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.

Travels: Investment Banker Walks Into A Coffee Shop [Day XV]

Wherein you all meet in a tavern.

[NB. This post is long because it is a reasonably exact transcript of a conversation I had with a man in a coffee shop this evening.  I had my laptop out, ready to write a post, and the only other person in the shop - a man who looks to be in his late fifties, salt and pepper hair, very fancy suit - is chatting to the barista about his radio choices.  Pandora - the Bob Dylan station.

They get going on Woodstock and he says something about Arlo Guthrie and the closing of the New York State Thruway.  I can't help mentioning the live recording of Coming Into Los Angeles, where he refers to the attended masses as 'a lotta freaks'.  Since I already have my laptop out, when he starts telling me his life story, I just type along.  It was a very strange thirty minutes.  I have no idea if this man's willingness to sit there in front of a total stranger as she typed away and nodded politely indicated a deep narcissism or if was just lonely, or what.  I don't even know if he knew I was writing down what he was saying, just that I was typing and I was looking at him, not the keyboard.


I have left the typing mistakes in for posterity.]


/begin transcript

My father is a flag-waving, you know, you would never accuse him of doing anything that was, um, un patriotic and the day before the draft came up he took me aside and he said.

This is a politician's war and I'm not going to have you die for some goddamned politician.  If your number comes up I have a car arranged and I will put you in it and take you across the border - there are people there waiting for you who will take you somewhere even I don't know where until the war is over.  And I said, really Dad?  And he said Really.

This man is wearing a silk shirt and a powder blue tie.

It wasn't so much freedom as the feeling that everyone there had that their life was going to be closed off and people felt they had no control over their lives.  They were trying to create a new society to escape from these -0 The people we've produced that have gone into politics that we've produced I can't believe.  They're a mess.

      This place has glass teapots.

What happened in that time too is that there were a llot of people in that time that were looking for answers is - a lot of those people went straight to drugs.  I did LSD three times and every time it was like -- I'm opeining the door to = -- another place.  And then the third time I tried LSD a being appeared in front of the door and said "you can't keep oepning and closing the door, you have to come into the room"  and when I finished with that trip, I finally said, I have to move into this next dimension of awareness, but I'm not going to seek it through LSD.  So then I had a spiritual epiphany and I lived with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in his ashram for three, four years.  That got deeper because I started to have experiences and spent time there.

      So, if you don't mind my asking - how did you come to be an investment.

Through chinese medication like everyone else.

      I'm not familiar with that trope, no.

I have a doctorate in Chinese Medicine.  I was working in Chinese medicine for three years, then I burnt out.  I was in my twenties at the time, and I met a fellow named Bill Bane, who is Bane Vanderbilt, Oppehauss family - probably the wealthiest people in the world at least in this country.  But through those connections I had met Bill Bane (Bane Capital) Mitt Romney, and he said Hey if you want to change careers you've got the right attitude and ability to do 90% of what we do and since you've learned Chinese medicine you can learn what we do in an afternoon.

Well, it took more than an afternoon, but that was the beginning of my investment banking career.

     That's fascinating.  Do you ever regret it?

No.  I could have healed people, created clinics and things like that.  But moving capital around, in various places, it's very fulfilling.  We finance a lot of technology companies...

     Yeah, well, you have the power now.  You're the man.

We have a whole - something I started, I guess it's more philanthropic than investment - but we support local farming.  Not necessarily a popular position in my circles.  I mean in theory it's great, we can support that.  I think ultimately genetically modified organisms can have useful production... I mean, the way we're raping the land, it's not good.

     That's very admirable.

     He put his hand in his pocket.

Well, it's who we are you know.  Everyone goes through the process of this 'getting' thing.  But it's not a real thing.  It's a disease, it's a neurosis.  There's only so much that you need to get.

     So who decides where, where the line is?

Well I think people know, you know, I have a house, I'm okay, I can stop now.  But we can't stop because it's a mental sickness.  You look at young people these days, the bulimia and the - what's the word - the anorexia.

     Well yes.  They've been around for a while.

Yes, well my ex-wife was anorexic but it's worse.  I need to see me for who I really am and break that spell.  We live in a consumer society that blocks us at every turn.  It's an addiction, like alcoholism.  We're destroying ourselves.

-chatter-

     Where are you from?

I was born in Manhattan and I grew up in Montclair New Jersey.  I went to, spent two years up in Massachussets getting my, what they call your acupuncture license and then spent four years in Manchester England where they have the only English language chinese medicine school in the world and when I came back from Manchester where I went to Newport and set up a practice and met some of the most amazing people in the world.  I went to Northeastern University then and got a degree in finance.  Got married, had my son.

     How old is your son?

He's twenty five.  Getting his degree in finance at Vanderbildt University.  I can't remember when we were talking, but he just said Dad, I'm really interested in Finace!  He's a musician too, he arranged it the music is on the radio.  But then he just decided no, I'm not going to do any  more of that.  And then he got a 720 on his GMAT.

     What is GMAT?

When you want to take a degree in business you gotta take a GMAT.  It's a test that they do, and it scores from like 400-800.  A perfect score - 800 and he had 720.  At Vanderbilt, which is the number one school in the US for master's in finance and, well, he got one of the spots.  And they gave him ten, fifteen thousand dollars as well.  There you go.

I am - well, I just moved here, I got a place up in Hollywood Hills.  Beautiful view of the San Fernando valley.  It's a beautiful 3000 square foot home, beatfil home.

      I guess your son doesn't live with you anymore.

No, no.  He was yougner, playing hockey from the playing 7-13 before he went to play at a hockey prep school.  I was in a hockey rink every weekend, you know, Christmas, holidays, because that's when they play the tournaments.

    - chatter about my work -

Skype: it's the future.  You'll have a tv that you can also use as a computer, I mean they're starting to do that right now.  we finance two companies who are doing that right now.  I do have a need for a personal assistant in a number of areas so this could work out.

We 'exchange' business cards.  He is wearing the fanciest stit I've ever seen.  The cuffs are monogrammed.

/end transcript.

Los Angeles is weird, man.

Notes from a retro booth.


One thing I do like about the flora of Los Angeles is that the big grey trees here are planted so close to the sidewalk that the roots push underneath the concrete and crack the streets apart and nobody seems to mind.  They just amble up and down the little rocky hills in the pavement.

Film: Brave - Tradition! Tradition!

*The first three paragraphs are not even remotely relevant unless you’re seriously interested in the politics of animated film production.

            Brave boasts two primary directing credits: Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman.  Andrews is an old hand at Disney, having acted as Head of Story on the very fine The Incredibles as well as his most recent (and unfortunate) screenplay credit for John Carter.  Chapman is no slouch either – she was Head of Story on The Lion King and directed one of Dreamworks’ best and most cinematically exciting efforts: The Prince of Egypt, a retelling of the Moses story that focuses on the conflicted relationship between Moses and Rameses.

            Anyway.  Nobody denies that the story of Brave is Chapman’s.  She brought the project to the studio and began to develop it as the writer/director.  (At the time, it was much more evocatively titled The Bear and the Bow.)  Not inconsequentially, Merida wasn’t the only female first for Pixar – Chapman was to be the first woman director in a company that is notoriously male-dominated even by industry standards. 

            Eighteen months before Brave was scheduled for delivery, Pixar replaced Chapman with Andrews.  It’s disingenuous to say that this was misogynistic or unprecedented: Monsters Inc., Toy Story 2 and Ratatouille all had directorial switches, for reasons the company is reluctant to disclose.  But it is unusual enough that people wondered about the motives for the change.  After all, who better to tell the story of a headstrong daughter than a woman who admitted that the script was based on her own relationship with her six-year old?  Pixar has never come out with a reason, and probably never will.  But at points in Brave, the cracks show.  It’s impossible to tell whose hands shaped what, but there are definitely two sets of distinctive tonal fingerprints on the film, and it muddies it up somewhat.

            This is Pixar’s first foray into a few things: period pieces, female leads, and the dreaded Princess Movie.  In the Scottish Highlands, adventurous young Princess Merida is chafing under the controlling thumb of her conservative mother, Queen Elinor.  Unbeknownst to her goofy, encouraging father Fergus, Merida and Elinor are in an escalating cold war about Merida’s arranged betrothal.    When the day comes, Merida looks for a third option with disastrous results and must struggle to right her wrongs and understand the true meaning of family and tradition.

            It’s probably not worthwhile to go into why it’s disappointing to see Pixar, a company that has historically tried to tell fresh stories with unconventional protagonists, choose the tale of a princess who doesn’t want to get married as their first female-led feature.   That said, Merida has one quality that certainly hasn’t cropped up before in the Disney stable:

            She’s kind of a jerk.