Murk

I'm down in Los Angeles, writing in a Kinko's on Wilshire Blvd. It's so smoggy outside that the streetlights are on at 10:00 a.m. Aside from that I won't dish Los Angeles, out of respect for people I know who are living or moving here. (WHY, WHY, WHY?!?)

All right, I've got that out of my system. Now for my report on my reading Wednesday night. Held at the very large and attractive Hustler Store on Sunset Blvd. -- a place so well-designed and attractively lit that it actually makes shopping for smutty magazines and dildoes seem no more threatening than a trip to the supermarket -- the reading was not actually a reading. It was more like a panel discussion on what it was like to be a pornographer. It featured three male writers -- me, M. Christian, and Alma Marceau -- and a woman named Susannah who had done a comic about bukkake. The host, a British guy in a plaid coat named Stan Kent, urged us to keep a lively discussion going, and it was so lively that I was the only one who dared slow things down enough to actually read from my work. (This may not have been a good strategy, since afterward I saw people buying everyone's work but mine. I don't think I sold *any* books. Maybe it was what I read, a sort of quirky passage from my story "Lizza.") In any case, it was a fun discussion and very entertaining, for me at least.

My good friend Christine came down from the desert and to the reading, which meant I actually knew someone there, and that was comforting. Afterward we went out for drinks with Stan and Alma, who is actually a bloke named Jacques. Coming along was this young woman who was either on some very good drugs or was simply naturally outgoing. She not only flirted madly with everyone at our table but then went to *other* tables and flirted madly with everyone there too, hauling out her wares, which were sex toys made from Pyrex glass. Her phlegmatic companion was a blond man who said he was a chef; he provided a dour balance to the woman's off-the-ceiling energy. When we left, Christine laughed and said that I had had a true L.A. experience.

The next day we went to the MOCA, both of them, and saw the Andy Warhol and the Arte Povera exhibits. It was very funny watching parents trying to explain Andy Warhol's work to their children, and thought-provoking, too: does the work mean anything if you are a nine-year-old girl and don't recognize Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe or Mao Tse Tung? This particular nine-year-old girl kept squirming and whining "But it's so BORING," to the dismay of her dad. I usually find such family antics insufferable, but in this context it was hilarious.

The other reason I came down here -- or rather, the reason I'm staying down here for the weekend -- is to work on my novel. But the modem on my laptop broke, and I have had to download the files for my novel off my FTP site. (That was good contingency planning.) So it's now off to my new weekend hotel for some work on chapter 18.