Sweetheart #10

Originally published in August 1996, this is the penultimate Sweetheart zine, my middle school and high school zine.

Sweetheart #9

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

Are you nobody too?

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 (1962), The Sterile Cuckoo (1969), and Bless the Beasts and Children (1971).  Each of these movies contains the sort of ouchy ennui I've been dragging around with me.  They're all a bit obscure – have you seen them?  

DAVID AND LISA 

THE STERILE CUCKOO

BLESS THE BEASTS AND CHILDREN

Anxious Poem

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.

Pretty Pasadena

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 of Fiction.  It was flanked by a cool old tux shop nobody ever went in and a gay bar called Nardi's that had good songs on its juke box you could hear through the walls of the House of Fiction.  Next to Nardi's was an indigent hotel called Crown Hotel.  I loved these buildings, which were all torn down.

I can usually find anything I am curious enough about on the internet, but I can't find any images of these buildings I miss, the tux shop and Bill's store and the gay bar and the residential hotel.  I did find some beautiful photos of Pasadena, though, and am sharing 3 of them below (and 1 from Little Tokyo).  You can find more of these moody Los Angeles photos, by photographer Corey Miller, on http://www.flickr.com/photos/toomuchfire/ and Instagram (@toomuchfire).

Jim's Burgers

Wonder Burgers

Rise Above (La Canada Station Fire)

Wide Eyed Pessimism