2 Broke Girls Drinking Game!!

EVERY TIME THEY SAY "HIPSTER", YOU KILL YOURSELF.

Gavin Rossdale: Born Loser

I'm always at the Melrose Trading Post!!

This past Sunday, I sold at the Melrose Trading Post at Fairfax High School and took some pictures to give you a closer look at the amazing people that make every Sunday wonderful in West Hollywood. 

James picked up this awesome 90's Electric Fishing T from Repose with a lake scene that wraps around the entire shirt. 

 

Here's the lovely Megan of Vintage Redeux who kills it with her partner Rachel every week.

Bianca (right) one-upped her boyfriend Kahli when she got Repose's sweet 70's bell bottoms, with burnt orange and tan suede sides.  

Beardo got one of my dead-stock art deco 80s watches... I just found some more that I had lost thanks to Krista, who found them in her car.  I left them there last Rose Bowl :(

Larissa found this sick vintage riveted Mustang jacket from Repose, check out her blog: velvetcodeine.blogspot.com!!

Justine picked up one of Repose's mini cut-off denim vests.  These sell as fast as I can cut them, so keep buying and I will keep supplying.

Addison looks great in this Navajo button-down.  If there's one thing Repose does well, it's this style.

Here are the lovely Joy, Louie, and Andrea Nicole of District Vanity Magazine, always filled with love.

The darling Junko Watanabe of Purrr Remake Los Angeles has a crowded booth all day.

What can I say there were a lot of back-to-school shoppers and Page got a mini-Pancho from Repose.

Sabin wins the prestigious "Best Dressed" award from Repose in her blue striped 70's knit dress.

Wallis looks great in this silk, scarf-print blouse with fancy gold buttons.  Just steam it, girl.

Manuel scored this western shirt and bollo tie from Repose!!

Daniel of Possession Vintage always keeps it real.

Here's John of The Cowboy Trip who has all the boots I want!!

Here's a spacesuit John has from the planet Xirqon, I'd say.

We end our story with a heart-warming tale, wherein Natalie (center) had ridden her bike to the flea market and shopped too hard, so she couldn't carry her stuff home in plastic bags on her bike.  Being the full service salesman he is, my bro David of The Love Bug vintage gave her a vintage back-pack for free so she could continue shopping with no worries.  How thoughtful!

Watts Towers: Nuestro Pueblo

        I trekked it out to South Central to see the Watts Towers, an inspiring work by Simon Rodia, an Italian immigrant who designed and built his own personal Sagrada Familia of mortar and steel, adorned by found objects: seashells, soda bottles, cracked tiles, porcelain, and geodes.

        The mortar is meticulously embellished with hand-set impressions of his own tools or other patterns.

Biutiful

                So I guess no one wants to exit a theatre trying to sort out an emotional  burden of their own susceptibility to grief and death, but why then did Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful make me feel so alive?  It’s a story about powerlessness, economic despair, wretchedness, a broken family.  The movie pounds the audience with reality, but it does not leave out the possibility that this tragic life is beautiful (elegantly misspelled “biutiful” by his daughter, Ana, played by the darling Hanaa Bouchaiib.) 

                This tragedy follows the lonesome travails of Uxbal (the inimitable Javier Bardem), who raises two children by himself, his estranged wife, Marambra, the enchanting Maricel Álvarez, the victim of bipolarity and drug addiction.  Unlike the flighty Marambra, who is unaccountable for her actions, Uxbal puts his children first, and sees even cancer as just another obstacle for his family, whom he will protect relententlessly.  Uxbal resists Marambra’s attempts to re-enter the children’s life, and it becomes apparent Uxbal, as in his other struggles, cannot control Marambra but merely cope with disappointing outcomes.  A plot synopsis would probably read closer to a torture list, and the viewer must endure each devastating blow to Uxbal in an absolutely harrowing film experience. 

                And then, as Uxbal dies in his daughter’s bed, in one flash of light, all is redeemed.  Returning to a snowy visage from the opening scene, Uxbal reunites with his dead father or dead father’s soul, appearing younger than Uxbal himself, having died fighting Franco when Uxbal was young.  In life, Uxbal has not the time to even reflect on his hardships, it is only death that releases him to this quiet winter scene.  His father was unobtainable in life, just as serenity and contentedness are incompatible with our tragic lives.  It is all the pain Uxbal endures that cement his character, this criminal of counterfeits and sweatshops, who has no time for redemption in this life, but finds salvation in the battle itself.  Not all heroes live to taste the spoils of victory, and in this life we can only count on the struggle and not the release of struggle.  Like a dying owl spitting a hairball from its beak, we must live with uncomfortableness and disaster.  The audience receives redemption along with Uxbal after 2 hours of unpleasantness, realizing that traumas and chrises measure our resolve.  Suffering is not merely a gauge of our misfortunes, it is the only way to prove our heroics.  And we will triumph.  Bravery and honor are sure to come to those with the least, as all their troubles remove doubt of the determined beauty of our souls.  

The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac

“Everything was fine with the Zen Lunatics, the nut wagon was too far away to hear us.”            

                So I hate for this to sound like a review.  I’m hoping for this not to come off as a GoodReads rant about how some 60 year-old classic is semi-overrated (it’s not) but here’s my take anyways.  Let’s call it a response. 

                It was the perfect time to read The Dharma Bums as I have begun studying Buddhism recently, more-so mysticism than Buddhism, but it’s easy to relate to Kerouac’s Ray Smith, a writer and self-proclaimed Bhikku,  or Buddhist monk, literally “beggar” or “one who lives by alms”, drifting up and down the coast of the Pacific.  Smith hops aboard the 24-hour Midnight Ghost freight train, hitchhikes on the wrong side of the road, and sleeps on any patch of ground cops are unlikely to notice.  Smith’s version of Buddhism allows for these long flights of illegal travel, binge drinking, occasional marijuana use, and, triple, excuse me, quadruple-teaming a beautiful blonde named Princess, a Bodhisattva, naturally, in a Buddhist ritual called “yabyum”.  This disparity between Ray’s interpretation of a Bhikku’s lifestyle with the traditional vision of the chaste, still Buddha abstaining from all worldly pleasures, is the crux of the book.  This incongruity would make plenty actual Bhikku’s throw down the lascivious book in disgust, but I think Ray’s optimistic naïveté is endearing, and he’s still searching and growing as all Bhikkus must do.  He doesn’t claim to be finished.

                His inspiration and validation for his particular brand of Buddhism comes from the great free solitary wanderers like Han Shan, a Chines e scholar hidden from the big city atop a treacherous snowy mountain, who “scribbles on the sides of cliffs hundreds of miles away from any other living beings.”  Ray’s friend Japhy, a wise and experienced scholar of Dharma, translates Han Shan’s “Cold Mountain” from the original Chinese.  Japhy is Ray’s wildman Bhikku mentor from logger land in the Pacific Northwest, welcoming his stowaway friend, Ray, to pre-hippie 1950’s San Francisco, their West Coast home base (not that either could hold a residence with their penchant for wandering), also home to their merry band of “Zen Lunatic” friends, Beat writers and poets living in decadent humility.  Ray is the most zealous student of Dharma amongst his Beat friends, and he eagerly devours any Truth Japhy volunteers.

                Perception is crucial in Buddhism, as paradoxical proverbs challenge traditional (particularly Western) logic.  To understand reality, one must remove his ego, and discover that the outside world is full of distraction, obfuscating the true godly nature of the world, which one can only see after searching his inner soul for Enlightenment.  A drifter teaches Ray that standing on his head will circulate his blood and cure his phlebitis.  Ray literally has to turn things upside down to see the truth.  Spending a summer atop a mountain in solitude as a lookout for forest fires, Ray stands on his head and realizes the mountains don’t just look upside-down, they are upside-down.  So is he.  It is only: “gravity holding us all intact upsidedown against a surface globe of earth in infinite empty space.”

                Japhy, unlike the less experienced Ray, can meditate indoors, but he also understands the importance of solitude in nature, taking Ray on physically demanding and dangerous hikes, likely to exhaust their sensory organs and reduce their consciousnesses’ dependency on sensual stimulants, bringing them closer to a meditative state.  The mountaintop covers the Bhikku’s heads with clouds, reduces the oxygen to their brains, and demands a journey away from civilization to a place closer to heaven.  Ray has a realization atop the treacherous Matterhorn  Mountain, after his fear of heights paralyzes him only minutes from the top: “Ah Japhy you taught me the final lesson of them all, you can’t fall off a mountain.”  

                Perhaps Ray realizes his fear and ignorance are the only things keeping him from God, like the lacerating wind and “frightening planetary space clouds” left him trembling in the fetal position on that impossibly high cliff, just a few hundred feet from the top.  And this is Ray’s redemption.  Humble enough to learn, he delights in the hope Buddhism imparts and the possibilities extant, like sturdy climbing rocks on the path to Nirvana. 

Echo Park Art and Design Fair at the Warehouse L.A.

Come check out the Echo Park Art Walk  and see Repose and The Love Bug at The Warehouse at 1197 W. Sunset Bl. Los Angeles CA 90026 on the corner of Marion Ave.