Last night for my Academy Series class we watched The Sea Inside and heard from the producer. I actually enjoyed the movie a lot more than I was expecting to. This afternoon I’ll be going to a luncheon to hear a lecture by the woman who adapted Memoirs of a Geisha to the screen.

Last night I also went and saw Heather Mills McCartney (Paul McCartney’s wife) talk about her work on land mines and animal rights. She was like, “I’m about to show you hidden-camera footage of cats and dogs in China being skinned alive for their fur. I’m sorry to have to show you this, but words can’t convey it. I think you really have to show people what’s happening in order to motivate them to change it. Just watch as much as you can, then turn away when it gets to be too much.” From the audience there was sort of a collective, “Um….” then the film was rolling. I’ve never been afraid I might vomit in the aisle of the theater before, but I guess there’s a first time for everything. I guess it’s too slow and expensive to actually kill the cats and dogs, so they literally just put a collar on them, tie them to a pole, and start cutting their fur off with a knife. This happens to about 2 million cats and dogs in China each year. The fur is then dyed to look like fox or mink or whatever, or even fake fur, mislabeled as such, and then used to make coats or jacket linings sold in the U.S. and Europe. It was incredibly revolting.

A Feast for Crows comes out tomorrow. I finished re-reading A Storm of Swords this afternoon, so I’m all set to go. A Feast for Crows is already available for download in PDF format from Amazon.com, but through a massive application of willpower I’m restraining myself from downloading it, and holding out instead for the Audible.com version to be released. In the best of all possible worlds, it would be posted at the stroke of midnight, but I’m afraid it probably won’t go online until sometime tomorrow morning, after I’ve already gone to bed. (If I can go to bed.) After waiting three years, it’s hard not to have built up inflated expectations, but I’m doing my best to moderate them. After all, I remember really disliking some things about the first three books the first time I read them, though upon repeated readings the things that initially bothered me mostly don’t anymore. It’s been said that a great work of literature is one that can be read repeatedly with increasing pleasure. By that standard, A Song of Ice and Fire definitely qualifies. Each time I read through it, I’m blown away by how many connections there are that I never noticed before.

This morning I manned a table in front of Tommy Trojan to sign people up for the USC College Democrats. That was fun, and I met a slew of new people. My table was affiliated with a coalition of groups including the USC Women Students Association and the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance that held a rally opposing California’s Proposition 73. The other groups had lots of stickers, and for me they selected a large pink one that read “This is What a Feminist Looks Like,” which generated much commentary and mirth from everyone I ran into from that point on.

Tonight for the first time I workshopped a scene from my play with my new professor, and he was very positive about it, so that was cool.

I also finally picked up some pepper spray today, so … yeah, it’s on now. Who wants some?

On Thursday I went to see director David Lynch talk about film and transcendental meditation (TM). They had some young guy hooked up to an EEG to show the dramatic effects that TM had on his brainwave patterns. Sadly, my EEG-reading skills are a bit rusty, and I couldn’t really tell the difference. I was actually more intrigued by the throwaway comment that closing your eyes frees your brain from having to process visual stimuli and therefore allows it to focus more brainpower on other tasks. Is that true? Lynch spoke about his dream of raising $7 billion to found a peacemaker academy, similar to a military academy except the exact opposite, that would graduate people who would go out into the world spreading TM and bliss. He admitted that $7 billion sounds like a lot, but really that’s only the cost of 3.5 B1 bombers. If we can find the money to spend on B1 bombers, is it so unreasonable to think that we could try spending that money promoting world peace instead? It’s a solid-sounding argument, but then again, compared to buying a B1 bomber, pretty much anything sounds like a deal. Lynch also fielded questions about film, and confirmed what I have long suspected about the weird homeless man / monster in Mulholland Drive — that it makes no sense. Lynch said, “Sometimes you just have a random idea for some weird shit and you just say ‘to hell with it’ and put it in your movie.” I’m paraphrasing, of course.

Tonight I went and saw musical satirist Ray Zimmerman, who’s sort of like a very political Weird Al Yankovich. I thought he was great. Listen to his hilarious song “T.M.I.” Unfortunately, I can’t find an audio version of my favorite song he played, “My Conservative Girlfriend.” (My conservative girlfriend / every Sunday we go Medicare slashin’ … My conservative girlfriend / Her white collar and her red neck are clashin’.) And speaking of funny songs, I finally found a copy of the Particle Board song online. (I have to live my life alone / ‘cuz if I ever bring a woman home / she’ll take one look at my place and any chance is blown. / I guess that I have to admit / a guy looks like he can’t commit / when a hex wrench can dismantle anything he owns.”) Check it out.

As my first semester of grad school draws toward its twilight and deadlines loom, I find I have less time to Livejournal, but I did want to share this sidebar about my grandfather that appeared in April 2005 issue of Budget Travel magazine.

More and more people seem to be using Myspace, so I went ahead and spiffified my profile there with some more images and more data about my predilections. Check it out. And while you’re at it, friend me.

My friend (from high school) Derek James has his first album on iTunes. (A search for “derek james stray” will bring it up.) You can listen to half the album for free on his website, but you need to go to iTunes to get some of the other songs, including my current favorite song, “Dust in the Wind.” (She’s like dust in the wind / see her once and then she’s gone again … She’s so hard to comprehend / convoluted messages she sends / so much time with her friends / does she know she’s fucking with my head?).

And in the “Awwww….” category, you can watch video of my cousin Zach showing off his new trick … walking.

I went to a lecture last night entitled “Creationism in Camouflage: The Intelligent Design Deception,” which was sponsored by the USC Objectivist (i.e. Ayn Rand) club. The speaker was pretty good. The funniest part was how he kept intentionally describing everything the Creationist movement has done in terms of Darwinian natural selection. (To wit, for a long time Creationism inhabited a comfortable ecological niche, but then increasing pressures from competing theories caused the weakest versions of Creationism — i.e. young earth Creationism — to die out, and eventually this pressure caused Creationism to adapt protective coloring — i.e. the surface appearance of scientific legitimacy — in order to survive in a hostile legal climate.) The only part where I disagreed with the speaker was at the end, where he simply stated, “The only coherent system of thought that can provide a robust rebuttal to Creationism is Objectivism,” without anything to back that up.

Then came the dreaded Q&A session. The host began with a very strongly worded injunction that the questions should actually be questions and not diatribes. The audience was stunned into momentary silence, aghast at the thought of actually having to ask a question rather than deliver a furious stream of verbal diarrhea, but their reticence didn’t last long. I spent most of the subsequent proceedings thinking about all my teachers over the years who always said, “There’s no such thing as a stupid question,” and wondering if they ever attended events like this, and if so, how they could keep saying that with a straight face. Seriously, it made me embarrassed to be at a major university, and I thought that many of these students should have their acceptance letters retroactively revoked. What part of “ask a question” don’t these people understand? “You’re wrong!” is not a question, and “You’re still wrong!” is not a “follow-up” question. And seriously, it’s cool that you talk to dead people and all, but a) you don’t, and b) that has nothing to do with the debate over Intelligent Design.

The speaker did make one other point that I thought was kind of clever. Intelligent Design argues that humans are too complex to have come into being without a creator. God is obviously more complex than a human being, so their own argument seems to require that God also could not have come into being without a creator. It’s one of those arguments that is never going to convince anybody of anything, but at least it made me chuckle, so that’s something.

Went to see Clive Barker at Dark Delicacies last night. Like the other event I went to at Dark Delicacies, this “signing” turned out to be literally just that — a signing. No reading. No Q&A. It was kind of fun just seeing Barker in the flesh, as it were, but otherwise it was pretty much a complete waste of time. (And given L.A. traffic, getting there and back took about two hours.) I don’t understand why anyone would purposely set up or attend an author event that didn’t include a reading and Q&A. If I knew ahead of time that the event was going to just consist of people arriving, standing in line, having their books signed, buying them, and leaving, I wouldn’t even bother to show up if Shakespeare was making a personal appearance. Though I guess some people get more excited than I do about having books signed. I think I had a book signed once and was like, “That was nice, I guess,” and haven’t bothered since.

Afterward, I stopped by a Subway and ordered a seafood & crab. The girl was like, “We don’t have any. Sorry.” As a hardcore seafood & crab partisan, I know that they often run out, particularly late at night, but this was like the third time in a row this had happened to me. An awful suspicion seized me. I scanned the menu in vain. I asked, “Are you just out, or do you not sell it anymore?” She said, “We don’t sell it anymore. At any Subway.” I asked, “Why not?” and she said, “Not enough people were buying it.” Having bought approximately 12 billion seafood & crab sandwiches since 1996, I said, “Well, I did my part,” and she laughed. She said, “Yeah, we had certain people who came in and all they ever ordered was seafood & crab. Since we stopped selling it, they’ve never come back.” I am likely to be one of those people. The taste of my substitute Italian BMT was bitter in my mouth. What a tragedy. I have no words for this, so I must turn to a bugger more eloquent than I, W.H. Auden.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever; I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood,
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

…

Seafood & Crab, 2005, R.I.P.

Last night I went to an event at the La Luz de Jesus gallery in Hollywood sponsored by the local chapter of Horror Writers of America. (Thanks to saycestsay for the tip!) They had horror readings, horror movies, and horror art. I thought the readings were great, especially a darkly ironic piece from the point of view of Santa Claus’s son, which depicts Santa as an abusive father who wants his son to take over the family business. The horror art was impressive too. There was a great painting entitled “Ghost Ship” of a skeletal pirate crew. I would have bought it, but unfortunately I don’t have $10,000 to spare right now. The most disturbing piece was some sort of holograph where depending on how you looked at it, you saw either a peaceful office scene or an airplane crashing through into the office. I met a bunch of cool new people too, including one of the stars of Return of the Living Dead.

The gallery connects to a shop called Wacko, which sells books, records, action figures, bric-a-brac, and novelty items of all varieties, all with sort of a goth/counterculture/Hawaiian theme. (Yes, Hawaiian. Don’t ask me.) It is probably the second strangest store I’ve ever entered. (The strangest is Comme de Garcons in Chelsea, Manhattan. It edges out Wacko only because it’s not trying to be strange, merely trendy, but it still comes across as positively creepy and extraterrestrial.) They even carried action figures of some of my favorite writers, such as Shakespeare (Hamlet), Edgar Allen Poe (“The Raven”), and Jenna Jameson (How to Make Love Like a Porn Star).

A Feast For Crows comes out in three weeks, on November 8th. I’m contemplating saving money by downloading the audiobook rather than shelling out for a hardcover. If I do, it’ll be a minor milestone — the first time I’ve chosen audio over print for the first read of a new book I was excited about. And I am excited. I’ve had to stop reading the ASOIAF message board so that no one will spoil the book for me. Those lucky brits already have their copies, and significant numbers of Americans who ordered from Amazon UK. I thought about doing that, but buying the book plus shipping to get it here before the American release was prohibitively expensive. And I haven’t finished rereading the first three books yet anyway. Sure, you might say: Is it really necessary to reread them for a fifth time? To which I say, simply, yes.

So the Slush God announced it’s “National Badger Dave Kirtley Into Going to World Fantasy Week.” It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that my presence is so greatly desired. I don’t know if it’s going to make a difference, as my reasons for not going have everything to do with time and money and nothing to do with not wanting to go, but I appreciate the sentiment.

So yesterday, totally exhausted from my late-night bicycle shenanigans, I managed to get up and drag myself as far as the couch to watch USC play Notre Dame. Yeah, I finally gave in and watched a game. I mean, you can hear the whole neighborhood cheering every time there’s a good play, so it’s kind of hard to focus on anything else. As far as football games go, it was pretty amazing. I’d still get bored just watching football though, so at the same time I also listened to the rest of Back in Action by David Rozelle, about an army captain who gets his foot blown off by an anti-tank mine in Iraq but then returns to combat with a prosthetic. I’ve been listening to a bunch of memoirs by soldiers recently to try to improve the versimilitude of my military/combat scenes and characters. (I also recently listened to The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell, Shooter, and One Bullet Away.) The thing that’s struck me most so far is how incompetent many U.S. commanding officers seem (which surprised me). These books make being in a war sound kind of like Dilbert, except that the dumb ideas your out-of-touch boss wants you to implement are likely to get you killed.

Today I had to get up at 7:00 a.m. That was no mean feat, considering I couldn’t get to sleep last night until 4:00 a.m. I took part in an AIDS charity walk up in West Hollywood. There was a huge turnout — it seemed like thousands of people. Parking was a nightmare. We spent half an hour driving into and then out of the Cedar Sinai parking garage without finding a place. I went with a bunch of people from USC College Democrats. They all had snazzy blue shirts with the name of the club on the back, and on the front was printed, “If you can read this you’re probably a Democrat.” Those shirts attracted a lot of admiring comments from the crowd. As we approached the end of the (7 mile) walk, one of the volunteers saw us and cheered, “Yeah! Yeah! USC!” and then added bitterly, “I just got my rejection.” Afterward, we went to The Hard Rock Cafe. I don’t think I’ve ever been to one before, and I really don’t see why so many people I’ve known over the years have been so proud to wear the T-shirt. It seemed like mediocre food at absurdly inflated prices. I’m still pissed because they charged me $10 for a draft beer. But oh yeah, that did somehow include a souvenir glass with the Hard Rock logo on it, so now every time I use that glass it’ll bring back memories of the Hard Rock cafe and how I was frikkin’ gouged there.

Did Midnight Ridazz again last night. This time there was a news crew who followed us and interviewed people in the parking lot before we started, though they didn’t interview me. (They were only interviewing people with crazy costumes.) We rode from Echo Park down to USC and back. I think it’s kind of funny that I keep driving an hour to join bike rides that end up going around my immediate neighborhood. This ride involved some pretty serious hills, and it is not easy to ride up a steep hill amongst a crowd of 500 without colliding with people. One guy was shouting funny stuff like, “I love this city! Yeah! You can’t spell ‘playa’ without ‘L.A.’!” There was a heavy police presence this time. We were followed for an hour or so by a police helicopter, known affectionately(?) around here as the “ghetto bird.” If I looked back, I could see it shining its floodlight down on the riders behind me, and the tableaux was eerily reminiscent of the tripods in the new War of the Worlds movie. (I mean, the ghetto bird doesn’t have legs, obviously, but in the dark you can certainly imagine that it does.) As we rounded a corner downtown, the police had detained one of the riders and were asking for ID. The mood of the crowd changed instantly. Whereas earlier they’d been waving to police, now they started booing. One guy started riding up and down the line chanting, “Who sucks? Cops suck.” But later we ran into the guy they’d stopped, and it turned out they’d just let him go. I had been looking forward to seeing some of my new random acquaintances who’d said they’d be there, but either they didn’t show or I just couldn’t find them among the hordes (and the hordes were massive). Toward the end of the ride, I was really struggling. I was already tired from exercising in the afternoon, and as the guy with the bag I was carrying all the water bottles for our group. I also discovered, near the end, that my tires were really low. Finally, utterly exhausted, I made it back to my car and went in search of food. Fortunately, the Jack in the Box drive thru is open at 1:00 a.m.

Correction. Apparently, the helicopter and teams of police running around with guns and dogs that I saw on Sunday was not related to the baby in the dumpster. It was instead due to a different crime (a burglary) that happened on my street around the same time. What a fun neighborhood I live in.

Yesterday my Writing for Film class was cancelled, so I went to a non-partisan “Support the Troops” candelight vigil over by Tommy Trojan. While there, I heard that police had caught the person who abandoned the newborn in the dumpster across the street from my apartment, and that she’s a USC student. I really didn’t see that one coming. They released her name, so of course everyone was looking her up on Facebook. (In fact, the news is now showing her Facebook photo.) It’s kind of eerie reading her profile in light of what’s happened. One gets the impression that she was partying a bit too hard (30-40% of her Facebook groups have to do with partying, including “SAY NO TO CUPS: students for drinking straight from the container,” “Crack Changed my Life,” and “People Who Should Quit Drinking and/or Drugs But Don’t Neccessarily Want To Support Group”), but that hardly makes her stand out around here. Actually, she seems pretty average in all respects. Her favorite movies list includes Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Three Amigos, The Secret of NIMH, and “Chronicles of Narnia (out Dec 9 2005 – fun day).” I can only imagine what kind of messed-up circumstances led to this situation. Her favorite quote now seems eerily prescient: “I’ve never had a problem with drugs. I’ve had problems with the police.” -Keith Richards. She’s being arraigned today on murder charges. Sad.

Minutes after my previous entry, the police helicopter blared something along the lines of, “Surrender now and force will not be used.” People (not me) started gathering in front of the buildings, but a cop came by and told everyone to go inside. Shortly thereafter, four police with guns drawn and a K-9 moved through the alley below my window. They knocked on the ground-floor window of the building next door and it sounded like they wanted someone to let them in so they could search the building. Then they disappeared from sight. One guy from my building stepped outside to smoke, and I told him the police had warned people to stay inside, and he was like, “Okay sure, just let me finish my cigarette.” He smoked his cigarette, then came back inside. Shortly thereafter one of the police dogs started barking, and it sounded like people were yelling in the parking lot of the apartment next door, but I can’t see back there. Later I saw the police come by and search the parking lot behind my building. The helicopter is still circling right overhead.

Update: Apparently a dead baby was found by a dumpster on Hoover, and police were trying to use bloodhounds to track whoever had left it.

Saw lotsa poetry today with poet and fellow MPWer Lisa. First we went and saw Galway Kinnell read at Antioch University down by Slauson and the 405. Galway Kinnell was amazing. His poem about his son’s long ago birthday party was wrenching and beautiful. The event also included a surprise visit by Ray Bradbury, who spoke briefly about the fortuitous origins of his novels The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man. Viggo Mortenson was supposed to arrive there later, but we couldn’t stay to see him because next we were off to Long Beach to see a poetry slam that some of Lisa’s friends were participating in. The slam poetry was great too, and I talked to a bunch of new people, including one guy who was an enthusiastic sf fan. LAPD had closed down the intersection adjacent to the venue because someone saw a suspicious package on a city bus, and the police forced everyone inside and then detonated the package. I never found out if it was actually a bomb or anything, though I kind of doubt it. Actually, right now a police helicopter is repeatedly circling over my apartment, sweeping the nearby streets and alleys with a floodlight, so I’m assuming there must’ve been a crime. I guess I’ll find out when I get my next USC crime alert.

Tonight I went to artist Matthew Price’s gallery opening at Wax Poetic, which is a strange sort of art gallery/beauty salon up on Magnolia street in Burbank. I thought the art was stunning. You can actually see images of most of the pieces from the show on the artist’s website, but they really look totally different and much more amazing in real life. The piece shown at left, “Clingut Orphanage,” was my favorite. I prefer art that’s representational but nonrealistic, and that suggests stories, which this piece definitely does. I met a few new people, enjoyed free wine and cheese, and entered a raffle to win a free beauty treatment, which could be worth quite a bit considering that a basic haircut there can cost $59. (They gave me a price menu — hair extensions can run up to $2000.)

I did another one of those Midnight Ridazz-style rides last night. This was much smaller, only about 25 people. We started from SCI-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture) over on 3rd street and rode down to USC. I met a bunch of new people, including one woman who’s a artist and art teacher. During one of our breaks she said, “I hear you write science fiction?” and I said, “Yeah.” Then she was like, “Have you ever read George R. R. Martin?” Actually, as a matter of fact, I have. We spent the next half hour or so riding and comparing notes on China Mieville, Tim Powers, Roger Zelazny, etc., interrupted only by the occasional sharp corner or police vehicle yelling at us to disperse. Then she and her friends were going to break off and go to a bar, but I needed to stay with the main group so I could retrieve my car. She wanted to give me her email, so I stopped, and as she searched for pen and paper I watched the flickering lights of the main group recede into the distance. Finally I got her email, said bye, and took off after the group, but they’d vanished. It was after midnight, and I was alone in downtown L.A. with only a vague idea of where I was. Not good.

Another straggler came up behind me on his bike. He said, slurring slightly, “Fucking where’d they go?” and I said, “I’m not sure.” He got out his directions, stared at them, and was like, “Okay.” I said, “You know where you’re going?” and he was like, “Yeah, man. Fuck.” So I followed him. He was kinda weaving all over the place, through alleys and in front of buses, hooting and hollering at random homeless people, who subsequently become irate, and singing to himself. I thought at first he was crazy, but quickly realized that he was just very, very intoxicated. He had an entire backpack full of cans of Budweiser, and was chugging and discarding them as he rode, despite which I was still pedaling as fast as I could just to keep him in sight. (Found out later his job is bicycle messenger. And that he was behind me because he’d stopped to get more beer.) I wasn’t positive this was an improvement over being alone, but he seemed pretty sure of where he was going, so I followed, but man he took us down some sketchy streets. I swear that downtown is busier at night than during the day — except that at night everyone on the street is homeless, a hooker, a dealer, a junkie, or some combination thereof. The sidewalks are so crammed with homeless that it looks like they’re lining up to try out for American Idol. I mean, there are whole neighborhoods of them. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. We did finally make it back to where we’d started. I hung out at a nearby party for a while, met a few more people, then came home.

On Thursday I went to an event sponsored by the USC Women’s Student Assembly, a screening of a documentary called The Education of Shelby Knox, about a teenage girl (the eponymous Shelby Knox) in Lubbock, Texas who was raised in a conservative religious household but is driven by her conscience to become an advocate for sex education and later gay rights. The Lubbock schools, which teach abstinence-only, of course have more teen pregnancy and STDs than almost anywhere in the country. The film opens with a funny epigram (didn’t catch who said it) along the lines of, “Growing up in Lubbock taught me two things: 1) God is love, and you’re going to burn in hell, and 2) Sex is the most evil, sinister thing in the world, and you should save it for someone you love.” The film shows interviews with various citizens of Lubbock, and some of the things they say are just appalling beyond belief. It makes Children of the Corn look like a documentary. The most moving scene is when the gay students stand strong against vicious religious bigots carrying shockingly disgusting signs like “AIDS Cures Fags” and “Matthew Shephard: Five Years in Hell.” The gay students, by contrast, carry signs like “Hate is Tacky.” Shelby carries a sign that says, “God loves everyone, even these crazies.” I have lived long enough to know that any true story involving moralism crusaders will inevitably involve the crusaders being exposed as a rank hypocrites, abject slaves to the impulses they claim to combat. In this case, it turned out that the head of the school board, who refused to even consider a sex ed program because it would “encourage” sexual activity, was caught using school computers to send messages to his secretary offering her $500 if she’d strip naked in his office during school hours. After the film, the actual Shelby Knox appeared to answer questions, along with representatives from Planned Parenthood and the Feminist Majority Foundation. The person from Feminist Majority looked oddly familiar, but I couldn’t imagine where I might have met her. After half an hour it suddenly came to me — I’d met her at my cousin’s apartment my first week in L.A. Small world.