| October 31, 2006 | Birtney and KFed Do Halloween 2006 in L.A. |
Chris and I dressed up as Britney and KFed this year.  Check out this video showing how we decided what to wear. We started Saturday night at the Halloween Vlog Fest party in honor of Amanda Congdon in the lobby of the Yahoo! Center in Santa Monica, and then we were headed to West Hollywood to a fabulous bash at Court's place. My two favorite costumes of the evening were Strawberry Shortcake (a.k.a. Sam of daily online video serial show Sam Has 7 Friends at the vlog party) and a seriously decked-out Marie Antoinette (in WeHo). Check out the photos. Labels: britney, chris, halloween, kfed, la, party, photos, video, vlog, yahoo posted by Jess Barron @ 11:40 PM 
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| November 17, 2005 | Gawking at 'Yahoo! Jocks' |
Last night after our day-long editorial conference at The Viceroy (I presented on the  topic of "What Works and What Doesn't for Yahoo! Broadband Portals"), a bunch of us Yahoo!'s and our entourage went to a cocktail party at Arianna Huffington's house thrown by Yahoo!'s Lloyd Braun and Scott Moore in honor of Gawker's Nick Denton and Mark Lisanti and celebrating the Yahoo!/Gawker syndication deal. (That's right, you can now check out a random assortment of Gawker posts co-branded on Yahoo! News. Yay. I think. Or maybe that's just the party line...)Arianna was an amazing hostess. She greeted us all personally as we arrived. (just as sweetly as she greeted Bill Maher and David Mamet.) And her bartenders certainly poured some stiff freaking drinks. Chris took tons of photos, as always of our posse at the party. I'm not so sure I can run for President anymore. Sarah also took a bunch of pics. Sadly, no Arianna. Our reflexes were obviously dulled by the drinks again. While sipping vodka and sodas, I met Gawker's Lockhart Steele, who it turns out is also class of 1996 and also a former college newspaper geek. Lockhart, alas, did not try to pick me up, though our very own superstar editor John Briggs did and succeeded (and I didn't even spill my drink!) Here's gridskipper's little post about the party. They called us "Yahoo jocks." Dunno what they're talking about. I thought that whole cool vs. uncool, nerds versus jocks thing went outta style in 1987. This means war! You know how I'm so sensitive about these things... I pinged the URLs to Esther today, and she IM'd back: esther: funny that gridskipper calls it a 'melee'/gang war and chris calls it a 'love fest' Chris described the scene more accurately. I witnessed a lot more lips-to-ass contact between the Gawker and Yahoo! crews than any actual threats of personal violence. It was all about the laaaaaaahv. Sweet, sweet laaahv. And I, personally, loved it. You can read more about the party on Defamer, and look at their pics. After Arianna's, I drove Oren, Rick, and Mali (followed in another car by Heather and Allyson) to the In-n-Out burger in Westwood for some late night cheeseburgers (with onions!). We drove with the top down and blasted Spandeau Ballet's "True" (screaming along at the top of our lungs) as we headed back to Santa Monica to the Viceroy. Labels: ariannahuffington, chris, gawker, in-n-outburger, la, party, photos, viceroy, yahoo posted by Jess Barron @ 2:23 PM
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| November 12, 2005 | Sake Bombs Over Beverly Hills |
Andy is in town visiting from SF, and he met me and the Santa Monica Yahoo! crew at Ariake in Beverly Hills for  sushi dinner and many, many bottles of sake, including sake bombs with gold flakes in them (to keep hangovers away!)You really need to look at Chris' flickr photoset to understand just how the Yahoo! Santa Monica posse rolls. We can't even eat sushi without going completely cray-cray. I put my bright red lipstick on Peter and Yun, everyone wore my cream leather coat, and Andy declared that it was all very different than the Yahoo! get-togethers up in Sunnyvale. Afterward, around midnight when we all got back to my house in Venice. Kim and Mary Jo brought 30 people over dressed in wigs and flamboyant clothes for a Dance Dance Revolution / Karoke Revolution party. They were their friends, and my Venice-area neighbors who had been drinking all night at The Whaler. This went on until 6a.m. when the beer (and everyone's energy) ran out. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), Chris' camera's battery died around when the party started, though there is this one random pic. Labels: andy, chris, ddr, karaoke, la, party, sake, santamonica, sushi, venice posted by Jess Barron @ 1:55 PM
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| August 3, 2005 | I'm very worried about dragons... |
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"Sleeping is giving in, no matter what the time is. Sleeping is giving in, so lift those heavy eyelids. People say that you'll die, faster than without water, but we know it's just a lie, scare your son, scare your daughter. People say that your dreams are the only things that save ya. Come on baby in our dreams, we can live on misbehavior." -The Arcade Fire, "Rebellion (Lies)"  August, Bocce and I road-tripped with Andy in his Element that was filled to the top with camping gear, food and supplies from San Francisco up to Klickitat, Washington. We left my house in SF at 7a.m. and after an entire day of driving, arrived at Esther and Jason's camp around 10p.m. that night.We promptly unpacked the Nutria Republic flag I had brought and hung it up. Then we opened some beers. Or maybe we opened the beers first. I can't remember now. "Oh my god, Jessica! There's giant bugs everywhere!" Esther said. "And we keep seeing them in the tents!" "Aggh! What kind of bugs?" I squealed. "I've never really camped where there are bugs before!" (Plus, I'm scared of bugs.) "Giant beetles and these things that look like giant roaches!" Esther said. "Also, ants! Part of the shade structure is on an enormous ant hill. We didn't realize that until after we had picked this spot. Also, when we were building it, we realized that we are on a lava flow and it was impossible to pound in the rebar." The terrain was definitely more apocalyptic than the sites of the 2 past Phoenix festivals I had been to. Though we couldn't see it too well in the dark, the land had been burned in a forest fire about 10 years earlier. There were dead trees with knarled branches like the fingers of the world's oldest woman all around. I decided immediately that the Black Rock Desert in Nevada (where Burning Man is held each year) was a much more hospitable place to camp. Our friends Phil and Lori who helped organize the festival stopped by to say hi. "We were talking to the fire crew," Phil said. "And if one person drops a cigarette on the ground -- all this dry straw grass will go up in flames and we're all gonna die. Seriously. There is only one road in and out of this place. And they said the fire moves like 10 feet per second. There's no way we could outrun it. And we'd never get these cars out in time on that road." It seemed true. The road in to the campsite wasn't paved and was too bumpy and rocky to drive more than 5 miles per hour, even in the sporty Element. I was glad we hadn't driven my lowriding Volkswagen Beetle. It was too late to pitch tents, and too rocky anyway, and also we were too tired, so we all drank until we fell asleep on the floor of the shade structure. I didn't sleep well, because I was too worried about the giant bugs we had seen crawling through the shade structure while we were drinking, and then in the middle of the night it started pouring rain and thundering. The shade structure kept most of us dry, except Wink who was sleeping underneath the connection between the two tarps. The next day Esther set up the Nutria Interpretive Center (which I called the "Nutria Re-Education Camp"), and I distracted myself by reading about nutria and then asking everyone to contemplate the many mysteries of their species, for example, "Just how frenzied *is* their copulation, I ask you?" For the next two days we played music, played more music, played more music, and played even more music, danced to music, ran around in the rocky hills and field, and got very, very worried when we encountered a pair of sneaky blacklight dragons lurking near what we thought was a cool-looking stage. "This stage looks really cool!" said Andy, as we approached a place with flowy colorful lights. When we got closer -- they popped up outta nowhere: a pair of day-glow painted dragons, making the moment at once completely dorky and completely hysterical. Thankfully, we didn't encounter many fabric batiks or blacklight posters of bare breasted alien women. As anyone that's ever been to an all-night trance party knows, this is a serious concern. But in this case, we were able to focus our worry on the dragons. We became Dragon Worriers (inspired by an Amber chatlog). And we laughed so hard that we cried. "Do you worry a lot?" "Dragons are a very real worry in this day and age!" "Too many people are concerned about dragons." "California is very dangerous." etc. etc. We realized that everyone knows that dragons *love* rainbows, and that nutria do not. Also, we vowed to avoid typing in the dark. We didn't sleep much at all, except sometimes on the floor of the shade structure in the afternoon. The other main psytrance stage didn't have any dragons (nor fabric batiks or blacklight alien posters, thankfully), but at 2a.m. it looked and felt exactly like a setting from the Sony Playstation game Karaoke Revolution. The purple and pink colors felt like they were straight from a video game. The crowd around the stage and the lights felt like they were straight from a video game. But, perhaps most of all, the speaker dancers (or "speaker bitches," as we called them) were 100% straight from a video game. They were not real; they were made out of pixels. That could be the *only* explanation for how they looked. How else could her nipples have been quite so perky? How else could his jaw -- and scowl -- have been quite so chisled? There really was no other explanation. In addition to our ongoing -- and increasingly frenzied -- worries about dragons, we learned about the Free Cascadia movement, where Oregon and Washington want to succeed from the United States and bring Northern California with them. Man, the people of the Pacific Northwest have some crazy stuff going on... Like dragons and nutria. It's like the freakin' "land before time" up there or somethin' with all these mythical creatures roaming around. You don't need to be worried about nutria; just worry about dragons and everything else will be OK, I promise. Labels: andy, august, california, dragons, esther, nutria, oregon, party, phoenixfestival, photos, worries posted by Jess Barron @ 10:42 PM
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| May 29, 2000 | We Like the Cars, the Cars that Go "Boom!" |
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This past Saturday night while en route to a party, my car exploded in my friend Chris's parking garage. Well, it didn't really explode. It just went "Boom! really loud and scary-like, when I put the key in the ignition. The doorman inside the building even heard the "boom!" And then the whole thing was dead, and there was smoke coming out from under the hood. It was very scary; you can even ask JP. We couldn't understand why a new Beetle that had just turned two-years-old would do something like that. It didn't stop us from going to the party, though. Chris kindly drove us, and we put off calling a tow truck until our return. Chris works at Anteye, this website where users submit their film and video shorts. I met Chris through Kim, one of my friends from home who I've known since 4th grade. They went to U Miami together. The party was cool. Chris and his friend Patrick are absolutely hysterical. I pretty much forgot about my car's demise until we returned to Hollywood later that night to call the tow truck. It cost $220 to tow my car from Hollywood to Santa Monica Volkswagen. Grrrrrr! And I don't even know what's wrong with it yet, since it was a holiday weekend and no one has been in to look at it. I seriously hope that this mysterious problem is covered in my warranty. Cars should not just go "boom!" JP and I went to another party that Chris invited us to on Sunday. It was at some producer guy's house in Santa Monica. He had a huge deck that overlooked the ocean. It was gorgeous. But it's in a weird part of Santa Monica and it took JP and me two hours to find the place. At least we were able to entertain ourselves in the car by playing Hole's "Celebrity Skin" and every mix tape we had access to. Labels: beetle, la, losangeles, party, web posted by Jess Barron @ 7:33 PM
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