I'm Not Buying It

http://yourebuyingit.blogspot.com/

A Touching Story

Visiting a museum with other artists makes for a great experience. I went to the LACMA last night for the opening of Franz West’s exhibit. Wednesdays at the LACMA are closed to the general public; this evening was special invite only. Outside the museum, guests were served paprika chicken skewers and fresh melon and pineapple squares and vegetables with a garlic hummus. Despite not being able to bring champagne from the cash-bar inside the museum, the atmosphere was quite bubbly. Most in attendance were artists themselves, chatting and commenting freely with the other guests. The other great part about it was that it was free.

After eight months in LA, it’s only the third time I’ve been to a museum. It’s not that I don’t want to go, I’m just complacent. When you’re traveling, it’s now or never. Sometimes that can lead to mischief.

I went to lots of museums in England because they were often free, and prices there would drive even Bill Gates to say “I’ll just have a water, thanks.”

“When are we ever coming back?” my friend teases me inside the Tate museum in London.

While in the Tate, we played a game of ‘I dare you to touch it’ which has very simple rules, and ends with both of you touching a painting and running. Not the most sophisticated, respectful game, admittedly, but I was young, and likely drunk.

Last night, however, the exhibit featured pieces intended to be touched. Franz West works with paper maché and a sense of fun. One installation had you pick up one of four pieces, white, golf-club length works attached to rebar; I imagined a giant Q-Tip, a roasted marshmallow, a skewered ham, and the ringed planet Saturn, if it were fused with an albino cheese doodle.

Exhibit-goers were encouraged to take these comical pieces and enter a make-shift chamber that snakes behind newspaper-lined walls and features a door-sized mirror. The wallpaper was a mix of La Opinion and LA Times and others from Los Angeles last weekend, giving a freshness to the experience. Knowing no one was watching, I mugged in front of the mirror with this cave-man’s club of dried paper, pretending to knock out home runs and clean my ears and joust Tower (I don’t know the new Hogan-ized version’s characters) off his perch in American Gladiators, and started to laugh.

Though it doesn’t mean as much in perennially warm LA, Spring is coming. It’s time to go outside and touch something and have a laugh.

An Ultimate Set of Tools

I was out last night at the Laugh Factory. Good show. Dane Cook emerged as the special guest and did a solid set, wearing some white-leather jacket with two twisting red dragons on it and it made me think he was channeling Will Ferrell's talent via Frank the Tank and Big Earl.

For me, the standout moment was that all the comedians engaged the audience in a "where ya from" fashion. While not unique to LA comedy, this adds a unique flavor given that most people aren't from LA; I myself only moved here in June.

The point is that when each performer found some out-of-towners, these tourists went ape-shit, interrupting the show. GAAAAH! Brooklyn!~!!


Seated in the corner booth which, by the way, is very uncomfortable, I stared straight at the side of the action and sideways at a girl from Michigan seated two down from me sipping thirty-bucks worth of gin & tonic and screaming intermittently until she got the attention she wanted. At least it wasn't boxed wine.

That's what we drank, back in a tiny hamlet outside Keri Keri; our fruit-picker's camp had a real party atmosphere. For recreation we had a television set, banished to the corner, all 17 inches of it, in an otherwise crazy shack decked with a pool table and picnic tables and graffitti walls and couches and a firestove; it felt like the camp counselor's bunkhouse in a bad 80's teen comedy, where you might see Phoebe Cates take her top off and Spicoli hit his head with a shoe.

One night, my ex-Marine friend from England, while his wife sipped red wine and watched, smashed the windshield of a car with a boulder.

If only someon's dad was a television repair man.

That dark Friday, some punk-local teenager (the kind I've seen many times over in parts of North America where the cops are cousins with the entire town) roars in drunk rocking some poor-man's Cadillac of a 90's Grand AM and starts speeding between tight clusters of trees and people in tents, some of whom were even sleeping.

The backpacker rabble, some upset at almost dying, ended up chashing the car into a tree; the driver was thrown over the car before being chased out of the camp. It sparked some Lord of the Flies rage in the group; left alone with this kid's car, they ripped away like monkeys, these backpackers, these tourists.

They'd come to the ends of the earth to tear themselves down, and anyone else nearby.

Dishtowels????

When I first moved overseas, my mother had put a roll of toilet paper in my luggage.

I laugh about it now, but at the time, I was furious. I told her of the time in college I'd bought an extra-large package of toilet paper and a bottle of ketchup. Seeing those two, just those two items on the conveyor belt was too much. My roommate and I offended the clerk with our bursts of laughter. It just happens. People laugh at toilet paper.

Today, I ran out. No shit.

7:44PM
It’s dark and breezy, and the walk to Ralph’s in downtown Los Angeles is low on the list of things that smell good; the brain went here:

No extra roll, must've been not looking, just grabbing. Paper towels? Shit, I've been using napkins instead lately, which means no. Napkins - shit, I've only got two - true, they're dinner-sized "Elegant Napkins" from Ralph’s but it's both not enough, and a shameful affair to picture: me about to heed nature's call, turning mid-stride, heading back to the kitchen, lifting a loaf of bread, swiping the last of them and thinking "well now there aren't any napkins!".

Surely I couldn't be so lazy as to use the dishtowels, could I??
Shit.

8:32 PM.
So I'm walking home from Ralph’s, napkins in one bag, in the other, toilet paper.

I passed a frowny-faced Latino couple trudging groceries to the family car, their preschooler in tote. She’d been staring at me as kids do, half-glimpses every twenty seconds over the shoulder, thinking you don’t notice. As they stopped, she turned to me and waited. I smiled, and she mimicked my face.

I remembered going two weeks without shaving, living in the van between Keri Keri and Wellington. I remembered showering in beach-side surf-bathrooms that didn't have mirrors. I remembered getting chastised and chased by Backpacker's Hostel owners for using their bathrooms and not paying (the German sisters always looked for excuses to not sleep in the van, Spike and I picked them up in the morning like travel-pimps, sliding in unnoticed to clean up). I remembered feeling happy during that time; none of us were looking in the mirror, worrying what each other looked like, we just smiled back and laughed.

On the way to Ralph’s, I jotted down atmosphere, as writers tend. Street. Wet empty red-zone cruiser. On the way back I switch it to a rained-on police car empty and adjacent to a fire hydrant, to make the first one sound dirty. I was feeling a bit silly, recalling the TP 'n' Ketchup incident, thinking how even tonight, for a moment I hesitated on taking advantage of the sale on toilet paper so it wouldn't be obvious, so people wouldn't be looking at me, the guy who came to Ralph’s at 8PM and bought 20 rolls of poo tickets.

Even if they are really looking, maybe they're just looking for someone to smile back and laugh.

sprechen Sie meine Sprache

Returning downtown yesterday, after dodging on the half-block walk home drifters and dog-coils and chewing gum laced with glass shards, I phoned a hotel in Germany. Shamelessly ignoring any international decorum or respect for other cultures, I immediately responded "Ah, hello, room four-oh-eight, please."

It occurred I hadn't fully engaged the receptionist; after half a second of silence I used my 'memory-ear' and realized she'd had the nerve to be speaking fluent German. To me. On the telephone.

Admittedly, I didn't 'Yes, And?' her as my Groundlings instructor would have me do.

It reminded me of the first time I was in Germany, and how hard it was to get a message across when you don't speak the same language. Sausage was about all that was eaten on that trip because it was pronounceable and everywhere. If you ever go and have a hankering, you'll find a sausage vendor among the loose concrete tiles of an impeccably clean courtyard between what remains of the Berlin Wall and a Long John Silver's franchise; the vendor wears his grill like a front-pack, using a harness and an umbrella; East meets West meets cheap street meat.

This freaky 'Berlin Banger' food-flashback reminded me of my German friend, whom, after six weeks of living in the Hotel Van Blanc with Spike and I (and occasionally her sister) got noticeably excited over a loaf of bread. Living in a van, food-shopping together became a bonding ritual.

We hit up the supermarket each day for hot chicken-halves, and for apples, if we weren't tearing away from angry orchard owners who saw us taking samples. We'd fill our water containers using the sink in the grocery store toilets and brush our teeth there too. At the deli counter in twenty-odd different cities we feigned confusion using the kind of bad lies that only an accent can hide (Spike had multiple accents) while eating free sample-slices of strange, new meats like pepperoni and roast beef, and ham, saying "ooh, never had this before, this is good," before we went "schnäcking" among the bulk bins, watching for security guards to pass, cramming handfuls of cashews into our mouths.

So we're in a town of less than 5,000 and they carry her favorite kind of specialty German bread.

"Ooh, Grunkern and Dinkel!" The German exclaimed in broken English.

For some reason I recall us barefoot, despite being in the grocery store. Not only is legal in New Zealand, it's common, and quite liberating. Since more people go barefoot, people are both more mindful of tossing rubbish and more likely to scold those who throw things away.

This story is an example of how when we communicate, we can have fun. It's also an excuse to remind unhealthy people who contribute to broken glass on city streets that cashews are high in protein, and that I have a bag; they're welcome to come over and eat nuts anytime.

Stop littering - I've dug glass shards from my heel with a knife, but that's another trip.

Vol. 2: Through a Glass Darkly

I've been frequenting Coles on 6th because their bartenders know a thing or two about drinks. They make a hell of an Uptown Manhattan, and have great Whiskey Sour glasses.

It's shortly after a recent Coles visit that while inside McKays eating my first of two large dinners late in the evening , I poured a Chimay not into its designed glass but a brandy snifter and was reminded of the time in 2003 I tended bar in a pub in England.

On rare occasions when pub-going British people, known world-wide for only consuming, as the phrase goes, two pints and a packet of crisps, actually ate a meal I served them fish and chips.

Mostly, I served drinks.

I mixed Snakebites sweet in special effervesence-inducing diamond-etched glasses for sour-attitude construction-work-skipping aussie alcoholics and poured lager foamy in hot-to-the-touch fresh-from-the-dishwasher flat-bottom Guinness glasses for mannerless flat-toned alcoholic assholes (this means you, Mush) and served Courvoisier warm in expensive snifters for senile closeted-homosexual pants-pissing alcoholic war vets and made sour-face-inducing Tequilla spicy in disposable plastic shot glasses for obnoxious over-gelled wannabe-tough-guy pratts and splashed intentionally-burnt coffee scalding in paper cups for penny-pinching Rugby enthusiasts who caught the first tube of the day at sunrise to watch World Cup matches live. Great job.

I went on a pub crawl (Julie calls it a Bar Crawl because, as she accurately defends, "they're not all pubs") where among wide-mouth-glass shots downed in expensive-looking trendy Santa Monica cocktail lounges and plastic-cup pints crushed beneath the pier and salt-rimmed margaritas tipped perched above the Promenade, a little bit of interesting trivia came up.

British pubs often stink, a pub-crawler noted as we dodged darts inside just such a place. Not, as I had suspected, because of stale beer staining the carpet, but from the Fish and Chips. It's the vinegar.

Perhaps if those sour drunks sprung for some food, I would've know that.

Vol. 1: The Vault opens

In 2004 my friend Spike and I lived in a van down by the river. Here's how it happened:

The two of us shared a six-bed dorm on the sixth floor of an Auckland hostel. The place featured a lobby-bar, a slot-machine room with a weekly $1000 jackpot, free dinner every night, and the laziest room booking system possible, filling the lowest empy spot first. Along with our own private lounge and kitchen, we had the highest and last-to-be-filled room in the joint, all for $120 a week. It was Paradise Found, and we ate every apple we could.

We crashed for six weeks in those top-floor bunk-beds before we had a single roommate, and he would be our undoing . For free beer, we hosted the hostel's Tuesday Night Trivia (we'd won too many weeks in a row) rigging it to give the bar-tab prize to a variety of British babes. We heckled the Taiwanese prostitutes from the neighboring BJ Bar who hunted for the jackpot in our poker-machine room. We invited locals in to buy us Happy Hour drinks. We guzzled beer Barney Gumble-style straight from the taps. We ran the kitchen on Thursdays, cooking for 100, using a week's worth of food. We turned the bar into an after-hours club, cranking the music and rocking 20-person all-nighters with an open-bar. We even used the computer system to bump our first bunkmates, the 'Swedish Beatles' to another dorm, all without any trouble.

This changed the day we pissed off the irate Israelite who, mysteriously appearing in our room, filed a complaint about, of all things, the noise of our late-night texting. We put the blame squarely on the absentee-manager's illicit Romanian lover and her ignorance of the booking system. Upon the manager's return, Spike and I were swiftly shown the door.

Thrown from the Garden of Eden we bought a white 1984 Mitsubishi L300 we dubbed The Hotel Van Blanc, and hit the road.