Links and Other Things: April 6, 2010

Blossoming and fruiting

calendula
calendula

pinkjasmine
pink jasmine

loquats
loquat

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Pictorial Webster’s: Inspiration to Completion from John Carrera on Vimeo.

The amount of work it takes to make a handmade book is astounding. Even more astounding is the price, $3000! Whoa, a mass-produced version is available for much cheaper. It’s cool and all, but I bet Dover has cheaper clip art.

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A food activist becomes a mistaken messiah!

“I don’t think a messiah figure is going to be a terribly good
launching point for the kinds of politics I’m talking about – for
someone who has very strong anarchist sympathies, this has some fairly
deep contradictions in it.”

I’m not the messiah, says food activist – but his many worshippers do not believe him. Members of religious group believe London-born author has come to save the world

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Oil spills are aggravating

Oil spill feared on Great Barrier Reef

“The state government has been acting like snake oil salesmen spruiking
the riches to be made from exporting LNG (liquid natural gas) and more
coal, however they fail to acknowledge the environmental harm that will
be caused both on land and sea by these industries,” Capricorn
Conservation Council spokesman Ian Herbert said.

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“OC life is not the life for me”

prrp3flyr33

In theory this seems good, bring back all the old punk and hardcore bands for an autism awareness. I mean, how many of the old punks were suffering from autism and didn’t know it, right? But honestly, I want to preserve my memories of the band members youthful bodies,their frenzied on-stage energy and the loud, fast music. These reunion shows are stuffed with old dudes laboring through sets while trying to relive their glory days, the songs are slower and some even try to shove long metal guitar riffs into hardcore songs. Isn’t that what we were against? I don’t want sad new memories.

Orange County Punk Rock Picnic

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Turkish Ice Cream Man

When I was 17, I was an ice-cream scooper at Thrifty’s, now Rite-Aid. I quit after a month because the weird guys from the nearby Hollywood halfway houses gave me the creeps, I kept breaking the sleeves of ice-cream cones making them unusable and I also didn’t realize part of my duties was to lug heavy cases of ice-cream out of the huge storage freezer down a flight of stairs. So much for my first job.

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trailscafe

Trails Cafe in Griffith Park has some tasty eats for an after hike respite, vegetarian stuff too. It’s a bit on the pricey side so hike with money. I had a delicious peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a very nice lavender and vanilla cookie which I have not stopped thinking about, yum!

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Learn Vegetable Gardening by the Foot

For many years I gardened using the square foot method. Initially (and subsequently, come to think of it) it’s pretty labor intensive but the rewards are high yields and less time spent thinning and wasting seeds. The soil must be double-dug due to the close spacing of plants but most gardening folks would recommend raised beds so as not to damage soil structure. I used a kitchen colander for soil sifting and two school rulers to measure my little plots.
I didn’t have a job at the time and would sometimes spend ten hours a day in the garden. Yeah, I was a little OCD. Now I’m the laziest gardener ever and my vegetable yields are representative of my work.

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I saw The Runaways movie and was kinda disappointed. First off, I was a Runaways fan although I was the generation ten years later. I thought Cherry Bomb was the bomb, har har. I always wondered why none of my peers seemed interested in them. Perhaps it was because Joan Jett was already a pop sell-out by then and Weird Al Yankovic had already improved her music. I have always liked this song by Joan Jett though, maybe because it reminds me of a football chant.
Back to the movie…The production quality was cheap and not in a good, edgy way, just cheap. Like they’re supposed to be in Japan but the actors don’t look Japanese and “Tokyo” is a recognizable street in Downtown LA.
The actress Dakota Fanning who played Cherie Currie was just wide-eyed and goofy. If you see videos of Cherie Currie, she was hard, like chola hard. I mean she looked like she was 30 years old and tough. That did not come through in the movie at all. And Kirsten Stewart as Joan Jett, pfft, she’d try to do this rough thing with her voice and I wanted to laugh. It was like an after-school movie for rebellious girls but not too rebellious, you know. Ah, maybe I just compare these things to my own teenage years too much. Overall, the movie did not capture the spirit of the era nor was it evocative of something monumental as I imagined it set out to be.

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Among the many t-shirt ideas I’ve had in mind to make “Los Angeles: Number One in Riots” is one of my favorites. According to this list, we’re number five and six which I think makes us number one as we are the only city listed twice. Oh yeah!

Ten of the Wildest Riots of All-Time

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Celebration – New Skin

Crazy about the vocals and the organ on this song. You can hear more of them and get downloads too and this amazing music site: The Sound of Indie

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one more song before the end of this long post…

I can’t believe this is Paul McCartney! Why? Because I actually like it and I dislike most anything having to do with The Beatles.

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From the Daily Bleed:
April 6th is the birthday of ERICH MÃœHSAM
German anarchist poet, murdered by the Nazis

Links of the Day: March 24, 2010

joanbrossa
Joan Brossa

I usually post these to Facebook and quite honestly, it’s FB that has pulled some of my attention away from this blog but I think this blog deserves better, don’t you?
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The Entryway
(h/t LA Observed)
This is really bizarre…or is it? I don’t know anymore. Two reporters go to live with a Mexican family in MacArthur Park so they can learn Spanish and make this fancy website to document it. I haven’t read it all but they seem to mention cockroaches and cholos quite a bit.
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pe14

Mobile Homeless Shelter

It has a toilet, cutting board, bed/sofa and captures rain water!
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Joan Brossa

I first became enamored with Joan Brossa when I saw a posthumous exhibition of his work at the Miro Museum in Barcelona. Iwas enamored and delighted by his visual poems or ‘poetic revolt’. An example are these two leaves paper-clipped together and called ‘Bureaucracy’

burocracia_blog
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Speaking of bureaucracy, I have a special fondness for graphics from the Paris 68 uprisings. I was thinking of making a t-shirt from this graphic, would you wear one?

nonalabureacratie
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The XX – Islands (Delorean Remix)

I’ve really been enjoying this song. Oh, and this one too!
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Today is Wilheim Reich‘s birthday (1897), the inventor of the orgone accumulator and author of The Mass Psychology of Fascism. I used to think if only more people read him, we’d all have less hang-ups and be a lot happier. I’m not as naive anymore but I’m still just as earnest.
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