sweetheart redux

This is a zine I did a few years ago. Click on the image to make it bigger if you're having a hard time reading it. love, princess robin

I lived in Philadelphia for a couple years recently and I still don’t know what to make of the experience. An important piece of information to back up how “what just happened?” I still am about having lived there is the fact that neither Geof nor myself ever visited Philly before we moved there. I used to take the Greyhound and Amtrak around the country a lot, and on one of those trips, I guess it must have been on the bus, I woke up at sunrise just as we were passing through a rural part of Pennsylvania, and it was breathtakingly beautiful, so for a few years after that I used to often say I was going to move to PA. I don’t think I really meant it, I just like to say things just to say them sometimes, to keep the conversation lively or whatever, but in any event, I think me telling people I was going to live in PA someday was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Anyway, I don’t even know where to start, trying to distill my Philly experience, but I think I’ll just go with the main, possi...

There’s an old adage, probably at least 20 years old, that, roughly quoted (from a song by the Smiths), goes: “I was looking for a job and then I got a job, and heaven knows I’m miserable now.” I bring this up because I’m used to complaining about having too much time on my hands, and I just started a perfectly fine (in the future, I foresee thinking it’s even great) job, so if you are unfortunate enough to be in earshot of me this week, you will probably hear me complain about being overwhelmed instead of the recent common complaint of unerwhelment. If it’s not one thing, it’s another, with some people (me!). Anyway, I was thinking about free time. Do only single people and Buddhists enjoy free time? Single people spend their free time doing all these great activities where they might just run into someone to fall in love with (dj’d pool parties on the roof of The Standard, artwalks in Chinatown, blah blah blah), and Buddhists know how to chill out: with their free time, they dr...

In case you've never been to the touristy part of Hollywood Blvd., which I live a couple blocks from, there's been a growing phenomenon the past few years: people who I can only assume are incredibly poor & in some cases homeless dress up like characters and stand in front of Grauman's Chinese Theatre. Visiting yokels take pictures posed with these characters and then usually understand that they're expected to pay a little something to the person in the costume (like a dollar). Sometimes these characters are a bit of a nuisance, but I'm sure that dressing up like Elmo for dollars on a 90 degree day, as a creative way of panhandling, is probably sort of a nuisance to the costumed people. anyway, here's what recently happened, in this fair city of HOllywood: http://www.ktla.com/news/landing/ktla-hollywood-characters,0,2280392.story okay, i always expected there to be a big sweep that'd get rid of the characters in front of the theatre. that in itself...

Hmmm, so nobody's very interested in reading my novel in serialized form in the blog format, it seems. Duly noted, and that's okay. What've I been thinking about lately? The Lakers Riot that we had here in Los Angeles, the celebratory riot in downtown, got me thinking about human nature & class issues. I was unfairly attacked when I was a teenager, by a mob of people, so my gut reaction is to be upset by groups of people giving in to mob mentality. while I've increasingly come to appreciate the spirit of anarchy, I still have mixed feelings about the Rodney King Riots. It was just so unfair that Reginald Denny got beaten up so bad, it seemed like such a misdirection of anger. But then, his beating was no worse than the beating King'd received from cops who were allowed to get away with it. My husband is usually pro-riot, so I've thought about the good sides of that riot of the nineties, and I do think that it was the result of a bunch of disenfranchised...

I think I might be a textbook case of an only child born of interesting parents and raised in los angeles: i was lonely, did stuff for attention, and much of the stuff done for attention involved art projects featuring dolls (my best friends!). anyway, this particular photo must've fallen out of one of my oldest photo albums last night, when i was scanning some old photos of friends to put up on Facebook. i just found it on the desk this morning and it seemed a bit like magic. two of these dolls were ken dolls i turned into trannies, & the girl dolls were unique in their own right. i brought them to school often, when i was in 7th grade, & me & my "weird" clique of friends played with them at lunch. definitely a sweet bunch of kids who wanted it known that we weren't just anyone, that we were unique. the two tackle fish that the african-american barbie is holding were named alfred and zappa, as my scrupulous teenage documentation states: these were...