-
Leave the trumpet-blowing to the musicians
I am actually a very shy person. If you find that easy to believe, good; I’ve done what I’m supposed to do. I may be outwardly shy and non-confrontational but sometimes, inside, I well up with megalomaniacal self-belief. In my head I act out little vignettes where I not only get my point across but…
-
Stupid User Tricks
I learned just about everything I know about writing computer code from a man named Carl. I met him in the early 90s when we were working on creating a digital, automated way to transmit raw union payroll data from my company (a sound postproduction studio) to his (a payroll processing company). The idea was…
-
Orange please
I have already told you of how my life of crime was over before it began thanks to an ill-fated attempt to steal a flashing orange traffic barricade in the dead of night with a bunch of friends when we were teenagers. But that was not my only brush with the law. In my 30s,…
-
Directing Traffic
“Hollywood” as an industry goes through cycles. Of course, you have the big studios which each have the facilities to complete an entire television show or film “in house.” But economic conditions sometimes dictate outsourcing to specialty studios that can often provide work at a more cost-effective price point. It was during one of these…
-
Speech Therapy
Back during the winter of 2006-07, I was hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai in West Hollywood. Following brain surgery which yielded a diagnosis of PML, I spent about a week in the ICU and then another week “recovering” in the posh “celebrity wing” I’d finagled my way into (just how is a story for another time). The…
-
Rock of Ages
This is the story of a rock. Not a metaphorical rock. And we could argue whether the rock would more accurately be called a stone, or a boulder. And I just made a note in my journal to write a post in the future about rocks, stones, and boulders, specifically the characteristics of each and…
-
It all started with Ranjit’s legs
The first computer program I wrote was called ROLO. That’s not entirely true, because in high school I’d written a program that did nothing but print my name out on the screen ten times to demonstrate to Mr. Rodgers, the Computer Science teacher, my grasp of the concept of “iteration” using a for-next loop. It…
-
Mexico
Oh, MexicoIt sounds so sweet with the sun sinking lowThe moon’s so bright like to light up the nightMake everything all right James Taylor, “Mexico,” 1975, from the album Gorilla Watching the coverage of the protests in Los Angeles, one thing stands out. It is Mexico’s green, white, and red flag that has become a…
-
Rage, rage against the dying of the light
Let’s get this out of the way right at the start. No. I don’t know who he is. But that is not to say I don’t remember him. Knowing the incubation period for the virus, I can narrow it down to one guy. I call him “white SUV guy.” He lived in Larchmont, a trendy…
-
Pillow Talk
When I first saw Ray, he was sitting alone at the other end of the bar. Ray is a “peeler;” he compulsively peels the label off his beer bottle between swigs. A jet-black head of hair atop an olive complexion gave him a dark, swarthy, almost brooding look. I could tell he was Latino –…
Your mileage may vary.