This Week's Dose of Dangle

It gets big if you click on it.

I went to LA and did a graphic recording gig at USC’s Norman Lear Center. It was great. It was an academic symposium full of the brightest minds. I’m beginning to feel that my graphic recording is really coming along. The work looked pretty good to me.

Now that I travel all the time for jobs I’m becoming a connoisseur of hotel accommodations. The Radisson at USC was perfectly located for my gig, right across the street. The Russian gal at the front desk was wonderful. It went downhill from there. Firecrackers went off all night. A pep rally took place a hundred yards down the street for the big USC-UCLA game. There were lots of college students staying in the Radisson, which I thought was odd. College kids are so young! They seem only to be a year or two older than my son who is only eight.

In the morning I got up at six and the shower didn’t work. Literally no water came out. I wondered if it was some kind of unusual bathroom fixture that I wasn’t understanding. Some of the better hotels put in novel shower controls; this one was simple but just didn’t produce water. Luckily, I looked in the mirror and my appearance wasn’t that bad. The hair was puffing out a little in back but that’s not unusual. The restaurant didn’t open till seven and then it sucked, the food was awful. I checked out and headed across the street with my gear.

In LA, taxi drivers sort of adopt you when you ride with them. They give you their card and ask you to call them the next time you need a ride. I don’t get how it works, or that it could be profitable driving from one side of LA to the other for a fare, but there’s obviously more to it than meets the eye. When I met Geoffie in Venice Beach, whenever that was, when he was on a cross-country bender, he had found a taxi driver named Mohammed, who was a hilarious Iraqi dude. Geoff kept calling him a terrorist motherfucker and Mohammed told us stories about how the Department of Homeland Security questioned everyone from his mosque one by one at the Starbucks across the street.

This time I met another guy whose native country is being bombed by the United States, a Pakastani taxi driver named Zahid who’s been in America forever but who lost his job as an electrical engineer when they outsourced and off-shored everything. "One thing about driving a taxi," he said, "they don’t lay you off." When I called him to pick me up for the airport he met me in his family car. “I don’t start until six when the other guy drops off the taxi, so I came to get you in my car,” he said. “Afterward I will drive back to my house and pick up the taxi.”

Saturday there is going to be a holiday sale at my wife’s studio in West Oakland, with Michael and a gang of other artists. I’m migrating a lot of merchandise from my studio over there. God I hope I can thin the inventory. Check my earlier post for information. Come and get some bargain priced stuff!

I’m also getting ready for a trip to Detroit to see Geoff and Hank and roam the streets of Ann Arbor. Gordy couldn’t come from Florida because his wife lost her job and they’re having trouble with money. I have to get a Troubletown cartoon done ahead of time. I’ll have to do it today but I haven’t got a clue what the subject will be except that I’m pissed about Obama caving in the the Repubs on the Bush tax cuts. Yeah, I’m a sanctimonious bastard from the left.