postcards from kentucky

**halloween weekend i took a short trip to louisville kentucky for some music and socializing. and to get the hell out of my edit bay for a few hours. here are two cards that i wrote that weekend. things being what they are, both of them made the return trip to los angeles with me. the first card was sent to my pal, p. in ny. the second card sent to w. in fort wayne.**


10.31.09 Happy Halloween! This Saturday morning finds me in Louisville! flew here on a red-eye -- didn't get as much sleep as I'd hoped, but as soon as I pulled out of he car rental lot and onto the road I felt great! It rained last night. the sky is full of big dark clouds. I put the Oxford American cd that you gave me into the stereo and it was perfect. I'm in no shape for a bright, sunny morning. :)
I headed straight to a breakfast spot recommended to me. I've yet to try the food, but the coffee is good & strong! an indication that i'm in kentucky: i ordered bacon, and the people sitting on either side of me did as well. but! this place also has avocado on the menu! (review to follow!)
i heard from {X.} that change is afoot chez vous: {your roommate} moving, more school, no tv..remember, in a pinch you can watch dvds on your computer. means nothing for football, tho. :|
hope to see you soon!
ps. read Buck O'Neil's memoir. I recommend it!



(This card reminds me of your schooling your niece!)
sunday nov 1, 2009 -- concours B Midway Airport...
Further time-change comedy" got to Midway with a 40 min wait between planes went to the closest hairport food place, grabbed a (fair-but long refrigerated) turkey sandwich. Ate the sandwich quickly and sent a happy birthday text to my brother. After ahile I thought I'd been waiting a long time...maybe the flight was delayed...It is then that i realized that my watch (reading 6pm) is set to Louisville time. Here in Chicago, it is 5 pm. so my 40 min layover was an hour-forty. I used my extra 15 min to get a mocha and cookie. and now that flight is boarding. THANK YOU for a fantastic trip!!

amazing thing of the day: yo la tengo

am at work cutting sound effects for a scene involving a medical emergency. doing this kind of work is both creative and tedious. there is a certain amount of veracity required (less impressionistic say, than the "scary surfing" scene i put sfx on in the cleaner last season. (someday ask me about all the rad stuff that one can use to make the ocean sound scrary and hostile.)

anywhoo, am listening to yo la tengo's latest album "popular songs." (see inset) a minute ago the song playing caught my ear. it was "more stars than there are in heaven." it was in minute six. soooo beautiful.

sometime last month i went to see yo la tengo at the avalon. i was very close to having to miss the show b/c of nutty work happenings (visual effects, don'tchewknow), but through a group effort at the office, got there having only missed about 15 min.

wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. b/c i have to get back to the aforementioned medical emergency scene, i will cut this short.

yo la tengo are the masters of the slow build. they can play a song for 10 minutes at a steady, almost imperceptible build. man, i love it.

this song, "more stars than there are in heaven" is just lovely. makes me want to watch hal hartley movies. and walk around on a windy day. and visit arcata.

after this song comes the delicate, "fireside," then the 15 minute feedback-tacular "and the glitter is gone." that will get things cooking in here. ;)

overheard...

"...they have the world's largest collection of Bigfoot memorabilia."

overheard in wild eggs diner, louisville kentucky. wish i'd heard the follow up sentence.

at kaldi coffee in atwater village a couple weeks ago 3 guys sat down at a table near mine in mid-coversation about the films of Frank Stallone. among them, they could name two. two more than i could name. their conversation stemmed from one of them having seen a funny f. stallone cameo on a tv show.


what else: monday morning found the left front tire on my car was flat. my rad neighbor, eric, changed the flat for my spare (little donut tire)!
tuesday morning i came out to find the spare was flat. *blank stare*
i was headed to my mechanic to get new struts and tires. this derailed the plan a bit. ended up riding on the rim (sigh) to the service station on hyperion to fill the spare so i could just get to work.

at the end of today i will have new struts and new bitchin michelin tires on my old car. the last time i replaced the tires on my honda, i thought they'd be the last tires to be on that car. that car just keeps running, tho. I LOVE THAT CAR.

more to come on the weekend in louisville, the Tale of Amelita (this is good!), the recent craft wave items, and terrific books!

just for the record: i have been working a lot. one week my pay stub listed hours worked as 75. the following week: 70. oof.

rad thing of the day -- 1 week later

this has nothing to do with June Allyson, but i just came across this pic of her. it's a terrific pic, and she was fab. so.

these days i am working at a studio lot that abuts a recording studio. i walk by there on my way to lunch or the mailbox. people are often standing outside the front door, smoking or chatting.

last week as i was walking around the corner i looked up and was face to face with eric clapton.

!

as i continued walking down the sidewalk i thought "hey. that was eric clapton. and he's recorded this song...and worked with that person...and and and."
this was just a random sighting, but since moving to los angeles, and working in t.v. i've ended up working and crossing professional paths with so many people that i never imagined i'd meet.

three of these that stand out:
--david mamet: having been a theatre/film major in college, i'd read my fair share of his plays, so working with him on the pilot for "The Unit" was a pretty rad thing.

--bruce campbell: while we never met, we worked on "Burn Notice" together. i got to cut a few scenes that he was in. also very rad.

--jim scott: jim's a record producer. he worked on wilco's "being there" and "kicking television" as well as the "7 worlds collide" record. i worked with jim while he was mixing "kicking tv". i was the assistant picture editor on a concert film that that jim was mixing. although the concert film never got released (ala) i did get a short tour of the sunset sound recording studio (think neil young and led zeppelin).

i've got another great one coming up: the director who is slated to direct my next episode of "mercy" directed the movie, "rock n roll high school!" oh, i am bringing in my dvd for an autograph, to be sure. :D

additionally rad: the editor i'm assisting these days was an editor on "The X-Files." she edited one of the all time great episodes: "Jose Chung's From Outer Space." I have brought this up in conversation no fewer than 8 times already.

i love the mail

i came home last night to find some packages on my stoop. four (4!) records/cds had come in the mail!
pkg 1: wilco: the album and grizzly bear: vekatimest -- from a local radio station, thank you gifts from a recent pledge drive

pkg 2: yo la tengo: popular songs (new!) and an lp of their score to "adventureland"

i was too tuckered out from work (got home at 9:30) to give any of them a listen last night, but put them directly into my backpack for quality listening at the office today.

note: it is true that until last night i hadn't owned a copy of the latest wilco album. it came out june 30. this means that i haven't been to a record store in TWO MONTHS. what?! i work 2 blocks from amoeba in hollywood. of course, now that i have 4 new records, i don't need to go for awhile.

but still.

hmm.

out with the dross! or: chip chip chip continued...

it's sunday, labor day weekend. i'm moving some stuff around in my apt to make some room for a guest i've got coming for an extended stay.

i moved my sewing desk and machine into my bedroom, and put the cool, carved wooden chair in the dining room. (i really want to be sewing right now but am using all restraint i've got to keep on task.)

i was looking to file some stuff in my (very full) filing cabinet when i took a look at all the floppy discs (!) and old check registers in there. in the last 10 minutes i have committed discs containing Avid settings dating back to 1997, old clip art, EDLs from student projects, and scripts written while an undergrad (gilroy garlic festival!) all to the electronics waste bag. fonts, title sequences, avid bins, term papers...out!

am realizing that the clip art i use for my business cards is on one of the zip discs destined for the trash. hmm. i don't have a zip reader, but i better be sure i have that art on my laptop b4 i ditch that disc.

side note: my task energies gained a little oomf when i got a call telling me that we're starting work late tomorrow.

music series while cleaning, moving stuff, etc: doves: some cities; neko case: middle cyclone; flaming lips: soft bulletin.
snacks of note: pyramid hefe, trader joe's choc covered almonds

the sad yet much loved life of a two year old's quilt

**in an earlier post i described getting in touch with old friends and sending them a quilt i'd made for their son. a few weeks after i sent it, Eli sent me this letter...**


Ms. Y-von,

Mendel loves the quilt you made him so much that he likes to take it around with him sometimes. He sleeps with it every night. Mendel is also enraptured with experimentation--not in a Sonic Youth or Destroy All Monsters kind of way, but in an "I wonder would happen if..." mode. When you put those two things together, it can (and did) get a little ugly.

I'll preface today's mayhem with a little background. It's not so much that Mendel finds trouble, it's that trouble swirls around him in a cloud of giddy puckishness. For example, Mendel is a runner. When he spots an unlocked door to the outside, he turns the knob, pulls the door and he takes off. This has caused a couple of insanely worrisome freak-outs where we turn our backs for a second and Mendel has opened the front door and run off to take his act on the road. This same free-spiritedness leads him to frequently color on things, put odd objects in the refrigerator and love, love, love to play with the toilet.

We've tried to create obstacles to his mischief in the hopes of slowing him down, but alas the kid is much smarter than either of us. The front door problem is the rare problem that we seemed to have solved. To date he hasn't realized that he can pull a stool over to the front door and climb up to unlock the deadbolt we've become religious about locking. The other problems though just seem unavoidable. We try to put those things that can damage, cut, color or stain up high and out of reach, but with three older siblings, these prized objects are frequent finds. He shadows his brothers and sister like a ninja and as soon as a marker has been left out, in the blink of an eye, he's written all over himself, the floor, and the walls of at least three and a half rooms. We're attentive parents, but the kid can create a mess faster than a Chicago road crew.

Interior doors are also a lost cause. The child proofing industry has produced these well-intentioned little guards that clip over a doorknob and sit loosely around it so that unless you know to grip the metal through the holes in it, you're stuck scratching at the other side like a lonesome schnauzer. After a couple of days, Mendel figured out that the solution wasn't twisting, it was pulling them apart...and the boy won again. We also installed toilet lid locks because he has an incurable interest in the porcelain pool. Somehow, he's managed to figure those locks out as well. As a result, things tend to find their way into the toilet that shouldn't be there.

This morning I walked into the downstairs bathroom and what should I see neatly stuffed into the toilet, but his favorite quilt. Historically Mendel has only managed to throw small objects in the toilet. This time really went for the brass ring this and stuffed in the whole quilt. Perhaps he was curious about absorbency. I suppose we'll never know. What we do know is that as gross as that was, after a couple of thorough machine washings, the quilt was as good as new.

I can't promise this won't happen again. The little curly-headed demon with curiously quick mischief making skills is fickle. One minute he's lovingly carrying around his favorite quilt, lying on it, or wrapping himself in it like a burrito. The next he's flipped and is skillfully soaking up the toilet water. So in case you sensed the abuse of your lovely gift or heard its psychic, disgusted wail, I just wanted to be clear--it's not because he doesn't love it.

I hope all is well.

Eli