You saw mommy kissing Santa Claus? Kind of makes the milk and cookies you left seem naively passé, doesn't it?
I'm dreaming of a chromatically challenged Christmas.
Blonds don't really have more fun, they just forget their misery quicker.
A life lesson from McDonalds: You get your toy only after all your nuggets are gone.
Yo-yos were invented by the ancient Chinese, and originally meant to be weapons. With this in mind, I'd love to see Tommy Smothers just frickin' lose it one day and nail some smartass 14 year-old with a Duncan Butterfly, a big bright red one.
Sure, shop local this holiday to support your town's economy, even though you plan to return everything on the 26th.
With fuel costs what they are now, some parents are encouraging their kids to misbehave – a lump of coal is a lump of coal!
I've been given half a peace sign by several motorists this holiday season, so at least people are trying. Huh? What am I missing??
Saturday, December 20, 2008
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Welcome To Hollywood!: My Turn In The Barrel
You know you're about to see daylight when an asshole treats you like shit and forces you out!
The most amazing thing about me & Hollywood, after all that's happened between us, is that I still go back. Fact is, I feel alive there, despite all the mind-warped forces working in concert – unknowingly in some cases, but still in an uncanny state of collusion – to destroy anything and everything outside of itself, that wanders in.
If you venture there and find that all doors magically open for you, that joblessness, homelessness and every other "lessness" shun you, consider that you just may be that lone visitor from the planet Krypton. The rest of us get our battered asses handed to us, in no terms uncertain.
At a party just off Melrose, a weekend a few years ago, I was told by a fella who worked for MTV, that "the whole point of your first time in Hollywood is getting your ass kicked. It's a rite of passage." If you aren't lucky enough to be born into a family already ensconced in the Entertainment Industry community – like say, Jamie Lee Curtis, whose parents were both established A-list movie stars – coming to Hollywood is sort of like joining Fight Club. It isn't necessarily showing them "what you got," it's showing them how much you can take – and smile with bloody teeth and cough, "shit, what fun."
Only there isn't always someone with a sense of reality among the initiators, who steps in to say, "Okay, he's had enough. Help him up."
I fared about as much in my first go-around. I met extreme versions of all the toxic personalities I'd thought I'd learned to avoid, during my life in the untanned outside world. I also made a few lifelong friends, but they were far fewer in number.
The two big Firsts of losing my Hollywood virgin status were my experiences with a first apartment, and the search for a first agent.
My first month was lived at Days Inn, on Ventura Boulevard. I got a distinct impression from the front desk-dude that I wasn't even near being the first rube he'd seen pass through on their route to stardom.
The more I drove up and down Ventura, I discovered all the cheaper dives I could have chosen – but they all looked like I'd be missing considerable sleep in them, answering middle-of-the-night knocks at my door – by women named Monique or Randi, with thick makeup and runny nylons, or guys on old bikes, named JayJay or Tulo, with bad goatees hiding faces of acne, and looking to hook me up with killer smokables. Days Inn was a tad pricey, but a tiny gated community unto itself, and a little more crowd-controlled by cruising peace officers. It may have been Red-State of me, but I stayed put, and liked it.
All the important addresses existed miles away on the 405 or the Hollywood freeway – all except one important outpost, which amazingly, wound up being a mere 50-or-so steps from the door of my first (and only) L.A. apartment: Anderson Graphics. This was a mecca for many actors, on many diverse levels of the totem – the Headshot Lithographer.
If you cared to rummage through A.G.'s back alley dumpster, you'd possibly find something that would fetch a few bucks on eBay, now. Things like, oh, shots of that actress who played a Klingon warrioress in a Star Trek spin-off series, in full make-up... or some old performers who were somebodies once, now trying to be again, and apparently not happy with their latest batch of publicity stills. Would you remember them if I dropped some names?
Sadly, the Internet, digital photography – and a drastic swing by the Industry to color non-litho headshots, killed off Anderson Graphics in the time I've been away – it is no more. And thus, a huge box of black-n-whites in my bedroom closet, that cost me every cent I had at the time, and took an entire afternoon – with a hypnosis session to calm my rattled nerves – to shoot, now amounts to little more than a block of dead weight that I can't bare to toss out. Not just out of sheer mortification at the multi-leveled, galling waste, but any possible symbolic embarrassment. Nothing says "failure to launch" quite like a whole box of unused headshots littering a garbage dumpster.
Yes, Anderson Graphics is but a memory. But I'm sure my little hell on earth is still there: The Oxnard Avenue Apartments, in Van Nuys.
First I must tell you about the town itself... downwind of Burbank, and bankrupt of all aesthetics. Visibly uninviting to anyone craving an afternoon walk. The air is ripe with the grease from twenty McDonald's locales, and the general funk of the freeway. Here, I'm sure, was invented the concept of the scary 7-11 where the cost of a Slurpee might be an unwelcome encounter with a depressed, pen knife wielding clerk on a cigarette break. A troll squatting under Hollywood's grimey drawbridge. The gateway to L.A. panic attacks, and unproductive weekends wondering if the neighbors have any other CDs besides that Hawaiian conga line mantra they keep playing over and over and over and over and over. This is Van Nuys.
The town's "fame" derives from its being the once proud Porn Video Production capitol of the world. I'd actually held out a small sliver of hope, concerning this.
Let it be said... the Hollywood of roving movie idols and majestic film studios lording over a sun drenched landscape of glamour and excitement is the stuff of old documentaries – the Gables, Cagneys, Bogarts, Monroes and Deans are now just gawdy billboard-size paintings on the sides of office buildings and downtown facades. The real money-scented, omnipresent industry that rises like sweat-steam from Hollywood's every pore, today, is PORN.
And living in Van-fucking-Nuys, I held a thin hope in my heart that at least once in a while my daily malaise would be disrupted by the sight of a blow-n-hump film princess... I dunno... window shopping at the mall – walking her greyhound – comparing prices on ground chuck at the supermarket...
A thundercloud of bleach blond hair... cyber-breasts defying gravity, and possibly other laws of physics... pedicured and painted toenails that cost more than my rent...
But no. I never saw even one SINGLE PERSON in Van Nuys who so much as smelled like they worked in porn. It was like being staked out in the backyard with a tent and a pen-light, looking for Bigfoot.
In fact, I myself was a bit of a visual anomaly. Everyone else: 5-foot-4, pudgy, tanktop, cut-off jeans and popsicle toes wedged into old flip-flops. Add the backward baseball cap of choice, and the cheapest sunglasses you can envision. This was the basic unisex Van Nuys ensemble – the children even wore a kids' version. At least when I was there – and no, I didn't blend in.
My apartment – did I use the "little hell on earth" line yet? Imagine a single room in your house – not a big room, but say, a small bedroom. Now imagine a narrow hall about, oh, three steps long. Imagine it connected to a bathroom with just enough space for a phone booth sized shower stall, and a toilet that when you rose from it, you were suddenly standing over the sink. $450 a month.
And I didn't need a job, or references, to get it. Lucky, huh?
And oh yes, most interesting of all – my front door, wasn't one. Wasn't a door, that is. It was a sliding glass window with louvres to ensure a sort of mock privacy. My front lock? You know those little aluminum hooks, on a screw, that just reach over far enough to hook when the door is closed? Yeah. That tiny piece of cut sheet metal, about as big as a half-dollar, was my only protection from all of L.A., just on the other side.
From outside, the latch could be unhooked with a key, that popped the nose of the hook up and out. It had a rather distinct sound – a sort of zzzip-click-click-kwok.
You can imagine then, the sudden quickening in my heart and soul when, one night around 1:00 a.m., in the apartment with the lights out, I heard my "front door" being opened from outside – with a key. And no, it wasn't the landlord.
I slept on an air mattress, which of course had a leak, and by about 3:30 in the morning I'd wake up to find myself basically on the hard floor between two air pockets. Fortunately I had a foot-pump, that had me back in business in a few minutes, and then the mattress was good till sun-up. I found the leak but couldn't ever seem to patch it tight enough. It defied even duct tape.
I had almost dozed off, with a cheap blanket over me. I had finally laid down at half-past midnight after assembling a mass mail-out of headshots and résumés. Another L.A. Monday lay in wait for dawn.
Zzzip-click-click-kwok.
That – that CAN'T BE what I'm thinking it is. Can it? I raised my head to look.
Someone. Is. Coming. In.
Have I mentioned that this was only my SECOND NIGHT in my apartment? It was. The sliding glass was pushed open. A large silhouette parted the louvres and came forward.
The cheap blanket was launched like a tuna net at the dark form! I couldn't do one on purpose to save my very soul, but I think I actually kipped-up onto my feet! In a flash I was nose-to-nose with my unannounced guest. Yes, in retrospect it seems very stupid, unarmed, in just my underwear – but in an apartment no larger than a desk set, with running and hiding both non-options, what choice did I have?
I hit the light switch. He was as tall as me, and carrying a metal toolbox. I think I was as just as much a shock to him – did I mention I was in my underwear?
When I asked his name, I got something in a Danish accent. I shit you not. Yorghensivsensven... or something similar, only not as deftly articulated. "I'm heer tue fix thee heetre."
"It's summer. It's 1 o'fucking-clock in the morning. I didn't send for a repairman. And the apartment DOESN'T HAVE A HEATER." I asked if he cared to try his answer again, in light of those facts.
He then resorts to a fine L.A. tradition – he lies. Even though the lie hardly bares even a slight resemblance to the first story, he goes for it anyway. This is something you just get used to when you move to Los Angeles. There is no use fighting it. Everyone is lying to you – and the even more amazing part is, most of them actually think you aren't aware of it. A whole county of shysters, somewhere near seven million, each of whom will calmly look you in the eye and tell you that night is day, hot is cold, pink is green.
"I din't know anyone wass home – I knocked and knocked fyor ten minutes."
I actually stared in breathless disbelief at him for about that long. "Uh... pal, you didn't knock even once. You OPENED MY DOOR WITH A KEY and CAME IN. I WATCHED YOU.
Now I'm arguing with him over something that we both know he is lying about.
Finally he opens his box to show me there really are tools in it. "I need to check the vents," he says.
"Okay," I said, "check them." There was only one vent. I let him 'inspect' it, standing over him like a monkey on a wino's back. If this guy was going to try anything, I thought, he'd have to be the most reckless, brazen asshole in the zip code – no cakewalk would this job be.
At last he was satisfied, or at least figured it was time to call it a night and back out clean. He left through the louvres without parting them. When the glass slid shut, I had a piece of PCV pipe cut to fit the slide gutter by mid-morning the next day.
This was just the first of what I would come to refer to as my "Welcome To Hollywood" moments. And oooh, yeah, they got better.
The most amazing thing about me & Hollywood, after all that's happened between us, is that I still go back. Fact is, I feel alive there, despite all the mind-warped forces working in concert – unknowingly in some cases, but still in an uncanny state of collusion – to destroy anything and everything outside of itself, that wanders in.
If you venture there and find that all doors magically open for you, that joblessness, homelessness and every other "lessness" shun you, consider that you just may be that lone visitor from the planet Krypton. The rest of us get our battered asses handed to us, in no terms uncertain.
At a party just off Melrose, a weekend a few years ago, I was told by a fella who worked for MTV, that "the whole point of your first time in Hollywood is getting your ass kicked. It's a rite of passage." If you aren't lucky enough to be born into a family already ensconced in the Entertainment Industry community – like say, Jamie Lee Curtis, whose parents were both established A-list movie stars – coming to Hollywood is sort of like joining Fight Club. It isn't necessarily showing them "what you got," it's showing them how much you can take – and smile with bloody teeth and cough, "shit, what fun."
Only there isn't always someone with a sense of reality among the initiators, who steps in to say, "Okay, he's had enough. Help him up."
I fared about as much in my first go-around. I met extreme versions of all the toxic personalities I'd thought I'd learned to avoid, during my life in the untanned outside world. I also made a few lifelong friends, but they were far fewer in number.
The two big Firsts of losing my Hollywood virgin status were my experiences with a first apartment, and the search for a first agent.
My first month was lived at Days Inn, on Ventura Boulevard. I got a distinct impression from the front desk-dude that I wasn't even near being the first rube he'd seen pass through on their route to stardom.
The more I drove up and down Ventura, I discovered all the cheaper dives I could have chosen – but they all looked like I'd be missing considerable sleep in them, answering middle-of-the-night knocks at my door – by women named Monique or Randi, with thick makeup and runny nylons, or guys on old bikes, named JayJay or Tulo, with bad goatees hiding faces of acne, and looking to hook me up with killer smokables. Days Inn was a tad pricey, but a tiny gated community unto itself, and a little more crowd-controlled by cruising peace officers. It may have been Red-State of me, but I stayed put, and liked it.
All the important addresses existed miles away on the 405 or the Hollywood freeway – all except one important outpost, which amazingly, wound up being a mere 50-or-so steps from the door of my first (and only) L.A. apartment: Anderson Graphics. This was a mecca for many actors, on many diverse levels of the totem – the Headshot Lithographer.
If you cared to rummage through A.G.'s back alley dumpster, you'd possibly find something that would fetch a few bucks on eBay, now. Things like, oh, shots of that actress who played a Klingon warrioress in a Star Trek spin-off series, in full make-up... or some old performers who were somebodies once, now trying to be again, and apparently not happy with their latest batch of publicity stills. Would you remember them if I dropped some names?
Sadly, the Internet, digital photography – and a drastic swing by the Industry to color non-litho headshots, killed off Anderson Graphics in the time I've been away – it is no more. And thus, a huge box of black-n-whites in my bedroom closet, that cost me every cent I had at the time, and took an entire afternoon – with a hypnosis session to calm my rattled nerves – to shoot, now amounts to little more than a block of dead weight that I can't bare to toss out. Not just out of sheer mortification at the multi-leveled, galling waste, but any possible symbolic embarrassment. Nothing says "failure to launch" quite like a whole box of unused headshots littering a garbage dumpster.
Yes, Anderson Graphics is but a memory. But I'm sure my little hell on earth is still there: The Oxnard Avenue Apartments, in Van Nuys.
First I must tell you about the town itself... downwind of Burbank, and bankrupt of all aesthetics. Visibly uninviting to anyone craving an afternoon walk. The air is ripe with the grease from twenty McDonald's locales, and the general funk of the freeway. Here, I'm sure, was invented the concept of the scary 7-11 where the cost of a Slurpee might be an unwelcome encounter with a depressed, pen knife wielding clerk on a cigarette break. A troll squatting under Hollywood's grimey drawbridge. The gateway to L.A. panic attacks, and unproductive weekends wondering if the neighbors have any other CDs besides that Hawaiian conga line mantra they keep playing over and over and over and over and over. This is Van Nuys.
The town's "fame" derives from its being the once proud Porn Video Production capitol of the world. I'd actually held out a small sliver of hope, concerning this.
Let it be said... the Hollywood of roving movie idols and majestic film studios lording over a sun drenched landscape of glamour and excitement is the stuff of old documentaries – the Gables, Cagneys, Bogarts, Monroes and Deans are now just gawdy billboard-size paintings on the sides of office buildings and downtown facades. The real money-scented, omnipresent industry that rises like sweat-steam from Hollywood's every pore, today, is PORN.
And living in Van-fucking-Nuys, I held a thin hope in my heart that at least once in a while my daily malaise would be disrupted by the sight of a blow-n-hump film princess... I dunno... window shopping at the mall – walking her greyhound – comparing prices on ground chuck at the supermarket...
A thundercloud of bleach blond hair... cyber-breasts defying gravity, and possibly other laws of physics... pedicured and painted toenails that cost more than my rent...
But no. I never saw even one SINGLE PERSON in Van Nuys who so much as smelled like they worked in porn. It was like being staked out in the backyard with a tent and a pen-light, looking for Bigfoot.
In fact, I myself was a bit of a visual anomaly. Everyone else: 5-foot-4, pudgy, tanktop, cut-off jeans and popsicle toes wedged into old flip-flops. Add the backward baseball cap of choice, and the cheapest sunglasses you can envision. This was the basic unisex Van Nuys ensemble – the children even wore a kids' version. At least when I was there – and no, I didn't blend in.
My apartment – did I use the "little hell on earth" line yet? Imagine a single room in your house – not a big room, but say, a small bedroom. Now imagine a narrow hall about, oh, three steps long. Imagine it connected to a bathroom with just enough space for a phone booth sized shower stall, and a toilet that when you rose from it, you were suddenly standing over the sink. $450 a month.
And I didn't need a job, or references, to get it. Lucky, huh?
And oh yes, most interesting of all – my front door, wasn't one. Wasn't a door, that is. It was a sliding glass window with louvres to ensure a sort of mock privacy. My front lock? You know those little aluminum hooks, on a screw, that just reach over far enough to hook when the door is closed? Yeah. That tiny piece of cut sheet metal, about as big as a half-dollar, was my only protection from all of L.A., just on the other side.
From outside, the latch could be unhooked with a key, that popped the nose of the hook up and out. It had a rather distinct sound – a sort of zzzip-click-click-kwok.
You can imagine then, the sudden quickening in my heart and soul when, one night around 1:00 a.m., in the apartment with the lights out, I heard my "front door" being opened from outside – with a key. And no, it wasn't the landlord.
I slept on an air mattress, which of course had a leak, and by about 3:30 in the morning I'd wake up to find myself basically on the hard floor between two air pockets. Fortunately I had a foot-pump, that had me back in business in a few minutes, and then the mattress was good till sun-up. I found the leak but couldn't ever seem to patch it tight enough. It defied even duct tape.
I had almost dozed off, with a cheap blanket over me. I had finally laid down at half-past midnight after assembling a mass mail-out of headshots and résumés. Another L.A. Monday lay in wait for dawn.
Zzzip-click-click-kwok.
That – that CAN'T BE what I'm thinking it is. Can it? I raised my head to look.
Someone. Is. Coming. In.
Have I mentioned that this was only my SECOND NIGHT in my apartment? It was. The sliding glass was pushed open. A large silhouette parted the louvres and came forward.
The cheap blanket was launched like a tuna net at the dark form! I couldn't do one on purpose to save my very soul, but I think I actually kipped-up onto my feet! In a flash I was nose-to-nose with my unannounced guest. Yes, in retrospect it seems very stupid, unarmed, in just my underwear – but in an apartment no larger than a desk set, with running and hiding both non-options, what choice did I have?
I hit the light switch. He was as tall as me, and carrying a metal toolbox. I think I was as just as much a shock to him – did I mention I was in my underwear?
When I asked his name, I got something in a Danish accent. I shit you not. Yorghensivsensven... or something similar, only not as deftly articulated. "I'm heer tue fix thee heetre."
"It's summer. It's 1 o'fucking-clock in the morning. I didn't send for a repairman. And the apartment DOESN'T HAVE A HEATER." I asked if he cared to try his answer again, in light of those facts.
He then resorts to a fine L.A. tradition – he lies. Even though the lie hardly bares even a slight resemblance to the first story, he goes for it anyway. This is something you just get used to when you move to Los Angeles. There is no use fighting it. Everyone is lying to you – and the even more amazing part is, most of them actually think you aren't aware of it. A whole county of shysters, somewhere near seven million, each of whom will calmly look you in the eye and tell you that night is day, hot is cold, pink is green.
"I din't know anyone wass home – I knocked and knocked fyor ten minutes."
I actually stared in breathless disbelief at him for about that long. "Uh... pal, you didn't knock even once. You OPENED MY DOOR WITH A KEY and CAME IN. I WATCHED YOU.
Now I'm arguing with him over something that we both know he is lying about.
Finally he opens his box to show me there really are tools in it. "I need to check the vents," he says.
"Okay," I said, "check them." There was only one vent. I let him 'inspect' it, standing over him like a monkey on a wino's back. If this guy was going to try anything, I thought, he'd have to be the most reckless, brazen asshole in the zip code – no cakewalk would this job be.
At last he was satisfied, or at least figured it was time to call it a night and back out clean. He left through the louvres without parting them. When the glass slid shut, I had a piece of PCV pipe cut to fit the slide gutter by mid-morning the next day.
This was just the first of what I would come to refer to as my "Welcome To Hollywood" moments. And oooh, yeah, they got better.
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