SAN FRAN TO CHICAGO
1) We took a black limosine “house car” from the Clift hotel to the airport. Our driver was from Alexandria, Egypt, by way of Philly. San Fransisco melting away. Melting away. I would buy the e-ink issue of Esquire in the airport, and some sushi and sake for the flight. We got in trouble for bringing the sake, but only after we drank it. I was listening to Miles Davis. The Complete Bitches Brew. The e-ink? I couldn’t decide if it was interesting or not. Probably not. An article within said that Steve Jobs had dismissed the Kindle, saying, “It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad; people don’t read anymore.” But I want to. Read. I wonder if, by the time I get an iPhone, someone will have made a decent reading app.
2) And all around us the economy is falling to bits. Crazy oscillations. Interesting times. I’m on vacation, so I haven’t read a newspaper in days and days. I’m shopping! Looking at shoes slightly more flamboyant than the ones I’m wearing now (unreasonably long, pointy, slick), and I set them back on the shelf. I see, for the future, more austere clothes. Less flash as manufactuers and marketers turtle up. A shakedown reflected in increasingly conservative styles. Or who knows? A period of austerity followed by the long overdue appearance of a colorful new cultural movement. The way unfavorable economic conditions in the seventies gave birth to punk rock, and the same in the eighties that gave birth to rap.
3) Long overdue? Well, consider the ascendancy of vapid celebrity, bling-obsessed hip-hop pop music and the sadly formulaic stiffness of what’s left of rock and roll. Surely it’s time for something big and young to crack the crust that the long boom has baked over us.
4) I decided: the e-ink magazine cover? Awful. Imagine a future when all magazines would have e-ink. At first primitive and partial, like this Esquire cover, but increasingly bigger and more sophisticated as the technology advanced and got cheaper and as the new designers who grew up with the possibility began to push the format. Magazine racks undulating, swaying, popping and zooming, writhing with beguiling images. A miniature Times Square at every airport newsstand. The endless ribbon of hot chicks on lad mags now dancing in their bikinis. How long before someone demanded sound? Why does everything yearn to be TV? It happened on the Internet too. From text to full video in no time at all, and everybody everywhere keeps telling me that nobody wants to read.
5) And so why didn’t I like Las Vegas? I wasn’t even aware of how much I disliked it until I got to Los Angeles and was instantly relived to encounter authenticity again. Imagine that; Los Angeles inspiring me with its authenticity!
That’s how phony Las Vegas was. I thought I would enjoy the indulgence of a party-all-the-time adult playground. I’m known for my self-indulgence, after all. But Vegas was Big Entertainment, as entertaining as a night watching network television or a trip to the mall. None of the stores or restaurants or entertainments bore the mark of real people starting real businesses because they loved to cook or make clothes or tap dance. Every square inch of every place instead had been planned and executed by collusions of corporate boards blindly chasing the lowest common denominator. Even the high-quality operations had no soul. The service I got was usually professional, but it felt like a professional veneer over a deep-seated feeling of rotten contempt. The waiters and the shopclerks were in cahoots with the dealers and the pit bosses, dedicated to separating the rubes from their dollars for their corporate overlords. You’d see it most at the gaming tables; dead-eyed dealers locked in bored mortal combat with the dead-eyed gamblers, nobody having a shred of fun, and everything shrouded in the kling-clang clatter and trashy lights of the omnipresent slot machines. And every surface, every floor and wall and ceiling created in a boardroom in search of the texture that would somehow convey some idea of what the greatest number of tourists might buy into as a kind of glamour or class. Borrowed from New York, borrowed from Venice, borrowed from Paris, borrowed from Rome; no place anywhere near gutsy enough to be something of its own.
And that’s the nice places.
At the Jean-George steakhouse in the Bellagio I had a technically perfect martini, but a few nights later in our tiny hotel in Los Angeles, I had an much better cocktail in the bar that the waitress (who was, of course, an actress) proudly told me she had named when the bartender invented it back in the day. She was proud of the cool little drinks in the cool little bar of the cool little hotel where she worked, and that was something I certainly never saw in Las Vegas: pride.
And yet, I want to go again. Immediately.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
THE DHARMA BUMS
Keroauc visited, far sooner than expected. Or rather, the ghost of Keroauc. Not at night, when we drove up from LA, although the evening had plenty of ghostly fog as we wound around and around the twisted Pacific Coast Highway. No, he came in the morning, when I was sitting out on the rustic hippie Ken Kesey deck of our Big Sur lodge. He was a bluebird. Deep indigo bluebird avatar who eschewed the expected breathless poetics and asked me only why I was challenged by Big Sur. Why my razor-sharp black pointy shoes that walked so good all over LA suddenly made me feel out of place. Had I finally become some irredeemably sneering superficial
poule de luxe? And why was I scoffing at the naked joy in the journals of the past inhabitants of my room?
That Kerouac. You'd think he’d be just all poetry, but he’s a hardass.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
90210
Today I am ensconced in my beautifully hip Beverly Hills hideaway, surfing on blissful waves of fantastic LA. The Los Angelinos love me here, and they love my new straw hat.
Friday, September 19, 2008
TODAY AND TOMORROW
Today I’m working. Runnin’ various verifications on a website I designed, did principal photography for and mostly wrote. That’s what I do. It’s wonderful. Plus I’ll do a little management, a little admin work, some cleanup of various chores. And then tomorrow morning I will tuck an ace of spades into the brim of my porkpie hat and hop a plane with Killer to Las Vegas.
We’re taking a ten-day technicolor American dream tour. Vegas followed by a road trip through the desert to Los Angeles, up to Big Sur to channel Jack Kerouac, and then San Francisco.
Monday, September 15, 2008
HER KEYS FELL INTO THE STAIRS
She had dropped them at the front door and they fell through the planks and down, down, down under the stairs in front of their house. He got an extension cord, a coat hanger and a work light up from the basement and set to unbending the coat hanger to fashion a hook to extract them. It was dark even though it was still early in the evening, and he could feel the first hint of a clear chill in the air. Summer was over. She stood on the stoop and watched him peeping through the boards and poking his coat hanger into the dark loamy mystery down below. She felt badly about dropping the keys and wasn’t sure at all that he could get them back. But he found them and hooked them, and as he carefully pulled the hook back up through the space between the boards, for a split second he left his body and soared straight up, off of the stoop, seeing himself on his hands and knees. Seeing her leaning over him, hands clasped in ecstatic expectation. Seeing the two of them together in the blue night, in front of their house, bathed in the warm electric light spilling out of the open door, in love and lucky but preoccupied by the minor challenges that come in endless waves. Seeing their inner-city street from above, with its other houses and their equally endless waves of small stories, small moments of small terrors and triumphs and then he was back on the deck, her keys in his hand and they went inside.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
THE FEAR, PART XI
I have the same fears as the next guy. You know; the economy; my health; whether my scallop tartare will taste as good as my tuna tartare.
Friday, September 12, 2008
BLUEGLASS
...my other long-term ambition is to learn the banjo and find a like-minded guitarist and acoustic bass player and start a trio that would play nothing but bluegrass arrangements of Philip Glass tunes. We’d be called BlueGlass.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
WE ARE ALIGNING OUR DEVICES
We are aligning our devices. Our wireless networks. Our investment vehicles. Our digital instruments. Our fancy French cologne. Our spiritual infrastructure. We are calibrating our gauges. We are girding our loins. Fitting our mouth guards. We’re licking our index fingers and holding them up in the air to gauge the prevailing winds. We are ready.
