NY: 0

OK, SF and Chicago will come in due time, I just had to let you know where I am now: Death by Audio. That's where my acquaintance, Jason Amos, works and lives, and where I am staying. Check the About section to get some idea of the place.

LA in one post

Oh, lazy, distracted Jeremy! I am about to leave San Francisco for Chicago and I haven't even written about LA! That's OK, because there is not a lot to say on the matter. LA is a dirty, unappealing city, and I only went there to visit my friend Dain, who is originally from a small town in Texas, and so regards LA with a fair amount of contempt. But, he's in the music business, so it's the best place for him to earn money. He now gets paid to make music from woe to go: write, perform, record, edit, produce. He makes his own guitars to use in his songs, or includes a weird water instrument here and there. The music goes into a huge catalogue that TV producers choose from to go into their ads or whatever. All things considered, it's a pretty good living. He lives with his girlfriend Julie and their friend Ted, both also musicians. One of their dogs, Oscar, has a pretty interesting howl too.

LA was a roughly even mix of hanging out at their place, out with them and out by myself. Vintage shopping was a big fat zero. The only two decent shops I found had plenty for women but nothing or very little for men. I signed up on CouchSurfing.com and was promptly invited to an event at a nightclub in Hollywood. I went along, feeling a little nervous, wearing my new knickerbockers & vest outfit, and soon found myself inundated with meeting other Couch Surfers or randoms inquiring about my outfit. Everyone thinks I'm English, partially due to that outfit, but it happens even when I'm not wearing it. Even an Englishman thought I was English! So I met a few people, felt the vibe and went home. The club & music was certainly not my thing, but the CS people were very nice. On my last day, we went to the Museum of Jurassic Technology, in Culver City. Well, that was just the weirdest museum I have ever been to! There was a such a diverse range of curiosities that it is impractical to describe: from trailer parks to eye-of-the-needle sculptures, and mice on toast. I can't think about it any more without feelling woozy.

So that was LA. Ate some good Mexican food, drank some awful Mexican beer; watched a hilarious old Sinbad movie with excellent clay animation by some old master of the craft. Next, San Francisco...

Airports... eeuughhh!

My flight was at 1.00 pm and I checked in at about 12.00 pm, so I had a bit of time. On the way to the airport I'd realised that I had left my favourite pair of summer trousers behind, and I also still had to call Dain to let him know which flight I was getting. I couldn't get through to Dain, presumably because that was a long distance call, but I got through to Amelia and explained about my trousers and could she also call Dain for me. Done. Oh, before that, I'd gone to StarBucks for a tall mocha frappucino, with whip, in order to get some change. Really, that was the only reason. Then I went and joined the security check queue. A few pages of my book later, I get to the security check and look at my watch, which says 12.45 pm. I just expected that if I was close to missing my flight, they'd call out my name and rush me through or something, I don't know! I finish the security check and walk, very quickly, to my gate (C12), which takes forever, because it is literally the last gate in that direction. It's now about 12.50 pm and the gate door is closed. I smile at the ground staff and show them my boarding pass, they telephone the plane who report that they are closing the doors right now. Sorry. Dang! I remain calm, it's no big deal. Flights on that route leave hourly, so they just book me onto the next one at no cost and I can even get an exit-row seat this time, woohoo! So I take my new boarding pass, get comfortable and proceed to read my book for an hour. It's a very entertaining book, This Side of Paradise, I'm really getting into it. So it wasn't until 1.40 pm that I realised I was still sitting in front of a closed gate and there was hardly anyone else around. Mild panic. Looking at my new boarding pass, my new boarding gate turns out to be N3, not C12. Still too dignified to run, I stride off in search of N3, which turns out to be in another terminal--thus the different letter--and I have to make a quick ride on an automated light-rail car to get there. The car is delayed by several seconds when someone prevents the doors from closing by catching them at the last second, then we're off. I stride over to N3 and find the gate closed. I hand the ground staff my boarding pass but I can't produce a smile. They pick up the telephone and speak to the plane. They let me on. Airports... eeuughhh!

The god botherer of 43

On the 43 bus to downtown, where I would change to the bus for the airport, the archetypal vagabond preacher boarded not long after myself. He was very dirty, carrying weird stuff and had a lot on his mind. He barked out a question to no-one in particular, "Where's the social security office?" and when no-one answered him it gave him reason to lecture everyone within earshot on the bus that "we'd all be talking to our neighbour when a crisis comes" and blah blah blah. He invoked the lord repeatedly and loved the sound of his own voice. He went on about fast-food and the Depression and how we don't know what suffering is, etc. Although there were elements of truth to his diatribe, it was a very predictable, dogmatic script. A woman sitting right near him eventually answered back in a critical tone and they entered into a barbarous exchange. The woman called him a drunk, he called her a whore, the bus driver got mad, etc. Then the director called "Cut!" No, just kidding, but it felt like something from a movie. Ah, god bless America, where life imitates farce.

Last night in Seattle

Fine dining at The Dahlia Lounge, but not before we have a minor misadventure at The Seattle Center (aka the space needle). We arrived at the Seattle Center, which is an impressive architectural landmark, only to find that the restaurant was booked out. Ah well, no 360 degree views for us that night. (I had this weird feeling about the local surrounds of that place that were later confirmed for me by Dain that it is really freaking dodgy! America seem to have a habit of putting expensive, tourist-attracting buildings smack in the middle of ghettos. It's really weird.) We wandered out and caught the recently built above-ground monorail: the budget panoramic view of Seattle. It was actually pretty cool gliding in between the old buildings; retro-futuristic. I then led us in circles around 4th and Pine in search of a restaurant that I had picked out of the guide book simply by name, The Dahlia Lounge. It wasn't that difficult, because the restaurants were called The Grill Bar, or Sammy Jay's or something equally moronic. The Dahlia Lounge turned out to be beautiful. It had a seductively red tone to the decor, predominantly lit by lanterns strung across the ceiling complemented by mosaic columns and a timber ceiling. We sat in a booth next to a street-level window and ensconced ourselves in the atmosphere. The music, which is so often painfully neglected in otherwise tasteful venues, was pleasantly old-fashioned and non-invasive; early-mid twentieth century jazz vocalists and the like, adding to the faintly Parisian feeling of the place. Our wines were lovely, locally produced, I think. For an appetiser I had seared hamachi, new crop Akane apples, chanterelles, warm pancetta vinaigrette: the flesh was silky and firm, giving you just enough to chew on and the flavours from the, err, sauce were delicious and fairly strong. Sautéed Alaska halibut, cranberry bean succotash, sweet corn, green herb sauce, radish, citronette was my main dish and though it didn't have the aromatic impact that the other dishes had, the flavours were delicious. The side dish of carmelised broccoli, chili, garlic smelt great but was a little overcooked. Our wine was great too, can't recall where it was from.

Sophie and I talked about deep and meaningful stuff that we hadn't had a chance to talk about in ages and it all felt very... gezellig.

Monday

OK, I've caught up with myself now and can be a little more verbose. Still in Seattle, was going to go to San Francisco today but I left booking my accommodation till too late, so I'll book it for later and go to LA first. I'm trying to decide if I have any predictions about Melbourne based on Seattle, but I think they are actually so similar that they need to retain their differences as much as possible. Small differences are everywhere: you need a key to access the "restroom" in almost every cafe; coffee by default is served as a double-shot ristretto; tattoos are quite common, including on neck, fingers, etc; in most cafés there is no table service, you collect your coffee and take your dirty dishes back to the bar. There is a guy making a host of vulgar snorting noises right next to me, so.... [hours go by] ... and, we're back! I couldn't help buying some books in this bohemian little store called Spine and Crown; there's quite a few second-hand bookstores of that flavour in Seattle, but this one is smaller and seemed to have more carefully selected stock. I was drawn in by Sartre's Introduction to Existentialism but ended up settling for nerd value and picked up The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose, Oxford Guide to the Mind and a cute little book from the seventies, Taxicab Geometry: An Adventure in Non-Euclidean Geometry by Eugene F. Krause, which turns out to be a serious learning tool disguised behind seventies fonts and page-long chapters. I told myself not to buy books until the end of my trip due to the weight, but I couldn't help myself. I also bougt a very handsome modern shirt, white with a decorative black stripe, that will look great with my forties trousers, I reckon. Also picked up a grey bow-tie with it, because... why not? :)

Sunday

Sunday morning we had a party in the arboretum for Charlotte's second birthday. Her new friends from the library and child care were there, Amelia made a cake, there were presents and party food, the weather was a pristine 24 degrees celsius, it was charming. I think we just had an afternoon nanna nap when we got back to the house. Went to another Value Village later where I bought an anniversary copy of East of Eden and read the first couple of pages out in the car, first in a mild Sean Connery accent then in a more appropriate American accent.

I've developed a liking for tall mocha frappucinos (with whip). When in Rome...