The fifth annual No Pants Metro Ride was yesterday and I missed it!
If you know me, that sounds like my thing (it also sounds like my friend Mark in LA, who put together some of the most interesting dinner parties in history, including ‘Absinthe and Fellini,’ ‘No Utensils Restaurant Night,’ and ‘Spin the Bottle’).
Oh well. Anyway, here are pictures.
The poet Robert Hass, in particular, got some press for his involvement in an Occupy protest in Berkeley. He probably got more press than other poets who participated by virtue of his status as a former poet laureate.
But this piece asks the question: would we have paid as much attention to what he had say if he had said it, not as he did, in a newspaper op-ed, but in a poem?
Depressingly, I think we all know the answer to that.
A paean to the Borders in Palo Alto.
I picked up my better half at a shopping center in the DC suburbs. Coming in, I noticed that it listed Borders as a tenant on the sign. Which made me realize that that space is almost certainly empty now.
The Bodhi Tree Bookstore, once a favorite haunt of mine back in my Hollywood days (the location, not the industry), will, apparently, disappear from existence should a buyer not be found by New Year’s Eve.
Raise a glass of green tea (which they used to offer for free to visitors) in their memory, should, as expected, no white knight come in to save them.
Yeah. I said it.
‘Cause LA puts poetry on its damn metro cards. Take that SF!
By the way, the LA subway system is underrated. I used to take it quite a bit.
Irony is dead. Again.
Another group of poets coming out in support of the Occupy Movement and its emphasis on addressing the growing economy inequality in our country – OccuPoetry.
One of the founders is a professor at UC Davis – the university where police pepper sprayed students engaged in non-violent resistance.
I have been complaining about the struggles of bookstores for some time, but I’ve neglected another industry in a similar situation – record stores.
Anecdotally, I gather that some indie record stores are reversing the slide and building their business through a focus on vinyl records and a focus on the community (hosting events, supporting and promoting the albums of local bands, etc).
However, the one I remember from high school, RTO (Record & Tape Outlet) in Dunedin, Florida, closed down. It was a cool kids hangout, with classic record store geeks both behind the counter and browsing in the aisles (yes – you can be both cool and a geek, as long as we’re talking about music).
And when I lived in Hollywood, slipping down the boulevard to the Virgin Megastore at Hollywood and Highland was a great way to spend a little time, but the last Virgin Megastore closed down in 2009, so that’s gone now, too.
I don’t know what is going on, but the sale of the struggling bookstore, the Bodhi Tree, appears to have stumbled.
He’s actually in.
This probably hurts LeMieux and McCallister the most. LeMieux because he will no longer have the “moderate” tag to himself. McCallister because he was never really doing well because people liked him, but just because they weren’t sold on Hasner and LeMieux – and now Mack will be the new shiny object for folks to look at.
The question now becomes whether Mack will be able to pull in the DC money that was flowing more to LeMieux and how much will state based interests put into independent expenditures on Hasner’s behalf (the corollary being whether Mack can raise enough to deal with those IEs).
Also, how much heat will he get for being married to a California congresswoman? It makes for a fine argument that he’s not really as deeply attached to Florida as he ought to be – presumably he’s spending not insignificant time in her Palm Spring district, as well spending a lot of time keeping house together in Washington. I don’t pretend to know the answers, but someone’s going to make hay out of this.
the coffee philosopher 