Until this Saturday, I couldn’t figure out why I was constantly running out of change. I always keep coins in the armrest of my car so that I can pay parking meters. I know to do that, because the parking outside Moving Arts, where I lead my weekly playwriting workshop, is metered. It has been for about 12 years; for the four years before that, it was free. For 12 years I haven’t had to scrounge around for change, but now, for the second week in a row I was asking everybody else in the workshop if they had change for a couple of bucks.

That was when I realized:  I was ask for change for a couple of bucks. The City of Los Angeles had raised the price of parking. “They doubled the price of parking,” I said. But then someone corrected me:  “No, they quadrupled the price of parking.” It used to be 25¢ an hour — effective January 1st, it’s 25¢ for 15 minutes.

A quick search on the internet revealed that yes, the City has raised these meter rates all over the place, and yes, people are hopping mad. More changes are on the way. Until now, parking at a meter was free after 6 p.m.; soon it’ll be paid parking until 8 p.m. and, no doubt, upward. The Daily News says that the City is projecting $18 million in new revenue from these parking schemes.

I don’t think it’s the increase in the price to park that has me so agitated. After all, the price to use a parking lot is more like $8-$28. (That’s why they’re called lots.)  No, it’s the fact that these meters don’t take credit cards — something almost all new meters do. The cost of a parking ticket, by the way, is $45 — and they patrol diligently outside our theatre. Which leads me to wonder aloud if the reason that the City hasn’t put in parking meters that will accept credit cards is because they’d rather dispense parking tickets.

This post, where I said that I read one to two books a week, was greeted with much curiosity by people I’ve run into around town. To paraphrase Dorothy Parker, the questions ran the gamut from A to B: “How do you do that?” and “Oh yeah? What were they?” The first is easy to answer: by doing that. The second is the reason behind this post.

I just finished The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. Five years ago, my brother Ray, who hadn’t read a novel in perhaps 20 years, marveled over it and warned me that it would make me cry (as it did him). He was right. It made me cry twice. That’s tough to do. (I’m very much of the school “Get over it.”) It had another result as well: Now I hate the Taliban more than ever. That’s the power of fiction.

A side note on this book. In that same post, I noted the conversation with businessmen who read No books. Nothing. None at all. Yesterday I had a meeting with three guys in pharmaceuticals, two of them owners of the company. They’re obviously smart men. I said to them what I say to a number of people I write corporate copy for: “I still read great Russian novels, but nobody else does.” This is shorthand for: The text has to be brief. But this time, still under the spell of “The Kite Runner,” I added, “Right now, I’m reading a novel by an Afghani.” Guy #1 says, “What is it?” I tell him. He says, “I read that.” Guy #2 chimes in: “I read that too.” Then we talk about the book, three men in their 40’s or 50’s who’ve been deeply moved by the same novel. (What are the odds?) And my brother being the fourth. One of the guys volunteers, re the author’s latest, “His new one’s even better.” On the way out, the one partner started to talk art with me — visual art. It turns out that all the paintings in the office are by him. And they’re really good. What did he want to discuss? German Expressionism. It was tempting to hang out just to talk about that further. (I almost brought up “The Testament of Dr. Mabuse,” my obsession for which continues (as I discussed here and here and here.))

I also read How The World Works by my friend Doug Hackney. This also made me cry, but for a different reason: I wish I knew then what Doug knows now. Doug was in business intelligence business before people knew what business intelligence was. If this book is any indication, beauty may be skin deep, but smarts go all the way through.

Although it would get me through (or over) the 405 freeway more quickly.

One day later, the Obama presidency still seems hard to believe. As though I’m going to wake up any moment now and find the old quote-unquote president back on the tube stripping more varnish from the republic.

On the one hand, Obama certainly looks and acts like a president — the sort of idealized entertainment president we’ve been hankering for. Michael Douglas in “The American President,” or Kevin Kline in “Dave.” Someone decent and articulate who is glamorous without being pretty. Someone who wears the imprimatur well and speaks to the cause of the country and is going to get something done before the credits roll.
On the other hand, it’s precisely that movie-star nobility that’s making it hard to believe. If he resembles the presidency so many of us desired, he in no way resembles the presidents we’ve endured, who in the past forty years have generally been small-minded gut fighters, self-centered slobs, and incurious chimps with evil sidekicks. I don’t recall the quote-unquote feting the defeated John Kerry shortly thereafter (indeed, what I recall is his saying that he now had political capital he was looking forward to spending — and spend it he did). But there was Obama saying very nice and largely true things about John McCain at a tribute. Maybe that’s smart — it is — but maybe it’s also decent and heartfelt. And maybe it sets the tone that now we have a grown-up in this office. I’m glad to see him there.

A couple of years ago I went to see Brian Wilson perform “Pet Sounds” at the Hollywood Bowl. It wasn’t for the fainthearted. To this day, I can summon up the feeling of angst and dread that all of us in the audience had for probably the first third of the show, when it wasn’t clear that Wilson knew who he was or where he was or who we were or what this was all about. You know that guy we’ve all seen at one point or another, on a subway or a bus or a street corner, whose mouth moves wrong and whose body isn’t in sync with whatever his mind thinks is going on? That was Brian Wilson that night. At some point his brain and his body realized there was a band behind him playing his music and he clicked into gear. Thankfully. But I knew I couldn’t — and wouldn’t — go see him perform again, no matter how much I love all that music. In fact, precisely because of how much I love all that music.

Just now I happened to come across Wilson again, this time on the Tavis Smiley show, promoting the dvd of his recent album, “That Lucky Old Son.” I wish I hadn’t. While Smiley struggled to get a conversation going, there sat Wilson very much like someone who’s been hit in the head with a frying pan. I’m trying to think of when last I felt so sorry for an interviewer, and nothing is coming to mind. The segment was mercifully brief, but it didn’t feel that way. The early questions elicited responses far shorter than what the host was expecting, which left him paddling around looking for more things to ask. When Smiley asked Wilson, a musician with a career of more than 40 years who after all was there plugging a dvd, if he’d ever imagined there’d be so many new ways to promote music, Wilson’s response was something like, “No.” Although he did then bemoan the death of radio. Smiley followed up to ask if the success of the Beach Boys would have been possible at the time without radio; Wilson didn’t know. Neither does anyone else — but at least we might have speculated, for the purpose of polite conversation. This being a chat show and all. But then, we didn’t fry our brains four decades ago.

I haven’t bought “That Lucky Old Son,” cd or dvd. I thought “Smile” was terrific, but it was almost entirely terrific because it was the rescue and rehabilitation of 40-year-old material. Judging from the video clip that was screened from the new dvd, Wilson can’t even sing now. I don’t think I want to hear any more.

Could this have worked out differently for Brian Wilson? I don’t know, but I’ll venture a comparison. His competitor and contemporary, Paul McCartney, just put out what is certainly his best new disc in 25 years or more. “Electric Arguments,” released under the name of McCartney’s side project The Fireman, captures the sound and excitement of the Beatles without getting trapped in the past. “Nothing Too Much Just Out of Sight” is the sort of howling blues vocal we haven’t heard from him since “Why Don’t We Do It In the Road?” circa 1968. Other tracks are reminiscent of “Abbey Road” or “Let It Be” — or nothing in the Beatles catalog. McCartney, recording under this pseudonym, sounds liberated from his own reputation, playing and singing with the freshness of youth. I only wish I could say the same for his friend Brian.

And not a moment too soon.

The current Newsweek tries to imagine how to rehabilitate George W. Bush’s reputation. They go for the obvious — admit the mistakes on Iraq and the economy; lay claim for improving education, and AIDS treatment in Africa; and blame everything else on how “the terrorists” changed the game and nobody had a playbook.

But I’ve got a better way to rehabilitate him, one that should be even more obvious: Send him to prison. That’s what it’s there for.

No, Virginia, music videos did not die out with the MTV we remember. They just went online. Here’s the one for “Ulysses,” the new single from Franz Ferdinand. The video’s okay — the song is great.