I woke up with one of my "I'm still drunk" hangovers. It wasn't painful but I was feeling very zoned out. I was supposed to get the bus to somewhere near Burbank but in the end Damon came to pick me up. We started with a beer run because Damon had to re-stock the bar in the hidden room so pretty much the first thing I got to see at Dreamworks was the hidden room. It's quite an incredible thing and there are so many stories that go along with it, Damon is my hero. Guillermo Del Toro was apparently on campus doing a book signing but I didn't get to see him. We grabbed some food at the canteen and then sat outside for a bit. Back inside and Damon showed me some cool animation stuff from How To Train Your Dragon while he was explaining exactly what it is he does. I also got to see some early stuff from The Croods. Matt was in an office nearby and Damon left me with him while he went for a meeting. Matt showed me a bit more of the campus, lots of cool artwork, a big wall of famous signatures and then a sequence from the upcoming Kung Fu Panda 2. At the end of the working day we headed for the hidden room and this time it was full of people. I tried a pint of one of the beers that's brewed by people that work at Dreamworks an hung out with some of the interesting animation folks. A lot of the people seemed to be writing novels so they were all talking about that. I met a woman called April who told me a lot of movies that I should watch and I found out that her husband actually worked on the bus explosion scene from Speed. Someone was telling a story about the "saying penis louder than the previous person" game and that's where the quote for this blog entry came from. Damon drove me back to the hostel and on the way we went to Norm's for a veggie burger. When I got back to the hostel the Chris, Leigh and Stuart were loitering and Stuart was going to Hawaii the next day. We had a bit of banter, added each other on Facebook and then went to bed.
Day 58 (Friday Nov 19th) "Spare some change for an old fool?"
I didn't sleep too well and when I woke up it was cloudy outside. I had a missed call from the bus manager guy so I called him back. He passed me on to a bus maintenance man who gave me some information about the bus and said that they'd kept one for historical purposes but I'd need to clear it with the head of security before I could go in and see it, I left a message for the security guy. I put my laundry on then headed to an Indian vegan lunch buffet about twenty minutes walk away. I ate two plates of lovely food but I think it was too much because I felt too full for the rest of the afternoon. On the way back to the hostel a homeless guy said "spare some change for an old fool?", I replied with "sorry, dude" and he said "have a good weekend buddy". I thought that was a nice exchange. I was really tired but was checking online for interesting things to do that night when I remembered that one of my old internet friends Justin had a gig in L.A. tonight. He has a band called Lemon Drop Kick who originally were three American guys with a Japanese female vocalist who sings in Japanese, I messaged them about four years ago on Myspace because I thought it was an interesting set-up and Justin had replied, we'd kept in touch ever since. I made sure I knew which buses to get and headed to a venue called The Strange in an area called Silverlake. It took about an hour on the Rapid 704 bus and then I had to walk five minutes through a slightly dodgy looking area. The venue turned out to be some sort of art gallery with a performance space which meant I didn't have to wait outside. Justin arrived about five minutes after I got there so I said hello, his band were on first so he had to set up his stuff. LDK did a good set although they said it wasn't one of their best performances. I got to meet the rest of the band when they'd finished and I also recognised Jeff as one of the old members of the band, he'd come along to support them. The second act was a trendy young black man doing some beat-boxing, dancing and rapping, he was quite cool. The third band were called The Slants and they had some Asian Jonas brothers on guitars who jumped on some boxes at the front that then lit up. The front-man had some great dance moves and had a mic stand that lit up. I can't remember the name of the next act but it was a rather camp Japanese man doing some electro-pop with some dancing women and a dancing man in a monkey suit. They were quite entertaining although the singer had a video of himself doing backing vocals behind him, he even conversed with himself between songs, it was quite creepy. Paul the LDK bassist told me to talk some random Japanese women so I had a go at that, they preferred my English accent to my lame attempts at speaking Japanese. One of the girls was literally the prettiest Japanese girl I've ever seen in person. The next band were Dead End Amelia, a lot of people had left and it did kind of feel like the night should have been over. I was mainly sticking around to hang out with Justin after the show but DEA turned out to be a very cool band. The front-woman was rather hot and I stood with Justin up near the front to take in the full show. They had some cool songs and did a really good cover of Change by Deftones, so good in fact that a balding dread-locked black man started going crazy at the front. Justin and Jeff spoke to him after the show and he showed us his driving license, his name was officially Freak. I said hello to more people at the end of the show including the sexy front-woman who had to mock my accent... but I didn't mind. Justin, Jeff and I drove to Mel's Diner which is where I'd almost gone with the BTTF gang, I knew where it was but Justin didn't, that was weird. I had a veggie sandwich and fries. Justin drove me back to the hostel and I had one of the latest nights I'd had in quite a while, in bed by 3.30am.
Justin (LDK), me, Jeff (former LDK)
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