a patch of permanently green astroturf

good morning ~

(click the link / Echo Park to listen)

My Big Breaka patch of permanently green astroturf

today’s track is a manipulated excerpt of the board recording of my set at dublab last Saturday

We’re playing extremely sick beachfront boardwalk hang Rippers on July 4th! At a show presented by Shea Stadium! You can either postgame the hot dog eating contest or pregame fireworks with us! I am very excited about the news and I believe it is the next Ben Seretan gig I have booked after having just done a bunch, here’s the flyer and the full lineup:

We found ourselves wandering through the aisles of a wide variety of grocery stores while we visited California. I never quite grasped it before but I see it now: I really love visiting grocery stores when traveling. It's a little pedestrian voyeurism, checking out what kinds of cereal a particular part of the world offers gives you a glimpse of a boring intimacy. Buying eggs or a loaf of bread or a bottle of aspirin can really make you feel like you've successfully infiltrated in a way that staying in a hotel or seeing the sights cannot. I feel similarly about riding public transit - what better way to see the world through someone else's eyes than to share their commute to work? In the well-lit, fluorescent abundance of a grocery store it feels easy to see everything, the entire world.

Our first night in Orange County, we gathered everyone informally at an enormous food compound inspired by the mercados of Mexico City where, between the various hot food vendors, stalls, and kiosks, the beautiful bulk chiles and enormous bags of made-on-site tortilla chips were something of an afterthought. It was a popular Saturday night location and the air was filled with the smell of cumin, cilantro, cinnamon, and manteca bubbling as a man in what looked to be lava inspection gear fried off the chicharrones. Lumps of our families passed around ceviches and aguachiles on the back patio while inside a DJ tried to coax people onto the makeshift dance floor. I don't believe I've seen a DJ in a grocery store before.

The next day we once again needed somewhere we could informally corral folks that wouldn't require a particular reservation and could serve a wide variety of needs and desires. Right down the street from the sculpture park and the museum - tucked behind other unassuming hotels and strip mall businesses - is a sprawling Japanese supermarket that also has a bustling food court, seemed like the perfect spot. Some got boba, some got enormous bowls of noodles, their surfaces iridescent with oil, one beautifully minded soul went in to the supermarket section and got a single onigiri and a rainbow-colored can of Boss brand coffee. There was an added benefit to meeting up here: activities. In our somewhat formal wear we put tokens into the gashapan machines, exchanging plastic baubles with each other, and then we kept cramming into the very kawaii photo booth, marveling at our face-tuned selves in the prints.

The following day we once again wandered the aisles of a grocery store, this time looking for throat coat drops and fun, funky seltzers we could bring to a cookout at my dad's house. This was perhaps our favorite type of grocery store: a little crunchy with an emphasis on produce and a decent bulk selection (and delightfully they keep much of their bulk section in old-timey wooden barrels). Typically if a place has both an operating deli and a big selection of dubiously effective vitamins and holistic treatments we're gonna have a good time there. The avocados were all ripe, the store was clean and spacious, and for a moment I could not help but indulge in the reverie of an imagined life in placid, smoothly sanded Orange County. The guy checking us out asked us if we liked to go to raves - how could you tell, we smiled? We asked him where he likes to go out in Orange County and his answer was obvious and then very surprising: LA, you go to LA, but then if you really want to go to a rave you have to go to Serbia. They have the best raves. My buddy Ted grew excited over text when I mentioned Sprouts - he was a fan, too, and even had a buddy who dropped out of college to work there. He loved it.

Later that week after helping our friends assemble their flower arrangements - which, to Gracelee's delight, necessitated us doing some floral scavenging through their neighborhood when they ran out of warehouse-bought stems - they suddenly realized that they needed, like, six gallons of lime juice. Their limited wedding party bar would include margs but they hadn't figured out where to source the citrus yet. We're on it, we said, hoping to help and began a search for the hundreds of ounces we would need. The first place - more of a shoppe shop than a grocery store - sold us two delicious cans of tepache and a bag of Have'a chips and pointed us in the right direction: Food4Less. This was one of the largest grocery establishments I think I've ever been to, the size of an international airport, cavernous and yet full of product. We quickly found what we needed and left the bags of juice on their porch.

As we pulled up to the wedding the next day I eyed a vendor across the street with a signature rainbow umbrella - they were selling a selection of frutas and I wanted my sweetie to experience the particular LA delight of chili powder sprinkled on tropical flesh. But later, after really exhausting ourselves on the steamy dance floor and deeply in need of hydrating fruit meat, the vendor had already packed up and disappeared. Fueled by the lime juice concoction we had helped create us two and our two friends decided to try the El Super in the distance. Another beautiful grocery store, full of varieties of limes I've never before witnessed and bulk pinto beans that rattled sonorously against each other in the bin. Whatever we stopped in there for, we left with a whole ass watermelon, a coconut sheathed of its outer, furry layer, and two bags of chips. Back at the party, it was very amusing that we suddenly were carrying around a whole ass watermelon - it came with us back onto the dance floor, it rode with us to our friends' AirBnB, we demolished it in the backyard, a patch of permanently green astroturf in Elysian Heights.

But what about you? What normal, everyday things in someone else’s life would you find fascinating were you to witness them? What’s your favorite type of grocery store? If you had to go and find four vases worth of flowers in your neighborhood right now, could you?