i flew back to vermont from los angeles today. sun to snow. california was surprisingly cold, but still green. i can see why so many people are attracted to it. i've posted a whole bunch of pictures on my flickr site.
happy new year! it can't get worse than last, can it? yikes, i don't want to think about it.
this is check out aisle 13 at the goleta kmart. i purchased shaving cream, hair gel, razors and floss. i chose aisle 13 because i always have bad luck choosing aisles and i thought, well, why not just go for it! i was persuaded to aisle 14 shortly thereafter by an impatient clerk with no customers.
having spent the majority of my time here in a priviledged cocoon (a nice house in the hills with mountain views, browsing pricey shops on state street, watching tanned, toned and groomed people jog, bike, and rollerblade, sipping latte's at custom roast coffee shops) i had begun to wonder where the real world was. and here i found it, in goleta. sandwiched between an upscale "shopping village" and a vacant modern office building, the kmart unimposingly sits back from the street. the signage is vintage, maybe late 70s or early 80s, dirty and faded. inside, a low ceiling (by today's standards in big box stores) glows with bare bulbed fluorescent fixtures dimly illuminating poorly marked sections of the store. people coursed the aisles in thick groups of familial resemblance. the register lines clogged the aisle to the left. fashion sense was absent, or at least unreadable to my sensibilities. i felt right at home, and thought, well, this is the first place in santa barbara that's felt like white river junction!
i was doing some christmas shopping here in santa barbara and walked by a coffee shop that seemed adequately non-corporate. there was a sign out front that said, "10% off your coffee if you can tell us the first year walkmans were made." so, i trod in pondering that bit of trivia. at first i thought early eighties and had settled on 1981, but when i placed my order i suddenly recalibrated my guess and said, "i'm going to guess '79." the barrista looked a bit surprised and said, "wow, you're right. congratulations." i was a surprised as he was. chalk one up for not thinking.
earlier in the day i visited my brother's print shop. he runs it with his wife and a few employees. basically they're an offset print shop but they've added a line of gifts and really nice paper-related products. it reminds me of a gas station, and in fact it was a gas station, but what i mean is that they sell printing (like gas) but have a convenience store that sells all kinds of things that you might want while getting your printing done, including post office services. it's a really nice hybrid business.
what's wrong with this picture? yes, my hair is a bit off, i know. i don't like the haircut myself, but that's another story. oh, you know i'm in los angeles from my prior post so what's this new york like streetscape? and what the hell are those hills apparently just beyond the end of the block?
this is the warner brothers soundstage lot which is amusing to amble about. you wander from paris to new york to london in a matter of minutes. the texture of everything is similar, a kind of stucco matte finish formed into bricks, stone, stucco itself and anything else required. it all looks old and weathered, unused. if they ever wanted to do a post apocalyptic urban film all they'd have to do is turn on the cameras, and of course obliterate those hills in the background.
my friend, brad (who was supposed to be in the picture but my aim was off) and i had lunch at the studio cafeteria. i had a turkey and gouda panini with oil and vinegar drizzed salad for $6.95. after having been here just two days i'm already delighting in the superficial. but, i didn't spot any celebrities. each soundstage has a plaque on it listing the movies made in it. it's pretty cool standing at the spot casablanca was shot, a kind of cinematic ground zero.
here's a nice brief description of meditation and yoga by swami rama:
Meditation/Yoga is a definite process for resolving conflicts. It is the simple and exact process of becoming aware of who you are. It is learning to know yourself as you really are. Meditation/Yoga is a practice of gently freeing yourself from the worries that gnaw at you, so that you can be free and respond to the needs of the moment, and experience the joy of being fully present. Meditation/Yoga is not what you think, for it is beyond thinking. You do not meditate on your problems in order to solve them, but through meditation you see through the problems you have set up for yourself.
here i am in grand central station, new york. that was last weekend. i was in new york for a radical faerie meeting. over two days we discussed the building that will be going on next summer, money issues (mostly how to raise it) and started to explore residency at the camp.
today i'm sitting in the west hollywood apartment of my friend marco who is a television director. he's off at work. i thought i'd be going out and seeing the town but i've really just felt like sitting around today and relaxing. he's got cable which seems like candy to me since i don't watch television at all. i've been soaking up independent film all morning.
tomorrow i'm going to visit friend brad who works at warner brothers. he asked me to come have lunch "on the lot." his invitation sounded delightfully insider and sparked memories of my old schoolboy dreams of being a hollywood director. in a couple days i'll be driving to santa barbara to visit my family, which seems to be relocating there. my brother and his family has lived there quite a while (my sister in law is a santa barbara native) and my parents have recently bought a house up in the hills.
there is something about los angeles that feels like home to me. partly, it's physically very much like denver where i grew up: flat in places, mountainous in others, smoggy, dry, overrun with cars and people tend to be well groomed and tan. there is a prominent latino presence. in high school, i was sure i was going to live here, work in movies, and spent long hours dreaming while browsing cinema magazines before bed, listening to movie soundtracks, trying to write screenplays, and making a few odd little super-8 films with my siblings and a few friends as cast.
once i created the bridge of a space ship in my family's garage. i cut holes in poster board and taped tracing paper to them and installed all our christmas lights behind them to affect the best simulation of control panels with blinking lights i could conceive. in my mind's eye today it was nearly perfect.
i've been back a few days now from my vipassana meditation retreat. naturally people want to know what it's like when you go away for ten days of silence. "oh, you can talk," was a common refrain this week. what happens when meditating is not easy to describe, actually, because the mundane details of sitting don't begin to reflect the profundity of the technique. what i did was sit for about ten hours a day for ten days, watching my breath and observing my mind and body. from the outside meditation is somewhat comic. the faces of meditators look more or less like the faces of people asleep on a subway. but inside the play of pain and pleasure force one to confront oneself more intensely than any therapy, course or program i've experienced.
here's what the website says: "Vipassana is one of India's most ancient meditation techniques. Long lost to humanity, it was rediscovered by Gotama the Buddha more than 2500 years ago. The word Vipassana means seeing things as they really are. It is the process of self- purification by self-observation. One begins by observing the natural breath to concentrate the mind. With a sharpened awareness one proceeds to observe the changing nature of body and mind and experiences the universal truths of impermanence, suffering and egolessness. This truth-realization by direct experience is the process of purification. The entire path (Dhamma) is a universal remedy for universal problems and has nothing to do with any organized religion or sectarianism. For this reason, it can be freely practiced by everyone, at any time, in any place, without conflict due to race, community or religion, and will prove equally beneficial to one and all."
