So one of the greatest birthday presents was given to me. I learned today that I will be launching the Los Angeles division of my favorite website, www.GayListDaily.com! If you haven’t visited the site yet, please do, and please SUBSCRIBE!! It’s cute, punchy, funny and very informative. 

If you have anything So-Cal related that fits the site, send me your suggestions! I need a wealth of material to write about which the LGBT would consider fabulous.

Thanks everybody. I’ll update this post with my swanky Gay List Daily email tomorrow.

How can people still follow this guy? In this recent video, presidential candidate John McCain himself communicates that mayors and governors do not have what it takes for a national policy or foreign relations position. 

This must be from the pre-Palin world. Here, in post-Palin world, mayors and governors who lead less than 1 million people I guess are qualified, according to McCain’s obvious change of what used to be a heart. Because Palin governed a population-small state neighboring Russia she has the experience McCain was vocally doubting not too long ago ...

Disgusting!

I know. I’ve been all political these past few days. But it’s hard not to be ravaged with anger at John McCain’s campaign. This video made it to the top of Digg, yet it needs to be seen by as many people as possible, so I’m posting it here. I promise I’ll return to the lighter side of life soon. (Though it is election season and it’d be a lie to say that there will be no more politics on ACD.)

Enjoy at pass it on!

There is an equal time law that requires media to give balanced
reporting to both presidential candidates. Though Angel City’s Devil is
a blog, I thought it would be fun to give John McCain equal time today.

A recent ad from the McSAME camp has taken a quote Senator
Barack Obama used to illustrate McCain’s policies, out of context. Once
again, the McSame/Failin ticket has been caught in their hypocrisy.

First, the McCain “out of context” “sexism” ad:

Here is Senator McCain referring to Hillary Clinton’s policies in the same way (as “putting lipstick on a pig.”) Is McCain so old that he cannot remember saying this recently, before taking Obama’s comment out of context and then accusing him of sexism?

Lastly, here is Senator Obama finally sticking up for Truth and exposing the dishonorable tactics of the Republican party:

Please share this with anyone you know who has been blinded by McSame/Failin’s Rovian distraction techniques. How can anyone who watches these videos still want to vote for a hypocrite and Veep candidate too scared to debate the issues that she calls anyone “sexist” who asks her to?

If you missed Fashion Rocks 2008 last night but caught every second of the VMAs, you’re a bad gay. Last night’s annual fashion show/concert hybrid was infinitely better than the putrid, Britney Spear’s commercial that was this year’s VMAs. And the best evidence I have to support my opinion is this video of Rihanna’s opening performance. Yes, bitch. That’s Rihanna voguing. Fabulous!!

Finally, the real agents of change are fighting back. Check out Sen. Barack Obama’s new ad:

Hackers can suck it. 

Gry_hat, the hacker that took my website offline, may have dissolved my determination, but has only strengthened my heart. (I’m not sure that makes sense, but it felt good to write.)

Due to almost-daily security worries with the website platform I was using (Joomla), I have decided to take a break from AngelCitysDevil.com as an LGBT web-zine. The relaunch (which was up for a week before being hacked) ate a month of hard work and mind-numbing programming, and I simply don’t have it in me at this time to do it all over again. I am looking into pressing charges, however ...

- With the bad news out of the way, let’s celebrate! -

My extra free time has been spent wisely. I’ve been lucky enough to become a contributing writer for a wonderful Southern California publication, IN Magazine. Two articles have been published, both of which immediately receiving rave reviews from my editor and the personalities they were covering. In no time, I was assigned a feature story for the magazine--almost unheard of for newly published writers. This assignment will be turned in tomorrow and will hopefully garner more feature work and could possibly be the beginning of a syndicated column (my dream job).

If you’d like to read the digital versions of my published work, click on the magazines below:

Yay!

“Boys to Men”

“Fun with Philanthropy”

Also, stay tuned to this blog as I will be posting more frequently, coloring within the lines of a personal blog rather than LGBT news magazine.

I love you, lil’ devils!

-Jonathan

Ugh. I put in weeks of hard work to relaunch Angel City’s Devil, and have to start from scratch because some asshole named GRY_HAT hacked it. 

Thanks, douche.

I apologize to my lil’ devils while the new site is temporarily down. Until then, we will be posting here on the old skool blog that started the whole thing.

If anyone has ever had a website hacked or knows how to punish the asshole, please let me know. Stick with me and your thoughts and support definitely helps me through this frustrating time.

I love you all!

Oh, here is a new picture of me that I took yesterday. Hope this suffices until we get the brand new (yet again) ACD back online.

I’ve been working my abs and arms hard this Summer, and this is the result thus far:

Reader’s Digest recently posted this list of tips given by the ultimate restaurant insiders - waiters. Now though these are all pretty much common sense, as a waiter I definitely can see why these need to be read by all!! 

1. Avoid eating out on holidays and Saturday nights. The sheer
volume of customers guarantees that most kitchens will be pushed beyond
their ability to produce a high-quality dish.

2. There are almost never any sick days in the restaurant business.
A busboy with a kid to support isn’t going to stay home and miss out on
$100 because he’s got strep throat. And these are the people handling
your food.

3. When customers’ dissatisfaction devolves into personal attacks,
adulterating food or drink is a convenient way for servers to exact
covert vengeance. Waiters can and do spit in people’s food.

4. Never say “I’m friends with the owner.” Restaurant owners don’t
have friends. This marks you as a clueless poseur the moment you walk
in the door.

5. Treat others as you want to be treated. (Yes, people need to be reminded of this.)

6. Don’t snap your fingers to get our attention. Remember, we have shears that cut through bone in the kitchen.

7. Don’t order meals that aren’t on the menu. You’re forcing the
chef to cook something he doesn’t make on a regular basis. If he makes
the same entrée 10,000 times a month, the odds are good that the dish
will be a home run every time.

8. Splitting entrées is okay, but don’t ask for water, lemon, and
sugar so you can make your own lemonade. What’s next, grapes so you can
press your own wine?

9. If you find a waiter you like, always ask to be seated in his or
her section. Tell all your friends so they’ll start asking for that
server as well. You’ve just made that waiter look indispensable to the
owner. The server will be grateful and take good care of you.

10. If you can’t afford to leave a tip, you can’t afford to eat in
the restaurant. Servers could be giving 20 to 40 percent to the
busboys, bartenders, maître d’, or hostess.

11. Always examine the check. Sometimes large parties are unaware
that a gratuity has been added to the bill, so they tip on top of it.
Waiters “facilitate” this error. It’s dishonest, it’s wrong-and I did
it all the time.

12. If you want to hang out, that’s fine. But increase the tip to
make up for money the server would have made if he or she had had
another seating at that table.

13. Never, ever come in 15 minutes before closing time. The cooks
are tired and will cook your dinner right away. So while you’re
chitchatting over salads, your entrées will be languishing under the
heat lamp while the dishwasher is spraying industrial-strength,
carcinogenic cleaning solvents in their immediate vicinity.

         To cheer us up after a failed trip home for my cousin’s wedding, Swils presented my boyfriend and I with VIP passes to the one and only Electric Daisy Carnival, or North America’s largest dance party. I probably should call it a rave, but I just can’t bring myself. Raves were the underground warehouse and riverfront parties I gleefully attended as a high school kid in Detroit. At their peak, 5,000 teenagers would dance until drenched with sweat, forced to hug dozens of new friends goodbye against the backdrop of dawn. Electric Daisy Carnival refused to remind me of the raves of my youth. Arguably 80,000 dancers filled the LA Coliseum (yes, where the Olympics were held) and the acres of concrete surrounding it. This, I learned from the newest generation of ravers, was a not a rave, but a “massive”. 

   Before I moved to Los Angeles at 17 years old I wanted to make sure I emptied every bit of rave fever from my soul. The rave scene in LA was notoriously exaggerated by the party kids of Chicago and Detroit. Teenage rave immigrants who relocated to the Midwest with successful fathers told stories of the vastness of the So-Cal scene, and how our tiny parties back home just didn’t compare. For every two candy bracelets our wrists supported the LA ravers had six. For every pill we required to enter the consciousness of the party, the LA ravers took two. They were hardcore. By 17, I didn’t need hardcore, I needed to soften up. I danced at every little party I could until my legs couldn’t be moved by house music any longer, until I couldn’t possibly accept or give another back rub to a sweaty stranger again. And then I moved to LA and left my phat pants at home.

  I was unmoved at the rave that weekend. I was out of place, lonely and not interested in buying enhancements from complete strangers. The music was different than we were raised on in Chicago and Detroit. It wasn’t house, but odd, psychedelic trance with sci-fi sound effects and unnerving blips and bleeps. I left early with a depressingly dry shirt and an incessant ringing in what used to be my ears. I didn’t go back to the party store on Melrose, finally ridding my system of the rave.

It has been nearly ten years. The most I have raved in the past decade has been in my mind, recalling the decadent moments of my youth in the hopes of finishing a memoir. When Swils first proposed the idea of taking J and I to the Electric Daisy Carnival, it emerged as a possibility only because of its utility as reference for my manuscript. My memory of my early rave days are fleeting and the thousands of blissful moments have a tendency to blend together. And my fondest memories of raving are the feelings of being utterly free from life’s problems, a feeling I truly can’t fathom as an adult.

   So the dominoes fell into place, I lost work and entered a low point in life (read the last woeful post) and was unable to leave town for my beloved cousin’s wedding ceremony.

   “Okay, we want to come to the party with you,” I unexcitedly informed Swils.

---

  “Do kids still dress as ravers?” I asked J as we were getting ready.

   “I don’t know. What are you going to wear?”

   “Uhm, shorts I guess. I just want to be comfortable. But I bet I’m going to stick out like an old man. Oh my God, we are going to be the old guys at the rave that we used to be weirded out by when we were younger!”

   I toyed with the idea of wearing candy bracelets and glow toys and all the cultural reference points of my youth, but then became nauseous with the image of someone my age dressed in such a way. I shook the image clean from my mind. Comfortable shoes and shorts it was, just call me ‘Grandpa’.

   Like locusts, the rare butterflies that only emerge when approaching a rave began to hatch in my stomach. I danced in Swils’s passenger seat, mentioning how excited I was at least a dozen times. By the time we exited onto Vermont, a few blocks from the LA Coliseum, our energy became explosive. Traffic froze for blocks as countless cars full of bouncing party goers poured into the area. Each car, covered in stickers, emitted different styles of dance music resulting in a cacophony of beats heard by those walking the sidewalks. We decided to exit the street side pre-party early and walk the rest of the way.

   Immediately after leaving the parking structure I knew this was like no rave I had been to before, LA, Chicago, Detroit or New York City. We were still blocks away from the entrance yet hundreds upon hundreds of party kids lined the streets, the sheer numbers of attendees forcing us to walk slowly and in single file down Vermont. The vibe already existed on these sidewalks. Ravers spoke loudly about which DJs they were dying to see, who from San Francisco or San Diego or Phoenix or Las Vegas they were planning to meet up with and how much fun they thought they were going to have.

   “I’m just going to look for the lesbian chill area and hang out there all night,” said a girl in short-shorts and candy bracelets up to her elbows.

   As if hearing her mission statement, a nearby police officer told us all to “have fun” and winked.

   Back in my day (------ a cliché only used by older ravers, and now me) the police officers did not offer well wishes, nor did they wink at us. Usually if an officer was that close we would have already had handcuffs clinking against our candy bracelets. This was like no rave I had been to before.

   The lines outside of EDC (I’m shortening the title as we both should be familiar with the party’s name by now) were thwarting and a sure-fired buzz kill for anyone who happened to have enhanced their evening a little early. Luckily, Swils’s gift of VIP tickets let us swoop right in under the radar. Later, ravers would say the only problem with EDC was the 2-hour wait to get in. The party’s promoters, Insomniac and Giant, promise to have that issue fixed for next year.

   After the bottleneck of the entrance, inside the bottle was a vastly different ecosystem. Carnival rides rose up from the crowd of ravers, competing with their colorful outfits with lush, flashing lights. Different stages of music were randomly placed outside the monstrous coliseum in no particular order, making stumbling upon a good set of music feel like a personal discovery. The vibrant ravers, incandescent lighting systems and DNA-changing dance music created an inescapable orgy for the senses. Our ears and feet begged us to find a stage and take a moment to dance. The Om area invited us to do just that.

   Ten minutes into enhancing EDC and Swils and J decided to ride the ‘Free Fall’ ride. This did not sound like fun for my sensitive stomach that already had enough on its plate.

   “Go ahead. I’ll be waiting for you dancing here. Mark Farina is just too good right now,” I said.

   The bass of Farina’s house music had my mind and time loosen their long-kept friendship. In the hopes of further tripping me out, the USC marching band -with each member donning sunglasses- marched by the stage, blending their masterful drum beats with that of the DJ’s. A tail of rolling ravers followed them like groupies, enthusiastically clapping at every time signature change.

  At the end of the long line of groupies marched Swils and J, practically skipping up and down with glee.

   “That was fucking unbelievable,” they said in unison.

   “We could see all of LA, including the whole damn party from the top of the Free Fall,” gushed Swils.

   “Let’s go into the main area, you’ve got to see it,” said J.

   Before we could leave the Om stage for the massive dance floor, two cute boys approached to introduce themselves.

   “I’m Kent, this is Josh,” one said.

    Instantly I remembered how social barriers didn’t exist at raves. The memories were flooding back and surrounding me in one big, warm hug.

   “And over here is Steph and Ian. They used to be figure skating champs. Want a sucker?”

(The new crew at EDC 2008)

   “Awe, it’s soooo nice to meet you guys. We’re headed to the main dance floor to see Moby. Please come with us!” I had morphed into an entirely new, nicer person, the kind of person that Hollywood seems to disintegrate upon arrival.

   With our own bonafide gay rave crew in tow, we all held hands and swam down the river of candy ravers towards the floor of the coliseum. On our journey, my lovable friend from work (and fellow Missourian), Koelen, joined us. The more, the merrier.

   We arrived at Candy Raver River Port (try saying that 3 times fast), spilled neatly onto the bleachers high above the main stage’s dance floor. Once the breadth of the coliseum was within our visual grasp, any word left to describe it simply wouldn’t do.

   “Holy shit. I’ve never seen anything like it.“

   “Fuck. Wow. Amazing.”

   “Jesus Christ. This is fuckin’ surreal.”

   ”I’ve never seen so many people in one place. How many could it possibly be?"

   These statements and similar others were made by us and the thousands of ravers dancing on the bleachers near. Below, on a grassy field trampled by USC football players and Olympians danced tens of thousands of glowing ravers.

   The sight in itself was enough to induce a high.

The main dance floor of Electric Daisy Carnival.

    Some of our new crew took seats while Swils and I couldn’t help but dance to Moby’s brilliant choices of music. Kent and Josh and Koelen and J exchanged hug after hug, smiles now permanent fixtures on their faces. Soon, fireworks shot up from behind the main stage forcing an eruption of cheers from the dancers on the field and the revelers resting in the bleachers. I took an immediate seat next to J, my hand finding its way to his thigh. A caress of my fingers said everything words could not. “This is the best night of my life,” they said.

   The peak of fireworks on beat with Moby’s music was easily met by later sets from Armand Van Helden, Andy Caldwell and Paul Van Dyk (which we were allowed backstage for). Each moment of EDC was unforgettable and just as ecstatic as the one preceding it. Countless shiny ravers introduced themselves to us and begged us to keep having fun; a buffet of good beats surrounded us and begged us to dance; the tangible vibe and PLUR bit into our souls and begged me to remember what had captivated my youth and encouraged me to write a book about it ten years later.

   We reluctantly left EDC, never really wanting it to end. The 80,000 ravers we had shared the best night of our lives with poured onto the streets of Los Angeles, instilling a vibrant sense of community I rarely feel in the big city. Even a week later and my gay rave crew frequently will reminisce about the wonders of EDC, hoping to keep the spirit alive. Thank you Electric Daisy Carnival for helping me remember.

    So my cell phone was turned off yesterday. Luckily Jay and I kick it ‘old school’ and have a land line. I am not completely cut off from the world, but freedom from the shackles of a cell phone isn’t all joy. 

Money is tight. It’s hard to admit and in fact quite embarrassing. But it’s the truth. Money is so tight that I have been giving friends our home number and notifying them to ‘replace’ my cell number with it, knowing that I will not be able to reclaim my mobile anytime soon.

My car might be taken away. It’s probably good though seeing as gas is about to hit $5/gallon and I ashamedly drive an SUV through the rough terrain of the Los Angeles freeway system. To be honest, even before I became unable to make the car payments our Jeep sat in the garage most of the time, Jay and I protesting fuel prices by jumping on mass transit. Still, I’m not sure it helps my credit score by having a car repo’d.

My cousin and lifelong friend, David, is getting married this weekend in Kansas City. I am not going. I was invited and even joyfully accepted his invitation to be in the wedding party, but months-long joblessness and a bleak outlook on life have prevented me from going. It’s the first time in ten years I have regretted living further than a day’s drive from home.

But before you think that this whine-fest is a complete turnoff (I mean
there are food riots going on in the world for Christ’s sake), I am actually not depressed
about the situation. Rock bottom means that there ain’t much further
down you can go, unless you have a shovel. I threw away my shovel in the rave years. Rock bottom needs to be a turning
point. I must wipe the dirt and pebbles off of my ass and get up and change things. I
need Oprah. Maybe I don’t need Oprah.

The new waitressing job is less than I expected. Business is iffy and I consider myself lucky if I end a shift with $80 in my pocket. Not to mention that for some reason I am only granted 2 shifts a week. It took me nearly 2 months to find the job at Numbers, and though I am looking for another supplementary job, I am expecting it to be another long and arduous process. Thanks to the economy, competition is rife and, much to my detriment, I am not the biggest seller of me.

As my phone, my car and soon my power, gas, internets and more are lost, the fundamentals of life shine through. No matter how hard it gets, I still have my family, friends, passion for writing and Justin. No amount of forced Ramen noodle dinners can take those away. And that is the silver lining in the struggle. And it makes a sight as rare as a snow leopard come jumping out of the frost -my smile.