The Indestructibles

Scrubbles goes through his iTunes library looking for “the indestructibles” – songs that have been done by at least three different artists and hold up enough that folks keep them around. Looking through my library, I find:

“Alone Again Or” (Love, The Damned, Calexico)
“As Tears Go By” (The Rolling Stones, Marianne Faithfull, Nancy Sinatra)
“Codeine” (Buffy Saint-Marie, Gram Parsons, The Barracudas, Spiritualized)
“Goldfinger” (Billy Strange, Shirley Bassey, Man… Or Astroman?)
“It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry” (Bob Dylan, Kooper/Bloomfield/Stills, Robyn Hitchcock)
“Misirlou” (The Cardinals, Freddy Martin, Harold Grant, John “Bucky” Wilkins, Woody Herman, Dick Dale)
“More Than This” (Roxy Music, Robyn Hitchcock, 10,000 Maniacs)
“Ode To Billie Joe” (Bobbie Gentry, Lee Hazlewood, Popdefect)
“When The Levee Breaks” (Memphis Minnie, Led Zeppelin, Kristin Hersh)

Long Beach’s oil islands

Curbed LA and the LA Times talk about the history of disguised oil drilling rigs just off the coast of Long Beach, but neither article mention the names for the man-made islands…

oil_islands_longbeach.jpg

The islands are named after four astronauts who were killed in the line of duty in the early space program. Grissom, White, & Chaffee (the three islands closest to shore) were killed in the Apollo 1 fire in 1967, and Freeman was killed in 1964 when his T-38 was struck by bird in 1964. Here’s the ubiquitous Google map.

Billy’s Deli, Glendale

In an utterly synchronistic event, both me and The New Diner independently visited Billy’s Deli in Glendale.

I first ran across Billy’s in the mid-80s when I was busy filling going through the Thomas Guide pages and figuring out where in LA county I hadn’t been yet. On that first trip to Glendale, I had a pretty good corned beef sandwich there and filed it away for further information in case I didn’t want to make the drive to Canter’s or Nate & Al’s. Billy’s has been around since 1948 and I doubt that the inside has changed much since then. Pretty remarkable given all the construction that’s going on in downtown Glendale right now. I suspect that in a couple years, Billy’s is going to be like that Chock Full O’Nuts diner in New York City that held up the completion of One Liberty Plaza for years.

The food at Billy’s is the oldest of the old-school comfort food. I had the corned beef plate with potato pancakes and it had just the right amounts of fat and grease to maintain authenticity. The bread and apple sauce are pretty stock though, and for the price ($13) I’d skip the corned beef plate and go straight for the sandwich instead. Is it good? For the most part. Is it satisfying? Heck yeah!

I can’t wait until the weather cools down enough to order the matzo ball soup (which if memory serves, is pretty outstanding there).

Have A Delicious Corned Beef SandwichBilly's Deli - Corned Beef PlateInside Billy's DeliThe Wall Of Billy's Deli

Banksy

Pop-art-snarkster Banksy hit town over the weekend and kicked over the anthill of LA hipsterati. Chaos ensues, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. For all of the verbage expended on the health and well-being of the elephant (the elephant was fine), no one cared about the poor cockroaches stuck in the case with the Paris Hilton CDs.

I liked these two:

bansky_frontier.jpg

banksy_bobbiesgraffitti.jpg

(Pictures from Supertouch Blog)

I wasn’t cool enough to get into the Thursday night opening like Supertouch was, but in the interest of adding to the inevitable Defamer Privacy Watch posting, I did see Kate Flannery (Meredith from The Office) there.

Diedrich coffee gives up

Holy cow!

Irvine-based Diedrich Coffee, conceding defeat in the coffee shop duel with Starbucks, agreed to sell 40 stores it owns to its Seattle rival for $13.5 million.

The local company will remain in business as a roaster and wholesaler of coffee beans. The sale includes all company-owned Diedrich and Coffee People locations. Franchise stores aren’t included in the sale.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by this, but I thought that the coffee bar cold war wasn’t in danger of heating up anytime soon. The most irritating side-effect of this for us itinerant IT workers that Diedrich’s free Wi-Fi will disappear for Starbucks’ pay system.

iTunes 7.0

To counter all the FUD that’s being expended on the new iTunes, all I have to offer is: I installed it. It found all my music. It synced with my iPod. It works fine. My only complaint is that the icon looks like crap on a light-colored background.

And finally! Something that I wanted over a year ago is now in…

itunes7_podcasts.jpg

Start/stop podcast downloads at will.

The WTC and I

I have two memories of the World Trade Center, one is direct and one not.

My first visit to New York City was on July 3, 1986. In the following forty-eight hours I experienced the following:

  • Arriving at the Saarinen terminal at JFK (I still miss crazy-ole TWA)
  • Several scary “80s-era” subway rides (including the Train To The Plane line!)
  • Gunfire followed by a woman screaming
  • The best coffee and bagel I had ever eaten
  • Attempted murder by cabbie (“pedestrians are targets California-boy!”)
  • Used book stores in every neighborhood
  • A dirty-water hot dog from a vendor in Central Park
  • The joys of trying to park a car on the Upper West Side

On July 4, Nicholas, who was living in NYC at the time, and I tried to get into Windows On The World. We got as far as the elevator where the ground floor maitre d’ took one look at us and refused us entry because I was wearing blue jeans and neither one of us was wearing a tie. I wasn’t offended, in fact I muttered a bemused “wow, snooty New York service… Alright!” to myself. We ended up watching the fireworks from the south tower observation deck… My only regret was that I didn’t take a camera with me.

The indirect memory of the World Trade Center is a flyer and a video I have of Spiritualized’s 1997 show at Windows On The World as part of their “Highest shows on Earth” concerts. I wish I could have been there, I could have finally gotten into the place. (there’s a Real stream of the show here)

wtc-asbestos.jpg

(advertisement from Asbestos magazine, November 1981. Found here and elsewhere.)

A Day Of Forgetting

I woke up early than usual on the morning September 11, 2001 and went about my usual routine of reading the CNN and BBC webpages while the coffee was brewing. I have an incredibly strong sixth sense when it comes to my network and immediately I knew that there was some high latency and congestion “out there.” The CNN page finally loaded in the stripped-down “our bandwidth is saturated!” design and I got as far as reading the “plane hits World Trade Center” headline before running into the next room to turn on the television – just in time to see United 175 hit the south tower.

In direct succession my exact thoughts were:

  1. Holy Fucking Shit
  2. The burning papers falling out of the WTC remind me of that scene in Brazil where the papers blow out of the Ministry.
  3. Ummm… How exactly is the right-wing going to respond to this?

At the lack of a better plan, I went to work – figuring that if World War III is going to start I’d be better off with the higher-speed Internet connection at UCI. Somewhere on the interchange from the south I-5 to the southbound CA-55 was where the news broke that the towers had collapsed. No one really got much work done, I spent the day watching the BBC QuickTime stream and reposting newsfeed headlines from the CNN irc server to ILX. The ten threads (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10) make for some harrowing reading…

Two things I wrote back then stick out:

Let’s see… Borders closed, air traffic suspended, police departments on tactical alert, several banking headquarters in the WTC destroyed. Seems like this sequence of events would send the survivalist/Y2K cult/retreatist groups into a spindizzy. I fear that the reaction/possible over-reaction in the ensuing fallout might be even worse than today’s events.

and then later on

I would both love and hate to be a fly on the wall at the CIA/NSA right now – I can’t can’t begin to imagine the collective reaming that’s going on. I suspect that when all this plays out the intelligence puzzle pieces that led up to this will have been pretty obvious, but lacking the “big picture” we simply could not have turned the discreet pieces of data into usuable information.

…

Even if there was prior knowledge, the sheer scale of the attack may have not caused it to be taken seriously. If you told me that four separate airliners were going to be simultaneously hijacked and then crashed into symbolic targets with massive loss of life, I’d say you had the script from the next Jerry Bruckheimer movie.

Probably the most interesting news here on out is going to be what’s in between the lines and what the govt. over-reaction and consequental loss of liberty/privacy is going to be. I’m hoping for the best, but I fear the worst.

Five years onward, today is apparently the day to reference “America,” “Freedom,” “God,” and/or “Evil” and depending on your litmus-tested political position, you’re either honoring the dead of 9/11, the thousands of troops killed in an uncertain response, or the tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani civilians. There’s a lot to object about the “Patriot Day” nomenclature, it’s purpose and wording is as vague and downright evasive as the entire Bush II administration. I suppose we all get the holiday we deserve.

I still kinda like the dorky, old-school Americana of Patriots’ Day. Supposedly, it’s a big deal in Massachusetts, Maine, and Wisconsin, but for little ole pre-MTV Laguna Beach it was time for the Patriot’s Day Parade – the one day of the year when the hippie beach town of the Pacific put it’s best Norman Rockwell foot forward and wondered what it would be like to be one of those towns in the East that you only see in sepia-toned photos… Fire department pancake breakfasts, American Legion halls, city officials riding on the back of vintage convertibles, etc. I was in the boy scouts in the 70s and part of Troop 35’s duty was to carry the display banners during the parade and somewhere out there is a photo of me doing just that. I’m sure if I saw it now, I wouldn’t even recognize myself. By the way, the Patriot’s Day Parade is still going strong and much to my delight it’s still kinda dorky and still adheres to its policy of “no group with a political or religious agenda can participate,” no matter how hard someone tries to sue.

I’ve been reading a lot about World War I recently. Not out of any agenda on my part, I just don’t know that much about it except for the basic details and a lifetime of watching Paths Of Glory and The Blue Max. I did have a great uncle who was a reconnaissance pilot in the Royal Air Corps, but my prevalent memory of anything World War I-related was being in London for another eleventh day – November 11, 1973: the 55th anniversary of the Armistice, a.k.a. Remembrance Day. I had just turned eight years old and despite a working knowledge of all things related to WWI aviation, I hadn’t still quite worked out what the hell The Great War (apparently World War II was still fresh enough in people’s minds then to not yet be “The Good War”) was all about. London was covered in a carpet of red poppies and my mom and I crowded into Whitechapel to see the Queen lay a wreath at a memorial and then decorate a group of surviving WWI veterans. Not all that different from the veterans you see at those local parades I was talking about earlier.

One of the key events leading up to World War I sounds very similar to a certain event in the Current Situation: Massive loss of life. Warnings that were readily available had anyone bothered to take them seriously. Conspiracy theories about pre-planted explosives and whether a government had allowed the event to happen. Public outrage which is manipulated and channelled into policies that lead to greater conflict. What is envisioned as a quick war (become peace is so boring!) becomes a bloody massacre on all sides.

My first inkling about the Lusitania wasn’t a memorial, a day of remembrance, or a news item – it was a jigsaw puzzle of the front page of the New York Times from May 7, 1915.
lusitania-nytimes.jpg

I doubt that most average folks now remember the Lusitania or even what World War I was about and I wonder what the people of 2091 will know of today. Today the Lusitania is a diver’s destination, an annoyance to local fisherman, and an subject of perpetual lawsuits over who owns want. With all of the hand-wringing, political posturing, words and angst expounded over what to do with the WTC site and how to best remember things, it’s worth bearing in mind that no matter what the outcome is it’ll eventually end up being a dusty sidenote collecting rust and weeds. The real memorial will be how we as a country acted and there my deep cynicism turns to deep disgust.

Maybe it’s just best to leave it as a big hole in the ground.

P.S. I’m just as much of a JFK conspiracy guy as the next fellow, but the next person that says “September 11th is the new JFK assassination” is going to get socked. September 11th is the new September 11th. Period. k thx bye.