ARTHUR - the magazine

I could give a shit whether anybody knew I'd left. That's another one of those lame Answers he made up a question for. He asked when I was moving to NY and I said Dude I'm already here. Arthur wasn't an "L.A. thing" -- if it was, people would've known we were gone.

The No Age/LA River thing is part of a larger issue having to do with access to nature in general and to the River in particular. Check my "Nature Trumps" blog -- it wasn't just the No Age show they've been going after (and btw, it wasn't cops, it was rangers), they've been ticketing fishermen and duckfeeders. And removing sanctioned graffiti murals. The level of bullshit is high.

re: COPS AND THEIR COPTERS. I've heard one here in the last 5 weeks. In Atwater Village in L.A. we had them almost every night. It's a style of policing they do in L.A. because of the sprawl. Read up on it. It's not that other PDs don't have copters, it's that in LA they have SO MANY and they use them all the time. They're also trained military-style. There's BOOKS on this stuff, dude.

i miss philly. after i left it became the big hot town for ex-nyc hepcats or something. or that's what i read in the paper. and jess from the gilmore girls opened up a cool publishing house/gallery. i love jess.

i just assumed this magazine was from SF

dude SF is fucking expeeeeeeeensive!

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NY is fucking expensive

Yes, you're the only one who reads. You are the enlightened hippie living in America's last stand for culture and art, and everyone else in America is a know-nothing. Dork.

i moved from d.c. to sf. sf was great.

except it only rained for a few months out of the year. that sort of broke me.

i moved from sf to philly.

philly sucks. except it rains sometimes.

Sorry, that's how all of us living in the wasteland talk.

what d'ya mean by that? just out of curiosity...b/c i have a friend who is moving to quebec next month

-- dell, Thursday, July 24, 2008 8:28 PM (35 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

quebecor, who i work for, pretty much prints everything in existence

"There's BOOKS on this stuff, dude."

and every movie about L.A.! i'm kinda scared of L.A. just from scary movies. but intrigued too.

also my hood is pretty jane jacobsed out to the max.

Jane Jacobs wouldn't recognize the NYC of 2008, Jay. I mean, I know you're all stoked about living amongst the Puerto Ricans. But...

Right, Arthur's all about the hippies -- that's why we put CONFIRMED HIPPIES Sparks and Diamanda Galas on the cover of the last two issues. Okay.

QN - Come to my neighborhood. It has everything she wrote about. Is this neighborhood indicative of ALL OF NYC? Nope. But there are a lot of hoods like this. Stuff happens here that could never in a million years happen in L.A., and I'm enjoying it.

ILM - conspiring to make sure you don't enjoy what ever you're enjoying at the moment

Jay, before we get too bitchy. I know what you're talking about, and it's a super cool thing. My grandparents are from Puerto Rico and Italy and my family grew up in NYC: Little Italy and the Bronx.

But for me, poor people are treated no better there than anywhere else, and those are my family's roots. That's all I'm saying. I lived in Astoria for many years. In my opinion, it's one of NYC's best hoods. But I also know that places like Co-OP City exist, and that they're residents (more like prisoners) have a vasty diff experience of NY.

Cops in L.A. are on steroids, they're trained military-style, and they've got helicopters! Lookit up. Awesome.

Of many dumb things said here, this is a keeper. You're not going to find even a medium-sized city in America that doesn't have quasi-military elements (nee jackbooted thugs) in its police force. Welcome to the 21st century.

everyone should move to MVI and hang out with me and bob lee

http://bp1.blogger.com/_Ga9VWddYFBA/SISaBELP3KI/AAAAAAAAC0w/CvyOyYvqnHk/s400/6annnouncer.jpg

we freeeeeeeeky

BTW, I apologize for my previous comments.

the no-ac thing will get really old in a couple weeks

"Of many dumb things said here"<--this is a keeper.

ILM - conspiring to make sure you don't enjoy what ever you're enjoying at the moment

Shakey otm

we have local color here too! sadly, not that many puerto ricans. but tons of brazilians! they are good too! and real live indians. not to mention our lovely portugese population.

http://www.mvtimes.com/images/2008/07/17/calendar/large/pa-feast-folklorico_rs.jpg

anyone who doesn't think LA cops are on some next level evil shit should compare their history to that of any other major metropolitan law enforcement agency (with the exception of New Orleans, who are probably the worst hands down) - Rampart scandal, Rodney King, etc etc

i should work for the tourist board for real

cops here suck always stealing yer stash

they use helicopters here to find our weed gardens the bastards

Philly's record not that great either, what with that whole "let's firebomb an entire city block" thing

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philly cops suck for real

cops kinda suck

it's kinda their job to suck

word

um, do you really need a list of incredibly fucked up things nypd has done in the same time period. just because ny cops don't look like hardcore military dudes like la cops doesn't mean they're less likely to shove a plunger handle up your rectum. la cops are pretty scary looking, i'll give you that.

how are the cops in portland oregon and austin texas

Amadou Diallo v. Rodney King

Austin cop let me off with a warning for doing 80 in a 65 last month, so they're cool

LA's Smug problem has magically disappeared, it's amazing!

um, do you really need a list of incredibly fucked up things nypd has done in the same time period.

I wasn't talking about NY, I was responding to Milo's apparent equation of LA cops with cops in any other "medium-sized city in America". which I'm sorry is just not historically accurate.

anyone who doesn't think LA cops are on some next level evil shit should compare their history to that of any other major metropolitan law enforcement agency (with the exception of New Orleans, who are probably the worst hands down) - Rampart scandal, Rodney King, etc etc

I don't think it's really that diff, however. I mean, yeah, L.A. has had some high profile stuff go down. But really, dig in the history of East St. Louis or Cleveland or Detroit or Buffalo or Providence or even Boston and you'll find all kinds of heinous stuff. In fact, Boston, in my opinion, has always exhibited a level of racism that's pretty intense.

Hell, what about this guy?

http://img.mediaspanonline.com/6651/2172141.gif

how about the canadian mounted police?

The cop vs. cop argument is kind of like the Most Racist City in America - guess what, the entire country is fucked up. Deal with it.

I wasn't talking about NY, I was responding to Milo's apparent equation of LA cops with cops in any other "medium-sized city in America". which I'm sorry is just not historically accurate.

when i first came to l.a. via an internship program they brought in a couple lapd officers to give us the lowdown on safety and one was a totally chill laura harring looking cop and the other looked like bill romanowski. the latter advised us that jaywalkers in l.a. were lawbreakers and if you happened to run one of them over, "no big deal". he also said you should be careful about people pretending to be cops and when a girl asked him what he would do if he pulled her over and asked to see his i.d., he replied, "i'd take you out of the fucking car and put you facefirst on the pavement". then he sort of twitched and the other cop sort of shook her head.

*she asked to see his i.d

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Yeah, they've been beating up Mohawks for decades now.

Milo Z - Re LAPD. I don't have my copy of (of course) Mike Davis - CITY OF QUARTZ at hand (guess where it is...) but there's a good potted history of the LAPD in there. IIRC, the LAPD was flushed and rebooted wholesale after WWII in response to (um) rampant corruption. They trained a whole new force according to military principles, since those had just won the war and blah blah blah. The upshot is that cops in L.A. are trained not to be policemen so much as they are an occupying force... This affects the way they talk, the way they carry themselves, the kind of attitude they bring to bear on the population. They are to Establish and Secure Authority at all times. This plays out all the time in pretty scary ways. And yes, it's been replicated since then in other police 'cultures' around the US. Whatever. No point in getting in a 'my cops are worse than your cops' argument. Just sayin.

most cops i've met are pretty cool

i'm white btw

Amadou Diallo v. Rodney King

and even here I would point out that NYers relations w/cops were not so bad that they BURNED DOWN THEIR CITY in response

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They can't. It's brick.

roflz

sf cops are great! fajita-gate, etc.

all cops suck sorta

but jesus christ, there are better battles to be fought if you wanna get into some hc polarization shit

c'mon, now.

ah fajita-gate. good times.

yeah, i dunno at this point

i would like to live somewhere next to the ocean

weirdly enough, sf was the only place that i have lived post-hs and been on the receiving end of homophobic comments (i ain't even gay, so go figure)

again, i would like to live somewhere next to the ocean

everyone seems to have a litany of complaints regarding where they live and where they've lived in the past. god knows i do.

and again, jay has made a rad magazine out of nothing, which is more than i can say for myself!

pls interview dale pendell, etc...