is 3:35am and i really wanted to go to gregs birthday party tomorrow because a hootenanny will break out and all but like i said im sick and i dont think i will get much better by tomorrow and this is the early stages of the sickness which will probably get worse which means that i am probably at the contageous stage and the last thing i would want to do is get every single one of my dear dear friends ill cuz of my dumb bus-riding ass.

but it is nice to stay up and just read peoples blogs and write and write and write.

hi blog.

hi tone.

hi cold.

hi tony.

hi blank area in the blogger post.

my man aj totally whipped out $30 and flowed it to the busblog so my hats off to him, thanks bro.

for that he gets a free mystery gift sent to his house.

i think he will like it.

i think it will be a poetry book of mine from way back when.

i think if anyone else flows $30 or more they will get one of my little out of print chapbooks of poems.

in my day i wasnt a bad poet.

infact birthday boy greg painted a portrait of me and titled it “the worlds greatest living poet.”

well, greg is the worlds greatest living lots of things, and right now he’s doing a pretty damn good job of raising his adorable little son, sean.

i am super happy for the way things are turning out for greg.

it doesnt seem all that long ago when he was sleeping on my couch in frisco trying to get it together and now he is living in one of the coolest, i shit you not, houses in los feliz, a house full of guitars and cool colors and old appliances, and love and love and love.

i bought him the dumbest birthday card of all, which took me a while to find, but of all people he would appreciate it. we share a love for the dumb things in life. like 99 cent store cookies, and plastic toys, and puns.

greg has influenced me in tons of ways but maybe the best way was that he showed me that not only is it ok to let the art out, but it is our responsibility.

so happy 74th birthday mi amigo. if i dont end up at your party, just know that i will be wearing a pointy birthday hat here at the beach house all day in your honor.

greg vaine, the worlds greatest rock operaist who isnt into kiddie porn.

From The Economist print edition

Los Angeles has lost one newspaper but is about to gain another AP

Riordan has his say

AS MAYOR of Los Angeles, and during his brief run for governor of California last year, Richard Riordan was a gift to journalists. Affable and unguarded, he spoke (and sometimes misspoke) his mind in a way that reflected his earlier years building a fortune in business, rather than the polishing efforts of spin-doctors. Now Mr Riordan wants to put $5m of his fortune towards starting a new weekly newspaper in Los Angeles.

The LA Examiner is due to start publication in June. A prototype produced last month gives a hint of what to expect. The editors, Ken Layne and Matt Welch, two experienced newspapermen who were pioneers in the online world of weblogs, have put together a colourful 52-page tabloid full of articles by an array of seasoned LA journalists and a few well-known outsiders, such as Billy Crystal. The aim, says Mr Layne, is to reflect the cultural energy of the city and, naturally, to cover local stories better than the existing media does.

This is a reference to the Los Angeles Times, the dominant local daily�and hardly a favourite with the Examiner crew. Mr Riordan griped at it throughout his time as mayor and during his failed run for governor. Messrs Layne and Welch, irritated by what they saw as the Times’s lack of basic beat reporting and its mealy-mouthed approach to racial issues, started a website in 2001 devoted to daily criticism of the paper. They called it LAExaminer.com in memory of an earlier competitor, the LA Herald Examiner.

If this sounds familiar, it is because the story is distinctly similar to that of the New York Sun, a right-wing newspaper which sprang out of smartertimes.com, an anti-New York Times site. Messrs Layne and Welch insist that they are less conservative sorts than their New York peers, but the Herald Examiner is still likely to be more right-wing than the LA Times, and it is making the same pitch as the Sun for upmarket readers.

Until last October Los Angeles had two free weekly �alternative� papers, the Los Angeles Weekly and the New Times LA. They both wrote about local politics, published entertainment listings and competed for advertising, especially for movies and sex services. In October, though, the New Times group, which is based in Phoenix, Arizona, reached a deal with the Weekly’s parent, Village Voice Media in New York: the New Times LA and the Village Voice’s Free Times in Cleveland would both close, letting the LA Weekly and the New Times’s Cleveland Scene raise advertising rates.

The news was a blow to LA readers who relished having alternative �alternatives�. But the Examiner has duly snapped up some New Times writers. Even better news came on January 27th, when the Department of Justice ordered the colluding weekly groups to pay fines and sell the assets of the closed newspapers, including the newspaper racks that sit on street corners. It will hardly hurt the Examiner to have had the leftish Weekly’s parent so briskly spanked for behaving like a scheming monopolist.

The Examiner plans to eschew sex-ads but still offer itself for free. This chaste, generous approach may make it hard for it to break even in three years, as it hopes. Mr Layne loyally argues that one attraction will be the voice of Mr Riordan himself, who will have a column. Another interfering proprietor? At least he dropped his original plan (possibly not altogether serious) to call the paper the Big Dick.

mssr matt welch + mssr ken layne