March 2008 Archives
Notes from indie and punk shows, and Kristoff in translation
by Daniel Hernandez
March 31, 2008 6:37 PM
The punks had their day here on Saturday, railing against Mexico City's peace-loving emos in what amounts to at least a psychological escalation of the anti-emo movement. Later that night, L.A. deathrock legends Christian Death played in Colonia Roma. Pictured above is singer Eva O and another band member during Friday's night autograph-signing at El Under. Below, for a view of the stage in the sweltering oxygen-less heat during the show, this is the best I could do. Kinda arty, no?
Across town in Polanco, the Indie-O festival took over the Vive Cuervo Salon, bringing earthy, earnest (as in, NON-EMO) indie rock to eager D.F. fans.
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The Pellicano trial turns into divorce court
Who’s that tapping, gently wiretapping, at my trailer door? actor Keith Carradine may well have wondered in April, 2001, as he and his girlfriend Hayley DuMond began noticing telephone problems and other odd events occur in Carradine’s Valencia RV park home. At the time, he related in court Friday, life was not as easy as Sunday morning for The Long Riders and Nashville star. For one thing, he was in the midst of a bitter child-support fight with his former wife, Sandra Will, who wanted to move the legal proceedings from Colorado, where Carradine had his formal residence, to California, where he was staying at the Valencia Travel Village. For another, DuMond had her tires slashed in Valencia while her parents in Sherman Oaks were receiving creepy phone calls in the dead of night.
Carradine, who appeared in a conservative suit and red tie, his hair shorn short, is one of a conga line of government witnesses to testify how their privacy had been invaded by Anthony Pellicano – who, in this matter, had been hired by Will to spy on her ex. He told U.S. attorney Daniel Saunders that at one point his landline phone in the RV park went dead and that an attempt to break into his trailer and truck occurred while he was filming on location in Australia. Meanwhile, DuMond, whom he eventually married, was being “aggressively followed” and, once back in the states, he received an unexpected call – on his cell phone.
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The amazing Page One Los Angeles Times article today, correcting a probably libelous Times Calendar story published on St. Patrick's Day and written by investigative reporter Chuck Philips, is known in the journalism biz as a “skinback.” I don't know exactly where the term “skinback” originated, but you could feel the skin getting peeled off Philips piece by piece in the retraction by Jim Rainey. It describes how Philips got duped by con artist James Sabatino into running a false story that implicated Sabatino himself, as well as associates of Sean “Diddy” Combs, in the non-fatal but brutal 1994 shooting of the late rapper Tupac Shakur.
Apparently, five-time loser Sabatino was so desperate to entangle himself in the lives of famous rappers that he created the fake FBI document on an old typewriter, implicating himself and talent manager James Rosemond. Chuck Philips bought it, writing that Rosemond and Sabatino "set up the rapper Tupac Shakur to get shot at Quad Studios," and then connected them to Combs' Bad Boy Records.
But the document was filled with dead-giveaways that it was a fake, which any independent documents expert could have told the Times. Credit goes to The Smoking Gun for ripping the lid off this putrid mess. There were problems with the Philips story even before The Gun went off.
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Emos prepare to rumble in Tijuana, march for peace in Mexico City
by Daniel Hernandez
March 27, 2008 1:58 PM
The nationwide assault campaign against emos in Mexico continues to surge forward, as word is spreading that emos will be hunted and beaten by anti-emo kids in Tijuana on Saturday. Word is emos will rumble with their adversaries at Plaza Rio, Tijuana's central outdoor mall. But hold on. My younger sister, who works at a high school in San Diego where many students commute daily from Tijuana (yes, that's life on the border), says: "My kids were saying that they were pissed because everyone is talking about it and they think the word got out already, location might change."
Meanwhile, here in Mexico City, El Universal reports that emos plan to march on Saturday alongside other "urban tribes" from their unofficial base of the Glorieta de Insurgentes to El Chopo, the revered youth alternative street market where the various tribes of Mexico City usually coexist without trouble. It's an effort to display unity and tolerance as the prospects of more assaults linger online and in the streets. Updates later.
Previously, over at Intersections, "The emos of Mexico are fighting back."
* Photo above, punks, "darketos" and metalheads hanging out at El Chopo in December.
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At the U.S. Federal Courthouse in downtown today, civil rights attorney Steve Yagman has finally been ordered to surrender to prison authorities on Monday, March 31, at a federal prison and medical facility in Butner, North Carolina. The renegade lawyer, who's made a career of battling the LAPD and the feds, will soon no longer be a free man.
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As I've reported at my personal blog Intersections, emos are under attack in Mexico. Here are a few good primary sources to better understand what's happening.
In Mexico, emo culture is a butt of many jokes. It is either despised intensely or generally ignored. But it's only the despising sentiment that lately has been getting wide airply. In the above clip, a Televisa on-air personality named Kristoff expresses a serious dose of anti-emo rhetoric and switches to English to say, on network television, "Fucking bullshit" to the emo movement. Some emos I've interviewed point to the Kristoff clip as a defining provocation of the current wave of anti-emo violence. Now check out this clip from another Televisa program where three emos are interviewed about the attacks. At the end, the kid on the left asks if he can say more thing: he directly accuses Kristoff of spreading anti-emo hate.
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Cheetahs never prosper
In a Dickensian twist, Anthony Pellicano was confronted this past week by women whose lives he had touched over the years – although the ladies in question might claim “blighted” is a more appropriate word. Tuesday saw L.A. assistant district attorney Karla Kerlin take the stand. Kerlin, who had worked as a Las Vegas showgirl before trying criminals in Los Angeles, sensed her phone was being tapped in 1999 when she was prosecuting John Gordon Jones, the so-called Limousine Rapist.
“You always seemed to know what I was doing,” she told Pellicano when the alleged racketeer, acting as his own attorney, cross-examined her. Even years after her brief dancing career, Kerlin presented a striking figure in a dark outfit with a bright smear of tulip-red lipstick on her mouth. She good-naturedly deflected Pellicano’s ineffectual attempts to portray himself as being on her side during the Jones trial, like a mother denying a naughty kid his allowance.
“Yes,” she said smiling, “I believe you were investigating me . . . [a] detective and I believed you were going to blackmail us.”
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These are members of the Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra (FPDT), during a reggae and ska festival in San Salvador Atenco on Friday. They took the stage with their iconic machetes and read from a declaration calling for the liberation of political prisoners swept up by the government during the violent confrontation in 2006 between federal forces and the people of this municipio in the flat orbit of Mexico City. The throngs of youth who had gathered to hear such bands as Los de Abajo and Panteon Rococo listened patiently, most of them covered in a film of dust and exhausted from a full afternoon of hardcore slam-dancing. And they were ready for more.
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The trend alarmed me, especially if you search the LA Times online--this city's paper of record--and see them mangle the spelling time after time after time. Seriously, someone in the copy writing department needs a tutorial.
The LA Times isn't the only offender, though. Somehow, somewhere, copy editors and ad writers in Los Angeles and beyond started writing "St. Patty's Day" instead of "St. Paddy's Day." It is a spelling that is completely and almost offensively incorrect. So here's a very brief explainer.
"Patty" has ALWAYS been the spelling of the shortened version of the female name "Patricia." "Paddy," however, is the spelling of the shortened version of the male name "Patrick." St. Patrick was a guy, not a gal, so the proper spelling of the shorted version of St. Patrick's Day should be St. Paddy's Day. In other words, no double "T"s.
On this fine Celtic holiday, when anyone can be Irish for a day, it would be wonderful to see the LA Times and anyone else get the gender thing right. Slante!
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Well, he is an entertainer...
Vince McMahon, World Wrestling Entertainment's head honcho, and the man who turned regional pro wrestling into a multi-billion dollar business, got his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame Friday morning.
Flanked by his son, Shane McMahon and wrestler (and son-in-law) Triple H, McMahon joked that he didn't want people to walk on his star, drawing jeers from the wrestling fans on Hollywood Blvd.
All photos by Scott Schultz.
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Millions of passengers use the Mexico City metro daily. It is one of the largest and most used systems in the world, a crowning achievement of the capital's fastpaced growth during the mid-20th Century. A new Gold line, Line 12, is under construction. It will provide a much-needed lateral connection between the lines that snake southward. I ride the metro as often as possible, despite its drawbacks. It is often insanely crowded, and under the hot earth of the Valley of Mexico, the subterrean atmosphere can sometimes be decidely unpleasant. This is a view inside the Hidalgo transfer station.
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Anthony Pellicano discovers Tarita Virtue is her own reward
For four days ex-Pellicano employee Tarita Virtue wore black to court as she testified under an immunity grant. And why not? It wasn’t her funeral, but that of her ex-boss, “P.I. to the Stars” Anthony Pellicano, who, with four others stands accused of Federal wiretapping and racketeering charges. Day after day Virtue described in damning detail the eavesdropping shenanigans of the Pellicano Investigative Agency, Ltd., while shedding light on the pressure-cooker work environment at 9200 Sunset Boulevard.
“Everyone working for Anthony is a personal assistant,” she said.
Women employees, Virtue recalled, were required at the end of each work day to stop by Pellicano’s office to give him a kiss and good-bye hug, and all assumed their private calls at work were tapped. Needless to say, none of the 14 rooms that have been diagramed at trial of Pellicano’s Suite 322 contained an HR office. One particularly revealing incident involved Pellicano’s response, in 2000, to Virtue’s speaking aloud while he was trying to concentrate on a matter.
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M.I.A. delivered once again at the MX Beat fest on Saturday night, scoring more direct hits on the ears and hips of thousands of Mexican fans who braved the merciless chill of the highland plain in Toluca where the festival was held. It was the final and biggest night of four in different cities in Mexico that constituted the festival, now in its third year. The simplest analogy is that it's the Mexican Coachella -- and you might remember my first impressions of that event. In any case, setting aside the lines and crowds and corporate propoganda that go with any big music festival, MX Beat was an all-around worth-it trip out into the desolate exurban wilderness. M.I.A. kept us dancing and the Beastie Boys kept us spot-rocking and there was plenty of digitech melodrama and dreamscapes in the form of sets from Lo-Fi-Fnk, The Teenagers, and Cut Copy. I was also basically blown away by Digitalism. Everyone was going insane inside the tent when they played at the end of the night, but maybe it was the freezing cold and general delirium.
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Margaret B. Plagiarizin'?
A little over two years ago, in the midst of the Oprah/James Frey fiasco, I wrote an expose called Navahoax that outed award-winning "Navajo" memoirist Nasdijj as being Tim Barrus -- a middle-class white guy from Lansing, Michigan, who was also a failed writer of gay pornography. Barrus not only manufactured his native identity, but he rose to prominence by lifting elements of Native American writer Sherman Alexie's biography and prose style, as well as those of several other native writers. "Nasdijj" won himself a PEN Award and a myriad of other literary accolades in the process.
Needless to say, Sherman Alexie was not pleased.
After Navahoax broke, and forests worth of trees were devoted to shaming Barrus for his fraudulence, Alexie and I both privately hoped our efforts would finally dissuade other struggling white writers from hijacking native identity to jumpstart their careers -- a curious and surprisingly common phenomenon that has existed for over a century, dating all the way back to Grey Owl, and possibly even before.
Ours was obviously wishful thinking.
And so this week it was with great interest, and shock, that I saw the news of another Indian fraud perpetrated in the publishing industry -- that of Margaret B. Jones/Margaret Seltzer and her book Love and Consequences.
Media coverage of Seltzer's fraud has been extensive, yet surprisingly the native identity theft angle has been largely downplayed. Though I hadn't read the book, looking into the story this week I knew there had to be a juicy Indian minstrel show in there somewhere. As it turns out, my intuition appears to be correct -- and I didn't even have to read the book to find it. Seltzer seems to have not just borrowed her native identity, she pulled a Nasdijj and took it directly from Sherman Alexie himself.
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Is Isis, the ancient Egyptian mother-god, related in some mystical way with Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent of Mesoamerican mythology? That's the central theme behind a new temporary exhibit at Mexico's National Museum of Anthropology. It is one of those "mega-shows" that have been sorta trendy in museums lately: separate entrances, heavy security, sound effects in the gallery spaces, a glossy temporary giftshop. Distractions aside, the show is pretty exciting, particularly the rooms dedicated to Pharoahonic Egypt because they bring to Mexico some never-before-seen antiquities from several Egyptian collections. There are also lots of depictions of Isis from the Roman Empire.
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Steven Leigh Morris Responds to "Bitter Homes and Gardens" Comments
by Steven Leigh Morris
March 4, 2008 10:21 AM
March of the Phony Progressives
Who's on first, when the right pretends to be left?
Among the smarter reactions in the comments section of my cover story, “Bitter Homes and Gardens” (February 29-March 7) was the complaint that I dismantled the unintended consequences in the city's plans for a more densely populated “transit-oriented” future without providing some alternative options. It's a good point, though thorny because the problems confronting the city are so beyond the purview of just the Planning Department, the Housing Department, the Community Redevelopment Agency or the Metropolitan Transit Authority. The knee-jerk reaction of City Hall's density wolf pack is to ridicule anybody remotely critical of their plans as ostriches who, when not playing golf with George W. and Dick Cheney, are sticking their heads in the sand. Double-speak doubles back on itself when the “progressive” friends of City Hall, who sound like lobbyists for the construction industry, label residents out to protect the last vestiges of the city's green space, or their own neighborhoods, as neo-cons.
All of these city departments are, in their varied ways, working to stem the challenges of a demographic reality that's overwhelming them: some two million infants to be born in the County within the next 20 years, mostly to poor families, and subject to the whims of global economics that are crashing Los Angeles straight into the Third World.
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Two more firefighters rake in fortunes – this time for reverse
discrimination
Two fire captains who were suspended after black firefighter Tennie Pierce was fed dog food (See L.A. Weekly story here) during a station house prank were awarded a total of $1.6 million in damages today by a Los Angeles Superior Court jury.
Captains Chris Burton and John Tohill alleged that because they were white they received harsher punishment from Los Angeles Fire Department brass than the Latino firefighter who actually pulled the prank. Jorge Arevalo slipped dog food into Pierce’s spaghetti in October of 2004, and received a six-day suspension. Burton and Tohill were suspended for 30 and 24 days respectively. They were not involved in the prank, they alleged, but as the supervisors on duty failed to inform higher-ups.
The two captains filed their reverse racial discrimination lawsuit in 2006. Their attorney says they had hoped to settle for $250,000 each, but private attorneys hired by City Administrative Officer Karen Sisson turned it down and now the city must pay far more.*
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Los Angeles Unified School teacher Michael Zeno was sickened when he pulled into his regular shopping area at Lincoln Boulevard and Rose Avenue in Venice, only to find a beautiful stand of longtime trees slashed to the ground.
This latest bit of urban renewal is thanks to "density hawks" in Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's Administration who approved a Whole Foods on the site, which was once a Big Lots store. Protecting the city's bits of green - including trees that took 40 years to get that shady and lush - is not on Villaraigosa's construction-crane agenda, as we've seen from his failed promise to plant one million trees.
"Those bastards cut down 15 trees that were there in the parking lot, to make way for the new and improved parking lot," says Zeno. "Those trees added so much to the traffic and asphalt nightmare that is that intersection. In these environmentally challenging times, this is the last thing we need to be doing."
He says he called the Whole Foods company and was told by a spokeswoman that they'd get back to him about how, and why, the valued trees had to be destroyed for a few more parking spots. Honestly, Whole Foods, what's the point?
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Welcome to a dusty fantasy land of deep-throating elf ears, masturbating trolls, and chain-mail-wearing porn stars.
by Bonnie Ruberg, Village Voice
Pornography director Dez is standing on an outdoor set in the L.A. hills, on the first nice day in months. He's surrounded by actresses who're naked except for some strategically placed sheet armor. “It’s been like thirty degrees here,” he laments over the phone, expressing concern about his naked employees trying to “work” in the cold. “Finally we can shoot.”
What Dez (his industry name) is so anxious to film is the second episode in a new season of Whorelore: Swords, Sorcery, and Sex—his web-porn series based on the immensely popular massive multiplayer online role-playing game, World of Warcraft. A land of elves, fantasy, and eight million players, Warcraft can now also claim it has inspired sex between men and women in eighty pounds of hand-crafted armor. And no matter what kind of protection you're packing, in real life that much metal has got to make things less than magical.
Click here to read the rest of the Village Voice article on World of Warcraft porn - or just click here to go straight to the gallery of their NSFW (not safe for work) photos.
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Slideshows
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Cobrasnake: Runway Renegades and Femme Fatales (Some photos NSFW)
Fashion gets bold with in-your-face slogans, pistol-heeled stilettos and barely-there sheers. -
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Spandex-clad booty shakers and split-lipped punkers get wild with Lady Tigra and Rancid. Plus,... More>> -
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