You Vicious Brut
This one's got some thoughts & visions from LA and San Diego, a 2-week podcast-hiatus, some awesome Instax prints, & more
The Virtual Memories Show News
A 2x/week email about a podcast about books & life
Podcastery
No new show this week, so you should go check out the great run I was on before my 2-week hiatus: Jim Moske • Adam Moss • Randy Fertel • D.W. Young • Jen Silverman • Leonard Barkan • Emily Raboteau
But don’t worry; I’ll be back with new episodes starting next week! I’ve got conversations recorded with Stan Mack, Swan Huntley, and Bob Fingerman, and a bunch more scheduled!
You Vicious Brut
So yeah, I haven’t posted a show in two weeks, but here I am again. I feel like I owe you something. At the same time, I got a peek behind the veil. That is, I was on my YouTube page today and the most recent episodes are listed as “2 weeks ago”, “3 weeks ago”, and “1 month ago”. I saw that and thought, “That’s what it will look like after I die; the episodes stop coming out and the dates get longer and longer.”
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I got back from California on a redeye this morning; landed 4:45 a.m., hustled out of EWR Terminal C to P4 parking lot, jumped in the car, and drove 45 min. home in on-off rain. Everybody else was driving like they’d been on a redeye with a screaming toddler for 5+ hours, but I held up just fine.
The trip — really, two trips — came out fine. I had a wonderful ~70 hours in LA, a fun & productive ~58 hours in San Diego. Like I wrote about last Sunday, I was really glad to get to LACMA and see some of the modernist and other art on display.
I also had a few transcendent moments on the Pacific Surfliner Amtrak from LA to SD. (Ride it before it’s gone!)
Most people take the west-facing seats on that train, so they can see the ocean as the train skirts the coast. I accidentally took the east-facing side, but decided not to move over. I like looking at the landscape, whether it’s nature or towns, and let’s be honest: after a while the ocean’s the ocean. Instead I got to see the cliff-faces and their precipitous homes, the erosion-patterns in the sandstone, a wetsuit drying on a wall, artifacts of life and what’s worn away.
I was in business mode — suit, dress shirt, hair slicked & tied back tight — and maybe I looked like an agent of destruction myself, a creature of blind consumption. My dreaming expression out the window probably gave me away, though.
Maybe two hours in, I glanced to my left as we neared the Oceanside station and saw an apartment building where the plumbing pipes were nested at 90° angles, horizontal, then vertical, maybe a dozen of them on the left half of the wall and an identical dozen on the right, an alarming symmetry. I didn’t think to grab my phone and take a picture. Instead I thought, “Man, this kinda looks like that Frank Stella I saw in LACMA on Saturday.”
I saw a bunch of art on this trip, as I wrote last time. The Stella transfixed me in a way that abstraction rarely does. I just kept looking at the long black housepaint-brushtrokes, the barely visible gaps between them, not trying to find anything. My ostensible reason for visiting LACMA — the Ed Ruscha retrospective — didn’t particularly grab me. Perhaps I’d already been saturated by visiting the floor above and taking in some of the treasures of the permanent collection, but the thing that zoinked me among the Ruscha show was his accordion/leporello book of Every Building On The Sunset Strip 1966, and that’s partly because of the immensity of the project and mainly because I NAILED MY PHOTO OF IT:
But the gas stations? The words? The material-play & the chocolate room? I don’t know. I got more out of getting close up with a ‘60s Guston. We can only meet art in the moment, and maybe his other pieces will come to mean more to me. Or maybe we’ll converge but never touch, like the plumbing in an Oceanside apartment building, or Stella’s brushstrokes.
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It wasn’t all Art Appreciation 101 on this trip. I also got in some good conversations while I was out west. I talked with some past guests (I’d drop names, but feel like unrecorded talks deserve some privacy), played with some dogs, recorded a pair of podcasts, and also had a ton of good gab-sessions with people at the biotech conference. I’m hopeful that I’ll bring a couple of new member companies into my trade association, which is a top priority for these meetings, although schmoozing runs a close second.
I also (fleetingly) had my first booze a LONG time. I quit drinking in 2012 on advice from my urologist, and except for a dinner at El Tenedor in Toronto in . . . 2019?, where the restaurant’s host insisted I have a glass of wine with one of the dishes, I’ve been dry. (That one was worth it.)
But during the BIO meeting, my Japanese pal Nori brought me around to visit one of the members he introduced me to a few years ago, also from Japan. There were 3 people at their booth, all holding plastic flutes of champagne, which another exhibitor — one of the regional economic development groups — was handing out. We caught up for a bit, and one of them left midway through. Eventually, he came back and handed champagne to Nori and me, at which point they presented me with an awesome gift — UJI MATCHA KIT-KATS! — and then held those plastic flutes aloft and toasted me.
And in that moment, looking at these smiling faces, I realized there was no way I could bring myself to embarrass them by saying, “. . . Actually, I don’t drink.” So I just slugged down half the cheap champagne, thanked them profusely for the Kit-Kats & their membership, and headed up the aisle and around a corner to another booth, where I could dispose of the rest of it.
Oh, yeah, and the next day, I wound up spending a couple minutes with the Commissioner of the FDA, Dr. Robert Califf, after a meeting about [REDACTED], but that’s a story for another newsletter (the one I send to my trade association).
Once I get some sleep, maybe I’ll remember more I can share with you from the past 6 ways. I’m glad to be home.
Art
I didn’t sketch much at all this week, but I did bring my art-stuff with me on the trip, fwiw. One of the artists I hung out with in LA reiterated his advice that I should practice blind contour drawing, and he’s right. You should go to the Flickr album of most of the art I’ve made & find something you like.
Postcardery
I stamped some postcards and threw them in my briefcase before leaving on the trip, and wrote/mailed 4 out of 5 of them. Let me know if you want to be on my postcard-a-day list. (Financial supporters of the podcast get a hand-drawn/painted postcard as a thank-you.)
Kickstartery
I took EIGHT Instax pictures for the art-book that I’m making. Two of them kindasorta break the rules/guidelines I set for myself, so I’ll have to decide if they get included. Neither of those are in this set:
This is all going to become a book that I plan on launching via Kickstarter (unless you know a publisher who’s interested in my weird vision). If you’ve got ideas about what sort of rewards I should make for different tiers of donors — like, things you’d love to receive if you contributed, say, $30, $40, $50 OR A WHOLE LOT MORE to this project — let me know.
Until Next Time
Thanks for reading this far! I’ll be back on Sunday with links, books, & workouts, and on Wednesday with a new episode (!), and maybe some art & more Instax.
Don't let me falter, don't let me ride / Don't let the earth in me subside / Let me see just who I will become,