Friday, February 01, 2013

Synthetic Outer Space And Liminal Entities




Apparently like everybody else in the world Dunkin Donuts has always wanted to go to Los Angeles. Apparently Dunkin Donuts checked their bank accounts and took a deep breath and decided that the time was right to take the plunge. Dunkin Donuts decided that they were going to do it! Dunkin Donuts is going to Los Angeles!

And like everybody else in the world when Dunkin Donuts decides something they announce it on their website. Here is the announcement Dunkin Donuts put up on their website last week:



Since the day I joined Dunkin’ Brands, one of the questions I’ve been asked most is, “When will Dunkin’ Donuts open in California?” I hear requests to come to California almost every day from our fans on the West Coast and all throughout the country, and of course from our passionate communities on Facebook and Twitter. Some big-name celebrities have even made pleas on national TV for us to bring our famous coffee to Hollywood.

And so, today is an extremely happy and momentous day for our brand, as I have the privilege of making the long-awaited announcement that Dunkin’ Donuts will in fact be expanding into Southern California. We are now actively seeking franchisees to open Dunkin’ Donuts restaurants in Los Angeles, Riverside, San Diego, San Bernadino, Ventura and Orange Counties in California. We expect the first new Dunkin’ Donuts restaurants in California to open in 2015.





A long time ago, in fact way back in Chapter 30 of “So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish,” Arthur and Fenchurch decided to go to Los Angeles, too.

I was pretty excited by this trip because I knew in real life Douglas Adams had spent some time in Los Angeles and his adventures out there had not work out exactly as he had hoped, so I wondered what Los Angeles would be like for Arthur and Fenchurch.

It turns out their trip resulted in one of my favorite descriptions ever of Los Angeles at night:


Late in the evening they drove through the Hollywood hills along Mulholland Drive and stopped to look out first over the dazzling sea of floating light that is Los Angeles, and later stopped to look across the dazzling sea of floating light that is the San Fernando Valley. They agreed that the sense of dazzle stopped immediately at the back of their eyes and didn’t touch any other part of them and came away strangely unsatisfied by the spectacle. As dramatic seas of light went, it was fine, but light is meant to illuminate something, and having driven through what this particularly dramatic sea of light was illuminating they didn’t think much of it.



I know someday I’m going to go to Los Angeles. Someday. Just like everybody else in the world. But I’m not as anxious about it, well, apparently, as Dunkin Donuts.

I have no immediate plans to go west.

But about this business of Los Angeles, and especially about the lights of Los Angeles, I do have one last bit of stop-motion to post before I take some time off from the medium.

And this is more about guitar than stop-motion.

Once I figured out how to switch to the detailed guitar voice on my synthesizer, I wanted to do a little something to get at least a simple example of that synthesized guitar playing up here on the blog. So this afternoon I arranged a few chords and wrote a few lyrics and I prevailed upon Little Plastic Doll to quickly rehearse a number called, “Lights of Los Angeles.” Here’s what we came up with. It’s really her singing, but the guitar is a keyboard synthesizer. In fact it’s me playing the same Yamaha PSR-S910 that the ladybug creature plays at the end of Creatures of Doctor Tina.

Here’s Little Plastic Doll performing “Lights of Los Angeles”


























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