100 things about mkf (part 1)

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back in the golden age of blogging [i.e, 2006], "100 things about me" was a standard topic on blogs everywhere, usually prompted by a request from some other blogger.

well, it's 2010, the golden age of blogging has long since passed and no other blogger has ever evinced even the slightest interest in my proclivities; nevertheless, this is a topic that has for some sudden and inexplicable reason [probably because i don't have fuck-all otherwise] captured my drunken attention this rainy night, so i'm going with it.

for what it's worth, here's the first installment:

1. while i'm considered masculine in LA, they'd laugh at that back in east texas.

2. if it doesn't have ice in it, i'm probably not interested in drinking it.

3. i'm the only person i've ever known who still lives like a bum after having made a shitload of money.

4. malign my honor and my expression of amused contempt will never change, but cut me off in traffic and i'll kill your kids.

5. unlike most people who see the mass of humanity as cattle, i count myself as part of the herd.

6. i consider imagine second only to blowin' in the wind in the contest for dumbest song ever written.

7. after having owned any number of high-end german cars, i'd stack the cheap toyota pickup i bought five years ago against the lot of 'em.

8. i am easily seduced by infomercials, which is why i try to leave my wallet down in the truck.

9. i bathe with irish spring soap because it drives my cat wild with desire.

10. whenever my next-door neighbor calls out, "hi, mike!," i can only smile and wave, because after ten years it seems impolite to ask him for his name again.

[stay tuned for 11-20, but don't hold your breath]

on "avatar"

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go see it--trust me, you'll get your five hundred million dollars' worth. then come back and read this.

* * * * *

like most everybody else in the theater that night, by the final third of mr. cameron's extravagantly gorgeous movie i totally found myself rooting for the primitive-yet-soulful blue people to rise up and crush the soulless, technologically-advanced white people [i.e., mr. cameron and me].

unlike most everybody else in the theater that night, i even got the irony: mr. cameron utilizing hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of cutting-edge technology to demonstrate to us, the unwashed, the evils of technology.

to take it a step further: while watching this film i easily managed to transcend a lifetime of indoctrination about our heroic taming of the american west to suddenly and vividly imagine how many horrifying, heartbreaking variations of avatar must've played out as the white man forged inexorably westward across the great plains, casually and wantonly destroying every native american culture that then existed.

yeah, mr. cameron, i get it.

and of course, he's right.  we caucasians are a cold, clever, ambitious lot; from that dark day back in the dark ages when we retreated to our separate corners of europe, built our cultures and subsequently spread our pale, greedy tentacles across all corners of the globe, the world has never been the same.

* * * * *

there's a little game i sometimes trot out at gatherings when i find myself the odd man out (a not-unusual circumstance).

i'll smile in a non-threatening way and ask everyone if they were forced to live the rest of their lives in a country other than the U.S.--anywhere they wanted--what would their top five choices be?

[you can play this game at home--in fact, before continuing, pause for a moment, close your eyes and think about your own answers, ok?]

they'll make their lists, read 'em, compare notes; an interesting and illuminating discussion of the various alternatives will ensue.

it's not until i point out that almost all their choices are countries created and/or run by white people that i'm decried as a racist.

* * * * *

bad as we are, mr. cameron, i bet the world will miss us when we're gone.

happy new year, rick & laura, wherever you are

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funny how things work sometimes--a song comes up on shuffle just as the alcohol's starting to work its dark magic, a blogpost is born which sets off a train of thought... and thus, last night's post leads to this one.

since moving from austin to los angeles i've made that long, bleak drive back and forth across the desert many times, but never more memorably than the trip from hell that took place exactly 20 years ago this night.

i blame myself, of course--if i hadn't abandoned my GM ethos and bought a goddam ford, the whole thing never woulda happened.

whatever--here's the story:



after arriving in los angeles in the fall of 1989 with little more than my graduation-present bmw and the clothes on my back, i accept not only a job with a celebrity architect who would ultimately use and abuse me, but also the ungrudging hospitality of rick and laura, who freely offer up to me the couch in their small one-bedroom pacific palisades apartment until such time as i manage to get on my feet.

[rick's generosity i sorta understand, him being my best friend from architecture school and all, but his new wife laura loving me from day one is a total fuckin' fluke which in my idiot youth i accept without question.]

after almost two months of enforced proximity during which they never even once bitch about my intrusion into their lives, i save up enough money not only for my own place, but to haul all my shit from texas out to the west coast.

it's christmastime and we're all flying back to texas--i suggest that in lieu of their paying for a return trip, they save a little money and drive back with me in the bright blue ford truck i just bought long-distance to drag a u-haul full of my shit from texas back to california. hell, it'll be an adventure!

they agree, their only proviso being that i get 'em back in time for the new years eve party they're committed to down in redondo beach.

[idiots--if they'd only known.]

i fly back to texas, enjoy christmas with my family, pick up the truck, try to ignore that it doesn't look as good as it did in the pictures, rent the u-haul, load it up with everything i own, pick up rick and laura on the afternoon of the 30th--plenty of time, i tell them and myself--and we head west.

by the time we hit fredricksburg about 70 miles out, we know we're in trouble--the truck is smoking--but we're young and dumb and high-spirited so we press on.

halfway to el paso the oil light comes on and we're like, what the fuck? we stop at a 7-11 in some podunk west texas town and it takes six quarts into the smoking crankcase to even register on the dipstick so we load up a few cases in the bed, figuring that as long as we add a quart every hundred miles or so we'll be ok, right?

somewhere between el paso and las cruces it gets bad--it's dark and we're climbing in altitude and the truck's sputtering madly and losing power and not rising to the challenge and we all just know the thing's about to die, and laura [at the wheel, scared shitless], turns to rick and me and says, "should i pull over?"

shivering, huddled together for warmth [did i mention the heater didn't work?] we both yell, NO!, she floors it and the motherfucker somehow keeps going.

it was that way all across the cold, dark desert that night--white knuckles on the steering wheel, any minute that piece o' shit coulda died and taken us with it, and we all knew it.

but that wasn't the point of that night--or this post.

the point of this post--and what i've never, ever forgotten--is that no matter how dark it got that night, and no matter how cold and scared we each were, rick and laura and i stayed strong, gritted our teeth and smiled for each other, and that made all the difference.

[and in case you're interested: yeah we made it, and rick and laura ultimately made their new years' eve party in redondo just in time, while all i was capable of once we safely landed was kneeling down, kissing the LA asphalt and collapsing into their bed.]

this one's from back when cars and songs on the radio still meant something

[and because it came up on shuffle tonight]

it's sometime after midnight on a cold, starlit evening in 1990 and i'm flying westward at 90 mph across the barren new mexico desert in my brother's pristine '72 lincoln mark iv [why? don't ask].

cigarette in my left hand, big gulp between my legs and thoroughly sick of the three eight-track tapes that came with the car, i'm scanning the empty AM dial for something--anything--when the auto-seek locks onto some obscure country station somewhere featuring a song i'd never heard before but which has me from note one.

when the signal suddenly fades just as the guy's bringing it home, i slam on the brakes, slew sideways across three lanes of I-10 to a screeching, smoking halt and reverse at high speed back to where it comes in clear again.

if you're one of those people who has never understood country music, i urge you to listen to this track all the way to the end, because it comes about as close to perfect as any country song ever recorded.

and unlike me, you won't have to sit in the middle of a deserted freeway to do so.

notes on christmas passed

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much as i love it, austin's always been artificial--it was this fun place where my brother and sister followed me down from east texas for college, and where i would spend eleven years of my life, but it was never supposed to be where my mother would end up.

* * * * *

when we were kids, she'd come in after a long day at work with her arms full of groceries and ask our slack, lazy asses sprawled in front of the tv what we wanted for dinner. we'd usually each come up with something different, and more often than not she'd accommodate us by whipping up three different meals with seemingly effortless ease, all served steaming hot at the same time. we naturally took this shit for granted.

this year as always, she promised to cook for christmas-eve dinner the full, traditional thanksgiving spread i rarely make it home for anymore. i'm a little concerned when i get in on the 22nd and realize that she hasn't yet commenced the usual preparations, and when the 23rd passes without much progress i wonder if maybe she's no longer up to the challenge.

i needn't have worried--by the time i rouse my ass outta bed on christmas eve, she'd been up for hours cooking and it was all done to perfection, complete with three different pies for dessert.

* * * * *

all my drunken good intentions to look up old friends went--just like the last trip, and the one before that--by the wayside; instead, shackled by the enforced sobriety necessitated by family proximity, i reverted to my normal shut-down self and stuck close to home and hearth for the duration of my time in austin.

it was ok--we had a good time.

* * * * *

watching some ironic i-hate-my-family holiday special, my mother snorts and says to no one in particular, "hell, i'd lay down across a railroad track if i could spend another christmas with my mother and daddy."

if life follows its natural order, i imagine one of these days i'll say pretty much the same thing.



sober update: good god, and to think alcohol used to cheer me up.

i really should get out and walk more often

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last-minute as always, head over to century city shopping center for the annual ordeal, see all the cars tryin to stuff themselves into every available entrance like ten pounds of shit into a two-pound bag, say to myself "hell, no," park on an off-street half a mile away and make my way back to the place on foot.

two hours later, heading empty-handed back down a cold, corporate stretch of santa monica boulevard toward my little truck--reminded once more why i hate malls and everything in 'em--i'm brought up short as i cross a side street and come across this modest white frame structure that in twenty years of driving up and down santa monica boulevard i'd never noticed and that by all rights shouldn't be there anymore.

scanning across the facade, my eye finds its entrance and it stops me in my tracks


i wasn't expecting zen perfection, especially here. and "barn" rings a bell, but i can't place it--all i can think is, god, i wanna get inside this place.

it's locked-up and dark--all i can do is whip out the iphone and snap it for posterity and later googling.

[tell you the truth, at first i figured some evil genius must've bonsai-ed that spindly tree to grow in just that way and then killed it at the apex of its development, until i came across the following picture from last summer online--guess it's still alive after all]


turns out 10300 santa monica boulevard was the live-work space of a. quincy jones, a modernist architect whose work i've long admired. he and his wife bought the barnlike building back in 1965, and he remade it as both his studio and their home. he died in 1979, and she's lovingly kept it just as he left it ever since.

until just last month, anyway, when she [or, more likely, her estate] finally sold it for a paltry $2 million.

for context, here's a macro-shot of the mostly-prosaic exterior


which almost completely manages to hide what's going on inside


i fully expect to drive by in a couple months and see this building torn down and replaced by something far more profitable-per-square-foot; the romantic in me hopes not.

[apologies for not bothering to link--it's an easy google if you're really interested]

a black day in guttermoralityland

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i'd always figured the spammers would pay no more attention to this little blog than has most everybody else; sadly, i was wrong.

apologies, commenters, for the new red tape.