* In two days, we will experience the second night of the year where our neighborhood becomes very loud (the other one is the 48-hour night of Pride weekend). There's a big Halloween street festival a few blocks down Santa Monica Boulevard, very close to our home. It&
You draw the lace curtains and open the floor-to-ceiling window to the normal-house-sized bedroom in your stately manor and a bat flies in and you faint but it's not because you're scared it's because the bat is a harbinger of
A chair is just a chair, but if that chair is inside a sinister, murderous house and sitting in it turns you into a possessed meal prep zombie, then you should consider leaving. This is the fate of Karen Black in Burnt Offerings, a 1976 supernatural horror film about a
I'm thinking about that woman who got fired today from her job of being the White House press secretary. She was bad at that job and everyone laughed at her. I'm thinking, too, of my shortest-ever job, which was at a McDonalds in Lubbock, Texas.
The exuberant, gruesome poster for the 1981 slasher film, Happy Birthday to Me, depicts a young man about to be impaled in the throat with a shish kebab. Above this image, the words: "John will never eat shish kebab again." You're not buying a ticket to
I have been to a movie theater just for the AC. I have bounced from cafe to bookstore to a second bookstore just for the AC. I have spent entire afternoons working in our bedroom because it's the one room in our place with AC. I have spent
As I write this, there are no reviews on Rotten Tomatoes for Rob Tregenza's latest film, Fast. On Metacritic, there are two. I know it screened for several days at MoMA in New York, one night in Los Angeles with Acropolis, and then a three-day mid-week
There's an October heatwave coming in a couple days and the forecast says it's going last more than a week. These are the meteorological vicissitudes of Los Angeles. I won't be cooking unless it's at 5am for a cold dinner late in
I have a 2000s-era iPod, and it contains exactly 29,804 songs that can never be updated because I have no more iTunes. Everything is inside that little flat box forever. None of it is leaving. It lives on a speaker dock in my kitchen. I wash dishes to
There's a line in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest: “To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” Somehow, I've become very careless in 2026, but not with my parents. Both died quite
Until September 8, right after Labor Day. See you soon.
A mid-1970s newspaper ad for a local movie theater features two programs. In the afternoon there was a children's matinee of a 1956 Margaret O'Brien musical called Glory, and the evening double feature was the X-rated Joys of Georgette and Sweet Taste of Joy.