December

I'd be pleased as punch if my favorite month of the year got kicked off with a healthy dose of the ol' white stuff...

Za Vashe Zdorovye

I'm a sucker for good clean design, and some of these Russian anti-alcohol posters are just brilliant.

[found by Kottke]

Just Don't Call Him Bryan

I wanted to hate Ryan Adams' new album. I really did. But, God help me, "Rock N Roll" (I mean, how can you not hate someone pretentious enough to name their new LP "Rock N Roll?") is very, very good. It starts out decent enough, with a couple good head-bobbing, finger-drumming numbers, some ups, some downs. Then, with what at first seems an abrupt change until you give it a couple listens and realize it was there all along, the album morphs into the best mix tape of late-80's alt-rock that you never heard, as Ryan alternately channels Morrissey, Robert Smith, Paul Westerberg, and that guy from Dinosaur Jr., often all at the same time, with a nice dash of the dear, departed Whiskeytown thrown in for good measure. I mean, just listen to "So Alive," the fifth track: it sounds like it was pulled from a John Hughes soundtrack. Okay, that album title's a bit tough to swallow, but that arrogant bastard somehow manages to live up to it. Great stuff.

Three Days in the Valley

I called my wife from the streets of New York, speaking to her on my cell phone as I sat on the wide steps of an old brick tenement building. The streets were dead empty, a pleasant change from the norm. No taxi cabs, delivery trucks, bike messengers, honking horns. No people. Just me and and the silent, empty streets, and the silent, empty buildings. And the buildings were truly empty: I peered in the front door of one, just to see, and found it hollow, no floors or rooms, just rows of beams and scaffolding and ladders. Down the block, a subway station led down, not into busy tunnels with roaring trains, but into a dead end. Then, a sign of life, as a guy speaking on a walkie-talkie cruised by. In a golf cart.

Nobody does surreal like Los Angeles.

My flight got in last night at about two in the morning their time, five AM my time, and I drove down Santa Monica Boulevard to West Hollywood in a bleary haze, through deserted streets. Managed to catch about six hours of restless hotel sleep before rising to greet what seems to be the typical perfect LA morning of sunny skies and 75º weather. Chugged down a Jamba Juice and drove to Paramount Studios, where I met a friend for lunch, then wandered the lot for a while, taking in the beautiful theatre, walking past the huge Blue Sky mural, checking out the display of Best Picture Academy Awards and the bench from Forrest Gump, and poking my head in one of the cavernous sound stages (this one complete with a huge backdrop curtain painted with a meticulously-detailed nighttime city skyline). And roaming the aforementioned streets of the movie set that fills in for New York City when the actual city is throwing a fit or demanding a raise or doing something else to render itself unuseable, as actors are wont to do from time to time.

There's a jazz to working on movies that you just don't get anywhere else. Nothing draws the attention of passers-by like the lights and bustle of a movie set, and when you're working on one, that attention just adds to the frenetic energy that sparks through the set as the camera begins to roll, giving you a rush that more than makes up for the crushingly tedious hours you just spent getting everything ready. Walking through the lot, feeling that energy again, made me realize how much I missed it. And walking through those empty streets of that psuedo-New York had me wondering how much I would miss its real-life counterpart.

Boo!

The little inn at which the missus and I had our wedding is, we learned a little beforehand, supposedly haunted. We didn't have any otherworldly encounters while we were there, but here's a shot of me doing my own ghostly impression which does a great job of demonstrating one of the reasons why my wife and I work so well: when I act like a freak, which is quite often, she can laugh and pretend she doesn't know me.

Don't worry, I'll have some more pictures up, as soon as I get the kinks in the photo section worked out.

[Photo by Leo Sorel]