sweetheart redux

 Hello friends, this here is #9 of the zine I published in middle school and high school, published April 1996. 

I haven't been very chatty on here this past week.  I feel down because of my own usual problems, but also the news has really been getting me down this week, mostly the mass shooting in OC and the sad details I keep hearing about the country singer Mindy McReady's suicide.  I tried to enact a Harry Potter movie only viewing policy in my house for the week, for the window of time we watch TV at night, to avoid the real world and the news, but since I am not a somehow/magically all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful 9 year old, this enactment went unheeded.  Anyway this morning I was thinking about these 3 movies that I loved in my teens that I grouped all together because they were all traumatically sad and poignant to the point where I could only watch them once in my whole life (except the Sterile Cuckoo, which I think I would watch once DAILY if I could find a copy anywhere), even though I used to count them among my favorite movies.  They are David and Lisa (19...

Loudly I waited afraid of the kill No doctor saved me and no doctor will The cross eyes and fat thighs and wet sighs and red Everything's thoroughly hollowly dead All the cracked children's books and the nights in my head All are thoroughly sleeplessly recklessly dead The Ovaltine covered with dust in a shed It's all coated and bloated and breathlessly dead.

The first town I ever lived in was Pasadena, a place famous for old money and white people, a fuddy-duddy suburban vibe.  That's mostly true, especially these days, when there are more atrocious condos going up every time I go there.  There really some of the ugliest buildings ever and there are blocks and blocks of them, like this:   There are still some things I like in Pasadena, like a $2 movie theatre called The Academy, but when I go there it makes me sad to see all the places I knew and loved as a child torn down and replaced.  In particular, I miss how the area on Colorado Boulevard referred to as the "Playhouse District" used to be, before it was all revamped to be 'an eclectic, cosmopolitan community rich in history and architecture'(according to its website ) .  Before it was revamped, my mom's best friend Bill owned the best used bookstore ever, and it stood where a Laemmle's movie theatre now stands.  The Bookstore was called House...

the faces of Sam McPheeters Gosh, I wish TV and the internet hadn't burned through my attention span, because I want to write an intro about Sam McPheeters that is worthy of the interview he gave me, but I'm so lazy.   When I lived in Olympia from 1997-2001, all my friends were so excited when Men's Recovery Project (one of McPheeters' bands) came to town .  Born Against, his earlier band, was really beloved, but I didn't know about them at the time, so I was unprepared for the audience fervor at the Men's Recovery Project show, one of their shows where Sam dressed up as Patrick Henry and recited the entire "Give Me Liberty" speech, which I thought was a trademark of his but as you will read, was more of a passing fancy.  The thing of it is, me and my friend stood out in the  audience because we were standing on a table to see better, so he ended up singling u s out to recite part of the spe e ch to, like "It is in vain, sir, to extenuate...