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 ...
Driving past Rhino Records on Westwood tonight, their entire marquee sign was given over to a very simple message: ‘RIP John Peel 1939-2004’. I found that very touching, though at the same time wondered how many of the other drivers on the rush-hour street would know who Peel was. Probably not many. Even though I ...
A small kid on a corner on Sunset in a bright-green Incredible Hulk costume, holding a sign advertising some nearby video game shop. The sign almost as big as him. A group of kids outside a tiny side-street recording studio. Half of them arranged behind artlessly positioned musical instruments — a basic drum-kit, a keyboard ...
Driving north along La Brea towards Wilshire the other day, I had a bit of a flashback. Up above the buildings on the left-hand side of the street was a huge billboard, pushing reruns of Malcolm in the Middle on some cable graveyard. ‘TV’s funniest show, five days in a row!’ it bellowed, below an ...
To USC last night, to see Michael Moore on his Slacker Uprising tour. It was a fascinating couple of hours, a curious mixture of hippyish old-school Woodstock earnestness and multi-media Daily Show satire. The two didn’t always fit together smoothly, but the effect of that was to reflect poignantly, in a way that ...
I think I’ve worked out what Los Angeles is for. What it does. It struck me the other day as I was driving to work from Santa Monica to East LA. Forget the motion picture capital stuff. That’s just a front. On Lincoln, in Santa Monica, I watched a girl test drive a new Vespa ...
It was probably nothing, she’s probably just fine, but she couldn’t have looked any more lost than she did while I was watching her wander up and down the street on Lincoln. The window at the diner booth I was sitting at might as well have been only one way, so clearly could I see ...