travelling

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.