I’ve got the adequate committee

I’ve just relocated to Chicago. Signed a year-long lease in Humboldt Park today. This isn’t the end of freelancing, but the end of doing it without a home base. I didn’t want to blog again until this was official.

Chicago is one of the most interesting cities, and best theater communities, that I have found in this year, and also home to many of my friends – and some of my family, too. I’ve been here exactly one week today.

I have a backlog of old posts from the drive through Nevada and first impressions of this city, which I will be putting up gradually.

Thank you, Sufjan, for the title.

travel

leaving los angeles: today

Closing up the house. It’s done: once again, all my life is in a suitcase.

Taking the Metro to MacArthur to meet X (the architect for the untitled national theater, and my traveling companion to SF.) We eat sandwiches at Langer’s, with old men and drag queens, and do last-minute work from the twelfth floor of his concrete-girdered loft. We prepare for Vegas, and the desert beyond.

We go to More For Less by the park to acquire ribbon for a ribbon-cutting ceremony, for our ground-breaking of the desert site for the untitled national theater, but they don’t have any ribbon. An omen of things to come, perhaps.

a propos of nothing, travel

leaving los angeles: t minus 2

Last day. Shipping boxes. Visiting the Valley. Driving over the 134 and the mountains. I’m glad X and I are going through the mountains on our way back to SF – I need to say goodbye to the California ranges.

My father reminds me how happy I was to be back on the West Coast earlier in June, how I called them from Seattle ravenously happy about the light and the ocean. He’s right, of course, I do feel more at home here. But this is a new adventure, and adventures aren’t about feeling at home. They’re about taking risks.

Replenishing the house-sitting staples: coffee, soap, toilet paper. Vacuuming dog hair. Tying up loose ends on the computer and in the brain.

Reading a vintage guidebook with ink drawings of important architectural sites in Chicago, and dreaming of Illinois.

Tomorrow we road-trip to Vegas and plunge into the Nevada desert.

acting, film, location, travel

leaving los angeles: t minus 3

Flashes of Los Angeles, as I shut down Operation Pasadena and prepare to be on the road again.

1) The road.
With no time left to use it, I discover 6th Street. You can have lived here all your life, worked here for years, and still find another (better) way to get from one side of it to the other. It’s particularly good for the Pasadena-to-midtown stretch: the 110 to downtown, and 6th west. Driving here feels like negotiating: I’ll see your sun blinding you off the face of the enormous iridescent office building lurking over the 110 North, and raise you a Cone Zone construction closing off your exit. There’s no one way to get from one place to another, only a series of guesses.

2) The Fairfax corridor.
There’s no more alien pizza, or cosmic pizza, or all the wrong names I ever gave Nova Express. I had two of the three most significant meetings of my time in Los Angeles in that all-night, sci-fi-decorated Fairfax pizza joint. i only remember one of them, but I know the other one happened. And now it doesn’t exist. If anything is a confirmation that I should be leaving town, it’s this sad disappearance. The front is boarded up.
We end up in Canter’s instead. A friend suggests that everything in life that isn’t theater is the green room. I buy sunglasses and a suitcase in the thrift stores, observe the selection of vintage menorahs, walk the walk, and eat the kugel.

3) The Heath Ledger Experience.
Waiting in line at the Grove. Running into the theater, dignity abandoned, scrambling for seats. One of the most wonderful performances I have ever seen, or ever hope to see. We laugh loudly at all the wrong places, at the most violent moments, when his acting is superlative. Which is a lot. I’d watch Christopher Nolan direct the phone book.
I was guilty of some of the cheesy reasoning folks have been throwing around about his death, BSing with a philosophy professor friend of my parents’ that a dark role makes your outlook on life darker, that playing the Joker drove him over “the edge.”
But that’s just not true. I don’t know how anyone can say that the performance actually drove him mad, when any actor would be so proud of that performance that it would drive them to greater sanity. He knew how good he was, and he was enjoying being that good. He was on top of his game, technically perfect, and proud of it.
Makes me believe, even more, that his death was an accident.

(I created a new category with this post, location, for things that are about places but not necessarily just about traveling. All my observations on place have been travel-related, for the last year, but I want to link into them with a more grounded noun.)

travel

leaving los angeles: t minus 5

Yesterday, I finalized a sublet in Chicago, and as if jealous, Los Angeles has become distinctly unpalatable. Traffic has started to turn against me. The weather seems less charming. Cracks appear in the dirt. A plant which I have been diligently watering for six weeks dies one morning, its leaves blackening in the sun. And the city, like a vulture throwing its baby vultures out of the nest, is kicking me out. It’s either that or the Joker. And I label a post “travel” again.

Here are other new ills that have come
just now, of evil doom,
from the blind stranger–
unless Fate is somehow at work.
For I cannot call any decision of God
a vain thing.
Time watches constantly those decisions;
Some fortunes it destroys, and others,
on the day following lifts up again.
-Chorus, OEDIPUS @ COLONUS (Sophocles)

a propos of nothing, quotes, travel

in every port

“It’s always been a battle between a kind of Wild West frontier sex industry and the Puritan church industry. At one point there was a saying that you couldn’t throw a stone in Portland without hitting a brothel. There were more brothels than churches, and there were a lot of churches. It’s hard to find a bar that doesn’t have nude dancers in Portland. People just end up going there by default to have a hamburger and there just happens to be strippers. Strippers are as ubiquitous as pinball machines, or video poker.”

“No, you’re doing it wrong. It’s like sex, if it hurts and it’s painful you’re doing it wrong.”
(On whether writing should be painful. )

– Palahniuk on Portland, on writing, and his new book, SNUFF. Reminds me of McMurtry getting the “couple of whores from Portland” to take the guys from the asylum out in the boat, in CUCKOO’S NEST. And it makes me miss the Pearl.

writing

died on the fourth of july

The death of the American writer Thomas M. Disch, by his own hand, on the Fourth of July, was the last act of a drama that had been unfolding in public for several years.

As the author of a large number of death-haunted science-fiction novels and stories, and of several Gothic tales which treat modern America as a land of the dead, and of a huge body of poetry much of which danced with death in formal measure, Disch could from the first have been described as a writer well versed in terminus.

I’m late in linking to this Independent article about Thomas Disch’s death, via Neil Gaiman, but the article is so interesting it’s worth reading late.

quotes

ribbit

On this Thursday, on this particular walk to school, there was an old frog croaking in the stream behind the hedge as we went by.

“Can you hear him, Danny?”

“Yes,” I said.

“That is a bullfrog calling to his wife. He does it by blowing out his dewlap and letting it go with a burp.”

“What is a dewlap?” I asked.

“It’s the loose skin on his throat. He can blow it up just like a little balloon.”

“What happens when his wife hears him?”

“She goes hopping over to him. She is very happy to have been invited. But I’ll tell you something very funny about the old bullfrog. He often becomes so pleased with the sound of his own voice that his wife has to nudge him several times before he’ll stop his burping and turn around to hug her.”

That made me laugh.

“Don’t laugh so loud,” he said, twinkling at me with his eyes. “We men are not so very different from the bullfrog.”

– Roald Dahl, DANNY THE CHAMPION OF THE WORLD

a propos of nothing, technology

Microsoft Word gives up on me

“There are too many spelling or grammatical errors in The Vault.doc to continue displaying them. To check the spelling and grammar of this document, choose “Spelling and Grammar” from the Tools menu.”

– My maligned computer, in frustration at my hundred-page poetry document.