4.Show the ability to fall prey to ideals that our grounded in propaganda or demagogue but not able to define either in a sentence.

5.Use outlandish signs or clothing to demonstrate one’s commitment to something they aren’t entirely sure of…

6. Distrust anything related to the liberal media or far left

7. Declare anything the opposing side’s actions as socialist, elitist, just something that ends in -ist.

8. Be against reading factual information or logical reasoning. As long as it’s on television it must be true.

9. Rule out words such as Peaceful, mediation, unity, in one’s dictionary.

10. Prone to physical violence, verbal lashing, to get a point across whether provoked or not.

Because this is the Lakers, not the Clippers, we don’t lose four in a row, in fact this is the first time a Phil Jackson coached team has dropped four straight like ever. We Laker fans don’t take to losing, we reject it like a Hot high school cheerleader does a pimple faced, nerdy geek showing the courage to ask her out.

First off, teams are giving us their best games and we haven’t shown the ability to match their intensity game to game. We did early in the season, but now we are wilting under the pressure having to perform in a playoff atmosphere this early in the season. Also, we’re starting to show our age, and the bench hasn’t stepped up like it did so greatly during the first 15 games.

I think we’ll be fine as soon as we get that win we desperately need which will come Friday against the woeful Sacramento Kings. I’m not in desperation mode as most Laker Fans. I just want us to win the important ones against the likes of the Spurs and Heat. I do believe we will come up aces in statement games like the upcoming Christmas game against the aforementioned Heat.

Kobe and Pau’s games will come around, and the return of Andrew Bynum will boost a tired front line sometime this month…. But the key is the resurgence of a season long struggling Ron Artest, who appears more lost then he did in his first year as a Laker. He offensive game in particular has to improve, I mean come on Ron, you’re missing dead wide open jump shots which is all that we’re asking of you on offense!

I think the struggles of our deep bench will be rectified once Bynum returns and Odom joins a strong second unit consisting of Odom, the killer B’s in Barnes, Brown, and Blake.

So worrisome Laker fans, chalk these struggles of our beloved team to the dog days of December, we will get it back!

Bill Simmon’s, move back to boston, Nerd, The Lakers

UMC feels forced and un(common)  I hope Common’s utter lack of inspiration other than the solid standouts “announcement, “make my day” and “changes” stem from him working on Terminator Salvation and not a career change. 

The good news is that Common has already stirred talk about his next record but he you-tubed his love for UMC, comparing it to a love child, (it’s more like a bastard child that should have been aborted.

I only hope this amazing MC realizes he could lose all his loyal fans(including me) if he stays in this direction, plus dude get rid of the neptunes, they make the same track over and over. Get Kanye to produce the entire next record ala “BE”  I never though I could listen to a Common record and not be able to recite at least one quotable ,

Please, will the real Common please stand up!!!  For now Q-tip’s the “Renaissance ” is the best hip hop record barely in front of Danny’s “And I love H.E.R., who by the way will be taking Common’s place as the premier self conscious MC, if Common doesn’t come wit it by his next record.

I still got hope for Common as their are sum bright sports on UMC,  I’ll just chalk it up to Common wanting to get his dumb,ass misoynystic self one for one record, hopefully it  doesn’t sell, so we can get the I used to love H.E.R Common back

2. Fleet Foxes-Ragged Wood: A brilliant masterpiece of a debut from this Seattle band. This band will definitely conjure up comparisons to My Morning Jacket and Band Of Horses. But they really come into their own with lush, beautiful harmonies that wow the ear and soothe the consciousness. You wouldn’t think a band singing about squirrels and forest creatures would be compelling but they are!!highlight is Blue Ridge Mountains. A must-have for any alternative rock fan

3. Flying Lotus- Los Angeles  a mind altering, genre bending exercise in expert electronic fusion. I can’t really place Flying Lotus into one category. If Madlib fell in love with random Atari sound bits instead of funky blue note samples than he might be Flying Lotus. If you love funk,electronica, jazz, video game sounds,with sharp as a tack drums check this one out. It might take a minute to grow on you, but once it does your will be on a rollercoaster ride you’ve most likely never heard before.

 Highlight: Roberta Flack 

4. Quiet Village- Silent Movie- Another instrumental record on this list that is incredibly soulful, cinematic and unique. I’ve never heard anything like this record. The first track could have been a number off the Bambi sountrack. The songs are all over the place emcompassing multi genres such as soul, funk, rock, jazz on single tracks! A good traveling album. Highlight: Free Rider

5.Deerhunter- Microcastle/Weird Era Cont.

A weird, very bleak but  original masterpiece sophmore album from these hard rockers. This is very deep and exhausting stuff. Only listen when your in a moody mood and preferably at home as this ain’t gym/jogging music. Everyone says to stop with the Radiohead comparisons, but I get that vibe from them but right now I’m Deerhunter more than Radiohead(so sue me) Highlight: Vox Humana

6.Vampire Weekend- Vampire Weekend 

I know I’m jumping on the trendy train with this pick, but I don’t give a what. I love this album as it is a record i wish the Strokes could have made but didn’t have the moxie too! Forget the hype,Strokes/Kings of Leon comparisons. This is a flat out solid record that doesn’t grow old as I’ve been bumping it since I got DL’d it in January. highlight:Campus

7. Danny- And I love H.E.R 

A wonderful soulful, jazzy love letter to the golden age of hip hop. Danny is a true child of the Tribe Called quest/De La soul 90′s socially conscious hip hop era. Yes this is like Common’s famous song I used to love H.E.R but an entire album devoted to the power of “real” hip as the poetic art form of the urban culture. With that comes our next pick. Highlight:Wanderland

8. Q-Tip- The Renaissance 

A truly surprising return to from the Abstract. Tip was always gonna be one of the greatest MC’s to ever touch a mic, but I felt his first record Amplified was well.. Commercialfied! I got my hands of the original version of this album two years ago and although I liked the live sound, I though it was ‘Meh” But this record brings me back to ’94.  Tip even produced most of the record. A must have for any Tribe fans or just fans of true, poetic hip hop, plus Norah Jones and D’angelo guest on it. Highlight:Believe

                                                            The Agony of Sports

Being a Sports freak is like being a heroin addict, you’ve got your extreme highs and you’ve got your extreme lows. Even when you’re not on it, you’re thinking constantly about it, it dominates your thoughts and dream’s.  You fantasize about the ultimate high (your team winning the championship). Some of us try to cut back on our sports obsession; other tries and quit cold turkey.  But the ultimate factor that always brings us back is our team’s success and the pure joy that brings. We are willing to endure losing seasons, favorite players departing for rival teams, as long as the undying hope that our team will win the big one someday (in the Chicago Cubs case probably not in our lifetime or any lifetime).

For myself, an Los Angeles born and raised diehard Lakers and Dodgers fan I’ve experienced every sports related emotion a fan can feel, from pure ecstasy to rock bottom despair (the Lakers’ losing in the finals to the CELTICS!!! This year). When my team loses in that grand fashion I wish they had just lost in the first round of the playoffs to avoid that crash of emotions from being so close to the top only to lose it to your rivals.   These emotions are again once being stirred up, as the Dodgers are experiencing success in the postseason, winning their first postseason series in twenty years.  I’m ecstatic for my team but weary of getting too excited because if they lose, I’ll be down in the dumps.  That’s the tragic Shakespearean quality of sports. You love your team likes it’s your baby and when they lose you feel physical and emotional pain. Sports can be incredibly therapeutic and also can drain the soul.          I believe that during this economic crisis and eventual “digital” depression the escape that sports provides is more needed than ever.  We need heroes to uplift and bring a sense of hope. Obama is “that one.”  Unlike the current economical situation sports aren’t defined by bad investments, greedy, irresponsible CEO’s giving life to that famous monologue Michael Douglas spoke in Wall Street. Sports are the ultimate reality based drama, an unwritten display of talent, heart, and heartbreak.

We, the fans spend hours and hours of our day devoted to our teams, caring for the players as if they were family. We don’t get paid for this (unless you’re a fantasy sports freak as well).  Referencing the lines Chazz Palmentieri spoke in A Bronx Tale, “Mickey Mantle don’t care about you, so why care about him.”  These words evoke non -sports fans sentiments.  Why care about a team, a ballplayer with so much dedication and passion, when they couldn’t give a rat’s ass about you. Are they gonna give back some of the millions to the fans when they lose as payback for all the heartbreak caused? Of course not, we have to live with the loss, while they get to go back to their million dollar penthouses and fake breasted trophy wives. All we, the fans ask out of a player is that he plays his heart out, leaving everything out on the field which isn’t the case with most pro athletes.   The fans don’t get paid to follow their team year in, year out (unless you’re a sportswriter) we do because we need to fill the emotional void of having a neglected social life (in my case and probably others). Especially in these dire times we need a Michael Jordan, A Wayne Gretzky etc. A hero to rescue us, from the disparate, grim reality we are facing.

As I’m still coming to grips with my Dodgers losing to the eventual champs the Philles, I can take solace in the old cliché” At least we lost to the champs” which really doesn’t mean anything.

Anyway I’m completely over baseball and now am fixated on the new NBA season, specifically my LA Lakers who are heavily favored to bring home the gold this year, oh btw have looked fabulous so far in their first two dominating blowout wins.

M.R. WEBB

MY GENERATION

The Ipod at all times carrying

Fresh price tags still on baseball cap wearing

Misogynistic rap music blaring

Existing in an unconscious bubble of digital rage

Trying to live on a $7 an hour wage

Everything built on the “My”

What the “My” wants

What the “My” can get

Or download illegally

We are the slacker backpackers

Blog smack talkers, text messengers

We live to be entertained

Not entertain our souls to live

We don’t read books

We wait for the watered down unoriginal film version

Why bother discovering life by living it in the moment

When we can look it up on Wikipedia and print it

M.R. WEBB

MY GENERATION

We don’t need to be intellectuals

This doesn’t make us more attractive to Myspace

We don’t live in a smart, Woody Allen Rom-Com world 

We photoshop our most beautiful traits and

Post it in Facebook as romantic bait

We have inherited the past generations dysfunctions

And the impending doom of a recession

Drowning polar bears and a government that doesn’t care

Economy breaking down from the wear and tear

Leading to a future that’s up in the air

Has awoken us to a path of power

That we must wear

Realizing we can’t count on luck

We don’t have the luxury to mess up

So we rallied around a savior by the name of Barack Obama

To fight and take our country back

From the greed of Wall Street

The “real” terrorists

We are mad as hell and we won’t take it anymore!

We are all unleashing our inner Michael Moore

We’ve chosen to take our future back as our own

Make sure it doesn’t land in the hands of a Bush clone

Write the new chapter and be in charge of our own fate

The future is ours and this shall still be “My” country

It’s not too late.

                                    Who Am I?

Who am I? That’s a good question. One that can be answered in a variety of different ways by a number of people who have met me. But here is my account.

 I was born at USC hospital in Los Angeles, in March of 1984. My mother was a twenty-four year-old Parisian woman who had immigrated a few years earlier to the states. She was a confused, artistic soul who wasn’t ready to be a mother.

I was conceived out of wedlock. My dad was coming off a messy divorce with a woman he had two children with and had pushed my mother to have an abortion. The last thing he wanted was another child with a woman he had dated for all of six months, and he had given her money for the abortion. My mother let my father believe that she would go through with it, and he thought he was in the clear.

Though she was in no position to have a child (a few years earlier she had a daughter out of wedlock) my mother went through with the pregnancy, concealing my birth from my father until I was six months old. 

When she broke the news, my father threw a fit. He eventually came to see me once, when I was still a baby, but then vanished for sixteen years.

I wasn’t really raised by my mother. She was to busy making it as an actress and a screenwriter. She needed a caretaker that would be like a second mother to me.  After an extensive search, she found a West Los Angeles daycare run by an El Salvadoran woman named Maria. Seeing the unstable home situation I lived in, Maria welcomed me into her home and unofficially adopted me as her own. Here I was, a blond Caucasian boy, being raised in a household filled with El Salvadorans. I could not explain my home life to my schoolmates without awkwardness. I was the poster child for the unconventional L.A. melting pot.

When I was seven, Maria and her family moved to a rough neighborhood in East L.A.  due to financial hardship. I experienced the ups and downs of living in a poor and violent environment.  My Korean neighbors were robbed and murdered which gave me a direct experience of gang violence.  I became desensitized to the never- ending sound of police sirens and helicopters. For the next few years, I moved back and forth between Maria’s house and wherever my nomadic mother lived at the time.  When she moved to Santa Monica, I was allowed to attend the best public elementary school in L.A. County.

During my early school years, I struggled as I was very introverted and prone to constant daydreaming. This led me to have to repeat 1^st Grade. I believe this caused me psychological handicap. I felt I was a failure and nothing I could ever do would be good enough. I made the unconscious choice to give up on my education. I barely got by in my entire school years except in English subjects and anything that required me to be creative. I heavily disliked school as I felt bored and uncomfortable in class. But I did experience some success in my early academic years such as winning a poetry contest while in second grade. Several of my English teachers said that I had promise as a writer but that I lacked focus and commitment academic writing. All I was interested in was writing about sports and films.  If there had been a school where I could have learned only about those subjects, I would have been a valedictorian! Unfortunately there wasn’t any and I floundered in my academic career.

Year after year, I became more unfocused and dispassionate toward school. I fostered the belief that I was never going to accomplish anything that would interest me in a school setting, so I dropped out of high school. I got a job at Starbucks at age 16, enrolled in the local community college because that’s what every parental figure around me was telling me to do. Eventually I dropped out of that school, focusing on earning money at my 9 to 5 job.  I was depressed a lot of the time, unsure of my lot in life.

I still lived with Maria’s family but yearned to be on my own.  I moved to Venice Beach with a friend because of its artistic community and its diverse culture. It was such a thrill to be on my own, in legendary Venice, CA. I was in the epicenter of the most radical, diverse culture in Los Angeles. I befriended transients, starving artists, rollerblading Venice showmen, writers and poets.   I began writing intensely about these colorful characters. I was high on the Venice scene, but after awhile I got burned out from everyone around me being constantly being on drugs. I was lost and felt that is was time to connect with my Mother, whom I hardly knew.  

I remembered her troubled childhood, in which she’d been left homeless on the streets of Paris by her mother at age thirteen. I understood the difficult situation she’d been in while pregnant with me and I felt compassion for her now. I was relieved that she was open to a new relationship with me as well.  My soul wanted to make peace, so I moved in with her and her cat.

Gradually, we began to heal our relationship and I ultimately forgave her for not being there for me. At this point she wanted to search for my father to give me completion. When she finally found him, he agreed to meet me.

Upon meeting him I was very nervous, but then I calmed down, realizing that he was far more nervous than I was. The only thing we had in common was our love for sports. This mutual love is what kept us together.  To this day, we developed a long distance relationship and I’ve forgave him for being M.I.A.

This process of forgiving my mother and father gave me the strength and wisdom that I needed to mature, but still I was unsure of what I wanted to do with my life.

I found purpose in writing poetry expressing the wounded part of my soul. My mother thought that I had a wonderful talent and encouraged me to write. She said I had great wisdom for someone that young.  I remember every adult who had known me since I was a child said this as well.  My poetry was styled after a favorite writer of mine, named Charles Bukowski. I dubbed my self the “New Age, Handsome Bukowski.” Like him I was from Los Angeles and wrote about being an outcast. My poetry came from a place of anger. As I lamented how the American education system had failed me, a part of me wanted to go college so I could make a living writing. However, the fear of failure in a school setting, caused me to abandon the idea of going to college.

I was reading the Sunday LA times, when a story caught my eyes. It was about the famousAnthony Hopkins volunteering his time to teach for free at an acting school in Santa Monica, CA, called the Ruskin School of acting. The story described the program as very transforming and personally revealing. I was immediately interested in becoming a student there. I’d always had an interest in acting and figured this was a place that could bring out the real me. The technique I studied was called the Meisner technique. It forced me to confront difficult emotions and reveal them in front of an audience.  Even though I did not pursue acting,  this had an amazing impact on me. Before I started the school I was incredibly shy and emotionally reserved. I didn’t know how to connect with people or open up about my feelings. This special training gave me an outlet to release my bottled up rage toward my father, which helped me connect with him in a way that we could develop an authentic father son relationship.

After graduating from the acting school, I proceeded to work as a videographer for a digital production company for the next few years. Working camera jobs eventually led to a paid internship at a Television studio in Santa Monica, called KJLA. This was a great gig for me as it offered a chance to work on a live daily news show. I was proud of myself to get such a great job that provided me with invaluable experience without having a college degree. I began to develop my own content, writing stories about issues I felt passionate about. I used the studio’s equipment to produce and edit some of these stories. I pitched them to the network, who found my stories engaging but too provocative too be aired

I began too to see the possibility of a career as a journalist. I would combine my skill as a thought provoking writer with the issues I was naturally drawn to.  Ever since I was a child  I loved reading stories in the LA times about real people. I had to read the paper first thing in the morning. I rode to school dreaming I that I was columnist for the LA times.

Now I can see how that dream could materialize.

 I realized that there were not many journalists out there that represent my generation; the “digital’ generation as I have christened it. I feel it is necessary that young people have a voice, when the future of this generation is hanging in the balance. I want to be one of those voices.

I  am now mature and responsible enough to take on this task.  I believe that with my diverse background, born poet nature and old soul insight, I will be a valuable asset to the journalistic world. The first step would be excelling in college which I am more ready for than ever.