LA Quickie and the Man of San Quentin
On this LA quickie, I arrived in Santa Monica at 11:40PM yesterday, and I’ll be back in Portland tonight just a little earlier. This trip was for casting call backs for a commercial that’s finally getting made. Well, three of mine are finally getting made actually, but I’m most excited about this one. It will be funny. And I don’t mean funny like a clown car accident. Note: the spot doesn’t have a clown car or an accident.
A few photos:
AVIS. We Try Harder…to Create A Sorry Window Into the Human Condition.™
The AVIS fluid dispensers.
Casting. The Indian actor in this group also played Baboo, the Pakistani restauranteur on Seinfeld.
Casting and lunch only took until 2. Afterward, we walked back to the production company to discuss a few things. On the way there, the directors ran into the man who does the voice to Spongebob Squarepants. I wasn’t told this until afterward, otherwise I would have gotten a picture. The directors on this project have worked on music videos and motion pictures, as well as a few commercials. It’s exciting to talk about the particulars of the project because of how cool and thoughtful they carry themselves. Once again, the machine of commercial production has ignited, leaving me as a small but powerful cog.
We took a quick dinner at a weird second floor restaurant called Killer Shrimp. The only thing on the menu was shrimp prepared in a spicy, flavorful broth made from stock, garlic, rosemary, chili, and other odds and ends. The only customizing to be done was whether to eat it with french bread, rice or pasta. We ordered the original, bread option. Each expensive bowl contained a dozen shrimp that we fished out with bread, set to cool on a plate, gutted, and ate. I only had the appetite for about 6 shrimp because I was eating a slice of bread with each. Pretty good broth, but I don’t know about “killer.” The powerlines running along the strip mall were crackling with electricity.
There was a horrible accident in Marina Del Rey that caused a traffic backup. A woman had slammed her car into a light pole, knocking it over and causing massive damage to herself and her car. She was getting loaded into the ambulance as we drove by. A small Dora the Explorer backpack was resting on her legs, Dora’s smiling face looking oblivious.
I’ll be back down in LA next week, so if you want to break into my apartment and steal my soiled sheets and garbage bin encrusted with used dental floss, then would be the time. Also, if you want to leave a fully prepared turkey dinner and sophisticated softcore pornographic magazines, that’d be swell too. Just clear a space on my windowsill by ecologically removing the lead paint chips and dust. Might as well do the blinds while you’re at it.
In other news:
One visitor to my site last month was from San Quentin. He or she looked at forty pages for over two hours. The actual numbers are a little murky since I only have tracking code on my main pages, so he could have looked at more and for longer for all I know. 
Luckily, whoever this mystery man is, he only came once. Was he put to death? Of any of my ten thousand visitors last month, I’m most interested in what his thoughts on this whole spread are.