Problems:
1) Finding herself faced with the task of recounting experiences that, at best, only serve to illuminate the grinding tedium of everyday life (a task for which some writers [cf. Zola] have talent, but for which she has naught), the blogger has difficulties extracting the ore of true mineral writing from the slag of boring fights with friends, trips to drab chain coffee shops, predictable jobs in predictable dresses, and overpriced-drink nightclub conversations with tremendously silly people.
2) Finding herself blessed with too many sudden new friendships with interesting individuals, dramatic developments in old relationships, stunning coincidences of international travel, work-related excitements, and various museums and Cultural Experiences Worthy of Note, the blogger is similarly unable to process the hypersensory glut due to time constraints (and the fact that the many new friendships, etc, have left the blogger with a dire and urgent and total-Internet-attention-span-sucking need to Wiki herself up some information on Johannes Kepler, the viola da gamba, Henry E. Huntington, and the plants that support entire ecosystems in the rainwater pools they store in their centres, including fishes that never swim outside their leafy bounds).
The blogging paradox: Too little to do gives one too little to say. Too much going on at once removes all possibility of contemporary explanation.
Some scenes from the tail end of my Los Angeles trip:
This happened. (Photo by Bonnie Harrison.)
I ate Zankou Chicken with the man who made me first read Joan Didion.
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I saw Justice live one night at a club called Cinespace. My bruises came in very nicely.
I hiked. Several times. In borrowed shoes.
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The Griffith Observatory finds a very nice allegorical explanation of the universe’s progression from the Big Bang in various pieces of celestial-themed costume jewelry, pinned to board in a long, meandering line.
Everyone got excellent massages that night.
Obviously furious at the late-afternoon unavailability of the Sunday Los Angeles Times, a Pasadenan peppered his local dispensory with Chick tracts. Said my companion: “Abortion Stops a Beating Heart. Isn’t that kinda the point?”
Who knew the Los Angeles subway could be so telegenic? (Photo by Leo Tolkin.)
Apparently, when the observatory was built, light pollution was a non-issue. Also: Griffith J. Griffith shot his wife.
She survived.
4 responses so far ↓
Albatross // May 9, 2008 at 10:14 am
“…stunning coincidences of international travel…”
I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours!
In 1987 my lover of three years dumped me for a guy with a parrot. I was devastated. In the middle of the chaotic year that followed I met a gorgeous archaeologist while taunting the evangelists on the University campus, and she invited me to drop everything, hock my car, quit my job, and join her in Athens in two weeks. So of course I did.
Two years later I was newly married (not to the archaeologist) and honeymooning in Brussels for one evening on the way back from Paris.
And there in the central square of Brussels, we met the archaeologist, who just happened to be passing through for one night herself.
Oh my new wife was SO thrilled with THAT encounter…
(Bonus not-my-story: my friend was travelling in Venice and ran into a mutual friend from Michigan)
(Bonus not-my-story #2: my neighbors met at a block party and after puzzling for some time realized that they had met before - on a mountaintop while hiking in Peru!)
Okay… your turn!
photojenna // May 12, 2008 at 6:44 pm
During my most recent trip to LA I decided to stay at the rented home of a group of about four guys, all young, all musicians. There was nothing in the refrigerator but leftover Chinese, hot sauce, and Jim Beam.
My first night there, a guy whom I don’t recognise as a room-mate walks in the front door. I ask if I can help him, and he says he comes by sometimes because he keeps his skateboard in the living room. He tells me he’s in a play (a play written by a New Zealand writer I actually once studied with, when she was writer-in-residence at my high school: Michaelanne Forster). And after a ten-minute conversation, when he tells me he’s meeting some friends for a drink at the bar round the corner, and would I like to come, I figure, Why not.
The friends include a model and an actress. I complained to the model of a recent job, which had confirmed me and then canceled, but canceled outside the timeframe in which the client would’ve had to pay me anyway. (Germans. Clever bastards, all.) “They canceled everyone,” I said, “the photographer, who’d originally picked me, was dumped, and so evidently I was surplus to requirements as well.”
The model, who was Italian, looked at me intently. “Who was the photographer? Is she pregnant?”
“Uh, yeah,” I said. “The photographer was [firstname lastname]. How’d you guess?”
“Because I do a shoot with her last week, and she complain to me of the German client, book her months in advance and then — pouf!” said the Italian, swishing her hands through the air for the onomatopoeia.
We later figured out that not only are we friends with some of the same people, but that her old Milan booker now works for the women’s board of my New York agency.
We had never laid eyes on each other before that evening — and wouldn’t have, had I not decided to take the chance that a skateboarding, Walter-Perry-playing guy might not be an axe murderer — but there were at least five reasons why we should have crossed paths earlier.
That’s only the most recent.
Also: Once a model friend of mine had a bunch of her clothes stolen at a models’ apartment in New York City. It was clear that the girl who’d left for Paris that day had been the culprit.
The following week, my friend goes to Paris. As it turns out, she’s represented by the same French agency as the thief. And the agency houses my friend in a models’ apartment where, upon entering, she finds all her stuff hanging in the closet.
“Oh! I’m so glad you’re here! I was just…keeping…these things for you,” said the red-handed one.
And, of course, I think I mentioned that the photographer for my job in Miami back in March has a girlfriend who’s a designer, who booked my friend Zosia for her lookbook. That was a fun discovery.
Albatross // May 13, 2008 at 6:38 am
> “Oh! I’m so glad you’re here! I was just…keeping…these things for you,” said the red-handed one.
HAHAHAHAHAHA… I thought it was funny this weekend when the guy who cut me off and flipped me the bird on the freeway ended up parking in the spot next to me at the mall, but THIS is a CLASSIC! Hahaha…
photojenna // May 13, 2008 at 7:18 pm
That one hits kind of close to home because last Saturday, I actually became the person who cuts someone off, only to be embarrassingly unable to shake them.
As I was nearing the completion of the packing for my current trip/all future known life plans, I knelt down on the larger of my two suitcases to close it. I knuckled into the clasp, grunted and bounced a little on the case’s hard shell to get it to shut over the 14 pairs of shoes and dozen vintage dresses I can’t wear to castings but also can’t part with. It usually works — except this time, I heard a solid snap, and the suitcase lock came off in my hand.
With only three and a half hours until my flight, I had to get on the Muni to go downtown to get a new suitcase.
Of course, Ross Discount on a late Saturday afternoon was a complete zoo. I am a fast walker and a search-and-destroy shopper; the easiest way to send my cortisone spiking is to force me to deal with a den of meandering mouth-breathing browsers. I got downtown in 20 flat, marched to the luggage section, grabbed a sturdy electric purple rolling valise, and weaved my way through Hosiery and Jewelry in order to beat the crowds of Chinese grandmas comparing sock discounts on the clogged linoleum tile store thoroughfares.
I was closing in on the checkout line at full clip when I realised I was going to bottleneck with a middle-aged guy in a windbreaker. I saw him at the very last second, and of course I didn’t break my stride, what with the minutes counting down to my flight and all.
He hesitated at the last second. I headed into the queue barely ahead of him — ever see Pushing Tin? It was like that scene where John Cusack has an impossible number of planes to wrangle, and so he sends the full-speed 747 sailing down to the runway, only barely missing the puddle hopper in the holding pattern — and I was close enough to hear him say, quite distinctly, “Real nice. Yeah, cut me off. I like that.”
Of course we ended up being called to registers 13 and 14 at exactly the same instant. And of course we also completed our transactions simultaneously, and of course we headed for the same store exit. “Was it worth it to get one place ahead of me?” he muttered as I started to head in one direction, and he another, on the pavement outside.
I recognise that cutting people off is a violation of the social contract, etc, and that him getting served as quickly as I did is probably just retribution for my bull-headedness, but fuck if I didn’t want to wheel round, electric-purple suitcase in hand, and scream Listen, arsehole!
So I’m afraid I can see both sides. I’ve privately seethed in schadenfreude over the rudely impatient person’s hold-up, and I’ve been that same superior bitch on a few occasions.
I don’t generally flip strangers off, however. People in this country sometimes have guns.
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