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I'm back! The Oak Ridge Boys and their lifesaving devices were not required on this trip. Did I miss anything?

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Off to Nashvegas, my little munchkins! Just for a couple days. A hummingbird just zipped by my window... I'll miss it here.

Be good.

Connecting to neural net

Oh dear readers, I apologize for my lack of updates recently. Art Boy has accused me of having another blog but I do not. There has just not been much to report. The cats are fine; the plants are fine (growing like gangbusters now that June Gloom is over); we are fine.

I did go dancing tonight at Perversion again. Gosh, it was fun. Once more the shoegazing room was closed, the main room was full of pounding industrial and the front room with the 80s music was where I spent most of my time. Some beautiful people were out tonight, including a cute vintage-clad couple - he wore brown trousers, suspenders and a sort of ammo belt thing (a Brendan-Fraser-in-"The-Mummy" look) and she wore a darling old-fashioned aviation kit with a leather Amelia-Earhart-style helmet. Also a fetching girl in a green bikini with fishnet stockings and Day-Glo blue dreads, whose boyfriend had dyed the tips of his mohawk to match; a scrawny gal in a ruffled white blouse & long skirt who danced beautifully; and a cute petite girl in a red bustier, black miniskirt, gloves & ankle boots, who looked straight out of the "Papa Don't Preach" video. I leaned my elbows on a little round table, watching them all dance and reflecting on how everyone there, rather than trying to fit into a scene, was just wearing what they fancied and dancing as they pleased. Was this a generational thing? Or just LA? Or just this club?

Out front was a Walk of Fame star - this was on Hollywood Blvd - for Antonio Aguilar, who died this week. It was covered with flowers, memorial wreaths, burning novena candles and handwritten messages. It would have been incongruous but nothing really seems incongruous out here.

Anyway, I got to dance to "Kathy's Song" and "Once in a Lifetime." Squee! Jeff, we are totally going when you visit.

The Texas Chainsaw Mascara

Or, in which I bleat helplessly and incoherently along the lines of "Why haven't I seen this movie before?" and "How did I come to love, say, 'Cabin Fever' without having seen this movie?" Oh dear God in heaven. Last night Art Boy and I sat down and watched "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" ... he is super cool and has seen it many times, but it was my first. Wow, people.

First of all, it's BEAUTIFUL. Visually, "Picnic at Hanging Rock" has nothing on this film. People buy special cameras to get this kind of saturated visual effect. It has the look and feel of late summer. My favorite bit is a couple of shots through a screen door, which is all full of dust that catches the light from the setting sun... it looks so gauzy and dreamlike. This movie feels like being outside, wearing shorts and worrying about mosquitoes, in the late summer.

And yeah, it's scary. The sense of dread builds as the kids in the van listen to newscasts about horrible things happening around the world, then read their scary horoscopes (Saturn is evil!), then pick up a creepy hitchhiker... then knock on the door of an innocent-looking farmhouse... And then, of course, you have Leatherface lunging out of the dark with a chainsaw. Yikes!

And it's just hilarious. Art Boy and I both loved how, when you get a sense of the family dynamics, Leatherface is kind of the fuckup. The other cannibals keep yelling at him, and they can't even walk around their own kitchen without shoving each other. My favorite part (I think) is when Pam sits up shrieking in the freezer and a slightly exasperated Leatherface shoves her back down and slams the door. No more of Pam!

There are three movies I've watched and immediately turned to the person next to me and said "Let's watch it again": Last of the Mohicans, The Fellowship of the Ring, and this movie.

Grunion run

Last night I was all hepped to return to Disko Nekro, but checking the Switchboard I discovered it has closed. Rats... The other options just didn't sound all that appealing so Art Boy and I ended up going down to the beach around midnight for our first grunion run. Apparently this was a "90210" episode, but I never watched that show.

At first I thought it was going to be a bust... the beach was dark and quiet, except for the glaring lights from the pier. But gradually people emerged from the shadows, sitting on blankets behind the lifeguard stations or standing in the shallows with plastic bags. A woman lurched by with an odd assymetrical lump on her back that proved to be a fairly contented toddler. It was like a fair, but dark and wet. We walked toward a clump of seagulls in the wet sand, and before long we had seen our first grunions, flapping horribly toward the water. Quite nifty. It's hard to say whether it was more fun watching for the fish, or watching people chase them with buckets and plastic bags. You apparently need a fishing license to catch them, but it's irresistible - like catching lightning bugs. I picked up a couple to show Art Boy, who was wearing sneakers and staying out of the water, then tossed them back into the shallows. Poor things, they'd had a hard enough day already.

After an hour or so we headed back toward the car, away from the pier, and suddenly came across huge flats of them. A huge wave would come in, all the way up to the high-tide line, then recede a dramatic distance, leaving a wide expanse of silvery fish flopping dryly on the flat sand, their tiny flapping bodies the only sound in the sudden silence. I've never seen anything like it.