How do you hack a hangover? Apparently this is one of the most viewed recent YouTube videos in the how-to section. Well, if you don’t count all the ones related to achieving erection, orgasm, or conception. I haven’t watched any of their social relations vids, but, if the advice is as terrible as this hangover advice, I’d recommend steering clear.
Personally, I’ve found that the most effective way to avoid feeling awful in the morning is to sleep late after a night of not drinking to excess. Then start the day with a delicious iced soy latte, a little sunshine, and a well-balanced, high-protein, low-carb, low-glycemic-index breakfast.
Failing that, I never remember to take those RU-21 pills when starting the night, but they are moderately effective. I am a very big fan of alternating beer with sparkling water during the evening and drinking the Function brand Urban Detox beverages before bed.
As a holiday, St Patrick’s Day has dubious origins but fabulous iconography.
Although the holiday tends to serve as both an expression of Irish pride and an excuse to get thoroughly blotto (Hi Funkatron), the origins of Saint Paddy’s are neither in drunkenness nor Ireland. Although observation of the holiday in the Americas was recorded as early as 1737 in Boston, the first serious St Patrick’s Day parade took place in New York City on March 17, 1762 as a celebration for Irish soldiers in the British military. That would be the British military whose asses we kicked in order to become a sovereign nation and pursue happiness and freedom and stuff. Nonetheless, over the years, the St Patrick’s Day parade in New York City grew into a bigger and bigger event. A lot of the first Irish immigrants to the New World were Protestant, but the 1845 Potato Famine lead to an influx of Catholic Irish population. Although grisly prejudice against the Irish in general and the Catholic Irish in particular lead initially to negative media coverage of the parade, when President Harry Truman attended the festivities in 1948, many people felt that prejudice was really something that the US of A was finally putting behind it. This was perhaps overly optimistic, but still a step in the right direction.
Actually in Ireland, St Patrick’s Day was celebrated as a religious holiday, even though St Patrick was a pretty lame saint. Patrick was essentially a trust fund baby from the 400’s. He was kidnapped from his parents’ estate and held captive for six years, during which time he, go figure, got kinda religious and started hearing voices. When he escaped, he is said to have walked 200 miles to …
What if you threw a fetish party and nobody new came? The same rugged stalwarts from the last five years were present, sporting hardened and stained latex wardrobe, silicone lubricated, lipoed, botoxed expressionless and very drunk. BDSM and drugs/liquor don’t mix but its Hollywierd and the weirdo onlookers, unhappy married couples, and pervy old white dudes in black leather were all in attendance. At least there weren’t any melancholy hipsters or smelly hippies. Then again they know how to party and should have been there.
My editor sends me a mysterious online message about a job should I choose to accept to cover it, a fetish event in said Hollywierd, wedged between X-Mas and New Years. I opened the message on myspace on my nearly defunct once puzzling newfangled phone that will let me navigate online but only in something smaller than 8 pt. font. I ventured to the address via the Red Line at the Hollywood and Vine Station and I was really ready to see something interesting whether it be puke or piss.
The club was situated at The Henry Fonda Theatre and has been known to deny entrance to those that have been placed on the list before, but I was miraculously let in, and my bag barely inspected. I should have smuggled a flask. It was cold out. So I was wearing something odd, not latex, but one of my fav old drag queen outfits from someone that had a much bigger bust and ass than me, that I scored in a Silverlake thrift store. Twas pink satin, and about 8 sizes too big, but I pinned it to my leotard with safety pins and felt fabulous. Underneath my skirt I had two pairs of stockings, and leg warmers, …
I’m not generally a fan of anything which uses the expression “white trash” because I’ve lived in the American South. Pig ignorant people there will generally excuse racist nonsense by explaining that they also have issues with “white trash” like being bigoted on the basis of class, as well as race, is somehow more reasonable than being merely racist alone.
Due to the humorous intent of the occasion, I made an exception, however, for Miss Kitty’s White Trash Ball at Dragonfly this past weekend and, damn, but I had a good time. My homeboy Lange and I hit the Cat and Fiddle beforehand. Having been a fisherman in Alaska after art school (yes, like the TV show), Lange is not such a big fan of crab and raw fish, so I felt it was high time I chose a restaurant with cooked non-seafood items on the menu. The Cat and Fiddle is a music industry hang which bills itself as an English pub in Hollywood, although I am personally partial to the New Orleans fare like their uber-buttery crab fingers. In fact, I ate brussel sprouts and crab fingers and I was thinking that this would be a kinda healthy meal without the butter and Stella Artois. Kind of representative of Los Angeles really, something which looks healthy on the surface, but something just underneath which could probably kill you. Fun fact to know and share: Parts of Casablanca were filmed at the Cat and Fiddle location. When I first saw Casablanca as a teenager, Humphrey Bogart’s Rick was not pretty enough for my taste, but, these days, I have enough pretty in my world that I’m more impressed by force of personality and strength of …
A few weeks back, my good friend TC, lead singer of Satiate and Blue Blood writer, celebrated her birthday. TC is into her Americana, so the theme of the evening was bowling and Pabst Blue Ribbon (and later tittays, tittays, tittays.) We started off the evening at Lucky Strike Lanes. The bowling alley at the flailing Hollywood and Highland mall advertises itself as upscale and I generally end up there fairly regularly when various porn companies rent out the VIP for parties. The teams were roughly divided along band lines of Satiate versus Dead Girls Corporation. I played on the birthday girl’s team and we were utterly pasted by DGC. In my defense, although I do not do an approach, I am not a terrible bowler, but Lucky Strike Lanes has an awful ball selection on a weekend night and their lanes are non-standard length and a bunch of their machinery seems oddly timed. Not in my defense, the other team also had to contend with the same sucky ball selection and non-standard lane length and oddly timed machinery. I swear all the balls seemed like they were made for giant steroid users with baby hands, like sixteen pound balls only a little kid could get a finger spread in. At one point, I accidentally threw one of the balls our lane was using when the system was actually changing pins and my ball went down the middle of the lane, got stopped by the pin-sweeper, and just kind of hung out there. I finally went up the lane to retrieve it. To my friends’ amusement and the bowling alley personnel’s annoyance. I can’t help it if I’m a DIY problem-solver.
There are a lot of people in Los Angeles who get decked out in full regalia every day, just in case. By this, I mean that they blow dry their hair or put product in it or put makeup on and make sure they are wearing something versatile but hot. Every day. Because you never know, in this city, when fabulosity may strike. A lot of actors and models and so forth end up getting discovered because they happened to already be ready to go, in the split second the iron was hot here.
The thing is that it tends to be a split second of hot opportunity. Because, due to a combination of flakitude and being on the forefront of cell phone technology, most party plans here are made at the last minute. If someone phones to tell you to look off your balcony because their car is outside, you can be relatively sure they will not flake before you get across your lawn. I pretty much only use the phone to (a) say I’m running late, (b) ask where to park or (c) compare notes on the party I am at with the party someone else is at. The last minute thing is also because everybody, who already has the hookup, works long and unpredictable hours. The various entertainment industries may yield fun jobs, but work is still work and tends to come first for anyone committed to what they do. Which is an awfully high proportion people in this city. I know I can’t be ready to go all the time because I work way way way too much and I have a lot of days where I end up having to put out unexpected fires. (Flame is the …
I would like to say that I was aware of Tucker Max long before he was ever in print. On account of how I’m such a spectacularly plugged-in girl on the interwebs. The truth is that there are massively high traffic sites which somehow never have audiences intersect. In actuality, I was stuck in the Phoenix airport when visiting my family and, strangely enough, the Phoenix airport actually has a pretty good Borders. Which even more strangely contained a book with a sleek black cover featuring a gentleman with an antisocial smirk holding, I believe, a bottle and a bottle blonde with her visage replaced with a Your Face Here sign. The title was the clever I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. I bought it along with a stack of noir novels.
Tucker Max’s I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell chronicles the author’s drunken and salacious exploits. He came of age as the offspring of a South Beach restauranteur. From his writing, I gather his taste thus unsurprisingly runs to big-titted blondes with fit but not skinny bodies. Mildly Southern demeanor potentially a plus. Too bad for him that his intelligence level is off-the-scale brilliant. Tucker Max has raised hitting on drunk human sluts to the art form, or perhaps sport, of a more advanced species.
He comes across to some reviewers as a misogynist. He does tend to refer to women as filthy whores and mention that they owe him a rib. The following excerpt from a tale of a horseracing tailgate party drinking contest is a pretty representative exchange from his book:
1:58: She raises the first shot and gives me a toast, “Give me chastity and give me continence – but …
‘Shy,’ ‘proper,’ ‘politically correct,’ ‘distinguished’ are just not the words used to describe this man. In fact, most people quite often would go with, ‘vulgar,’ ‘uncouth,’ ‘improper’ and a ‘highly charged ball of beer fueled sexual energy.’ I mean, we’re talking about a guy, whose nickname is “Sketchy.” Speaking of which, he also happens to be the only person I know who’s named ‘Racci.’ Never could a person be more appropriately named.
I met him approximately fourteen years ago when I went to go cover an old band of his from Atlanta doing a show in Cocoa Beach, Florida when I was running a fanzine out of Tampa. It was a weird venue, and honestly, the most I can remember of that night was they wouldn’t turn off the smoke machine and it made for horrible photos. We were introduced at that show, but didn’t really pass more than a few words.
A few weeks later, one of my friends, who was super into him at the time, asked me to go with her to see his band up in Atlanta, GA. I figured I’d get some better live photos than the previous shots to go with my review. I ended up being pretty much a third wheel and went out to the stairwell to drink some beer alone when my friend left the hotel leaving Racci and me on the stairway enjoying conversation. That was our very first discussion and the beginning of a very hilariously awesome friendship. All over some girl, some beer and some conversations at a Hampton Inn. You ever have snapshots of your memories? This stairwell with two people and a case of beer, is one …
Estimated opening weekend gross for Accepted is around $10 million, which is hunky-dorey for a movie with a production budget of only around $23 million. I don’t know what percentage of those movie-goers also attended Comic Con or talked to someone who did, but Accepted did the most brilliant promotion at the convention.
Comic Con is the largest convention of its type in the U.S. This year, significantly more than a hundred thousand people showed up. Which is significantly more than the forty thousand or so the city of San Diego could probably handle. It was impossible to park anywhere near the convention center and it was approximately one billion degrees and the food in the convention center concessions started tasting kinda rancid by the second day. And, even for pretty literally nauseating food, the lines were likely to take an hour or so. Which cuts down on one’s collectible-browsing time. So, by the end of the day, everyone was sort of running on empty, streaming out of the San Diego Convention Center en masse, hungry and a long way, under a hot sun, from their transportation.
So the promoters of the Accepted movie threw a collegiate-style beer blast and barbeque across the street. The basic concept of the flick is that an enterprising young man is rejected from every college he applies to, so he creates his own institution of higher learning called South Harmon Institute of Technology. Yes, that acronym is what you think it is. The star-studded event featured a skateboard ramp and a giant banner reading “Welcome SHITheads” with the San Diego Gaslamp district as a backdrop. While waiting in a refreshingly …
What if you threw a fetish party and nobody new came? The same rugged stalwarts from the last five years were present, sporting hardened and stained latex wardrobe, silicone lubricated, lipoed, botoxed expressionless and very drunk. BDSM and drugs/liquor don’t mix but its Hollywierd and the weirdo onlookers, unhappy married couples, and pervy old white dudes in black leather were all in attendance. At least there weren’t any melancholy hipsters or smelly hippies. Then again they know how to party and should have been there.
I would like to say that I was aware of 
‘Shy,’ ‘proper,’ ‘politically correct,’ ‘distinguished’ are just not the words used to describe this man. In fact, most people quite often would go with, ‘vulgar,’ ‘uncouth,’ ‘improper’ and a ‘highly charged ball of beer fueled sexual energy.’ I mean, we’re talking about a guy, whose nickname is “Sketchy.” Speaking of which, he also happens to be the only person I know who’s named ‘Racci.’ Never could a person be more appropriately named.
