Two Items of Note

1. I have confirmed with the producers that I made the final cut in Gigantic (yippee!), despite my absence from the cast and crew page on the website. Apparently I wasn't the only one left off, so I'm a little less offended. A reminder that Gigantic opens April 3 in NYC and April 17 elsewhere.


2. My episode of Eleventh Hour (remember Tom, the painfully shy neighbor creepy doorman?) was apparently on the fast track. It is scheduled to air Thursday night, March 12, at 10pm on CBS. Set those DVRs!

I was going to upload a bonus picture that I forgot the other day, but Blogger is not cooperating. So next time, I guess.

Technical Difficulties

Wednesday on [redacted] was pretty awesome and crazy. A VERY long day.

Been very busy catching up with the rest of my life since then. I'll get a post up later this weekend with pics and all.

Also, I would have posted sooner, but I was having a problem accessing my computer...

RSS now available

Thanks to some snippy comments from the peanut gallery, I discovered that my RSS was not functioning. Now it is, Julian. 

So you can bookmark us in your RSS reader to know when there's a new post: our feed URL is 
  feed://www.knower.org/blog/blag/rss.xml

If you have no idea what the hell I'm talking about, no worries. :)

Test Post

To get RSS working. 

I'm Baaaaaack

Okay, it took a looooong time to settle. And to be honest, I'm not really settled yet; more like "less chaotic".

But December has finally brought some cooler weather, so I don't feel as guilty for being inside. My days have become a little more manageable as boxes have been unpacked and the blizzard of bills and tasks involved with the move out here have slowed to a trickle. And I figured if I can waste half an hour on facebook every day, the least I can do is get back to writing here at bLAg.

So hey there again.

It's late, so I'll save the catching up stuff for the next few days. But I'll leave you with one present.

Whenever possible, I'm trying to snap shots of anything unique to LA (thanks, iPhone!). So here's the first pic in this series....

It was taken at The 101 Coffee Shop, a cool retro diner next to (you guessed it) the 101 highway. Great milkshakes and fries, amazing lattes.

And I guess the point of showing this image is this: living in NYC or LA, you are bound to run into celebrities pretty frequently. Most locals will ignore a star as they are walking by as a point of pride:not to be a jackass, but to give the person his or her privacy and to preserve a kind of, "Oh yeah, I hang with the kool kidz all the time" vibe.

But I guess some people still get starstruck:

Crashing the Party

Zach and I have been talking about collaborating on a writing project for some time now, and while this wasn't exactly what we had in mind, the opportunity to chronicle our adventures in LA (not to mention getting to LA) called out to us.

I encouraged Zach to start this blog way back when as a way for us to stay connected while we were on opposite coasts. The awesome name and logo are all his, and I'm just thrilled to be invited out on the dance floor with him.

We have some revisions and enhancements in mind, but until we stock up on down time, we're going to forge ahead with plain old prose for a while. We hope you'll come along for the ride.

In an environmentally friendly hybrid vehicle, of course.

Comments Enabled

I accidentally had a setting on that required you to register to comment. But I was alerted to this fact, and I've just toggled it.

Now anyone can comment.

Hint, hint.

About The Name

Why bLAg?

It was the immediate image that popped into my head when I thought about creating a weblog about LA. And the collage above, complete with freeways and palm trees, was part of that initial vision.

It's just a combination of "blog" and "LA", really.

It is not:

• blahg—Dictionary.com defines "blah" as insipid; dull; uninteresting. LA is certainly none of those things. People in LA are sometimes some of those things, but the town itself is not;


• blague—"blague" is French for "joke". This bLAg is no joke, y' hear? And I am not French. So that settles that.


• blag—it's bLAg, not blag; "blag" is short for "blaggard" which derives from Black Guard: the lowest menials of a royal household who had charge of pots and pans and other kitchen utensils, and rode in the wagons conveying these during journeys from one residence to another: the scullions and kitchen knaves....I most certainly do have charge of the pots and pans and other kitchen utensils; but I'm not much of a wagon-rider (although I do drive an '89 Corolla....more on that in a later post).

Although now that I read further, there are some other definitions of "blag" from the Urban Dictionary that might well occasionally pertain to me or my writings.

To wit:

To gain, usually entrance to a restricted area or club, or some material good, through confidence trickery or cheekiness. Lying is also acceptable. This might describe a lot of my auditions here, except for the lying part.

Convince another person that all the stuff you just made up is in fact true and worthy. Ha! That's what I'll be trying to do in these posts.

a) To get something for nothing or to do no work. b) To get annoyed by something. I will probably spend a fair amount of my time in LA doing no work. I will surely spend a lot of time in LA being annoyed by something. Most likely, traffic.

An expression that decisively and effectively undercuts the statement of another. Essentially means "bullshit." Hmmm. Any connection between "LA" and "bullshit"? Let's meditate on that one a bit.....

What else?

In my graphic design of the logo, I have attempted to tip my hat to the basic geography of Los Angeles: the "L" and "A" are kind of over-sized; they overwhelm and crowd their "b" and "g" neighbors out of the picture. It's an apt metaphor for the way this urban sprawl pushes up from the Los Angeles basin, crowding out both the coastline and the Santa Ana mountain range.

In all fairness, I dig LA quite a bit. As a born-and-bred east-coaster I still have a baseline suspicion of the place—but by and large, it's far better here than I'd imagined. No doubt that sounds like sucking-up, but it's actually quite true.

Opening Credits

Hello friends, friends-of-friends, and strangers who have stumbled upon this passage.

Henceforth, this corner of the web will be haphazardly and sporadically devoted to any and all observations which tickle my brain as I spend some time out of my regular stomping grounds and simmer awhile in the urban sprawl known as Los Angeles. (Or as Bernardo Bertolucci once referred to it, "The Big Nipple".)

Once in a while you will no doubt come across tidbits relating to my experiences with The Industry, as show biz is called here; that is to say, the film and television business in which I am currently pursuing employment.

But most of my scribblings (or keystrokings, I guess) will be devoted to the culture shock I'm experiencing being here: typical left-coast vs. right-coast ramblings no doubt, and probably a lot of stuff which has been said by others before me. But it will be my firsthand view of these things nonetheless.

Comments are welcome. LA can be a lonely place.