With a lot of these logos, somebody’s gotten the shaft.

The ostrich pillow.

I have a short play that’s being performed during Moving Arts’ holiday party this Saturday evening. It’s one of six plays that will be staged at various locations around a large house in the Hollywood Hills.

I invited a relative to join us for this on Saturday night. Every industry has its jargon; when you’re a practitioner in that industry, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s jargon and therefore what people won’t automatically understand. So when I invited her to join me for a holiday cocktail party “in a large house, with six brief environmentally staged plays,” she asked me, “What is an environmentally staged play?”

I explained that an “environmentally staged play” means it happens in different locations and is specific to those locations. (Mine is set in a bedroom, and is performed in a bedroom.)

She responded, “The plays sound interesting. We were thinking it meant the props were all from recycled materials.”

Which, of course, makes sense on the face of it. Especially given that I once produced a play called “Cockroach Nation” with set dressing largely drawn from trash….

This new “mood sweater” that “spills the beans about your true feelings.” I think everyone already knows my true feelings just about all the time.

Here are The 14 Habits of Highly Miserable People.

One way in which the rain does actually affect us here in LA (as opposed to some people just thinking it has an effect): The mail arrives later. It’s 3:51 p.m. Still no mail! Frustrating.

(Can you guess how I feel about the proposal to eliminate Saturday delivery?)

I’ve lived in Los Angeles for more than 26 years now. Even now, the effect that rain has on the local psychology never fails to amaze me. Yesterday and today, it’s been raining. Judging by the reaction, you would think it was a rain of frogs.

A few months ago, I signed up for “emergency warning” texts from the local and state police. If there’s something big going on, like a freeway collapse or a shooting spree, I figured I’d want to know about it. California, and Los Angeles in particular, has had more than its share of disasters.

So here’s the text I got earlier today, while in my playwriting workshop, from the state police:  “LA storm brings rain.”

Pere Ubu is playing here in Los Angeles on December 17th. I’ll be there, and I hope you will be too. Here’s the link for information and tickets.

Sometimes we are lucky enough in life to find an art product that truly suits us. We’re not always clear why it is that it suits us, it just does, and we are sometimes bewildered why it doesn’t suit more people because that thing is so palpably astonishing to us. I’m passionate enough, and naive enough, about Pere Ubu and what I believe to be their extraordinary catalog that I can’t help but feel it impossible to understand why more people haven’t embraced it. In their 35-year career, they’ve proved that they can do, well, almost anything: they are post-punk pioneers who have also produced sophisticated but appealing pop albums, explored the blues, embraced their own form of Captain Beefheart-infused jazz, and experimented at every turn with introducing new sounds and new ideas into what in different hands would be a hidebound endeavor of album-tour-album-tour-album-tour, liberally laced with old ideas executed in old ways. (For one example of that approach, consult any of those 90’s hair bands. Or Rod Stewart.) I can only assume that it’s their very experimentation and the shock of their difference that has kept them on the commercial margins. Because they are not singleminded or simpleminded in their tastes and explorations, few have followed. That is a shame.

It is also a shame, to me, that the ticket prices for the concert above are only $13 – $15. That’s right — for one of America’s most important bands, the band that forms the bridge between the gleaming Brian Wilson / Van Dyke Parks partnership and everything alternative that’s interesting since then — the ticket price is the cost of the latest incoherent blockbuster spectacular at your local megaplex. The ticket price for acts no one wants to see starts at 20 bucks — but Pere Ubu (!) is 35% off that. I don’t know how that price got set, but I’m concerned that it’s low enough to be more insulting than attracting.

I can only hope that whoever reads this buys a ticket and shows up.

In the meantime, those relative few of us who savor Pere Ubu will be there.

The four of you hunched over laptops does not equal performance, just as that cacophony of sound effects does not equal music.

My theory about why you’re the opening act: You’re so bad that the headliner will seem like The Beatles by comparison. So your transparent failure has been encouraged.

If you can see me back here, now you know why I’m typing into my phone. As is everyone else back here.

I was sorry to learn just now of the death of Syd Field, a colleague of mine when I was teaching in the graduate writing program at the University of Southern California. Syd was a nice guy and a good teacher. And a bit influence:  just about everyone in Hollywood has read his book. Here’s the obit.

Also, I seem to have missed the passing of Marcia Wallace. Just over five years ago, Marcia was in a special performance of one of my plays — a one-night-only fundraising thing — and I have to say, she killed it. I knew the thing was funny (it had been done before), but she found all sorts of new things that made me seem like a comedy genius. She was very sweet to work with. I grew up watching her on The Bob Newhart Show, so getting to work with her, however briefly, felt like one of those situations where you ask yourself how you wound up this lucky in life. I’m sorry we’ll never get another chance. I hope that, somewhere in my “records” such as they are, I can find that photo we took together.