I’ve always loved Bhairavi Desai, the head of the Taxi Workers Alliance. Late last week, she got to say goodbye to Matthew Daus, the outgoing head of the Taxi & Limo Commission, at their hearing last week.

As Ms. Desai headed back to her seat, she chirped, “Good luck to you, by the way.”

“Same to you!” Mr. Daus replied. “It’s been an absolute pleasure.” He added, in a humorous tone: “Let’s go have some lunch after I’m out of there.”

“As long as I get to add the poison in first,” Ms. Desai replied.

THAT IS GOOD STUFF.

“No negative news allowed on the front pages of newspapers or the headline news sections of Web sites… Do not feature news reports on major incidents in Beijing during the two meetings, including ‘staffer at Xidan Books Building hacks manager to death’ or ‘accident at Shunyi car showroom, one man dies.’ Do not highlight the timing of these events… Do not report on cases of detention center inmates dying during sleep.”
–A list of media guidelines that China’s Communist Party propaganda department and Bureau of Internet Affairs sent to editors of state-run publications leaked to the internet recently. These translated excerpts are fascinating.

In case you missed it over the weekend, Paul Westerberg of the Replacements-and, of course, that song-wrote a eulogy for Alex Chilton. You can find it here.

It’s strange to watch history being made. Prior to yesterday’s passage of the health care reform bill I think the most significant legislation in my lifetime may have been the Americans with Disabilities Act, and I don’t recall scrambling to the TV set to watch the roll call on C-Span. But there we were last night, after nearly a year and a half of invective, fear-mongering, hostility and the rest of it, encapsulated into a weekend where a prominent gay legislator was the recipient of anti-homosexual taunts and a genuine hero of the American civil rights movement was shouted at with a word that most publications refuse to print because it is so offensive and historically loaded. And then one congressman called another congressman-a congressman so intent on making sure that American women not have full access or control over their bodies that he demanded and received executive order as part of the price for his support of the bill-a “babykiller.” It really makes you proud to be American.

But maybe that is part of watching history up close. Fifty years from now, if we are not a fully-owned subsidiary of the Chinese (we won’t be) I suspect the story will be something much more bland: “Americans, in a time of economic turmoil, recognized the need for every citizen to have access to adequate health care, and despite several deep currents of anxiety, rallied to pass the first iteration of the current system.” Etc. The jeers, the rancor, the lies about “death panels” will all be part of the small details that only the specialists pay attention to. Watching the process last night, watching each aye vote, you had the sense that, yes, these people knew they were making history. I’m not naive. I know the bill is flawed. I know there’s a lot more to be done, and I know that the vicissitudes of the public mood may mean that it takes longer to get the important things fixed than it should. But last night was historic, and everybody knew it. So, actually, yes, it made me proud to be an American. We’re slow to act, we’re easily confused, we often fall prey to fears to which we should know better than be susceptible, but mostly we will do the right thing. Eventually. Piece by piece. And sometimes that’s good enough.

And now, more process.

And how was your weekend? Back in the East Village, apparently a roving street brawl took place around Avenue A early Sunday morning-this series of photos was taken on East 7th Street, closer to A than First Ave., outside fancy contemporary Greek restaurant Pylos (try the haloumi!). The total police response from the 9th Precinct was one squad car.

My Corner Pot Shop’s Charm Offensive

by Willy Blackmore

I live next to a place where people buy marijuana with great frequency. And not in the way that your neighbor upstairs pushes a few dime bags here and there-this is a full-blown storefront, with free coffee and a TV and couches for people to lounge on. Carefully stapled bags, “prescription” printed on one side, are pushed out of a little window similar to the kind manned by bank tellers or postal clerks. The child-proof amber prescription bottles are the same kind that Cephalexin or Xanax comes in, but with ink-jet-printed labels reading ISH slapped on them, citing CA Health and Safety Code 11362.5–7. And that’s because this is all, still, legal in the failing great state of California.

Prop 215, also known as the Compassionate Use Act, brought about the legalization of medicinal marijuana in California in 1996, making operations like my friendly neighborhood pot shop, the Long Beach Organics Collective (read the reviews!) possible. What were originally envisioned as collectives made up of the terminally ill or chronic pain sufferers coming together in peaceful, self-supporting agrarian enclaves, growing and sharing their marijuana amongst themselves, has blown up into big business in recent years. San Francisco, with a population of under a million, is home to just twenty-three tightly regulated dispensaries. The city of Los Angeles is home to at least 540 pot shops, a figure that is said to be larger than that of all the Starbucks in the City of Angels. (There are just slightly a bit more than 1700 Starbucks in the whole state.)

In LA, billboards and print ads offering cheap medical marijuana evaluations are a regular sight. Their aesthetic borrows heavily from The Chronic and Doggystyle era rap album art, mixed in with a token bit of medical iconography; cannabis leaves abound. Banished to the back pages of local alt-weeklies, just a page’s turn from the escort ads, the target audience doesn’t seem to be cancer patients, people with glaucoma or those suffering from spinal injuries.

My pot shop is just a few blocks north of downtown Long Beach, a neighborhood that fell on hard times before the Great Recession hit. Then the already empty retail spaces expanded storefront by storefront, leaving many blocks largely vacant. While opening a more traditional business in any of these spaces would require surviving the excruciatingly slow and arcane process known as obtaining a business license, opening a pot shop has been the easier route. They are not the target of federal raids that still can and do target places like the hookah bar down the block which was so shady that a heavy chain and padlock was kept across the doors even during their so-called “business” hours, as they openly sold marijuana inside-all while operating under a business license for selling beauty and hair care products, one of the easiest to obtain. The Obama administration has called the feds off of dispensaries that abide by California law, regardless of the all-trumping federal laws against marijuana.

Now the Long Beach City Council has passed an ordinance in the hope to curtail the ever-expanding number of dispensaries. It sets a buffer zone around schools for one thing; it also mandates that all marijuana sold be grown within the city’s limits.

There are three schools within just a few blocks of my pot shop. The closest, just a half block away, is a pre-school, which seems to indicate the end of the establishment. Community activists have been highly vocal in their support of these proposed laws, citing crime, ugliness and sketchy people. To them, dispensaries are no better than your average casita.

That has not been my experience.

My thoughts on the local pot shop began with a bowl of water. José, the intimidating, tall and wide guy who sits watch over the doctor’s office-like waiting room, set it down outside the front door. “For the dogs,” he said, as I walked past with my own beagle, Sigmund, “so they can have a drink.” My pot shop wanted to be a good neighbor. This was just the first step in what has become a growing neighborhood charm offensive. As it occupies the sole retail space on the block, the LBOC is continually looking to insert itself into the community, hoping to become loved and indispensable to stoners and marijuana teetotalers alike.

A good friend who lives nearby in an apartment she owns, inside of which she often smokes medicinal-grade marijuana picked up from one of those old-fashioned (illegal) drug dealer types. She recalled her response to the LBOC opening by miming taking a drag off a joint then speaking in fits and starts around a fake cough: “Fuck, man. What about my property value?”

And in a sense, yes. One of two things are highly likely to happen if you stand out front of the LBOC for any extended period of time: a patient will offer to sell you the weed he just procured at the dispensary, or someone will ask if you have a club card and if you can buy for them. I often recognize my high school-aged self in the faces of the shotgun-riding passengers sitting in cars parked in the 30-minute spot out front-it’s a green zone! That must have been the face I put on while someone over 21 went into the gas station to buy me beers. I’ve watched teenaged skater kids rip into the stapled-shut bags-police procedural rules bar cops from unsealing stabled prescriptions-more than eager to get at their purchase. Once one pulled out a huge bud right on the street corner, holding it up against the sky to examine the color of its hairs, the pockets of THC crystals.

But then there’s a philosophy student from Cal State University Long Beach, with a grey-flecked ponytail, that I see regularly. He walks incredibly stiffly, uses a cane. To pet my dog, Sigmund jump up and put his paws on the man’s waist; he is unable to bend over. He found himself on suicide watch after making a bad choice during a doctor’s visit; he said that if a proposed treatment wasn’t going to help, he just wanted it to all end.

And there’s a grandmother with a motorized scooter who comes with her pre-teen grandson. She motors past the younger and not-visibly-suffering patients to pick up a quarter of her strain of choice.

Phase two of the charm offensive blew way past the doggie water bowl. One early weekday morning, I saw a flock of blue t-shirts milling around out front, trash bags in hand. The back of each shirt was silkscreened with a white cannabis leaf, with the words CLEAN UP CREW running beneath. The blue-shirted legal stoners made their way through the neighborhood, picking up trash with the help of latex gloves. Others swept up dead leaves and debris-surely including a fair number of hastily torn “Prescription” bags-from the sidewalk.

They clean up every weekend now, with at least a dozen people making up a given Saturday or Sunday’s crew. The volunteers are familiar faces from weekdays at the dispensary-the same twentysomething-heavy crowd, but with quite a few more female volunteers to balance out the bros. And they don’t do some half-assed cleaning job. This is far from being a spotless neighborhood, the grass and sidewalks littered with an array of trash and leftover food-chicken bones and stripped cobs of corn impaled on sticks, sold by street vendors, along with various fast food packaging and wrappers. On weekends now, the sidewalks are spotless, the landscaping free of clinging bits of trash, no dregs of meals half ground into the sidewalk.

There’s definitely a Mafioso feeling to the whole thing-as if the residents in the neighborhood are “being taken care of.” It’s not like we’ve all been gifted iPods that fell of the back of some truck, but with all of the political debate going on, the charm offensive does make it feel like I’m unwittingly giving something back, if only my own attitude, for these cleaner streets, for the dog water and also for the dog bag dispenser they later installed outside. I use the bags-they’re the biodegradable kind, the ones that won’t clog up landfills like the cheap plastic sandwich bags I used to buy for picking up after my dog.

The charm offensive is not entirely working. A stroller-pushing mother unleashed a fierce tirade on a pair of street cleaners the other Sunday. Even as they were picking up trash, she pointed them out to her husband as if they were breaking car windows or stencil-bombing people’s front doors: “Look baby, there’s two of them now,” she said.

Then, yelling across the street, not pausing as she pushed he daughter forward: “Now you’re fucking out here picking shit up off the street?” she yelled.

The Mafioso thing is definitely getting to some more than others.

I became the best of neighbors to the LBOC completely by chance way too early recently when my trusty beagle sidekick and I foiled a robbery attempt. Out for a morning walk, not even half-awake myself, Sigmund and I passed by someone walking up the sidewalk around the corner from the front of the dispensary. I vaguely remember saying hello, which is totally out of character for me, especially when resignedly taking the dog out anytime before 6:00 a.m. This makes me think that Sigmund howled at the man-and his beagle howl is raw and loud, a painful sound to hear. On my way back, I saw the same guy messing with the metal gate covering the LBOC’s glass doors. He was trying to dismantle the cameras, as it turned out. José told me all of this the next day. He said that as they were playing back the security tape, just when the would-be burglar was trying to take the camera down, the footage showed Sigmund and I walking past, and the burglar took off.

Even before the City Council passed the “locally grown” part of its initiative, the LBOC had moved into the empty office space next door. They quickly put up walls, added new doors and may have already started growing a crop right here on my block. The front of the grow operation space has large plate-glass windows looking out on the street. They hope to decorate them with rotating art installations. None of this may matter, in light of the school-zone buffer laws. But they seem to think that if they can make the neighborhood love them enough, all the laws might just go away.

Willy Blackmore lives in Long Beach, where he works for a PR firm and also writes sometimes.

Photograph by Katherine Hitt, under a Creative Commons license.

Scandal on Prison Island after comedian Fiona O’Loughlin brought that country to a standstill with a suggestion that National Treasure Bindi Irwin “needs a slap in the face.” Irwin is the daughter of revered Prison Islander Steve Irwin, who earned the love of fellow Australians by molesting reptiles on TV and then died. Outraged viewers “called O’Loughlin spiteful and hateful after her performance on ABC music quiz Spicks and Specks on Wednesday.” And now they’re going to beat her with a spoon.

Peter Watts, the super-dark scifi writer, is now a felon, because he didn’t lay down on the ground after border guards (Canada-America, not Mexico-America!) punched him in the face repeatedly. (Also because he didn’t lay down on the ground, and asked what the hell was going on, he got pepper-sprayed in the face.) This is a felony because “assault” seems to be classified much the same way as “resist” or “impede.” So if you impede someone’s fist with your face, boom, felony. Sentencing is forthcoming; he faces two years. This is pretty much in every which way a travesty, particularly as it involves a guy who rescues stray cats in his spare time.

I admittedly know very little about Canadian politics, but I thought that Prime Minister Stephen Harper was supposed to be the more palatable choice for voters who were scared by the creepy evangelicalism of Stockwell Day and Preston Manning. But apparently he is going as far right as he can? What is up, Canada? You guys are supposed to be the sane ones! Can’t you reanimate the corpse of Lester Pearson or something?

Joe Coscarelli is working up a list of complete sets listed. There is: Usher’s “Little Freak.” (“Like Santa I keep a vixen/ Got that Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Dixon, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen!” Um, ha. And then there’s Jay-Z, who (sorry) I have never felt, particularly for a stunt like this.

From the unmemorably titled “Reminder”:

Ten number one albums in a row
Who better than me?
Only The Beatles nobody ahead of me
I crush Elvis in his blue suede shoes
Made The Rolling Stones seem sweet as Kool Aid too
‘96, ‘97, ‘98, ‘99, 2000, 2001 and beyond
‘02, ‘03, ‘04, ‘05, ‘06 and 7, ‘08, â€˜09

Man, that is basically the equivalent of me typing “You guys. Wut?” and then copying and pasting it 20 times. You guys. Wut? You guys. Wut? You guys. Wut? You get the point. Anyway, go help Joe make his list!