In the morning I dragged myself sleeping from the second connecting bus into your cafe, ordered a triple hammerhead and told myself I was ready for a job interview.
Across the street from my bus stop a car slowed down next to me.
“Hey, bud,” came a voice from inside. I walked on. I know better.
“Hey, bud,” the voice said again. I looked over. Cops. “What’s your name?”
I resisted the urge to deny them even the most basic information. Apparently satisfied with my name, they bade me “walk safe” and left me alone.
At the bus stop I tried to read a few pages of the tome weighing down my jacket pocket but the cold bit through my layers and I nodded off. Across the street was a frat house whose sprinklers cast cold humidity into the wind.
Twenty minutes from the UCLA campus was the Westwood Denny’s where a gorgeous woman with double nose rings served me a fried chicken sandwich while an older woman wet herself in the booth next to mine. She asked me for a napkin and I felt at home.
If the show hadn’t had a strict midnight curfew I’d never have made the eight mile walk across LA to the bus pickup, but it did and I did.
Anything!! inhabit a rarefied zone also home to Aluk Todolo or Chaos Echœs at the heaviest possible intersection of free jazz’s technique and extreme metal’s brutality. I like to think the high watermarks of Those Darn Gnomes’ run reached similar territory. After the set we talked about the spirit we were both chasing, about pursuing the music no other group had given us the opportunity to hear or play or live. Considering the formative impact Drome Triler of Puzzle Zoo People had on me during the Gnomes’ heyday this conversation meant more to me than I can say. I was reminded of an interview with Downbeat in which the great Sam Rivers contrasted his approach with that of earlier improvisers:
When Ornette Coleman emerged, he played thematic material which came out of the blues, and improvised on it. Cecil Taylor… played themes and improvised on them. Dave Holland and I had no thematic material; it was spontaneous creativity, completely improvised, and every night was different.
Spontaneous creativity: that’s what we’re chasing.
I got to play with Rob for the first time back in November, but his range never fails to impress me: though he again switched between tenor sax and 笙 he never once repeated an idea from his solo set or the quartet in which we played, yet of course the whole set was unmistakably Rob Magill. Voice: that’s what we’re chasing.
Mike had indeed cut his hair and I did indeed recognize him by mustache alone. Well, not mustache alone: Mike is one of the absolute kindest, warmest people I’ve ever met and his disposition and energy are immediately recognizable. I’ve heard writers and artists from Mary Oliver to Roberto Calasso hailed for the generosity of their work but in his art and his aura Mike provides a living example of what that means. We’re better off having people like him in our little corner of the world.
The dive was nearly empty, lit only by arcade machines and a string of Christmas lights behind the bar. The establishment’s dedication to the analog extended beyond the arcade games; music was supposed to emanate from a turntable in the back of the long room but the record had ended long ago and the only sound was the needle softly scraping flat empty vinyl. I had made it there early, too early, and sat for a while waiting for the bartender to appear.
The only other patrons were two barflies on stools at the other end of the room, a tiny woman and a man with a shaved head and a mustache. I realized I usually recognized Mike by his long hair and mustache and if he had cut his hair I might not have known him and in the dark bar lit only by a wall of glowing orange arcade games this could have been Mike but then he stood up and walked with a cane and he wasn’t Mike nor could have been. Later the tiny woman took his cane and he hobbled like he didn’t have any hips.
The Korean grocery store was supposed to have great 양념치킨 but this late at night it was only 붕어빵 and I wandered the aisles perusing frozen fish and exotic Oreos.
At Coffee Signal I drank a pistachio einspanner over the course of two hours, savoring the opportunity to sit and kill some time. Everyone in the cafe sat at a laptop studying or working remotely.
Union Station to LA is a brisk little five mile walk. My perambulations tend to take place within the bubble of my headphones but particularly away from home in semi-foreign territory I relished the chance to take in the sounds of a new city. If you’re reading this blog you probably know I regularly complain about my hometown’s lack of walkability compared to “real” urban spaces; LA really isn’t all that different, just another expression of the vast flat sprawling lichen spreading across southern California. But I did get to pass a Mediterranean restaurant called “Mr. Sandwich.”
On the bus the HR department from the fiber optic job called me back to schedule my penultimate interview. I do my best to avoid being the person on the bus shouting loudly into a phone airing my business to my fellow disinterested riders but I guess this felt important. I tried to get back into Underworld but my focus drifted to the desert willows flying past the window.
That morning I worried if I’d brought my current book — Dumas’ La Reine Margot — I’d blaze through the last hundred pages and be left without any reading material. Last time I took the train to LA (for Noah’s Otherkin premier) I finished Austen’s Emma in a single sitting, so I was counting on a solid three hundred or so pages worth of reading time. I always love a nice thick car battery of a book when I’m traveling, so I took the opportunity to crack into DeLillo’s Underworld. I’ve always been something of a DeLillo-agnostic, but Underworld had me hooked from the first page of its masterwork literary performance chronicling the 1951 National League’s Shot Heard ‘Round the World. Considering my equal interest in both DeLillo and baseball I was surprised as anyone.
Your mom had a dermatology appointment and my bus stop was right outside the medical center so we carpooled together. The tip of the toothpick spearing my clinic sandwich broke off in the whole grain and I spent longer than I’d wish fishing it out of the masticated turkey-vegetable mass hovering on my tongue.
“I’m thinking about doing something a little crazy,” I told you. “Talk me out of it.”
“What is it?”
“There’s this show I really want to hit up.”
“When is it?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Where is it?”
“Koreatown.”
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