Marie Javins's Blog, page 51

New Paint on the Block

The new neighbors bought their house for double the price of mine and then they immediately lowered the value...

Of course, Halloween IS right around the corner. 

On Safari in Jersey City

1. It's a party!

2. What the hell is that?

LAX Excursion

I’m flying out of LAX tonight and it’s possible I’m going to miss my plane.

Right when I was leaving the office, some people decided they had to talk about a very important issue, so I was running late. I ended up grabbing a Lyft to Van Nuys Flyaway because I thought it would be the fastest way. (Normally I get the Red Line to the Hollywood or Union Station Flyaway.)

Well, that was a big mistake. The wait for the Lyft was annoying, the traffic was horrendous, and the bus left 20 minutes late.

Note to self: Always opt for the train during rush hour. 

So I was looking up how to walk from Terminal 1 to Terminal 7 in case I have to jump off the bus and run while it makes its loop around, and hey, something amusing came out of this irritating night.

Decades Past

Here's a fun photo my mom posted today.

How about those socks I'm wearing!

Blockage

Eight months and 24 days after learning the hatch in the JC basement was super-leaky, it's blocked up! I tried hiring a landscape designer to deal with my backyard, but the only person who bothered to give me an estimate was crazy-expensive, so I put some laser-focused google-power to work and located the builder that company works with.

He was quite reasonable. Also, awesome.

Next step is to get the staircase and concrete out and fill it with dirt, drainage, and gravel. Actually, it's unclear what the next step is, but I'm hoping to find out soon.

Heritage Square Field Trip

In 1969, a bunch of cool old Victorians were picked up and moved somewhere safe from real estate development.

I went there over the weekend, needing to get out of the house.

The living homes of Carroll Avenue in Echo Park are more exciting, but these are cool too.
Here are some photos.

Enter Stage Left

Snagglepuss, the stage adaptation, was nominated for a Harvey Award! 

Where Have We Heard This Before?

This former New Yorker drew a circle around his new office in the map, and tried living in different parts of LA via AirBnB within that circle. He also takes public transit.

Sound familiar?

I can hear my aunt saying it now. “I told you to write an article.”

Of course, writing an article is easier when you already work at a newspaper. Perhaps my story needs to be told as a comic.

Stuff of Legend

Look what Rev Cool, a radio host in southwestern Ohio, uncovered when cleaning out his barn.

It's a poster from a seminal event of my college years. I was at a DIY conference of radio hosts at Rev Cool's house, with the other "new music" (or whatever we called ourselves then) hosts from WYSO community radio. Me, Rev Cool, Marty Lou, Chuck, Dennis, I think.

"Do you think Antioch would book the Dead Kennedys?"

"Maybe," I said. "Probably not."

I was wrong.

Do the Hustle

I returned my Yosemite rental car before work yesterday, then at the end of the work day, walked outside my Burbank office building to catch the bus to the metro to Vermont/Sunset, where I hopped on a DASH bus up to the Greek. I had a ticket to see Blondie and Elvis Costello.

This kind of event is so easy here in LA, if you can work around the parking costs and the traffic into Griffith Park. The outdoor amphitheaters are huge, so you can always get a ticket. The settings are pleasant, enjoyable even if you're watching nothing. I wouldn't think to buy tickets to much of anything if I had to get myself uptown to the Beacon back home—I'm more a small event or more likely no-mainstream events-at-all person—but here events are more appealing due to the settings.

So I went to the Greek on the bus and watched Blondie and I thought about disco.

Disco was happening during my childhood. Donna Summer was the soundtrack to the 1970s, along with the Fifth of Beethoven, Play That Funky Music (White Boy), Gloria Gaynor, and as kids, we all tried to do the Hustle. Or something. I don't know if it was really the Hustle. But there were dances people would try to do, and I was certainly not great at them.

But Donna Summer was in my vocabulary, the same way the most popular music of your childhood is in everyone's vocabulary, even when you didn't actively seek it out as a kid.

Watching Blondie last night, I remembered seeing the album Parallel Lines for the first time, and knowing this was a thing. A moment. There was no way to understand it for a kid, but this was a crossover, where punk rock and new wave and disco all came together to be...a thing. An unquantifiable hybrid.

Last night, I found myself thinking about disco.

Which is not a sentence I am proud to type since I really ought to understand something I grew up around.

But disco. What the hell was that? Why were people protesting it? Why were they mocking it? Why did it vanish? Or...did it vanish, or was it just repackaged and renamed? Where did the name "disco" come from? Is there a racial component to the anger at disco? Or is disco just popular culture commodifying some kind of trend, as it usually does?

I could look all this up, I realized, and later I will, but at the moment, it was hilarious to me to realize that I needed to read up on disco. And that one of the great punk bands was also a purveyor of disco, and later rap, repackaging it in a way even the whitest person in the whitest suburb with the most sheltered life could understand. Sort of like Hamilton, but in the 70s.