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 ...
Sitting beside me on the couch is a can of Coca-Cola, bravely liberated from Costco last night in torrential rain. On the side of the can is a huge, bright-red bauble. On the side of the huge, bright-red bauble, as if reflected in its perfect shininess, is the face of a jolly old man, with ...
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 ...
In celebration of Norms’ iconic ‘Steak & Cake’ special, A. & I were taken to imagine a restaurant whose menu consists entirely of foods which rhyme. We think it’s a fabulous idea, and an obvious gap in the market. The Norms special might be extended into three courses. There could be hake, ...
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 ...
[Update: A thoughtful and thorough piece by Bruce Schneier, which covers a great deal of the same issues as below — and some more besides — though which seems to begin from the unsupported premise that technology in voting is in the end both inevitable and desirable, so long as its inherent problems are fixed. ...
The project that I’ve been working on at Unidentified California University for the past year originally hired me as a techie — to help with putting the research results onto the web, and in other digital forms for distribution, and also to fathom out a piece of software they’re using for qualitative analysis of ...
Well, not really. (Okay, a bit.) Trawling idly around the web tonight, looking to find any news of the album that Kate Bush is working on (I know, there really should be a sound file attached here named ‘hollowlaughter.mp3’), I came back to these photographs of her. I’ve seen them before, but I still find ...