San Diego 2003I'm lucky to have a lot of friends in different parts of the world, but it's also a drag because I don't get to see some of them very often. And if I'm flying to the US, I've got to choose whether I'm going to see the New York crowd, my friends in SoCal or NoCal, Kansas, Tennessee, Florida etc. The plan now is to buy or otherwise acquire an island in the Atlantic midway between Europe and North America, so everybody could meet each other halfway and I can finally introduce everyone I know to each other. That would be one hell of a party. But in August I was lucky enough to fly to San Diego and catch my good friends Jeremy, Diana and Hannah in the same city. I met Jeremy and Diana when I moved to San Francisco in 95, and Hannah and I met in Florida, like a million years ago, through our mutual friend Loraine. The reason I went to San Diego was very sad—Loraine died
in Los Angeles in May, and I needed to get back to SoCal and sort
of try to get my head around it and make peace with it. I don't
know if I fully succeeded in that, but it was incredibly cool to
share some time with good friends. It wasn't like we were reliving
old times, this was new and different, but it was good, really good. |
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 Japanese carp in the pond at Balboa Park. |
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 Surviving the heat at Balboa Park. Diana took me shopping the day before, and I went crazy in the used clothes shops in the Hillcrest district where we lived. You just can't find good cheap casual stuff in Copenhagen. |
 Spectacular seafood salad I got at a restaurant in the park. The seafood is something else I miss about California. |
 Diana at the restaurant. |
 The San Diego Museum. |
 Diana and I had heard there was an exhibit of Hokusai woodblock prints at the San Diego Museum, so we went to check it out. Turned out we were wrong about Hokusai, but caught an exhibit of Degas sculptures instead. No harm done there. I hadn't known much about Degas' scuptures before, but I thought they all had a pleasingly obsessive quality. |
 The girl that started it all. Part of the reason I came to SoCal was so Hannah and I could take a trip up to LA and hang out with Loraine's scene. It was a little hard, honestly, but I needed to do it. Here is Matt, one of Loraine's friends from Cal Arts. He took one of Loraine's self-portrait photos and printed a bunch of enlargements for us. It was very cool of him to do. |
 Jeremy, like me, is a technophile. Here's a room full of happiness. |
 Diana at her and Jeremy's place. They let me crash there the whole trip, which was pretty cool. |
 I don't know if it's the way I'm standing or what, but I look like a complete tool here. |
 Diana took me to Little Italy, San Diego. San Diego itself is mostly a military town, considering the American Pacific fleet is based there. But there are some cool sections like Hillcrest or Little Italy. |
 Diana went to get her hair done, so I camped out at this cafe in Little Italy. I was right on the approach path for San Diego International, so I got to sip my coffee and watch the airplanes and write on my laptop a little. The weather was great and it turned into a really nice, relaxing day. Considering all the heaviness, I don't think I started relaxing completely till the last couple of days of the trip. |
 My last night in San Diego I met Hannah, Diana, Jeremy and Phoenix at a tasty sushi joint in Hillcrest. It was Hannah's favorite place because they served the "Bloody Samurai," a Bloody Mary loaded with wasabi. Here's Diana and Hannah as we waited for a table. |
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I became friends with Phoenix through Mondo 2000, then he eventually headhunted me to EMusic. Once I was there a while, I got Jeremy in, and all three of us worked together for a while. Jeremy and Phoenix still work there, though I fled California for Europe when the bubble burst. |
 I lost track of Hannah for a while when I was living in San Francisco, though she and Loraine visited me once, about the time everything first began to fall apart. I remember a good evening at the Zodiac bar in SF. |
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 Jeremy and I at the sushi joint. |
 Great picture of a really fun night. It was over too quickly. Notice the sign behind our heads that says "Warning! Alcohol Impairs Judgment!" How apropos. |
 We had been debating over sushi whether they actually still make "Clamato." Then in a weird synchronicity, we realized when we left the restaurant that there had been a Clamato sign right over our heads the whole time. There are forces in this universe that we do not understand. Surely, Clamato is one of the most mysterious of these. |
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