Welcome to a Sunny California Day in the Mind of Joel J. Rane.
I'm not available at the moment; however, my precious computer is now taking your requests. If you find yourself stunned by the power of the Internet, perhaps you should visit the burnt-out hippies responsible for it all, the illustrious think-tank PARC, formerly owned by Xerox.
These four ladies of the Day Family, my great-great-aunts Gladys, Grace, Neva and Oza, are enjoying a smoke while they vamp about in men's clothes. There is no life sweeter than a Southern life.
The links to various documents on these web pages are just below. If you're merely interested in li'l old me, just keep on reading. You can check out a movie star's life in pictures, my celebrity friends at my Catty Librarian page at MySpace, or the California Libre blog, my futile screeds against war, death and ignorance. Perhaps you're strangely fascinated by my up-and-down career as a librarian, or some of my bizarre habits. Nature lovers, would you like to know what my favorite creatures are? Perhaps you're curious where my friends and I are hanging out (when we're not working so damn hard), or you've heard about my inspirational thoughts for today. Read on, friends...
Typically, you're already mad at me and want to send a flaming hot piece of e-mail. Or perhaps some cold flabby spam?
Yes, I am also a writer. It's so much fun I gave it a separate page, and you can read or download some of my work there...or you can search for my more successful colleagues' work at Powell's. But why write? What is my damn generation looking for in life, anyway? Just the chance to get the hell out of here? Maybe so, maybe so. In any case, we've got to think globally if we're going to survive on this lovely little rock of ours. Enjoy some of my wanderings and stories thereof on my travel page as well.
Yes, my glamorous career, the food rotting in my gut, my stylish Los Feliz apartment, I owe it all to my talents as a librarian. After years of struggle and aimless drifting, I finally have a real grown-up type job. I am a substitute reference librarian for the Los Angeles Public Library. Yeah, that's a picture right there, built up in the Twenties, burnt down in the Eighties, reborn in the Nineties. If you want the real dirt, you can drop on by; we've got over seventy branches all across the city. Knowledge is power!
When I was a mere lad I ran away to UC Berkeley, back when it was a quaint campus of political idealists and doped-up zombies across the bay from San Francisco, not the fake progressive bedroom community it is now. As a requirement of a special advanced degree, I lived for three years in friendly and pleasant Barrington Hall, with fellows like Bob there on the left. Luckily I survived to graduate and return home, to continue my so-called studies at USC, find my true self and put that self in debt for the next fifteen years. I practiced creative writing in the Master of Professional Writing program. A few people I knew there found jobs eventually.
After recovering from my hangover and the Santa Fe Avenue club scene, I forgot about writing for money and began a glamorous career in librarianship at the American Film Institute in Hollywood, California. But they needed more money to throw fabulous Hollywood parties and balanced accounts by laying off a large portion of the staff. Once again unemployed and nearly homeless, I ran away from home again, only to get stuck in rush-hour traffic and detoured to the School Formerly Known as GSLIS at UCLA. Most of my friends from there also found jobs eventually. My wanderings then were those of a journeyman librarian, and I was off to busy Torrance Public Library, the blazing and smug efficiency of the Pasadena Public Library, five-story burn-out at Rio Hondo Community College, and finally I served God and the Dominicans at the now-closed Saint Michael's High School in South-Central Los Angeles. Yeah, after a year the Catholic Church also needed money, not for Hollywood parties, but to build a fabulous cathedral instead of educating the poor. 
I'm not bitter! Back to the job-hunt grind! Rescue came quickly in the form of catty Monterey Park Public Library in one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the world, the University Library at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, the Kennedy Library at California State University, Los Angeles, and proudly bourgeois Redondo Beach Public Library. At last, on the brink of uninsured part-time despair, the city of my birth gave me a mission serving children at the Exposition Park Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library! After thirty more months of guilt therapy in South-Central, I declared myself cured and transferred to my neighborhood library, the lovely Cahuenga Branch, opened on 4 December 1916. After two years there, including seventeen months as the manager, I made a break and threw off the shackles of power. Then I became a lousy air-traffic controller in a world of illusion. Go figure. While I was there we created two excellent annotated bibliographies on-line, the California Fiction Database and the Series and Sequels Database. Check it out, as we librarians like to say. Then after five years of dealing with the insane street people, I grew weary, and now I'm back working part-time as a floating substitute librarian.
Now, are you looking for my wonderful hotlist of library resources in Southern California? Or perhaps you'd like to read my angry screeds or see my life in pictures?
...is not myself, contrary to the opinion of some, or even a member of my dreaded species. No, if I'm going to suffer through another incarnation on this tiny rock, I wouldn't mind basking in the sun as a bristlecone pine, the oldest trees on Earth (in a tight race with the famous baobab tree and the local Mojave Desert creosote bush). Leonard Miller's page on the bristlecone is informative, and to visit some of these trees here in California, check out information on the Inyo National Forest. We'll slowly grow and wait for you pesky humans to finish up your business. Isn't that damn pyramid of yours eroded away yet? When's that bomb going off? There are a host of other plants that kick ass.
The most remarkable animal on the planet Earth, I think, might be the Cyprinodon diabolis, a species of desert pupfish who live only in the top few metres of one small desert oases, the Devil's Hole near Death Valley. They've been stuck there, hundreds of miles from any other body of water, nibbling algae, for over 20,000 years. WOW!
I am also oddly fond of three types of insects, darning needles, ladybirds, and roly-polies. For you damn Yankees, those are dragonflies, ladybugs, and pillbugs. Sorry, entomologists. I know the roly-poly is actually a crustacean. Just don't argue the point with a second-grade teacher who's had a long day.
However, I'm not so attached to any bug that I wouldn't feed them to one of my other pets! My companions in this eternal whirl around the sun have included hungry carnivorous plants, placid cacti, a friendly orange chromide and a hilarious spotted puffer. To say nothing of the most common top-end predator in California, our friend the black widow! I am also a fan of those illusory fossil celebrities from another world.
Since we're so cozy now, let's reveal all to the Internet. What do I do in my spare time? I drink a little, contemplate alternate realities, and bemoan the fate of my contemporaries from the class of '83, such as Heidi Fleiss. Or let's just skip the shitty dope and try to learn something from my spirit guide, Frida Kahlo! Like some of you out there, I wonder when our generation is going to finally shut up and let ______ have it! (Fill in the blank.) Are we waiting until George W. Bush brings his born-again Armageddon down on us? Maybe you'd like to help me make California independent someday. Free that Bear! I also enjoy wandering in the desert, away from the ravages of the Twenty-first Century...click on the photograph of the Famous Mojave Pay-phone (now disconnected) to visit some of my friends on the Outside. I've even bent an elbow at the Li'l A'Le'Inn in Rachel, Nevada, near mysterious Area 51. However, I prefer the ruins left by our human predecessors in the Southwest, the Hisatsinom and Hohokam peoples. 
I'm also one of those strange men who study coins. Not merely any coins, but those of the Mexican Revolution, and I'm not alone in this behavior. Got a life? Get a life! This is a life? You suckers can blow your own money at Ebay.
Gee, but I hang out with so many arty types...my photographer pal Robert Barkaloff wants you to look at his possum, and the Goddess only knows what our buddy Sicko wants you to look at. If you like my California Libre screed, perhaps you might enjoy the ranting of my compadre, writer, filmmaker and painter Mark Norris. Arty subversives will enjoy a visit to the intellectual styling of Professor Sandra De la Loza, while you capitalists can find expensive gifts at Ikon, the lair of Kay. The art scene becomes multi-layered magic at the studio of Sergio Zenteno, the blog of Keith Boadwee, or in the brain of Pilar Albarrac�n. I've also been blessed to know some passionate purveyors of fine art, like Kim Light's LightBox, and Andrea Reynosa's Brooklyn project, Smack Mellon.
Bring on the rock and roll! My friend Geri Soriano-Lightwood will provide the musical entertainment; unfortunately no pictures of her sexy mommy self, but you can peruse clips of her band, the Supreme Beings of Leisure, or maybe you're clamoring to see the Flash music videos created by her husband Miles Lightwood at Pixelwurld? I have a thing for talented couples as well; in gay Paris you'll find musician Julie Bonnie of Cornu and her husband, author Nicolas Richard...catch more of Nic's talent on my writer's page. I met this talented couple through my equally talented friends Beth Chance and Bill Weigel; these superheros forms part of the Absinthe Glow and operate a real-life Incredibles operation from deep in the mountains of Santa cruz. Finally, that charming home in the redwoods would be reduced to cinders by the ministrations of rock twosome Chris D'Angelo and Roberta Hoffmann, of Strange World Carnival; afterwards you'll need the less-destructive tuneage of cool cucumber Mike Watt.
But that ain't all; I'd like to introduce you to my other contemporaries, such as mon cher Hillary Bays, investigating the mysteries of the Internet, who made a cookie just for you. If you like to drink, you can advertise with a shirt from The Plastered Bastard to that effect, courtesy of photographer Trisha Cluck's brother Jimmy. See you on the floor of the Reno Room! You can sleep it off at the San Francisco Model Home of Kathy Kennedy, who'll sell you one of your very own! Those enamored of more exotic places will enjoy Jenny Chu's trip to China, or if you are ready for a trip further away, land on the crumbling conspiracy planet of the late David Jove. You may also enjoy a visit to Humberto and Claire's sexy Internet radio show Con Sin at LA's local Kill Radio, capped off by a trip to the dental chair of Alfredo Barsuglia. Finally, enjoy the ravings of my dear Demitria Monde Thraam (yeah, that's DMT) at Involution. You meet the nicest goddamn people in California.
I owe much happiness to three dear women in my life, but none of them has posted any hot photos to the Internet, at least not like Kate Winslet! Yeah, show us your wedding band! Well, Crissy is chasing a tot and performing with husband Carlos in Snakes in Eden, Laura made the news at the International Documentary Association, and Ellen is working hard to become Italian. My sweets, they almost make me regret my quirky bachelorhood...almost.
You might think the way I do, if your parents looked like this!
You could smoke a bowl, tune into "I Love the 80s" and revel in your own Xness. You could start a new life. Or perhaps you could peruse the verse that I think makes life worth living.
You could Skype me (hit the button below), or visit my Catty Librarian page at myspace.com!
For faster results...send me e-mail.
