My Great-Grandfather Zacarias Tellez Jr. and his documentation
In case you think what’s happening in Arizona is something new, I’d like to share this small bit of my family history with you. As cliche as it is to say, those who do not know history are destined to repeat it. Or is it those that know history remember how to repeat it?
In the early 1900s my great-grandfather Zacarias Tellez Jr. along with his parents and siblings traveled from Arizona to Cananea, Sonora, MX to work in the copper mines. It was a fortuitous journey. It is where he met and married my great-grandmother Matilde. However, returning from one of his trips to Cananea, a strange thing happened…
Some might remember this song from a compilation I made a few years ago. Hala Strana is a project of Steven R. Smith. He traveled around Eastern Europe recording Roma/Gypsy musicians and used these recordings as a basis for this musical project. This song is (what’s the word?) sublime.
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.”
“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”
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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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!
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
