JULY 28TH, 2005 | ARCHIVE

Wednesday Night

Now it's quiet. The boys are going home tomorrow. I don't know quite how we did it but I think we are in good shape for mixing. Eighteen songs in the can.

Earlier in the evening everyone went out for a meal. I skipped out because I was tired and I wanted to save up some energy to sing later. I moved very slowly. That's the nice thing about LA. It's so warm here that you can move very slowly if you want. I moved slowly into Borders and bought The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie and The Big Chill on DVD. The Big Chill for God's sake. I moved into the elevator and went up into the apartment. The warm sofa in the warm apartment engulfs me and I try to get into Baseball Tonight despite all the fricken adverts.

"I could eat some Japanese food", I thought to myself, slowly.

We've got a Japanese restaurant in the building as well as a Borders. I phoned them, ordered the special, and got comfy again. I started watching The Big Chill. Twenty minutes later I saunter down to the restaurant and pick up my food. I come up, have my dinner, and watch some more of the film. Guess I'm worn out. There doesn't seem to be much else to do.

At 11 I go back to the studio and sing Funny Little Frog. Stevie sings with me to the backing track. It's about the only time of the day when I feel useful, commited and alive. Perhaps that's the secret. Make everything else so dull that you want to live inside the record. I'm living inside the record.

Thursday

Which is why today slid so easily from the sublime to….nothing. I got up pretty late, looked up to see what the Dodgers were up to, and found out they had a game on in LA starting in half an hour.

So I had a wash, then ran out. I was going to try and catch people this morning, but I think they would understand. I took the number 2 bus toward Downtown LA, and I meditated badly on the way.

I was late for the game; I finally got there in the fourth inning. Because it was a 12 o’clock start, the crowd was mostly packs of bussed-in school kids. I didn’t mind; I felt like I was on a field trip.

The ticket office was shut. The fellah on the gate said.

“I’ve got a ticket here, you can give me five dollars for it.”

I tried to fish out five dollars.

“After the game! Go ahead, go ahead.”

So I went ahead.

Now, Dodger Stadium is a very beautiful place. It’s a nice enough stadium, just like my flat in Glasgow is a nice enough flat. What makes them both beautiful, however, is the view. The view from the Stadium is of parkland and palm trees and a hint of the desert and then ranges of desert mountains, and the most ‘drawn on’ cumulus clouds that I have seen outside of a Ladybird Book. How they organised that view, when the Stadium resides just on the edge of Downtown, is a real triumph of environmental architecture.

Pity the view of home plate wasn’t so hot. An uninspired team went down 6-1 to the Reds from Cinncinnati. I didn’t mind so much, I was feeling good about things, letting the nice bits of the last few days roll over me.

What I like better than attending ball games is walking away from ballgames. I like the way the crowds dissipate. And I like to find myself walking down increasingly silent streets. In Glasgow, or Ayr, this would be more drawn out and palpable, but in a big American city it’s a bit of a joke because everybody gets into their car. I’m the only sucker walking home. And it takes me three goes to get out of the parking lot because all the pedestrian exits are blocked, so I have to jog alongside the cars.

Eventually I take a left into a quieter street that seems to go up into a park. And I let myself meditate as I drift, enjoying a traffic free quiet that is rare.

This time the meditation is not about people but about songs, about the record. I’m trying to imagine the running order, but it’s not really working.

I look at my new cords. I can’t help looking at them because they seem to me to be on the perfect cusp of blue and green and gray. But then I am colourblind. Maybe Barney Sumner is colourblind as well, and that’s why he came up with the words to my favourite New Order song.

“Oh you’ve got green eyes, oh you’ve you’ve got blue eyes, oh you’ve got grey…eyes. And I’ve never seen anyone quite like you before.”

While I looked at my cords I wish that fashion had given into practicality that morning. The sweat trickles down the back of knees.

Echo Park, Silver Lake, Thai Town, Los Feliz. Those are the names of the places that I thought I might hike through to get home. I want to give this town the same chance as I did San Francisco. I got hotter, however and the roads became twistier, so I didn’t make it all the way.

I jumped back onto a busy bus on Sunset Boulevard eventually. It broke down! Woah, the people were pissed. I didn’t mind. I sat in a launderette to get cool, and missed a couple more buses while I read the L.A. Weekly. I watched pretty girls load the machines wearing obviously the only few scraps and patches that were available to them, everything else being in the wash.

Launderettes; little snapshots of public domesticity. Women in curlers, men wearing vests (U.S.‘wife beaters’), girls just waking up for the back shift, boys just in from the early shift; everyone looking grumpy, unapproachable, unkempt and beautiful.

When I did get home finally I was thinking, like I always do, that something good should happen tonight. It’s my first day off in weeks, I want to go somewhere that’s happening, and talk and fool about and dance, and wear something new. C’mon, you owe me something, city.

Nothing doing. Jackson’s gone to ground. The boys are gone, Bob and Sarah have gone to pick up their respective spouses at the airport and will be ages, and it’s too late to phone any of my fledgling L.A. companions.

So I loaf, and watch the Mets' score on the internet while the game’s going on. I sit and watch the score! (Funny how, like in Fever Pitch, when football becomes extra important to the author in times of extreme non-happenings, that my baseball concern surges in the vacuity of this Southern Cal Apartment Complex.) The Mets lose. It’s midnight. Everything seems rubbish.

That’s the danger of living in a record. When the music stops you fall off the turntable.

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