Um, What's Your Number

If you could quote Tex Perkins, Gillian Welch and Lester Bangs. If you could recite the entire lyrics to 'Isis'. If you read Doctor Gonzo's letters. If you got the desert in your toenails and hid the speed inside your shoes. If you had wet hair, black trousers and smooth, bare heels. If you cooked linguine with saffron and cream and fresh crab and diced sea bass and barely sauteed scallops. If you ate New York Strip steak, that had been brutally char-grilled just past rare.

If you danced for me and let me sing for you. If you sat, stayed and cheered for a fourth quarter comeback. If you had seen Melbourne in the rain, Nafplio in the chill and Prague in the snow – and you still wanted more. If you have dug a hole in the sand, filled it with hunks of dried Red Gum wood and lit a searing, midnight bonfire, that made nearly as much noise as the crashing surf in the distance. If country music had saved your life.

They Call It Black Friday, But Tuesday's Just As Bad

Coming back up Wilshire, as we slowly made our way out of Santa Monica and towards Brentwood,

both of our easy strolls gave way to pronounced limps. We had started our walk back at 3^rd street and were now approaching the 20's. The Virginian wasn't equipped with the right footwear. That was her excuse. Mine had more to do with the same 'old before my time' afflictions that come and go like the weather over the bay. Whatever it was, we both needed a break. A little pit-stop from the exercise.

Around where we were, Wilshire opens out into a wide, multi-lane carriageway, buffered on each side by stubby commercial spaces. It has the feel of those wide, winding highways that accountants ride through as they make their way home after work, past outer suburbia and on towards the outer, outer suburbia of their pre-fab McMansion houses. The white noise of never ending cruising steel, crunching changing gears and screeching brake-pads is often accompanied by a visual palate of blacks, greys, charcoals and browns. All over the world, such exact roads exist and on their sidewalks, as this all rushes past you, one tends to feel lonely and silent.

Red and Yellow

I'm listening to a lot of Tom Waits lately. And Tex Perkins. It has been almost exclusively the two of them on the iPod. They both have more than enough stuff out there to keep me occupied for endless afternoon walks through the rolling and sweeping - yet concise and compact – silent , side-street opulence of Hancock Park. Both of their recorded works cover an almost unbelievable variety of styles and genres.

Waits started off with a traditional wounded, boozy, New Orleans feel and then progressed towards the more loose and avant-garde - sounding something like a giant, red circus tent with straw flung across the ground, silver shining stars stuck to the roof and the smell of whiskey mixed with elephant dung hanging about your ears. Tex's sound started off more experimental, bawdy and bourbony and has slowly made it's way to traditional and nontraditional Country, with little pit-stops for disco, ladyboys, drum machines and heroin-addled-bluesy-funk.

Feels Like I've Written Before

I've probably written about some of this stuff before.

I wrote another post about breakfast a while back. I write a lot about breakfast. Not only on this blog, but on the pages of other notebooks. Breakfast and Trains. I write a lot about breakfast and trains.

No trains around here lately. I’d love one, though. Sleek, low slung, high-speed carriage, high-backed red chairs with fold down armrests and scattered with high-nervous company. I would love to bunch up into a corner, sitting with my back towards to driver's seat and my head resting on the big window. My earphones plugged in, I’d pump up as much Ella as I could find and just stare, watching the outside go by as I held as still as possible. Hold my ground, whilst everything else rushes past and away.

Hasn't been that much Breakfast either. I’m eating. I’m having an early first bit of something, but not that breakfast 'thing'. That early morning salvation that is a dance of compassion, care and activity hasn't been around me for a while now. Until this morning. This morning was one of the greats. One I will remember for a while to come.

Of Topography

Tallow Beach. 

The locals call it 'The Back Beach”. It runs from south under The Byron Bay Lighthouse, past Suffolk Park and ending down at Broken Head. How long that stretch is I couldn't tell you. I suppose I could look it up, but I’d rather not. I want to write about my memories of the beach, not of an image that is adulterated by another's perspectives. You can look it up, if you like. If you need to know. It's a long way. It runs a long way.

Insomnia Ain't No Kind Of Lady

Sleep comes hard now in Hollywood. Similar to before, but even harder now. Last time I was here, I converted that lack of sleep into early mornings for exercise. The fresh air – still crisp before the sun had time to take full effect - and the silent green sidestreets, would be followed by the muggy, filled air of a clanging gym. All done, showered and completed from with plenty of room to spare before a full mid-morning breakfast. Later, at night, I’d be served a heavy dose of drowsiness well before midnight. I'd finish work and almost run home to collapse into bed, whilst begging whomever takes such requests, for even thirty minutes more than four hours sleep. But that was before. That was last time.

Now sleep comes even harder than that in Hollywood.

Sure There Is

I've woken up thinking of live music gigs I've been too. Specifically, I’m trying to think of which ones were the best. I'm not sure why that is. It could have something to do with what I was listening to as I walked around Hollywood last night. Perhaps. I think there is probably another reason. I’m sure there is.

I consider myself lucky. I've managed to be at quite a few truly great gigs. That is lucky, for I don't go to that many. I’m held back by knowing that on occasion, I will have certain 'issues' with large crowds. It's easier to just avoid them and so, consequently I end up avoiding many gigs. There's a word for that sort of thing and you'll probably want to fling it at me. It's actually a little more complex than that and like so many of the quirks of my days, it involves a train in one way or another. I'm fascinated by trains and trains seem to be fascinated by me too. (Mostly it's Freight Trains of old and lore that have done me in, but in this instance it was the fault of a more modern, underground one.)

Bessie

“Bessie was more than just a friend of mine; We shared the good times and the bad”

That's a lyric from The Band song 'Bessie Smith'. It is an ode to the grand old dame of all blues singers. Bessie had long passed away before any of those boys were born and none of them ever got to actually meet her. They're singing about a connection they felt to her through her records. Not just a simple connection of recognition or empathy, but a connection of more than friendship. A bond, that was a reciprocated, circular, personal exchange. One that rose above convenience or ease and was strong and present in both the good times and the bad.

What a great bond to have. To know that because she had been there on both sides of the coin before, she would certainly be there again. She wouldn't change with the winds of time or the cast of a glance, because she was frozen in a moment on those records. They could put on 'Careless Love' and the emotion and the caution and the regret and the pain would sound the very same as it always did and leave them exactly desperate and hopeful. Bessie had been there. You could hear it in her wail. Bessie had probably been there much worse.

A Note and a Warning

This here post is an exercise.

I want to be a writer. I mean - A Writer. There's a difference.

See, anyone can write. Every monkey and his cousin has a blog or a tumblr or fancies their Facebook status update as concise, social decelerations. There is Twitter which is for those that are trigger happy with quickly constructed, oblique aphorisms, whilst hundreds of literary journal take submissions from those who take the time edit and re-edit. People all over the world, in all languages, write every day and they all do it for different reasons.

My reason? As I said, I want to be A Writer.

Laundry

“If all I had left was ten dollars, I’d spend it all on a service laundry.”



Some of my most intimate memories involve Laundry. In fact, many of them do. This sounds like an odd declaration – even in the context of other declarations made on this blog – so let me explain a little:

To you, the word 'intimate' may suggest moments shared between people. Moments of closeness experienced, understood and remembered only by them. To me, in this instance, 'intimate' means private, alone, quiet and personal. Laundry means all of this in my memories.

Of Rain

I miss the rain. I know it rained today, but that wasn't what I wanted - what I miss.

It was heavy for a while out there. I stood inside a street-level, glass-wrapped lobby off Union Square and watched it. Yeah it was heavy and it was hard. For a while, it scared away the oversized, primary-coloured golf umbrellas. You know you're dealing with something above a patter when the rain is too much for even those over-protected folk to withstand. I felt secure, like a hedge-funder with a full bank acccount in a shrinking cash economy. I felt above and safe and beyond the deluge. And not only because I was dry and inside, but because I was dry and inside a cinema. Not any cinema, but one I have used before, last time I'd lived here. One with many screens over two levels and a stairway connecting them that you can climb or descend unsupervised and flow on for free from movie to movie. You can keep that Movie Marathon going from morning to midnight if you know how to read the program right. And I can read that shit better than Bukowski could read a formguide down at the track.

Of Spray Paint, Cake and Change

So, there is this wall down on Fairfax. It runs along the side of a vacant lot. It is covered in various, unrelated, spray-painted images and letterings, that make up one whole body of work. The list of folk responsible for these individual pieces, reads like a who's who of local and international Street Artists.

The other day 'they' partially buffed that wall. There is a whole story to who 'they' are and what 'they' did and what may now happen to 'they'. It's actually quite interesting. But that's not the story I wanna tell today. So I won't. It's really just an introduction to the one I do wanna tell.

Sushi and Rain

Why aren't there more Blues songs about Sushi and Rain?

In fact, I don't know of any at all. Not even one. But there should be. Several. There should be several songs about Sushi and Rain. There are Blues songs about The Rain. Plenty. Either Rain on it's own or in combination with other items or things. But not with Sushi. And there should be songs about Sushi and Rain.

Drink?

I wanna drink more alcohol.

I do. Lots more.

I wanna grab at whole bottles of Sailor Jerry and drain em straight down my throat. I wanna wake up with the taste of last night's bourbon, which I then wash it away with a fresh, ice cold beer. I wanna order two gin and tonics for appetizer and take a cloudy, sweet cider as my dessert. I wanna do shots of tequila with you behind the service bar. I wanna sneak swigs of wine at the back of the classroom. I wanna impress you with Amaro and Lillet Blanc and then depress you with warm, supermarket brand vodka and cooking port. I wanna drink more alcohol.

When I Was King For A Day

Playground space was always at a premium in my younger days. The private school I went to was not one of those affluent, serene, tie and blazer scenes laid out over a sweeping campus grounds. Ours was more so a small, grungy, religious collective school, set around an open, crumbling ash-felt rectangle. A high, cyclone fence separated the couple of less-than-regulation size basketball courts on one side from a nondescript square on the other that would be used for outdoor school assemblies and epic cricket matches. At the bottom of this, was a raised square, which was laid with tan-bark and comparable in size to a 7 spot carpark. Sitting in the middle of this was a wooden jungle gym, complete with a swing, two slides, monkey bars and a swinging, wood slat bridge.

For the several years prior to adolescence, whilst we were not senior enough to fight off our elders for the use of the basketball courts, this was the recess area we made ours. And there was just one game we played on it, at both morning and afternoon recess, everyday – King.

Took. Take. Tired.

At times, I've heard and over-heard people talk about how hard it is for them to 'get' certain artists. Modernism did that. Still does. Sure, before Modernism there was art that made you stop and scratch at you head, but it was Modernism that really went at this ethos hard.

Life can sometimes be hard to get. Most of the time sometimes. Even when it does make sense, the next day you can awake confused by that which was so crystal yesterday. Or you can come home from your jog, aware of that which you didn't 'get', when you left the house in the early morning. 'Getting' anything on this planet is relative – relative to when and if you are 'getting' it or not. Somewhere around the beginning of the 1900's, artists began to feel the need to transcribe and retell this relativity.

For Bukowski, Waits and Bogey

on these here streets

once walked

once stumbled drunk

those whom i now turn to

on these here streets

in tousled bed sheets

they wrote of what they believed in

of what did not believe in them

and i believe in what was left as i hide

in tousled bed sheets

black and white density

spoken in deep tone and true

repeated so oft it is now purest lore

and i whisper them to myself in this

black and white density

the blues from back east

faded to the music of my now

which tastes stronger because of shared proximity

however still haunts and hangs the smell of

the blues from back east

in this here city of sun

that shone firm upon 

rendering many golden through the ages

yet still lonely dawn is so damn cold

in this here city of sun