Clik here to view.
Herman Riley
[This is from 2006, 2007 and today. Herman Riley died on April 14, 2007.] Saxophonist Herman Riley died this weekend. My favorite ever piece of writing I ever did in the LA Weekly was about Herman...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Buddy Collette
Buddy Collette passed from this mortal coil in 2010. I loved Buddy Collette, and here’s the obit I put together for the LA Weekly. I remember it was a last minute job, and the editor gave me an hour...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Deep time
(No idea when I wrote most of this….) Next time you go up the 5 through the Grapevine, and come to the place where Highway 138 comes in, you’re crossing the San Andreas Fault. Fault zone, really. It’s...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Pretending the Road Diet people are Scientologists
What puzzles me about this Road Diet planning in Los Angeles is that no one has counted just how many cyclists there are. We know how many cars travel on a given road. But if anyone has counted...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Hemingway
There’s a storm somewhere off Baja, and the air over L.A. is damp and listless and hot, and everywhere is the sound of overheated air conditioners and little else; people, pets, even the birds are...
View ArticleClik here to view.
I am sick to death of the elite
I was about to submit some of my stuff to a major Los Angeles literary magazine when I saw the staff…. And I’m sorry, but you cannot be an LA literary magazine and be white as the driven snow. This is...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Google News
Not sure what is up with Google News lately, but when I look up the news for Los Angeles I get twenty stories, fifteen of which are from the LA Weekly, three from the Orange County Register, and one...
View ArticleClik here to view.
I love this town #1
Madonna at 28th and Maple. Our Lady of Guadelupe adorns walls all over this catholic city. This one, in South Central L.A., was photographed beautifully by my friend Ellen MacKay. .Filed under:...
View ArticleClik here to view.
There’s a porn star on the telephone
(written before some election or another) Only in L.A. do porn stars leave messages on your phone. It was a dude porn star, so points off there, and he said he’s HIV positive, which kind of takes some...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Zen
Emerging from Griffith Park, the stoned lady forget to press the button at the crosswalk, though she never noticed the difference as she walked across Los Feliz Blvd staring at her iPhone. The traffic...
View ArticleClik here to view.
No commas
No commas. No idea why, but there’s no commas. A whole email without any commas. It’d probably be a bad idea to write my Great American Novel this way. Anyway, feel free to parse. We have to go the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Merry Christmas
I’m up early, staring at the tree. It looks good even in daylight which is good for a Christmas tree, sometimes they look strange then, things off, lights blinking ridiculously. But not this one. It’s...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Power Outage
Power’s been off and on, mostly off, all day here in our stretch of Silver Lake. Gotta love the DWP, delivering juice with all the intermittent excitement of a fourth world capital besieged or maybe...
View ArticleWaverly Terrace
We just don’t live in Silver Lake anymore, we live in Waverly Terrace Silver Lake. Or is it Silver Lake Waverly Terrace? This is what happens when Katy Perry moves into the neighborhood. Maybe we’ll be...
View ArticleFire season
The fires up north are 600 miles away. The ones around Lake Elsinore an hour away but the winds are blowing the smoke inland, away from us. Until the winds begin blowing from the east we’ll smell very...
View ArticleMoon
Gorgeous crescent moon tonight over Los Angeles, tinctured orange from smoke I’m assuming. Seems magnified considerably by atmospherics. Raising my cup I beckon the bright moon wrote Li Bai, thirteen...
View ArticleHollyweird
We’ve been four decades now in what are essentially the eastern suburbs of Hollywood. First couple places were in East Hollywood, which is sort of Hollywood’s Brooklyn (I’d say Queens but that’s West...
View ArticleThe pain of alliteration
I was lectured by a new resident of Frogtown that they do not call it Frogtown. It’s called Elysian Valley, he said. They had just moved there from San Francisco. So you moved from Frisco to Frogtown,...
View ArticleThe crazy beauty of another Fourth of July in Los Angeles
I just love all the cacophony. It’s crazy beautiful. I’ve always loved the sight and sound of fireworks and this is one of best nights ever. We’re stuck at home this year, away from our annual Eastside...
View Article
