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.

My Visa card issuer just updated my card and changed the account number. I of course need to share the new information with companies that charge that card, so I just called 24 Hour Fitness.

Their answering machine message says they’re closed.

Remember how much I love AT&T?  Mostly because of the fantastic service. If you’ve got AT&T, I’m sure you can relate. Well, lately they’ve been extra solicitous.

I got a “thank you” card in the mail from AT&T, “thanking me” for sticking it out with U-verse for two years now. As a thank you, they also promise two rewards:  a free On Demand movie rental, up to $6, and a $15 AT&T Visa “Reward Card” that I can redeem however I wish. All I have to do is go online and redeem it. They’re even so nice as to give me a printed step-by-step walkthrough of how to do this. So I did this. Here’s what I found out:

• The “free” On Demand credit of $6 will credit to my account in 1-2 months. In other words, after I’ve already spent about $400 — unless I switch from AT&T. Which is kind of what happens with the other offer as well:
• The prepaid Visa will be sent to me after I’ve stayed on the service for another four months. My U-verse bill (for cable, phone, and internet) is $194/month. So actually, this “thank you” is really a tiny discount to get me to stay longer. Precisely, it’s the equivalent of a $15 discount off about a $600 bill.  That’s a discount of .025%. I’m making an offer right here and now:  I’m currently engaged in several negotiations. If any of those people I speaking with would like a discount of .025% and they’ll sign right now — just let me know. You can have it.
• When I went online to redeem the card and learned these things, I also saw this encouraging text about the $15 “thank you” “reward” card:

So when you actually want the fifteen-buck thank-you card, it’s worth only ten.

I threw it all in the trash and considered, again, switching to Charter.

In the past 10 days I’ve seen three performances that were simultaneously spectacular and enervating — Robert Wilson and Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach at LA Opera; Robert Wilson delivering John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing at UCLA; and Brian Wilson in concert last night with some of the Beach Boys and with Jeff Beck.

All three of these are going to inform my thinking for a while, in a number of ways. Because all three of them balanced performance elements of the highest level with stretches of tedium that leave me asking, “Is that intentional?”

I haven’t fully synthesized my thoughts about this yet, but here’s the condensed version:

Einstein on the Beach is a masterpiece. The stage images, often featuring performers moving ever so slightly, when matched with the repetitive, minimalist music of Philip Glass, frequently left me in a trance. I was enveloped with this music and with the visuals. When I wasn’t in a euphoric or trance state, i.e., when I was able to reassert my intellect, I started thinking about things, such as:  “What does this mean? When will something happen? And is this why Rich Roesberg once told me the only music he can’t listen to is Philip Glass?” I was so expectant of something happening — and lots did, in sometimes astonishingly small ways — that the intermissionless 4.5-hour opera went by without my ever thinking I needed to run to the bathroom.

Lecture on Nothing includes the infamous section where a piece of spoken word is repeated 13 times. The piece is a “lecture” composed on a complex time signature — words “performed” as music — but I have to admit feeling like the woman at the first reading of it who said she couldn’t stand it any more and ran out. At the same time, the silences and pauses were somehow breathtaking — because our lives are so often filled with clutter (of noise, of sound, of music, of language, of advertising) that its absence is startling. Wilson also brought a level of staging to it, in his trademark minutely observed motions, that increased my hyperawareness.

The show last night at the Greek Theatre left me wondering again if Brian Wilson isn’t a counterprogramming genius. The last time I saw him (sans the Beach Boys name) was at the Hollywood Bowl in 2007. For that show, he had a laughably bad  would-be symphonic-choir band open for him; honest to God, our entire section was beside ourselves with laughter and mocking. After that, Wilson seemed like a genius, even though he had all the affect of 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. Last night, he put in an exceptional first set, performing much of Pet Sounds, and with Al Jardine in tow, to the incredible delight of everyone in the venue. Astounding doesn’t begin to convey the feeling of hearing that music performed so well by two of the guys who produced it almost 50 years ago. After a few more Beach Boys songs, including a wonderful rendition of Sail On Sailor, Jeff Beck and his band were given the stage for a 45-minute set. In my analysis of these three events, the set by Beck and company would be the purposely tedious section that renders a specific counter-response (in this case, further enhancing Brian Wilson’s reputation and the impact of his performance). Forty-five minutes of noodling around on a guitar, no matter how self-indulgently, doesn’t constitute a concert or, at least, not one I want to see. I now understand how my wife felt the last time she gamely accompanied me to a concert by King Crimson — except they actually have songs. As I said to my companion last night, the only thing Jeff Beck needs is a singer, and some songs.

I’ve got two more concerts this year — Thomas Dolby, and Police, both in November — and I’m hoping to get to that Magritte show this week in New York.  The “mystery of the ordinary,” indeed.

Need help understanding color theory? This should help.

I’m a fan of the work of the late artist Mike Sekowsky, whose career in comics spanned the 1940’s through the 1970’s, including such notable DC comics as Justice League of America, Metal Men, Wonder Woman, Brave and the Bold, and assorted science fiction comics. If you read DC comics at all in those years, it was practically impossible to miss his work — moreso because his style was so recognizable.

Except, it seems, by DC Comics. Because when you go to this page, you’ll discover that DC is attributing all his work to “Josephine” Sekowsky.

Sekowsky had a reputation for being difficult. But I don’t believe he had a reputation for gender confusion. (And perhaps the opposite; see the above image — which also helps to reveal why so many of us remember his drawings of Wonder Woman and Black Canary.) So it looks like DC has accidentally misattributed all of his work, which is a terrible shame. Especially toward someone who put such an indelible stamp on so much of their history.

(The above images are also not by Josephine Sekowsky.)