Archives -
DesperatePosted March 20th
I’m working on some text for a friend’s forthcoming web project. This image was supplied to me:
Friend and I had the following chat:
1:53 PM BEN: that copy work for you?
2:03 PM GR: it did. Thanks. I sent it over to P to get her feedback.
2:06 PM BEN: cool
2:07 PM GR: I think we might use the last line on promos.
2:07 PM BEN: nice
2:07 PM BEN: i sorta thought it would lend itself to some visual flourishes…
2:09 PM BEN: who is that poor very hungry girl wearing the bondage t-shirt?
2:10 PM GR: a mannequin.
2:10 PM BEN: shit
2:10 PM BEN: you
2:10 PM BEN: are right
2:10 PM GR: hehehe
2:11 PM BEN: if it wasnt for her removable hands…
2:11 PM GR: it’s ok. You are not the first to make that mistake.
2:12 PM BEN: fucking sexy deceptive mannequins…
2:12 PM GR: hahaha
I recounted this conversation to another friend:
2:19 PM NE: you thought it was real?
2:19 PM NE: hahahahahahhaha
2:19 PM NE: loser
2:19 PM NE: hahahahahahhahahaha
Fly awayPosted December 24th
Rest in peace Goldie. December 24, 2008.
California Loop 2008Posted November 3rd
You will never appreciate clean underwear more than after you reckon the stench emanating from a three-day-old pair after a 12-mile hike nearly seven days into a summer camping trip. It spikes the nose and addles the mind, like heatstroke or reality TV. There was a grocery bag in my car that I called the The Bag of Incomprehensible Funk, where especially noxious apparel went to outgas before returning to my pack. Then there is the thrill of stripping those brined undergarments off for a campground shower. Undisguised grunts of pleasure escape from the neighboring stalls, ohhhhhhhhs and aaahhnghs and sharp, contented exhales. So mesmerized are you by the sensation of shedding filthy skin that you don’t notice you’re making identical noises. But it hardly matters—vanity has no place in the wilderness and you have hot water for less than 25 cents a minute. Which highlights this universal axiom of camp cleansing: Always shut the tap yourself. Being caught unawares, dripping and quarterless, in a coin-op shower when the water clicks off is an awakening nearly as rude as birth.
In late August/early September I took a two-week solo camping trip, looping around California, penetrating its vacant northeastern corner and straying briefly into Oregon and Nevada. The journey included Mendocino County, Humboldt County, Redwoods National Park, Crater Lake National Park, Lava Beds National Monument, Lassen Volcanic National Park and Yosemite. I kept detailed notes; I’m not sure why it’s taken me so long to post, nor why the post has been so agonizing to write. Prematurely then, I turn this travelogue over to you. Some portions have been obsessively rewritten, some have been stolen verbatim from my journal and some have been dashed off to maintain the narrative. Other bits have been omitted entirely, and at this late stage I am only ambivalent about their absence. A viewer’s note: The photo gallery below includes a few snaps from a prior trip to Death Valley in January 2008. This is a little underhanded, but I like the photos and DV was on the original California Loop itinerary. After two weeks of camping, I was simply too wasted to confront the heat. The trip was romantic and restorative and often lonely, and I saw a lot of volcanoes. It was a conscious assault on the mediated existence of urban life, and in that respect it was a direct hit.
Los Angeles to Hopland, 509 miles
It’s a little glib to compare good times in Mendocino to good booze. Fine palliatives are always on the itinerary, and during my travels I sampled 17 wines, 11 beers, 11 brandies, two mezcals and one stupendous absinthe [the links will take you to my top selections], but time in this real Northern California enriches the soul as well as the blood. Maybe good times in Mendocino are like good dreams—vivid during, hazy after and utterly rejuvenating. One evening, Kumar, Sunny and I dined on foot-long Golden Slipper oysters from the Mendocino coast. These monster bivalves could consume an oyster knife whole, so we set them over charcoal until the shells just cracked and pried them open by hand. The flesh within was lobed and wet like a toddler’s liver, speckled with grit and as big as my palm. We carved them into chunks, basted them with Tapatio and lemon and slurped them down.
With friends the next day, we tasted at Navarro Vineyards and Roederer Estate, where Trina insisted the willowy blonde behind the bar was hitting on me. I gave her Pod Chocolates and she gave me a fat discount on two bottles of wine. Technically, this means she has my phone number. There’s a photo of me leaping about 12 feet from a rock into the Navarro River that you will not find in the gallery above, since my silhouette resembles The Penguin from Batman Returns (it does no longer; thank you Wii Fit). On our way home we stopped at the Anderson Valley Brewing Company for craft brew and jars of coveted spicy mustard. The AVBC staff were kind enough to let me collect hops directly from the vines suspended over the beer garden. I thanked them with chocolate, which they double-reverse-thanked with a free pint. Outside, a circle of shower-deprived Mendofolk were smoking bowls off a bud the size of a perfecto cigar in plain view of the daytrippers. I was exquisitely happy. Remind me to tell you about the $350, 22-year old Germain-Robin Anno Domini brandy.
Hopland to Mottole Beach, 171 miles
Up the 101 into Humboldt County, the sticky kind heart of the ganja galaxy, a broken down, exceedingly rural landscape of hills and valleys where cattle meander in the road and one can drive for miles without seeing any evidence of a legitimate economy. The town of Honeydew, as it were, consisted of a few ramshackle farm buildings and a hybrid post office-general store with wood plank floors. The locals toasted my arrival with Miller High Life, which they sucked down from the hoods of their pick-ups moored in the dirt out front. I’m not making this up to enhance the story. A strip of Dymo label-maker label was stuck to a nearby outhouse: Shake more than twice and its playing with yourself.
The Mottole River drifts into the sea about 35 miles south of Eureka along Humboldt County’s Lost Coast. A rustic 10-site campground huddles behind some dunes away from the beach, seeking respite from the ceaseless wind. After my first night in the tent—fly off, stars scattered across the black dome of sky—I took a morning hike towards the Punta Gorda lighthouse three miles to the south across deep, ankle-shanking sands. The Lost Coast delivers on its name: foreboding, vacant, indifferent to the travails of life, and wildly beautiful. The ocean is a frigid gray-green and massive waves wheel over and break directly on the beach. The body count included three dead sea lions, a turret of feathers and bone that was likely a pelican and a decomposing gray whale. In life it must have been 40 feet long; in death its perforated vertebrae were the size of dinner plates, and gulls pecked its flanks for scraps of putrid carrion.
Mottole Beach to Redwoods National Park, 108 miles
Next stop Redwoods NP, a UNESCO World Heritage site, hermitage for devotees of the forest and home of the world’s tallest trees, whose location is a closely guarded secret . I was told much later by a geologist I met in Lava Beds—who knew the whereabouts of the hidden grove but politely declined to reveal them—that the world’s tallest tree is now the world’s second tallest tree, thanks to a recent storm that sheared 12 feet off its canopy. I logged 16 miles of hiking beneath the silent arbor, the most trekking I did anywhere. I found a walking stick abandoned at my campsite. It was stamped with the words Lassen N.P., likely a souvenir from an NPS gift shop. I claimed it and prodded the logs in my dinner fire, planning to deliver it to Lassen for someone else to find. From my journal:
8/29/08
I started leaving a spare container in the tent at night so I didn’t have to leave to go to the bathroom. You can get away with a lot when you camp solo, like pissing into a jug labeled “Simply Lemonade.” My tent has glow-in-the-dark zips, which personally I think is really cool. There is this tendency among some of the retired set to show up at camp and simply reconstruct their living rooms around the fire pit. Chairs, lamps, the morning paper, everything. Not bad necessarily, just… comical.
Redwoods National Park to Crater Lake National Park, 210 miles
Crossed the mouth of the Klamath with it scimitar-shaped sandbar, detoured to the Safeway in Crescent City for moleskin and cola and then pointed northwest along route 199, otherwise known as the Smith River Scenic Byway. The moment I left the coastal winds behind, a savage heat gripped the road and the air smelled like tinder. It seemed the mildest provocation might incite the forest to explode. When I stopped in Grants Pass to review my map it was 106 degrees and the air was as still as a mortician’s shroud. The combination of heat, wheezing AC from the cars queued at the Burger King where I was parked and the chatter of overfed drivers ordering double-bacon this and king-cheesy that made me ill.
The alpine caldera of Crater Lake offered respite from the heat, a ravishing volcanic bathtub 1953 feet deep, five miles wide and, having neither inlet nor outlet, caching some of the world’s purest water. I hiked to the peak of Mt. Watchman for a retina-peeling panoramic view of the Lake and the surrounding forest. Mt. Shasta was visible 100 miles to the south, the Three Sisters 90 miles north. I hiked the ruinous dirt escalator called Cleetwood Cove Trail down to the water’s edge. You can see rocks protruding from an underwater shelf 40 feet below before the cabochon light is consumed by blue, then fathomless black. I absolutely love Crater Lake.
Crater Lake National Park to Klamath Falls, 69 miles
I re-provisioned in Klamath Falls, about 20 miles north of California border, where I stayed the night at the Quality Inn (high quality), watched The Hills on MTV for the first and last time (low quality) and breakfasted with a busload of Korean tourists (medium quality) who had followed me from LA to Crater Lake. Miraculously, I’d managed to slip back into civilization directly between the Democratic and Republican conventions. That morning I stupidly asked the hotel clerk where the falls where. “There are no falls,” she replied, “but there’s a park across the street.”
Klamath Falls to Lassen Volcanic National Park via Lava Beds National Monument, 217 miles
From my journal in Lassen:
9/2/08
Bumpass Hell is Bumpass Cool! Or hot, rather. I ran into a California Conservation Corps group on the trail. Mostly they were hammering small stones into even smaller stones and pushing boulders around a rocky incline in a wheelbarrow. I’m not sure what they were conserving, but it seemed like a lot of work. Tonight I started an excellent fire! With nothing but downed wood, newspaper and a lighter. Tonight I am a man. Or a fireman.
I debated leaving the walking stick in the gravel at the Mt. Lassen trailhead but was unable to part with it.
Lassen Volcanic National Park to Yosemite National Park, 318 miles
Crossing back into California from Nevada, I stopped at the agricultural inspection station south of Topaz Lake. I declared my Oregonian apple and tomatoes. The woman eyeballed me xenophobically. “Can I see the apple?” she enquired.
“Uh sure, it’s in the trunk. You know, it passed ag check back when I crossed over from Oregon.” This was true.
“Oh. Well… ok.” She dismissed me, seemingly relieved to have been spared the mundane business of interrogating yet another piece of fruit.
In Tuolumne Meadows I tried night photography and Jetboil omelettes and sort of vaulted up the south face of Lembert Dome. Showed you, trailhead.
Yosemite National Park to Los Angeles, 366 miles
I was erratic and emotional on the drive back to LA. I didn’t know where I would feel more alone—at home or in the forest. Regardless, I’d been drifting southward like flotsam in a river ever since Lava Beds, and in my eagerness I vetoed a side-trip to the Bristlecone Pine Forest in the White Mountains, one of the many ranges that border Death Valley. I glimpsed a coil of smoke idling over the peaks as I drove past, not an uncommon site in the inferno of summer. Turns out that was the BPF visitor center burning down. It had sparked that morning and burned to the foundations. A cause was never determined.
In the town of Mojave, known to most Angelenos as that dusty toilet where you take a piss on the way to Mammoth, I stopped for a snack: my last contraband apple and some granola. There was a wild old man— bearded, cooked by the desert, with a pinched Hannibal Lechter face and a battered baby carriage overflowing with garbage and Made in China American flags—nosing through the McDonalds parking lot for cans. Periodically he would stop and play a tune to no one in particular on a pink toy guitar strung across his chest. The Lassen walking stick was his, of course; I knew this. I fished it out of the car and offered it to him. He took it immediately and without thanks, as if I was late for the exchange. Then words hemorrhaged out of his face at an incomprehensible rate something about deaddogsundera houseunder andthecitydidno thinga nddidyouseethis articleinthetimesthisman isveryrichthatguyov ertherebeatshisdogsiknowand people beat mewhenisleepand no wihavea weapon! I’m not sure but I think he was referring to the walking stick. He had a ring of ballpoint pens tucked into the neck of his shirt like a Masai necklace . I understood his urgent need to speak; I’d been alone for a while too. When I drove into LA that evening the city was a different color. No visual information was gained or lost; rather my brain, recoded by wilderness, rendered a shifted spectrum.
Total miles driven: 2222.5
Total miles hiked: 38.7
Ratio of miles driven to miles hiked: 57.4 to 1
Xochitl Robledo and Ray MurakawaPosted May 29th
Tied the knot—literally; you’ll see—on Memorial Day weekend at the Altadena Country Club. Mother Nature indulged in some spirited wedding day counter-programming that afternoon. It’s tough to get married on a cool, overcast May day in Los Angeles, but X&R pulled it off and it was gorgeous. Pod Chocolates provided wedding favors as well as a little amateur photography. Click the image below to launch the album. This also serves to inaugurate Noisy Balloonist Photos. Any photo albums that appear in-post will be available in chronological order under the Photos tab above.
I’ve known the couple forever. I’ve known Xochi’s brothers Jonas and Eliseo and their extended family even longer, thank you Jimmy’s Coffeehouse. My sincere love to Xochi and Ray, who are probably booming under the English Channel on Eurostar right now. They made everybody beautiful.
Rock Band band namesPosted February 20th
I’ve been refining this post more or less since November when I got the game, adding names, dropping them, trying intently to massage the funny. It’s making my copywriting bone tingle. Should you have beef with my taxonomy, please remember: genres are notoriously imprecise and these names are, after all, totally made up.
Prog Rock
The Wizard of Zo
The Jettisons
Heavy Water
The Collapse (real band)
Exeunt
Cubic Musiconia (taken: a super-band of sorts, assembled from my solo tour characters)
70s Punk
The Gendarmes
Felt Bikini
The Gimps
The Plants
The Drags (also a real band; damn you, German)
The Speci-Men
Gutter Punk
Messy Handjob
Feces Police
Toothless Old Man
Piss Whistle
Pussy Inspection
Fetus Party
Z is for Bitch
80s Thought Pop
Politics as Usual
Ready Not Ready
Binding Arbitration
Mur is Furder
Jazz
The Trio Quartet
Nu-Metal
Coat of Arms
Ventricle
Lagbolt
Numismatogram
Velociraptor
Sleepdriver
Inchwyrm
Math Rock
The Idiot’s Guide to Starting a Band
Atomic Waits
Grinding in China
The Frags
The Ridley Scotts
Neve Campbell tribute bands
The Craft
Goth
Crying Jäg
Etheria Mare Lactalis
Deck of ‘Tards
Oxycontin Twins
Emo
Chartreuse
Rainy Day Supper Club
Old Navy Turtleneck
The Four-Eyes
Indie
Pretty Weathergirl
Every Seventh Sunday
Away Message
Restless Leg Syndrome (taken: our headlining act, featuring Jeff, Daisy and myself)
Arena Rock
Outer Heaven
Katana
Slyder
Big League Chew
Scent of a Roadie
Gila Monster
Iroc
Mouthful
Freshener