Entries 108

Page 3 of 5

“So, if Mitzi was attracted to you but you’re not attracted to humans, why didn’t she ever, uh,” I tried to be delicate but some things can’t be put delicately, “fix that with her magics.” “What ...

---

“You can’t argue a thing into being,” she said, “that’s not how magic works.” You can conjure a little through work and practice, you can gamble or bargain or negotiate with the higher or even th...

---

One of the other upsides of Los Angeles, for all the bad things you can say about it, is the utter timelessness of living there. You can’t account for seasons in the way you can in other parts of...

---

Not everything is awful about Los Angeles, I’m not saying that. I don’t want to say that. It’s just that every joy there has a dark side, the kind of deep shadows that can only be cast in the bla...

---

There are few phrases with a stronger one-two of power and malleability in our English than “the end of the world”. It means so damned much to so many but also a different thing to nearly every p...

---

“I hate those The Secret books,” she told Frank more than once, “the idea that magic’s simple as projecting intentions then getting whatever you want, such a childish and hungry and greedy way of...

---

“You play any instruments?” Frank asked, deflecting back to me. “My brother,” I said, “brilliant guitarist, though he’s rusty. My dad is, was,” Frank and I both stumble on the line between what i...

---

“So, why did you study us in two separate disciplines?” I asked Frank, trying to change the subject from my own flaws, foibles, folly. “How do you mean?” “I mean, you taught human music and human...

---

“And then what happened?” I asked the sasquatch, as he stopped to listen to the distant sounds of people insulting each other in different dialects of Spanish, in the diner’s back-of-house. “That...

---

Frank Yetti prefers to say that he is “seven feet tall” in American English, in local measurement vernacular, even though that’s not exactly true. If you put him in the cliché of a general practi...

---

You’d figure a sasquatch wouldn’t have much to be afraid of in our world, even a small yeti like Frank. Six-foot-eleven would seem to ensure that, if nothing else, he would be the last busker in ...

---

We kept coming back around to that lyric “it never rains in Southern California, it pours” which is true enough, both literally and metaphorically. In the places where there isn’t often rain, eve...

---

Fascination almost always starts out as fear, a fear that is eventually overcome while that focus lingers on. It’s a feature that seems to come standard with any level of sentience, human, animal...

---

“Ultimately, people only want stories if they can convince themselves they’re real,” the yeti said, as he set his coffee back on the saucer, “at least plausibly real. My people, yours, all people...

---

I’ve seen The Eels, the vehicle for their front-man Mark Everett, live twice. Once in L.A. with my brother, once in Brooklyn with my then-girlfriend. At the El Rey, their opening act was a Britis...

---

“What was he like, Frank?” “Who?” “Zevon,” I asked the sasquatch, half honest curiosity, half changing the subject, “you must have some crazy stories, working the road for Warren Zevon.” Frank s...

---

“When I was young.” Frank never said when he was “little”, always when he was young. You’d think it was because he was a sasquatch, nearly-seven-feet tall but that wasn’t why at all. As if he was...

---

Frank started keeping a diary of his experiences, once he realized it was going to be a long time before he found his people again, if he was ever going to find his people again. At first, he wro...

---

You’ll drive down from the San Fernando Valley, from the strivers and the strife, the immigrant markets with names you can’t pronounce and the white kids from the East Coast going broke for their...

---

There’s a line on Figure Eight by Elliott Smith, his spirit mentioned previous, that goes “Got a foot in the door, God knows what for”. When first I listened, I thought it just clever songwriting...

---

Before it became The Suburbs, the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles was just a bunch of orange groves. You can still receive lectures from local old-timers about those days, whether they a...

---

“It’s a hell of a thing, Mike, a caterpillar.” I didn’t know what he was on about at first, Frank had a way of being gnomic, hinting around ideas in hopes you’d come to conclusions yourself first...

---

“It’s okay if you write about this, by the way,” Frank tossed the notion as an afterthought, “no one would believe any of it, Mike, they’d dismiss you as bonkers and only be half-wrong.” He laugh...

---

Out past the northeastern exurbs of Los Angeles, past the Nazified city council of Santa Clarita, past the desolation of Palmdale where everyone bought houses thinking the property-speculation bu...

---

It took Margaret Nussbaum years to become The Amazing Mitzi, according to Frank Yetti, to reach the modest success she’d attained as a stage mage. She hadn’t started as a slight-of-hand artist al...

---