Things I wonder about Career Opportunities

More things I wonder about. Since I'm unemployed I spend time thinking about my career and wondering if anyone will ever employ me as an IT Project Manager, a job for which I am highly qualified since I've been doing it for - oh - let's say 15 years. However, being an IT Project Manager isn't a really glamorous job and while it should pay okay there are more lucrative opportunities to be explored.

For instance, how do you get to be a Cult Leader? L. Ron Hubbard was a pretty awful science fiction writer when he took his science fiction ideas and turned them into a really lucrative cult. He was so successful that the COS pretended he was still alive for years and had other hacks write horrible science fiction stories under his name to continue the franchise. And they figured out how to rig the NY Times best seller list by having their cult members go to bookstores and buy cases of his books, thereby sending him onto the best sellers list.

Or how do you get to be a War Lord? The only qualifications for being a War Lord seems to be having a Toyota Land Cruiser, a bunch of younger cousins and some Kalishnikovs. But being a War Lord allows you to do all sorts of taxation with out representation stuff that lines your coffers. It's pretty lucrative and you get the bonus of having people really really look up to you. It's great for the ego. Now I don't have a bunch of cousins, or a Toyota Land Cruiser and I don't know how to fire a Kalashinikov but if you look at the Al Qaeda in Iraq blooper real apparently Al-Zarqawi doesn't either. I can trade in my Accord for a land cruiser, but I'm still stuck with getting followers. I think that I could probably become a girl scout leader and get a following that way. We could cruise up and down La Cienega, roust the children and nannies in La Cienega Park and demand payment. The girlscouts offer the "experience of a lifetime" while learning about the power of girls, I say let's learn about the power of girls bearing semi-automatic weapons in land cruisers! Imagine what money we can make when we turn over parks to opium poppy production! It's so much better to buy local produce!

LA Stories

After hitting the little Sunday farmer's market on Melrose Place (good name for a soap opera, don't you think?) we were stopped at a traffic light on La Cienega Blvd when I heard a little "crash." I looked over and a Mini Cooper had rear ended a stopped Hummer. Unless the Hummer had magnets (Hey maybe X-men's Magneto was driving!) it was the mini's fault.

Another lovely L.A. moment came last week when I put on my really expensive suit and went on a job interview. I went to a house in a canyon overlooking the valley and was asked to have a meeting poolside. I sat on expensive teak that had bird doo doo on it in my exquisite blue grey suit and looked out at the canyon, the valley, the pool and spoke about Project Management, all the while wondering if I had enough sun block on.

Things I wonder about

Delusional people often are deluded that they are God, or Jesus. Or that they are divine, like Jesus, or that they are talking to God or Jesus. Or Mohammed or the Buddah for that matter. Who do delusional aethiests think they are?????

In Mexican Cuisine there are many salsas. Salsa Fresca, Salsa Cruda, Salsa Rioja, Salsa Verde. In Puerto Rican Cuisine there is no salsa, thought there is chicken and rice. So how come Puerto Rican music is called Salsa and Mexican Music Mariachi???

Signs: 1000 fabrics & Art Shows

This is a pretty good sign. We went to see the modernism in america show at the Hammer museum and it was pretty fun, all the Duchamps were fun to see and some of the painting were incredible - but I'm always a sucker for Kandinsky. But more surprising were these very evocative and moving videos by Jesper Just, a Danish artist, of men singing. In one a bewigged man sings an american pop song in a deep bass voice with a Danish accent and then slowly falls to the ground - doing an impersonation of "The Dying Swan". Move over Pavlova!

We also went a while ago to look at the Klimt's that had been restored to the heirs od Adele Bloch-Bauer after being looted by the Nazis. Anyone seeing the huge gold portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer can imagine why the painting was looted - It's GOLD! Any normal soldier in the field could tell it was valuable - it's GOLD! It's a huge painting, not something that one could simply hang over the old couch and it fills your entire visual field with GOLD! However the best painting was the one of birch trees. Once again a huge canvas with a landscape of birch trees. In art history books you always see the portraits Klimt did of women, which are always rather ambivalent about their subjects and which seem to surround their subjects with ornamentation that is more visually impressive than the women, who become enmeshed in the patterns. But you never see the landscapes which are really beautiful. Apparently he used lenses to flatten his visual field which then gives the paintings a flatness and an attention to surface while also portraying a three dimensional world. So you sort of get a visual impression of something that is both flat and deep.

The Hood: LA Conversations

We were driving along and Cam said, "Hey is that T.???" I had forgotten that you had to remember people's wheels as well as their kids and dogs so that you could recognize them on the street. At a stop light on Pico we pulled alongside T. and honked at her. She rolled down her window and screamed "I'm teaching J--k B---k's Lamaze class!" and drove off.

The Hood: Flora

I had never really seen pomegranite trees before, or if I had I hadn't really known they were pomegranite trees. For one things, they don't look like fruit trees. They look like bushes. And when I looked at the tree in the backyard, I saw little leathery red bulbs on the tree and I thought that those were the pomegranites. I thought the leathery bud would swell and grow. But the leathery bud was actually a flower bud, and bright crimson flowers shoot out. It's quite spectacular. Aren't they beautiful?


I've been working with a few recruiters since I'm trying to find a job. Yesterday one of the ones I like called and spoke to me about a position with a good title. The thing is, I can't decide if I would want to work for Playboy. Is it just too schizophrenic to go from Martha Stewart to Playboy? Last February I was speaking to the folks at Hilton Hotels about a position and I was working for the state of california then. And I thought "Wouldn't it be weird to go from working for Martha, to working for Arnold, to working for Paris????" Eeeeewwwwww! But it's totally schizo to go from Martha Stewart Living to Playboy. At Martha's we would get a copy of every magazine that we produced. The mail room would put the new issue on your desk and you'd take a while and read the magazine. You'd discuss it with your co-workers "We're really losing a lot of ad-sales revenue in this issue, but I love the article on knitting." What do they say at Playboy - "The article on illegal immigration policy is really hard hitting, and did you get a load of those knockers on Miss May?"

I bet it would be hard to get people back to work after getting the latest issue of Playboy's magazine. The lines to the men's bathroom must be long on those days. So I don't know if I want to go there. But I guess I will at least check it out and report back. It would be totally cool if everyone, male and female, had to wear a bunny tail on their suit.

Signs: Church, Crown & Commerce

I drove my car down Pico past other car washes (wasting money again!) since this car wash had a really good sign. Crown Car Wash. It's right next to a Catholic Church and, I couldn't get it in the photo, it's within spitting distance of the Big Mormon Church in Westwood, that has a big golden angel moroni on top being all pseudo-gothic and old testamenty.

The LA Times did a large series this week on the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints, a gloom-and-doom off-shoot of Mormonism whose leader the feds decided to put on the FBI's most wanted list this past week. This is one of those ultra-orthodox, going back to the real way sects that are busy going back to 1840 when good old Brig Young had a lot of wives and so they practice polygamy and refuse to educate their children and demand that women be subservient to men and that men be subservient to their prophet. You know, the one on the FBI's most wanted list. The Utah Attorney General was quoted as saying "this is our Taliban." So what this sect of 10,000 do is 1) practice polygamy, 2) molest and rape their children, male and female, 3) practice shunning, 4) abandon male children by the side of the road, 5) stop educating the kids at about 11 so that the girls can get "married" to older men and the boys who are not abandoned can work on construction crews and get injured and maimed. They do this to keep the number of boys down so that there is less competition for wives.

One point that I thought was fascinating was that the sect makes money by working construction jobs, and they use their boy kids as slaves to keep costs down. So in this area of Utah and Arizona they under-bid construction crews that are made up of immigrant labour. Yep, Mormon boys are cheaper than illegal immigrants.

The other thing I think is amazing about all this is the, (aside from the fact that your tax dollars go to support these people) what is it about God and pedophilia? Roman Catholic Priests have been molesting children for years while the Bishops just looked on and giggled and these more-closer-to-god-than-you Mormon zealots have been molesting and raping their own children for over 50 years and the federal, state and local governments have done nothing to stop them. Not to mention the "official" Mormon church. Which despite sending their missionaries everywhere in the world (including New York City) won't send them to this town in their own state.

None of this seems very sanctified or religious to me. It seems to me that devotion should include civil rights, including those of children, because what Jesus said was actually "love thy neighbor." He didn't say "rape children."

For A Symphony, Is It Funny?

So we went to see the L.A. Philharmonic with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting at the new Frank Gehry designed Walt Disney Concert Hall. Partly to see what the fuss was about the building (new for us, it wasn't here when we left) was and partly to listen to Beethoven, something I wouldn't have been caught dead doing when I was a teenager or a twenty something. But now that I have so much less to prove I can listen to Beethoven and marvel at the music. And also marvel at how many film composers just totally rip him off.

Anyway, listening to Beethoven now, in the aughts, is different than listening to him when he composed the music. For one thing he was breaking rules then, so people were shocked, shocked! But I listen to it and it just sounds pretty. It sounds marvelously, wonderously, gorgeously, telentedly, stupendously pretty, but I can't hear the rules breaking. And I wonder what it would be like to hear the rules breaking. Would I have to spend a couple years only listening to Bach and then listen to Beethoven to hear the rules break?

Probably nothing at this point could make it seem new and out-of-bounds. Partly because I'm such a rock-and-roll-punk-john-cage-schoenberg modernist, (just making up one of those german words there) and partly because I am pretty ignorant of the rules of classical composing. Scherzo? What's a Scherzo? It sounds germanic so I'm randomly capitalizing it.

For example (of my ignorance), who knew that the 8th Symphony is a joke? It's supposed to be FUNNY. Apparently the bassoons keep on correcting the strings, who keep on starting a little phrase in the wrong key, stopping, getting a correction from the bassoons and starting again. Who knew that the metronome was INVENTED during Beethoven's lifetime, and that he thought metronomes were super-duper, and so he added a little homage to the metronome in the 8th - with the bassoons again. I mean bassoon players everywhere must become jubuliant when orchestras schedule the 8th. "We get to do the puffy cheeked metronome thing AND correct those snotty strings!!!!!" Well I bet people who attend the symphony and read the program notes know these things, but I was pretty ignorant until I read my program.

But gosh, it is fun to go to the orchestra. The new Disney Hall is warm and intimate and has lovely accoustics. And it's wonderful to see the musicians play their instruments. I don't really listen to orchestral music and think of the component parts, but when you see the orchestra you see the tool that is making the noise. All the different kinds of horns, the wood winds. All the spit maintenance that happens. And it's rather thrilling, during the 7th Symphony when Beethoven just jumps the melody from section to section and you can see the melody move between them. It's rather bravura.

There was also, I thought, a rather dynamite new work commissioned for the LA Phil by Anders Hillborg that had a dynamite percussive ending, I really love when pianos are used as percussion instruments.

So there you have it. The new hall is a great addition to LA, it's a lovely place to hear music and I'm glad the LA Phil is doing the job it's doing.

Signs: Fox&Goose

This is a little "English" pub that is fun to have breakfast at in Sacto. Good Sign.

Deja Vu All Over Again.

You know, the thing about moving back to the city of your youth and early twenties is that you forget that you aren't twenty and yet you are constantly reminded that you AREN'T twenty. Quite frankly, I don't know how to get anywhere, but when I get in my car and drive around I listen to the same college radio station that I listened to when I did know how to get around, and since everything on the radio sounds like the Gang of Four or the Slits or the Bush Tetras, it seems that the soundtrack hasn't changed and that I'm going someplace I know how to go. And then I'm somewhere and it doesn't add up in the map in my brain, some parts of town butt up against other parts of town, like I can see Century City from my house, but I can drive to Culver City in two minutes by turning left onto La Cienega - and the two are not supposed to be close. Or I've forgotten whole stretches of neighborhoods and so things are farther apart than they should be. And dear lord, recruiters call me up all the time and ask me to accept jobs that are hours of driving away and they think I'm crazy when I say that's too far, but often they tell me that it's really close and I don't really know for sure so I say, Okay. And then I end up driving through Compton thinking "I sure wouldn't want to have an Unreliable Car driving here. I wanna get Strait Outta Compton!"
And speaking of that Deja Vu all over again, it was time to take the peebs to Hancock Park, locally known as the La Brea Tar Pits. Or the Tar Pits Tar Pits, because La Brea means tar pit. The Giant Sloths are an age old favorite. Here they are graced by the peeb nation.

The tar pits have these really great statues all over the place of saber toothed tigers and woolly mammoths. Here saber-toothed tigers are depicted fighting on Wilshire Boulevard.


They've built a fancy Museum-On-A-Hill to educate the public about Fossils and Dinosaurs and Woolly Mammoths and Saber-Toothed Tigers. The entire place smells of tar, which drives the peebs wild, so imagine what it did to Saber-Toothed Tigers.

The great thing about all these prehistoric animal names is that they are bloodily descriptive - just the thing to interest children. A kind of fabulous ferocity of the slightly weird. A Woolly Mammoth is like an elephant but with hair and bigger tusks - and you know what tusks mean (aside from the obvious phallic Freudian meaning) but they mean something fierce. Giant Sloths, they are the obviously fantastical prey, slow moving tons of meat. The mere idea of a Saber-Toothed Tiger is enough to send any young boy into a frenzy, never mind that fact that they remind me of Victorian Gentlemen with handlebar moustaches.

But in this weird kind of California\LA kind of way, we were treated to statues and dioramas when we were young of these fabulous creatures and the are still there today, (like the dioramas at the NY Natural History Museum) with much the same text on the (new) signs. Most of the way we think scientifically about prehistoric creatures has changed significantly in the past twenty years. And so the scientific depictions of dinosaurs have changed, T-Rex has been re-assembled so that he is not so erect.

And here we have a picture of the lakeside diorama depicting a couple of mammoths watching another mammoth sink into the oozing lake of tar. The text describing this to visitors says "A family of Mammoths watch helplessly as the Mother Mammoth sinks into the tar."



What kind of weird anthropomorphizing shit is that? "Helplessly" Mammoths had kinship relationships and we should have anthropologists studying them as well? While they've found Mammoth bones in excavating the tar pits, they didn't find Mommy Mammoth bones. This is just the hopelessly sloppy, emotional thinking that is endemic to our educational system, and I don't think visitors reading the signs think that they are post-modern ironic constructs about meta-structures. And we are right next to the art museum, so they could be written by someone like Stephen Prina or Jenny Holzer trying to fuck with us. But I doubt it.

So while I, like many before me, THRILL to the thought of a Saber-Toothed Tiger in all it's hyphenated glory, I would like the educational sign writers to be a tad more educational. It's their job to be precise, it's my job to be hyperbolic.

Signs: Observation Pit

This is the incredibly smelly observation pit of my youth.