#Kids from South L.A.

[minaaaawaaaa]

Reblog/comment with your favorite things in South Park *fanon media. Here's some of mine, pairing-related separated since some people don't really care for that, which is totally fine

Craig being partly Peruvian (derived from Pandemic I & II); either not Thomas's or Laura's biological son and half-siblings with Tricia. Also him just being tall asf; I think his dad is supposed to be taller than the average adult male character. Also Craig balding early in adulthood LOL

Plot twist villain Cartman in larger-scale-plot fics

Also, Cartman still earning God's wrath when he really, really deserves it

Kyle being the absolute fussiest little shit you've ever seen, at any age, for good reason usually. This is pretty canon, but still it's important to maintain

I think it's never directly put out there in canon besides Tweek's name being so terrible, but the Tweaks have definitely had Tweek and half the town on meth for years

Tweek being super artsy and those practices helping him relax; visual arts, music, sewing/crotchet, etc.

Clyde Donovan, the most sensitive crybaby football player of All Time

Quarterback Stan, regardless of high school/college/NFL level

It's so sad but longtime-alcoholic-since-10 Stan :( I still love him

Not sure when/where it became popular as it isn't too evident in canon, but the weird Craig and Kenny often being pothead frenemies thing? Idk when or why it started but it's pretty fun

Burnout yet extremely dependable Kenny working a ton in high school and often shooting for custody of his little sister Karen once of legal age. Also him being a scientific/mathematical genius but never applying it to prioritize Karen's comfort and safety instead. Also him being super clean given his family situation

Stan being the 5-in-1 body wash friend and Kyle being a major skin care girlie

When ppl draw them in the show's style and when they make them actually look like they're 9

Adaptation of the wackier canon events into a more realistic context like maintaining Butters's eye injury through other means, Kenny being gone for extended periods of time, Stan secretly taking in animals, still playing superheroes. I recently read an anger management counseling fic where Cartman bit off a guy's finger in an argument which I assumed was a Scott Tenorman Must Die reference

Pairing-related

Tweek being closer to the Tuckers than his own parents; his own house being tidier but the Tuckers' being much more of a home

Craig's been gay since 2007, Season 11 episode 8, "Le Petit Tourette." No straight reason for asking to do "the coolest kid in the world's" laundry. Has a type for twitchy dudes--Thomas from that same episode and then his relationship with Tweek

Cartman's demented-ass crush on Kyle; Kyman shipper or not, that kid's got bigass issues. I do not ship Kyman but Eric's got a fucked up little obsession with Kyle. Bro saved his family from deadly L.A. smug because he couldn't live happily without having Kyle there to constantly argue with

Stan being the one to be super down bad for Kyle yet also be the one with more issues in the relationship. I love Stan but dude has way too much of Randy in him, he's gotta be a pain in the ass

Only Kenny calling Butters "Leo," with most characters not recognizing his actual name being Leopold; being sort of popular as a secretive background relationship and Kenny being very protective

[mattnben-bennmatt]

Ben Affleck on how Good Will Hunting was created (March 2020)

The way that movie started was [Matt Damon] was in a— it was actually a directing class, but he had taken all the acting classes at college. And I had already moved out to L.A. to start acting and he was about to come out to L.A. that summer. And I came back into town and he said, "Do you want to come to my directing class? I want to do a scene," and I was like, "What is the scene that you want to do?" "I have this idea about a guy who's a really smart guy but he's not educated." He wanted to basically play a guy from South Boston who's really smart and people underestimated. And I was like, "That's a really good idea!" And we sat down and he wrote some stuff, a scene, for that. And then after we performed it for a guy named David Wheeler [...] nobody seemed to like the scene in the class. But we thought it was good. And we thought— we used to talk about "We should really write this! We should really write this!" And we were just young enough to be so incredibly stupid and naive that we thought we actually should do it and that someone might make it. Which would have been on its face a completely absurd idea. But we pursued it and we had fun. So he had come up with the idea of this character and he was like, "Who do you want to be?" "I want to do a guy who's the Mercutio; the funnier character who tells stories." I mean, yes, I definitely wasn't the first guy to come up with the funny-but-likable best friend guy, who the audience gives permission to be a little more outrageous than the protagonist in some ways. You know, sidekick. That role was juicy. All I ever get to audition for is the bully throwing kids into lockers. And I want to be funny. And I think you could be interesting— there's an interesting tension between a guy who grew up in the neighborhood but is destined for bigger things, and his friends reluctantly recognizing that. So that was built around the idea of a scene saying: it's his friend, in fact—not the Robin Williams character—that gets him to push off from where he's moored and sail off into the world. Where he feels like— even his best friend feels like, "Yeah, love you and want to hang out with you, but this is where you belong."

[beardedmrbean]

A Los Angeles woman fatally stabbed her partner and possibly threw her two children from a moving SUV on the freeway before she fatally crashed into a tree Monday morning, authorities said.

An 8-month-old girl died and her 9-year-old sister was injured in the violence, which began around 3:40 a.m., Los Angeles police said Tuesday.

The children’s mother, Danielle Johnson, 34, got in an argument with a man whom she lived with, Jaelen Chaney, and stabbed him with a knife, police said.

Johnson then took her two children in a Porsche SUV, and at 4:30 a.m. that car was seen driving on Interstate 405 "when the two children were expelled from the vehicle while it was moving,” police said in a statement.

Investigators believe the children fell or were thrown out of the moving vehicle, the California Highway Patrol said. The infant died, and the 9-year-old was taken to a hospital with what police said were moderate injuries.

Johnson then sped into a tree in Redondo Beach, a coastal city in the Los Angeles region, at more than 100 mph, police said. She did not survive the crash, which occurred around 5 a.m.

Investigators later found Chaney, 29, dead in the Woodland Hills home where they lived with Johnson's children, police said. The deadly incidents were later connected and determined to be a double murder and a suicide, police said.

“We really don’t know why this incident escalated to such violence,” Police Lt. Guy Golan said, according to NBC Los Angeles.

The highway patrol said it was broadcast a medical emergency at 4:29 a.m. about the injured children on the freeway, and authorities found the infant with major injuries. The Culver City Fire Department pronounced her dead at 4:44 a.m., the highway patrol said.

Redondo Beach is around 30 miles south of Woodland Hills, which is in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. The 405 Freeway is the main artery linking the western part of the valley to the Los Angeles basin.

The surviving child is in the care of Child Protective Services, NBC Los Angeles reported.

[jules-has-notes]

2016 VoicePlay fall roundup — projects galore, frequent travels, and holiday cheer

As summer rolled into autumn, VoicePlay just kept rolling on their various creative fronts.

While the other guys were cruising in the northeast, Tony and Layne were hard at work back home, prepping and filming PattyCake's first Halloween video.

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California schemin'

Once the sailors were rested up, most of the guys headed for the west coast. They spent two days in Los Angeles filming collaboration videos, first with Kurt Hugo Schneider and then with AJ Rafael.

On the upside, their absence from Florida meant that they didn't have to take shelter from Hurricane Matthew. Unfortunately, Tony wasn't involved in the videos (for reasons that would soon become clear) and was supposed to be on a later flight than the others. He didn't make it out of Orlando before the airport was shut down.

From L.A., the guys hopped up the coast to San Francisco to perform at a benefit concert for the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation hosted by the Alpha Epsilon Phi fraternity at Stanford University. With Tony stuck at home, the fellas called in their old buddy Paul Sperrazza from Vox Audio to pinch hit as their baritone for the night.

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Squeeze me in

After a few days at home, the guys hit the road again. They started with three days of student workshops in eastern Ohio.

During the week, they set their social media followers the challenge of finding them among the crowds of students and faculty at some of the schools. (Can you spot them all? The kids make surprisingly good camouflage.)

New Philadelphia, OH — East Elementary // West Elementary

Zoarville, OH — Tuscarawas Valley Elementary School

On the final day, they worked with the choirs from two local high schools, who then joined them for a show at Kent State Tuscarawas the following night.

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From there, the guys headed south to West Memphis, AR for another concert and a workshop at the local high school the day after that. One crafty fan brought them homemade VP logo cookies.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by VoicePlay (@thevoiceplay)

students at West Memphis High School

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Next they flew up to NYC to perform at a fundraiser for the Lupus Foundation of America.

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Then they scooted upstate to Rochester for a show at Nazareth College before finally heading home.

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Happy holiday-ween

Once they returned to Orlando, it was time to buckle down on rehearsals for their second year at Mickey's Very Merry Christmas Party, so that they'd all be able to hit the stage running in November. (Layne did take the time in the middle of the week to have dinner with their old friend Jeff Thatcher and introduce him to Doris, though.)

The extra twist this year was that, on top of getting themselves and their backup guys ready to perform their holiday setlists, these performances would also be their next step toward formally acknowledging Tony's departure. He wouldn't be joining the other guys on stage in Tomorrowland this season. Instead, they would alternate between two replacement baritones, Erik Winger and J.None, who would continue performing with them into the new year, until the group could decide on a new permanent member.

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No trick, all treats

At the end of the month, Geoff & Kathy announced that baby Castellucci was on the way at long last. They shared a short video documenting some of their challenging road to parenthood on Geoff's personal YouTube channel.

and baby makes three… er, five?

WARNING: This video contains footage of Kathy receiving many injections in her belly and buttocks. As a result, she engages in some pain-induced swearing. Understandable, but probably NSFW.

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One of the pumpkins from the baby reveal was then repurposed to create VoicePlay's social media posts for the day of Halloween.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by VoicePlay (@thevoiceplay)

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North to South (Carolina)

After a week and a half at home, the guys moseyed up to South Carolina for a pair of shows in Aiken, this time with Erik Winger as their substitute baritone.

A group of fans, perturbed by some negativity they'd been seeing directed toward the guys in YouTube comments and on social media, had been conspiring amongst themselves to counteract that energy. They'd created a book of positive messages and images. The two friends who had volunteered to collect and deliver everyone's submissions also documented the presentation during the post-show meet and greet on the first night so that all the contributors could see the guys' initial reactions.

Ashley and Nancy present the book of fan love

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The second day also held a few surprises.

It can be nice to have fans in the service industry.

Aiken, SC show — pre-show chatting // post-show group hug with fan Ashley // prezzies!

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Sing, laugh, and be merry

And then it was off to the races. VoicePlay began their second annual residency in Tomorrowland for Mickey's Very Merry Christmas Party at Disney World in early November. For nearly 100 performances over the course of six weeks, they once again entertained thousands upon thousands of visitors to the Magic Kingdom.

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Hardcore mode

In between MVMCP shows, the guys continued doing their other jobs. Among other things, that meant Earl was lucky enough to be playing Crush in the Nemo live show when iconic professional wrestler Mick Foley was in the audience.

Earl meeting Mick Foley // the VP MVMCP B-team — Tony F., Antonio, Deejay, Joey, & J.None

Having a full cast of replacement singers came in handy during the second week of Disney World shows. VoicePlay had also booked a holiday concert down in Delray Beach for the Friday before Thanksgiving. So, while Winger filled in for Tony on the road, J.None and the rest of Echo took to the Tomorrowland stage in full force.

Eli and Ashley even left a day early and took a detour to attend a Carrie Underwood show in Tampa on the way.

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VoicePlaying for Gamecocks

At the beginning of December, VoicePlay headed up to South Carolina with Winger once more for their last non-Disney holiday concert of the year at USC.

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Bubblicious

In early December, some of the guys finally got to meet the British music blogger who had been singing their praises for several years when his vacation itinerary brought him to the Magic Kingdom.

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Caroling we roll along

Their final video shoot of the year was also the final entry in their first set of PartWork videos, a gentle rendition of "O Little Town of Bethlehem". With the announcement of Tony's departure drawing closer, the other four guys were all featured in this video in their usual roles, and Geoff did double duty to cover the baritone part.

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VoicePlates

As a fun little end-of-year treat, their pal (and former 4:2:Five tenor) Danny Alan stumbled upon some holiday paper goods that bore a surprisingly familiar looking design.

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The guys finally took the last few days of the year to relax and rest in preparation for their hectic start to the new year, but those are stories for another time.

[exhuastedpigeon]

give me a sign, I want you next to me

7,011 words Teen Evan Buckley/Eddie Diaz

Buck loves working at the 118. He loves living in LA. He loves his kid. He loves the life they've manage to build. The only thing he doesn't love is that his husband is across the world in a war zone. OR The 118 knows Buck has a really cute kid and a partner he loves, they just think that partner is his husbands ex.

“So Buckley, tell us about yourself.”

Buck had been with the 118 for approximately 48 hours before Howard - call me Chimney - Han had sat down on the back of the ambulance to watch Buck while Buck did chores around the ladder truck. The ‘us’ he was talking about was clearly Henrietta - Hen - Wilson, who was at least checking inventory in the ambulance instead of just asking Buck questions. 

“What do you want to know,” Buck looked up from where he was shining the truck. “I’m an open book.”

“Why’d you decide to become a firefighter?” Chimney asks and Buck is glad for the softball first question. 

“I like helping people,” Buck shrugs, “And the pay isn’t too bad.”

“How old are you?”

“Are you allowed to ask me that?”

“You’ve already got the job,” Chimney shrugs this time. “And I’m not in HR, hell if I know what we can ask.”

“I’m 28.”

“What were you doing before you decided to become a firefighter?”

“I was in the Navy for 5 years,” Buck didn’t go into detail about that time in his life because even though he’d processed most of the trauma and had a great therapist, he didn’t like talking about it with people who are basically strangers. “After I got out I traveled around South America for a few months before settling in Texas and working on a ranch until we moved to L.A. last year.”

Keep reading on AO3

[ricflairdrip20]

Boyz N The Hood - Lloyd

contains: sweetness, slight mentions of violence, some sexual content

• You grew up in South Central L.A. with black adoptive parents and a sister, to whom you were close with growing up (you’re caucasian)

• You are a honors student majoring in MIMG (microbiology, immunology, and molecular genetics) in UCLA

• You live in a one-story house just a few blocks away from your boyfriend, that your father helped pay for while you focus in school

• You drive a blue metallic 1989 Toyota Camry

• You’ve been dating Lloyd, one of the members of the Blood gang

• You only told your sister and your friends about it, to which your friends aren’t too thrilled about since they are known for violence and wielding guns. It took a while to convince them, but they eventually accepted, but not while always reminding you to be careful

• He’d sometimes spend the night at your house

• He is sweet to you

• Whenever you’re studying so hard you fall asleep on your desk, he’d close your textbook, marking the page you were on with your paperwork, and putting a blanket over you, giving you a kiss

• He’d pay for you everytime you go out

• One morning you found out that Lloyd, along with his friends were killed in the shootout in front of a burger joint where they were eating the night before

• Needless to say, you were devastated and spend the next few days saying goodbye to him

• You kept his red hat, along a few other things

• Shortly after, you found out you were pregnant and obviously you want to keep it

• Nine months later, upon graduating with your bachelor’s, you gave birth to your son, Kevin and you made sure to share the stories about his dad, despite his gangster roots

• You didn’t want to be far away from where you’re from so you moved a couple of towns away to a nicer area where your kid can grow up a good life

• You then continued your education, eventually getting a PhD degree in MIMG and works as a researcher at a biotech company

NSFW

• You enjoy sex with him, especially when you came home after a major exam or completing a difficult assignment

• You likes him to go fast, especially during stressful days

• Lots of kissing, on your face, neck, and chest

• Aftercare is sublime, telling you sweet nothings and “I love you’s”

[taylorhawkins]

"If I was to not know Taylor and go see his band play in a club, I would approach him after the show and say, 'How much do you charge for lessons?'" enthuses Grohl. "He's 50,000 times a better drummer than me."

Forget Dolly the Sheep: Hawkins seems like he's a clone of Grohl, only three years younger. With his mop of dirty-blond hair and goatee, Hawkins is looking kind of Skeet-like himself, and he's as skinny, antic, and hyperkinetic as Dave, maybe even more so. "I can't wait to go on tour so I can see if Taylor ever sleeps," laughs Grohl. Besides the ability to play like John Bonham, Stephen Perkins, or his idol, Stewart Copeland, Hawkins brings his own, surfer-influenced dialect to the Foo mix: a sample glossary includes "winger" (complainer), "Hessian" (hick, redneck, unsophisticated, burnout), and "flobe" ("when you fuck something up," says Hawkins, "like, if you've floundered, you're a flobe"). "He's the whitest Southern California surf kid I know," opines Smear.

Hailing from Laguna Beach, about 50 miles south of L.A. in Orange County, Hawkins just spent a year and nine months of constant touring in Morissette's backing band, which offered excellent preparation for the Foos' six hours of nightly rehearsal overseen by General Grohl. "You have to be an athlete to play these drum parts," says Hawkins. "I play really hard, and that's the key to playing drums for Dave Grohl-you've got to beat the shit out of the drums." [x]

[dweemeister]

July 10, 2024

By Tim Grieving

Before John Williams believed in himself as a conductor, the general manager of the Los Angeles Philharmonic believed in him.

Ernest Fleischmann was a savvy and powerful impresario, born in Germany in 1924, raised in South Africa to escape the Nazis, a frustrated conductor and journalist who managed the London Symphony Orchestra for eight years and ran the European classical division of CBS Records before coming to Los Angeles in 1969 and transforming a “provincial second-rank orchestra,” as L.A. Times critic Mark Swed wrote, “into one of the world’s best.”...

... When Fleischmann saw Star Wars with his kids on opening weekend in the summer of 1977, he thought to himself: God, this score! “It’s really the score and the sound effects that have made that movie what it was,” he later said. “It was almost Wagnerian.” The LA Phil was scheduled to tour Japan that fall, but the tour was canceled at the last minute when the promoter went bankrupt. With his orchestra suddenly freed up, and Star Wars totally consuming the culture, Fleischmann saw a plum opportunity; he paid a visit to John Williams’ Brentwood home and asked the composer if the LA Phil could perform music from Star Wars in a concert of space-themed music. Williams said “Fantastic,” and created a special 28-minute suite from his already super-famous, record-breaking score.

The resulting concert on November 20th, 1977 at the Hollywood Bowl—the iconic outdoor summer home of the LA Phil—was a galactic party designed for young families, complete with a laser light show and readings by William Shatner. The sold-out audience went crazy for it, but the event also highlighted the deep tension between anointed priests of “high culture” and the hoi polloi. “We were criticized very heavily,” recalled Zubin Mehta, the LA Phil’s music director who conducted that night. “Our critics and colleagues said that we had sold our souls to Hollywood. It was really a children’s concert.” The grumpy L.A. Times critic Martin Bernheimer called it “artistic prostitution.”

Fleischmann didn’t care. He had the LA Phil repeat the “Music from Outer Space” program at the California Angels’ baseball stadium in nearby Anaheim, and he commissioned an album of the Star Wars suite and Williams’ new Close Encounters suite, recorded at UCLA’s Royce Hall in December 1977 by Mehta and the orchestra. According to veteran classical music broadcaster Jim Svejda, it was the first time a major American orchestra treated film music “in a very serious way. I think it made a very dramatic statement.”

[fatehbaz]

When Mike Davis thought about California, he thought about concrete. In 1998, [...] [Davis] took the stage at the founding conference of Critical Resistance, the Los Angeles prison abolition organization, and held up a hunk of his driveway. To a kid in the 1950s, “this is what the California Dream was made of,” Davis regaled the audience. In those days, concrete embodied the postwar promise of liberal capitalism: “great dams,” good union jobs, and tuition-free colleges. Now, Davis looked at his prop and saw “something rather sinister.” Concrete meant the prison-industrial complex -- and the life-affirming investments that mass incarceration had crowded out. “Each of those prisons,” lamented Davis, “is a school or a hospital that’ll never be built.”

If public works are the material expression of political priorities, then we can learn a lot about a place from what gets built. Davis’s focus was on prisons, as the antithesis of the colorblind “California Dream” he grew up on in Fontana, a steel town fifty miles east of Los Angeles. But follow the concrete into another outlying region, and the relationship between race, infrastructure, and abandonment becomes even more tangible.

Beginning in the 1960s and accelerating after the election of Tom Bradley in 1973, the City of Los Angeles transformed its port from a lowly backwater into the nation’s “gateway to the Pacific Rim.” The San Pedro Bay Port Complex -- an amalgamation of the facilities in L.A. and neighboring Long Beach -- is today the busiest port in the Western hemisphere. Its growth stands as a triumph of political imagination, made possible by concrete and other raw materials. In the port’s shadow, however, live some of L.A.’s poorest and most marginalized communities. Places like the aptly named Harbor Gateway: a thin ribbon that links inland Los Angeles to the harbor region to the south. What might this area -- the gateway to the gateway to the world -- teach us about the struggle against inequality under global urban capitalism?

---

L.A.’s port was not always so central to the city’s economy and self-image. Its turbocharged expansion under Tom Bradley was part of the mayor’s larger project to make Los Angeles a “world city” [...]. Bradley’s L.A. sat at the vanguard of what liberal technophiles called the “New Economy”: a growth machine organized around finance, high-tech, and logistics, unlike the industrial factories of the Northeast and Midwest. The rising cohort [...] saw the financial sector and Silicon Valley as potential sources of inclusive economic development [...]. To proponents and critics alike, the emergent New Economy conjured images of an ethereal world of fictitious capital and instant communications. [...].

Rhetorically and literally, the “New Economy” was still grounded in specific places and structures, as L.A.’s logistics sector made clear. [...] The volume of containerized cargo passing through Los Angeles more than quadrupled in the 1980s, from 476,000 “cans” in 1981 to over two million in 1989. The cost of shipping from Asia dropped by as much as 60 percent. Today, L.A.’s is the busiest port in the Americas and ranks ninth worldwide. [...]

“What develops in the outer fields of Los Angeles and other megacities,” writes activist and scholar Charmaine Chua, “is an architecture of urban capitalism that has shifted away from ‘public works’ -- infrastructure as a public good -- and toward remaking the globe as a logistical leviathan.” The restructuring of the U.S. economy, in other words, can be understood in terms of the things that governments built, and the places that were allowed to languish.

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Much of the wealth of the port must also pass through Harbor Gateway -- a working-class, mostly Latinx community in the area known as Southeast L.A. [...] Harbor Gateway is a cartographic contrivance, and because of this, it’s also a jurisdictional orphan: some of its homes fall within the tortured polygon of Los Angeles, while others lie in unincorporated L.A. County. Historically, this has allowed officials in both governments to take on, or skirt, responsibility. It’s often made Harbor Gateway a “No Man’s Land,” with neither the city nor county eager to meet the needs of its working-class Latinx community.

This and other overlooked areas have not benefitted from L.A.’s logistics revolution. But to say Harbor Gateway has been “left behind” would be incomplete. As Geismer argues, policymakers’ worries about those Americans whom globalization “left behind” has reinforced the belief that pockets of poverty and unemployment are exceptions to national economic growth, as opposed to features of economic restructuring.

In historical terms, the fate of Southeast L.A. is closely linked to the rise of logistics via the process that Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “organized abandonment.” While policymakers built up the logistics leviathan, Southeast L.A. lost many of the resources -- including decent jobs and housing, well-funded schools, and healthy environments -- that allow people to live meaningful lives. [...]

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[C]ommunities near the port must live with the environmental consequences: diesel fumes, noise pollution, and chemical spills among them. In the early 2000s, researchers determined that the port complex was the largest air polluter in Southern California, emitting the equivalent of sixteen thousand tractor-trailers idling 24 hours a day.

Chua describes the considerable ecological and health problems associated with logistics, which include elevated rates of cancer, asthma, heart disease, and depression. In many of these places, however, the etiology of serious illness can be hard to pinpoint. From 1947 until 1982, Harbor Gateway was home to Montrose Chemical, the nation’s largest manufacturer of the notorious pesticide DDT. The plant remains an active Superfund site; in some areas, DDT levels exceed 700,000 parts per million. For years, Montrose also dumped barrels of “acid sludge” -- totally legally -- just off-shore. As many as half a million lay on the ocean floor, according to a Los Angeles Times investigation.

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There was no golden age of capitalism in Southeast L.A. The California Dream served to mask corporate abuse [...].

But the abandonment of places like Harbor Gateway has also intensified in times of austerity. Longstanding ecological violence is exacerbated by an approach to governing that privileges the logistics sector above all else. The human costs of that choice -- cancer, respiratory damage, heart disease -- are well documented.

This makes Southeast L.A. the underbelly of global capitalism -- of cities’ reliance on logistics amid grave social and environmental harms. Behind the promise of the just-in-time supply chain is a world of slow violence and premature death, distributed through racial and spatial disadvantage.

---

All text above by: David Helps. “The Politics of Concrete.” Protean (online). 21 July 2022. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, personal use, criticism purposes.]

[stephenjaymorrisblog]

Marianne Williamson

(Madam President)

Stephen jay Morris

12/15/2023

©Scientific Morality.

All my life, I’ve been told that I exaggerate. Little did I know that this gave me the talent to work for the American news media! You should have seen the headlines of my local newspaper, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. For example, there was “The Biggest Rainfall Coming to L.A.! Many Will Drown!” And (my favorite): “Communists Rob a Grocery Store!” As it turned out, some Russian tourist had taken a red apple without paying for it. At the neighborhood food market, you could buy The National Enquirer. My favorite headline of theirs was, “I Had Gay Sex With John Wayne!” Of course, this was all designed to get you to buy the tabloid.

Well, nothing has changed since then. On cable T.V., they want you to watch their commercials, so they try to captivate you with sensationalism. “Oh! My! Bob!” or “Donald Trump wants to be dictator!” The fat fuck must have somebody tie his shoes for him, for Christ’s sake! Yeah! That’s right! Then there are the mouth pieces of the Right: Nick Fuentes, the Gilbert Gottfried of the gentile race! I am terrified of him. Matt Walsh, the Catholic mental case with a Fidel Castro beard. Dennis Prager, the covert narcissist who thinks God worships him. He would do anything for attention. If he was guaranteed survival after committing suicide, he’d do it. “Look at me everybody! I’m special!” Indeed, you are, Dennis; indeed you are!

Like the Navy versus the Army in football, the two-party system is going to last forever. Both parties are controlled by the 1%--the Conservative elites and the Liberal elites.

With all of these apocalyptic predictions and end-of-the-world scenarios, why even bother to vote? They want you to stay home.

Want to upset a conservative? Tell them that Trump is no different than Biden. Or tell a Liberal Democrat that Biden is like Trump! Watch the steam come out of their ears—like Herman Munster. They are both senile, old farts.

We’ve got the presidential primaries coming up, however, that’s all heading south. The Democratic Party’s Central Committee wants to cancel the primaries. The Democratic Party has already done so in Florida, but three other Democratic candidates are fighting the decision. Good luck on that score!

One candidate who’s caught my eye is Independent, Marianne Williamson. She is from the New Age Left. Though I despised the New Age movement in the 70’s, some new agers I’ve met are very Anti-Authoritarian Left. They and I are from the same generation of late Baby Boomers. We are both the romantic idealists of the counterculture. I can’t vote for Abbie Hoffman, he’s dead! So, I’ll vote for the Hippie candidate.  Williamson’s policies are like those of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR never survived to implement his “Economic Bill of Rights,” so maybe she can continue FDR���s reform of America.

She is not Christian. So, what! I don’t give a poop if she channels Elinore Roosevelt! If she can help put America back in order, my vote is for her.

And now, what’s this shit about Trump wanting to make America fascist? With what army? The orange puke can’t even navigate a ramp! To accomplish it, he’d need the support of the 1%, the U.S. Military, the CIA, FBI, Wall Street, mainstream Protestant denominations, and other establishment entities. Do you really think that Trump has the support of the CIA? Me neither.

With all the hysteria going on, I say, bring it on! Hail, Trump!

Just kidding.

Marianne Williamson for president! I’m not kidding.

[boricuacherry-blog]

Erlandson is tall and affable with dyed-blonde hair that hangs in his eyes and a loose, almost nasal Los Angeles-native drawl. One of seven children in a close-knit Catholic family, he actually hails from San Pedro, California, the recently reanointed punk-rock mecca a half-hour south of L.A. Erlandson's boyhood paper route included the home of Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn, but Erlandson missed out on his hometown scene at the time, preoccupied as he was with good old 70s rock.

Now 32, a fact he gives away freely but sheepishly, Erlandson was a late bloomer. He attended college at Loyola Marymount, where his father was a dean, and also held down an accounting job at Capitol Records. Then he caught the punk-rock bug. "I started late," Erlandson says. "I didn't really experiment with anything bad for you until I was 27."

Within the band, he's known as the Archivist, the guy who keeps track of all the live tapes and jam sessions. On a musical level, he's the guy who really gives the songs their crackle. He played most of the guitars on Live Through This, while Love concentrated on lyrics and vocals.

Like Love, Erlandson is a Buddhist, though after she introduced him to the religion he became the most devout practitioner.

What kept them together was a love of god-awful clattering. "We were one big, screaming mess," Erlandson says. "I was just like 'Ok, this is cool, this is noise.' I was always into the No Wave thing, but it never caught on in L.A. I was like, 'Wow, I finally found someone who's into doing this stuff.'" With Pretty on the Inside, Love's vividly scabrous lyrical tone - part self-immolation, part outwardly directed paroxysm - was well established, and beneath the cruddy goth-punk caterwauling there were hints of New Wave sense and songcraft sensibility. Erlandson and Love were a couple and lived together, before he dated Drew Barrymore. He says Billy Corgan kept getting in between their relationship. "There's that cartoon side of her that is intimidating, but deep down inside there is a sweet little kitten," he claims. He would go on to date Kristen Pfaff, who became their bassist and would tragically die in 1994.

"I love him so much," says Drew Barrymore, who is dating Erlandson. "And I have a family now from Eric, too. He has such a huge, amazing family. Seven kids. I never thought I'd have a sense of family until I had my own kids. I want two: a boy and a girl. My daughter will be named Ruby Daffodil."

-Rolling Stone article, 1995

[familyhistoryblog101]

Nicholas's Family Interview

I interviewed my father, Jose Benavides. He was interviewed on October 14th, 2024. He was born in Los Algadones, Mexicali (within the state of Baja California, a part of Mexico) in 1975, and soon after moved with his family to Tijuana. He lived there carefree with his family for 5 or 6 years before coming to America for a better future. He and his family first lived with another family (8 people total) in a 1-bed 1-bath apartment in East Los Angeles, California for almost a year.  From there, his family would get enough money to move to Cudahy, then South Gate, before eventually moving to Downey once he was in high school. He and his family would stay there to this day, where he now lives, 49 years old, with his wife and 3 kids in a house of his own.

One part of borderland culture experienced by my father was the food he ate growing up. When he lived back in Tijuana, he ate food like Chorizo con huevos (pork with eggs), Chilaquiles (Fried tortillas with salsa), and many other dishes which consisted of beans, rice, eggs, and tortillas. When he first came to live in East LA, he would continue to eat primarily Mexican dishes cooked by his mother. Once he was enrolled in school, however, he would be served American elementary school food like pizza, chicken nuggets, hotdogs, and hamburgers. He mentioned that once he became more independent from his family while in school, he would prefer to get American food with his friends. I feel that this situation paralleled the experience of Roshini Rustomji’s mother in her article “Thanksgiving in a Monsoonless land.” In this article, Rustomji recalls a Thanksgiving in which family friends came over for dinner, which was unusual for the single mother and daughter. When the family friend arrives, he is surprised by the turkey Rustomji’s mother is cooking (alongside traditional parsi-Indian sides) where he exclaims “What, Dinaz Mehta! What is this? A Turkey! Have you forgotten how to cook Parsi food? I came here for pukka, real Parsi food. And what do I see? A turkey! What do you think you are? An American” (Rustomji 329). As mentioned earlier, my father experienced this disconnect between “American” and “Mexican” foods as his friends pulled him away from eating the traditional Mexican food he would eat at home. Similar to the mother’s outburst in the article, where she tells the family friend “Who are you to tell me I can’t love two places? No one, no one can cut boundaries into my heart,” he was able to find a balance between the cultures of the food he eats (Rustomji 330). Today my dad still eats Mexican food, cooking it himself. Despite this, he still eats a lot of American food because his wife and children prefer it. Even if he sometimes wants Mexican food, he is willing to sacrifice it for his family's preferences.

Another thing I asked my father about was the socio-demographics of the places he lived throughout his life. Back when he lived in Tijuana, most people that lived there were Mexican, which makes sense given Baja California doesn’t border other Central/South American countries. He lived with a lot of his family (cousins, uncles and aunts, grand parents) around the city because the poor infrastructure (and poor economy) of the area at the time made it tedious to travel to and from other cities. Once he moved to California (East L.A specifically), he shared an apartment with family friends who had come to America before my father’s family. In this area of urban, low-income housing, my dad was still surrounded by Hispanic families and kids from Mexico and other Central/South American countries who had also immigrated to America. By the time my father was in high school, however, his family had moved to Downey (a suburban city south of Los Angeles). While it had different areas of the city, overall the city was considered middle-class and comprised of mostly “white” people (people of European descent). As he graduated high school and continued to live in Downey, however, he witnessed a slow change to a Hispanic majority within the town, where now around 70% of the city is Hispanic. These different areas all display an idea shown in Rosaldo’s article “The Erosion of Classic Norms.” In this chapter, Rosaldo talks about the new and old way of ethnography. Previously (up until the 1960’s), ethnography as a study believed cultures to be unique and uninfluenced by each other, occurrences of other cultures within other countries being exceptions rather than the rule. The new study of ethnography, however, sees culture as transient between “borders,” that being how things like immigration and the assimilation of ideas lead to cultures intermingling between borders. Given my dad’s immigration from Mexico to the United States, this new approach to ethnography is shown through his experience growing up. When he moved from Mexico to East Los Angeles, he found other immigrants like him who embraced culture from not only their home countries, but that of America. In Downey, despite the ethnicity of the city changing so much, the Hispanic culture did not overpower the European traditions originally in the town, but instead integrated with it.

[whatdoyoumeanitsnotawesome]

Anon, here in the San Francisco Bay Area, great bastion of liberalism and the setting of nightmares for conservatives the world over, there are many popular retail chains that offer a variety of HP merch, and it’s not niche at all.

Hell, down south in theme park land, i. e., L.A. & environs, Universal still has a major HP installation and attractions that draw thousands of people per month.

The play is touring all over the States and selling out tickets like gangbusters.

Don’t kid yourself, Nonny, JKR is still getting money from suckers every day.

Wait, you guys genuinely think not just that the fic fandom is keeping HP relevant, but that the IP is still relevant at all? When was the last time you went into a major retailer store? Because let me tell you, nobody is selling HP merch in 2024.

Here in Europe we have these international chain stores called Primark. They are the cheap, fast fashion retailer, and back in the day they were the home of HP merch. Every year, for the autumn/back to school season, they would release entire collections of merchandising, anything from sweaters to bags, candles, stationery, jewelry and even sweets. At one point, the big flagship store in my city (which is, by the way, five stories tall) had a HP section so big, that it spawned half a floor, all decorated and neatly organised according to the houses. To this day, no other IP has occupied so much space nor has it received the care and dedication that they put into HP. Heck, Primark was so popular for its HP merch that even HP YouTubers from the States would go out of their way to visit them just for the HP merch alone.

Last week, I visited the very same store, and how much merchandising did you think I found?

The answer is one (1) piece of merchandising in the entire store.

And it wasn't in the adult section mind you, it's been years since they've had any merch that you could wear in public, only ever releasing the occasional pyjamas: it was instead at the very end of the children's section, by the tills. A sad, plastic pen, made to resemble a quill, in a tiny cardboard box, placed there in a last ditch attempt to catch the customer's eye while they waited to pay.

I know it seems hopeless to see that the author is still getting huge cheques, but consider, how many of those come from long standing contracts with things like the theme parks and streaming services?

And again, most people in real life are not fandomers, they are passively aware of the franchise, and see it as generic entertainment in the same way your mum might call any given Pokémon a "Pikachu". Just take a look through Twitter and see how many low effort meme accounts are still sharing low quality screenshots of decade old Tumblr posts, and how many people will blindingly follow them, blissfully unaware of the existence of fic, ship wars, author opinions or anything remotely negative.

Harry Potter has fallen from grace, a forgotten Funko Pop in the sales bin, waiting to be bought by a careless family member to occupy its place in the shelf of knick-knacks, between that ugly souvenir your coworker got you and the baby shower pictures of your uncle's twice removed sister in law's, ex-husband's daughter. It will always be there, yet it's not important enough to draw anybody's attention, gathering dust for the rest of eternity until a child picks it up, humored by clueless parents, unaware of everything that it once stood for.

Just make peace with the fact it's not in your hands anymore. After all, becoming paranoid about being reminded of its existence won't do you any good, anyways.

--

[wellthatwasaletdown]

No question about it. He definitely dumped her but I think that he planned it strategically around the time that he was going on his Latin America portion of the tour. He was about to leave the states and it was the perfect time and a perfect excuse not to mention all the shows that he planned for 2023. If he didn’t do it, then he was gonna have to wait a while// I’m kinda agreeing with thenuther anon that it was mutually decided. She knew she wouldn’t be able to go anywhere anymore and with all the Jason stuff with the kids and custidy and the nanny stuff , idk I feel, she as well knew they wouldn’t be able to go any further at the time and agreed to end it 🤷🏻‍♀️

There was no way she was mutually agreeing on anything. She wasn't willingly going to give up on the relevancy that dating Harry Edward Styles gave her. Why wouldn't she be able to travel with him? She and Jason shared custody. Flying from L.A. to South America is just like flying around Europe from London. They also did two weeks at time on occasion, so if she wanted to travel to Australia or Asia, she could have.

Even if she couldn't travel, the tour was ending July. That wasn't a long time. It wasn't like it was the start of his tour in 2021. If they had taken the break back then, I would have bought it. But, we're talking about the woman who flew to New York from London for one day to watch the same show that he was going to do in London two days later.

[frilly-interference-dazzling]

A Way to Live It Up, for Me! 👻

I don't want you other guys to do what I did.

I didn't start it, but I make it out. I don't fully enjoy it, but in the real world as a person I wanted to be carried around by someone older who I like.

My singing teacher in college for the group class wanted to. She was tall, as well as strong and pretty big, from Up North, from Minnesota, which is West of Wisconsin. I could tell sometimes only singers lift, and some violinists have you sit on their lap or pretend to, since maybe singers lift.

I came home from college, across the bridge from New Orleans, and in Louisiana there the kids wanted the lift. In Mississippi, kids maybe starting or about to start puberty did it. The Mississippi River.

A question I have here is battling the idea of if I deserve to be touched and loved.

I am from South East Coast and North East Coast Florida. I met a girl from L.A. a little younger in my class with white blonde hair, blue eyes, and nice maybe pretty fair skin. She was taller. She had a nice full solid figure. I bet if we were from the same area, she would be shorter. I moved to the New Orleans area and stopped growing so much. I grew again over an inch since moving back to Florida at 19/20. I was the best at gymnastics classes, too, age 1 3/4 - 9.