Visiting LA for business and pleasure this weekend. Have to find an apartment to move into on the first of Feb, and I also need to retrieve some TCK footage from Matchframe, the post-house that's handling our online. I've seen a few promising rooms for rent, though I haven't written a check yet. I don't think I'll have a problem ultimately finding what I need (read: what I can afford near the beach).

In the meantime I stopped by the set of Austin expat Alex Holdridge's new movie, called In Search of a Midnight Kiss. I'm not sure if this is Alex's "I hate LA" movie, or one version of it, but the scene that I saw him shooting was good 'n funny. Brian McGuire is in it along with Scoot, Robert Murphy, and Holdridge himself. Brian plays a character named Jacob -- I have reason to be nervous knowing how Alex rips his narratives from the teeth of his own life. But it does seem that the character has more in common with McGuire that anyone else. From what I could gather without reading the script, the film is about a young filmmaker/writer who has recently moved to LA and is finding life to be harder, meaner, and less nice. There are two intertwining relationships within the story and a lot of good dialogue to boot. Alex is shooting it ultra-shoestring-can-you-spare-a-dime style, which got me feeling all nostalgic and shit. Just a camera, some lights, a few actors and a can-do attitude. The day I was there they were scheduled to shoot 17 pages of script. By noon they had reached page 5 -- not sure if they made the rest, but it doesn't really matter because he will shoot it, he will edit it, he will reshoot what he needs to reshoot and it will be good. If you need more evidence to be convinced, know that Seth Caplan is producing it.

Yesterday I saw Match Point -- hella-good moviemaking by Mr. Woody Allen. Took a while to get going but then it kept me on the edge of my cushioned, non-stadium-seating seat. There are wonderful parallels to Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment.

Today I went to the LA Philharmonic at the Disney Concert Hall to hear Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No.1 in D major and Bruckner's Symphony No. 8 in C minor. I know very little about classical music, but I found Prokofiev to be lithe and serpentine, and Bruckner to be clunky-but-good. Put that in the liner notes.

Lately my fear of a chaotic, panic-ridden, water-scarce, riots-everywhere Los Angeles has been on the rise. Maybe it's because I just read an article in the New Yorker about New Orleans during/after Katrina, or maybe I'm just remembering a film I saw at SXSW last year called Waterborne, which is about a biological terrorist attack aimed at LAs water system. But if something went wrong here, something on the scale of what happened in New Orleans, then things could really get effed up here. Imagine trying to evacuate LA. Imagine not having enough water in LA. Of course a career in film is much more important to me right now, so I'm just going to ignore these thoughts, stock up on some bottled water, and go see Harry Pothead and the Sorcerers Stoned.