Considering how relatively few — relative to a truly committed fan (my excuse being that I’m a Middlesbrough fan) — football matches I’ve been to in my time, an oddly large number of them have had a significance beyond their immediate competitive stake. I was at the game at Wembley on a chilly night (though ...
As you drive north on the 110 through downtown LA, a spectacular photo-realistic mural of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (by Kent Twitchell) looks benignly down from the multi-storey side of a very-LA concrete parking structure. It’s every bit as striking and fresh as it was the first time I came to LA. The ...
Why didn’t I know more about Frank Rich until recently? I’d had this distant image of him as a gleeful, maybe slightly out-of-touch with anything other than Broadway, poison-penner of acidic theatre reviews. Not sure I could have been more ignorant. Turns out he’s a frankly brilliant Op-Ed, to the NYT as ...
Evidence that I’ve been thinking too much about web-design lately: I was looking at a very elegant multi-column university letterhead yesterday, and I thought to myself: “Oh sure, it looks good now, but how will it cope when someone resizes the paper?” Funny that a window has become my default, rather than ...
Maybe I’ve been wrapped in the deadening clutches of US bureaucracy too much lately — yesterday at a branch office of the INS/CIS, fetchingly situated in the end unit of an unlovely strip-mall — but it occurred to me yesterday as I sat with the other hopeful souls that, while the essence of a country ...
Maybe it’s been done already, but someone ought to write something Kafka-esque in which a Josef Q finds himself compelled to join queue after queue in an impenetrable and byzantine bureaucracy, the end of each interminable one leading to the beginning of the next, only to find, at the moment of apparent conclusion, ...
Back from working my way through a mountain of dirty clothes at the laundromat this afternoon. The inconvenience of not having our own machines is noted, but still, I’ve always found something oddly pleasing in the ritual trek. It’s made all the more significant when almost everything wearable one owns begins ...
Some random notes from last month’s LA Times Festival of Books, before I forget the two days of peaceful rambling up and down the hills of UCLA. How relatively little fiction, for a start. How much space given to self-help books and self-publishing organisations (if that’s not contradictory). Ricky Jay was ...
A. and I are in Portland, looking after her grandparents while her parents are away in Hawaii. The quiet, the huge, well-stocked house, and the presence of both a Chevy Tahoe and a BMW outside the front door ought to make this time something of a relaxing break from LA — and it is something ...
Dinner with friends some time ago, and, things having been a bit lubricated with wine, a friend of theirs aimed a question in my Limey direction, a reasonable paraphrase of which would be something like: “So. The Royal Family. What’s that all about then? Hmm? Hmm??” The edge of belligerence in his tone ...