Well, I tried.

I wanted to see if I could get back into blogging here, but my attention is focused completely somewhere else. Don’t get me wrong. I do want to blog, and I do have stuff to say. But this blog was a product of a Hollywood life; the posts were culled from a world of which I was very much a part, even when I spent some time away. It was all about the Los Angeles experience. The blog was built for quick, wry observations on the absurdity of a life lived between Sunset and Fountain Avenues, the hours worked at Amoeba Music, that mecca for the dedicated, the weird and the just plain insane, and the struggles of an aspiring screenwriter living in the thick of it.

It’s not that I’ve changed, really. It’s that I’m just not living in the thick of it anymore. I’m still a writer. I still love music. And I still love sharing goofy shit. I just want to do it in a new forum. On a new blog, better suited to my sensibilities.

To that end, I’m trying to wrap up the few straggling web design projects I’ve saddled myself with and spend some coding time on myself for once. And I’m writing. And I’m living. And I’m taking notes.

I’ll share them soon.

The post What’s Next? first appeared on Sixsquare.

If you’ve never made that trek, especially you Californyuns, what are you waiting for? It’s extraordinary. And please do stop just north of San Simeon if you can. You’ll hit the Elephant Seal view spots up there. I stopped, thinking that it’d be cool to see a few of the beasts. After all, I like looking at beasts. Zoos are my favorite places (though I always find myself wishing I could be a little more behind the scenes and not hanging on the metal railing with all the grade school kids.) I was expecting a few dozen of the seals, but there were more than that. There were a few thousand of them, littering the beach like driftwood as far up the beach as I could see.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3R3c98laFU]

I think the reason I was so taken with them is because, these days, that’s me. Or at least it feels like me… washed up on the beach, blubbery, molting, exhausted and prone to making large, guttural noises. Right? We all feel that way sometimes. Right now, that’s me.

The post I Am an Elephant Seal first appeared on Sixsquare.

The post How Do I Eat This? first appeared on Sixsquare.

I’m feeling incredibly lazy today. I was gonna write about the Santa Barbara leg of the trip, which was a whirlwind of people and adoring fans, but that will have to come later. I’m in Avila Beach now, just a stone’s throw from San Luis Obispo. I’m a bit Gumby-headed from a couple glasses of Edna Valley Zin, and I’m chilling on the back porch of my parents’ place.

Just sayin’.

More soon.

The post Lackadaisical Melange in SLO first appeared on Sixsquare.

The post Guns for Kids first appeared on Sixsquare.

Cactus Taqueria: the best late-night food in Hollywood

Cat & Fiddle: We crossed two different worlds – some of the Amoeba crew and some of the Technicolor crew gathered for drinks, food and conversation in that dark and glittering courtyard just off of Sunset Boulevard. Most of us ordered food. We traded tales of thievery, insanity, artistry, drudgery and depravity for three hours. Halfway into it, I began to wish I had an audio recorder.

Meal: everyone had fries. I had chicken marsala.

Woke up by seven, in spite of having been out at Cat & Fiddle till late. Crept out of Kirk and Steve’s Beverly Drive apartment into a hazy, sunny morning, threw my stuff in the car and headed up Western to the 101. I shot up the highway to North Hollywood and peeled off at Magnolia to have breakfast with world famous bassist, Sara Rivas at Andrew’s North Hollywood Diner, which is the new and terribly boring name for what used to be Sitton’s North Hollywood Diner (I like the name Sitton more than I like the name Andrew.) More stories, and some decent complaining on both sides. I’m getting a little tired of the story of my ridiculous year, but I’m getting at better and better at telling it.

Meal: scrambled eggs, Italian sausage, coffee

Having time to kill afterwards, I wandered into downtown Burbank to see what was up there, but it turned out that there was nothing up at all. People were just hanging out, buying stuff, going to work and drinking coffee. I bought some coffee, too, to see if I could blend in. But that got boring, so I hopped back into the Beetle and drove down Glenoaks Boulevard to my old neighborhood in Glendale. My old apartment was still there, a full year later. And it looked exactly the same, so I didn’t take any pictures or nothing. I swung around to Brand instead and parked on the street and went to Porto’s Bakery, where all the large people eat breakfast. In the year I’d lived two blocks away from this joint, I’d never actually set foot inside. Now seemed to be the time.

Meal: croissant, plain, unheated

Then to Burbank, where I parked, strapped on my elaborate knee brace (not because I needed it, but because it looks cool) and met up with the Technicolor subtitling gang. We kicked back at the on-campus cafeteria and spent the next hour slinging stories back and forth over the growl and roar of the Metrolink trains and the planes taking off from the airport. “Drive safe,” said Alicia, as we the meeting finally broke apart and we headed our separate ways. “I need you to be able to work.”

Meal: vegetarian pizza slice and a salad, which I barely touched.

Then that was it. I was done with Los Angeles. I climbed into the Beetle, threw the knee brace into the trunk and wheeled onto the 5 to the 118 to the 23 to the 101.

The post Eating in Los Angeles first appeared on Sixsquare.

Wind-blown coal dust

Flagstaff ahead

Finally, some bad weather

Driving in the rain

Rain over California

Cajon Pass

The post On the Road: Miscellaneous Travel Pics first appeared on Sixsquare.

It’s been a rough winter. It’s been a rough year. Events of the past 12 months have left me adrift and isolated and struggling to find a way back to life and love and all that hooey. It hasn’t been easy. But it didn’t take me long after returning to Los Angeles to find what I’d been missing.

Last night at Spaceland, above the crash and bang of the music and the din of shouted drink orders, I ran into a bunch of people I’d known from back in the Amoeba daze. And I don’t know why it struck me as surprising, but all of them remembered my name. I mean, this is a store whose work staff was easily over 200 people. You knew lots of names, but they tend to drift away. Especially after three years away.

And then again, today, when I actually dropped by the store, aside from the rows of new faces at the checkout counters, which see more turnover than a WWI trench, it was almost as if I’d never left. Of course, I had, and there’s really not much to do at Amoeba if you’re not on the clock, so I wandered off and drove down the street to my old apartment building on Martel, where I thought I’d check on my old neighbor, Bertila.

Testing the caption

I love my old place. It’s in a classic Hollywood apartment enclosure with the front gate and the courtyard and the big, central banana tree, and as I mounted the stairs to her flat, I found it impossible to believe that it had been a full three years since I’d move out of there. So Bertila and I sat and talked in her flat, me, the addled, aimless motormouth and her, the wise, hookah-smoking caterpillar with her back to the sunny window, wreathed in pearly smoke, dispensing advice and gently chiding me for being so reluctant to admit that I’m totally rad.

Like, totally.

Those are the kinds of friends I have. The awesome ones.

The post Mile 867: Los Angeles first appeared on Sixsquare.

I gotta respect Sara. A few years ago she decided to pick up the bass as a way, I think, of keeping herself busy and sane. She took some lessons and was soon playing for the Black Tales. Now she’s got regular gigs with the Bitchfits (yeah, a distaff Misfits) and, light years away from that, Healamonster & Tarsier. Good for her.

Anyway, I’d have some excellent pics of the show, but they wouldn’t let me bring in my camera without permission from the booking agent, so here’s a craptastic iPhone snap of Sara onstage:

It was good to see both bands do their thing, and especially cool to see Amoebites old and current, Rachel, Andrew, Katy, Mo, Lance Rock, Jen, & AJ. It was like I never left.

The post Spaceland first appeared on Sixsquare.

There were two or three rain storms, a hell of a lot of wind and finally a cluster of yawns that I dispelled with Paul Tompkins first comedy record. I missed my coffee exit in Barstow because I was giggling over his “snakes-in-a-fake-can-of-peanut-brittle-routine” and had to backtrack.

Making some phone calls now to some of the LA cats to warn them of my impending arrival.

Rush hour. Yay me.

The post Mile 730: Barstow, CA first appeared on Sixsquare.