Fast Food Crime Scene

Pizza Hut (4251 Beverly Blvd.)= In an effort to top Shakey's at their own game the Koreatown Pizza Hut has a lunch buffet set-up Mondays thru Fridays for $5. It sounds like a great deal until you realize there's a fucking middle school 2 blocks away, do every pizza faced brat descends on the place like a swarm of locusts. This means as soon as the servers nervously place a new pie on the counter all the kids swarm and gulp down very slice before you can even reach for one.

If you're watching your weight (what are you doing here, then) there's the most bizarre Caesar's Salad ion the planet, no croutons but tons of bacon bits. So many bacon bits it looks like a rabbit relieved itself in the bowl. A pig gave his life to finish a Caesar's Salad.

I don't know what I'm complaining about, there are places I was never meant to go to = stadium concerts, poetry readings, visiting the in-laws, comic book conventions and Pizza Hut. Oh, and if the one-armed Mexican boy still works there tell him Andy said hi.

Carl's Jr. (1111 N. La Brea Avenue)= I don't know if I'd come here for food, I mean let's be frank, this is a tranny crash pad masquerading as a fast food joint. Am I outraged? Fuck no, what better way to flip the bird to dead fascist Carl Karcher than have every torn-up drag queen and Santa Monica Blvd teen runaway hustler all passed out in dead cattle grease stench.

Let's try that again: Fast sex flesh passed out in fast food flesh stench, you can hear the snores from whores and see the snooze spit bubbles popping out of smeared dude lipstick lips.

Sometime they try to infiltrate the court yard at the SM Gateway across the street but the Security Guards chase their asses off. Sometimes they sneech right through into Target and elbow their way past chola bull dykes and Communist poon strippers. It's complicated, baby. Like the tranny hustlers say, "If it's not all over the place, it's right in my face." Get it, girl.


Pink's Hot Dogs (709 N. La Brea Avenue)= Pinks is the Eiffel Tower of grease and everybody has to go to The Eiffel Tower at least once in their life so I went and I waited and waited and waited and nobody loves hot dogs more than Andy Seven but fuck me these dogs had the hardest casing I've ever bit into. I felt like I was giving GI Joe a titty nipple hickey, like bad hard vinyl plastic cock'll do the do and Orson Welles must have been out of his mind pulling up here and ordering 16 chili dogs and macking them down in one sitting even his Pekingese must have stared in horror and it always crawls up my ass when people write one sentence reviews so here's my one sentence bon appetit Steinbeck.

Burger King (5118 Wilshire Blvd.)= Rebecca and I call this "Teen Trauma Burger King". It rocks! Half of the time there's a yellow crime scene tape wrapped around the front of the place because when the High School down the street lets out the Degrassi Devils end up waxing each other. The tape stays out for the next few days and the BK staff does a sloppy job of hosing the blood off the sidewalk (BK staffers doing a sloppy job? Impossible!) I'll be the dues at the Jack In The Box across the street are jealous of all the drama.

But there's more: There's a big, big, big "Oasis" Christian youth center next door, so the Oasis jesus kids are probably wishin' and hopin' all the gangsta thugs will throw down all their weapons and come right in after school and repent. The drama is so intense it beats watching "The Best Years".

Oh yeah, the food. What about the food? It's Burger King. Shee-it!

7-Eleven (8077 W. 3rd Street)= If you want to know what jail folks really look like hit the local 7-11. I'll be boiled if I ever saw a chick at one, it's usually guys that look like they got tossed out of the drunk tank. They puke right by the front door and the cashier who has "F-U" tattooed in his brain won't mop it up.

He won't clean the cherry Slurpee machine either, so the red sludge hardens around the nozzle looking like Joan Crawford's last period. All the cons look like they want to punch you out just because you're using the ATM machine and they can't, because they think you need a PhD to punch in your PIN number.

I smelled more unwiped asses here than I did at the local maternity ward. Maybe it wasn't ass but the odor of delicious 7-11 burritos "percolating" in the microwave. So if you love doughy beer monsters with shaved heads and 100 zits poppin' out of their skulls and think "OZ" was an epic TV show, you're so 7-11 material.

Going Steady With Jesus

One of the most disturbing aspects of growing up a Jewish teenager in the 1970’s is being thrown to the lions, theologically speaking. It was the era of The Jesus Freak, Jews For Jesus, “Godspell” and countless bad musicals trivializing God and his many prophets, etc. If you were young and Jewish the Jesus vultures chased after you like you were so much potential carrion.

Here’s a basic rundown of what I had to endure during the Disco Deity Era: One afternoon I walked up the alley to the market and a VW bug with three hotties drove by. They pulled up and flagged me down, a hot chick leaning her head out the window. “Hey! Hey guy, can I talk to you for a second?” calling me with a smile on her face. I can’t believe my good luck!
“Okay, what’s up?”
“Did you know Jesus Christ loves you and He’ll save your soul? Do you want to be saved?” Oh shit, she saw my yarmulke.
“Ahem, I-“
“Here”, she pulled out some crummy pamphlet. “Here’s something you can read today. We’re having a teen rally this Saturday, and-“
“Shabbos!”
“-we’d like to see you there, tee hee”, the girl driving the car giggled.
“Go ahead, take the booklet!”
“No thanks”. I walked away.
“Your loss. Bye! Jesus loves you!” They finally drove off. It wasn’t His love I wanted.

If there’s one thing I can’t stand to this day it’s Jehovahs Witnesses marching into Jewish neighborhoods during Passover and the High Holiday Season. As if the entire Jewish population is supposed to toss aside their faith on a holy day. Many was the time you’d see them from your living room window marching up to your front door and they’d ring the bell over and over again. I would sit on the sofa and just wait for those idiots to turn around and leave.

One of the worst places for Jesus brainwash was in Westwood Village by the UCLA campus, one of the hottest hang-out spots in the Seventies. Saturday nights were bad. As my brother and I went on our way to the movies some smelly, stringy-haired hippie yelled at us, “Excuse me sir, are you ready to be saved?” My brother stopped dead in his tracks, and turned around and said, “Listen, you moron, I’m sick and tired of being preached to, why don’t you take your religious bullshit somewhere else? People don’t come here to be bugged, okay?”
“Sir, I sense some hostility in you. As a formerly member of the Judaic tribe”, the crazy hippie whines, “I’ve found Christ, and want to share my gift of eternal salvation with you. As it says in Romans 33:7”, he cracked open a thick, greasy Bible.
“We don’t follow the New Testament”.
“I understand your anger, once I was a lost lamb in the land of Canaan. As it says in the book of Matthew, Love your enemies and pray for your persecutors, so I will pray for you as Christ did for Pontius Pilate”. He shut his eyes tightly and spread both arms out in the iconic crucifix position, his fingers trembling as he did so.
“No one knows the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him", he bellowed. Everyone walking by stared at this foolish apparition and a couple of girls giggled. “Offer the wicked man no resistance, and if anyone hits you on the right cheek, offer him the other as well.”
I tugged on my brother’s arm, and nodded for us to hightail it while little Savior was still reciting scriptures with his eyes wide shut.
“For behold, I, God, have asuffered these things for all, that they might not suffer if they would repent; But if they would not repent they must suffer even as I; Which suffering caused myself, even God, the greatest of all, to tremble because of pain, and to bleed at every pore, and to suffer both body and spirit—and would that I might not drink the bitter cup, and shrink”, he continued. “Do you hear me, brothers?”
He opened his eyes to find no one in front of him. We were off eating bagels on Broxton Avenue.

Sometimes I wonder if any of these proselytizers have kept the faith since then or if they treated it like a passing fad. Religion was a fairly trendy thing at the back end of the Sixties because many felt they had a lot to repent for. Perhaps that was the most annoying aspect of the Jesus craze: once one fuck-up was saved they assumed everyone needed salvation, but we just didn’t give a damn. And we still don’t.

The Dearly Departed Think You're An Idiot

The middle of the summer has been a bitter pill to swallow for me because that’s when I observe Yahrtzeit (memorial anniversary) for both my mother and my favorite uncle. Not only do I go to temple on their memorial dates but I also take a Sunday morning off to go to the cemetery to visit their graves. When I go to the cemetery – Mt. Sinai, next to Forest Lawn, up in the hills – I stop off at Trader Joe’s and buy flowers. I like the cemetery, it’s up in the Hollywood Hills between Burbank and Glendale, it’s a nice location, even though the cemetery keepers don’t do much to beautify the property. While sitting by their graves side-by-side I kept my fingers crossed that the gardeners' golf cart-sized truck didn’t plow right into me, seeing as how it was speeding down the lawn over the graves coming right at me. Another few feet and I’d have to order my own plot. Thanks for adding to the peaceful ambiance, boys.

After saying a few memorial prayers I drove out of the cemetery and slowed down to catch a funeral in progress. At least, I think it was a funeral. Most of the mourners in attendance wore Hawaiian shirts and board shorts with sneakers. I didn’t know this was funeral attire. It seemed really disrespectful to me, but unfortunately not the first time I’ve been to a funeral where the mourners wore t-shirts, dirty jeans and other assorted casual shit. I like people to get comfortable, who doesn’t, but a funeral is a sacred ritual where people join together to grieve over their loss. If casual is the new order for funerals then I want everyone to wear their black nightclub best at my event – which will never happen because cremation is a fairly good option. Nobody belongs in a box, except for Dick Cheney.

Mt. Sinai is very stingy about trees, I always assumed cemeteries should have trees, bushes, greenery, etc. to maintain the eternal life image. Most of the grounds are flat and the grass more often than not is dry and filled with weeds. Dead people, dead plants, for the prices the mortuary charges you’d think the place would be kept better. On the way home from the cemetery I stopped off at my favorite liquor store down the Hollywood Hills and bought a root beer. As I drank I thought of all the people I’ve known who are no longer around and how their memory seems like wonderful dreams. That’s as casual as I get about death, and just for the record I wore a white dress shirt, gray dress slacks and black shoes. It's a little thing called respect, try it sometime. Get dressed for the dead even if it kills you.

The Clayton Brothers Get Fruity

You couldn’t swing a dead man’s dick without hitting a hot girl at The Clayton Brothers’ “Jumbo Fruit” opening at Patrick Painter Gallery on Saturday, July 18. I don’t know what brought so many of them out in droves; perhaps it was the inclusion of “fruit” in the title. Next time I put on a show I must add buzz words like “fruit” or “candy” in my title.

The paintings were portraits of people eating or resembling various kinds of fruit, and while the content of the work was nothing special the technique was pretty dang offbeat.

The artwork was mostly oil on canvas even though the media didn’t appear that way. The smooth textures of the brush strokes gave an airbrushed appearance to parts of the work. Other parts of the painting had crude strokes that ran in counterpoint with the smooth lines. The result was a work that was stylistically unpredictable.

I liked the smaller portraits suspended over wooden slats of varying colors, that was a real attention getter. Patrick Painter is spread out over two spaces in Bergamot Station, and considering that it was the only gallery open after 6 pm it kept the event from feeling too claustrophobic. While artists retain the right to ask for any price for their work I thought The Clayton Brothers went way over the top. A quick look at their price list and there wasn't one painting under $40,000. That's right, there wasn't a typo or too many zeros on the list, every piece was $40,000 and up. I don't think anything sold.

I saw two curators from other galleries at the opening. One didn’t bother to say hi but he never says hi to anyone anyway. He looked like a member of The Mothers of Invention circa 1969, nice keeping up with the times. The other curator kept standing next to me but also wouldn’t say hi. It’s ironic because I bought two paintings from him and you would’ve thought that would rate a hello, but this is the art world. There’s more integrity in politics.

The Insane Legacy of Dori Seda

One of my fondest memories of touring was hanging out with girls in San Francisco. My wild mermaids had arrived: There was something about them that made them special. The girls of San Francisco were the most insane, funny, sexually aggressive, and sharper than fuck harpies on the planet. These were not the prissy, entitled princesses of Los Angeles: they all seemed to be mainlining acid, comix, battery acid coffee, fried cum, teddy bears and cheap pulp novels. If there was a cartoonist that embodied all this erotic insanity it was the amazing Dori Seda.

Dori represented everything that was awesome about Frisco femininity. Intelligent, sexually charged, and always funny, a guy didn’t have a chance because it hurts to laugh with a boner. A near complete collection of her wild comics can be obtained in “Dori’s Stories” (Last Gasp Publishing). Her autobiographical tales depict her being a stoned nuisance at a party, dating an obnoxious teen metrosexual, hitting the sex want-ads, a wimmen’s retreat orgy, and lots of drug-fueled swinging. Before I go any further let me explain that these are still done in the classic underground comix style and aren’t a load of cheesy Playboy Magazine “Annie Fannie” romps. You smell more car exhaust and Mission District smog than you do Aramis and VSOP brandy. The humor is paramount to the erotica, anyway, and that’s why these comix rule.

The story that “dogged” her career (forgive the pun) was “Crabs Eating Raoul” about (you guessed it) more swinging. After giving a hypocritical ex the boot the story ends with Sedi in bed kissing her dog, with the line “from this experience I’d discovered the true love of my life”. Seda felt hounded by bestiality accusations after this story and went to great lengths to repeat over and over “I really don’t fuck my dog”, which actually turned into a pretty funny running gag. It didn’t really bother her much because in a later story she’s naked giving her dirty dog Tona a shower, another very funny story.

While Dori was serving up her cool slapstick erotica in the uptight Eighties her personal life was not so charmed. She worked as the cleaning lady at Last Gasp Comics, hoping she could get her foot in the door. She worked up to bookkeeper and got a chance to draw her own comic, “Lonely Nights” for that publisher. While she had the admiration of Weirdo Comics publisher R. Crumb (who published her) she didn’t quite capture the favor of his successor Peter Bagge (who rejected her work). Never bitter, Seda turned to posing for fumettis photographed by “Ghost World” director Terry Zwigoff. Her alter ego in the fumettis was “Sylvia Silicosis”, a disease she suffered from.

Dori contracted silicosis (aka black lung disease) from fabricating her ceramic sculptures without using a protective oxygen mask. Her constant smoking combined with her disease made her hack and cough constantly, eventually killing her during a debilitating flu epidemic in Northern California in early 1988. The tragedy didn’t end there: Seda’s mother claimed to be the beneficiary to all of her work and refused to allow them to be released for a book-length compilation, reportedly dismissing them as “filth” and “of no entertainment value”. Everybody’s a critic. Fortunately, a will Seda had drawn up for laughs was unearthed by her boyfriend which enabled her work to be enjoyed for years to come. “Dori’s Stories” has been out for ten years and I just discovered it, and damn if it isn’t the most entertaining book I’ve read this year. Just reading Dori’s stories makes me realize how special she and the rest of the girls of San Francisco truly are.