| May 22, 2009 | Get Back to Where You Once Belonged |
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I'm back in LA, after spending last week in NYC for some Yoostar press demos and meetings. Yoostar was written up in Forbes, Good Housekeeping, NY Daily News, and several other places. Follow our Yoostar twitter feed to stay up-to-date. We've updated Yoostar.com with a new intro video and, and we updated the Roles page to show some of the movie clips you can act in with the Yoostar system. Also, you may have noticed that this blog looks pretty different (and also that I'm posting to it after over two years of absence). While I was in NYC, my friend Lee pointed out that poprocks.com looked "so 1999." He was basically telling me that my online presence was wearing mom jeans. Ouch. I suppose, it's good to have friends who will be bluntly honest. It's like the time Andy told me that I needed an RSS feed for my blog, or the time JP told me I should not ever -- under any circumstances -- leave the house without wearing a bra. Funny, though, no one ever said there was anything wrong those times when I dyed my hair blue or apricot. I've seen the photos, and I'm surprised I didn't receive more critical feedback. Labels: andy, blog, haircolor, jp, la, lee, nyc, press, twitter, yoostar posted by Jess Barron @ 12:57 PM 
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| July 7, 2005 | Awakened to London Blasts |
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When you work in online news, today is one of those terrible days when you wake up to 10 or more alerts from the AP coming in on your Blackberry one after the other. Pop. Pop. Pop. The messages say things like "LONDON (AP) Police have reported \'a number of fatalities' at one London subway station" and "LONDON (AP) Hospital officials say 190 people are being treated for injuries from explosions in central London." It is a terrible feeling. My phone rings before the alarm goes off at 7a.m. I wake up and pull the laptop off the floor and up into bed with me. More than 10 Yahoo! Messenger windows are active and highlighted in bright orange at the bottom of my screen as I sit in bed in a similarly bright orange Trainspotting T-shirt (that used to belong to J.P. before he disappeared). The active Messenger windows are all of my Yahoo! news co-producers (in Canada, East Coast, West Coast, and London) who are pinging me to join voice chats to discuss how to handle this news on our front doors and portal pages. Everybody is so on top of it, but still we're scrambling to stay on top of the latest angles: How many dead? How many injured? Is Al-Queda being officially blamed? My friend Clare in the Yahoo! London office is also telling me via Messenger that she narrowly missed getting onto the bus that minutes later exploded. She decided to take a faster bus this morning instead. I'm telling her that I'm glad she's OK, but this is all pretty horrible. If you want to read the latest news on this story, check out the Yahoo! Full Coverage page. The people working on it -- my friends and colleagues on the Full Coverage team -- are updating it with the best articles, info and photos available online. Also, check out the London bomb blast Flickr pool (sent to me by Esther). posted by Jess Barron @ 7:00 AM
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| January 8, 2005 | I'll Tell You a Secret... |
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I'll tell you a secret: I didn't even wear a bra for one year from age twenty-four to twenty-five. (This was back in 1999-2000 when I worked at WildWeb in Boston and then at Scour in Beverly Hills when I first moved to Los Angeles). One of my dearest (and very gay) friends was staying with me in LA for a few weeks back in the warm spring of 2000, and he took me aside one morning after we ate breakfast. "Sweetie," he said. "I'm not sure how you're gonna take this... but... you really need to start wearing a bra." He dragged me back into my bedroom and turned me so that I could see the sideview of my chest in the full-length mirror. "Your boobies are too big to be just letting them hangout together all unsupervised." I think my jaw dropped, or I giggled. And I probably turned red. But he was right. It was true. I needed to wear one! In fact, it was totally obscene that I wasn't wearing one to work. You know, I dunno why I even stopped wearing bras at that point in my life -- was I embracing an excessively bohemian lifestyle? Or maybe I thought bras weren't comfortable or they were too complicated... or something. More likely I was just too lazy when getting dressed in the mornings before work. "Princess, trust me, you'll thank me for telling you this someday," he said as he rummaged through my armoire to find a bra with underwire. You'll be no doubt relieved to learn that ever since that breakfast-time chat on a warm spring day in 2000 in Los Angeles, I've been committed to wearing a brassiere every day. Especially to work. I mean, those were the wild internet/dot.com days -- but what was I thinking?! Thank you, JP! You certainly had at least one positive impact on my life. Labels: jp posted by Jess Barron @ 12:33 PM
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| January 11, 2002 | Vassar's Wet Dream |
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"This is Vassar's wet dream!" Mindy squealed, as Ethan Zohn won Survivor. "I mean c'mon, he's a heterosexual male and he's an athelete..." "Yeah, no one's gonna think it's an all girls school anymore... This is almost like when you worked in the school's publicity department and you were making the recruitment videos, and you wouldn't use me as a stand-in because I wasn't black or male or athletic or Asian," I responded, still bitter from missing my big break in Vassar's promotional video due to my white female majority status. "What I want to know," said Adam a.k.a. Atom, "Is do they get one million dollars and then have the 40% taxes taken out or do they give them enough money so that they have a million after taxes?" "I can't believe our classmate won Survivor!" Mindy said. "Yeah, if someone from Vassar was going to win Survivor, I would've expected it to be a catty gay boy like J.P. or a pissed-off Women's Studies major," I said. Mindy immediately called Helen on her cell phone, and I called Allyson who is at CES in Vegas, and probably right now shaking her ass at Rum Jungle. (Oh, I'm not jealous. Noooooo. But what if she's hanging out with Bill?!) Allyson didn't answer, so I didn't even know if she knew yet that Ethan won. Damn. No She Said, She Said tonight. After that we thought about who else to call, and I ended up calling Lee to point out how, once again, Vassar's superiority to his alma mater Occidental College (which incidentally goes by the nickname of "Oxy," Eww!) has been made evident. We considered calling J.P. because he's such a pop culture addict, but I remembered how he keeps telling me that he doesn't watch reality TV because his own life is much more interesting. Perhaps the best part about Ethan winning Survivor is that I won $80 in my office's Survivor pool. It may not be a million dollars, but it's enough to buy me a few cocktails (even at San Francisco prices). After the Survivor excitement Mindy and Adam busted out Dance Dance Revolution and started jumpin' around my living space. And then Mindy and I busted into the duet that she and I are singing Saturday night during my birthday festivities at The Mint. My birthday is coming up very soon. We're celebrating two days early on Saturday night. What song should I karaoke? People keep asking me what I did on New Year's Eve, and it's not such an easy question to answer: "Ummm, well, we built drunken pyramids on my kitchen floor and scared the dog." Seriously, how the hell do I explain what was going on in this photo?. Heather also posted some New Year's pics on her site too. Labels: allyson, jp, lee, mindy, sanfrancisco, sf, vassar posted by Jess Barron @ 7:01 PM
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| June 4, 2000 | The Busier the Better |
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If you were wondering and waiting in antipication of why my car went "Boom!" last weekend, here is the official answer: It turned out that my pretty blue Beetle's battery exploded. Alas, it wasn't covered under the warranty, because as the mechanic guy eloquently and existentially put it: "sometimes you get a bad battery." But, it's all fixed now -- and I suppose my experience with the explosion could've been a lot worse. Like if I had driven to Tijuana for Memorial Day weekend. I will just file the whole car incident under "How to lose $400 without really trying." Grrr! I really need to remember to sign up for AAA. Selena tells me that membership includes a bail bond. Apparently, in the event that you are ever thrown into the clinker, those Triple A peeps will front your bail. That's pretty sweet.) The last few days have been some of my favorite since I've moved to Los Angeles. I've been feeling so good, and doing things that I'm enjoying so deeply. I guess it began with Tai Chi on Thursday morning. I knew I needed to try lots of new activities to help myself to not focus on Lee and to also get me to start trying all the things I wished I could learn. And that very morning Selena came in to work with a book of all kinds of courses. We started looking through it together and decided we wanted to take: belly dancing, bartending, tai chi, yoga, self-hypnosis, drum lessons, conversational Japanese, and DHTML. We had to narrow it down a bit, so that we could focus properly and so that we'd have *some* free-time left. We decided to save belly dancing and conversational Japanese for later. But then we decided that we're going to join Barry's Bootcamp too. We're starting that tomorrow, and we're going to be doing it every day at 6:45 AM. Yes, that's AM. Wish me luck. It may just be too hardcore for the likes of me. We'll see. So, Selena and I started going to a Tai Chi class last Thursday night, and it really helped me to get over the negative funk I was in. It takes so much concentration to learn the movements, that I was able to get completely out of my head for the three hours while we were in class. It's one of the only activities I've found that is completely relaxing for me. It eradicates all of my anxious feelings. Now every morning and night I keep practicing the postures we were taught, and I can't wait to learn more this week. I wonder if yoga will be this good. I can only hope. On Saturday, I had breakfast with Adam (who is the singer for Timonium, a darkly ethereal band I might go see play this Tuesday night at the Silver Lake Lounge, but I'm not sure because that's the night that Jeff comes back from NYC). And then we went to Rhino Records (which, as it turns out, is only about two blocks from my house). We spent a few hours there, hearing new music on the listening stations and also listening to older CDs in the used section. Adam told me that he thought I would like a British band called Broadcast, and when I listened to their CD "The Noise Made By People," I fell in love. I bought that CD and also Dimitri from Paris' mix CD "A Night at the Playboy Mansion." I also bought a few used CDs (Laika's "Sounds of the Satellites" and Shudder to Think's soundtrack to the film "First Love, Last Rites.") After Adam left, I went up onto the roof of my apartment building and listened to music on my discman for a few hours. I mostly focused on the Travis CD "The Man Who." It's a great album. My favorite song is the first track "Writing to Reach You" (yeah, it's probably not surprising that a web writing person would relate to that one, huh?) I just love the opening lyrics: Everyday I wake up and it's Sunday This morning I went bowling in the Valley with Ray and Selena. I learned how to bowl the real way, (as opposed to my old method of just rolling the ball with both hands in the between-the-legs stance). After bowling we had coffee at Buzz in West Hollywood. And then I went to visit JP, and we had a great time. After that I went to see Robert Mapplethorphe's controversial exhibit "The Perfect Moment" at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Labels: beetle, jp, la, losangeles, music, selena posted by Jess Barron @ 10:16 PM
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| May 19, 2000 | My Sudden Gwen Stefani Obsession |
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Let's get this straight, I have never been a huge fan of No Doubt's music. But the other night when I was out with Selena and JP to see Tsar play at a Hollywood club called Vinyl, those two pop junkies (Selena and JP) started talking about Gwen Stefani. "Why won't anyone marry poor Gwen Stefani?!" one of them said. I listened as they discussed things I knew nothing about, things I had maybe heard about but had allowed to fall under my radar as pop tidbits about things that I just wasn't interested in. They excitedly discussed No Doubt's video for "A Simple Kind of Life," and how everything in the video is about how Gwen wants to get married and have a baby, but that none of her boyfriends were at all down with that. The men in the video all run away from her and look at her like she has three heads. It's also weird because Gwen used to date Tony (the Indian guy in No Doubt), but they broke up and are still friends, but as JP pointed out -- you need to notice that the baby Gwen picks up at the end of the video looks like he is Indian.
Labels: camille, jp, music, selena, video, women posted by Jess Barron @ 5:44 PM
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