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: 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

Travel: Cat-and-Tonic [Day XXVII]

Wherein the legal age is still twenty-one.  I think.


The grocery store around the corner from the house is a cornucopia of Weird American Things.  Today I was in there buying more tea - I have drunk poor Mary out of Darjeeling and Chai - and a little boy, maybe six or seven, was running around with light-up shoes on and what I thought was a Cat in the Hat t-shirt.  I paused to quietly envy the blinky sneakers and would have moved on, but he banked sharply and crashed into me.

"Sorry," I said.  He nodded and backed away.  Instead of saying Thing 1, his shirt had Drunk 1 written in the circle on the front.  He was unfazed, and disappeared down the liquor aisle.  (Still not used to that either.)  I wandered down after him - there was a hastily written sign on one of the shelves:

Thanks for your feedback.  The liquor section of the store will now be open from 12 PM - 3 AM.

When I got up to the register with my tea, Drunk 1 was helping his young mom out the door with their groceries.  I wonder if he has a twin who was lucky enough to get Drunk 2.

Notes from a very clean comic shop.

I walked from Sunset Boulevard home yesterday, which probably doesn't mean anything to you and didn't mean anything to me either until I did it.  It is a long walk.  But it was very interesting. I never realized how many famous people's names I actually knew until I was edging my way through the tourist collective checking out the brass stars on the street.

It was interesting to see who wanted their picture taken with which plaque: a twenty-something guy was pointing excitedly at the Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen star; a newlywed couple still in their outfits stood proudly over Marilyn Monroe.  A homeless man was sleeping on Werner Herzog, but I think they'll move him soon.  The homeless man, not Werner.  Damn unclear English syntax.

Cheers
Julia

Travel: Ah-murr-ca [Day XXII]

Wherein we put some holiday in your holiday so you can holiday while you holiday.
Nobody went to the office on the fourth.

In the evening, the sirens were more frequent than usual.  I can only assume people were lighting off crackers and blowing their fingers to shreds in celebration.  Some of the bangs were quite close - Mary and I went out to San Vicente, the boulevard nearest to the house to watch the fireworks.  She says the local country club has a display every year, but it's set so far back into the grounds that only a few of the fireworks make it above the tree-line.  The rest just light up the smoke and make the sky look radioactive.

A few other clusters of people were out watching as well.  Los Angeles is so warm, even at nighttime I was out in my bare feet and a thin shirt, and a few little kids chased each other around with sparklers.  It felt very surreal, like we were in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  The police cars kept passing as the grand finale made a valiant leap and pushed past the tree line for a spectacular red white and blue explosion.

It is a tale.

Told by a country club, full of sound and fury,

Signifying American excess.

Hurr hurr.

As we walked back, one of the family groups passed us.  The heavyset father looked put out.  “Well, that was lame,” he said as he plowed along the sidewalk.  Mary laughed.  “I’m sorry, but it was,” he shot over his shoulder.

Notes from the office.

In Los Angeles, there are televisions on all the buses.  Today on the way to the studio they were playing old reruns of 21 Jump street.

The rest of the office is on lunch break.  "Is it weird that I'm eating turkey, chicken, and salami at the same time?" one of the writers asked.  From the next cubicle over: "Sounds like something I would do."  A thoughtful pause.  "You want to go see Spiderman tomorrow?"

Great minds of our generation, ladies and gentlemen.

Cheers

Julia

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.

Travels: Over The Plate [Day X]

Why hasn't there been a film made about a paparazzi who slowly becomes famous for taking particularly interesting or unusual photos of celebrities, to the point that the images themselves become considered 'art', and the person in question becomes the object as well as the subject of the media's attention?  It could be a good short, I don't know how well the concept would hold up in the long run unless you threw another cog into the works.

This may have happened in real life [Terry Richardson comes to mind as a sleazy dude who started out taking pictures of vulnerable celebs and became respected in the photography world, but that's a slightly different thing and totally eugh anyways]... I should do some research.  Being a paparazzi seems like such a strange and dehumanizing job anyhow, I wonder how people would get into that line of work in the first place.  Are they disillusioned photojournalism majors?  Star-hounds?  Film fanatics?  Or just people trying to get through a day's work.

If a paparazzi did become famous, they could set up some pretty sweet self-shot gigs.  Like how J. Jonah Jameson at the Daily Bugle always wants Peter Parker to take pictures of Spiderman for him.  Sneaky buggers.

Cheers
Julia

Travels: Assorted Bonbons [Day VII]

Notes from Brentwood Town.

Not much to say today, just a nitpick that I had not anticipated about living in Los Angeles: I am constantly earworming myself with songs about various streets, districts and landmarks in the city.    The primary culprit at the moment is Randy Newman's excellent and cutting I Love L.A., which has the audacity to include a sing-along chorus that does nothing but list the names of local boulevards.  I have found myself humming it every single day.  It is making me insane.

You will share my pain.

Cheers
Julia

Travels: STEEEEVE! [Day VI]

Wherein I become a much more useful player in Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon.


I'm down here because I Know People.  This is not through any particular skill or exceptional quality of my own; it is merely an accident of birth and subsequent neighbourly mingling.  This was brought home to me rather forcefully when Mary pulled me along to the premiere of Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World, a film written and directed by one of Dana's very good friends both in the industry and in real life, Lorene Scafaria.

As I have long suspected, for those involved above the line a film premiere is a sort of adult Prom, an opportunity to put on a pretty dress and get in a limo with your friends and drink champagne somewhere fancy.  I am frankly surprised they didn't all pack up afterwards to go camping in the Santa Monica Hills and zip their sleeping bags together.  The atmosphere certainly supported it.

Outside the theatre there was a red carpet set up, with a secondary 'lane' for regular film-festival goers whom nobody was interested in photographing.  There was a small river of paparazzi between us and the real stars [including Dana, Lorene, and an extremely pregnant and pretty Diablo Cody, whom I was too nervous to talk to], and a sort of unofficial third lineup across the street.  I thought at first that they were just observing the cacophony, but as soon as the actors appeared they revealed their true colours.  "STEVE!" they bawled.  "KEIRA, KEIRA, I LOVE YOU!"  A chant went up after a few moments: "Sign this, sign this, sign this!"  The actors gave no indication that they heard any of this nonsense, and I don't blame them in the least.  I'm sure they're coached not to cop to this in public, but I imagine the press junket is very few celebrities' favourite part of the job.  The photographers were hardly more polite: some of the writers and less-seasoned red carpet walkers looked downright shellshocked by all the noise.

I could get really cheesy and describe my experiences before and during the afterparty as Seeking A Friend For The End Of The Film, but I won't, because that would be declasse and God knows I am eternally bound to classiness.  After some theatre lobby nervousness, Dana handwaved me in to a very strange bar where the shot glasses had LED lights in them and cater-waiters were swanning around with mysterious looking puffs that turned out to be crab cakes.  Her kind assistant Kate let me stick close to her and gawk surreptitiously at all the finery, but it did strike me that perhaps the function of these parties is less to exclude the unworthy and more to give the people who do have face recognition some time where they can celebrate their achievements in peace.  I imagine there are very few places in urban North America where Keira Knightley can just sit down and have a friendly chat in a restaurant without being semi-consciously interrupted by a stream of well-intentioned admirers.

It was a very surreal experience.  For me, that is.  Not for Miss Knightley.  I suspect she is fairly acclimated to the LED-infused shot glasses.

Notes from an American premiere.

The film itself is a sort of apocalypse-meets-Lost In Translation-meets-Punch Drunk Love-road-trip... thing, and I was pleasantly surprised by it.  Steve Carrell does downtrodden, passive Everyman [an archetype I'm not particularly fond of] with appropriate hangdog aplomb; Keira Knightley is basically playing a quirky Dream Girl [again, something that tweaks a lot of film critics].  That said, they brought a lot of humanity to the characters and they have good onscreen chemistry.  And I'll admit, I did find myself tearing up a bit during Carrell's confrontation with his father, played by Martin Sheen.  The writing can be darkly funny in parts, and I reckon it's worth a watch even though the predictable last act/love story and uneven tone does bring it down somewhat.

Cheers
Julia

Travels: The Magic Kingdom [Day V]

Disneyland: ITSO the great, sadly late, Ray Bradbury. Old Dead Things.

In the centre of the park, a grove of carefully tended flowers surround a statue. The bronze is sun-warm to the touch.

Far away, under the earth, eyes blink.

Steam drifts through vents in a cold dark room, pulling heat from a tube in the centre. The body inside, empty, twitches in the cold as the throat works. Veins that once pumped blood now ooze acids: gel and nitric and mystery magic. The mouth is motionless. In a nearby chamber, a heart ticks with mechanical precision on a bed of ice. The brain was removed long ago - everybody knows it is the heart that really matters.

He waits.

Beat. A little girl holds the hand of the statue.  Beat. Tourists squint in the sun, flash cruel lights in his eyes. He cannot close them.  Beat. Underground, his breath steams silently inside the tube, trapped. His fingers yearn to shade his face. Above, a pigeon passes over the sun and falls, suddenly, into the shadows of ringed palm trees.

An enormous, deformed animal lumbers past the statue, and the man in the tube feels a pang of kinship: the monsters that roam the park are trapped too, marooned in a prison of felt and sweat - their hands foreign white bodies hanging from rubbery wrists. He imagines tongues lolling in the heat, sunken eyes inside the bobbing heads. They glint out at him with empathy.

His knuckle itches. It has always itched.

The room has no clock in it, but they check on him twice a day. The door creaks open; it is Connors. The man in the tube imagines a smile. Connors is the best of them, the gentlest and the brightest. Most days he brings a thin sketchpad into the room with him and draws lying on the floor, thin legs kicking at the air like a boy.

"Good morning, sir," says Connors with respect. "It's a beautiful day out there."

He sits and draws next to the tube for a few minutes, gentle-eyed women in flowing dresses and dragons and shining castles, and speaks casually of the world. He has been away from the facility for several days: "My baby sister, married. What a doozy of a place this old rock of ours is." He shakes his head and looks up. "But you always knew that, I suppose. One day you'll see it again."

Yes! the man wants to shout. He wants to reach out and flip through Connors' book, make the skirts on the women twirl and the fire flick forth from the dragons' mouths. He wants to claw away the fog of the room, clamber up, up, up to the sun and the light and the hurt and see his world, the perfect world he always knew he could make and he did, he did make it better than anyone could have imagined. Too well, perhaps. In a perfect world, there is no room for decay.

Move, mouth! he commands. Gnash, o Teeth! Bend, knees, bend and break and bleed, bleed blue fire! The tube trembles, earth reaching out to him. He wants to sing.

Obey! Obey! Obey!

Connors looks up from his drawings, startled. Above, the nails of the statue shift and bite into bronze. The tick of the heart falters. It slows. Connors rushes out, his sketchbook open on the floor.

In a perfect world, there is no room for old dead things.

Notes from a tired brain.

Still not super happy with this, but part of this exercise is letting go of writing before I stomp it into the ground, so there you have it. I am pretty sure Walt Disney's cryogenically frozen body is in no way attached to the statue of him in the park, which is actually quite charming, but Bradbury is the best at body horror and I couldn't pass up a real-live I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream scenario.

In actual news, Disneyland is definitely cool in its own way, though I'm sure I come to it very differently than I would have as a child. Now it's more food for thought than mindless amusement. Still definitely a worthwhile experience. Also, a thriller/chase sequence set inside the It's A Small World ride would be amazing. I want to shoot that now. Kind of DIVA meets Charade - it's a scary and surreal artifact of bygone times, much like Disney himself.

Cheers
Julia

Travels: A Triple Decker Afternoon [Day IV]

Wherein I am already late and a thick fog of capitalism descends upon the land.

Just under the wire with this one - writing from a hotel in Anaheim.  My good friend Matthew is down here at a voice actor's conference (who knew they had conferences... but doesn't it sound like fun?) and has roped me into Disneyland.  I've evaded it for twenty-two years, but to be honest I'm a little excited for tomorrow.  It's all a bit 'the lady doth protest', especially after Matthew extracted a promise from me that I would not say anything that could be termed snarky while inside park bounds - he thinks I have some sort of inner child that requires release.  As I generally rely on my snark to protect me from the reality of any given situation, I am understandably nervous.

In unrelated news: man, Union Station is really really and truly a beautiful building.

Notes from a beige bedspread.

I think I will resurrect the ITSO tomorrow.  It was an old writing exercise I used to assign myself to practice pastiche, with ITSO standing both for 'in the style of' and inspiring hope that a reader would say "it's so [writer you were emulating]."  I always secretly wished a teacher would assign it as a project and I would have tons of experience and kill it, but no such thing ever occurred.  Life is bleak.

Travels: One's Lot In Life [Day III]

Wherein I take the bus in the wrong direction and Darth Vader presides over Fox.

I often wonder how a studio set functions without occasionally acknowledging the tension of twenty minions politely waiting for their big break... while working for the person whose job they would like.  Bad sentence, but I'll come back to it later.  Point being, at school we all know we're competing, but at least we can kind of do a friendly jostle here and there and there's an understanding that eventually anyone who works hard and has a reasonable balance of good luck to bad will make a stab at it.  Not so at Fox.  I met a good fifteen people today: they would all like to be in the writers' room.  They are not.

I was walking around the lot with Dana's lovely assistant Kate when she circumspectly referred to this weirdness.  I asked her for advice about the summer.  The lot has large murals painted on several of the buildings - the one behind Kate showed a vaguely anemic Luke Skywalker doing battle with Vader.

"Don't be pushy," she said.  "Don't be too smart.  I mean, be smart, but not about the writing.  Make friends who write.  Be smart with them, get your lines out at your dinner parties.  I'm still working on the balance."  We looked up at the mural.  Poor Luke, about to have his hand cut off by the Force.  Stuck up there forever.

"Does Dana ever show her scripts to you, though?  In private."

Kate beamed.  "Dana's really nice with me, actually.  I'm lucky.  One of my jokes made it into the pilot; I called my parents, I was so excited."  I asked her what the joke was, but she wouldn't tell me.  "It'll seem like bragging," she said.  "I don't know you well enough for bragging yet.  Try again next week."

On the way home from the lot, I took the bus in the wrong direction and ended up at the Santa Monica airport.  It's as close as an airfield can get to cozy, with little carts puttering around on the tarmac.  I bet the air traffic controllers there are happy with their jobs - they don't want to eventually get into the cockpit.

Lucky air traffic controllers.

Notes from a stucco workplace.

Any flat surfaces in LA which are not regularly cleaned acquire a thin layer of chalky black dust.  Mary says it is from the big ships that come into the harbour; it makes me feel like the volcanic apocalypse is approaching.

I may come back to this later, but shredding Mary's old patient notes is killing the writer in me.  Every file is a real character - you'd never need to come up with a backstory again!

Cheers

Julia

Travels: Paying It Forward [DAY II]

Wherein I embark on a long walk on the beach and God goes with me.
OK, I get it now.  I get the long walk on the beach thing.  This is a most momentous occasion.

Santa Monica is its own municipality, and the TAP [Transit Access Pass] I bought doesn't work down there.  The bus driver was very kind about it.  "You mus' be a tap dancer," he said.  "We don't tap dance down here."  The buses are otherwise much the same, but the beach is wildly different.  Broad and flat and sandy - real sand, not the rocky kind we have at home.  Twisty grey trees of indeterminate taxonomy line the edge of a steep cliff with steps carved into it, leading down to the flat plane of the beach.

Once you get down, the enormity of the whole place strikes.  On a Thursday morning the beach was fairly quiet, a few runners trudging along near the strandline.  I took off my flip flops and immediately sank a good three inches; I had thought perhaps my feet would act as small snowshoes, but the sand is so fine and soft any weight just plummets.  Anakin Skywalker would enjoy it.  As I trundled slowly down the beach, a parasailer wafting overhead, one of the few sunbathers caught my eye and I smiled.

"Come here, sweetie," she called, and I could see her front tooth had been replaced with a silver one.  She was wearing a bikini and worn-out running sneakers.  I hurried towards her.  "It's okay to smile!" she said happily.  "You having a good day?"  I nodded and thanked her.  "God bless, God go with you," she said, and I turned away to walk and watch the parasailer.

I hadn't gone more than a couple dozen feet when the voice called me back.  "Sweetie!"  The woman was waving at me; I turned around.  "Do you have any money?" she asked when she got close.

I am fairly used to this at home.  "A little," I said, and reached into my purse.  She had a bag of her own, and was rummaging in it as well.  I paused, curious, and she pulled out a wad of dollar bills, proferring them to me.  "Here, take this.  Take it and go with the Lord."  I politely told her that I had plenty of money to get home.  She shook the bills at me insistently.

"Do you live in the desert?" she asked.


I did not know what to say.  I nodded.

"Only take the money if you need it.  Do you need it?"  I shook my head and closed her hand over the bills.  She smiled, turned to return to her blanket, then ran back towards me, her untied sneakers kicking up sand.

"I just want you to know, that - I didn't, you know, give you that because of anything about you.  The Lord is in me, is all.  He just got up in me and told me to give it to you."  I opened my arms for a hug - she beamed.  "God is good!" she said.  "I love you!"

Nearby, a man in a full-on Ghostbusters jumpsuit was shuffling up and down the beach with a metal detector.

Writing notes from a windy beach.
Too much to see, not enough time to write.  Point form for now.

- Walking down the shore was kind of like playing real-world Where's Waldo.  Lots of weird stuff.
- Four separate mom-and-baby-outdoor yoga classes under the trees on Ocean Avenue.  Everyone appears very fit here.
- Line cooks, still in their kitchen whites, playing soccer in the covered parking lot of a hotel.
- A store with beautiful pottery in the window and no entry door that I could find.
- Three men in beige jumpsuits and yellow plastic rain hats ducking in and out of the surf with metal detectors.
- Huge brown pelicans swooping over the waves at the shore.  One landed a couple of feet away from me near a beach umbrella and eyed it balefully before bobbing its neck and ascending with a weird clumsy grace.  They are really enormous.
- More bird sightings: cowbird, what looked like it might have been a curlew, and mystery tracks in the sand.  The pigeons on the beach struggled to stay on top of the sand just like me, especially a club-footed one that left uneven tracks.  There are also a bewildering assortment of gulls - of the red-billed, mottled, and enormous varieties.
- Los Angeles squirrels are much braver than the ones at home.  They are brown underneath and have smaller, rounder faces.
- A couple dug into the sand like a reclining chair alone on the beach.
- At the Santa Monica Pier Amusement Park, the World's First Wind Powered Boardwalk Game.
- Along the pier itself, two carts side by side, both selling hand-drawn depictions of people's names.  The proprietors were glaring daggers at one another.

There was more, but it is already being whisked away by the fog.  Next time I will bring my camera.

Cheers
Julia

Travels: Your Bank Of America [DAY I]

Wherein I find five dollars and the Veteran's Act is put on display.

The Bank of America is the devil, says Mary, but it is within walking distance.  Mary has an account there already and she knows a few of the tellers.  Inside, the bank is neutral and clean, with a collection of red chairs near the entrance.  As we sit down, a ragged-looking man in a canvas jacket stands and brushes past us.

Mary beckons over one of the tellers, a youngish man with blue eyes whose nametag announces him as Beau Kasinsky.  I have never met a Beau before.  They exchange pleasantries.  On the ground near my feet is a crumpled bill.  American bills are much less exciting than our Monopoly money, but five dollars is five dollars.  I smooth it out a bit dumbly, then present it to Beau with the appropriate I found this on the floor caveat.  He laughs and calls his supervisor, 'Nick' - no last name on his tag - who nods jovially and presses the bill into my hand.

"I think the person who dropped it left," I say awkwardly.  "Does it belong to the bank now?"

"Nah, you're a winner," says Nick.  "The bank can't take it anyway, and I think I know who lost it.  He won't miss it."  He drifts off.  He had strangely blue eyes too - I wonder if our teller's are contactually enhanced.  They are very bright.

Beau leads us past a counter with an Investing and Accounting sign over it: the jowly man seated at the desk talks to himself and pokes at his iPad.  He promises to pick up the Prius at five - he looks pleased.  I doubletake and Mary taps the side of her head, smiles.  "Bluetooth," she says.

The man who was sitting in the red chair when we arrived hovers around the door of the bank before opening it and drifting past us.  He looks haggard close up, mostly bald.  Mary glances at him.  "Oh, I thought that was Steven.  He's not, of course, but he could be.  Wouldn't that have been fun?"  I nod knowingly.  I cannot remember if we know a Steven.  Perhaps Mary is thinking of someone in Rochester.  At any rate, the tall man wanders into the line for the clerk and Beau nods at him.

"If you want to return that money, he's the guy who lost it.  He lives next door, comes in here all the time.  He'll just withdraw stuff and then toss bills away as he walks out.  We try to keep things civil - he's on VA.  Really messed up, poor guy."

"Veterans are the only minority group that get guaranteed health coverage down here," Mary whispers.  "But it's not always enough."  I look at the man again.  He shuffles in slow increments towards the teller counter, though there is no one in front of him.  To our left, Investing and Accounting is asking about Fannie Mae - he looks totally insane, nodding at thin air and tapping on his pad.

"Um, if you want, I can give back the money for you."  Beau holds out his hand and I pull the bill from my wallet.

"Thanks."

He hurries over to the man, tapping him politely on the shoulder.  The veteran's back is turned to me, but Beau comes back and smiles.  "He says thank you."  We finish up with the account and Beau jokes with me about my Canadian response to finding the bill.  "My roommate would be pissed," he says.  He thinks you guys are all crazy socialists up there.  He's very, um, American.  Not like, racist or anything though."

I smile.  "You should tell him you met a Canadian Communist and she gave her money to a homeless guy."

"Yeah, I think I will."  He laughs, shakes my hand and waves us out.  I look back through the glass doors, and the veteran is still standing in line, rocking back and forth on his toes.  His beard is unkempt, and his ears stick out.  A thought occurs to me.

"Mary, when you said he could have been Steven - you didn't mean Mr. Spielberg?"

"Well of course.  He lives just up the block."

We walk back to the car in silence.


Writing notes from a large city.

Los Angeles is one shade greyer than Vancouver.  Enormous dead palm trees recalling Cousin It line the streets, bolstered by ten-foot high concrete retaining walls, and every house looks arbitrarily planted on its street, with no connection to its neighbours.  The primary colour palette seems to be sand, beige and white, with pops of green scattered randomly through the town.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it looks like David Lynch's colour corrector got to it.  The brightest thing I saw today was a garish billboard for Madagascar 3: THREE DEE THE MOVIE stuck on top of a Trader Joe's.

[Unrelated: Trader Joe's is the best.  Why do we not have them at home?]

Cheers
Julia