Travel: They Live! [Day L]

Wherein yeah, Los Angeles is a tiny bit creepy.

There is a sheen to some of these people.

It's not immediately visible.  Everyone here carries oil-removing wipes in their purses to prevent any unwanted glimmers.  But it is there in the eyes.  You can see it when they run to catch up in heels and squash torsos together and yip, high-pitched.  You can see it in heads bend over iPhones, thumbs tapping furiously as they wander down the halls.

Talk bounces off them, but they never stop making sounds at each other.  Every time a door opens here, I jump.  My mouth curves up.

Today I feel myself reflected in flat white teeth.

Notes from the last week.

This is all minor nervousness, the kind of thing that usually gets written down on the backs of napkins and then tossed in the trash.  The people here are really nice to me, actually, and I am sure this is all in my head.  I probably just act weird.  Actually, I know I act weird.

Cheers
Julia

Travel: Sense and Sensibilities [Day XLIX]

Wherein I give network TV a fighting chance.

My sister Miriam is a huge Friends fan.

She has all the box DVDs and can faithfully quote Phoebe and Chandler's most rambling monologues.  Watching the show can pull her out of a slump - if I come downstairs and hear Jennifer Aniston's voice and a laugh track coming from the basement I know she needs to be on her own for a bit.  She knows the characters and how they'll behave in a given situation;  I think she sees the Friends as, well, friends.  Recently, she's shifted from a coffee shop to a neighbourhood bar, following another group of thirty-somethings in How I Met Your Mother, still running in its eighth season.

Conversely, I never really 'got' most scripted sitcoms.  I love TV, love the medium and what it offers in terms of character opportunities and chances for prolonged serial plotting, but the 'group of adult friends hang out wacky-style for twenty-two minutes' never really appealed.  Even Frasier, which does make me laugh when I've seen it in hotel rooms and airports, never caught on for me beyond the occasional rerun.  The shows I love try to build epic worlds only to die a painful, limping Death of a Thousand Nielsen boxes in their first couple seasons.  A few times, Miri has watched one of 'my shows' with me - she found the characters I adored unlikeable or unrealistic and the premises far-fetched.  Right or wrong, she's my barometer for public taste in television.

I think she will really enjoy Ben & Kate.  

And that's not a slur on Miri, and it's not a slur on the show.

I haven't talked much about the show itself in these entries because it seemed largely irrelevant, but today we had a table read* and the actors came in.  Hearing them bring so much energy to the lines, seeing the excitement on Dana and the other writers' faces as their show coalesced... I really felt a collection of people imagining something special together.

And it is hard for me to be objective now, even on the fringes of production, but the scripts make me laugh.  The actors - particularly Nat Faxon, whose last gig was as a screenwriter for the Descendants (he and his cowriters won the Oscar for it) - make me laugh.  The jokes make me laugh.  There's no question that Ben & Kate is situational comedy.  In some ways it's safe as houses.

But I'm going to watch it when I get home in the fall, even if I don't have a Nielsen box.

Notes from the 14 bus.

Wonderful Los Angeles.  A teenage boy got on the bus today with skate sneakers, low-riding baggy jeans, an unzipped hoodie that said Thug Lyfe on the back... and a pair of tzizit sticking out from under his t-shirt.

Cheers

Julia

* It's a meeting where the writers, producers and the main actors all get scripts and the producer reads through the entire script, with the actors running their dialogue while seated.  A regular table read of a half-hour show takes about fifteen minutes.

Travel: The Apocalypse Amendment [Day XLVIII]

Wherein I am surprised by a friend.


Nerds are really friendly.

This is a broad statement.  It's also kind of true.  When I started to feel a little homesick for my Vancouver cadre, I added two things into my schedule.  Solo movie nights at the Aero Theatre, which shows old and unreleased films; and a weekly event called Friday Night Dice, which is an open group of board-and-tabletop gamers who meet in a church basement.

One of these choices yielded a group of sweet, inclusive, helpful people.  Guess which.

I've been to the Aero a good five or six times, and never spoken to anyone but the ticket taker.  This doesn't preclude a good time (they showed The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly last week!), but it is telling.  At my first Friday Night Dice, I wandered the tables for maybe three minutes before a couple pulled me into a back room where a Settlers of Catan game was set up.  We did awkward introductions with the five guys sitting cross-legged on the floor, and by the end of the night I had an invitation to a Mystery Science Theatre group-watch, a bag of Twizzlers*, and a ride home.

Nerds are really friendly.

Since that night, I've fallen into a little posse made up of some of the regular Friday Night Dicers.  They fall into familiar archetypes for me - a few computer programmers, an elementary school teacher, ex-military model-painters... and this is Los Angeles, so of course there are a few actors.

My favourite of the bunch is a guy in his mid-twenties inexplicably named Kyle Wylie (seriously).  He's a journalist for a local paper, and every time he opens his mouth it feels like I get another piece of the puzzle about his mysterious backstory.  Jason Isaacs used to read Wylie to sleep.  Wylie has been to thirty-three countries, mostly on location scouts.  Wylie grew up on an Indian Reservation with his mom.  He loves Tarkovsky, but doesn't want to be a filmmaker, because his father is 'in film'.

He somehow makes this all sound very matter-of-fact, but I am pretty sure Wylie's father is not just 'in film'.  He lives in a way fancy house - nicest basement I have ever gamed in, not that nerds appreciate full-sized windows in their subterranean domains.  Despite all this nonsense, like the rest of the Friday Night Dice crew, Wylie seems like a smart, down-to-earth guy.

This is a long run-in to the run-in I had with Wylie on Friday when everyone was taking a smoke break outside The Building.  Side-Note to churches: if you don't want to project a menacing image, please don't name your ostensibly all-faiths community centre The Building.  It sounds like you're constructing a Death Star in the attic.

In addition to his mysterious past, Wylie has endeared himself to me by being totally willing to debate at length.  We seem to agree on major issues, so the debates are mostly pop-culture centred and only parodically intense.  I love to argue, so it's nice to have company who does too.

I don't remember how the gun thing came up, but come up it did.  Like many liberals, I have a fairly narrow portrait of what a gun advocate looks like.  Gun nuts are dangerously unstable teenagers raged out on despair, or old guys in the woods with armour-piercing bullets definitely not designed for bears.  Gun nuts live in the south.  They are backwards and terrifying.  They are not my friends - they are not left-wing college graduates who play Dungeons and Dragons.  They are not smart.

But apparently sometimes they are.

My argument with Wylie about gun control went on for two hours, and what his side boiled down to was this: "The founding fathers knew that all governing bodies eventually trend towards chaos and dictatorship, and the only thing preventing that trend in America is that the governing entities know that their population is armed and will not stand for abuse.  Sometime in the next three hundred years, a dictator will arise, and the people will speak against him.  With bullets.  Ergo, it is the responsibility of the current government not to interfere with the arming of the populace because that would be undemocratic."

I... had no idea how to react.  This made so little sense that I couldn't even assemble a response.  And thus, I lost a debate against someone who thinks George Zimmerman had every right to own the gun with which he shot Trayvon Martin.  I've never understood how differential politics can 'wreck' a friendship or marriage, but I did feel weird hugging Wylie goodnight after learning that about him.  Life is complicated and strange.

But this song is not!  I sent it to Wylie as a joke, which he accepted with good humour.

Notes on the California Air-Care laws.


The other surprising element of the Friday Night Dicers is their total embrace of California's medical-marijuana dispensary cards.  "I told them I had an eating disorder, and that the pot would help by giving me the munchies," said Kei, who is skinny in that low-exercise indoor-dweller way.  We were all standing outside in the warm California night air, smoke drifting away as Kei lit his pipe.  "They didn't even ask."  I went around the circle and got the rest of the gang's excuses for their medical cards.

"Back pain."

"Insomnia."

"Social anxiety."

"Post-traumatic stress disorder."

This from Michael, a sweet-faced, heavyset twenty-something who always comes to the gatherings with his fiancee.  He was in the Air Force from eighteen to twenty-four, and spent three years in Iraq.  "It helps with the nightmares," he said quietly.  Like me, Michael doesn't smoke with the rest of the players, but he showed me his card.  "I was waking Danielle up at night.  It was a real problem.  I don't take it unless I can feel something coming on and it's nighttime - the smoking is too gross.  But I'm worried about getting addicted if I take sleeping pills instead.  The pot, I know I won't take unless I really need it."

More sides for the dodecahedron.

Cheers
Julia

* They call them Red Vines here, but trust me.  They are Twizzlers.

Travel: Dyed In The Wool [Day XLV]

Wherein I assist the masses.

I spent the morning today assembling baby quilt patterns on Etsy for Dana.  Apparently infants have very strong opinions on mauve.  Relatedly, and more excitingly, I have begun taking notes on conference calls when Katie (Dana's assistant) is out on errands, which means I get to be in the room for all of the network check-ins.  My quick typing, one of the three abilities I cite when other people ask what I'm good at*, has finally paid off.

The writers' room is kind of a dream for someone as nitpicky as me.  People usually don't like to go see films with me because rather than just say I enjoyed it, I think for about twenty minutes and then double down on what worked and what didn't.  It can kind of kill the buzz.  I try not to do it anymore.  But in the room, seven or eight people are doing the exact same thing at the development stage.  Even though I don't talk at all, I feel in such good company.

It's surreal to think that the show is actually going to go on air and that, for the first few episodes anyways, I'm going to have a lot of information about how different it almost looked, or why the characters are playing out the way they are.  

Notes from Avonlea.

Up at Dana's house yesterday, I was spearheading a campaign against The Room, Dana and Quinn's storage space cum nursery.  There were all sorts of things in there, from wedding memorabilia to old script notes to a large ziplock bag of free cosmetic samples, which Dana cheerfully handed off to me.  

Once I got home, I used one of the moist towelettes on my face.  It didn't sting too badly, and after a few minutes my skin began to feel very stiff.  It was odd, but I figured it was some sort of active ingredient until I threw the wipe away.  My fingers were stained a horrible orange-y tan.

I ran to the washroom in a panic and stuck my face in the sink.

My entire face was streaked with what looked like wood varnish - I felt like a very tall Oompa-Loompa.  Now I know how Anne Shirley felt when the horrible raven-black hair dye turned out green and she had to cut off all her hair.  Fortunately for Mary's bathroom tiles, I did not have to cut off my face: the stuff (which I assume was self-tanner) came off with some vigorous scrubbing and rubbing alcohol.  I have no idea what I would have done had it not: I looked truly ridiculous.

Maybe it would have been a talking point at the office.  I bet they don't get many Oompa-Loompas down here.

Cheers,

Julia

*the other two are spelling and the ability to love even the most awful of cats.

Travel: #TheMysteriesOfSocialMedia [Day XLII]

The office is very excited today: #DanaFox is trending on Twitter.

Also: Dire news.  A plot point depends on a cardboard pastry insert, but the gas-station Hostess Cupcakes of the script come in a tray, according to the serious-voiced man around a corner.  Not in a little cardboard tube.  A tray.  Things are going to have to change.  Someone says Twinkies come with a cardboard edge.  Don't you think Twinkies would be funny?  Yeah, yeah, totally.  I had a teacher in high school and he had a plate of Twinkies that looked exactly the same after nine years.  I'll have my graphics people come up with a Twinkie thing just in case, because everyone has that perception that Twinkies last forever.

Crisis averted.

But wait, more concerns!  In the flashback, do we need Lisa Frank, or will Trapper Keeper do?  Maybe Dana will find the Trapper Keeper too loud.  But that would be awesome.  It's on E-Bay now for like, seventy five bucks.  One of the other staffers speaks up.  Oh my gosh, I have like ten of those at my mom's house.  She is ordered to take pictures and e-mail them.  They think Lisa Frank is more character-appropriate.

It's the little things that kill!

Notes from Katie's desk.
It is really weird to be surrounded by coworkers who are not your coworkers.

Cheers
Julia

Travel: Schrodinger's Date and Other Phenomena That Should Have Stopped In High School [Day XL]

Wherein I take pot shots at my own passivity.  Also cats die.

When Erwin Schrodinger posited a quantum thought experiment wherein the state of a boxed cat could be termed simultaneously ‘alive’ and ‘dead’ as long as it was not visible to the experimenter, I doubt he understood what far-reaching consequences his words would have on the dating tactics of 21^st century dillweeds.

Allow me to explain.

Most dates are defined by their concrete existence.  One asks, receives affirmation that a date is welcome, and then proceeds to go bowling or whatnot.  This is fine – consider this the walking-about version of the cat.

The trouble begins when you accompany a friend to a film/passion play/narwhal dinner theatre and begin to notice that they are behaving… oddly.  Perhaps they’re a new friend you’re just getting to know, or an old one with whom you’ve been out of touch.  Either way, something seems off.  Possible symptoms include: offers to pay for food and/or accoutrements, group outings where six other friends mysteriously fail to show up, and the infamous Long Weird Hug.  You know the one.

Congratulations, you are on a Schrodinger’s Date.  This is a precarious situation.  Acknowledgment of the date-like nature of the evening will force you to confront the problem, effectively killing your Friendship Cat.  But there is a possibility that, if left unexamined by the scientist, the Date Cat will not trigger and you and your companion’s feelings can escape unmolested.

Once you have identified the Schrodinger’s Date, your options are limited.  The simplest solution is to remove the cat from the box posthaste.  Let your companion know in the clearest possible terms the following: the two of you are not on a date.  You will never be on a date.  And if they didn’t want to get their sensitive feelings hurt they should have been more explicit about asking you out so you could have cut their date-like feelings off at the ankles and spared them further pain.

…But who are we kidding.  If you were that sort of person, you would not be trapped in a Schrodinger’s Date in the first place.  They are the exclusive province of the vaguely passive.

So here is your recourse: Do not allow your companion to open Schrodinger’s Box and gas the Friendship Cat.

You are already a master of passivity; crack that nonsense up to eleven.  If you feel that they are reaching for the Box (or putting their lips too close to your face), double down.  Talk about the weather.  Engage deflector shields.  Mix some metaphors too, that should throw them off until you get out of the theatre.  Do not under any circumstances use the word ‘date’ in a sentence.  Avoid calendars and Lebanon.  In fact, just cut them off if they start making a ‘d’ sound.

If, despite all your weasley tactics (that’s weasley, not Weasley – sorry Ron), they manage to posthumously identify your hangout as a date, then it is their fault for not getting your consent before dating you and you can feel free to quietly loathe them while they drive you home because the Los Angeles buses don’t run after 11:00 at night and the 405 is scary as hell.

Watch out for too-long hugs, clueless social navigators of America.  May the Quantum Cat be with you.

Cheers

Julia

Travel: Taste The Rainbow [Day XXXVI]

Wherein swag is had by all and I give notes on a network television script.

Hold your arms out in front of you and make a circle.  Look down to about your waist.

You are looking at the approximate volume of the Skittle duffel bag that just came through the office in the arms of a man named Freddie.  The writers were very excited.  He was handing out packets to everyone at a desk, and I stopped him to ask what had brought on the sugar shack.

"Nothing, really.  Skittles is hoping this will brighten your day."  He left me with a bag and sauntered out.

I am suspicious.  What if these Skittles are a bribe, sent by the network in order to prevent Dana from airing the upcoming episode where Tommy, Ben's black best friend/sidekick, explores race relations and self-distances from his black identity in order to fit in better with white friends?  Or the one where little Maddie gets hold of a Judy Blume book and questions the nature of sexuality?  Disastrous.

Okay, so maybe not from the network.

But there must be some nefarious force at work for so many Skittles to have been amassed for no transparently visible reason.  I blame the patriarchy.

They are tasty though.

Notes from a red tongue.

Yesterday, Dana gave me the preliminary script for the second episode - which she wrote - and asked me to give notes.  My head exploded.  I cannot give notes to this woman.  She is an insanely successful screenwriter and I am a ex-college student who missed the last two sessions of my Professional Development class.


Obviously.

I ended up pretending I was writing the notes for an alternate universe version of Dana whom I would never have to see again once she read them.  It worked fairly well, except that when I handed over the script this morning, she did not - upon touching it - shimmer away into another dimension as I had hoped she would.  Life is full of disappointment.


I have had too many Skittles.


Cheers
Julia

Travel: Adventures In Babysitting [Day XXXII]

Wherein the brutality of human nature is revealed.  Also I pretend to be a dinosaur who lives in a piano.

About five years ago, Dana's brother Ben and his girlfriend eloped.  Dana was the only non-priest present the ceremony, which was on a remote beach.  They sent the family pictures after the fact as a wedding announcement.

For a story that starts out so sassy, their family life is pretty normal.  They live about a twenty minute drive from Mary in Pacific Palisades (the Pacific Palisades?  All the names here are slightly weird) with their in-house nanny and two little boys, Nathan and Leo.  I haven't had too much to do with them so far, but today Nathan came over to the house and Mary seemed wiped, so I took us out for a walk.

As it turns out, Nathan is a smart, funny, friendly kid.  We got into dinosaurs pretty quick - it's my safe topic of conversation with four year old boys.  And with them, anything can be a dinosaur, and anyone can be a dinosaur catcher.  We started with a Stegosaurus-box in the house and moved on to garbage cans, the piano, passing dogs, rocks in the creek, and cars.  Every time, we snuck up, 'caught' the dinosaur with the little green nets Mary uses to scoop debris out of her front-yard pond, asked it what we could do to improve its presumably peaceful dinosaur life, and moved on.

I did both the dinosaur voices - Gggh AArghzzzz RRR my throat hurts - and translation.  Nathan was basically Captain Kirk, violating the Prime Dinosaur Directive all over the place.  We transplanted dinosaurs (fallen leaves), fed dinosaurs (the garburator), hid under dinosaurs (the soccer net in the backyard), petted dinosaurs.  Several of the 'dinosaur owners' we encountered (poor unsuspecting folks walking their dogs) found this charming rather than crazy.  It helps to have a four year old along when you're doing this kind of stuff.

Things got weird when we approached a 'sleeping' dinosaur - a big empty black van on the curb.  Nathan said to sneak up on it, so we crawled forward until we were behind the back wheel.  I cautioned Nathan not to actually hit the wheel with his net, and he swiped the air obediently.  "ROOOAR!" went the dinosaur.

I left it up to Nathan.  "Did we catch him?"

Nathan nodded, then dropped the net.  He held his hands up in claw-shapes, and I figured he wanted a turn to be the dinosaur.  "Hello there, dinosaur car," I said.  He shook his head and twisted his hands away from each other.

"I'm not a dinosaur.  I'm killing it by twisting its neck so it can't breathe."

I was stumped, but made appropriate gurgling noises.  "Please let me go!"  I growled.  Nathan made a snap motion with his little hands.  "There, it's dead."  He looked proud.  "Can we go find another one?"

We got up and started to walk back towards the house.  "Was it a bad dinosaur?" I asked.

Nathan looked thoughtful.  "I guess it might have been.  Sometime."

We played for another half-hour, and Nathan killed every dinosaur we met.

Cheers
Julia

Travel: Mix Master [Day XXXI]

Wherein writing is rewriting in music, too.

When pilots get made, the producers don’t have to worry about clearing the soundtracks, since nobody’s officially making money off the show yet.  Once they have a series order, though, the pilot gets sent back through the post process so the mixers can replace the ‘temp music’ with cleared, licensed stuff.

The familiarity of the processes are a strange comfort to me.  I sat in the mix room for four hours with Dana, the director Jake Kasdan (Lawrence Kasdan’s son! Fangirl moment.), and a couple of sound techs as they trudged through every cue.  Maybe it was just hunger, but it gave me flashbacks to four months ago, when we mixed our own infinitely tinier show. 

Sure, there are more people here – the console of blinky lights is slightly larger, and they didn’t have any problems licensing Take On Me for the party scene.  But there’s the same amount of surreptitious eating at the console, the same arguments about whether the levels on the cue should come up five percent or go down ten, the same laughs at the lines that only seem to get funnier the sixth time.  The mix is a slog, but there’s a sense of excitement too – like marathon runners coming into the stadium for the last lap.

They stuck with the composer who did the temp music for the series proper, so he had to rewrite - and slightly tweak - his own compositions for the airing version.  “Do you think it’s too close for comfort?” Jake said as they listened to the temp soundtrack against the one we were using.  Dana didn’t seem too worried.  “It’ll squeak by.”

I asked Randy – the line producer – who had ended up with the rights to the composer’s temp music.  “The Fox conglomerate.  If he so much as tries to demo anything else with one of those tracks, they’ll have a lawyer on him faster than you can say shark.”

“Even if he’s replacing his own music on one of the shows they run?”

“Especially then.”

So not quite like we do it at home, then.

Cheers

Julia

Notes: A Few Thoughts On Depression

This is kind of a personal essay.  It's not really funny or insightful.

At seventeen, I became very unhappy for reasons I didn't totally understand.

I was just finishing twelfth grade.  College promised a respite from all the mistakes I'd made in the past four years, particularly social ones.  I should have been looking forward to reinventing myself, and at some level I imagined that I was.  My parents, especially my mom, had found their tribes in freshman year - I pictured a tangle of young people piled onto a dorm room bed or huddled over papers; cramming, chatting away and falling asleep in the library.

People asked me if I was nervous, since it's so unusual for Canadian kids to travel away from home for school.  (Of my advanced placement class - full of people much brighter than me - of a hundred and ten, four left the country and only about fifteen went outside of BC.)  I said no, and I really think I meant it.  High school had become a thick, muggy column of air I had to push my way through.  I regularly fell asleep in class, and my teachers expressed concern about my 'home life'.  I laughed it off.  My home life is perfect.


When my parents organized a trip to Japan to visit my cousin Gay, however, I pled too much schoolwork and spent spring break locked in my room, sleeping through the day and emerging only to brew a fifth, sixth, seven pot of tea or to take another half-hour long shower.  I was accountable to no one, especially not myself.  But, I thought, it wasn't my fault.  It was high school's fault.  As soon as I escaped its toxic fumes I would emerge triumphant as the fun, intelligent person I knew college would extract from me.