Doublet and Hose

One of the benefits of travelling in the off season is you get to see winter fashions that never really make it to LA. This seemed to have been the 'look' on my most recent trip: double-breasted wool coat, black tights, and brown shoes. (I assume there is a miniskirt or something in there somewhere...) I bet no one thought the doublet-and-hose look would ever come back. This comes so shortly on the heels of skirt-over-jeans and shorts-with-tights, things I'd have thought looked so ridiculous no one would ever wear them in public. Fashion is mysterious. Incidentally, it appears that listening to French-language radio has a beneficial effect on my drawing skills. Perhaps this is the secret of all those ridiculously talented bande-dessine artists?

Clarisse McClellan

It's impossible to say how much Fahrenheit 451 influenced the direction my life would take, or how much I was already a dangerous nonconformist by Grade 9 when I read it, but when I revisited the book for the first time recently I was astonished at how familiar Clarisse McClellan seemed to be . . .

Santa Monica Bay

Most of the time it's a monotonous concreted-over boxy dustbowl, but every so often Southern California can be so beautiful you understand what attracted people in the first place (who then built boxes, concreted it over, and made it as dull as possible).