I’m leaving Los Angeles. Not tomorrow, not next week, not even later this year, but tempus doing the fugitting thing it does will mean that it seems scarily soon. At any rate, it’s something I’m working towards, and that’s a good thing in my life. It’s not hard to come to the conclusion, ...
I don’t need to worry any more about drifting towards bastardised mid-Atlantic speech-patterns. Or, rather, I still need to worry about it, but I don’t need to worry that it’s already happened, because I have what seems to be a foolproof test: if I can ask for some butter at a commercial eating ...
Lunch yesterday at Wendy’s near USC (a large #7 combo with a small chili). I was wandering away from the counter with my tray when the server asked, as if he knew me from somewhere: “Are you a producer?” “A producer?” He hadn’t said what sort of producer, but this is LA, so it was ...
To Vons, a few nights ago, to buy some old-fashioned incandescent filament light bulbs, because the batch of long-life fluorescent bulbs we got at Costco a few months ago lend our living room the snug, inviting glare of a car parts warehouse. Standing, slightly baffled, in front of the display, it took me a few ...
I always knew I had no small talk, and now I know I’ve got no big talk either. — Sue Townsend, The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole I feel like I’ve grown up with Adrian Mole. We’re roughly the same age, and I have a nagging suspicion that I have more of his pretentiousness than ...
A nice little piece in the LA Times about Will Self walking in Los Angeles. LAX to Watts is a significant endeavour. I’ve done it by bus a few times and even that takes a couple of hours. It reminded me of a day I walked from the outskirts of London into the West End. ...
A trip to Westwood Village to see Eastern Promises sparked a conversation — over Pinkberry frozen yogurt (with strawberries and raspberries) — during which I tried to describe to A. the viscerally unpleasant reaction I have to films which portray the unrelentingly grim realities of life. The connection is a little unfair to ...
Standing in Barnes & Noble (“Will you be saving ten percent with our discount card today?” trills the girl at the till over and over) at the corner of 3rd Street and Wilshire in Santa Monica, reading through the new Michael Palin diaries. I’m struck by how often something depresses him, and how ...
Is it better to be able to see a long way down the road a bus will be coming from, since that means you’ll get to see it soonest, even though you might have a long wait for it to subsequently actually arrive once you’ve seen it, and even though if you can’t see the ...
After years of bristling with annoyance at any suggestion that my very vaguely Anglican upbringing might be much of an influence on what I do or don’t believe — one flavour of which might be to imply atheism as a negative reaction to something imposed, rather than a ground-up positivist construction of something new ...