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“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...

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“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...

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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...

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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 ...

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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...

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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...

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“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...

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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...

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“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...

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“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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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“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...

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“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...

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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...

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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...

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Frank broke with academic orthodoxy on the subject of skin-ape culture in many ways but most importantly on the question of whether humans were anything other than an evolutionary cul-de-sac, fea...

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The Magic Castle is real. Even if you think I’m just some crackpot ranting about sasquatches, go on the internet, look it up. The internet is, after all, the footnotes to everything. The footnote...

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Translated to English, the creature I called Frank asked the group “Focus just on the scents for a moment, what are the background smells?” “Patchouli,” one student said. “Burning sage,” said ano...

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My time spent Los Angeles made me lazy. No, not lazy, not exactly. When I had work and knew what I was supposed to be doing, I worked my ass off, point me in some direction and give me a push, I’...

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“What you might not expect,” the Amazing Mitzi once told the sasquatch called Frank, “is how fake magic is actually magnitudes more difficult than actual magic.” She smiled, gestured with her rig...

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There’s not much need for a calendar in Southern California, certainly not inside the Thirty-Mile Zone. There are only two seasons of any significance in Los Angeles, the season of fires and the ...

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Stupidity is an under-rated characteristic, at least at the beginning of your journey, at least in the entertainment business, especially in Los Angeles. It helps to start off stupidly, stupid as...

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