I Don’t Have Time For Your Blog

So my new building has a small, only mildly functional laundry room. There are 2 washers and 2 dryers and only half of each works.

Nevertheless, they’re hardly ever used (even though the building has 18 apartments or so) and you can’t beat the convenience so I’ve pretty much been using them. But it turns laundry into a whole-day affair if you’re trying to actually keep colors and whites separate, instead of going for the College Freshman Bulk Wash and hoping your undies don’t turn pink.

But as I was passing one of the many Laundromats — I’m sorry, I mean Lavanderias — in my neighborhood, I noticed that there was a big sign in their window advertising free wi-fi Internet access while you wash.

“Free wi-fi?” I thought. “I pay for that when I’m in an airport. And you’re offering it to me for free?”

Well, okay, with purchase. But it’s not like laundry is an optional activity.

I mean, sure, I remember the places near colleges that would serve you beer while you washed. That made sense for the “beer-swilling laundry monkey” market that prospers near colleges. But wi-fi? That’s nerd washing we’re talking about. That’s practically an oxymoron.

Of course, this is Los Angeles, so there’s an even more upscale version of this in neighborhoods hipper than mine — coffee! sandwiches! art gallery! open mic night! Christ, all it’s missing is a poetry reading. I mean, when I think of an audience for my super-sekrit poor-poor-me emo poetry, I definitely think, “Boy, I hope my audience is secretly wondering whether their spin cycle is finished.”

Let’s talk about what’s really dividing this country.

I’m a confirmed Yellow Stater myself. (In case you were wondering.)

The Decemberists played here in Los Angeles last night. It was one of the best shows I’ve been to all year. They played with lots of energy and skill, and Colin Meloy’s self-consciously intellectual lyrics just flowed over the audience like a McSweeney’s reading you could dance to.

I saw a familiar actress at the show — I won’t name names, but let’s just say she was in “Spider-Man” and “Spider-Man 2″ — looking emaciated and frightening. One bad turn of her heel and it looked as if her leg would snap like a twig. I hope she gets better from whatever she’s got.

One small, strange thing I noticed about the way Colin sang.

Whenever he sang an open vowel like “ah” or “uu”, his tongue would pop out of his mouth, not a little but a fair amount, like you would at the dentists only straight out instead of curled down. It added sort of a raspy “ylll” to the sound that was very distinctive — distinctive but familiar.

The first artist I thought of once I’d seen this was, of course, Joe Cocker in his famous Woodstock performance of “A Little Help From My Friends”. You could hardly miss that thing snaking out of Joe’s mouth during the “Do you need anybody? / Could it be anybody?” call-and-responses.

But the guy who probably precedes them all on “that sound” is probably Van Morrison. The Cocker-Springsteen vocal style in general — the mutter that swings up to a growl and a scream and back again — probably owes its lineage to him.

Now Colin’s vocal is much clearer, but I think there’s still a connection: his open vowels are voiced by lips tightly curled around teeth. It’s slightly nasal, more of a hum than a shout.

Try it, I guess, the next time you sing “Happy Birthday” or something — just shove that tongue up and out towards the center point of your mouth during the “aaa” of “happy” and the “ur” of “birthday”. See if anyone notices.

I guess they’re still checking for gels and liquids even on domestic flights in the US. But I made it to and from Fort Wayne without incident.* Just in case, I had put all of my three-ounces-and-under toiletries into a Ziploc™ bag. I did not, however, write “Kip Hawley is an idiot” on the bag. Oh well — maybe next time.

I wonder how appreciative the Dow Chemical company (Ziploc™ division) is of the new rules. I’ll bet there was a spike in Ziploc™ sales.

It reminds me of the bad old days just after 9/11 when we were supposed to protect ourselves from the terrorists with duct tape and plastic sheeting. Remember that? I always wondered if the duct tape and plastic sheeting guys put them up to that.

Maybe next year they’ll make another announcement:

There is an imminent terrorist threat that requires that all Americans stock up on… mayonnaise. Yes, mayonnaise and bubble wrap. You can ward off the terrorists with mayonnaise and bubble wrap.

Now, it just so happens that we’ve known about this threat for a couple of weeks. But the reason we chose not to announce it is that we wanted the chance to announce a new partnership between the Office of Homeland Security and America’s biggest retailer, Wal-Mart.

Our partner Wal-Mart is now offering a special on 5-gallon jugs of mayonnaise and 10-packs of bubble wrap. We call it our Homeland Security Patch. Just pick up our latest patch and your home will be secure against this latest threat.

What? Will there be other patches yet to come? Well, terrorist threats are unpredictable, so we can never be sure.

* Well, without a security incident. There was the incident where my plane was delayed by over two hours so I ended up driving from Chicago to Fort Wayne. But that wasn’t Kip Hawley’s fault. I think.

So I haven’t gotten on a plane since August. Do we still have to smuggle bottles of shampoo in our rectums in order to get them on board the plane?

Also, I’m bringing some foot powder with me. If they ask me about it during the security check, it’s cool to say “it’s just anthrax powder,” right? They’ll enjoy a nice hearty chortle and say, “Ah, you amusing rascal. Now get on board that plane!”, right?

I forgot to mention the two women armed — double fisted — with cans of whipped cream who approached me as I relaxed by the curb during Decompression.

“Would you like us to squirt in your mouth?” they asked.

Why… yes. Yes, I would.

Four nozzles approached and committed a brief but sudden act of whipped creamery.

“Pffnk ymw,” I added, as they skipped on to find other willing participants.

There’s something that doesn’t happen every day. Thank you, Guerilla Reddi-Whippers, wherever you are.

So last night I took the subway down to LA Decompression, which is a regional Burning Man Event. I had a great (first!) time at Burning Man this year, and thought it would be a nice way to reconnect.

I was not disappointed. It was tiny, of course — little can compare to the vastness of Black Rock City — but it had the right flavor, a friendly crowd dressed to the nines.

Fashion note: I didn’t really understand what playawear was before I went to Burning Man. I mean, sure, you can look at pictures on the web, but it’s hard to get the Zen of it until you’re in it.

There are two major fashion groups at Burning Man:

• Goth/Industrial/Post-apocalyptic
• Fab-u-lous!

Somewhere in there lurks a few minor subgroups like Raver stuck in time and Hallowe’en gone wrong. Oh, and the always popular Portly naked man.

Anyway, it was a fun event — nothing on the scale of Burning Man proper, but a morsel, an amuse bouche, if you will.

I also got to see Drop Black Sky there, which is a band my friend Lisette has been tirelessly promoting for quite a while and God only knows why I never went to one of their shows before, because their stuff is great and you can listen to their whole EP on their website.

So naturally, a day after I start the blog my laptop dies.

I’m hard on laptops. I probably ask too much of them, keeping them running under heavy load 24/7 when I decide to try to convert my entire DVD collection for use on my iPod, or whatever. The laptops I own die ugly, brutal deaths, the kind of deaths that would make the most battle-hardened figure say, That’s no goddamned way for a laptop to die.

So here I am on the emergency backup laptop I had stashed at work just for reading email and other such nonsense. It’s no match for that dualie MacBook that they wheeled into the back of the Genius Bar with the promise, “We’ll do everything we can for her, sir, but it’s touch and go.”

In particular, its Wi-Fi card is flaky, so I’m tethered to the frigging cable modem with a bright yellow Ethernet cable. Nobody uses a cable to connect to the web anymore. I hear that the Amish are allowed to websurf now, as long as they promise not to use wireless.

Trust me, this backup laptop is old. It can’t even play video without stuttering. My iPod has better video playback than this goddamn thing.

But of course I soldier on, using it anyway so that I can keep in touch with you, dear readers. I do it all for you.

So first I have to tell you what I do for a living.

I make puppets.

But not puppets like Bert and Ernie. I make digital puppets. They only exist inside the computer. They are often called “character rigs”.

Some of them are fairly easy. Where I work, we’ve made a lot of puppets of people. So we’ve got that people thing down pretty well at this point. And we’ve made lots of puppets of animals. Sometimes the animals stand up like people, and sometimes they’re on all fours, but either way we’ve made a bunch of them and we’re pretty good at it.

But then sometimes you see one you’ve never done before, and you start to get excited about it because there’s going to be some fun challenges to solve to make that character move.

And then there are the ones where you put up the picture and everyone just goes pale with fear. And after about ten seconds of silence someone in back says, “Well, good luck with that.”

We had one of those recently and the guys who were working on it went and talked to the animator and they threw around some ideas and got something hacked together and gave it to the animator to test.

And the animator came back with this cool friggin’ test with all this stuff going on that just means you have to figure out how to get this guy on screen, I mean, it doesn’t matter if it’s going to take you a year and a half, you just have to make it work, because everybody has to see how cool this looks even though it’s just a little test you did on a hacked up character rig.

Those are the sorts of things that make me want to work in animation — when you’ve got something to put on screen that’s just going to look amazing.