Darren Radar

1025 Highland The Giant People of Hollywood - Part 1 I don't know the dimensions of the signs, but they're huge. Giant pieces of patchwork fabric cover the North and South sides of the building entirely. When I'm looking down on LA from the top of Runyon Canyon I can see the sign clearly from over a mile away. An iPod ad perpetuates its iconography on the side facing the Hollywood Hills and a movie advertisement perpetuates the local industry on the side facing Downtown. The building is at least 15 stories high and half again the width of that, but it is very narrow, like each floor is made up entirely of one long hallway. When I first arrived in Hollywood the the building held up an an ad for the movie of Dreamgirls. Over the roofs of the low houses and buildings and through the palm tree tops, I could see the top half of the sign from the front door of my apartment. The back of three sequin-dressed girls as they take center stage, facing a crowd obscured by glaring ...

Horatio 17 and counting. The year has been up and down for my cat, Horatio. He's adjusted fairly well to California. He looks good and his coat has returned to its original color after having turned slightly orange-red just before the move. He has a couple new enemies, the neighbors cat and the giant raccoon that lives under the apartment building, and he's managed to escape the confines of 818 Las Palmas a few times by pushing out the screen on the large windows in the front room. He still throws up with regularity, but after a recent change to an all-Fancy-Feast-all-the-time diet, he seems to be keeping the food down much better. He has a very nice Indian vetrinarian who has treated him for the annual urinary tract infection as well as for a nasty case of fleas (something new, Colorado being so dry that fleas are rarely an issue). By all accounts he's a healthy old man of a cat (around 85 in human years). The vet and I decided to experiment a bit on Horatio earli...

Here, in no particular order, is a view from the last 365 + or so as seen in reverse reflection from a speeding car. Ahem. 818 Revisited The numbers of my address, having worn on me for a year now, seem symbolic. Mystically the numbers have to do with success and resurrection. The building is about 80 years old. The water pressure is practically non-existent. The bathroom sink and the shower have stopped up a number of times. If the link trap in the sink where the washing machine drains isn't cleanned regularly the sink will overflow. It's happened four times now. Of the four units in the building, we occupy the lower left. Just outside the windows that run along the North side of the unit is a long driveway leading to the garage in the back - a concrete canyon that broadcasts, like a speaker tube, any and every sound coming from within our apartment. Our neighbors upstairs and in the building next door are privy to our conversations, music, and the television we choose ...