Different Hours

Well I've been out of town for a few days. I went down to LA for a friends engagement party. The party was at a beach out in Malibu. Very good people, lots of fun. Too much drinking in the sun. LA in general is a terrible place as near as I can tell. The people are vacuous and concerned only with what they wear and if they're in the right place at the right time. I think people constantly joke about the differences between northern cali and southern cali, but in fact the differences are right on. In LA the weather was beautiful, both the men and the women were beautiful, everything was grossly overpriced (I don't want to think about how much money Tami and I spent down there but at $9 for a cocktail...) and while I'm sure that there's a very interesting vibrant "scene" that I wasn't exposed to in my brief visit I can't imagine that it is as sincere as what exists in the bay area. By sincerity I mean a real love for the music or art or writing that is being practiced and less a love of simply the act of doing it. This can be translated as thus, "ooh, look at me I'm so cool I do this cool thing." A particular lyric by Paul Westerberg comes to mind, "Playing make up, wear a guitar" and that pretty much sums up my impression of LA. The beach, however, was gorgeous. We stayed in a hotel in Hollywood called The Standard which, unbeknownst to us, is a very trendy see and be seen type of establishment. It has a bar which gets very loud and a restaurant which does the same. It was very odd to walk into a hotel lobby at midnight (our plane was delayed out of Oakland) feeling tired and dirty to find a lobby crowded with the young and beautiful sipping drinks, lounging in clear plexi-glass bubble chairs that hung from the ceiling, a DJ spinning tunes, a scantily clad model who was paid simply to lounge in a glass box behind the registration desk (this seemed to me to speak volumes about LA), it was all a bit surreal. Not that all that stopped us from joining the throng for a drink after checking in, it was kind of fun to hang with the beautiful people for a while but I can't imagine living their unless you're an aspiring actor/actress in which case you're delusional anyway.

At the end of this week the family and I head to the outer bank of North Carolina for a little vacation. I'm really looking forward to it, but I'm sure I'll be blogless for that 2 week period so I'll try to be better this week. This will be one of those rare occasions that the whole family will be together, though my sister Chula won't be able to make it she will be replaced by brother and his new son who couldn't make it last year. Fun and sun at the beach.

I got a review published on line by the Trouser Press. A band called Pond. Check out the review