Almost the first thing I wrote on this blog, almost a year ago, was a small piece about the beginning of filming of the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide. Almost a year later, spare a thought for the film itself, because it’s become the locus of so much baggage and anger that it’s no longer just a film. ...
We drove across to Glendale on a whim yesterday and spent a pleasantly weird couple of hours wandering around Forest Lawn, inspiration for Evelyn Waugh and many others. The air around LA was thick with a low-lying mistiness that flattened the views across the city into planes of grey, but we were in a quiet ...
A. and I saw two films yesterday, and my reactions to each of them probably say a lot about what sort of person I am. We headed over to Hollywood in the afternoon, got caught in one of those inexplicably snarly patches of LA traffic, missed the start of the film we’d intended to see, ...
(Apologies in advance for how crappily-written this is. It’s late and I’m tired, but I wanted to post it anyway.) Pretty much the defining characteristic of qualia is that they’re unsharable. They keep us in our own little bubble-world of sensations, and we’ve no idea what the same ostensible feeling ...
Once upon a time I lived in a beautiful city full of bookshops. Whenever I could, I would take myself to readings and signings and such, and, whenever I did, the same fanciful idea would float around my dizzy head. I think it had to do with the fact that book-signings are just about the ...
So I’m spending a lot of time at Santa Monica’s main public library these days, and it’s completely fascinating. It’s actually the temporary main library, because they’re building a shiny new one a few blocks from here that won’t be finished until next year. But that’s by the by. ...
It might seem strange that my favourite photograph from the day is of signs on a wall, but not if you know me. It’s not just that we were snapping a bit randomly, and both posing a bit reluctantly, for the photographs of ourselves to have much more than a feel of familial contractual obligation ...
[Written on Tuesday, but posted early Saturday morning at PDX, to which I give three hearty cheers for free wireless Internet access.] I know this isn’t exactly what’s meant by moblogging, but all the same I feel pretty mobile. I’m writing this at an altitude of many thousands of feet somewhere above the ...
(‘Worse than 2000‘. Sometimes it sucks to be right, when there isn’t a damn thing you can do about it.) A couple of years ago I found myself working somewhere I’d previously worked about seven years before that, and in close proximity to some software that I’d written then, which was still ...
I’m not sure how I feel. Sad. A bit numb. But above all baffled by this strange, young, wonderful, fucked-up country. It’s a tedious truism that America is a country of extremes, but it’s absolutely the case. It’s the country of the Amish, but also the Castro; it’s the home of Gotham, but also ...