WCS 38: Livin’ the DASH life
Too: Netflix hits & misses + W. Kamau & Medhi + Worst. Lakers. Day. Ever.
A stand-by line of mine used to be that it’s tough to feel like one of the greats when you’re shopping at the 99 Cents Only store. Those stores are now a wrap, and I can’t even have my security blanket of a joke without sounding old.
Anyway…
On Sunday I was running down the hill to catch the bus that stops at the end of my block, as far too many of my days begin. This time I’d shut the gate running and turned onto the street. With a building velocity I ran toward Echo Park Boulevard and the DASH bus stop. A coyote appeared in an instant, from around a hedge. That forced me to slow, then do a stutter step in the mode of prime OJ Simpson, and let the damn thing pass.
Like, Excuse me, Mr. Coyote.
I was in a strange ballet, with my backpack on. My bus stop was the end zone, I was downhill running.
Of course, the sign on the bus that I’d sprinted for said “OUT OF SERVICE.”
I boarded regardless. All of us did. By my estimation, seven out of 10 times these free LA Department of Transportation DASH buses announce that they are out of service. (Or, more frequently on my side of town, “fuera de servicio”). It’s just something you accept as a DASH user. I’ve asked LADOT why this is the case, but as of publication time had received no answer.
My destination? The Jet Room, a cannabis delivery hub that I discovered while tutoring at MacArthur Park Elementary School, the first job I’ve ever had that protected me and my after-hours cannabis use. This delivery-focused company, I’d learn, plays a role in my friend David Weinberg’s wildly entertaining and award-winning podcast series Dreamtown.
The Jet Room also carries a brand and strain of affordable weed that absolutely is my jam: Kushland Signature’s Black Cherry Gelato. It’s a sativa-leaning hybrid that’s been my collaborator on this week’s Sojourn content. And, at $14.99, Kushland let’s me walk out with an eighth for under $25, after tipping and the state’s absurdly high tax take.
On that Sunday trip to The Jet Room, I made my way through a lighter-than-usual assortment of Central American families, domestic hepsters and unhoused, and zombie-esque junkies emanating up from MacArthur Park. It made solid post purchase sense to pay and hop on the Metro train, rather than wait for the next free bus toward my next destination. DASH says their busses come within five and 20 minutes, but the gaps are actually more like 90 seconds apart and then 40 minutes apart.
Now for the points of this email, all 10 of them.
Which subscribers are old enough to understand that the historical precedent for Trump’s role in international isolationism is Charles Lindbergh?
10 ‘A good use of white privilege’
Conversation between two of my very favorite rejects from corporate news, Mehdi Hasan and Berkeley’s W. Kamau Bell, this week generated a delicious new phrase for your lexicon of American racism.
In this Substack Allstars meet up, the obvious career parallels get a going over, but things take an intellectual leap upon discussing Macklemore’s Top-10 comeback song on behalf of the Palestinians.
We’re Not Kidding
“He can get away with something that maybe a Palestinian rapper can’t,” Bell points out. “They’re not going to get the mainstream attention like a white man like Macklemore, so thanks to him for using his white privilege for good.”
Hasan also says in an unrelated comment—as I wish more people would—that the billionaire character Batman’s far more a toxic mental case than anything heroic.
Lil Hits
The Shining’s Mt Hood locations and The Goonies’ spot in Astoria show up among the 10 most-Googled film locations.
Here Is OregonAuthor Tracie McMillan’s working-class parents aren’t speaking to The White Bonus author; her book that attempts to quantify all of White America’s economic advantage. Use context clues to surmise why they’ve shut down.
The Brian Lehrer Show
9 Was Wednesday the worst day ever for Starfucker City?
Folks not enamored of the La La Lakers sometimes refer to LA as Kobestan, as in being filled with absolute Kobe Stans. I call the joint Starfucker City.
On Tuesday, fans of the Los Angeles franchise that’s not the subject of a hilariously soapy series on Hulu learned that a college coach rejected their job offer, stunning everyone who’s not noticed the Lakers going through seven coaches since 2011.
“The Lakers brand should not be confused with what the Lakers job is,” reporter John Fanta told Dominique Foxworth. The next day, pivotal General Manager Jerry West—aka “The Logo”— passed away at the age of 86. West, who went on to help build the awesomest Warriors iteration, died in estrangement from the royal family of Starfucker City.
In 2000, new-ish Lakers coach Phil Jackson threw West out of his locker room, creating a rift that never healed, especially when Jackson began dating Jeanie Buss, eventual owner and daughter of then-owner Jerry Buss.
After the all-time great player went on to become Golden State’s GM, the Lakers front office signed off on a (pioneering, endlessly watchable) HBO series called Winning Time that made an especially broad and clownish caricature of The Logo.
JJ Reddick will interview for the Lakers coaching gig this weekend. We wish him well.
Lil Hit
The congnoscenti tend to say that the NBA is at its most exciting when the New York Knicks are good. Some of us tend to believe the league has yet to recover from losing the Super Sonics.
Vice
8 As with Fox News, Sinclair Media is why your folks in the sticks don’t know shit
We’re four years into Sinclair Media stumping for Trump before unwitting local news viewers around the nation. But if you ain’t alarmed at the sight and sound of its myriad anchors reading from the same partisan script that attacks Joe Biden, then you are dead inside.
The New Republic
“Earlier this year, Smith purchased The Baltimore Sun, insulting its staff and laying out a vision to steer it in the conservative direction of his TV stations,” writes Hafiz Rashid.
Lil Hit
Fake mafioso and former US President Donald Trump inadvertently absolved the Hanford Congressman David Valadao when he told Senate Republicans, “I never loved him.”
CNN
It’s hard for many of my Jewish friends to hear, but “From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free” has entered its “nigger” phase: It’s a part of how young people talk now, independent of its disreputable origins. The genie ain’t returning to the bottle.
7 Give or take a Porzingis, the Mavericks are toast
By the time you read this item, one of the greatest offensive players ever to pick up a basketball might be entering the reflection phase of his first Finals appearance. Even more than Luka Dončić’s epic meltdown in Game Three, the Slovenian will have to face his undeniably atrocious defense
Yahoo Sports
“For all his gifts, for all his wizardry orchestrating the Mavericks’ offense, for his no-look dishes and his step-back triples, Dončić lacks the foot speed and the awareness on too many defensive possessions that have opened floodgates for the Celtics’ stable of scorers,” writes Jake Fischer.
Another season has passed with the basketball community still weirdly unable to talk about defense. What are we, children with learning disabilities?
Unrelated hoops insight that I can’t hold until fall training camp: The retired coach analyst hates the fadeaway jumper, except when it goes in. Which it does, a lot.
Lil HitPeople have been hardcore capping the crooning of Darren Waller, He’s a one-time standout Raiders tight end, substance-abuse recovery success story, ex-spouse of a WNBA star, and—as of Sunday— an NFL retiree at 31. At press time, I was waiting on Darren Waller’s call to me about this. Sadly, he never hit me up.
TMZ
When Diddy eventually goes to trial—or when the deep-dive doc gets made— the Clive Davis portion of the Puff Daddy-enabling narrative is gonna be juicy AF.
6 Why doesn’t Gaza activate our sports media?
The doggedly intrepid Dave Zirin would like to know why America’s sports media can’t make as big a fuss about the community destruction happening in Israel as it did when cops killed that one Black dude back in 2020.
The Nation
“Instead, we have obsessions with legal sports betting, pompous pronouncements about basketball star Caitlin Clark (by men who seem to have just discovered that women play hoops), and an overproduction of podcasts that brand themselves as being about more than sports but won’t touch Palestine. It’s a whole lot of fiddling while people are burned alive with munitions made in the USA,” Zirin writes.
I have some notes, but none that I’m equipped to share in this format.
Lil Hit
The three-story home where the late novelist Ursula K. Le Guin wrote “The Left Hand of Darkness” and “The Dispossessed” will become a writers’ residency.
The Vancouver Colombian
The Tipping Point
Ordinarily this newsletter is for paid subscribers. I screwed up and let you see my unfinished work, which is a bummer of the sort only a few of us know.
From a far, I’ve long respected the people working on this project. Let me know if it works for you.
5 ‘Fifty Years of Queers’
We know them. We love them. Some of us fuck them.
Seattle’s first Pride parade was in 1974. Five decades later, The Stranger has published its first Queer issue since the pandemic. To say that this represents a kind of double normalization might be too cute by half.
So let’s go for it. OD on cuteness.
The Stranger
Singer-composer SassyBlack contributes a piece about finding her superpowers.
Nathalie Graham takes us inside the world of “queerleaders” with a look at Seattle Cheer, part of the 14-team nationwide Pride Cheerleading Association.
Lil Hit
Sorry so late in telling you, but the season finale of Rick & Morty was the acid trip from hell.
Reddit
4 Netflix comes clean with its viewership numbers
That big company adjacent to my gym at the corner of Sunset and Vine is not the most transparent operator. Getting to find out who’s watching what on Netflix was a years-long chore.
Now we finally have confirmation of which original content excelled on Netflix and what has bombed in the last six months of 2023. The report ain’t Nielsen rankings, but we’ll have to take it.
The Hollywood Reporter
The Netflix Cup, an early live sports foray, attracted only 700,000 viewers. So did Mulligan, the animated series executive produced by Tina Fey.
Meanwhile, the Obamas’ Leave the World Behind had 121 million viewers. Other hits include One Piece (71.6 million) and Wednesday (23.9 million).
Lil Hit
Disneyland has the employee and visitor population of a small city, but it’s still strange when someone dies there, a manager did on June 4.
Torrance Daily Breeze
3 Twelve Jewish groups are fighting Oregon Food Bank
It’s about the devastation of Gaza, of course. The food bank published a statement calling for a ceasefire on April 30 and shortly thereafter the groups asked for a retraction and withdrew its support.
Oregon Live
The food bank’s first-ever statement on an international political event was greeted with generally favorable local reaction.
The letter’s signatures come from the Mittleman Jewish Community Center, the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland, and five congregations.
Lil Hit
With the Olympics only five weeks away, new records in the 1500 and 5000 meters at the Portland Track Festival hints at what to watch.
Olympics
2 Behold: My Democratic Party advert
Playing smart, The American Left could blow the GOP and its national slate of far-right candidates back into the 19th century. Play wrong, and the US becomes a tipping point for a planet-wide populist conservatism.
Charlemagne tha God had an excellent take on national Democratic politicians not talking like humans. It’s a laugh-filled head-nodder, but the communication gap between Washington and America is more complicated than that.
Beyond clear and honest, the November messaging must be basic. Like, really basic.
The Daily Show
My advert for Biden/Harris would be an image succession of the past 40 years’ GOP favorites who are not fucking with Trump. The cult is strong, but memory is stronger.
It’s a two-commercial deal; The second ad alternates the names and images of the GOP nominees’ convicted and charged friends. More than most, swing state suburbanites view criminality as a barrier to participation.
Lil Hit
Cannabis is healthier for you, but Demon Alcohol makes you more immediately entertaining, as a drunken Seth Meyers illustrates.
Late Night with Seth Meyers
1 Scenes from a shit show
Beating an apparently dead horse is my jam, sad for you. But it’s painful and confusing to watch cannabis grow ever more popular while its legit sellers so struggle.
This week we learned that pesticides are a presence in legal California products. Colorado points the way toward this iteration of legal weed’s demise and, yeah, sure California is prepping to go into the toilet with The Centennial State.
LA Times/Politico/Chronicle
Times Co-Author Alex Halperin writes, “Twenty-five of 42 legal cannabis products that The Times and WeedWeek purchased from retail stores and had tested at private labs showed concentrations of pesticides either above levels the state allows or at levels that exceed federal standards for tobacco.”
Colorado’s supply glut issues and competition from “cheap, largely unregulated intoxicating hemp-derived products” have led to a 30 percent tax revenue decrease over the past two years.
SF Gate Cannabis Editor Lester Black quotes Vince Ning of weed distributor Nabis: “People thought the big crash was going to happen in 2022, and there was certainly a crash, but things continued to get worse in 2023. And we are still in 2024, and things aren’t looking that much better.”
Lil Hit
Through last weekend’s New York-LA series at Yankee Stadium, Fresno State’s Aaron Judge and Dodgers phenomenon Shohei Ohtani were crammed onto a ball cap, in one of the most crass merchandising plays you’re ever going to see.
Dugout Report