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, ...
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 ...
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 ...
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, ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...