Good Night and Good Luck

The Front Porch is going offline for awhile....but will resurface at a private new address....

For members only!

More and more I realize that I cannot say what I really want to here. All of my scathing Hollywood stories need to come out somehow...somewhere else, I think.

Thanks for reading the Front Porch. It has been a good ride.

Send me an email if you are interested in the new location.

See ya.

Fun Times in the LBC

"When you in the LBC lookin for a fly car, come to Cal Worthington and tell'im Snoop Dogg sentcha!"
--old Cal Worthington radio spot

So Saturday the NFF and I headed down to SanDiegofied, gentrified Long Beach for fun and adventures. The LBC has more to offer than one might think. And LBC doesn't stand for Long Beach Crips, dammit! (although it used to, perhaps). We have to reclaim our language from the sinister gang element, yall! So Z and I created our to-do list and got on the cloggy 405, trying to navigate her highbrow golfcart hybrid into a nonexistent carpool lane as black rainclouds congealed overhead.

To Do List:
1. Acres of Books
2. Oysters
3. Aquarium
4. Movie

My eighth year in Los Angeles and I finally made it to Acres of Books, the only decent used bookstore in the megalopolis. Huge and musty and disorganized with secret rooms...stacks reaching to unreachable vaulted ceilings...shelves leaning at 30 degree angles under which one must tread softly, lest he get buried alive by literature.

For E:

Midaq Alley, Naguib Mahfouz
Pass the Butterworms, Tim Cahill
Created in Darkness By Troubled Americans, McSweeneys
Greasy Lake & Other Stories, T. Coraghessan Boyle
(all male, it has been noted)

For Z:
Lizard, Banana Yoshimoto
Female Travel Narratives (forget the author)

Next was King's Oyster Bar on Pine St. (where I took the folks when they were down last Halloween). This is a picture of that obscure object of desire:



This is a picture of E waiting expectantly:



This is a picture of gluttony:



This is a picture of Z's Cadillac Margarita:



This is a picture of a 3000-calorie brick of bread pudding. Yum!



This is a picture of E and Z in a manic Post-Pudding Coma!



Afterward we staggered down to the pier, trying desperately to stay awake. This is a picture of E in all of his pink-shirted glory:



Aquarium? Some other time.

Movie? Hmmm.

All in all, a good time was had in the LBC. You can even take the blue line there! (Or Ghetto Blue, as it is sometimes referred). Do not underestimate the LBC. Visit your home away from home. Visit the LBC.

Epistolating, Vol. 1

The NFF and I have decided to take a two-week break from the tyranny of modern communication devices. This will never do out in the real world, of course, so we will confine our little experiment to our little world and the two inhabitants inside of it.

These are the rules:

1. No telephoning (land lines are telephones too!)
2. No emailing
3. No texting
4. Telegraph okay, if you can find it
5. In person visits allowed--encouraged, in fact.
6. Letters are the preferred mode of communication
7. Letters must be handwritten
8. Letters must be worthy of their permanence
9. Letters may not overlap (waiting for the other person is part of the whole deal)
10. Quitting is not okay.

And, oh yeah...

11. Blogging is not a modern COMMUNICATION device, per se.
12. No faxing. Faxing should be made illegal, anyway.

Of course, I immediately tried to turn it into a competition, with rewards and punishments and rankings, but since this was her idea I have to defer... :(

We're not sure what this is going to accomplish but I will be happy to blog about it as it happens.

Glad to be back in the blogosphere. NFF is harassing me about my recent non-blogging so hopefully I can make up for lost time. What's going on w/ Ostertag? I step away for a few weeks and all hell breaks loose.

Ballot Box Stuffing and Lagniappery

Sorry to use the Front Porch as a film-based propaganda page, but I must. In conjunction with Worldfest, a low-rez trailer from "Way of the Puck" is showing on the 24-7 Show page:

http://www.247show.com/watch-videos-online.cfm/cid/29/sid/232

Ratings are derived from votes, so I encourage everyone to vote and vote often. Five stars, yo! How can I buy your vote?

Of course, a better resolution teaser, trailer, and other lagniappe are available on the WOTP website:

http://wayofthepuck.com

Can lagniappe be pluralized?

Shout out to Boonasty for getting me off my a** and having Worldfest link to the WOTP site.

Keep on truckin,

The Management

March Madness

I have been remiss, I'm sorry. I've been Busy Beyond Belief, which is no excuse, I know, I have been in Read-Only Mode. I have been visiting the blogosphere but not participating. There is working and sleeping and then working and sleeping and then a little bit of stressing and then working and sleeping some more.

Some day it will all end.

There are new digs in West Hollywood.
There are fifteen 12- to 14 hour days in a row.
There is the impending film festival and the last-minute effort to meet a deadline.
There is the trip to Vegas, which ends poorly.
There is the sickness, and the fever, and the vomiting.
There is the mail piling up, piling.
There is the myth of Sisyphus and all that junk.
There are the flakes and the AWOLs and the dealbreakers.
There is the malfunctioning iPod.
There is the new female friend on the scene.
There are a lot of things.