Welcome to Ink Pen Shmee - FTL to LA

I'm Ink Pen Shmee, a writer and relatively recent Florida to LA transplant.

Ink Pen is up and running. Welcome.

This was an action-packed week in LA. Living in LA, it's often difficult to decide whether to stay in and just let the world spin around you (missed the Built to Spill concert at the awesome Henry Fonda Theatre last night) or to go out and find either great tedium (traffic, parking) or great enjoyment - last Sunday's amazing Paul Oakenfold and Underworld concert at the equally amazing Hollywood Bowl, for example.

A Florida girl like me wonders how is such a venue as the Hollywood Bowl even possible? When you go to a concert there, you essentially walk up a scenic mountain path (with tickets like mine, you're way up at the top!) ,past groups of people sitting on blankets or at picnic tables with bottles of wine (it really is a wine-centric experience), to your seat, where you continue to dine and drink as the sun sets over the Hollywood Hills. Just when dusk reaches it's breaking point, your favorite band's opening act comes on, and night sets in as the music builds to your favorite act. It's insane.

After the show, we went backstage and met Paul, who was a chummy center-of-attention kind of fellow. He joked about coming-of-age under the direction of a mutual acquaintance, made us giggle and was on to other things. We searched for alcoholic refreshments, but the few bottles that were around were empty, so we turned our attention to trying to figure out whether this blond guy in the room was the singer for Underworld, but we couldn't tell, so we didn't get to meet any of Underworld. But that guy did bump into me and I said, "Excuse me," which was quasi-remarkable.

Back in Florida, going to a concert venue often felt like going back to the state's prison-like public high schools. You wait in long lines to get searched, and then you're redirected all over the place like cattle until you find your seat, where you sit and wait for so long for the bands to start that you're mad at them when they finally take the stage, you forgive them when they play your favorite songs, and you realize that, more often than not, it's just not worth it to go. Great bands almost never make it down the peninsula to Florida, so the next time one does come, you do go and you kick yourself again.

At the Hollywood Bowl, and the Fonda too (except for their weird, but understandable "no gum" rule), it's just like the concert fits in to a great hang out space. It's sweet.

Speaking of the Fonda, Six-String Shmee and I went to watch the Spoon concert on Tuesday night, and the Austin quartet was A-okay. Their music is fun, but they're not my favorite and the crowd in the main room was so thick that I had to get out and up to the rooftop lounge, where, you guessed it, I spotted a celebrity smoking a cigarette and chatting up a short brunet. Who was it? That guy with the long face who got his ass kicked in Dazed and Confused, otherwise known as the co-star of Judy Delpy's new movie, 2 Days in Paris, Adam Goldberg. Thought he's not exactly a heartthrob, I must say he's grown into his face, and he's not too bad at all these days. I usually can't resist approaching celebrities with the weirdest questions and comments that pop into my head, but it just doesn't seem like the thing to do in the cooler-than-thou setting of a too-cool-for-school Spoon concert.

One of the perks (besides saving money that you don't have anyway) of staying in in LA that you get to meditate on what you're doing here and if you're going to last, if you should or shouldn't work out and look for inspiration to stick with it. On Thursday night, I stayed in and found a few gems when I sifted through my British Literature anthology from college. If you were hoping for the aphorisms of Oscar Wilde, lucky break for you:

"Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know."

"One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that, would tell one anything."

My favorite:
"Twenty years of romance makes a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage makes her look like a public building."