in the spirit of the new economy we had a rush job this week to design and produce a presentation for our client’s meeting with an unnamed prime minister of an unnamed country. our client is in Washington DC, so we were asked to Fed Ex the presentation one day early, so as to avoid any delays due to the coming “Snowmaggedon.” they kept telling us “planes will be shut down,” and “it’s all over the news,” and in one of those weird phone call lulls, i happened to mention we losers in Los Angeles were also expecting a storm on Friday. “Oh really?” asked the client. “Yes,” i said. “Well… with less drama.”
nice client, nice presentation, nice rainy afternoon in the park thanks to finishing the job one day early.
an “E-normous” mat zapper has suddenly appeared—happy 2010—in the hallway at my local yoga place, and around the corner near the tank tops and herbal tea is its companion, a 50-gallon bucket of Purell wipes. The mat zapper says it’s an “Ultra-Violet yoga mat sanitizer” for authorized personnel only, but the Purell wipes are free.
with the appearance of these large objects dedicated to squashing bacteria the message that is highlighted (way more than breathe/surrender/peace/namaste) is just how gross and dirty yoga places really must be. in other words, it gets you looking. before the mat zapper, the ropes were simply “dark,” the corners of the rooms “well-shellacked,” and the mats “just a little sticky.” now the bar has been raised. something “sanitized” this way comes and now everything must be measured against that. yeah, think about ole zappy before you put your face in that blanket.
and talk about single-usage appliances… i can’t figure out how to get even a chopstick UV’d on that thing.
in high school my brother and i had a friend named Dean who was obsessed (on alternating weeks) with brown dogs and when Boston’s third album was coming out. in those days OCD was rarely diagnosed, especially in New Mexico, and we took his did-i-lock-the-car did-i-lock-the-car did-i-lock-the-car neurosis in stride, like we did his musical odes to brown dogs. Boston had just finished their 7xPlatinum second album and every station in New Mexico promised a soon-to-be-released THIRD album followed by a visit to Tingley Auditorium. the wait for poor Dean grew from two years (the unfathomable time that had elapsed between the first and the second album) to forever, where we all got a little older and went to college and forgot (at least me) about the whole thing. only every time i hear a Boston song (which is every half hour in New Mexico, and i just spent two weeks there) i always think i should google to see if that third album ever came out.“So many people have come and gone…Their faces fade as the years go by…”
today i finally did it (ok, truth is that i heard a Foreigner song, which reminded me of Boston) and discovered lo! that third album did come out! whoa! 8 years!
and so here, 20+ years later, is my ode to Dean. Boston and a brown dog: pure love. pure love.
ever since the Northridge earthquake in 1994 i have had the fear of being inside a porta pottie, peeing into the plastic echo… and then along comes an aftershock, a giant gust of wind, or shockwaves from an asteroid crashing into the moon and BOOM! down goes the porta pottie on its side. and that’s BOOM! on the side that the door is located, mind you. so not only am i trapped inside, sloshing around, but there’s no way out other than through the roof. check those ventilator shafts!
ha ha ha everyone says, it’s not going to happen. relax, all my friends tell me. (meanwhile i’ve written a huge book about this very thing happening to the CEO of the world’s most popular ice cream company.)
so today at Drummond Ranch where our pups do their sheepherding i find out that during the storm last week the wind BLEW the porta pottie over on its side, BOOM! Ha! SEE??
the noise spooked one of the horses so badly it freaked/bolted/had a kanipshit and did this number to the fencing.
notice the amazing view beyond, snow capped peaks!
after 2 weeks of blowy snowy conditions in NM, two days traveling in the car, ten-foot high snow drifts in Flagstaff, dinner at Bun Boy, Barstow, and getting busted by the LAPD, we are back in LA in search of the bowl of posole, the hot sopapilla and the quiet forested arroyo for taking pups on their morning walks.
some friends recommended Bronson Canyon to us but they failed to say how cool it looks! there’s altitude, bat caves and SHADE!
but let’s not get carried away. can’t forget this is LA afterall.
a few years ago an artist friend of mine moved to Oregon from Los Angeles slightly against her will and best judgment. after several gloomy months she developed a severe small-town depression and started admiring the local gourds. not wanting to be a crafts-fair artist she starting painting the gourds rather than ON them, but this soon turned into a really big worry: what, then, is the difference between painting a gourd and painting on a gourd? really.
and so, here’s the rice farmer’s answer to Rykovanov’s portrait of Pushkin en riz.
it’s just a sneaking suspicion BUT… it seems like our lovely city/state is so broke a missive went out from someone high up telling the cops to run people down for spare change.
this morning we got a visit from a cop for having our dogs off leash in Pan Pacific Park. there are used condoms in another part of the park and homeless people tossing their empties and random acts of shooting and some guy BBQ-ing his mail and the cop has to come bother us. i didn’t drive so i didn’t have my license so the cop asked me for my info. it went a little something like this:
last name?
lee.
first name?
angie
is that the name that’s on your license? your full name?
yes
do you have a middle name?
nope
(pause)
(…)
all i’m saying is that if i don’t find a match…
that’s my real name
all i’m saying is that there are a lot of angie lee’s in LA county
(i wanted to say the other angie lee’s were probably all korean so they were certainly NOT me. apparently he was checking to see if there were warrants on us. negative, said the lady on the walkie talkie. 10-4.)
there was another weird moment where he looked right at me and asked me my hair color. funny.
he did let us off with a warning, (thank you LAPD – as we were three people with four dogs, we didn’t know whether we were going to get four tickets or three, or even possibly two), and he did toss off the COP attitude after a few minutes and become a real person and we did have a nice chat. BUT – he claimed the ball field we were in had a sign that said “no animals” which isn’t true. then he said “the signs are coming.” (yeah, as soon as we collect some more spare change.)
his other complaint was that kids played baseball here, and he didn’t want kids playing in dog pee and “feces residue.” OK mister, but what part of having dogs on a leash protects kids from said residue? and besides, what about those yoga/kung-fu/kick-boxing fitness trainers doing private lessons in the park? oh, he replied, the city is in a lawsuit about that right now.
after he indirectly asked us to pass the word to other dog-off-leash-park-goers (“do you have friends who hang out here? no.) we suggested him posting flyers at Park La Brea telling the residents about the new crackdown. (there’s a regular gaggle of unnerved apartment dogs from Park LB that gather in PP Park everyday at 6pm.) he was quite excited about this idea (although i neglected to offer to design him a flyer) and we parted ways.
