Los Angeles News Blog

Kevin Scanlon

Being a writer means I have to open myself to as much sensory input as possible, as often as possible. It's like I have this giant sticky drift net that's always open around me, trapping sights, smells, feelings, and sounds which will jar loose some long - forgotten memory, or find their way into some future work of fiction.

My son is home from college, visiting briefly before he goes back for his summer session, so I've been making a concerted effort to cram as much writing as I can into limited working hours each day, so my evenings are free to spend with him and the rest of our family. This weekend, my wife and I took him out to dinner, where I found myself in front of a Centipede arcade machine, drawn there by the unmistakable sound of the player earning an extra guy.

Something caught in the mental driftnet, and I began to reel it in. "I have to play this," I said, doing my best not to be as manic as Richard Dreyfuss behind a pile of mashed potatoes.

They looked at each other, warily. "Okay..." my wife said.

I dropped a quarter into the slot, felt the trackball fit comfortably beneath my right hand, and began to play. By the time the first flea dropped, I'd retrieved a childhood memory from the early '80s.

Arcade games - the actual cabinets that took actual quarters - were ubiquitous throughout my childhood. After about 1978, you couldn't walk into a fast food restaurant or convenience store and not find one.

Kevin Scanlon

"You ready to leave?" Anne asked from just outside my office door.

"Yeah, let me just finish this," I said, typing as fast as I could, my fingers and brain in a familiar creative race.

"If we don't leave right now, we're both going to be late," she said.

I glanced at the clock: 3:15pm. "Oh shit. Okay, I'm getting up now."

I told my brain to take the ideas it was releasing and hold onto them for about two hours. My fingers and brain wanted to know who won the race, and I told them both that I didn't have time to invent one of my trademark conversations between things that can't actually converse. They didn't protest.

Though I wanted to stay at my desk and keep writing, I grabbed my stuff off my desk, slipped on my shoes, and went to the kitchen to fill my water bottle. Anne had come up with a solid plan: She had an appointment at 3:30, and I had a voice over session at 4, just down the road. For only the second time in our life together, we could actually carpool to our respective engagements, and it would be convenient. I must admit, I was excited by the idea, not only because we were doing something nice for the planet and saving money on gas and parking. I was excited because I love to spend time with my wife, even if it's just an extra 30 minutes while driving somewhere.

Anne wasn't nerdy like me when we started dating, and she isn't nerdy like me, now. She's been nerd-adjacent for thirteen years, though, so she's picked up an appreciation for some of the things I'm always geeking out about, like, polyhedral dice and their role in dispatching fantastic monsters, the existence of three (and only three) Star Wars films, produced between 1977 and 1983, and why I get twitchy when people holding food get too close to my comic books. It's no big secret that I love my wife, but just in case it wasn't clear: I love that she gets me, and I'm grateful for that every day.

Kevin Scanlon

About once a year, I get it into my head that I need to go play miniature golf. I convince my wife to come with me out to Sherman Oaks or Upland, and we spend an hour or so trying to contain our disappointment that the carpets are torn, the grounds aren't maintained, the ponds are filled with crud, and the whole place doesn't look or feel anything at all like the magical places we loved when we were kids.

"I don't know why I think it's going to be different every time we come out to do this," I said, the last time we went out to hit the links.

"You're just upset because I'm kicking your ass," Anne said.

"Fucking Pagoda hole. That was bullshit. The volcano hole will be the great equalizer!" I declared.

She laughed as she teed up.

I looked around and tried to overlay my memory of this particular course over what I saw. My ponds were clean, my fountains were blue-tinted geysers, my little boats and seaside town didn't have peeling paint or broken windows. The carpet on each hole was smooth and pristine, and the arcade inside the castle behind us was filled with dozens of different video games and pinball machines.

"I can't separate how this place really looked in the '80s from how I want to remember it," I said. "I wonder if I've just idealized it, or if it really did look and feel fitter, happier, and more productive when I was a kid."

Kevin Scanlon

About 12 years ago, my wife and I pulled her original Atari 2600 out of storage and hooked it up to our television. We set it on the floor, next to my Sega Genesis, and showed it to our kids.

"What's that?" One of them asked.

"This is how we started playing video games at home when we were kids," I told them.

"Yeah, your uncle and I got this for Christmas in 1977," Anne said.

"Boy, you guys are so old," Nolan - who was 5 at the time - said.

"We are totally old," I said, not knowing that, ten years later, he and I would have to stop playing Frisbee in front of our house because I had "hurt my Old," when I tripped over the curb trying to catch up with one of his more powerful throws.

We looked at it together: Once-shiny silver switches jutted from the top of a sleek black body that was wrapped in faux woodgrain. Black rubber cords snaked around it, ending in the iconic joystick controllers that are woven tightly into the fabric of my youth. A cardboard box, its edges revealing the passage of time as clearly as its contents, sat on the floor beside it. Inside it, 20 game cartridges waited, keys to a time machine waited: Combat, Pitfall, Yars' Revenge, Space Invaders, Centipede, Missile Command, and Cosmic Ark among them.

Kevin Scanlon

When I worked as a scout for Propeller, I dreaded April first. It was already hard enough to find interesting, quality news stories, and having an entire day where I couldn't trust anything I read was just annoying. However, I've always enjoyed creative and humorous things that are obviously fake, like Think Geek's April first products. This year, Reddit's redigg joke was pretty good, and the New Fark Experience was fucking inspired, but I will remember 2009 as the year my son Nolan pulled the perfect prank on me.

The night before, while Nolan and I watched the Kings play like they couldn't wait to get to the golf course, and the people who paid to watch them at Staples center didn't really need to get their money's worth, he grabbed my cell phone off the coffee table.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Looking at your pictures."

"Oh. Okay. Just don't mess with any of my settings or anything, okay?"

"I won't."

Kevin Scanlon

On my bio, it says that I'm an actor, writer, husband and father. I love being every one of these things, and somehow I've managed to strike a good balance among them in the ten years I've kept all these plates spinning in my life.

It's been remarkable that I've managed to keep them all going without a catastrophic failure for so many years, and I guess it was not so much a question of if, but when, one of them would wobble and crash to the floor.

Yesterday, I ended up spending more time than I expected working on a voice acting gig. I got home from the recording session just in time to pick up my son from school, and didn't get to start writing until late in the afternoon, just in time for him to come into my office and ask me what we were having for dinner. My family has always come first for me, so I stopped writing and took care of feeding him. I went back to work, just in time for my wife to get home from work. I hadn't seen her all day, so I took another short break before I went back into my office, closed the doors, and went back to writing around 8.

My brain, apparently very unhappy with me for starting and stopping so many times, refused to work with me, and I spent more time gnashing my teeth than actually writing for the next five hours.

Kevin Scanlon

Warning: This week, I'm talking all about the Los Angeles Kings. Even though we've had a team here since 1968, the First Rule of Being a Sports Fan In Los Angeles dictates that relatively few people follow the Kings or care about the game, because the Kings have struggled - not "The Clippers" struggled, but still struggled - for much of their existence. I understand that there is another team, somewhere near Anaheim. Because I am a Los Angeles Kings fan, this team does not exist for me, and I will not speak of it again.

PRO TIP: Get into the Kings now, because they're about one season away from being a great team that can seriously compete in the playoffs. All your friends will think you're ahead of the curve and you can charge them for hockey insights!

I've been in love with ice hockey since I went to my very first Kings game, at the Forum, during the magnificent purple and gold era in the early '80s. I was 13, and all I remember about that game was how bad the Kings played, how awesome the fights were, and how much I wished I'd discovered the sport earlier.

One year later, Star Trek made it possible for me to be a rabid hockey fan for the rest of my teens. I bought my first pair of season tickets in the 1987-88 season, and kept them until 1992-93. When I was a teenager and traveled to a different city almost almost every weekend to attend Star Trek conventions, I made a special effort to go to cities with NHL franchises, so I could see what it was like to watch hockey where the fans were as passionate as the buildings were old. Boston, New Jersey, Montreal, Calgary, even Hartford all provided memorable experiences, and I got to see some truly outstanding games over the years.

Kevin Scanlon

Not that it matters, but most of this is true.

When I was six years old, I set foot onto on a T-ball diamond for the first time.

I was skinny, awkward and unsure of myself - basically a smaller version of the teenager I'd eventually become - and I didn't have very good coordination, but my dad loved baseball, and I knew that if my dad loved it, I loved it too, because that's the way things work when you're six.

It was the spring of 1978, when smog alerts were as common as reality shows are today, and hazy, reddish gold sunlight shone down on the field at Sunland Park. The sounds of other kids playing on the swings and in the giant rocket ship at the playground mingled with the smell of barbecue smoke as I stepped up to the plate to take my first practice swings.

My first swing connected with the middle of the tee. The baseball - in those days of gas lines and national malaise, we didn't have the soft RIF balls my kids got to play with - fell off and landed in the batter's box on the other side of the plate. The other kids giggled while the coach clapped his hands and shouted encouraging words to me as I picked the ball up and put it back on the tee.

I looked up and saw my father's expectant face through the chainlink fence near the dugout. I slowly and deliberately lifted my bat, held it out at arm's length, and aimed at the top of the tee with one eye closed. I stuck out my tongue and furrowed my brow. I tasted sweat on the corners of my mouth, and felt my heart beat in my ears.

Kevin Scanlon

From Marengo on the East to Pasadena Ave. on the West, there's no shortage of bars along and within a block of Colorado Boulevard in Old Town Pasadena. They range from really cool, like Lucky Baldwin's on Raymond, to really douchey, like [BAR NOT NAMED SO I DON'T GET MY ASS KICKED BY A DOUCHEY GUY WHO LOVES GOING TO THE DOUCHEY BAR]. I haven't bothered going anywhere other than Lucky Baldwin's for years, but last Thursday night, I spent several hours in this little place that was described by its owner as "a dive bar, behind the Container Store." 

"Behind the Container Store?" I thought when my friend Drew asked me if I knew anything about the place, and if it would be a good location for a Fark party. "There's something behind the Container Store? And it's not a dumpster filled with containers of dead bodies?"

I used the promise of dinner at Akbar, a fabulous Indian restaurant on the corner of Union and Fair Oaks, to convince my wife to go with me and scout around. After gorging ourselves on various Masalas and ka Salans, we went in search of the cleverly-named Olde Towne Pub.

Kevin Scanlon

Last week at blogging.la, Chal Pivik said, "Despite re-opening in late 2006 after nearly five years of renovations and additions, Griffith Observatory remains one of LA's relatively off-the-radar attractions, even though parking and admission is free."

I completely agreed, and spent much of the weekend thinking about some of my own favorite off-the-radar attractions. When I mentioned to my wife that I may write a column about some of those undiscovered places, she said, "Just because these places are undiscovered by you doesn't mean they're undiscovered."

Being a geek, I replied, "But until they are observed by me, they don't exist in my reality." Then, "Or, actually, the various locations both exist and do not exist, because -"

"Stop. Stop. Stop. You're getting geek all over me."

"Sorry. My bad," I said.

"I know. You can't help it."

I haven't been able to stop thinking about these places that exist for me, but may not exist for other people, so today, I thought I'd open the box and find out of the cat's dead or alive by sharing one of my favorite off-the-radar locations in all of Southern California.

Kevin Scanlon

Toward the end of December, my wife and I went to the calendar kiosk in the mall. (You know the one; it's between the Crocs kiosk and the cell phone kiosk. No, not that cell phone kiosk, the other one. Yeah, that one.)

It was time to do the annual calendar replacement, which is something I dread more than I probably should. To some people, it may not be that big of a deal - a calendar is just a place to write down appointments and reminders - but to me, it represents a 12 month commitment to a theme, and I want to ensure that I do not choose poorly.

This particular kiosk was fairly well-stocked, considering how close to Christmas it was, and my wife waited patiently while I invested more time choosing 2009's kitchen wall calendar than many people put into choosing a tattoo. Which is why I've never had a tribal barbed wire calendar, thank you very much.

I dug through the kittens and puppies and sexy models. I pushed aside countless sports teams, lamented that I've never been able to get into fantasy art, and finally decided to go for something familiar and reliable.

"Excuse me," I said to the bored teenage girl who didn't know how lucky she was to have a job, "I can't seem to find the Far Side calendar."

She stopped texting and gave me a look.

"There isn't a Far Side calendar," she said.

I laughed at her hilarious joke.

"Seriously," I said, "make with the Far Side calendar."

Last Sunday, it was 83 degrees - in January! - under a nearly cloudless sky the color of a television tuned to a dead channel. It was beautiful; one of those nearly perfect days that makes some people want to move here, and makes it worthwhile for those of us who already do.

I desperately wanted to spend the entire day outside with my son, hiking up the Sam Merril trail, walking around the Rose Bowl, or playing frisbee in the street out front. But thanks to an unholy convergence of writing deadlines piled high around me, partly due to some poor planning on my part, but mostly due to a sudden explosion of OMFG DO THESE THINGS RIGHT NOW requests that dropped into my lap on Friday, I was stuck inside.

I wasn't going to complain; at a time when more and more people I know are losing their jobs and I'm starting to get survivor's guilt, I'm grateful to have enough work to keep me inside on a Sunday. Still, I sat in my chair and looked out the window, at one of the most beautiful January days I've seen in my 36 years riding Planet Earth, and felt the warmth of the sun on my face. I looked back to my desk. The TO-DO list was long and devoid of checkmarks. The blank document on my monitor was a perfect sea of white, disturbed only by an insistent blinking cursor.

I took a deep breath, and got to work. Nothing came easily, distracted as I was by the unnaturally perfect day that was just 25 steps away, but I eventually made my way through it all, and in the fading light of the afternoon, spent about ten minutes throwing the frisbee with my son. It was the best ten minutes of my day, and my only regret was that it didn't last longer.

Sunday afternoon, my editor e-mailed me and asked how I was doing in the 2008 Weblog Awards, where I'm nominated for Best Celebrity Blogger, alongside blogging heavyweights Gilbert Arenas and Britney Spears.

Yes, you read that correctly.

"I think I'm going to lose to Britney Spears," I wrote back.

"You should write about it for your column," she said.

"Well," I thought, "I told Twitter that my conflicted feelings about the whole thing are too complicated for 140 characters ... sure, let's do that."

So now, without further ado, I present this week's column (Ha. I bet you thought you were actually reading this week's column all along! That's how I get you! I'm like a ninja, I am!)

When I was in my early twenties and had the dual luxuries of copious time and disposable income, I loved to cook. I cooked different things all the time, experimented with various styles of cooking and ingredients, and wasn't afraid to take a chance on something exotic. "What's the worst that could happen?" I thought. "I'll just make something different if this doesn't work out."

Then I got married and had kids. My days got longer, my responsibilities grew exponentially, and the whole concept of free time became a memory so distant, I wondered if it had ever really existed at all.

I still cooked, but I had a new set of priorities. Instead of grabbing a cookbook and picking out a recipe that looked interesting, I had to ask myself: How long would this take to prepare? How much is it going to cost to feed two growing boys in addition to two adults? How likely is it that the kids I'm working so hard to feed are going to complain about the uniqueness of the meal I've prepared? Wouldn't it just be easier to order take out or throw something in the microwave?

The economy is in the shitter, unemployment is skyrocketing, and it turns out that there are just nine days left until Christmas, which means there are only eight shopping days, provided you're willing to run through the mall with Governor Ahnold and all the other panicked people on Christmas Eve. It is entirely understandable if you just want the whole damn season to be over. If you haven't totally lost the holiday spirit (or dumped it all in your egg nog), I'm here today with a few tricks to make the holidays not just bearable, but joyous and wonderful.

When I was a kid, this was my favorite time of year. Like most kids, I was always hopeful that I'd get that year's version of an official Red Ryder carbine-action 200-shot range model air rifle with a compass in the stock, and this thing which tells time, but the presents were only one small part of the magic of the season. I truly loved watching my neighborhood transform into a heavily decorated winter wonderland, complete with animated snowmen and millions of twinkle lights. I loved hearing the ubiquitous music, watching the Yule Log and Rankin/Bass specials on television, performing in the annual school pageant for my parents, and visiting dear relatives we only saw on special occasions.

Part of the joy of childhood is believing that it will never end. As I got older, however, the inevitable Santa revelation [SPOILER ALERT: Santa is the fifth Cylon] was nothing compared to the shock of learning that all that holiday magic I took for granted didn't just happen on its own. A lot of work goes into this month-long orgy of holiday cheer, and as I became responsible for conjuring the same magic for my own children, the joy of the season began to compete with, and even vanish behind, the crushing holiday stress.

I tried my best just to suck it up and deal with the stress, to make sure my kids enjoyed the magic of the season. But I was so busy creating the magic, I ended up resenting the whole goddamned season. Christmas became an obligation, and not the least bit magical.

I watched a lot of movies when I was a kid, frequently imagining myself in some of my favorites. In 1977, the movie was Star Wars and I was Han Solo (like most geeks, I was really Luke Skywalker, but he was so whiny and Han was so cool!) In 1982, the movie was Tron, and I was Flynn, using my supreme video game skills - the ones my mother always wanted me to stop developing so I could come eat dinner - to defeat the MCP and save the world. In 1988, it was They Live, and I was out of bubblegum.

Then I grew up, and in 1996 I saw a film that I didn't have to imagine myself in, because watching it was like watching a documentary of my life. The movie was Swingers, and though its brilliant writing and a sensational cast made it a sleeper success nationwide, those of us who lived in Los Angeles and were struggling to make it in the entertainment industry were able to enjoy it on an entirely different level from the rest of the country.

I spent the first two thirds of my life working as a full-time actor, but about five years ago, my primary focus shifted from acting to writing. A funny thing happened on my way to being a full-time writer, though: I started working a lot as an actor, both on camera (CSI, Criminal Minds) and with my voice (Teen Titans, Legion of Superheroes). This has lead to a pretty standard question when I do interviews: "What do you like more, acting or writing?"

"It's a lot like asking a parent which child they love more," goes my standard response, "the truth for me is that I love both of my children for different reasons, and I don't think it's possible for me to love one more than the other. However, it is impossible for me to imagine my life without them in it."

My acting career has spanned just a few months shy of thirty years. During it, I've worked with awesome people, complete douchebags, famous people who were intimidating, famous people who were gracious, famous people who were on their way down, and soon-to-be famous people who were on their way up. This week, I thought it would be fun to combine my actor side with my writer side, and tell a story about one of those people.

Music is exceptionally - my wife may say irrationally - important to me. I can walk into a store, determined to spend hundreds of dollars, only to turn around and walk right back out if something horrible is playing inside. Music has never been disposable background noise; it's defined me, inspired me, soothed me, and provided a soundtrack to my life. I think this began in second grade, when my father introduced me to music as art during weekly drives to visit my great aunt in Northridge.

We lived in Sunland, and because the 210 didn't go all the way through to Pasadena like it does now, we had to spend a lot of time driving along surface streets before we could pick up the freeway in Sylmar. Though many of today's parents hasten their children's descent into consumerist zombies by distracting them with DVDs or handheld video games, minimizing or even eliminating interaction on the shortest of car rides, my parents treated our visits to Aunt Val's house as miniature road trips. We played the alphabet game and auto bingo, we told stories, and we all sang along with KLOS and KMET, or one of my dad's many cassette tapes.

My dad loved classic rock, so when I look back on my childhood, The Beatles, Boston, Heart, The Doobie Brothers, and Fleetwood Mac provide the soundtrack. Twenty-nine years later, I can't listen to "Second Hand News" without hearing the unique sound of his VW bus's engine just underneath it in my memory. Most people who listen to "Black Water" hear Patrick Simmons on vocals, but not me. I hear my dad, modulating his voice to hit all the different parts of the harmonies during the chorus. When I hear anything off Boston's eponymous debut, it's accompanied by the steady sound of a hammer driving nails into cedar wood. Dad listened to that album a lot while I helped him build a gate for our side yard in the usual eight year-old manner: by wearing an oversized tool belt and handing him nails while I stayed out of the way. I'm sure it's possible to listen to Dreamboat Annie without giant earphones and a 15-foot coiled black cord, but I don't know why anyone would want to.

Web Editor's note: the L.A. Weekly is proud to raise a pint of Guinness and welcome Wil Wheaton onboard as our new weekly columnist. Check back every Tuesday for his latest.

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Way back in early 1990, I was at the Forum in Inglewood for a Kings hockey game. The Kings were hosting the Chicago Blackhawks, and by the second period the game was effectively over. The Kings were in the process of turning in yet another lackluster performance en route to a 7-4 defeat, which was the style at the time.

As the Zamboni began to resurface the ice before the third period, thousands of fans streamed out of the building.

“Look at these people,” I said to my friend Thomas, disgusted, “they’re like fucking Dodger fans! The game’s not over!”

He pointed to the scoreboard. “Yes, it is,” he said.

“There’s a whole period left, man! They could come back!”

“You really believe that?”

I didn’t, but I was committed to my righteous indignation. Somehow, I’d managed to summon more passion about the game than the players. “Never forget,” I intoned as solemnly as I could, “the Miracle on Manchester.” (For those of you who are too young to remember, the Miracle on Manchester happened in a 1982 playoff game with our hated rivals the Edmonton Oilers, who were a much better team. Trailing 5-0 in the second period of a must-win game, the Kings mounted a comeback so unlikely and so impressive, we’re still talking about it 26 years later. I know, I know, but it makes the 7-8-2 record a little more bearable.)