Need an LA retelling of Give a Mouse a Cookie.

Give a Cop a Helicopter

Someone fashionable spends a lot of money on clothes. Someone stylish dresses in a way that accentuates and complements their beauty and personality.

West Hollywood, June 2023

“we did it Joe”

The three years we’ve lived in our apartment, every Saturday has featured the same event: the neighboring building’s gardeners using thunderously loud leaf blowers. Today, something new: an electric leaf blower, quiet as a vacuum.

This is it! Proof that society can actually evolve for the better.

Vanilla ice cream with stewed peach and olive oil.

Eaten, of course, in the bath.

You might think that being a writer has the occupational hazard of constant papercuts, but, thankfully, no, it doesn’t. Or so I thought! Yesterday I sliced deep, right across the pad of the middle finger on my left hand. My booboo still hurts today, too. Writing is dangerous folks, be careful.

I love the vibe of mechanical keyboards. And, I mean, how cool that they’re back, just like film. A few weeks ago I broke down and actually ordered one, a bluetooth number. It came in Monday, and, well: I immediately hated it. Too much travel. Too easy to mis-type. Using it feels like work, unlike my usual ugly $29 Logitech keyboard, which feels like a telepathic port connecting my brain to my computer. This keyboard feels like a hurdle my brain and fingers have to leap over to reach the screen. Rarely have I gotten such a quick and firm no.

Just then my partner came in and was like, Oooh, what’s that? She quickly made off with it, and now it’s her daily driver. So I get to see and hear its handsomeness all the same, just don’t have to use it. Hooray!

Just realized that “passive income” and “rent-seeking” are synonyms. One is just parasitic capitalism dressed up for the digital nomad set.

Watching Marquese Brownlee on his podcast talking about the shortcomings of FaceTime on the new Apple headset, doesn’t it seem like like the wrong approach to use AI to turn a facial scan + infrared eye tracking data into an uncanny avatar?

Way better to play up how unreal it looks, and make a stylized hologram or other transparently digital but cool-looking representation. (Distressed VHS, mid-oughts home security system camera, recovered Super 8 reels, etc.)

Would anything be improved by Leia looking all uncanny valley as she says “Help me Obi-Wan, you’re my only hope”? Nah.

One of my favorite parts of the “L.A. All-Stars” show at Space Ten were a set of one-page zines by Madam X. Making something fun and powerful using just the front and back of a xeroxed sheet of paper—it’s a great artistic constraint.

Here’s maybe my favorite:

And the back:

Wow, with so many Reddit groups set to private, the internet legitimately feels smaller. (And it’s noticeably harder to research things.) I’m in full solidarity with the mods resisting the enshittification of their platform. Hope Reddit corporate rolls back their API BS soon.

We’re lucky as a society to have Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as one of our clearest moral voices. And how great that he has his own newsletter, regularly speaking out about all manner of things. But I think we need to draw a line. He has no right to be as good of a writer as he is.

Here he is, this morning, writing about the PGA Tour’s new deal with Saudi Arabia:

The Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF)’s governor, Yasir al-Rumuyyan, confirmed their investment in golf will be in the billions. Perhaps the PGA’s new logo should be a bone saw.

What a great image. The whole piece is great, powerful, and fun, too.

Last night, I finally sent out “Healing a Space,", a Lightplay about my neighborhood and some things I’ve noticed over three years living here. A highlight was finally getting to write about a monstrous house we always go by on our evening walks.

It has three tiny dormer windows and then, next to them, somehow three roof hips in quick succession. For all the world it seems that three houses were teleported into the same space, their volumes overlapping in a non-Euclidian mess. We refer to this structure as either “those house” or “that houses.”

At last night’s opening for “L.A. All-Stars” at my favorite gallery, Space Ten, my brother got to take part in a performance piece that Chris Burden made in his student days.

My brother had studied Burden’s work as an undergrad himself, so it was a total highlight, courtesy of Bob and Axel Wilhite.

After years of following Los Feliz Daycare on Twitter, I did a full double take this afternoon at Joy on York.

The concept that aspiring writers must “write every day” has always ground my gears, but I could never put my finger on why. Today I realized: it makes it sound like a chore outside of life, a new routine, fulfilled through will power. When for me the durable change is to weave writing through life.

Love this album cover, the title, and how it looks on YouTube.

The music isn’t half-bad, either. Ambient-influenced, classical-inflected, full of deep-voiced strings and the droning energy and circularity of focus-core.

The fine art of bathmaxing.

Pacific Design Center, viewed from West Hollywood Park during the WeHo Pride music festival, 2023.

Like a cherry tree, I too need over a thousand chilling hours before I can produce my great gift.

West Hollywood, June 2023

easemax (v.), to arrange one’s life and actions in the way that ensures the easiest path and the greatest comfort at all moments. Jimmy hit another level of easemaxing when his boss started letting him work entirely from bed, where pajama-clad he ate snacks his mom brought in on special tray.

West Hollywood, May 2023

At some point we spoonerized oatmeal into moat eel. Now every time I eat the stuff I’m bothered by visions of a fishing rod poking through a crenel, a cauldron bubbling in a dingy castle kitchen, a fragrant bowl of fish gruel. What a time the chivalric era must have been.