I guess it really started Wednesday. I babysat Owen – played in the backyard, had dinner (delicious pizza from Two Boots) with Cyn, Josh and their Chinese exchange student QiaoQiao (pronounced “Chow-Chow” vagy csaocsao), had bath time and the towelly-towelly run, read some stories and put him to sleep. Then finished up season four of The Wire (NSFW) while waiting for Abby to get home from another Wednesday at The Edison. It’s hard to describe what a great show The Wire is, but I guess the best way is to say it’s not like a “show” at all. Rather it seems more like a window into a part of this country that I know nothing about, a sort of docudrama of urban life in America. Anyway, you should definitely see it.

Thursday I got up early to go climbing at Malibu Creek with Chris (and nearly bailed because I was so tired), who brought along his friend Annabella and her mother. I led the first climb of the day, a 5.8 that was one of the longer routes in the spot, and then we watched Annabella’s 67-year-old mother do it in tennis shoes without much trouble (though she skipped the hard start). As her daughter put it, “my mom’s pretty badass”. It should also be mentioned that she lives on a 40-foot catamaran and sails up and down the eastern seaboard most of the year, and she’s “always looking for crew members.” Um, yes please? Also led a 5.9 later in the day. We swam in the creek and ate PB&J. Hit the road and caught rush hour traffic back to Silverlake; I got home with just enough time to shower before my class at LA Trade-Technical College (sorry, Cole, no walk today buddy!). Spent three hungry hours learning about solar photovoltaic modules, alternating current vs. direct current, and laughing at our instructor’s funny stories. The students’ attitude is very colloquial – like high-school shop class – and many of the instroctor’s anecdotes start off with the groan-inducing “so I was talking to this guy…” Got home around 10pm and hung out with Howard, who had just returned from a week of food conventions in New York, for a bit, then watched the first half of The Seven Samurai, by Akira Kurosawa. It’s really pretty amazing that I haven’t seen any of his films, being the Japanese Art guy that I suppose I was, and though I did doze off in parts I could immediately see why he’s garnered so much acclaim.

Friday did my usual news-reading put-puttering around the house, then Howard and I met Jess and Emily at the Barbarella bar for happy hour. After tuna tartar, hummus, a so-so mojito and a terrible caipirinha (sigh, still drank it), we left and watched the sun go down from Crestmont between games of billiards (I won and lost every game on a technicality, scratching and so on). Next was a party up in the Mt. Washington area, which was nice because a) it had a great view that was different from the great view at Crestmont and b) there was a hot tub. People traded jokes and were merry. At midnight I got Jess to sing the Star Spangled Banner, with the group joining in for the last two lines. Three hours of singing, hot-tubbing, drinks and smiles later, we headed to our respective places of rest.

Saturday was little Abram’s second birthday and he performed like a champ. Pool party at Grandma and Grandpa Goldstein’s house in West Hollywood, with lots of the little tykes in attendance. Also met Leonie, Carson and Dajana’s two-week-old baby girl. The cake had a basketball theme – Abe loves the “b-ball”. Lifeguard “straight out of central casting for Baywatch” was on duty, and tried teaching QiaoQiao to swim (what’s with Asians and the fear of water? People I knew in Japan didn’t know how to swim. On an island nation for chrissakes! Maybe in China all the lakes and rivers are too polluted to warrant learning? Probably better off drowning than growing a stunted third arm from your hip or melting your face off.) After that headed home for a nap. When I woke up Eric had gotten home from 6 weeks in New York and Minnesota, so we caught up for a while. He’d been working on a job installing artworks at the newly-reopened Governor’s Island. Later on I caught up with Hilary and friends (also just back from a few weeks vacationing in Europe), Jess, Emily and QiaoQiao to see a screening of Jaws (“See it, before you go swimming.”) at the Hollywood Forever cemetery. It was packed and got cold by the end, but we’d brought lots of great snacks and drinks, so it passed nicely. After I dropped off QiaoQiao (not noticeably disturbed by the roboshark), I regrouped with Jess and Emily and friends and drove around looking for “The End of the World”, a semi-secret (and hella hard to find) lookout spot somewhere below and west of the Hollywood sign. We eventually found it and passed a bottle of wine while sitting on top of a wall painted with the American flag, toasting to the liquor laws in the land of the free. Home again around 3:30am.

Today got up about ten (for a change. It’s hard to sleep late most mornings because the light comes right in my window and pokes my eyeballs out right through the lids) and made some eggs and fruit. Got on the net and finally used up my Borders gift card that I got for Christmas to buy two CDs: K’Naan – Troubadour (convinced by Magee and others with quite dope musical tastes) and the new Mos Def – Ecstatic (convinced by the track with Slick Rick that is blowing up KCRW). Hooked up with Abby, Merlin and Owen (thankfully feeling better after five tough days and nights of high fever) and headed to Santa Monica for some beach action. It was packed, but windy and much cooler than east LA, so my three consecutive days in the water came to a close without an ocean entry. Had mediocre and over-priced sushi for dinner (but! $2 happy hour pints of Sapporo!), then got a couple of slings and locking caribiners at REI. Wanted to get so much more – a sport-climbing rack of quickdraws, a messenger bag, new biking gloves and shorts, a water bottle, headlamp, etc etc. but oh yeah, I’m still unemployed for the most part. Added to the list of other wants (new laptop, circular polarizer, 10-16mm Tokina lens, plane tickets) for when I finally sit my ass down and find a job. But that’s what Monday’s are for, right?

Life in LA is good. Pictures to come soon. And after all this, happy birthday America. We’ve come a long way, and we’ve got a long way to go. But it’s good to be here, and I wish you could be too.

Residents of any of the cities where Bootie events go down will likely be pretty familiar with the tunes, which are mainly composed of this year’s pop sensations combined with yesteryear’s funkiest or best-known tracks. These come off the dancefloors and onto wax in Best of Bootie 2008.

Some of the more obvious entries include the A+B mash of The Police’s “Roxanne” and The Bee Gees’ “You Should be Dancing”, by DJ Zebra, and the tongue-literally-poking-through-the-cheek irony of Divide & Kreate’s “Until It Talks”, a combination of Coldplay and Metallica tracks.

But the award for creativity most definitely goes to SF’s DJ Earworm, who mixes not two, not five, but sixteen different artists (Rihanna vs. Kardinal Offishall vs. Akon vs. Ne-Yo vs. Estelle vs. Pussycat Dolls vs. Leona Lewis vs. Danity Kane vs. Madonna vs. Timbaland vs. Justin Timberlake vs. Lupe Fiasco vs. Matthew Santos vs. Britney Spears vs. Flo-Rida vs. T-Pain) to create “No More Gas”. Bordering dangerously on the Girltalk-dominated sub-genre (or is it a completely new one?) of extreme mashups, this is a whole bunch of song fragments, choruses and other bits that somehow got stuck in your head over the year. No need to go back to all those (mostly) bad originals, now you have them all in one track! It’s like a “Best of” list all in itself.

Anyway, as always with the Bootie compilations, this one is pre-mixed for your continuous listening and dancing pleasure. Many thanks to A+D for keeping the Bootie series going and here’s looking forward to a mash-terful 2009.

Click the photo above to go to the Bootie site and peruse the album, or just click HERE for the full zipped download, complete with cover art!

Anyway E and I left “early” at about 2:30am and went to Corvinteto, which has all the charm and style of a red light-swathed opium den (and I’ll let you decide whether that sounds cool or not), where we proceeded to get our boogie ON. Long story short, my 7:45am alarm came WAY too soon.

So I got sad.

Part of it is that we’re leaving. Sometime. More on that soon, when I force myself to sit down and write again. But then I read the news about the NYPD goons getting acquitted, and I just felt terrible for Sean Bell and his family and friends. I have no clue why, except that they are so obviously the victims of a racist and unjust system – but what else is new? Bang off twenty shots. Stop. Reload. Bang off another twenty shots. It was him or us, judge. Who was Amadou Diallo again?

Then we heard that a bicyclist had been killed yesterday. Riding on a bike path, hit by a truck that took a right without looking. Maybe he wasn’t either. And I wanted to cry for his family and send them cards and hug his kids or siblings if he has them. Maybe he doesn’t. I mean, didn’t.

We decided to join a group of 150 or so bikers that had gathered at Heroes’ Square to paint a ghost bike and chain it to the spot where he was killed. It was pretty powerful, all these people who didn’t even know the guy coming together to ride. Along the way we stopped at another ghost bike, one for the victim of a similar incident that happened a few months ago. This madness must cease.

And you would think it would – soon – judging by the turnout of last Sunday’s Critical Mass ride. It was only the biggest in the world, EVER, at an estimated 80,000 participants. The only things bigger are the anti-government rallies and the Sziget Festival, but I don’t even know if that counts because most of those people are foreigners.

But the truth is, Hungary is changing impossibly slowly. It is a wildly squawking Turul with its wings drowning in a thick paprikas. Did I tell you yet why we’re leaving?

And this is the most poetic thing I’ve read in months. It makes me sad to know these truths.

But don’t worry, I’ve been drinking water all day.

The next day, we found out this was the Singas Project. “Sin gas” is Spanish for “without pop” – meaning this was no teenie-bopper-friendly BS, but some soulful dance-jazz that we found ourselves immediately enamored with. Check out the below video (be patient with the crowd chatting at the beginning) and let me know if you want their album – I’d be happy to buy it and ship it to you, because I think they’re that cool.

Photo gallery HERE. Post coming soon.