My good friend rocked the House of Blues on Sunset the other night. He is lead singer, writer, manager, promoter, and concert organizer for his headlining group, and it was a real thrill to see him up there being the main attraction he has always been at heart. The music is positive energy in waveform blasted out over an inevitably enthusiastic, screaming crowd, played in incredible synchrony by six consummate musicians. Consider this a big shout out to the Nikhil Korula Band! Check them out at nkband.com with your speakers turned up.

My best friend Steve is getting married this weekend. I'm still not quite sure how I feel about it. Of course, I am enthralled that he is taking the next step in his life. Of course, I am ecstatic that he's found someone great, someone he rightly deserves, to spend the rest of his life with. Of course, I am overjoyed to be a part of the ceremony, to stand there next to him providing whatever support and congratulations I can. But I cannot shake this sense of loss. It has nothing to do with some sort of "now I'm not going to be able to spend as much time with him" drivel. The loss I feel is for youth. My youth. I just can't believe that I have grown so old that my best friend since the sixth grade is of the marrying age. When I look at him I still see the guy I went on high school skiing trips with, the guy whose quick hands saved my face from being bludgeoned by thrown objects at concerts, the guy who I went to every Special Edition Star Wars movie with on opening night. Many growing-up years have passed since he and I hung out every weekend, making trips to Sport Chalet when nothing else exciting was going on. I think the pangs of loss I feel are normal, and will probably grow stronger with each passing decade. And while I do miss the old times, I can't help but smile when I see my best friend now, happy and successful and on that difficult but rewarding road I know I will one day be bold enough to take. In the mean time I can't believe my great fortune that I get to witness the ceremony that brings the lives of these two wonderful people together. Congratulations Steve and Jessica on taking the next great step. May the union of your spirits enrich your lives forever.

Going to an evening event in Hollywood is always interesting. Whether the performance is of Jerry Seinfeld or Pauley Shore caliber, the prospect for people-watching always makes the night enjoyable. There is no other group of people like those in Los Angeles, and when they get all shined up to roam Sunset Blvd, they are unique to the extreme. Going to UCLA, I of course am well acquainted with these people, and thought I had pretty much seen the strangest of the strange. I was, to my great benefit, quite mistaken. Last night I had the tremendous opportunity to roam the darkened nooks and crannies of the world famous Magic Castle. A good friend of mine recently became a host there, introducing the performing magicians and schmoozing the guests. Thanks to his surprisingly deep connections within the place, we were treated as VIPs, with reserved seats at every show, free admission, and no line waits, not to mention being introduced to celebrities (the great Emo Phillips). It was a blast, and the shows were of the highest caliber. Magicians are the strangest of performers. I often find it difficult to watch them on television, despite my fascination with the subject. They flounce and flourish, strutting around in a manner not befitting a grown ass man. But what bothers me most are their faces. Looking perpetually shocked must take a great deal of practice, and the thought of them sitting for hours in front of a mirror silently bugging out their eyes in mock disbelief just creeps the hell out of me. It’s the same reaction I get when confronted with an old, hair-plugged, fake-eyelashed doll. Eeeeeeww. Anyway, I had not thought about why this face was so pervasive within the magician community until my trip to the castle. The shows we saw had as few as 6 people in the audience, and it gave me the rare opportunity to see one of these individuals performing up close. I realized that the face was absolutely necessary for the showmanship of the fantastic display. The techniques involved in convincing prestidigitation obviously require tremendous concentration, up there with violinists and sculptors. However, the difference between these professions is that magicians must look like they are not working at all, that everything is happening thanks to their effortless command of some mysterious and indefinable force that exists solely to allow quarters to be pulled out of ears and flames to turn into doves. If a magician were squinting and panting, moving jaw side to side and gaping retardedly at the audience, it would detract amusingly from the feats of fancy fingerwork fervently flinging flapping feathered future feasts from furtive folds of flouncey fabric. Forgive, please, my alliterative digression. So, once I established the necessity of the scary-surprise face, I began to look at my fellow audience members under a new light. The patently obvious thought occurred to me that many of these unquestionably bizarre individuals were magicians themselves, and magicians from Los Angeles, no less. As I looked around, the worn expressions of mild surprised amusement seemed laminated onto a good number of these countenances, like a perennial shock therapy patient on his lunch break. Lines dug deep into foreheads, lips curled back into plastic smiles showing enormous, capped white teeth, and eyelids remained forcibly tucked back into their hiding places exposing great red eye-veins. The discovery was remarkable. Each of these men (always men) also had some sort of "hair issue". Whether it was too big, too thin, too combed-over, too sprayed, too dyed, too rugged, or too plugged, (or some combination thereto) the men were archetypal examples of excessive American plumage mating norms. Each had also studied at the Michael Jackson School of Fashion Design, as the rooms fairly glimmered with golden sparkles and attention demanding colors. The last accessory, and I mean this only from their vantage point, was an over-the-hill ex-Barbie doll armband that would bounce playfully at their side, tossing stringy blonde hair and wrinkly tanned cleavage at anyone who passed. Walking through the halls and lobbies of the Magic Castle one is positively assaulted by sparkles, teeth, wrinkles, and perfume emanating violently from each member of the gregarious crowd. I suppose this all sounds rather terrible, but I found it wildly amusing. Talking with these people who have been well cemented into the show business life for decades gives one a completely new perspective. They are all experts at being the center of attention, and have a charm and, in a fashion, kindness, that reminds me of a beloved but slightly wacky old uncle. I definitely plan a return visit, as I did not have a chance to explore the secret passages and other mysteries of the place. In any case, if you can get yourself in, take a trip to the Magic Castle. I guarantee it'll be fun.

They bring in their soddingly detailed questions bout printers and hard drives and other such vexions. Expecting a well worded simple 'splanation, they stare at me blankly while I emination. "I'm sorry, I really don't know a good manner to help change your ancient laptop to a scanner." Or "Maybe you should throw the whole thing away, its clearly not as waterproof as you say." "But what about 'spensive components?" they ask. "Could I maybe get something to make it a mask?" "A mask?" I retort, "I don't get your meaning. "You've started to venture towards windmill leaning." And then the 'versation turns sadly pathetic as their as'nine stories make me want a medic. at last they will pick something for me to hawk and I must inform them that we're out of stock.

Some people just make me angry. Sure, there are terrorists, and they suck, and the way they make their point to the world is wildly misguided. But, and I know this is not on par with killers of the innocent, sometimes I meet people who are so horrible that they put me into a shaking, teeth-grinding rage. I am so infuriated by their behavior that they pulverize and mangle the next three hours of my life in absentia. That's three hours of brooding and stewing and concentrating on their demise that I will never have back. Here's an example. Yesterday, I went out kayaking in Alametos Bay down in Long Beach. It is a 3 mile inland loop of generally calm water that surrounds Naples Island. Though the water is flat, in the afternoon it can be buffeted by intense winds that make any jaunt around quite difficult. I departed from the dock and plunged unknowingly into a strange cosmic vortex that required my doing a full three quarters of the trek with the cursed blast directly in my face. When sitting on a light plastic shell holding a pole with big fans on the ends, paddling into the wind is quite a chore (not one I necessarily detest). A prevailing rule on any crowded stretch of water is that the smaller boats stick to the sides, giving way to the larger ones in the center. This is important because the smaller boats are much slower than the bigger ones, and fast boats screaming along the edges past expensive docked ones is just a bad idea. Another important rule of the water is that if you are facing a boat head-on, just obey the instinct instilled in us through driving on our American roads, and veer to the right. If both boats do this, they will inevitably miss each other, no problem. This can be less obvious on the open waves of the ocean, but there in what is essentially a wet street (with CONES down the center, no less), it is simple, ingrained, and necessary. So, given all that information, the story resumes as I was about two thirds of the way around, having just paddled two miles into the wind. I was hugging the docks on my right to keep out of the way of the plethora of vessels of all shapes and sizes going to and fro along the loop. My head was down, and I was grunting into the wind, each pull a tremendous effort, trying to keep up my precious momentum. A pathetic grinding whine caused me to look up, only to see a hard-shelled dinghy with three passengers heading straight toward me at full throttle. This was not so much frightening as it was extremely annoying, because they were hugging the docks the way a boat half their size would not. I assumed, however, that at some point they would notice me and head to their right, as rules and common sense would dictate. A normal person with average intelligence and/or water experience would not force a small unpowered vessel out into the paths of large fast-moving boats. It soon became clear, however, that the man driving the fiberglass tub in front of me had indeed noted my presence, but (likely due to his tiny brain not being properly seated in his skull) seemed unwilling to do anything about it. He stared absently ahead, with no more interest than a Chevy pointed at a pigeon. With inches to spare, I plunged my left paddle into the water in a backstroke, stopping the kayak in its tracks while turning it almost 90 degrees from its previous course. Then, with my last remaining strength, I dug hard into the water, propelling the craft forward just enough to get out of his eminence’s way. I looked incredulously at the oblivious trio as they came up beside me. The driver was in his mid sixties, well dressed and looking like the most vile kind of egocentric moron. His wife sat next to him sipping on a wine glass, and whom I can only take as their son was about 35 and hulking in the front of the boat. The driver continued on his course, without a glance sideways. (Though the explanation is long, all this took place in a matter of seconds.) When the man got to within two feet of me, I looked him right in the eye, as though saying hello, and instead pointed out, "Next time, you need to go outside of me." As in, next time you see a smaller, slower boat, don't send them into the fray. Stay to the right. Be sensible. Have awareness of the boats around you. It was a reasonable statement, forcefully but not rudely put. They needed to know that what they were doing was at least disruptive if not dangerous. Well, clearly the man and his wife were much more intelligent than I had given them credit for, because they managed to produce an offspring whose mental capacity and thunderous wit could compete with any mouth-breathing football player. A couple of seconds later when our boats were a cowardly twenty feet apart I heard these well conceived words pierce through the buffeting winds from the mouth of the young "man" ten years my senior, "Next time why don't you BITE ME." The emotions that rolled through me for the remaining distance of my trip were tenfold: 1. HATRED 2. Foolishness for letting his developmental disability get to me 3. Anger at the world for letting people like that exist 4. Incredulity that someone would talk to another person like that in front of their parents 5. Incredulity that parents would let their child talk to another person like that 6. HATRED 7. Feelings of unfairness for not having a chance to tell that bastard all the ways in which he was a complete retard 8. Puzzlement about what I could have said instead to get my point across more gently but as firmly 9. Brooding and plotting my revenge 10. HATRED Even now I want to tear that guy's hair off, puncture the tires on his Dodge Ram Pickup Truck (for so he must drive), sink his pathetic little dinghy, slap him across the face, read him the rules of the water, send him to prison, and, oh yes, burn his entire Raider Memorabilia collection. Instead, I gave him a look that conveyed my disgust and pity, plunged my head back into the wind, and continued the loop around. However, I did not stop considering different ways of destroying his life for many hours into the evening. What a waste of a day. But though I always end up feeling foolish for reacting to these people, ten or fifteen days go by and I encounter another one with the same infuriating mixture of rotten persona and tiny cranium and I just want to spit in their face. I suppose it is yet another cycle of life. If only those mean, stupid people would just not exist, this world would be a great deal more pleasant.

As a soon-to-be architect I am thrilled to be living in one of the greatest Architecture Cities in the world. Los Angeles has so many incredible features that this fact is often overlooked. From the turn of the century when the brothers Greene crafted their genius in our fair city, celebrating the burgeoning outdoor-centric interests of the more wealthy inhabitants of such, Los Angeles has drawn the absolute creme of the architectural crop to its sunny basin. The Greenes were followed closely by Schindler, Wright, and Neutra, establishing LA as a place to find acceptance of even the most radical ideas that might stir lukewarm acceptance elsewhere. This gives my city a unique place in the world, as our design ethos developed into "try something new," and the architecture of Los Angeles began to influence the look of cities across the entire globe. There are many other notable examples, but Frank Gehry's work in LA has done more for the reputation of this city in both architectural terms and beyond than perhaps any other architect living or dead. He began by remodeling his house in the year of my birth, 1979, blipping onto the radar of the architectural community by using chainlink fence and corrugated metal as architectural elements and by leaving the studs in his interior walls bare of sheetrock. It was rugged, industrial, inexpensive, and completely original. His work can hardly be called any of those anymore save the last. I am biased by living here, but I believe his seminal masterpiece is the Walt Disney Concert Hall planted like a stainless-steel flower in the heart of Downtown. Its sinuous metal petals look constantly in motion, and the interior is as light and lithe as the exterior is massive. The auditorium inside, designed by Yasuhisa Toyota, can be considered one of the top 5 music halls in America for its astounding acoustics, a feature which brings a building of rare beauty into the annals "One of the Best Ever". Toyota and Gehry spent a great deal of time making sure that each and every seat in the hall would receive the best possible sound. It is with all of this background that I am thrilled beyond words to perform in this amazing venue tomorrow night. I look forward to seeing how they handled the backstage area of the hall. Standing in the middle of a sold-out sea of anxious faces, knowing that they will be hearing the very best of our more than 200 person choir belting out Beethoven's 9th Symphony at the tippy-top of our lungs is something I have looked forward to since before the place opened. It's going to rock!

My friends and I went to El Pollo Loco the other night and were informed by the speaker at the drive thru that we could order anything on the menu, but to be advised that they had run out of chicken.

I am a shy person by nature. I attribute this to my sheltered, only-child upbringing in the wild mountains of Altadena. I am therefore not usually inclined to conversations with random strangers, no matter how hot they are. However, the other night I had occasion to chat with two of these in succession, out of the blue and a bit less akwardly than you might expect. I was stationed at the Burbank airport anticipating my father's imminent arrival on Alaska Airlines flight 395. It was an hour and a half late due to a faulty lavitory door which, understandibly, had to be replaced prior to takeoff. Don't want the embarrassing situation of the door flying off in turbulence, exposing Jim the plumber's hairy naked corpus mid-dump to the entire planelength of soon to be horribly scarred human sardines. Anyway, back in the baggage claim area I stood waiting in the almost empty, slightly cramped space. There was one other person there, a girl by the name of Hslneagb (I'm bad at remembering these things), who was also waiting patiently for her father's arrival. We got to talking, and quickly discovered that we were the same person, but of different genders. Similar upbringing, similar interests, similar skills, similar beliefs, similar professions, similar ideas, etc. It was actually a little eerie, like she was stalking me Single White Female-ish, except that she made sure I knew she had a boyfriend within just a few minutes of the conversation. We talked for the whole hour and a half about all kinds of random things, beyond just isn't-the-weather-a-thing and can-you-believe-that-traffic-place that usually populates stranger-speak. Anyway, long story short the plane finally arrived and we went to greet our respective fathers (it was, by coincedence, Father's Day). My dad came over to me, beaming, a small asian girl in tow. "Chris, I want you to meet someone!" Oh crap. She looked sheepish and akward, but smiled at me expectantly. "This is Grsbson (perhaps it was something else, now that I think about it). She and I sat next to each other on the plane. She graduated from UCLA the same year you did!" In a brilliant attempt at humor, I said, "Wow. It's surprising that I've never seen you before." See, there are about 9000 people in each graduating class, there were 800 people in my major, and I usually had 400 people in each classroom with me. I thought it would be a funny joke. Her smile fell like a toddler on stilts. I recovered quickly. "Oh, is that a dog?" I pointed at her dog. The smile returned somewhat, and she nodded at the tiny thing in her arms as my dad explained that the two of them had spent the last three or so hours talking about, well, me. "I feel like I know all about you," she said, hiding her slight embarrassment with a laugh. Just as I was about to say something cool, clever, and stylish, her sister ran up and hugged her, careful not to squish the little quivering animal, which looked positively horror-struck at the sudden intrusion. "Well, uh, gee," I proclaimed magnificently. She realized the power and beauty of my statement and we all launched headlong into a pointed four-way silence that buckled the walls and sent the dog into a urinary fit. With full mouth-breathing smiles we stared stupidly at each other until I managed to break the force field with another profundity. "Ok, well, it was nice to meet you. Happy Father's Day!" Huuuuuuuuh. My dad went to pick up his bags and she moved off with her sister, looking back at me as if to say, "you are much more retarded than I was led to believe." When my cargo returned, bags in hand, he asked excitedly, "so, did you get her number?" Sigh.

Last night I got really frustrated with Audible.com and accidentally ripped the UIOP and { keyes off my laptop keyboard in a moment of fury. Just broke the crap out of them, sending little delicate plastic brackets flying across my dining room floor. It was a combination of me feeling angry at paying for files I couldn't download, having to deal with a site whose primary functions didn't work, and flimsy computer design. All I did was wipe my hand across my keyboard with a little more pressure and speed than usual, and suddenly I was staring down at a gaping wound, the tinkling of computer guts raining down like artillery shells in the Matrix. I almost fainted, as my laptop is brand spanking new and I had to go into a large chunk of debt to buy it. For the next hour or so I cannibalized plastic keyboard key mounting brackets from other, more useless keys (like the tilda and the "menu" key next to the space bar, who the hell uses that?) to get myself up and running again. I'm still really mad at Audible, though, because this is (obviously) all their fault. They should be called Audiful.com. Oooh. I just wanted to give this cautionary tale to all those out there who are mad at their machines. Don't take it out on the poor defenseless keyboard. It's not doing anything to you. Blame Audible.

On Thursday I turn old. In my mind I'm still just a kid. For the first time in my life I understand the cosmetics industry. It always stymied me, I couldn't understand why people would do such horrible things to themselves just to artificially look younger. But I finally get it. It's not about looking younger, its about trying to get the image in the mirror to match the image in their head. No one ever feels as old as they really are. This is something I've been aware of for a while, but only now as I face my 26th year of consciousness do I understand its true importance. When I turned ten that extra digit made me nervous. I realized then that some subtle shift had occurred, that I had gained a decimal place that would stick with me for the rest of my life. Most likely, I now had all the digits that I would ever have, the finality of the thought putting my life until that point into an odd perspective, like I had joined an exclusive club that was made up primarily of people I did not yet identify with. I could only look back at my childhood and know that it was mostly over, and certainly I would never be able to go back to having just one number. When I turned thirteen I lamented the addition of such a weighty suffix to my age. In my mind, I was still getting over being a double-digiter, and all of a sudden I had to face the tidal wave of stigma associated with teenagerness. I spent the first couple of years just coming to terms with my new, more dangerous peers. Strange things happened to the face in the mirror, my visage no longer reflecting the innocence (naiveté) of my mental persona. I put off learning to drive until it was thrust upon me by peer pressure when I was 16 and a half. When my driving instructor arrived at my house for our first lesson, I had had my learner's permit for a good six months and had never been behind the wheel. Driving was for older people, not little kids like me. I completed the course and didn't take the test for months afterward. It took me a good eight months just to wrap my mind around the fact that I might be qualified to try and control one of these metal elephants. Eighteen and off to college. If not for my parents driving me to the dorm on the first day of orientation, I would still be living at home. Well, you know what I mean. Having a room of my own (more precisely a 4x8' mattress on top of the bunk bed in my triple) that was not only not attached to my house but was more than 30 miles away seemed inconceivable, if I may quote the Princess Bride. I've been in my late teens ever since. Not willing to capitulate to yet another alteration of my numbers, I mentally held off doubling that first digit. So, in my mind, I'm still 19. But now I look in the mirror and see, for all intents and purposes, a 26 year old fossil sobbing back at me. I hang on to my younger mental image not out of vanity or conceit, as I imagined the plastic-surgeoned Hollywood-istas would, but out of fright and desperation. Time moves like a pile of rubble down a slope. At first it creeps along slowly, letting us take in great views of the vast but ultimately unconsidered future. It imperceptibly picks up momentum, the bits of rubbish jostling us around a little more violently as we begin to sink into the rocky pile. Soon we can feel the breeze in our face and realize a shift is occurring, that this ride may not be as painless as we thought, that our calculations about its duration may have been slightly off. At some point a large rock smacks us in the face and we understand at once that we cannot be passive about this trip, because we are now sunk to our waists in a thick mass of hard, dense objects hurtling recklessly towards the as yet unseen but inevitable bottom. How will it turn out? Will we come to a crashing end, the rocks smashing our bones to bits as we lie helpless and broken in some dark, lonely place? Or will we slowly suffocate in the rubble, sinking to our doom, never to see the final destination we had been heading for all this time? This is the source of said fright and desperation. The great 26 on Thursday is that first unification of face and rock. I can no longer even pretend that I am still a youngster. I had all of these grand ideas about what I would do before I was old; incredible things that only young people can reasonably attempt. At least 25 was still in the first half of the 20s, and when you're in the first half, you've barely begun. I am now planted firmly in the second half, with no choice but to try to reconcile my view of myself and the real me, the things I wanted to have done vs. the things that I actually have. That's the real reason behind the cult of youth in America. It stems not from vanity, but from the very potent anxiety over our unrealized goals and ambitions.