by kara on November 7, 2010
In a grammatically challenged Wikipedia entry, the Los Angeles suburb of Eagle Rock is described as an “upper middle class neighborhood” and “an eclectic gathering of hipsters and the creative class”, and “Over the past decade , (the) neighborhood has been experience gentrification as young urban professionals* have moved from nearby Los Feliz and Silver Lake”. This is a gross mischaracterization of the neighborhood I moved to 6 years ago (although I did in fact move from Silver Lake and I have been called both a hipster and a yuppie).
*Yuppies
Nestled between Pasadena and Glendale, Eagle Rock was one of the first homestead settlements in Los Angeles. The town’s name is derived from a giant rock that looms above the town that vaguely resembles an eagle’s head. Eagle Rock is home to the bucolic Myron Hunt designed campus of Obama alma mater Occidental College, and it’s fantastically curate bookstore. There are vestiges from bygone eras like Colombo’s, Stony Point, Capri, the Italian Bakery, and Casa Bianca, and a smattering of mom and coot businesses like the almost Twilight Zone-esque Tritch Hardware. But it’s not Mayberry. Eagle Rock has a history steeped in meth, drag racing and murder. Eagle Rock’s mid century era Rockwellian sheen was tarnished when it became a hunting ground for serial killers like he Hillside Strangler and the Night Stalker.
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by kara on November 5, 2010
Pipsqueaky, Depression Era New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia was the one who made sure this airport, New York’s smallest, got built. The tiny Tammany Hall foe famously refused to exit a plane that had landed in Newark, insisting that his ticket read New York, not New Jersey. He demanded to be taken to New York, and urged New Yorkers to support a new airport within the city. Today, the airport he championed while in office is located in northern Queens on the waterfront of Flushing Bay, just down the highway from Shea Stadium
La Guardia Airport opened for business on December, 2nd, 1939.
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by kara on November 1, 2010
Ah, the Midterm elections. Not sexy and traumatizing like the Presidential, but often a political barometer, with seats shifting to or from a governing party, so the result can be high drama. Remember that in 1994, the Democrats’ lost both congressional chambers and Bill Clinton was forced to govern with the (1990’s versions of) hostile Republicans, huffing and fuming with sexual jealousy. The Dems’ 2006 resurgence saw the party take back control of both, foreshadowing Barack Obamas win two years later. Granted, things have never looked worse. But rather than sitting at home bemoaning the Teabag Party’s intrusion into our system let’s take a moment to soak in this unprecedented insanity.
Tuesday’s election is less a referendum on President Obama and more a referendum on Fox News, who dictated the entire ridiculous narrative of this election. The engine of their comeback, the Tea Parties, the faux scandals, the unrelenting anti Obama propaganda, the unrestricted airtime to any GOP candidate. Tomorrow is just the fait accompli of a campaign that Fox has been waging since the day after the black guy took office. Congressional Republicans admirably maintained their discipline in uniformly voting “Nay†on every black proposal, because the Fox Special Ops Force was looming over their bony white shoulders, threatening anyone who waffled. Well, I don’t know about you but I’m not ready to hand the country over to a TV network that came to power via Married with Children, not just yet.
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by kara on October 22, 2010
by kara on October 22, 2010
In May I took my nephew to a Phillies game and a tour of Citizen’s Bank Park for his 8th birthday. Having practically grown up at “The Vet”, it was a pretty unsettling experience, unleashing a wave of characteristically overly complicated ponderings. The paradoxical equilibrium between past and present, the slowly unfolding reality of the passage of time, the perilous impact of nostalgia…then came the confusion, anger, resentment, accusations, recriminations, tears, (why me??), the meditation on the loss of childhood’s expectations, and the struggle to let go of the sentimental attachments to failure that seek to enslave us forever. What is the meaning of a nostalgia to a particular place that has been emotionally significant but which I hate? Or the painful feeling over a return to a place, that de-links the physical place from nostalgia, or as Kant said “a romantic middle-class preoccupation with the passing of youth itself”. There is no return home to The Vet; any real return would be a crushing disappointment over the physical site being transformed, or in the case of The Vet, gone. And there was no disappointment. No nostalgia. There was nothing.
So my hometown team finally has a respectable home, even if it comes 30 years too late for me. Through the process of acceptance, I realized something about myself. Why I was one of them: the Philadelphia Sports Fan; bitter jerk, inflicting my emotional rage on others, at Dodger Stadium, at my office. Because I never really knew what it was all about until now. Roaming through CBP, one thing became clear: It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t me, The Phillies, The Eagles or even other Philly sports fans. I, like my fellow fans coming of age in the late 20th century, carried the deep and odious scars of our stadium. It wasn’t us. It was The Vet. It was The Vet all along. And now it is over. The dead baseball stadium era had come to a close. The Vet was actually gone. It was gone and it was never coming back.
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by kara on October 21, 2010
I love this photo of “Barbie Dream House After Dark” from Manhattanite
As photographed by me last night on the way home from dinner. The house (including furniture, it looks like) is for sale today at that shitty flea market on Avenue A and 11th Street. If any YM reader purchases this 1970’s yellow-and-orange BDH, please do invite me over so I can play with it. I just won a Legally Blonde 2 Barbie on eBay, and she has yet to be gang-banged by oversized G.I. Joe dolls until her legs fall off.
It seems hard to fathom that the photographer could walk by this DREAM HOUSE – for sale at that crappy avenue A flea market – and not buy it. SHE WALKED ON BY. I wanted this SO BADLY when I was a kid but my mom wouldn’t let us have Barbies because of the unrealistic waists and boobs.
by kara on October 14, 2010
I can’t think of another pop group that comes with a more fitting name than Teenage Fanclub, not because the majority of it’s fans are teens or that they even have a fan club, but because they bring out the inner teen in those of us who have an inner teen. Few bands have written with so much affection for the teen-age condition – not with dark tales of self-destruction or bullied loners shooting up the schoolyard – but by mixing the melodic, stylistically complex approach of classic British bubblegum power pop with punk’s irony and distorted guitars. Sure, some of the lyrics are sophomoric if not often downright insipid and even their album covers look like they could be designed and executed by 13 year olds (they are crap – take Bandwagonesque, Spin Magazine’s 1991’s album of the year, a wonky yellow sack of cash floating on a lurid hot pink background). But they distinguished itself as a maverick pop band by trading in the typical self-serious, clamorous sound and fury of adolescent angst bands with melodic hooks and boyish harmonies.
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by kara on October 10, 2010
These are their stories.
T
well. i guess we're here
watch out, brandi hasn't been out in 14 months
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by kara on September 28, 2010
Flamenco dress shop photograph by Kristen Vallow
My sister Kristen and our friend Eugenia were both working in Madrid this summer. These are their stories.
EL BOCAITO CALLE LIBERTAD
http://bocaito.com 00 34 91 5321219
A great tapas places to start the day, in the CHUECA part of town . The tiny fried squid (chopitos), and fried anchovies, steak that you finish cooking in a red hot sandstone. More than 130 tapas on the menu, 15 to 20 types of tostas (toast topped with prawns, egg and garlic, pâté with caviar, cockles, and so on), and the best pescaito frito (deep-fried whitebait).
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by kara on September 12, 2010
My Nerd Collage for The Node
“The Node is the official Nerdist community. It is a collaboration network for creators to nerdsource (crowdsourcing with nerds) and exchange ideas. We share photos, links, videos, and pretty much let our nerd flags fly. Seriously. Look at my face. I am serious”. – Chris Hardwick
Of course you can’t see his face.
