More Southland

Did Secret Agent Fred and I have a lovely time down in the southland?  Why, yes, yes we did.  Thanks for asking.

In Los Angeles, we repeated our "Fancy Ass Manicure and Mexican Food Tour" plus we added the thrill of making a pass by the Los Angeles County Museum to see the Big Rock.   Friends more in the know than little me had chastised me for going to LACMA last month and skipping said Rock so I was determined to show them up this time.

It's supposed to be called "Levitated Mass,"but even the people that work in the museum refer to it as The Big Rock.  Here's the scoop from the LA Times review of it:

• "Levitated Mass" is a piece of isolated desert mystery cut into a dense urban setting that's home to nearly 10 million people. A water-hungry lawn north of LACMA's Resnick Pavilion was torn up and replaced by a dry, sun-blasted expanse of decomposed granite. A notched gray channel of polished concrete slices 456 feet across the empty field, set at a slight angle between the pavilion and 6th Street. Like a walk-in version of an alien landscape painting by Surrealist Yves Tanguy, quiet dynamism inflects a decidedly sepulchral scene.

Whatever.  It's a big rock sitting on top of depressed (in every sense of the word) sidewalk and you walk under it.  It is just as artistically thrilling as it sounds.  As a big rock, on the other hand, it's great.

We also drove out to Palm Springs where it was HOT, bitches.  I tried to enter into an appreciation of the blasto sun, like a lizard and that sort of worked.  Mostly I avoided it as much as you can in a desert, but I still got the blotchy red skin so very appealing in those of us descended from Vikings and other Northern European cabbage eaters.

Our charming bungalow was in a hotel very successfully decorated by Kelly Wearstler, the mistress of bold graphics and white paint.

I got to go swimming at night, which I love and ate hot fudge sundaes every night.  A perfect desert trip.

I also bought a painting by Chris DiVincente.  I love it, but I don't have any room for it, so I'm negotiating for our friends Jan and Aaron to take a big ass photo off my hands to open up some space.

Iris

After fighting with the weeds in my garden for lo these many years, I finally gave up and brought in a ringer.  Yes, it's true, I hired a gardener.  I've always been reluctant since it seems like pulling up weeds is such a basic part of gardening.  Also, it's not always clear in the yard what is a weed and what's up there because I want it so I wasn't sure I trusted somebody else whaling away at it.  But now that I have let go and embraced the zen of somebody else breaking their goddam back, I'm thrilled.  Never has the yard been so immaculately tidy.   It makes me want to go out and buy more plants to fill in the new bare spots.  Turns out I'm a plant hoarder.

I'm also a big slut for irises which are coming in now in their frilly glory.  These are bulbs I put in last fall and whenever you do something like that, it always feels like a leap of faith.  It's nice to have it vindicated.

Secret Agent Fred and I are off for a few days in L.A. and Palm Springs to absorb the glamour and eat Mexican food.  Since he and I share a skin tone that can best be described as potato peelings white, our plans for poolside shenanigans are strictly limited to night swimming, but that's what I love best, so I think we should do swell.

And an old favorite, a tasteful pink rose called "April in Paris"

Details when we get back.

Guns and Kitties

I was absorbed by stumbleupon (much like the various Star Trek characters were absorbed by the Borg.  I swear that site is like crack for web browsing) when in the midst of apparently endless number of sites comprising lists of odd facts (or "facts."  I'm never sure how credible they all are) I stumbled on a page that had downloaded the video shot by a dashboard cam in a cop car that recorded some crazy ass Ohioan who stepped out of his unfashionable car at a traffic stop, turned and starting unloading like 50 bazillion rounds into the cops' car.  You can see it HERE

Amazingly, even after this hail of lead, neither cop was seriously wounded.  The crazyass, on the other hand, wound up just as dead as you might expect some guy standing fully exposed shooting at a couple of cops would be.

Of course, a lifetime of American TV has so inured me to these scenes from various police shows that I was only mildly struck by it, mostly along the lines of "This guy really wanted to be sure he got killed. Thoroughly."

Studying AK 47 marksmanship

Saki, on the other hand, was riveted by it.  He's usually oblivious to whatever is happening on the computer, even when it plays four goddam Smiths songs in a row.  Something about this video, though, got his full attention.

It's possible he's planning something I should worry about.  This is particularly worrisome since he has developed the skill of appearing in my lap without me realizing how he's gotten there.  I'll be leafing along through worthless internet sites and looked down only to discover I have a lapful of cat.  How do these things happen?  If my leg didn't go to sleep and if he could ever refrain from farting (please god,) I'd never even know he was there.

Stealth cats, that's how the world ends.

Junkie

Safeway late on Sunday night: read it and weep, bitches.  I go there so you need not.  Actually I go there because I like to take vicodin with seltzer water which means I go through quite a lot of the stuff and I find Safeway's in-house brand, the charmingly ludicrously named "Refreshe", to be my favorite. I pronounce it with an exaggerated semi-French accent.

Speaking of Safeway brands and the fall of civilization, the company has invaded the home turf of stoner junkies everywhere by coming out with their own line of fine, fine snack products ripoffs.  It's called the Snack Artist and it reproduces well known and beloved junk foods.  I can personally attest to the quality of their version of Cheetos.  I don't know what chemical crap makes up the yellow-y orange dust that clings to your fingers like super glue after you've put away a pound or two of them, but man are they tasty.

Less fortunate is the crack they took at Lil Debbie Swiss Cake Rolls.  I'm sure you remember how distraught we all were when the Hostess Baking Company went tits up and the source for those chocolate cake rolls with cream filling (and let's be honest; every word in that phrase should be enclosed in ironic quotation marks: "chocolate"  "cream") was cut off.  I was thrilled to run across Safeway's attempt to fill the void, but valiant as it might be, the result is simply lackluster.

Still, I plan on working my way through the entire line of potato chips of many lands, tortilla chips in every conceivable flavor and ersatz Twinkies.  The only drawback (aside from possible death by junk food) is that moment at the checkout stand when you sheepishly empty your cart and you feel that everybody, the cashier chica, the bag boy, the lesbian in line behind you, is judging you based on what you're buying.  In my case, this consists of 12 two liter bottles of seltzer and enough garbage snack to feed a small dormitory of stoner boys.  And a bunch of bananas like some pathetic attempt at healthful living.

Also, expanding on my much updated post below about Spotify, I have given up and switched back to Pandora which, I think to punish me for cheating on her, insists on playing long swatches of The Smiths.  ENOUGH, already!  It's like living with a morose teenage girl.  Let me know when Roxy Music comes on.