Yesterday, I booked my trip to Los Angeles for the feature story I'm doing on the adult movie industry. I'll be there for about a week. I'm staying in Hollywood. I'll be driving back and forth over the Hollywood Hills, which divide the real Hollywood from the Other Hollywood, just like old times.
I got a camera. I will be taking photographs, as well.
At this stage, there is a lot of talking on the phone, a lot of poking around the Internet, a lot of jotting of random notes that will be revisited in several weeks and deemed incomprehensible.
There's a bit of a balance to be struck here, between planning and chaos. Some things I expected to be happening while I'm there are not, but you never know what will happen when you are where you happen to be.
I guess it's sort of like this photograph. I went out on the front porch to take some test shots, so I could download the photos onto my computer for the first time and figure out how to use the software. I took some shots of bright flowers in pots that looked like photos taken by someone who had escaped from a Hallmark insane asylum. After a while, I jutted my arm out and took this random snap of the trees against the sky, of which someone said: "The tree is like a dendritic forest--like a slide of the brain of a rat who'd been raised in an enriched environment."
A rat in a maze.
