77 Wars

   Hockey is my first love and though I grew up in Los Angeles being a Kings fan, I still remain a loyal and loving fan of my team that hasn’t seen the post-season in 5 years, has an all-time post-season record of 55-94, and has only qualified 5 of the last 16 years. It has been a painful journey at times… I went from loving Wayne Gretzky, to hating him for a few years, and then back to loving him as the never say die coach of a horrible desert team torn from the loving hands of Manitoba.
I witnessed, in person, Luc Robitaille score his 499th and 500th goals in a game vs. Buffalo at the  Great Western Forum. I was there when Luc played his last home game… and just like in 1986 when I saw Transformers: The Movie and my hero Optimus Prime died, I found myself in a crowd of my peers crying for the loss of something I couldn’t really describe.
I met Dave Taylor when I walked up to the press booth (it was in the stands back then) at the Forum, he was sitting there and appeared to be making some notes. My friend and I walked up and I said, “Mr. Taylor, are we interrupting you?” he laughed and said we weren’t. I asked him if he’d mind signing our ticket stubs and he also signed the sleeve of my Robitaille jersey. Then, on his way out of the section, when we were on our way to the concession, we saw him and asked if he’d mind taking a picture with us. That stub and photo are in a frame on my wall, on display until the day I die.

I met Jimmy Fox during the ‘94 lock-out, I was sitting on a low brick wall in front of the Starbucks in Manhattan Beach and out he comes with his coffee… I felt like a little kid (Well, I guess I was only 17 at the time), I said “Hey, you’re Jim Fox!” and though he looked pretty down at first, he perked right up. He had this huge beard and had looked pretty dejected, I remember thinking, wow, this guy misses hockey even more than I do, I could just see it all over his face. So we started talking about the lock-out, how frustrating the whole thing was and how it had seemed to be such an extremely long time since we had seen a game… we talked for what must have been 20 minutes and the whole time he seemed just as excited to be talking to me as I was to him. I couldn’t believe it, this guy who I loved to see sitting next to Bob Miller on TV, talking to me about my team, talking about hockey… And then a few weeks later (Game On!) after the lockout ended and the season had resumed, I saw him again and he was clean shaven and glowing… the man seemed to be floating on air. We said hello, and had a brief exchange about how grateful we were to have the greatest sport in the world back. I really thought Jim Fox was a great guy on TV, but he’s also a true Ambassador of the sport, a real 1st class guy and I still love watching him talk about my team and I hope he never stops… he’s my hockey Vin Scully.
And of course, Vin Scully brings me a little closer to my literal home… I live about a 7 minute walk from Dodger stadium. I liked baseball for a while, but it wasn’t until about 5 years ago, when I moved into Echo Park, that I truly fell in love with Dodgers baseball.
My first real memory of the Dodgers was when I was sitting in a restaurant with my parents, in San Diego of all places, and the game was on loudly over some kind of bar and when Kirk Gibson blasted that shot into history, the whole place went crazy and though my family pretty much hated sports, we got caught up in it and they replayed that home run, I don’t know, it seemed like 50 times… my folks pretended to be impressed. When I moved into the same zip code as the Boys in Blue, I was jazzed about it… I mean, here I was, so close to Dodger Stadium that I could hear the crowd cheering when someone hit one out… I could hear, with my bedroom window open, the sounds of people leaving the stadium… hooting and hollering and drunk, honking their horns, especially after a victory. I could hear fireworks on those nights during the summer when they had them after games… I was intoxicated by it.
I got to know my local bartenders, especially at The Short Stop (the “Dodger bar” where no Dodgers ever seem to go)… I started to get offered, as I do to this day, free tickets from them and sometimes those tickets are field boxes… and as we speak (so to say) my guys have a 3 1/2 game lead on the snakes for the Division lead after seeming to be “fading into oblivion” about two weeks ago before winning 11 of 12. Two weeks ago I watched, sitting about 60 feet away from third base, as Manny Ramirez sailed a ball about 20 feet wide of a grand slam…
I took my girlfriends father and family and our best friend to Dodger Stadium field for Father’s Day catch this past June and I’ve made sure to be there for my Joe Torre and Takashi Saito bobbleheads. A Joe Torre bobblehead! I mean, yes, a Joe Torre bobblehead, as manager of the Dodgers, here in my living room, bobbling his head at me! I had an appointment to go to with my girlfriend the night of the Saito bobblehead… but I made sure to walk up to the stadium, get MY bobblehead and walk home… I was not going to go without… I might have missed the game, but my $10 was well spent nonetheless…
I was there in 2004 to see Steve Finley hit a walk-off grand slam against the [expletive] Giants in the last inning of the last game of the season. A game that determined the winner of the NL West, a game led by the Giants 3 to nothing entering the bottom of the ninth, a game whose winner would see it win the wild card with the soul-crushing benefit of sending their most bitter rivals, crumpled and useless, curled up on the floor, into the abyss of another wasted season. It’s almost unbelievable that we can occasionally get to be part of something like that… 56,000 screaming fans (well, not the guys wearing SF jerseys), drunk on beer and a seven-run 9th inning, hugging and taking pictures of each other, power brokers high-fiving Echo Park thugs, d-list actresses shaking big blue number one dodger fingers, my brother almost knocking me over…
Going back to the ice… I was present for another one of those moments. In 2001, I was about 200 feet away from the net in the wings end at the Staples Center, sitting next to my best friend Ben (who happens to be from Michigan), in overtime of Game 6. The Kings had lost the first two, but had come back to win the next three… and then with just under 5 minutes gone in the extra period Ziggy Palffy broke down the right side and fed Jozef Stumpel a pass that caromed off Chris Osgood’s skate and squirted out directly to Adam Deadmarsh. He buried that puck deep in Kings lore and I will never forget that moment. I stood up yelling and screaming and hugging whoever was near and then looked down to see Ben with his face in his hands… we had just done the unthinkable… we had just beaten the Wings in the playoffs.
And that pretty much catches us up to now… Will we see the freeway series happen? Could the Dodgers possibly beat the Angels? Of course there are heavy doubts on my boys winning even one post-season series (yes, it has been 20 years and we are 1-12 in the post-season since and those are GAMES not series’).
But while I may have many theories regarding theology and while I may not have jumped up and down at signing Andruw Jones to a $36.2M contract, I have a true faith in my teams. And you might ask me why, but if you don’t understand the fanatical, probably maniacal, love of sports, there is probably no reason for me to explain it to you. We just believe.

   So. I was cleaning up my home/life/piles of junk when I decided to possibly, finally part ways with my Vextrex system. For those of you who have your heads in the silicon sand (also can be read as: for those of you who are not computer/video game wanna-be historians, or nerds, or whatever the hell it is that makes you aware of every piece of electronic gaming hardware ever produced) the Vectrex was a video game system developed and built by GCE (General Consumer Electronics) and released in 1982. It is an all in one unit, with it’s screen, controller, and one game built-in. The other games come in the form of cartridges. The guys who engineered this machine are Gods at trade shows. Anyways, this is not a history lesson, but a sweet goodbye. If you want to see more, go here: vectrex wikipedia or here Vectrex Commercial or to an auction for a vectrex 3D imager on eBay.

Though I knew it was still considered cool as hell by a lot of guys, I had no idea how much people were paying for these things. The systems go for (with just the unit and controller) as much as $200 depending on the condition… and if some guy saved one in a box, mint, it can be worth $500. Games go for $5-$100. One rare game, of which there are only 4 or 5 known copies, was at $700 on eBay a day before the auction ended… however, I didn’t “watch” the auction and so I’m not sure what the final price was, some people thought it might hit $4000, but as soon as I find out, I will update this post.

After i realized how coveted these systems and games are I almost decided to keep mine, but I thought about it and realized that it being more valuable to me because of it’s popular desireability made the whole thing feel kind of wrong and cheap. Something like a guy leaving a girl and then realizing you want her back only because other guys like her, and that is stupid. So I decided to sell it all, but thought that I would (I need a word that is like immortalize, but in a mocking way, that suggests that our feeling of permanence in the universe is fucking ridiculous) sort of hold on to it by writing this rambling piece of garbage about it.

I’ll miss it in a way… it’s been in my family since my brother bought it in 1982. My girlfriend was born in 1984. I’m not sure what that means, but regardless, I’m selling it. it was at the beginning of my complete obsession with video games that lasted until my early 20’s (my first video game, my first elctronic love, was Ms. Pacman. As a three year old, I could always make it to at least the red levels). That love hit it’s greatest heights and started to come to an end in a house full of testosterone, televisions, technology, and THC. If I sound nostalgic it’s because I remember it being such a great time… Battlefield 1942 was running almost 24 hours a day on a bleeding edge PC in some kind of three man shift. We had four televisions alternating between sports, Playstation 2, Nintendo 64, Gamecube (piece of shit we hardly ever used), cable television and an Xbox that pretty much constantly kept the Halo disc warm and spinning. If you were playing Battlefield 1942 in 2002 and remember being killed by a member of [team poo], that was us… we were so good we got kicked off of servers for cheating. I guess a lot of admin’s out there don’t like being repeatedly anihilated on there own electronic ground.

But the nostolgia is just some fun reminiscing… I don’t have any desire to go back there and that was part of my decision to sell my old video games. I never considered any of this stuff “collector’s items”. I have some great 1st and 2nd gen Transformers, Dodgers bobbleheads, and some original Star Wars stuff laying around, but I’m not the guy keeping this shit in it’s box in a humidor… fuck that… they are not collectables to me, they are toys. Toys that I still love. And I still set up the storm troopers battling it out on top of my fridge and in fact, there is a Hoth battle scene in my goddamned freezer. But the day I would turn “my toys” into “my collection” would be a truly sad day for me… I’ll leave the collecting to someone else.

As far as video games go, I still love to play, but it’s not an obsession, and I actually don’t own anything more recent than a Sega Genesis and an 8-bit Nintendo right now and don’t plan on buying anything soon… but if I get a new computer you can bet your burro I’m gonna load Battlefield on it.

don’t read this if you do not want to read something that alludes to plot lines and events in this book or film.

i recently read this book and then within a week or so i watched the film. i must say that i was impressed with what the coen brothers did with this story. it seemed like all of the images i had in my mind set right on top of what i watched in the film and there wasn’t much that didn’t fit. the one thing i disliked in the film was woody harrelson. i’ve liked him in other films, well, at least in natural born killers and kingpin (well, maybe i don’t like him that much, but i don’t hate him), but he seemed awkward, out of place and i feel it should have been someone a little more, uhh, serious i suppose.

the book made more sense when it came to what the story meant because of the interweaving of the sheriff’s journal entries, so if you like this kind of bleak shit, then go get the book and read it. it is worth your time and can probably be read in a day or two if you’ve got the time.

overall it seemed to me that mccarthy states here the nature of man. and that nature is destructive on one hand, but also can be sympathetic and, i want to say maternal. of course, death is a major theme and it’s inevitability seems to be a point as well. while the changing times catching up with a sleepy kind of desert and a more traditional mindset amongst the people is very obviously presented, it didn’t feel like that was why mccarthy was writing this story. maybe the character chigurh is just representative of man’s self-destructive nature and death and that no matter what you do to it, it will not ever stop.

i will most likely come back to this post and update as i think about it a little more, but i’m off to meet a friend for dinner and beer at a new place over on heliotrope. if it’s worth a damn, i’ll post something about it here. if you were into this film and/or book, i highly recommend that you read “the road” also by cormac mccarthy.

    seven and a half hours into an all-night IT shift and it is 630 in the morning. i am waiting for a few gigs of data to migrate to their new server. i’ve been listening to my bloody valentine’s “loveless” and mono’s “gone”. i suppose they are post-punk and post-rock respectively, but i often have a hard time pigeon-holing a group into one kind of convenient genre. besides, almost any music worth listening to is comprised of many elements from outside of whatever category they end up being filed under. also, i learned some basic permissions settings in unix tonight and i like how part of this command looks…  -R 777 . it’s cool because it is used to change permissions to allow full access by everyone.

these two records seemed incredibly well suited to play through the very early, dark morning hours. if you are reading this, most likely i know you and probably have no need at all to say anything much about my bloody valentine. if you haven’t heard “loveless”, go buy it, it is incredible and it’s one of those records that i wish i had been given in 1991 (slint’s spiderland is another one i’d go back in time and hand to my 14 year old self, not to mention i would also have to kick my own ass, while of course violating some sort of time-space law). it is kind of a beautiful wall of white noise and melodies, it is melancholy and hopeful and there is no fucking around. the album just starts off with energy and when you turn it over, the b-side gets right to work as well.

   mono is undoubtedly always going to be compared to explosions in the sky, but they just keep getting better. a bunch of japanese dudes from japan. if you know explosions in the sky and have seen friday night lights then perhaps you see how explosions is a great soundtrack for what actually turned out to be a pretty darned good movie even though it’s about high school football in texas. mono is better suited for a well made war film not directed by some scum sucking shit like michael bay. of course it works pretty well to just put the records on and listen to them. “gone” is a five-sider and pressed on some extremely beautiful, heavy vinyl with a really cool etching on side six. all of the songs were recorded between 2000-2007 and only one of them was not recorded by steve albini, so the engineering is damned sharp. these guys churn out a lot of guitar, but they use a wider array of instruments than explosions, who stick to drums/guitar/bass, though both bands use a lot of effects. mono also stays darker than explosions, who tend to not only have that quiet/loud dynamic throughout everything they write, but there is everything from bliss to oblivion present… and since i keep mentioning them, i’d advise you to take a listen to explosions in the sky’s “the earth is not a cold dead place”. both mono and explosions put on great live shows.

hey look at me! i have a website. i don’t even know what the fuck i’m talkng about. i can even mispell shit and totally ignore it.

the explosions site has one free mp3 when you go to the album.

on temporary residence limited

on creation records

also on temporary residence

an unfinished entry from summer ‘07…

so i get down to sea level records this morning a little early and turn on all of the computers and lights, go around and open the gate and then i sit down to read my e-mail and check on the outside world. i had loaded the new shellac album, excellent italian greyhound, into our computer, started listening to it and then went to espn.com to check on baseball. the weird part is that when i go to espn, the main headline says ‘touch and go’. that is the label shellac is on. what makes it weirder is that when i reloaded the page a minute later the headline was different.

maybe it’s not that weird.

well, this is the beginning post of a multi-parter [yeah right, i didn’t even finish this post, but we’ll see what happens. -n]. sea level’s closing down and i’ve been “working” here and hanging out way more often this year, and then fuckin’ todd has to go and ruin it. always thinking of himself, that bastard.

number one: ok, so people think i’m crazy or an idiot, but i did not know who fuckin micheal bay was.

number two: do not go see this movie. do not ever go to see this movie. do not ever rent this movie. do not ever watch this movie for free. do not ever let anyone pay you to watch this movie. remember godzilla 2000? yeah, that bad. did you see broken flowers? this was actually worse than broken flowers. WORSE. yes, worse.

number three: if you continue to read i must issue here a SPOILER WARNING. because i will tell you that this piece of shit has no real plot. as far as i can tell it was made by the people who brought us fox television and it’s a promotion for general motors full line of vehicles, nokia, ebay, avril levine and linkin park, or they’re equivalents.

how can i even begin to tell you what a complete piece of shit this movie is? it’s actually a story about some dorky guy who’s had a long-time crush on some hot girl. the girl is in with the jock/popular crowd, but turned off by them being so jock-ish. eventually this dorky kid turns out to be a hero and then he gets to bang this chick. oh yeah, there are robots that fight each other, but this dorky guy’s parents have more speaking parts than the entire cast of robots. and of course the hot chick knows everything about fixing and stealing cars. so it’s kind of like weird science mixed with some orange county garbage about meaningless, crazy car scenes mixed with the most terrible script. no, that doesn’t quite fit, but i’m gonna move on, finish saying what i have to say and go to bed.

so…the robots themselves have no sort of similarities (except optimus prime) to the transformer series or original movie. the story line is completely not there at all. i feel nauseas.

well, enough.

FUCK MICHEAL BAY. i would throw a party for a week if he fuckin died. maybe i’d shit on his grave. that’s right, it’s that bad. i had never seen any of his movies, but how appropriate for this to be the first.

I had low expectations, but you have to understand… i know that the transformers story and series wasn’t written anywhere near as well written as robotech or a lot of other good shit out there, but as a kid it was my favorite fucking thing ever.

when i was seven years old and i went to see transformers: the movie in 1984, i fucking cried when optimus prime died. i cried, i remembered that my brother (eight years older) told me not to be such a pussy, but i told him to fuck off. he also called the decepticons the decepticondoms, which i wasn’t sure about, but i knew he meant it in a bad way and that pissed me off too.

but anyways, i expected this movie to be bad, but… but, my friends didn’t seem to understand, maybe it’s because i haven’t been seeing many movies or tv shows, but this movie made me feel horrible about life, about my life, about the universe and all of existence.

micheal bay? fuck you. fuck you in your stupid fucking ass.

so i heard about this movie called “killing michael bay” and so i looked it up. it’s not that good either, but somehow i feel better knowing that there are so many other people out there that hate this guy that i didn’t know i hated until about three hours ago. so watch it if you like, it’s below.

this is fantastic… according to a study linked from reuters, 4 of the top ten least affordable cities for real estate are in california, including the top three…

#1 los angeles

#2 san francisco

#3 san diego

and #6 sacremento

so, weren’t some of us going to start a commune somewhere?

Fast growing LAX airport based company looking for an intelligent, hard working, innovated person to work directly with the CEO on projects directed toward expanding the company along with other administrative tasks.
Ideal person will be a recent graduate of a major collage receiving high GPA marks with a degree in business, finance or other high skilled professions.

Collage degree is required.

——————–

i’m not really sure where “innovated” people come from, but i guess medical science is making anything possible these days. also, the misspelling of “college” appears twice and makes me wonder who works in this office.

i just came across this guys site and it’s awesome… lou drendel… he grew up in the world war II era and his dad built models of all kinds of aircraft. his earliest memories are of trying to draw and color airplanes, so he’s spent his entire life drawing and painting really cool shit. unless of course you don’t like jets and spacecraft, but then you’d be an idiot and you would be reading something else, like maybe at stupidshitfordumbbastards.com or something like that. anyways, see one of his paintings below and check out his site (make sure to look at the galleries)  at http://www.aviation-art.net/