Yesterday I went to LA with my cousin Rachel.
On the highway we saw Larry the Cable Guy on a motorcycle:
In case you want to know how long it took to drive from San Diego to Los Angeles in music-time, it took three Beck albums to get there (Odelay!, Midnite Vultures, Guero). Even though all we listened to was Beck, this song was stuck in my head because it always gets stuck in my head when I am inside Los Angeles:
This seriously might be walking down a Los Angeles boulevard in the sun distilled into a song.
I will sing this song at a karaoke bar some day.
We went to Amoeba and saw some goths sitting on the sidewalk waiting to meet Peter Murphy. I wish I had taken a picture because I want to steal some of their fashions.
I bought things.
Then we drove to West Hollywood.
Conversation while trying to find a place to park:
Rachel: Is it weird that I’m parked in front of someone’s house?
Me: It’s weird if you keep staring at the house.
We walked around for awhile and ate at some subpar pho place. Then Rachel’s Docs started hurting her feet so we searched desperately for a pharmacy to find Band-Aids.
The bandages didn’t work and all of the dog owners and their dogs judged Rachel every time we stopped for her to adjust the bandages that were slipping off her feet.
So we walked (well, she trudged) back to her car so she could get her slippers.
Rachel is a classy lady that likes to defy socio-economic norms. She put lipstick on and shuffled to the Troubadour owning those slippers like a Beyoncé.
This was my second time at the Troub. I think I can call it the Troub now because it was my second time there, which grants me annoying lovemark branding nickname privileges.
I think this is Bill’s stranger-with-candy van outside the Troub (should I stop calling it the Troub? But it’s kind of fun to say and it rhymes with Tony Shalhoub. Okay. I’ll stop.):
The TROUBADOUR smelled like leather, cigarettes, beer, and that misty scent that I can only describe as “the way the Pirates of the Caribbean ride smells.”
The opener, Michael Chapman, was great. His gravelly friendly bear growl of a voice almost transformed the venue into a backwoods clearing. There was something really comforting about hearing the rattling of beer bottles clinking together at the bar, like billiard balls.
And then there was Bill.
I am pretty blind
I used to be sort of blind, now I can sort of see
but I am PRETTY POSITIVE that Bill and I made eye contact several times for long durations during the show. You know how your other senses will compensate for sensory weakness(es)? Yeah, well, basically I could smell Bill looking at me. Especially when he sang “Oh, sweet young girl at the wedding” in ‘Baby’s Breath.’ I am going to go on deluding myself that he added the ‘sweet’ in there because he saw me. ;)
My fantasy plan (plantasy?) of action was to wait outside the venue and cold step to Bill with a fresh pack of gum because somehow I knew he was looking for some—sorry, it’s those hours of Beck, they’re embedded in my mindbrains.
I was going to walk up to him and ask him if he’s ever seen Sherman’s March and if he hadn’t I’d have told him, “Well, it’s this documentary and there’s this one part where the director, Ross McElwee, is filming a bunch of women going crazy over Burt Reynolds in their hometown and one of the women goes up to Burt Reynolds and gives him a kiss on the cheek. Later she says, “I took me a kiss, I HAD to.” And right then and there he’d HAVE to know what I was angling at.
What actually happened was that Rachel and I saw all the hip Angelenos waiting outside smoking cigarettes and it just looked too exhausting so we walked under all of these Hills of Beverly trees of life and headed back to the car.
