The Final Year

Going to an evening event in Hollywood is always interesting. Whether the performance is of Jerry Seinfeld or Pauley Shore caliber, the prospect for people-watching always makes the night enjoyable. There is no other group of people like those in Los Angeles, and when they get all shined up to roam Sunset Blvd, they are unique to the extreme. Going to UCLA, I of course am well acquainted with these people, and thought I had pretty much seen the strangest of the strange. I was, to my great benefit, quite mistaken.

Last night I had the tremendous opportunity to roam the darkened nooks and crannies of the world famous Magic Castle. A good friend of mine recently became a host there, introducing the performing magicians and schmoozing the guests. Thanks to his surprisingly deep connections within the place, we were treated as VIPs, with reserved seats at every show, free admission, and no line waits, not to mention being introduced to celebrities (the great Emo Phillips). It was a blast, and the shows were of the highest caliber.

Magicians are the strangest of performers. I often find it difficult to watch them on television, despite my fascination with the subject. They flounce and flourish, strutting around in a manner not befitting a grown ass man. But what bothers me most are their faces. Looking perpetually shocked must take a great deal of practice, and the thought of them sitting for hours in front of a mirror silently bugging out their eyes in mock disbelief just creeps the hell out of me. It’s the same reaction I get when confronted with an old, hair-plugged, fake-eyelashed doll. Eeeeeeww.

Anyway, I had not thought about why this face was so pervasive within the magician community until my trip to the castle. The shows we saw had as few as 6 people in the audience, and it gave me the rare opportunity to see one of these individuals performing up close. I realized that the face was absolutely necessary for the showmanship of the fantastic display. The techniques involved in convincing prestidigitation obviously require tremendous concentration, up there with violinists and sculptors. However, the difference between these professions is that magicians must look like they are not working at all, that everything is happening thanks to their effortless command of some mysterious and indefinable force that exists solely to allow quarters to be pulled out of ears and flames to turn into doves. If a magician were squinting and panting, moving jaw side to side and gaping retardedly at the audience, it would detract amusingly from the feats of fancy fingerwork fervently flinging flapping feathered future feasts from furtive folds of flouncey fabric. Forgive, please, my alliterative digression.

So, once I established the necessity of the scary-surprise face, I began to look at my fellow audience members under a new light. The patently obvious thought occurred to me that many of these unquestionably bizarre individuals were magicians themselves, and magicians from Los Angeles, no less. As I looked around, the worn expressions of mild surprised amusement seemed laminated onto a good number of these countenances, like a perennial shock therapy patient on his lunch break. Lines dug deep into foreheads, lips curled back into plastic smiles showing enormous, capped white teeth, and eyelids remained forcibly tucked back into their hiding places exposing great red eye-veins. The discovery was remarkable. Each of these men (always men) also had some sort of “hair issue”. Whether it was too big, too thin, too combed-over, too sprayed, too dyed, too rugged, or too plugged, (or some combination thereto) the men were archetypal examples of excessive American plumage mating norms. Each had also studied at the Michael Jackson School of Fashion Design, as the rooms fairly glimmered with golden sparkles and attention demanding colors. The last accessory, and I mean this only from their vantage point, was an over-the-hill ex-Barbie doll armband that would bounce playfully at their side, tossing stringy blonde hair and wrinkly tanned cleavage at anyone who passed. Walking through the halls and lobbies of the Magic Castle one is positively assaulted by sparkles, teeth, wrinkles, and perfume emanating violently from each member of the gregarious crowd.

I suppose this all sounds rather terrible, but I found it wildly amusing. Talking with these people who have been well cemented into the show business life for decades gives one a completely new perspective. They are all experts at being the center of attention, and have a charm and, in a fashion, kindness, that reminds me of a beloved but slightly wacky old uncle. I definitely plan a return visit, as I did not have a chance to explore the secret passages and other mysteries of the place. In any case, if you can get yourself in, take a trip to the Magic Castle. I guarantee it’ll be fun.

They bring in their soddingly detailed questions
bout printers and hard drives and other such vexions.
Expecting a well worded simple ’splanation,
they stare at me blankly while I emination.
“I’m sorry, I really don’t know a good manner
to help change your ancient laptop to a scanner.”
Or “Maybe you should throw the whole thing away,
its clearly not as waterproof as you say.”
“But what about ’spensive components?” they ask.
“Could I maybe get something to make it a mask?”
“A mask?” I retort, “I don’t get your meaning.
“You’ve started to venture towards windmill leaning.”
And then the ‘versation turns sadly pathetic
as their as’nine stories make me want a medic.
at last they will pick something for me to hawk
and I must inform them that we’re out of stock.

Some people just make me angry. Sure, there are terrorists, and they suck, and the way they make their point to the world is wildly misguided. But, and I know this is not on par with killers of the innocent, sometimes I meet people who are so horrible that they put me into a shaking, teeth-grinding rage. I am so infuriated by their behavior that they pulverize and mangle the next three hours of my life in absentia. That’s three hours of brooding and stewing and concentrating on their demise that I will never have back.

Here’s an example. Yesterday, I went out kayaking in Alametos Bay down in Long Beach. It is a 3 mile inland loop of generally calm water that surrounds Naples Island. Though the water is flat, in the afternoon it can be buffeted by intense winds that make any jaunt around quite difficult. I departed from the dock and plunged unknowingly into a strange cosmic vortex that required my doing a full three quarters of the trek with the cursed blast directly in my face. When sitting on a light plastic shell holding a pole with big fans on the ends, paddling into the wind is quite a chore (not one I necessarily detest). A prevailing rule on any crowded stretch of water is that the smaller boats stick to the sides, giving way to the larger ones in the center. This is important because the smaller boats are much slower than the bigger ones, and fast boats screaming along the edges past expensive docked ones is just a bad idea. Another important rule of the water is that if you are facing a boat head-on, just obey the instinct instilled in us through driving on our American roads, and veer to the right. If both boats do this, they will inevitably miss each other, no problem. This can be less obvious on the open waves of the ocean, but there in what is essentially a wet street (with CONES down the center, no less), it is simple, ingrained, and necessary. So, given all that information, the story resumes as I was about two thirds of the way around, having just paddled two miles into the wind. I was hugging the docks on my right to keep out of the way of the plethora of vessels of all shapes and sizes going to and fro along the loop. My head was down, and I was grunting into the wind, each pull a tremendous effort, trying to keep up my precious momentum. A pathetic grinding whine caused me to look up, only to see a hard-shelled dinghy with three passengers heading straight toward me at full throttle. This was not so much frightening as it was extremely annoying, because they were hugging the docks the way a boat half their size would not. I assumed, however, that at some point they would notice me and head to their right, as rules and common sense would dictate. A normal person with average intelligence and/or water experience would not force a small unpowered vessel out into the paths of large fast-moving boats. It soon became clear, however, that the man driving the fiberglass tub in front of me had indeed noted my presence, but (likely due to his tiny brain not being properly seated in his skull) seemed unwilling to do anything about it. He stared absently ahead, with no more interest than a Chevy pointed at a pigeon. With inches to spare, I plunged my left paddle into the water in a backstroke, stopping the kayak in its tracks while turning it almost 90 degrees from its previous course. Then, with my last remaining strength, I dug hard into the water, propelling the craft forward just enough to get out of his eminence’s way. I looked incredulously at the oblivious trio as they came up beside me. The driver was in his mid sixties, well dressed and looking like the most vile kind of egocentric moron. His wife sat next to him sipping on a wine glass, and whom I can only take as their son was about 35 and hulking in the front of the boat. The driver continued on his course, without a glance sideways. (Though the explanation is long, all this took place in a matter of seconds.) When the man got to within two feet of me, I looked him right in the eye, as though saying hello, and instead pointed out, “Next time, you need to go outside of me.” As in, next time you see a smaller, slower boat, don’t send them into the fray. Stay to the right. Be sensible. Have awareness of the boats around you. It was a reasonable statement, forcefully but not rudely put. They needed to know that what they were doing was at least disruptive if not dangerous.

Well, clearly the man and his wife were much more intelligent than I had given them credit for, because they managed to produce an offspring whose mental capacity and thunderous wit could compete with any mouth-breathing football player. A couple of seconds later when our boats were a cowardly twenty feet apart I heard these well conceived words pierce through the buffeting winds from the mouth of the young “man” ten years my senior, “Next time why don’t you BITE ME.”

The emotions that rolled through me for the remaining distance of my trip were tenfold:
1. HATRED
2. Foolishness for letting his developmental disability get to me
3. Anger at the world for letting people like that exist
4. Incredulity that someone would talk to another person like that in front of their parents
5. Incredulity that parents would let their child talk to another person like that
6. HATRED
7. Feelings of unfairness for not having a chance to tell that bastard all the ways in which he was a complete retard
8. Puzzlement about what I could have said instead to get my point across more gently but as firmly
9. Brooding and plotting my revenge
10. HATRED

Even now I want to tear that guy’s hair off, puncture the tires on his Dodge Ram Pickup Truck (for so he must drive), sink his pathetic little dinghy, slap him across the face, read him the rules of the water, send him to prison, and, oh yes, burn his entire Raider Memorabilia collection. Instead, I gave him a look that conveyed my disgust and pity, plunged my head back into the wind, and continued the loop around. However, I did not stop considering different ways of destroying his life for many hours into the evening. What a waste of a day.

But though I always end up feeling foolish for reacting to these people, ten or fifteen days go by and I encounter another one with the same infuriating mixture of rotten persona and tiny cranium and I just want to spit in their face. I suppose it is yet another cycle of life. If only those mean, stupid people would just not exist, this world would be a great deal more pleasant.

As a soon-to-be architect I am thrilled to be living in one of the greatest Architecture Cities in the world. Los Angeles has so many incredible features that this fact is often overlooked. From the turn of the century when the brothers Greene crafted their genius in our fair city, celebrating the burgeoning outdoor-centric interests of the more wealthy inhabitants of such, Los Angeles has drawn the absolute creme of the architectural crop to its sunny basin. The Greenes were followed closely by Schindler, Wright, and Neutra, establishing LA as a place to find acceptance of even the most radical ideas that might stir lukewarm acceptance elsewhere. This gives my city a unique place in the world, as our design ethos developed into “try something new,” and the architecture of Los Angeles began to influence the look of cities across the entire globe.

There are many other notable examples, but Frank Gehry’s work in LA has done more for the reputation of this city in both architectural terms and beyond than perhaps any other architect living or dead. He began by remodeling his house in the year of my birth, 1979, blipping onto the radar of the architectural community by using chainlink fence and corrugated metal as architectural elements and by leaving the studs in his interior walls bare of sheetrock. It was rugged, industrial, inexpensive, and completely original. His work can hardly be called any of those anymore save the last. I am biased by living here, but I believe his seminal masterpiece is the Walt Disney Concert Hall planted like a stainless-steel flower in the heart of Downtown. Its sinuous metal petals look constantly in motion, and the interior is as light and lithe as the exterior is massive. The auditorium inside, designed by Yasuhisa Toyota, can be considered one of the top 5 music halls in America for its astounding acoustics, a feature which brings a building of rare beauty into the annals “One of the Best Ever”. Toyota and Gehry spent a great deal of time making sure that each and every seat in the hall would receive the best possible sound.

It is with all of this background that I am thrilled beyond words to perform in this amazing venue tomorrow night. I look forward to seeing how they handled the backstage area of the hall. Standing in the middle of a sold-out sea of anxious faces, knowing that they will be hearing the very best of our more than 200 person choir belting out Beethoven’s 9th Symphony at the tippy-top of our lungs is something I have looked forward to since before the place opened. It’s going to rock!