I'm thinking about moving to Los Angeles. First it was Eben who mentioned that he's leaving Seattle for either Oakland or LA and then it was Davemaze musing that his life might not suck so much down there. Last week we were supposed to take a little road trip down there. LA is strangely alluring to me right now.

Dave called me on Friday and said something to the effect of "You can't stop us, YES, we will prevail. They cannot beat Tom Hanks and Bruce Springsteen. They're culture-carpet-bombing the earth. Turn on the TV! Oh my God, Stevie Wonder. We cannot lose with these guys on our side. I see it all now and I'm not afraid." Or something like that. He's right of course. There's a beam of bright white light shooting into the sky out of Hollywood and splintering into an umbrella of 5 billion stars. We have reach that no terrorist could ever dream of. It is the closest thing we have on the earth to "The Force".

Not only do we have more media, not only more sophisticated media, we have BETTER media. The Oscars is the most important global cultural event of our times. For sheer concentrated planetary focus, it kills the Olympics. I saw people drooling over the Oscars in India that spoke no English and never went to anything but Bollywood films. I'm sure to be accused of cultural elitism, slanting the story to make it look like an Indian kid is going to choose Michael Jordan as a hero over Sachin Tendulkar. No, calm down, these things are incremental. But I do know that even though the kid has never shot a basketball, he still wants a Chicago Bulls jersey.

This is what makes me want to go down there. As my man Eben said today, "LA is where the rubber meets the road. People in SF, yeah they make art but people go to LA if they want to get their stuff out there. That's where you go to get seen and heard. That's what I'm in it for and I want to be surrounded by people who are going for it." Fuck the pseudo-integrity of obscurity.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I always associated moving there with the countless duffs across America that pack it up and try to make it in show business. I always thought LA was shallow. I always thought it would be too much driving. None of that shit seems to matter to me any more. I've already made it. I embrace my surface qualities, revel in them even. I'm going down there to be with the other stars and lend my bit of light to the force. I'm gonna test drive a '73 Porsche 911 Targa tomorrow.