Sunday, May 10, 2009

Saturday, May 2, 2009

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

jr valrey

His career in journalism began after he attended a summer journalism program at San Francisco State as an eleventh grader. While attending St. Joseph's Catholic School in Alameda, he wrote an article about the racism that he said he and other nonwhite students faced within the Catholic school system. The article was published in the San Francisco Examiner on the same day that O.J. Simpson was found not guilty, and consequently received a lot of attention. When a teacher mentioned in the article threatened to sue, several local journalists came to Valrey's defense.

"They came to my defense and I really saw the power of journalism in my own life," Valrey recalled. When the teacher in question learned he had the support of the Examiner's lawyers, Valrey says she had a "religious transformation" and decided not to sue. "When I had seen the power of journalism, I saw that I could use it in the interests of not just myself but to get justice for my community.

Thursday, April 16, 2009

the mighty boosh

http://www.adultswim.com/video/?episodeID=8a25059520a465b60120a5554dae000a

The Mighty Boosh had one of those ginormous billboards up on Sunset. Exciting to see noel's face so BIG.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

doctors are 'failing to spot Asperger's in girls'

It is a condition on the autistic spectrum that has long been known to affect boys, who may have obsessive interests or struggle to make friends. Now an expert says many more girls have it than was thought, and failure to diagnose them can lead to misery and self-harm. Amelia Hill reports

Amelia Hill The Observer, Sunday 12 April 2009

Article historyDoctors are failing to diagnose thousands of girls who have Asperger's syndrome, according to one of the world's leading experts. Dr Judith Gould has accused the medical world of missing and overlooking girls with the condition, condemning them to lives of such misery that many resort to extreme self-harm and anorexia.

Gould and her colleague, Lorna Wing, carried out ground-breaking research into the link between Asperger's syndrome, autism and other pervasive developmental disorders in 1979. Exploiting that insight, they pioneered the concept of the autism spectrum. Now Gould, a chartered consultant clinical psychologist with more than 35 years' experience in autism spectrum disorders, has called on the government for a packet of measures to help girls with Asperger's.

Gould, who is director of the National Autistic Society's Lorna Wing centre for autism and co-founder of the Centre for Social and Communication Disorders, said: "We're failing girls at the moment. We are doing many thousands of them a great disservice. They are either not being picked up in the first place, but if they ask for help they are being turned away. Even if they are referred for diagnosis, they are commonly rejected."

The government is about to launch a consultation on a new national strategy on autism. Gould and the National Autistic Society want the final strategy - due at the end of the year - explicitly to address the misconceptions about gender that can make accessing help, support and services particularly difficult for girls and women.

"Women tell us that these misconceptions can make their particular battles and struggles even more difficult," said Jane Asher, the society's president. "They say that getting a diagnosis in the first place can often feel like an insurmountable hurdle, with many doctors unaware that the condition can affect females."

More children are being diagnosed with Asperger's today than ever before. A decade ago one in 1,000 children in the UK was thought to have an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Five years ago that had increased to one in 500. Today the figure stands at one in 100.

It remains unclear as to whether the increase in diagnoses is caused by a true increase in the disorder, or is the result of increased awareness of autism and its broad characteristics.

Even less well understood, said Gould, is the difference in prevalence rates between boys and girls. The statistic most commonly reported is that ASDs are four times more common in males than in females. Many clinicians, however, believe that the ratio is as high as 16 boys to every girl. But Gould believes that significantly more girls have the condition than is recognised; she estimates the ratio to be 2.5 boys to every girl.

"Girls are not being picked up because there is still a stereotyped view of what Asperger's is, which is based entirely on how boys present with the condition," she said. "Professionals are not up to speed in knowing how girls present. We are working with the government to ensure they highlight this concern in their upcoming consultation. We are hoping to convince them to target this much under-investigated but vitally important issue."

Tony Attwood, founder of the first diagnostic and treatment clinic for children and adults with Asperger's, and author of The Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome, agreed with Gould's estimation of a 2.5:1 ratio of boys to girls. "The bottom line is that we understand far too little about girls with ASDs because we diagnose autism based on a male conceptualisation of the condition. We need a complete paradigm shift," he said.

"We need to draw up a female version of Asperger's that identifies girls on the basis of the way they present, and we need to do this as a matter of urgency: undiagnosed Asperger's can create devastatingly low self-esteem in girls. In my experience, up to 20% of female anorexics have undiagnosed Asperger's."

Girls slip through the diagnostic net, said Attwood, because they are so good at camouflaging or masking their symptoms. "Boys tend to externalise their problems, while girls learn that, if they're good, their differences will not be noticed," he said. "Boys go into attack mode when frustrated, while girls suffer in silence and become passive-aggressive. Girls learn to appease and apologise. They learn to observe people from a distance and imitate them. It is only if you look closely and ask the right questions, you see the terror in their eyes and see that their reactions are a learnt script."

Girls also escape diagnosis, said Attwood, because they are more social than boys with the condition. Their symptoms can also be missed because it is the intensity of their interests that is unusual, and not the oddity of what they do.

"The impairments to their social life or interests tend not to stand out in the same way as boys' do," he said. "They might have one friend, while boys with the condition won't have any. Also, boys hyperfocus on facts and certain interests, such as trains or weather. Girls escape into fiction. They have imaginary friends, live in another world with fairies and witches, obsessively watch soap operas or become intensely interested in celebrities."

Professor David Skuse, head of the behavioural and brain sciences unit at the Institute of Child Health, teaches clinicians to diagnose the condition. "Increasingly fewer girls are diagnosed as their IQ reaches 100, the population average," he said. "Some people maintain this is because girls simply don't have Asperger's, but I would argue that brighter girls, especially those who are more verbal, are able to mask and compensate for their condition. I make sure I emphasise the difference in the ways boys and girls present when I train clinicians, because I am certain that girls are being failed by the system, especially those with higher IQs," he added. "My belief is that, if we can prove the ratio of boys to girls is as high as many of us suspect, it would be as significant a milestone in this field as the discovery that the condition is on a spectrum."

Saturday, April 4, 2009

consciousness expansion


James told the girls: watch this it will make you smarter. They huddled around the monitor: no wait, shut up, i need this. i need to be smarter

Friday, March 27, 2009

Friday, March 13, 2009

now that's a boy band


I never knew the words to this song...makes a nice poem...

Breaking away with the beast of both worlds
A smile that you can't disguise
Every minute I keep finding
Clues that you leave behind.
Save me from these reminders
As if I'd forget tonight
This time la luna,

I light my torch and wave it for the...
New moon on monday
And a firedance through the night
I stayed the cold day with a lonely satellite

Thursday, March 12, 2009

alexander mcqueen




dark provocation, as wwd said. leigh bowery lives on. "One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art." - Oscar Wilde

ken weathersby

great stuff...check him out

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Monday, March 9, 2009

must cut down on the sugar

but i just got the girls scout cookies i ordered at the office. ok after that...

Friday, March 6, 2009

greatness: jg ballard

WHAT I BELIEVE

I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.

I believe in my own obsessions, in the beauty of the car crash, in the peace of the submerged forest, in the excitements of the deserted holiday beach, in the elegance of automobile graveyards, in the mystery of multi-storey car parks, in the poetry of abandoned hotels.

I believe in the forgotten runways of Wake Island, pointing towards the Pacifics of our imaginations.

I believe in the mysterious beauty of Margaret Thatcher, in the arch of her nostrils and the sheen on her lower lip; in the melancholy of wounded Argentine conscripts; in the haunted smiles of filling station personnel; in my dream of Margaret Thatcher caressed by that young Argentine soldier in a forgotten motel watched by a tubercular filling station attendant.

I believe in the beauty of all women, in the treachery of their imaginations, so close to my heart; in the junction of their disenchanted bodies with the enchanted chromium rails of supermarket counters; in their warm tolerance of my perversions.

I believe in the death of tomorrow, in the exhaustion of time, in our search for a new time within the smiles of auto-route waitresses and the tired eyes of air-traffic controllers at out-of-season airports. I

believe in the genital organs of great men and women, in the body postures of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Princess Di, in the sweet odors emanating from their lips as they regard the cameras of the entire world.

I believe in madness, in the truth of the inexplicable, in the common sense of stones, in the lunacy of flowers, in the disease stored up for the human race by the Apollo astronauts.

I believe in nothing.

I believe in Max Ernst, Delvaux, Dali, Titian, Goya, Leonardo, Vermeer, Chirico, Magritte, Redon, Duerer, Tanguy, the Facteur Cheval, the Watts Towers, Boecklin, Francis Bacon, and all the invisible artists within the psychiatric institutions of the planet.

I believe in the impossibility of existence, in the humour of mountains, in the absurdity of electromagnetism, in the farce of geometry, in the cruelty of arithmetic, in the murderous intent of logic.

I believe in adolescent women, in their corruption by their own leg stances, in the purity of their disheveled bodies, in the traces of their pudenda left in the bathrooms of shabby motels.

I believe in flight, in the beauty of the wing, and in the beauty of everything that has ever flown, in the stone thrown by a small child that carries with it the wisdom of statesmen and midwives.

I believe in the gentleness of the surgeon's knife, in the limitless geometry of the cinema screen, in the hidden universe within supermarkets, in the loneliness of the sun, in the garrulousness of planets, in the repetitiveness or ourselves, in the inexistence of the universe and the boredom of the atom.

I believe in the light cast by video-recorders in department store windows, in the messianic insights of the radiator grilles of showroom automobiles, in the elegance of the oil stains on the engine nacelles of 747s parked on airport tarmacs.

I believe in the non-existence of the past, in the death of the future, and the infinite possibilities of the present.

I believe in the derangement of the senses: in Rimbaud, William Burroughs, Huysmans, Genet, Celine, Swift, Defoe, Carroll, Coleridge, Kafka.

I believe in the designers of the Pyramids, the Empire State Building, the Berlin Fuehrerbunker, the Wake Island runways.

I believe in the body odors of Princess Di.

I believe in the next five minutes.

I believe in the history of my feet.

I believe in migraines, the boredom of afternoons, the fear of calendars, the treachery of clocks.

I believe in anxiety, psychosis and despair.

I believe in the perversions, in the infatuations with trees, princesses, prime ministers, derelict filling stations (more beautiful than the Taj Mahal), clouds and birds.

I believe in the death of the emotions and the triumph of the imagination.

I believe in Tokyo, Benidorm, La Grande Motte, Wake Island, Eniwetok, Dealey Plaza.

I believe in alcoholism, venereal disease, fever and exhaustion.

I believe in pain.

I believe in despair.

I believe in all children.

I believe in maps, diagrams, codes, chess-games, puzzles, airline timetables, airport indicator signs.

I believe all excuses.

I believe all reasons.

I believe all hallucinations.

I believe all anger.

I believe all mythologies, memories, lies, fantasies, evasions.

I believe in the mystery and melancholy of a hand, in the kindness of trees, in the wisdom of light.

sweet..tim sullivan

11 Things: 144 Things I Love
Tim Sullivan
Thursday, March 5, 2009


1. The sky to the east at sunrise. 2. ShamWow! 3. Iced coffee. 4. Fresca. 5. T. Rex. 6. Club Six. 7. "The Magnificent Seven." 8. Dirk McQuickly. 9. "The White Album." 10. 10cc. 11. Root beer. 12. Root Division. 13. Funston Ave. 14. Hubris. 15. Dustin Pedroia. 16. Jack Boulware. 17. Jack Kerouac.18. J. Georgie's Donuts, Teriyaki and Hamburger. 19. The pink elephants at Zeitgeist. 20. The Hemlock jukebox. 21. The Homestead jukebox. 22. Bicycles. 23. Home. 24. Mary Lynn Rajskub. 25. Okonomiyaki. 26. Dubaku. 27. Spoon. 28. Spooning. 29. Leaving. 30. Returning. 31. Burlingame Museum of Pez Memorabilia.
32. GETV. 33. The 33 bus. 34. David Ortiz. 35. Rich Aurilia. 36. Gonzo Grape Bubblicious. 37. Gonzo journalism. 38. .38 Special. 39. Sutro Baths. 40. Sutro Tower. 41. Mabu dofu. 42. Bouncer. 43. Bubbles. 44. Breaking rules. 45. Pedro Martinez. 46. Pancakes. 47. Darkness. 48. The Dark Room. 49. "Donnie Darko." 50. Shabu-shabu. 51. Poutine. 52. Protein. 53. "Damages." 54. Brutal honesty. 55. Tim Lincecum. 56. Moxie. 57. The Roxie. 58. Joan Jett. 59. Tina Weymouth. 60. "Neat Neat Neat." 61. Nihilism. 62. Narcissism. 63. Bibimbap. 64. Bartender Johnny Davis. 65. Virginia Woolf's "The Waves." 66. "I Don't Care Anymore." 67. Qwitter. 68. People who hate Muzak. 69. The Armory flags. 70. Oranger. 71. Oranges. 72. Lemons. 73. Lemonade. 74. Lemonheads' "Lick." 75. Lick-Wilmerding. 76. Ding Dongs. 77. 1977 Mopeds. 78. 1978.
79. "1979." 80. "Women and Children First." 81. "Fair Warning." 82. Philip K. Dick. 83. Charles Bukowski. 84. Coincidence. 85. Drama. 86. Dramamine. 87. Beer. 88. Meatwad. 89. Time capsules. 90. "Time the Avenger." 91. Running through the N-Judah tunnel. 92. Angus Young. 93. Neil Young. 94. Cy Young. 95. "Forever Young." 96. Innocence. 97. Incense. 98. Peppermints. 99. Irina Slutsky. 100. The Scorpions. 101. Trader Joe's. 102. Trader Sam's. 103. Trader Vic's. 104. Repercussions. 105. Reverberations. 106. The Replacements. 107. Pokey Reese. 108. The hokey pokey. 109. Health. 110. Insurance. 111. Health insurance. 112. Writing. 113. Rewriting. 114. Fretting. 115. Dave Chappelle. 116. Dave Roberts. 117. The James Gang. 118. Rick James. 119. Sweet Polly Purebred. 120. Underdog. 121. The Undertones. 122. Underwear. 123. Pants. 124. "24 Hour Revenge Therapy." 125. "Bivouac." 126. "Unfun." 127. Fun. 128. Jerry Harrison. 129. Jerry Roberts. 130. Robert Frost. 131. Robert Duvall. 132. Robert Levy. 133. The walls at Connecticut Yankee. 134. The golf course in Golden Gate Park. 135. The elevator at the Fillmore. 136. The elevators at the Westin St. Francis. 137. The nurses at St. Luke's. 138. Lust. 139. Hal Hartley's "Trust." 140. Rajon Rondo. 141. "Blue Rondo a la Turk." 142. Words. 143. Newspapers. 144. The sky to the west at sundown.
- Tim Sullivan,
tsullivan@sfchronicle.com

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/05/NS1E165RSS.DTL
This article appeared on page F - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Friday, February 20, 2009

patrick hill

Christopher Miles says: A sculptor I know, who came out of art school at the height of minimalism in the late 1960s, once told me how a next generation of artists began to realize the impossibility of creating pure form that eschewed reference. This, he reasoned, was the natural response of artists rethinking their relationship to content, largely via conceptual art and postmodern approaches to image-making, and engagements with space and context that would come to be defined with terms like “postminimalist” and “expanded field.” Patrick Hill seems to want to revisit both sides of that juncture — to produce forms of stark geometry and purity, and to complicate them with plays of transparency, surface, material and engineering while contaminating them with the sorts of associations we attach to patterns, textures, shapes, hues and spatial relationships. Combinations of materials — including glass, concrete, wood, marble and fabric — in units most easily described with words like “sheet,” “block,” “slab” or “swath,” often stacked, leaned or spliced together, can become, in Hill’s delicate (and dangerous) handling, threatening or comforting, burdensome or uplifting. Their unions and intersections can translate to erotic or awkward. This is Hill’s talent — that he can deploy geometry that makes you blush or feel anxious, and that he additionally can make it seem fey or macho, or goth, or punk rock or hippie. As smart about construction as he is about subcultures and dress codes, and informed by both the strategies and critiques of the minimalist and postminimalist epoch — the assignations of gender, attitude, class and politics that were both teased out of and heaped onto largely abstract art — Hill turns all that into a playground, and if at first you think the gravity-harnessing and defying results seem lite, look again, for while they may not always deal in gravitas, they do pack a load.

love magazine fashion and fame



this is gonna be a really good mag. cover design is totally mid- 80s details. i can't find a jpeg on the web so maybe i will hit the archives and scan one? right. i ask you--where would beth and the gossip be with out YAZ? the article on iggy is great. every child should read it in school...

snippet: In the early Sixties, when Iggy Pop was still James Osterberg, he would listen to the radio and get annoyed. He recalls Lesley Gore’s ‘It’s My Party’ as a particular source of frustration. ‘Maybe it was a clever pop song, but I didn’t wanna hear it. That was fake! That was wrong! I felt bad when I heard that. In the top 40 I’d like one song by The Kinks and one by The Beatles but there were 38 things that made me feel the same. It was the same feeling I got later when Nixon was president – a kid just knows – he’s a psycho, he’s a scumbag, I’m not gonna fight for this any more and I laugh at it. Fuck you. So I really felt bad all the time.’

With an antipathy toward the mainstream that would turn out to be mutual, he took his gut feelings and the things he admired and set about making music that would make him feel better.

‘Well I started to make some of it; most of it I couldn’t make. ’Cause Bob Dylan made music that made me feel better, but I didn’t have those skills. “I Only Have Eyes For You” by the Flamingos – now that sure as hell made me feel better, but I couldn’t do that. Didn’t have the licks, didn’t have the chops, didn’t have their vocal chords or Dylan’s brains. But I figured I could find something. I met people later who assumed that because I’d do a song like “Gimme Some Skin”, swearing and cursing and spewing to a hyper-driven emotionless riff, that I wouldn’t like Debussy, or girl groups – but I do, very much. But you do what you can, also, there’s something to that.’