Author Archives: will

oscar yawn

It’s Oscar time again and I couldn’t care less. I suppose I’d be a little more engaged if I’d seen even a quarter of the movies that are nominated. I used to love the Oscars. I would make a big deal about guessing who should win, who would win and where I was going to […]

btk

Bind. Torture. Kill. BTK. This guy’s been dormant for so long that most people had forgotten about him. But thirty years after claiming his first victim, Dennis Rader is behind bars. Turns out he’s a family man. He’d always been organized, meticulous and patient. But most of all he was, as the cliche goes, just […]

like a cow pissin’ on a flat rock

I sit down at Groundwork on Sunset and Cahuenga as I often do in the hour or so before work. I’d just hurried through a fierce rain squall to get there, but now that I’m pulling out my notebook, sun streams across my table. That’s the way the weather’s been lately here in L.A. Even […]

intelligent design?

There’s a terrific editorial in today’s New York Times that addresses the recent acceptance by a Pennsylvania school of an alternative to Darwinism. This approach, dubbed Intelligent Design, figures that human beings are far too complex to have simply evolved by chance. They must have been “designed” by someone or something (they’re careful not to […]

r.i.p. hunter

It seems Hunter S. Thompson has committed suicide. That sucks.

celebrity roundup

Tonight I spot Trent Reznor shopping the Mezzanine at work. Others tell me he comes in to Amoeba a lot, but it’s the first time I’ve seen him. I have to check three times before I’m convinced it’s him. I kinda want to tell him that The Downward Spiral remains one of my desert island […]

we hate it when…

…our friends become successful. (Part 2.) Right on the heels of Mark Lawson’s stint as a battered boxer on Cold Case, another Mark friend of mine (Mark Smith) has got a book in stores. Comic stores, that is. The Amazing Joy Buzzards, an oddball tale of a rock band that fights supervillains, is now on […]

the great kat

What do you do if you’ve attended Julliard, studied the classics and driven yourself to the heights of guitar virtuosity? You become The Great Kat, of course. Her blood photos are pretty outrageous. Yesterday was Valentine’s Day. I got a paper cut under my fingernail.

shapes and sounds

THIS is a glimpse of why I don’t believe that there is a God. Not “god” you see, but “God” as put forth by the limited intellect of the average human. We share a sort of vision because we evolved that way, not because it’s the Truth. Imagine understanding numbers as shapes, as sounds, as […]

palace of silver

On January 27, 2002 I met John Sanford. It is a cool Sunday, overcast and gloomy. I’d read his novel, The People From Heaven back when Andrew Davis was looking for something to develop by a Santa Barbara writer. The book, an experimental novel about a black woman named America coming to a hostile New […]

phisherman’s paradise

A little freaked out by a post on Boing Boing today. As if phishermen didn’t have enough income rolling in from duping hapless computer users, this little exploit in Mozilla, Opera, Firefox and Safari makes things even easier for them. It seems that certain websites can take advantage of the International Domain Name specification in […]

SFX: gemma hayes

Two years ago I track down Night On My Side, the debut full-length by singer/guitarist Gemma Hayes. This is during a time of serious transition, and I dig deep into the CD for a few weeks as if it were an emotional salve. On impulse I drop it into my player the other day and […]

insult

Have you ever had this happen? I’m walking out to my car through the courtyard of the apartment complex. I enter the narrow hall to the locked rear door. One of my neighbors, a girl I don’t know very well, approaches the same door from the other side–the side where you have to use a […]

Mu-ziq

The CD purge continues Jerry passed the torch. Here’s the stuff. Music Questionnaire: 1. What is the total amount of music files on your computer? 41.7 GB at the moment. This is not only everything I’ve checked out from Amoeba since I started in June, but it’s also the accumulated tunage I’ve ripped from the […]

the delicate skin

Seventeen months ago, a pair of cool producers optioned the delicate skin. There was a fair amount of sernedipity involved. I had just posted it over at Triggerstreet.com when one of those producers happened to stumble upon it. Hers was the script’s very first review, and it glowed. This amazed me at the time, because […]