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 ...
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 ...
It’s true I tell you. A. and I spent a wonderfully peaceful and bucolic afternoon last Sunday at the LA Open Cricket Tournament, organised by the Southern California Cricket Association at Woodley Park in Van Nuys. It was the last day of the three-day event, involving twelve teams from as far away as Chicago and ...
Paul Grice’s analysis of the pragmatics of conversation, which concludes that conversation is a cooperative act which, if it’s to be effective, should follow certain maxims, defines informal protocols for getting the message across effectively. It applies to both speaker and listener. To the speaker it says: ...
To Beverly Hills, early yesterday morning, in my informal capacity of IT-guy to my Famous Philosopher Friend. He’d called me a couple of days before to say that he was having problems with a new printer he’d just got, and now neither printer nor computer (an Apple G4 Cube) was working properly. It’s not ...
Walking westwards down Wilshire from our new apartment towards the commercial centre of Santa Monica, a funny but almost magical thing happens. The street that pumps like a main artery through the centre of LA seems to vanish into a blue haze in the distance. It’s the Pacific Ocean, of course, but it comes as ...