Playoffs baby, it’s that time of year when the kiddies get all tingly just fantasizing about their team making it to the top. The hits get harder, the plays get more important, legends get made and bonuses get paid.
Not that I’m a die-hard football fan. I can’t rattle off names, plays, analyses, statistics. I watch football for two reasons – to see people get hurt and to hold on to one of the last connections I still have with my home town of Baltimore. The Ravens, a punishing gathering of miscreants and criminals, colors Black and Purple and a mascot ripped out of the morbid poems of a psychotic who died penniless and alone in the cracked cobble of Lord Baltimore’s city.
We play the Pats this weekend and this is one of the most important games of the playoffs.
The Patriots are the kings of postseason. If they advance, they’ll probably win the whole thing because it’s been a few years. If Baltimore wins, we’ll make it all the way only if we somehow congeal, like week-old hollandaise sauce, no easy feat. But back to New England for a sec.
I hate a team that claims a region as its home instead of sticking to a single state or city like respectable squadrons. On top of that their coach is a cheater and their quarterback is some pretty-boy cologne model all-American douschebag type. And the refs are all over his fucking jock, swinging from Brady’s nuts like monkeys from a fucking jungle gym.
Which brings me to the point. Our main opponent in Sunday’s game isn’t going to be New England. It will be the refs and, once they fuck us, it will be ourselves.
Baltimore is the black sheep when it comes to NFL referees. Without pulling the race card or resorting to gossip (though I did hear a rumor that Harbaugh is the only idiot who doesn’t send the referees 40-pound turkeys stuffed with gold coins for the holidays)(and seriously, what the fuck do all those refs do with all those turkeys and gold coins?) it could only be chalked up to some sort of grudge. It’s word in the ref’s changing room that in the off-season Ray Lewis has a wild night with the white wife of every NFL referee, leaving her quivering and satisfied just as her cuckolded, striped husband comes home.
Tony Corrente made a horrible pass interference call last week against Baltimore that led to an Oakland touchdown, made Chris Carr even worse in the Universe’s interpretation of him as a person, and killed the fucking wind in our sails. We only won because Oakland was so bad. The fact is, pass interference is the call we get most fucked on. It’s because the call can’t be reversed. The refs are angry about their own shortcomings, sure, but it’s not fair to take it out on us. So they call every pass interference call they can, even when our players don’t touch the receivers, even when the tackle came blatantly after a dropped pass. But a goddamn pack of wild dogs in Bengals uniforms could be gnawing on Todd Heap’s biceps and it would be ruled an incomplete pass.
Maybe it’s just because Corrente is a west coast dousche bag and high school social studies teacher in inland SoCal, a combo well-known to be antagonistic towards minorities and specifically people from gangsta port cities in a stifled post-industrial decline.
Pete Morelli is a 57-year-old who made it into the NFL at 46. He called absurdly close calls against us during our week 16 game versus Pitt, blocks that had nothing to do with the play, unnecessary roughness for legitimate hits which didn’t elicit so much as a peep when they were laid on Flacco, bullshit pass interference calls. This eventually destroyed our spirit, killed our team, led to us folding after we had 2 touchdowns called back .
Because that’s what we do. Like the girl whose step father calls her a slut so much she begins fucking the whole football team, our team gets so much referee abuse, so much more of a heightened supervision than any of our opponents, that eventually we just give it up. Watch, this weekend we’ll be called almost anytime we hit Brady, every pass play we break up, and every block we make. But any time our D line gets held for a Pats gain, Flacco gets hit a minute after the play, or Heap gets karate chopped just prior to reception the fucking stripes’ll turn a blind eye. You can’t throw flags on missed calls, though goddammit you should be able to.
On Sunday I’m not afraid of Brady or Belichik. I’m afraid of Gene Steratore, the Pennsylvania bastard in the Foot Locker outfit. Let him be warned, Baltimore is much closer to Washington, Pennsylvania than Boston. And if Baltimore loses, Gene, Ray Ray will be looking for your wife. She’ll be the one in the nighty, two martini glasses in hand, checking out her window for when a real man arrives. Specifically one who’s not blind.
Goddamn I love football.
Friday, January 8, 2010
Friday, October 30, 2009
Hollywood is a Depraved Cold Sore of Decadence: Les Deux
L.A. is a city of rats, beady-eyed scavengers lurking in dark alleyways and scampering up palm trees, occasionally finding a rotten lime or a bag of white powder to gnaw on for some sustenance. Brooding in the dark. When the rats grow bigger, as things tend to do under the California sun, they become weasels. When the weasels go out on the weekend, they spike their hair and put on shiny shirts and spray themselves thick with Drakkar Noir or Aqua di Gio or Ralph Lauren –a lot of those bastards are bathed in RL Polo cologne, yes – and hump their egos down Sunset to a decadent corner of Hollywood called Les Deux.
“Met her at Les Deux and she do like sex” – Ya Boy and Doc Hollywood, WE RUN L.A.
Les Deux isn’t my kind of place. I spent my first year in L.A. haunting eastside spots in Silverlake and Los Feliz and Echo Park, occasionally going to Sunset Junction haunts like 1408 and Tantra and finding them a little sceney. My new house is on the same street as Les Deux, though, and as we had a friend promising free, waitless entry and comped drinks, we decided to make a night of it. A quick hike down the block, road soda in hand and finished just in time to find our posse waiting to greet us outside the stanchions, the girls wearing slinky dresses, the guys in button downs and jeans as is the accepted uniform in such a place. The bouncers ushered us through ivy-covered corridors to a dance floor teeming with shiny-shirted weasels and fresh nubiles in the minimum amount of clothing legally allowed by the state of California for clubbing purposes, all bouncing around and craning their necks to see and be seen in full disport for just how much the world was their oyster.
Les Deux is an old faux-European plantation house, a strange SoCal craftsman hybrid situated on Las Palmas and Hollywood, just south of Graumann’s Chinese theater where all the freaks dress up like superheroes and dance around for tourists. The freak at this club is a different type of freak and their costumes aren’t aimed at getting fat housewives in khaki shorts from Kansas City to throw a few bucks into a hat on the ground. No, these freaks are geared towards one intoxicating, suffocating impulse that wafts through the air here, that’s splattered all over the walls and after the place is closed for the night the cleaning crews have to mop it up off the sticky floors. Sex, my friends, that’s the ticket. And this is where it all begins.
We walk past the fountain on the outside patio, pushing through the throbbing crowds with my right elbow pointed forward like a bowsprit parting the sea and rabble-rousers. We walk around the bar through a dank alleyway and inside a sitting room that’s open on all sides and strangely empty. Everybody’s outside, engaging in bacchanalian celebration of the night sky with smokes ablaze as Baz Luhrman’s ROMEO AND JULIET is plastered on a massive brick wall above the crowd.
“Look at this red wallpaper, all to give the look of royalty. These people really buy into this,” yells my mustachioed friend into my ear.
“Yeah, I haven’t seen such self-indulgent opulence since just before the fall of the Roman Empire,” I yell back.
We wait for free drinks from our friend’s friend. Scotch and sodas for me tonight. This is no place for beer. I don’t think I could handle it armed with nothing more than malted hops and barley.
“Gotta get get BOOM BOOM BOOM! Gotta get get BOOM BOOM BOOM” erupts through the air and everybody pulses with the Black Eyed Peas newest brainless pop monster, even those of us who have heard the song a few too many times on Power 106 (as well as the endless mash-ups and remixes haunting the airwaves).
The song ends as we disperse to the bathrooms, pleasantly disgusting, no sign of decorum in the linoleum receptacles for our human waste. The bathrooms are innocuous doorways stashed in the middle of a narrow hallway that empties into a claustrophobic room that’s empty and closed off to the general public. Maybe L.C.’s having a party here – those glitterati from THE HILLS always used to talked about this goddamn place, didn’t they?
The more I drink, the more this place makes sense, the more I can turn my brain off and just ogle the underage debutantes, inhale the sex in the air and let down my guard against such ego. Why not?
“That party last night was awfully crazy, I wish we taped it, I danced my ass off and had this one girl completely naked. Drink my beer and smoke my weed but my good friends is all I need. Pass out at 3, wake up at 10, go out to eat then do it again. Man, I love college” Asher Roth proclaimed over the loudspeakers, possibly twice and therein lies the rub. This place is like one big frat party, extended past the years of acceptable Greek intoxication. It’s what I imagine Sigma Ki / Gamma Phi socials to be like, all primped and prospered and high-fives and the only way you can get in is by paying exorbitantly and knowing the right people.
Outside I duck into the smoker’s section, looking for some fresh air away from all that rotten cologne and pheromone-charged perfume. The air in Les Deux is odorous enough to keep wild lions and possibly an African elephant away.
Fire jugglers walk through the crowd and sometimes dance atop the small rooftop over the main bar. The most space is in the smoking section. All of these weasels and weaselettes are just dripping in coitus, with Red Bull vodkas seeping out of their pores. On the upstairs balconies that open to the courtyard girls lean against the railings with nervous scanning eyes. They wish they were Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton. Those two would walk out onto that balcony like the goddamn Pope and just by waving their hands work all the little sexpots below into a frenzy. Instead these celebutantes-for-a-night are trying to strike sexy poses, looking curvy and fishlike as average girls tend to do when they’re attempting to make sexy model poses. I watch the crowd and momentarily flash to the finale scene in GREMLINS 2 when all the little green bastards are congregated in the lobby, cavorting and carrying on, and while springing new kin off their smoking backs from the sprinklers an electric demon is sent into the room and turns them all into goo.
People hover around the place with faux antique cameras, flashbulbs and all. They’re supposed to make all the little girls feel like there’s somebody other than them taking their pictures – Twitter “OMG, paparazzi is so out of control at Les Deux, luckily I looked hot!” That’s the great con. They’re rolling solo with atavistic press cameras that remind one more of Fellini’s Paparazzo than TMZ’s paparazzi. That’s okay.
In the late hours the night invariably shifts into alcohol-induced strobe light vision. Dancing. Compromising positions. Strange blond girls grinding against you. Wild words. Talk of a latenight skinny dip. As the drinks flow and the neon lights strafe against palm trees tall shrubs stab skyward, hiding partygoers from the night, from prying eyes, from the reality that’s creeping in all around the den of ego and sexual juice.
Don’t remember the walk home. Remember being kicked out when they finish serving drinks. Remember exploding a champagne cork against our wall. We’re not done for the night. We’re fiends, creatures looking to eat and drink the finest and most twisted life has to offer, insatiable, unflinching. The debauchery of the night needs shots of champagne to finish it proper, even if we can’t remember the last hour and a half. To hell with bourgeoisie conventions of temperance. We cheers to a fine night hanging out with the beautiful and the rich of the ego capital of the world. What a rotten place is Les Deux. But anyplace with that much sex and stimuli will always breed an experience that is unforgettable to all but the most jaded of revelers.
“Met her at Les Deux and she do like sex” – Ya Boy and Doc Hollywood, WE RUN L.A.
Les Deux isn’t my kind of place. I spent my first year in L.A. haunting eastside spots in Silverlake and Los Feliz and Echo Park, occasionally going to Sunset Junction haunts like 1408 and Tantra and finding them a little sceney. My new house is on the same street as Les Deux, though, and as we had a friend promising free, waitless entry and comped drinks, we decided to make a night of it. A quick hike down the block, road soda in hand and finished just in time to find our posse waiting to greet us outside the stanchions, the girls wearing slinky dresses, the guys in button downs and jeans as is the accepted uniform in such a place. The bouncers ushered us through ivy-covered corridors to a dance floor teeming with shiny-shirted weasels and fresh nubiles in the minimum amount of clothing legally allowed by the state of California for clubbing purposes, all bouncing around and craning their necks to see and be seen in full disport for just how much the world was their oyster.
Les Deux is an old faux-European plantation house, a strange SoCal craftsman hybrid situated on Las Palmas and Hollywood, just south of Graumann’s Chinese theater where all the freaks dress up like superheroes and dance around for tourists. The freak at this club is a different type of freak and their costumes aren’t aimed at getting fat housewives in khaki shorts from Kansas City to throw a few bucks into a hat on the ground. No, these freaks are geared towards one intoxicating, suffocating impulse that wafts through the air here, that’s splattered all over the walls and after the place is closed for the night the cleaning crews have to mop it up off the sticky floors. Sex, my friends, that’s the ticket. And this is where it all begins.
We walk past the fountain on the outside patio, pushing through the throbbing crowds with my right elbow pointed forward like a bowsprit parting the sea and rabble-rousers. We walk around the bar through a dank alleyway and inside a sitting room that’s open on all sides and strangely empty. Everybody’s outside, engaging in bacchanalian celebration of the night sky with smokes ablaze as Baz Luhrman’s ROMEO AND JULIET is plastered on a massive brick wall above the crowd.
“Look at this red wallpaper, all to give the look of royalty. These people really buy into this,” yells my mustachioed friend into my ear.
“Yeah, I haven’t seen such self-indulgent opulence since just before the fall of the Roman Empire,” I yell back.
We wait for free drinks from our friend’s friend. Scotch and sodas for me tonight. This is no place for beer. I don’t think I could handle it armed with nothing more than malted hops and barley.
“Gotta get get BOOM BOOM BOOM! Gotta get get BOOM BOOM BOOM” erupts through the air and everybody pulses with the Black Eyed Peas newest brainless pop monster, even those of us who have heard the song a few too many times on Power 106 (as well as the endless mash-ups and remixes haunting the airwaves).
The song ends as we disperse to the bathrooms, pleasantly disgusting, no sign of decorum in the linoleum receptacles for our human waste. The bathrooms are innocuous doorways stashed in the middle of a narrow hallway that empties into a claustrophobic room that’s empty and closed off to the general public. Maybe L.C.’s having a party here – those glitterati from THE HILLS always used to talked about this goddamn place, didn’t they?
The more I drink, the more this place makes sense, the more I can turn my brain off and just ogle the underage debutantes, inhale the sex in the air and let down my guard against such ego. Why not?
“That party last night was awfully crazy, I wish we taped it, I danced my ass off and had this one girl completely naked. Drink my beer and smoke my weed but my good friends is all I need. Pass out at 3, wake up at 10, go out to eat then do it again. Man, I love college” Asher Roth proclaimed over the loudspeakers, possibly twice and therein lies the rub. This place is like one big frat party, extended past the years of acceptable Greek intoxication. It’s what I imagine Sigma Ki / Gamma Phi socials to be like, all primped and prospered and high-fives and the only way you can get in is by paying exorbitantly and knowing the right people.
Outside I duck into the smoker’s section, looking for some fresh air away from all that rotten cologne and pheromone-charged perfume. The air in Les Deux is odorous enough to keep wild lions and possibly an African elephant away.
Fire jugglers walk through the crowd and sometimes dance atop the small rooftop over the main bar. The most space is in the smoking section. All of these weasels and weaselettes are just dripping in coitus, with Red Bull vodkas seeping out of their pores. On the upstairs balconies that open to the courtyard girls lean against the railings with nervous scanning eyes. They wish they were Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton. Those two would walk out onto that balcony like the goddamn Pope and just by waving their hands work all the little sexpots below into a frenzy. Instead these celebutantes-for-a-night are trying to strike sexy poses, looking curvy and fishlike as average girls tend to do when they’re attempting to make sexy model poses. I watch the crowd and momentarily flash to the finale scene in GREMLINS 2 when all the little green bastards are congregated in the lobby, cavorting and carrying on, and while springing new kin off their smoking backs from the sprinklers an electric demon is sent into the room and turns them all into goo.
People hover around the place with faux antique cameras, flashbulbs and all. They’re supposed to make all the little girls feel like there’s somebody other than them taking their pictures – Twitter “OMG, paparazzi is so out of control at Les Deux, luckily I looked hot!” That’s the great con. They’re rolling solo with atavistic press cameras that remind one more of Fellini’s Paparazzo than TMZ’s paparazzi. That’s okay.
In the late hours the night invariably shifts into alcohol-induced strobe light vision. Dancing. Compromising positions. Strange blond girls grinding against you. Wild words. Talk of a latenight skinny dip. As the drinks flow and the neon lights strafe against palm trees tall shrubs stab skyward, hiding partygoers from the night, from prying eyes, from the reality that’s creeping in all around the den of ego and sexual juice.
Don’t remember the walk home. Remember being kicked out when they finish serving drinks. Remember exploding a champagne cork against our wall. We’re not done for the night. We’re fiends, creatures looking to eat and drink the finest and most twisted life has to offer, insatiable, unflinching. The debauchery of the night needs shots of champagne to finish it proper, even if we can’t remember the last hour and a half. To hell with bourgeoisie conventions of temperance. We cheers to a fine night hanging out with the beautiful and the rich of the ego capital of the world. What a rotten place is Les Deux. But anyplace with that much sex and stimuli will always breed an experience that is unforgettable to all but the most jaded of revelers.
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