Important Information

I wanted to poach some eggs, but the first one I reached for was stuck to the package. As everyone knows, this means it cracked and leaked, then dried. This is why, when buying egss, one must touch every egg to make sure it moves. Michael Haney taught me this. Sure.

I decided, rather than let someone try to grab it too vigorously and get egg all over the place, I should label it. That done, sharpie in hand, I decided the others might benefit from some more positive sentiment.

LA Decom

Every year after Burning Man, people feel a little lost. They've had a tran-scendant experience, some little fun, and/or a lot of drugs, and they miss it. Kind of like when you leave summer camp.

Enter the concept of the "decompression" party. Several cities around the US (I don't know of any abroad) have large, open-air parties about a month later, inviting people to set up dance stages, performance spaces, wear costumes, etc, just like at BM. To try and recapture some of that Burning Man feeling, in order to feel some of the lost passion that they felt in the Northwest Nevada desert, to cure some of their ache for the experience.

So I bought two tickets to "LA Decom" ($10 apiece). I thought, maybe this is a way for Ellen to get a sense of what it was like -- athough I secretly suspected it would be weird/lame/boring. It was to be held in an open space right near downtown LA, not far from Dodger stadium and right next to Chinatown, in what used to be, I kid you not, a cornfield. In fact the way they clarified the location for the Decom party was to refer to its location as "yes, the cornfield." Apparently this piece of land, once the site of a Tongva Indian village, was for a hundred years a kind of railroad depot. The tracks were then removed and the city bought the land in the early 2ooo's. Then in 2005 an artist planted corn and dubbed the work "Not a Cornfield." I unfortunately never got to see the corn. It's now just a large dry dusty park.

Ellen and I arrived last Saturday for Decom and were greeted with the traditional Burning Man invocation, "welcome home." (I like this about Burning Man.) But the actual event was a bit disappointing. If Burning Man is Disneyland, then this was like a small-town San Gennaro festival. If Burning Man is the Super Bowl, then this was like a rural high school game. So we wandered around for an hour, enjoying the LA sun, and not much more. A few times, we got a little Burning Man type fun: some guy, sitting under a large shade structure, would yell "Gummy Mango?" and then slighshot the little individually wrapped candy at you. It hit me, but it didn't hurt -- I just picked it up and ate it. When I stood arms akimbo and feigned indignance -- "how dare you sir." He smiled and pegged me again. Yummy!

Then there was the Black Rock roller disco. A large area of plywood was laid down, and you could borrow skates and skate around. A few hardy souls tried it out -- they couldn't skate very well. No helmets. An accident waiting to happen. Or, as I then clarified to Ellen, "happening."

I kept saying to her, this is a pale shadow of what it was like. She said she understood. The only way to experience it is to go. At one point the wind kicked up and a significant amount of gritty dust blew in our face. "Now THAT'S what Burning Man was like," I exclaimed.

Still, we didn't have a terrible time. We wandered back out onto the street, hopped back on the Gold Line, back to the beautifully restored Union Station, where we had parked our car.

Burning Man Part 2 -- The Dust

The dust is everywhere, surrounding you, permeating all barriers and entering your very being. Just like, as they taught us in church, God.

Sometimes, the dust would just kick up as you walked, turning your legs an odd shade of yellow, like you have a series of minor bruises, or like you applied spray-tan wrong. (Seasoned burners, as far as I could observe, wore cowboy boots or other high, protective footwear.)

Other times, the wind would begin to blow and the dust would form a few-hundred-foot high cloud, creating "white-out" conditions. There were moments, during one or two days, that you couldn't see twenty feet in front of you. And, memorably, on the night of the "burn," I had to shine my flashlight at the ground three feet ahead of me because that was the limit of my vision in the dust storm. I didn't want to step on anyone. The wind was powerful. It was spooky -- people appeared suddenly out of nowhere, face covered with bandanas and big goggles, like bug-eyed bandits. (I looked the same of course.) As the spirits would have it, the wind died down and the dust cleared in time for the 40-foot high neon-lit man to burn spectacularly.

Now, what remains for me of Burning Man are some great memories. And the dust. Basically, anything I brought to BM, whether it sat outside in the open or lay buried in a duffel bag, is covered in dust. My backyard looks like an exploded campsite as I hose everything down and try to get some of the dust off. It's not working. From now on, whenever we go camping, there will undoubtedly be a significant portion of Northwest Nevada dust on our stuff, reminding me of BM 2009.

Oh, and of course I'll be shitting all the dust I swallowed for weeks to come.

Burning Man Part 1

Yes -- I went to Burning Man this year.

As you can tell from the above photo, there is a certain amount of hardship involved in attending BM. It takes place in the middle of nowhere, a white dusty dried lake bed in an area of northwest Nevada known as the Black Rock Desert. Really, it's miles and miles from a tiny little non-town.

There are two principles of Burning Man: radical self-expression and radical self-sufficiency. The first means large art installations, crazy modified vehicles, nutty outfits, weird theme camps, and the occasional nude person. The second means bring absolutely everything you'll need: water, food, shelter, etc. Many people come in RV's, but many others camp out in tents, like I did. And you must leave no trace -- not even the water you use to wash with (otherwise known as gray water). Burning Man makes a big deal of "leave no trace," and most people devise some way to take showers while capturing the water to let it evaporate. I just laid out a tarp and took demure sponge baths.

I had been wanting to go to Burning Man for many years now, and only this year did my ability to go coincide with a spike in my desire. Ellen, on the other hand, had no interest, seeing as how I kept telling her about the dust and the wind and the camping out. I had a bit of trepidation -- wasn't it just a haven for hippie losers? Hey I'm no hippie! But what about the other word?

I read obsessively about it for a few weeks before going and prepared diligently. Already owned a tent, bought a tarp for shade, bought freeze-dried food and a camping stove, etc.

Then drove 10 hours to Reno NV and stayed in a depressing Motel 6 ($27.99/night) before heading out to the desert. Set up my tent, got on my bike, and headed out into Burning Man.

What a revelation. The "art cars" (moving vehicles altered to resemble fish or animals or just abstract sculpture) scurrying every which way (there had to be 70 of them), the large scale art installations, the loud dance music coming from lots of camps (and from most cars), the crazy costumes people wore, the sheer size of the place (30,000 people attend, in a huge well-laid out circular grid a few miles across) -- and the Man himself at the center of it all, 30 feet high, surrounded by a weird organic looking abstract base, made of wood and ready to burn.

And that was just during the day. The place really comes alive at night -- every piece of art, stationery or moving, had a nighttime look, lit up with neon or LED ropes. Most people and bikes had lights of some kind on them. The Man is outlined in neon, even though when he burns all that neon will be destroyed.

The whole thing felt like a combination of Who-Ville and Road Warrior and a Fellini film. It was like living in a Terry Gilliam movie.

I loved it.

Even though at least one night, the wind was 50 mph and there was so much dust you couldn't see three feet.

But that's for the next post!

Poker Buddies

These are the guys I play poker on Fridays once in a while. It's rare to see a photo of us -- we generally show up, talk a little entertainment business, and play poker. But the guy in the middle holding the cake, David Himmelstein, a screenwriter, has decided to move back to Cambridge, MA. I envy him. In a rare show of minor emotion, a cake was gotten for his last game with us. (It was festooned with little cards and a roulette wheel.)

One guy's missing -- Chris Kruize, a production accountant -- several days ago he had his gall bladder out, and he couldn't make the game. Pussy.

It's a weird experience, this game. I got into it because my friend Stephen Bulka (pictured to the left of me) got me into it. I've been playing for maybe 5 years? Maybe more. But there's very little personal discussion at the game, so nobody really knows anything about me, except that I used to work in animation, and maybe that I am married. But it's fine with me. We joke, drink a little beer, insult each other's poker prowess.

It must be mentioned, though, that this is no "Odd Couple" cigar-fest. No, it's a modern Southern California poker game. We used to order subway sandwiches, because everyone thought pizza was too fattening. We recently switched back to pizza, but a few guys still bring their own lo-cal meals. I bring peanuts and chips on which to snack, but Bulka brings grapes. Jeez. Also, our stakes used to be nickel-dime-quarter, and I lobbied to raise them to fifty cents-dollar-two dollars. Now keep in mind even these raised stakes mean that on a terrible night you could lose $60. But some of the players fought this tooth and nail. Luckily the higher stakes prevailed, so at least it feels like you're playing for actual money. One other note about the wimpiness of the game: Randy Kornfield (pictured to Himmelstein's right) has a college-age son, who whenever he plays, inevitably beats us and walks away with $80 of our money. We hate him. Really.

Still, it's fun to have a regular poker game, and much to my delight the insults fly and are often hilarious. But I am a terrible poker player.

Angry Old Man

I guess this entry is proof that what really makes me want to blog is anger. Plenty has happened to me over the past few months but this really got my goat.

As we like to do occasionally, Ellen and I went to the movies yesterday. The 4:25 show of "The Hangover" at the Americana. (Very funny, but certainly not the second coming of Preston Sturges or anything.)

The theater was pretty crowded -- our row was full, mostly of teens and twenty-somethings. The young people behind us talked throughout, but I let them alone. Because: soon into the movie, a young woman one seat over pulled out her phone, read a message, and texted one in reply. This happened over and over. After the sixth time it was clear that she was more interested in the text conversation than the movie. (Maybe it was too lowbrow for her sensibilities, and she should have gone to see "Dim Sum Funeral" instead.) I leaned over and said "hey could you stop texting, it's very distracting." She replied, "It's distracting you?" or something like that, to which I responded, "yes." She stopped.

Then later in the movie she started again. I thought of leaning over to her friend (who was right next to me) and saying, "If your friend doesn't stop texting, I am going to grab her cel phone and heave it at the screen," but for some reason I didn't, even though it was making me mad and kind of ruining the movie for me.

But I did make my point. After the movie was over and the lights came up, she and her friend stood up and started making their way past us. I let her friend go past, but then immediately extended my leg to block the offending texter's progress. She was forced to stop. I said to her, "You shouldn't text in movies. It's fucking rude." She looked at me and made her counter-argument: "Shut up old man!" At that point Ellen sort of reached out to push her toward the aisle, saying something like "Get out of here." They left. I felt good that I had said something, but I must admit I didn't like being called an old man, even by a rude young whipper-snapper.

I was glad that I didn't lower myself further by adding "I said no texting fatty!" even though it would have been appropriate.

Sorry

Sorry I've been so lazy.  I cant believe I haven't blogged since mid-March.

But t's been so busy lately.  I've been working more than full time, on this nutty show called "Lost Tapes."

I've also been taking two real estate classes.  Tonight I'm studying for the final in one of them.   It's tomorrow, Saturday morning, at 9AM.  Jeez.  Then the following Saturday I start another class.

Ellen and I have also been looking at rental houses.  And we took Hunter to Disneyland for his birthday last Saturday.

This is the busiest I've been in a long time.   Maybe ever.  Why isn't it making me rich?

More later, I promise.