Slimy

It's raining in Los Angeles. It's not quite up to late-fall-in-the-midwest standards, with all their gloppy, loud, kinda painful glory. But it's a lot more that the usual drizzle. Pretty rare.
It's rare enough that it's kinda dangerous.

The rain mixes with the grime and filth on the roads and it makes them very slippery. In most normal cities, it rains often enough that the grime is regularly washed away, so we don't notice it much. In LA, it builds up for months, so the first few hours of a rain mix all that mostly-dry film on the roads into a nice sheen of slippery, gooey good times. It's something of which I became frighteningly aware the first time I lived in LA, when I rode a motorcycle. Note: Sliding around on a motorcycle is a lot less fun than in a car.

So I didn't even attempt to ride my bike. Especially since I just finished work and I'm tired enough from being up all night (note time of post) that my equilibrium is shot. I just took the metro and walked my bike from hollywood and highland.

I was working on a new show that we got recently. I'm not sure which network is going to air it, but it's about a highschool marching band and somehow, it's actually pretty good. I liked working on it, in part because it's not one of the frustrating pseudoscience ghost shows we do.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention, though, that the really good thing about the rain is that even a really light sprinkle pulls the smog out of the air and the views around town are WAY more clear. downtown, mountains, everything. Ok, maybe all those pollutants being pulled down into the water table isn't a really good thing, but, you know.

Anyway the view from the roof of my (14-story) apartment building is going to be amazing!

Ok, enough. I'm going to bed.

Gallic Scrapbook

I've been thinking a lot about France lately. Not just this past year and teaching English and all, but the bicycle tour I did the spring before, and the summer in school in Lyon. And I realized that I never really told people all the stories, and especially all the things that aren't exactly stories but were so much more important at the time. I think that I sort of wanted to keep them private, keep those memories for myself, only allowing bits and pieces out to anyone else, but recently I am kind of scared that I will start to lose the things that mattered most to me while I was there. I also feel like I owe it to friends in the Eastern Standard time zone, since I didn't really stay and hang out at all in between Brittany and LA, and only gave short, predictable answers to the question "How was France?"

I feel like I have forgotten a lot, not in a permanent loss kind of way, but in a temporary, just-need-to-jog-it-loose kind of way. Hopefully this will help.


I remember springtime in Brittany, unfolding on schedule the second week in March, but still taking everyone by surprise and lifting our spirits in spite of ourselves. I remember the first few days of sunshine, when we didn't dare hope it would continue because we didn't want to jinx it, so Silvia couldn't help but spill out a running commentary of the unexpected beauty of every small glinting thing we crossed, basking in the same sunlight but all seeming fresh and new and different, like the deep glowing green of ducks' necks on a pond or glimmering jewelry in a shop window. I remember the warmth, at long last, that let us take off our jackets, only to remember that we had to cover ourselves (due to Catholicism) before entering the basilica in Quintin, which was just as well because the dark inside of the chapel didn't yet know that winter was over and was thus still cold enough that we could see our breath, an extra treat in the few daring rays of colorful light trickling down from the handful of stained-glass windows depicting Our Lord and Saviour or Whatever. I remember whistling as quietly as possible to hear the sound reflected and carried up throughout the Gothic arches in the ceiling, out of my control after passing through my lips, but still my responsibility in case any sour-faced church personnel appeared. Fortunately they did not, and I was able to experiment some with different acoustic decay times from different locations in the chapel, as well as different intervals and pitch registers, even using the reverberation to harmonize a little. Silvia definitely frowned at me in that particularly Italian way and I felt compelled to explain that she shouldn't bother, that whistling in churches was one of my favorite things, so no amount of frowning would make me stop.

I recall how a few weeks later, it turned out that our apprehension was either well-founded or coincidentally accurate; this brief respite didn't last forever. I awoke one morning shivering and saw through the window that the whole world (or Brittany, at least) was bathed in white. There was a fog so thick that I couldn't see three rows deep into the cemetery across the way, but it wasn't grey. The light permeating through the fog was strange, almost eerie; it was as if there were no clouds actually blocking the sun and it would have been a bright, cheery day, if only I had been elevated sixty feet in the air. As it was, it made everything quite beautiful, since there was plenty of light, but the limited range of visibility forced everyone to focus on the nearby, perceptible objects more closely, isolating them for analysis. This was my impression, anyway.

And along with the fog came the Dutch, two boxy European vans' worth of exchange students, all buzzing in that Germanic, loud, fashion-forward way, prone to some combination of bangly bracelets, blond layered hair and tiny, round eyeglasses. Recognizable from at least sixty yards. Their French was awful. Negligible, even, so everyone spoke in English. I am proud to mention that my French kids' English was at least as good as theirs, even though I had always had the impression that Dutch people are born speaking seven languages fluently, with English chief among them. I ended up traveling with the group as a chaperone, and this somehow felt more adult, even, than teaching. I remember that the bus ride was the first time I truly cursed the existence of portable music and loudspeakers (read: modern cell phones), and in particular their popularity with youths in every industrialized country in the world.

People of Earth: Hip-hop sounds terrible through tiny speakers. Make a note of it.

Damn, did I feel old.


Much more to come! Old bars, the chapel at the school, weird american hangups! Poorly designed parking garages! Immigration issues!

Surrogate

Vince and Stephanie took the holiday opportunity to go Back East for a couple of weeks. So I have been staying at their place and taking care of their cats. That's actually most of the reason I started this blog; I'm in someone else's house without all my usual distractions and my friends are out of town.

Cooking in someone else's house is kind of interesting. I had to run home to get my pie tin, since apparently they don't place as high a priority on baking as I do. You get used to doing things certain ways with the tools that you have, and if the toolset changes a little, you have to, say, roll out a pie crust with a wine bottle. There's no shame in that.

Also, did you know that not everyone stocks sesame oil, nutritional yeast and tofu at all times, just in case? Weird, huh? Thanksgiving dinner turned out great, anyway. I wish I had a camera to take pictures of the tofurky, stuffing, sweet potato casserole, mashed potatoes, sautéed kale, cranberry sauce, and apple pie. After I finished off the apple pie a few days later, I made a pumpkin pie as well.

Later this week I think I am going to do 'butter'y-French style seitan with a red wine and beet reduction. I have a few especially toity recipes that I am going to try out. And if I find a camera in a drawer somewhere, I'll take pictures.

The cats are pretty great. Devo is enormous and friendly and behaves more like a dog than a cat. I think he is smart enough to figure out that being aloof only gets you cred temporarily. Duncan is a beautiful deep grey and he's legitimately shy. He spends most of his time under blankets, though as he gets used to you he'll come out more and warm up. In the presence of any guests, myself formerly included, he would always disappear somewhere. They are really very insistent about feeding time, though. In particular, they wake me up in the morning by knocking my glasses off the nightstand or putting their cold noses on me.



This housesitting venture also coincides with a dry spell at work; I haven't been to the studio/office in a week and a half, and this after working a full week and putting in at least 20-30 hours at the Roller Derby track to get sound and other production elements ready. So after being in high gear, these two weeks are a little disorienting. I've been reading, watching movies, and trying to write some music for the library, though it's a little slow-going since most of my gear is back at my apartment downtown, and I didn't feel like lugging all of it up to Hollywood.



In truth, the setup that I have cobbled together reminds me a lot of the portable composing rig that I put together when I was living in France: it's functional, every thing has its place, but it's just a little awkward everywhere and not at all ergonomic. Of course, in Brittany it was all arranged on a hundred-some-year-old desk, not an Ikea jerker. And the view from my window was a two-hundred-some-year-old cemetery, not the Hollywood Bowl. But still. it reminds me just the same. And I managed to get some writing done on that setup. We'll see.



In Vince's absence I have also been recruited to work on the finishing touches on the audio for the movie we have been working on for, uh, ever. We just had some sync issues so I pulled down all audio files for the whole movie and I am told by the video guy and the director that sync is solid now. It feels good to wrap up a project that big, and now I'm kind of anxious to start whatever is next. The screening is on Friday, though I just got an email saying that now I may have some work that evening. Perfect. Of course. It couldn't possibly work out any other way.

Roots, or at least an anchor.

Hey, look, I have a blog.

It seems like the job in Boston isn't going to pan out anytime soon. Still a possiblity, but it's a lot closer to the horizon than to me. I think I have internalized this fact and I'm ready to actually live in Los Angeles, commit to finding things here that I consider part of my life, instead of letting this feel like yet another temporary station.



So let's make a list of what I need to do:



-find a food co-op here and join it. (probably won't find one downtown)

-make a map with the local farmers' markets and mark a calendar.

-get a membership to second-run and older movie theaters.

-make friends. (yikes)

-go to shows.

-find a good bike shop.

-build a loft in my room.

-ship my records out here and buy a record player.

-learn Spanish.

Any other suggestions? What things make up a life?