Cliche Writer's Blues 2

Okay, Diablo Cody, I hope you're blowing a kiss goodbye because I have had just about enough out of you:

Los Angeles is often described as the nadir of vapidity, a smog-choked space cradle. By contrast, Greenblatt's always feels like an oasis of warmth and substance. Inside the deli, people are buying cheapo vodka, Reubens with Russian
dressing, and bottles of Piper-Heidsieck, which, according to a handwritten placard, tastes better than Veuve Clicquot.

Again with dissing us in your Entertainment Weekly column. You know who "often describes" Los Angeles in this manner? That would be you. You, who chooses to live here and has a very successful career and life that many people would envy. Don't like us? I'm sure Minneapolis will be happy to take you back.

I do agree with her on Greenblatt's, although the above paragraph skates a bit too close to the East Coast Real cliche for my taste. But the most telling part of the article is here:

After I get my soup, plus a corned beef sandwich and a pickle the size of a Wiffle bat, I drive back up the canyon in the hopes of getting home by nine. Daisy of Love is premiering, and as you might infer based on my past coverage of Rock of Love, I'm not going to miss a second of VH1's latest ''dating'' show. As soon as I get home, I settle in with my German shepherd and Chihuahua — the Yao Ming and Spud Webb of the animal kingdom — log on to Twitter, and turn on the boob tube.

Okay, so you base your opinion of us on Daisy of Love and Rock of Love, yet you only need go to your own neighborhood deli to find something in LA you love? Imagine what could happen should you venture out even further, to one of our world class museums or parks or 826la (you're a writer, come on!) or Machine Project or the Kogi taco truck. Why, it would be a whole new world.

Plus Snake of Eden are eliminated anyway. Time to expand your horizons.

A Tale of Two Cities

One might think HBO's Entourage would be a no-brainer for this site, but I have to admit I enjoy the show and don't have a problem with it as far as Los Angeles stereotypes go. It always seemed their writers weren't making those broad characterizations about our city that are found so often in media, but instead focus tightly on one highly specific subset of Hollywood denizen. If you want to call a bunch of shallow industry social climbers "shallow industry social climbers," fine by me, as long as you don't generalize it to the rest of us.

However, that was until this season's finale based in their hometown of Queens (where the show's apparently relocating for next season), meaning they've now set up an East Coast/West Coast duality. And you know what that means in TV: the return of the East Coast Realness cliche. This one's kind of an anomaly, too. Usually East Coast Realness is perpetuated by New York based shows making a two- or three-episode arc to a hyper-glossy superficial Hollywood, but it's not often that you get one going West to East.

But this episode sets it up from scene one, in which Vincent fools around with an attractive female attorney in a New York nightclub. "In LA, you could only get an actress or a hooker to do that," says his brother, Johnny. "God, I love this motherfucking town!" That's right, Johnny -- there are no sexual women at all in Los Angeles other than those paid for their attractiveness. Good thing you're back on the East Coast. You'll never meet an actress or hooker out there!

Just to play up the distinction a little further, after that first scene the boys, who whiled away nearly every L.A. episode in trendy, glossy Paris Hilton-type clubs, suddenly eschew the high-end lifestyle to hang in a grungy neighborhood pool hall in Queens. How serious are they about this transition? Johnny purchases the dive and marks it as their territory by even naming it after himself.

You know things are bad when even the cinematography is stereotyping. Check out these scenes of the guys getting out of their taxicab in Queens:

See the earthy sepia tones permeating the houses, the street, the guys and even the clouds? Salt of the earth. Now check out another car on the street, this one belonging to Ari back in LA:

My eyes! The pure white of the buildings, redness of the sportscar and even the staggeringly bluer sky all connote bright shiny things. You know, like bright, shiny, Los Angeles. I've seen Adrien Grenier at cool indie rock shows around town, too, like of Montreal and Ratatat, both times in the decidedly earth-toned and unshiny Troubadour. Can't he do something about this?