today is charles bukowski's birthday. my hero. one of the reasons that i moved and have stayed in hollywood.

one of the reasons that many of you read this blog.

charles bukowski was poor, ugly, mean-spirited, tenacious and for most of his life ridiculously unsuccessful.

he was also an unabashed alcoholic who said that alcoholics were amateurs, that he was a good heavy drinker.

he lived into his 70s and when i say lived i mean lived. he fought he fucked he wrote and he wrote. he went to his stinky job year after year and he bitched but he didn't whine. big difference.

read any of his dozens and dozens of books and if you took a shot every time you read him whine you'd barely get a buzz.

i adore that.

bukowski was also an accomplished poet. something his idol, hemingway, was terrible at. one day i will show you a poem from hemingway and you'll be sad for him.

no need to cry for bukowski about anything. in my opinion he was the most important poet of the twentieth century. important because his poems were regularly rejected for decades by the big magazines and yet he didn't slice his ear off or change his style or write his congressman, instead he kept to his guns and wrote more poems. he produced. and eventually the morons running the asylum died and eventually the poems that had been rejected were suddenly brilliant and the lit world opened its arms to bukowski and bukowski shook them down and went back to la and drank his cheap beer and slept with his cheap women and laughed and laughed.

as he should.

because his poems were good.

as were his stories and his novels and his american life.

if you want to read about los angeles or hollywood or california start with bukowski and you'll be happy you did. there wont be many fables about malibu or bel air or the sunset strip which is good because that's not la anymore than the hollywood sign isn't hollywood.

the ghost of bukowski still stumbles down the dirty streets of hollywood. he lived very close to where i live now and when i think about the two and a half years that ive lived here i think about how ive never been more prolific, how ive never been luckier with the ladies, and how ive never made less money.

just like my hero.

minus the alcohol abuse.

here's to you charles bukowski, the biggest influence of the busblog, next to the Bible.

my old bukowski photo essay +the faith fools

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i know its a thousand degrees outside. i dont care. i want out of here.

i want to be on the road. i want to be on a harley chopper with a red white and blue suede vest on and my huge lenny kravitz fake afro blowing in the wind as you and i blaze a trail between hollywood and somewhere.

im sick of tv im sick of radio im sick of everything. my soda tastes flat, my flat girlfriend feels flat, my bicycle tires are flat, even my stratavarious is flat.

tomorrow i have to cover the X-Games for a skateboard magazine who wants me to take pictures.

sunday the Boss plays dodger stadium and i dont have tickets which is fine cuz theyre $85 and i dont want to pay that to sit up in the air, so i will take the bus down sunset and buy a great ticket for probably $40 and be so close that i'll get sprayed on my clarence.

theres very little else that i would want to do other than be at the beach with my true love cuz its hot in hollywood and its been hot. every day in the 90s or hotter, not that im complaining because chopper one is climate controlled. unfortunately my hollywood hills mansion isnt. i dont even have a ceiling fan.

my lunch sandwich didnt do me right. my lunch cheetos didnt do me right. the only thing doing me right is my ebay auction which has nearly gotten 100 hits.

the other night miss montreal was over, she brought me california pizza kitchen pizza and she saw a picture of me when i shaved off all of my hair and she loved it. looooooved it which is nice cuz one day that will be probably a neccessity.

im bored im bored im bored, america. theres no crooks who want to steal in this heat. theres no bad guys even plotting. we listened to the illegal taps that weve placed and everyone is saying that theyre going to santa barbara or frisco or oregon or anywhere other than hell-a.

i see the light at the end of the tunnel and its dim.

like me.

im so not free.

blue cad + la encantada + sexy girl + scurrility

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the sad thing about being in hollywood during the biggest blackout in american history is i just looked at it as good television.

sadly it wasnt that good of television.

today, the morning after, it has made for awesome blogfodder.

my pal amy has a wonderfully detailed description of her night in Park Slope which started with:

4:10 p.m. The subway stops. Air conditioning goes off.
4:13 p.m. �Attention passengers, we have lost power.�
4:15 p.m. �Attention passengers, we have lost power. We have lost power.�

Female passenger (to much laughter): �And�?�

she also linked to some really great pictures from the Gothamist.

im not quite sure LA would have handled the blackout with the class that it appears the east coast did.

here in LA we have problems when it rains for a few minutes.

and im sure the guys who sell generic batteries at the busstop would have tripled their prices if not quadrupled them.

anyhow, Text America has some interesting pictures here.

and i think this fellow Dean Land has a decent take too.

however, as in most national freaky deals like last night, there is rarely a better place to go to learn/gawk/read/write than Metafilter, which is consistantly good... especially on Fridays.

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dear space aliens,

hi.

thanks for writing me so much.

here on earth we dont have porn ads on the top part of our emails. believe it or not, but people here will read the emails without advertisments. so naturally, i thought your emails were what we call Spam.

sorry.

youve all written so much that i feel its best if i answer you in this post.

first of all, thank you so much for reading it. i knew how i was getting about 100 hits a day, but i was always curious as to who the other 900 people were, so this explains a lot. welcome.

The United States. i live in the United States of America. im sorry that i just call it America. its a lazy american thing to do. i know that theres south america and central america and the usa is in north america, but when i write it as "america" i am sorta saying, "yes i know this is arrogant. we are arrogant. and we're probably going to stay this way for a while."

rock music. the cds i gave you are rock. you are hearing guitars and drums and someone yelling. what youre feeling is the bass. the purpose of rock music is to help you remember that youre a live animal. which is what we are at our core.

the best rock music is dangerous and agressive and wild and powerful. it's also nice when it can be sensitive and subtle and insightful. but as long as it rocks it could be completely full of shit. it's the music of the common man and the only thing that matters. next to spirituality, of course.

almost all of you asked me about either beer or cigarettes or drugs. even though we dont have fancy space machines, odds are humans are smarter than you. we just havent been around as long. one of the drawbacks to being so smart is life gets boring, so some people like to get fucked up so they can look at things with innocent eyes. other people are so smart that they outthink themselves out of doing the things they want to do, so they get drunk and let loose.

some people are just stupid.

theyre the ones who smoke cigarrettes.

but they do look cool, which is generally the point, and old age has never been marketed as being all that, so maybe these cool kids are on to something.

usually we keep our voting records private, but since so many of you asked, im going to vote for larry flynt as governor of california. at first i was going to vote for gray davis because its not right that he should have to win a second election in the middle of his term, but then i thought, fuck him. he should be bitching more and hes not so fuck him.

im voting for larry flynt for the same reason that people lie about why they say theyre going to vote for the terminator. they say arnold is a good businessman, but very few people in the world are as successful as larry flynt. hustler, the magazine he's best known for, actually brings in just a fraction of all the monies he gets from magazine publishing. and he's ugly, and hes crippled, and hes slightly insane, and he has set the bar for what is completely dirty. and in america, thats a tough trick.

most of the people here though are pretty nervous about how others will perceive them. they run around being a certain way so that they will have a better chance of being successful. but larry flynt has shown us that you can be the grossest frog mouthed s.o.b on the block and if you know what youre doing you can Still build a golden tower in beverly hills from all the money that you'll end up with.

and how sweet would it be for the republicans to see that their dirty little coup resulted in hell freezing over and larry flynt ending up governor of california?

itd be enough to put the state on the map.

anyway, thanks for writing, i will answer more questions and clear more things up later.

love,

tony

p.s. my flying car is not for sale, and neither is chopper one. thanks though!

fragrant + buzz machine + clever hack + scrappleface

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people, it's ok. theres two full days left in the busblog auction to sponsor blogger pro for a year.

theres no reason to call your friends to bid for you.

and theres absolutely no reason to stand in line, east coasters, to use pay phones to have your friends bid on your behalf.

its just a simple sponsorship.

a link on a dumb blog.

a speck on the skid mark on the boxer shorts of the internet.

i just got a phone call from a sweet young woman calling from a Ben & Jerry's on the lower east side of new york.

she says they are having a great sale there because theres a blackout happening today and Ben & Jerrys knows that their icecream is going to melt, so theyre practically giving the stuff away.

in between spoonfulls of chunky monkey she is asking if i could extend the auction until the power gets restored to the east coast.

i politely told her no.

sadly, the auction will end as scheduled, on saturday night.

so for all of you who are waiting until the last minute to get your bid in, you should probably bid now.

you never know what nuttiness will happen.

we are in mercury retrograde after all.

and the only guarantees in life are death, taxes

and a bunch of dumb shit here on the busblog.

instapundit has permalinked madpony! + sponsor blogger pro for the busblog + ouahad + coyote

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when i knew that i was going to be coming to los angeles after high school, i imagined dating hot young blonde models, driving a convertible, and surfing on saturdays.

at least one of those things came true.

surfing it turned out, in southern california is more of an ideal than a reality for this midwesterner, as strangely the pacific is normally as cold as a pacifico.

i have driven my share of convertibles while out here but nowhere near as many as i thought i would, and none of them ended up being mine.

which brings us to the hot young blonde models.

ive never been one to have a boundless amount of self-esteem or self-confidence but as ive gotten older i have realized that he who asks receives. even if he shouldnt have it. even if he doesnt deserve it. even if he is way out of his league.

in xbi training they poison you constantly.

one day they put lsd in our cap'n crunch and walked us over to this big ant hill next to the beach.

we watched the ants be ants and our trainers esped to us.

if you put your foot next to the ant hill and stomped around notice how the ants arent intimidated or freaked out, they just do their job. be like the ant, agents.

look at how the pretty ants arent stuck up about their ant-beauty, and how the ugly ones go on with their lives with as much outward confidence.

it took us a while to identify the ugly from the pretty ants, but the acid helped.

be like the ants, agents.

we watched how they lifted leaves and twigs twenty times their weight.

we watched how they worked until it was time to stop working, and we watched how they never fought each other, and we watched how they partied once the sun went down.

the next morning we looked at the world as if we were all ants.

we were quiet, and strong, and obediant, and worked as a team.

that night they asked us to go to some of the hot dance clubs in la and bring back to santa barbara the prettiest girl that we could.

once that mission was accomplished, the women were given jewelery and limo rides home.

and i'll never forget the lesson of the ants.

and the incrediblly vivid sunset.

and the fact that after being in california for nearly a century, i have never been surfing.

last night a young blonde model came over and gave me a shoulder rub. im not crazy about shoulder rubs, but i was tired and not in the mood to resist nice offers.

her hair brushed against my sunburned back and it was nice.

nicer than youd think.

she flipped me over and told me i had the sweetest eyes.

and then we went to bed.

minutes later we were asleep.

dc + bored housewife + mallory

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today is fidel castro's 77th birthday. to celebrate one of my associates drove over to Versailles and brought us back some delicious cuban garlic chicken.

i dont know anything about fidel.

i dont know anything about cuba.

it is good to see elian gonzales again though.

hola elian!

i didnt get much sleep last night. i was doing that dumb photo essay till 3:30 in the morning.

i like doing photo essays if theres something new thats gonna come from it. last night new stuff happened and that made me happy.

its fun to twist a few stories together and hit a lot of topics at once and if i had to do it over again i probably would have been able to twist them together better, but when you have to wake up in the morning you have to call it quits at some point.

i also like doing photo essays because they take soooooo long, and i hardly ever allow myself 6-7 hours after work to research and write and pull pictures and deal with procrastination and deal with the clock ticking.

it reminds me of deadlines at the college newsroom and i like that feeling.

pressure and its influence on art.

time as a motivator.

i hear ozzy's kid killed a dog the other night in his sleep.

i hear a lot of things.

i hear im having a bad day today at work.

i would like to hear from people who owe me a reply to my email.

before i forget, much love to makeoutcity.com who sent me two cds, to my buddy tom from rogue cheddar who also sent me a cd, and to my girl Bunnie who sends me the most interesting art projects.

thank you kind world, i dont deserve your attention, but i will take it and i hope i can give you back something just as nice in return.

bloopy + bunnie + makeout city

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new photo essay



"the day president bush got impeached"

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the thing is i really like xtina. and ive been known to appreciate the dirrrty skank ho look. and yet somehow this get-up and makeup and attitude falls flat with me.

i cant really say why.

other than shes completely uglifying herself for no good reason.

sexiness doesnt always mean tons of makeup, mousekateers.

but why listen to me? if i was mtv i would have the Queer Eye guys go to Christina's house and give her the sweet makeover. maybe she'd have some tips for her.

maybe they could exchange notes about pleasing a man.

i just ate the best chicken corn chowder soup. spicy. mmmmmm.

this morning i wanted to put the blog on hiatus for a little while, but then i re-read my astrology and saw that the discomfort and issues that im having with turning the big 3-0 in a month-and-a-half mixed with the full moon and the tides means that i should just take those negative feelings and do something creative with it.

so i wrote my girl Xtina an email and i told her that she and all her little girlfriends should come over to my house one of these weekends that theyre planning a girls night out.

and instead of dolling themselves up and singing karaoke in k*town, they should just have a sluts night out at my place and they could have a ho-off and the winner will get to be ho o' the day, which means that she has to do anything that the losing girls tell her to do

to me.

and because life is beautiful as soon as christina gets back from her tour with justin shes gonna round up her girls and do just that.

i have a zit above my eyebrow.

anyways the cubs lost yesterday and that makes me nervous.

at least my pants fit good.

and these nice people have each linked me:

steph + tundrah + utter wonder + neens

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they say air signs get bored easilly. and xbi training teaches us to look at the details if we ever get bored.

they do this by making us look at a tree for 8 hours. after a while you see the tree differently. after awhile you see patterns. after a while you can see how things really are in the tree. after a while you start talking to the tree. after awhile the tree starts talking back.

thats when they tell you to just focus on a leaf on the tree.

after awhile the leaf moves.

youd think riding the same bus down the same street day after day for two years would be boring to an air sign. but then the training kicks in and one of the tricks that the marines from the agency teach you is how to properly hate. i can hear them in my head as i ride the bus as i did today.

god i hate men in suits. look how they stand. they stand so dumb. and look at that trendy bag. fuck men in suits on the bus. who are you trying to kid. whats a suit mean, that youre doing well. how well can you be doing if youre standing up on a bus in la in a fucking suit.

ah look at this, three guys in golf shirts. one in shorts. two in pants. standing, blocking the back door. fuck you men in golf shirts.

but im no good at hating. im not a complainer. im a liker. i like the women who still got it even though its barely there. but they work it. theyre old but they havent thrown in the towel. theyre flabby and gray and resigned but havent quit. go babies. go.

i like the man in the crazy used car salesman blazer snoozing away missing his stop. my what a big nose you have there. my what long nose hair you have. my dont you seem peaceful sleeping there as the gentle movement of the subway car rocks the widdle baby to sleep.

i like how my sunburn is starting to hurt now. how it wants my attention like an old girlfriend. i like how my pants fit and how my heart feels and how my computers fucked and how my life isnt mine. oh to be included in my own destiny.

but its just easier to get into chopper one, turn on the a/c, fire up the laptop and write to you as the blades warm up and protect me from this arid heat.

hi blog that i love.

hi tony, sorry about your home pc.

its cool.

why dont you ask your buddy jeff to get you a new motherboard and processor?

cuz jeffs a busy man. and its sorta funny that we can never get it together.

then why dont you go and do it yourself?

cuz im dumb deep down. super dumb the deeper you get.

and the ladies walk past showing their bellies as if their legs are nice to look at or their hair or their faces or their pretty smiles or their heavilly mascaraed eyes or their gravity defying hey look at that its the in-n-out truck

and theres a palm tree.

and theres a leaf.

and theres me.

splink + tracy + ernie the attorney

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hi bad luck. i see you there. youre at my front door. youre at my back door. youre at my front window. youre in my heart.

i see you in the moon. i see you in the dark. i see your shadow move across the lawn thats wet from dew and yellow from dogpiss.

and dark from the gnarled tree blocking the moonlight.

youre in my computer and youre eating away at it. youre checking out chris's pictures and jeanines and karisas. youve got moxies and clipper girls and annas folders and youre invading them, you want to fuck it all up and maybe you will but i see you and youre nothing.

anyone can be a destroyer but so few can create.

create mayhem if you want but thats easy.

even the dumbest rock can fall off the dumbest cliff and make a series of beautiful ripples on a peaceful lake

but guess what bad luck

that lake goes back to being cool in no time

and youre just a dumb rock again

this time forgotten in the watery depths

never to see the setting sun again

never to get sat on for a pizza picnic

never to get initials scratched on it.

never to have a joint rolled on it.

bad luck youre fleeting and you do your best on me and mine, youre in my computer so bad i cant even Copy or Paste.

four hundred megahurts, 128 mb of ram, and ive put out better things on this old box than all the bad luck on this bad block and i know youre after me cuz i can taste the dish soap on my baja fresh plastic cup

i can hear you when youre fucking shit up.

maybe twice in the history of the modern day busblog there hasnt been a picture

so take a picture cuz this wont last long.

kimbalina

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some people dont like it when i write about politics. strangely it's usually only the republicans who ask me to stop writing about how bad our president is, and how worthless our GOP-lead congress has been, and how i rarely agree with our conservative supreme court.

it fascinates me because their only reasoning is usually, "youre a great writer, but you dont know shit about politics, so knock it off."

but then they give no examples.

it makes me wonder what debate team they were on.

heres the deal with this blog. it's mine. i call bullshit on bullshit and i tell you why im doing it.

if you want to call bullshit on me, tell me why im full of shit.

start with telling me why you're not holding our president responsible for anything. tell me why the national economy isnt his fault, and yet the california economy is gray davis's fault.

tell me why its ok for bush to send us into war over claims of weapons of mass destruction and nukes in africa even though there was no proof about either.

tell me why you support a man who bombed afghanistan and iraq but not the saudi arabia over 9/11 even though bin ladin is saudi as were most of the terrorists.

answer these questions logically and i wont even bring up the fact that your boy stole the election with help from his brother, and the supreme court, and the klan.

maybe the klan wasnt involved, but he did steal the election and in a way thats sorta punk rock, so i'll give you that one.

this time.

see, i am a reasonable person, and as an american i support the freedom of free speech and an enviornment of honest communication.

telling me to shut up because my beliefs are contrary to yours doesnt add to the discourse.

it sounds like something from a darker period of the human experience back in the days when the Terminator's dad wore a swastika on his arm.

and if you dont want to tell me about why i should think differently about the president of the united states of america and his party who hasnt really done any good for the greatest country in the world lately, tell me why i should give Arnold a break.

even though he hasnt held a public office, or put out a good movie that wasnt riddled with extreme violence, and who drives a Hummer, and whose four books that he's penned had nothing to do with public policy but instead how to trick your muscles into getting bigger.

spell it out clearly and with facts and you'll never be bothered with politics on the busblog again.

ladies and gentlemen, that is my promise to you.

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britney murphy came over last night when i least expected it. and i know what you're going to say, "isnt she crazy?" but show me one person who isnt crazy and i'll show you someone who's so dull that its not even worth the time.

and maybe guys like me turn girls like her crazy.

anyway, shes not crazy. shes hot. lots of people confuse the two.

at some point i drifted away into a deep dark peaceful sleep.

and at some point someone started making beautiful lust to me and it was definately a young woman and it might or might not have been ms. britney murphy. whoever she was she felt really soft and she knew what the hell she was doing.

and i dont know if guys can have multiple uh, hmmm, well, but i think i did.

109 years old, nearly 110, and new things can still happen.

very bizarre.

both of us were turned on that we did it again right after.

now its the early morning and i want to call in sick but the problem with crimefighting is that the criminals dont call in sick.

i have sunburn on my shoulders from the dodgers game yesterday.

i have scratches on my back from what might have been britney murphy or what might have been miss montreal or what might have been clipper girl's upstairs neighbor.

i have so much work to do i dont even know where to start.

and i owe you all so many photo essays that i dont even know what to do.

but what i would like the most to do is remind you that the Sponsor Blogger Pro for the busblog auction is in full gear. it's the only guaranteed way to get linked here for a year straight every day.

and i'd also like to remind you that life can be pretty badass sometimes.

if you let it.

98ward + mc brown's great pictures from yesterday + trueboy

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a while ago i thought it would be a good idea to buy a bunch of cheap cubs/dodgers tickets and take all my friends. it wasnt such a good idea.

it was a great idea.

i got six for saturday night and eight for sunday, today, and even though i couldnt take all of my friends i did get to go with a bunch and it was fun and its something i hope we do more often.

last night we sat in the front row in right center. me, basart, greg, molli and sean, and bonnie and charlie.

bonnie had never been to a game before in her life.

sean had been to four, and he's only a few months old.

ok, hes a year old.

first inning i was pretending to be a gay european girl and robin ventura smacked a ball that went back back back right into what should have been my glove, but the camera that takes all the good pics on the busblog was in that glove and my gay diet pepsi was in my other hand.

if you saw the replay or tivoed saturday nights game youd see me backing away and basart backing away and everyone backing away except for one year old sean who reached out and said ba

and probably woulda made the catch.

and the announcers woulda said, someone sign that baby up.

but he was snuggled into his snuggly of his dad, my buddy greg, and the ball bounced back onto the field as robin ventura rounded the bases.

the rest of the game we watched intently as we hoped for lightening to strike twice but in life just like in homerun balls, you rarely even get one good chance to make the sweet ass play

never two.

and when i saw it on instant replay i agreed with bi vicky, im not all that i once was.

im a mere shadow of the blogger i used to be.

fortunately my friends havent noticed. yet.

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