Mesh Magazine

Attorney, former president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, mayoral candidate, and Mesh columnist, Matt Gonzalez, also happens to be an artist, making collages at an impressive pace since he left politics a couple years back. His first solo show opens this Thursday at Adobe Books (3166 - 16th Street) with music by Lafitte in Exile.

Emily Donelan is a writer and television producer in San Francisco with a passion for art and design. Check out her posts on artists, design trends and events in the Bay Area.

Born in Washington, DC, an SF transplant by way of Chicago. When Emily’s not eating burritos in Dolores Park, she’s writing for tornados in brooklyn.

While dining with friends at Aziza recently, we got to talking about childhood toys. My friends were horrified to learn that I tortured my Barbie dolls by chopping off their hair and ripping out their limbs. What did you expect from a short little brunette?

I confessed that my favorite dolls as a kid were the Strawberry Shortcake dolls. Of course. I loved their little pets, and I loved that they had food names and I loved that they smelled nice. And they were cute. Like me.

Flash forward to Jon and I roaming the toy aisles of an unnamed shiteous store to kill time when we were early to the airport.

What I saw made me shriek in horror and, quite frankly, freak the fuck out.
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For our friends down south, we dig into the Mesh archives to bring you some thoughts on the City of Angels.

By Daniel Taylor
The thing about flying into Burbank—as opposed to the more upscale, metropolitan LAX—is that when it comes time to exit the aircraft, you don’t do it in the now-ubiquitous, sheep-through-the-chute fashion employed by pretty much any other airport I’ve ever been to. You get off that bitch like a foreign dignitary, like an international man of mystery: out the back door, down some steps, and into the open and sweaty tarmac asphalt. Though there were, unfortunately, no throngs of well-wishers or admirers waiting to greet me with waiving signs and screams of delight, there were still the looming, smog-coated mountains ringing the San Fernando Valley and the glimmering, toadstool high-rises off in the LA distance, welcoming me to, what the great 20th Century American Poet W. Axl Rose called, “The Jungle.”

One thing you notice about Los Angeles immediately upon arrival is how ugly you are. Unless, of course, you’re beautiful. But that’s very unlikely, given that 99% of the beautiful people in America live in the greater Los Angeles area. As some erudite Chicoan once explained to me “LA is just a collection the five hottest people from every small town in America,” a statement that, at the time, I thought was something of a joke, but now see is mostly based on fact. Getting a latte in a Santa Monica Starbucks, I found myself surrounded by people who 10 years ago were voted Most Likely to Get the Fuck Out of Here as Fast as Possible in the Bumblefuck High School yearbook and did exactly that, staking their claim in the Wild Westside of Hollywood and share-cropping copious amounts of effortless hipness and sheer natural beauty. And though it would seem that such concentrated physical attractiveness would give those amongst it a somewhat skewed idea of what beauty actually is, there are always a fair share of tourists, interlopers and passers-through, from which it can accurately ascertained that yes, they are indeed, still better looking and more fashionable than everybody else.
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By the Eloquent & Oft-Quoted Daniel Taylor

The thing about drinking low-grade Milwaukee beer like Schlitz, Pabst or High Life is that, at the time, you feel so smart, like “Let these suckers drink their expensive Microbrews, I’ll get my can of Schlitz, tip the bartender, and still come out ahead.” And besides, the watered down nature of shitty beer, allows the drinker to consume it at a much more rapid, and thus more exhilirating pace than it’s thicker, more stout peers. The more you drink, the smarter you feel about your choices.

You might even start to feel a bit of middle-class patriotism. Holding a can of Schlitz in your hand just feels so damn American. You start to feel like you just got off work at the factory and now you’re down at the docks, looking for a scuffle. And that guy next to you drinking the Heineken, he doesn’t know how it feels to put in a true day’s work. In fact, you might just have to wipe that smile off his goddamn lips. “I’ll show him, after a couple more,” you might start thinking. “I can lick any sonofabitch in this place.”

Then the next thing you know, you’ve been magically time warped directly to your bed, or your car, or someone’s front porch, and the sun is showing you that the only sonofabitch that got whipped last night was you. You start to realize that Schlitz is actually an onomonpaea, because that’s the exact sound it makes coming out your other end, along with whatever burritto or pita or other decidely Unamerican food you threw on top of it in your drunken, 2:00 AM street walking.
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This originally appeared in the January 2006 issue of Mesh Magazine.

My original plan for this issue was to write a Year In Review-style piece, detailing all the amazing shit that happened to me in 2005. But then I realized that I’ve spent the majority of this year looking at 15-year-old girls in their underwear on Myspace, perfecting my swept-bangs combover and looking for track jackets at the Salvation Army so I can act like I paid $80 for them at Urban Outfitters. A nutshell without a nut indeed. But I am still young! Why look to the past when there is such an infinite, limitless future laid out before us? What follows are my thoroughly researched predictions for 2006. Read ’em and weep.

“Intelligent Design” will become the cornerstone of science curricula across the country. Students will also be required to learn Chinese and Korean, so that when those countries figure out how to use stem cells to cure every disease known to man we can be their bitches and beg for them to save our lives.

The United States Supreme Court will overturn Roe vs. Wade. Republicans in the House and Senate will immediately push for a new round of tax cuts for the wealthy, so they can afford the child support for their illegitimate children.

A cup of coffee will officially become known as a “Starbucks.” In turn, local coffee shops across the nation will be forced to change their “small” to “tall” despite the fact that it makes no fucking sense whatsoever.

Super Wal-Marts will include built-in churches. Realizing that the only people better at selling bullshit to poor Americans are generic Christian churches, Wal-Mart begins building Sam’s Club Churches of Christ right next to the Tire department in every new super Wal-Mart, undercutting local churches by only having five commandments.

Soymilk will give me bitch tits. My attemps to get emo-thin by going vegan will backfire when all the estrogen from my soy-rich diet causes me to grow some B-cup boobies. On the bright side, my long lonely nights will not seem quite so lonely with my two new friends.

Looking to bolster his image, President Bush will team up with Mel Gibson to star in Passion of the Christ 2: The Second Coming. Broadcast exclusively on Fox News, Passion 2 stars the President as a loose cannon messiah, kicking ass and taking names. An action packed romp in the spirit of Lethal Weapon, Passion 2 was filmed entirely in the rare English dialect of Bushisms. Fundamentalism for the whole family!

A college student somewhere in America will figure out that money is only worth anything because people all agree to adhere to the same arbitrary system. He will totally trip out on this for like five minutes before taking another bong hit.

I will convert to Christianity. As the saying goes… If you can’t beat ‘em, join ’em. Plus American Fundamentalist Christianity is like the University of Phoenix of hardline religions: pay a few dollars, show up on a few Sundays and you can get the same piece of Salvation as all those people working their asses off to be pious. Besides, Christian emos wreck all kinds of hot gash these days.

We will all die from the Bird Flu and our Myspace profiles shall be our eternal epitaphs. In 1000 years, extraterrestrial visitors will still be able to ascertain exactly how “gr8 it was 2 C U last night!” but will have difficulty figuring out what the fuck “< 3” means.

Don’t Sweat the Technique…daniel at synthesis.net

By Daniel Taylor. Illustration by Clifford Greenwood.

Here’s the story. There is nothing you could possibly ever say that I could possibly ever care about. You’re not appealing to me in the least. I don’t want to chat with you online. I don’t want to add you as my friend. I don’t want to see if I can get your band a show in my town on either March 24th or 25th. I don’t want to come to your reception at Hipster Coffee Shop with Two-Buck Chuck and DJ WhiteKidWhoGotDecksForChristmas spinning totally ironic ‘90s hip-hip songs to look at shit that you traced out of an old Juxtapoz. You are not part of a movement. Your art fucking sucks.

Your blog is also a real piece of shit. No one cares about what you have to say. Period. Just because you read a Dave Eggers book doesn’t mean your life is worth fucking documenting. He made most of that shit up and it still wasn’t even that great. Your life is not tragic, it’s not exciting, it’s just ordinary and pathetic. No one wants to read about it, and especially not have to look at pictures of it. Your friends all look like assholes in vintage/mod/emo/indie eBay clothes and your girlfriend is probably the most pathetic of them all. Sorry if you think she’s totally the hottest girl in your little scene of trendy dive bar scumfucks, but she looks like the chic from Morningwood without the fat girl from Facts of Life cuteness. She needs to take those blanket ponchos back to Urban Outfitters and clean up her act. No one needs to look at 34 photos of her at the Myspace angle trying to look mysterious. She’s looks like every other girl at the Pitchfork Band of the Month rock concert except maybe a little stupider. You should wake up and smell the coffee. You will never have a hot girlfriend. No matter what. (more…)