Thanks to some thoughtful planning on the part of the FIAF Secretariat, I was able to painlessly combine my already planned trip west for the AMIA Conference in Portland with the somewhat unexpected and definitely financially unforeseen trip to the EC Meeting in Los Angeles, held over the two days prior to AMIA.

It was nice to have another chance to visit L.A., see a bunch of friends, and hit some favorite spots – or at least Loteria and the ArcLight, which is about all I managed in a brief two days. For two eight-hour days, I was one of those poor souls trapped in the Academy conference room, one of those people I used to see as I passed by on my way into the office for the day, or out for lunch, or heading home, and it’s safe to say the meetings covered all three points in the day. There wasn’t much time to do anything else by the time we were done, but it was an enlightening experience, being on the inside of a long series of discussions about the organization.



The neighborhood was definitely changing, from the fact that I was staying in a hotel that last time I remember was more of a flophouse, like the Mark Twain up the street (which was actually undergoing renovation), to the fact that the old Big Lots, which was then going to become the Academy Museum, is now the home of BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, whatever that is…

After two and a half days in L.A., it was off to Portland, where I hadn’t been in a few years, and where the changes, whether it’s “Brooklynization” or just what happens when you haven’t been somewhere in more than three years, seemed really apparent. It just felt like a different place, with all of that construction downtown, the artisanal popcorn for sale in the hotel lobby, the general self-fulfilling Portlandia-ness of the place. It was still nice to have a chance to look around, and the rainy weather was still as dreary as ever, but it seemed different this time around.

The conference was good, with the usual mix of familiar faces and new acquaintances. We had a nice Selznick School get-together, and even managed a four out of ten showing from our class, now almost ten years on, which I thought was pretty impressive.