Left Coast

Jeez Louise, I love me some New York, but there is nothing like my annual pilgrimage to the West courtesy of Rich Mele's couch.

Imagine a place where it's global warming every day, and all the chicks are hot and in bikinis all the time, and it's perpetual summer all the time. Well, if you don't mind being gridlock'd on the 405 for hours at a stretch, there is a place called Los Angeles for you to live in sedate happiness. As a New Jorker, I shouldn't confess to such thoughts, but after a shitty, sleety winter, some high-ass mercury was just what the dermatologist ordered.

Did I say chicks in bikinis? They're everywhere... all about. Clothing is so goddamn optional, it's delicious. And that shot's just at Hermosa Beach, one of the very small beachy communities outside L.A.

Venice Beach, where my host lives, has a gorgeous boardwalk of note that features a selection of crafts, including this bomb-ass full-scale scrap metal Predator. Awesome.

The view from up on the hills is breathtaking... there are plenty of high points in Manhattan, but none that overlook sheer ocean and volcanic bluff. The gap between mountain and coast is gorgeous, where all civilized life teems in Los Angeles County.

But, when in L.A., why the fuck not take that four-hour drive through the Mojave desert to Las Vegas? We did it on a spontaneous lark, and upon arrival on the Strip at 2 in the A.M. we were greeted by a mirage of phantasmagoric light in the scrub desert.

How can I not go to my birthright and try to claim a bit of my heritage from the capitalist usurpers? Here I am with my namesake, the Gaius, at the door of his casino. Before I was ejected, I tried to claim his $50 chips as my own, but the pit boss wouldn't hear of it.

As I explored the labyrinthine corridors of Caesar's Palace, that boorish, Viagra-filled pig Hef was signing Playboys with those tits-on-a-stick he calls girlfriends. The hat, Hef -- Why? Are you sailing home from Las Vegas? Dousche...

Praise be to my host, Rich, for stashing me on the couch and swinging the doors of L.A. wide open. I plucked every last morsel of meat from those red crustcean legs of hedonistic joy, and I go back home a changed man. Los Angeles unlocks each man's pleasure, be it a line of coke on a model's hipbone or a handful of taco at Tito's on Washington Place. I live for the five days each year I get to live in Fantasy-Candy-Boobie-Summer-Land. Only 363 more days to go until 2008's trip...

Bundle of Joy

Hello world! It's me! Little Baby Failure! I've been born again, most recently, in New York City. It might be coincidental what with the 300 millionth person in the U.S. being born this week and all, but my birth is special and extraordinary! Aren't I cute!? Waahh!

I'm here because MetLife, the unscrupulous insurer who's been a New York City presence since 1868, has successfully sold the cluster of buildings known as Stuyvesant Town to an equally unscrupulous realty concern called Tishman Speyer for an ungodly sum of cash plus acres of rotting human flesh and human depravity -- although, I think the flesh was thrown in as a bonus.

With this transaction, we're all witnessing one of the largest tracts of middle- and lower-class housing in the whole of New York City wiped off the map in favor of transforming the 110 building complex into, essentially, a gated luxury community within a generation or so. Much of the apartment units have been rent-controlled or regulated in some fashion, enabling people who aren't hedge-fund managers or Earth-plundering robber-barons to live in the borough of Manhattan. It was an ingenious postwar idea, and it survived happily until Wednesday, October 18.

And that's when I was born! Coo! Poop!

You see, no one of any significant power lifted a goddamn finger to stop the ludicrously-enabled real estate interests of this berg from cherry-picking one of the most undervalued properties in a land mass with diminishing real estate. Gone is a bumper crop of rent-contolled apartments, and gone is any hope of people being able to maintain a generational existence in New York City. Our Plutocrat Mayor decided to do what he does best and "let the market decide" -- which is bullshit, of course, because the playing field in New York has always been tipped in favor of luxury development. There's nothing fair or organic about it.

So, bouncing Baby Failure entered the world that day, heralding a transaction that ensures the middle class get a one-way ticket to western New Jersey or possible homelessness, as the rents in Stuyvesant Town are now allowed to reach "market value" as the units turn over to new ownership. The city's leadership seems pitted in cage match-style combat against its most needy citizens as it rolls over for the same 20 or so real estate entities, who develop the city skyward (at all costs) for people with seven-digit incomes. There's failure all about -- this fucking place is practically a nursery full of dented, asthmatic babies without a future.