Happiness is a Warm Gunn

There is nothing at all I dislike about Tim Gunn (of Project Runway and Tim Gunn's Guide to Style), and now I'm endeared even further, after today's "Traveling with the Stars" profile in USA Today featured this quote:

Last fall, I was in Los Angeles for five weeks while we taped Project Runway season six. I had visited LA many times before, but those trips were always a mere day or two. My impression of the city was lukewarm: a sprawling megalopolis where people spend inordinate amounts of time trapped in idling vehicles. What's the appeal of that? So, I arrived in LA for my record-breaking stay with huge doses of apprehension. (But) I fell in love with Los Angeles! I found it to be a cultural treasure chest, with fabulous museums, architecture, and entertainment. And the weather was so sunny and sublime that I actually began to long for a cloud to pass by. Furthermore, I embraced the city as a pedestrian (!) and greatly respected the jaywalking enforcements, which I wish were in place in my dear home of New York, because it makes navigation so much safer and civilized. Finally, everyone should experience Ralph's, a fabulous food emporium that's unlike anything that we have here in New York. I shopped there every day. It was my therapy!

I don't think poor Tim could have handled an actual 99 Cent Store -- it probably would have given him a conniption. While I don't personally share his love of Ralph's, even that of the rock n' roll variety, once again one sees that preconceptions of LA are shattered once you actually spend a little time engaging with our city. Thank you for sharing your experience, Tim. You know you're making it work.

Plastic Passion

Oh, Andy Warhol. I love you and your art to death, and you did an amazing job of prophesizing the whole Internet/Cobrasnake/Shadowscene/Last Night's Party micro-celebrity culture; you really did. But you've got this one infamous quote that just refuses to go away:

I love L.A. I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic -- but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.

Talk about your backhanded compliments. Sheesh. And it's so frustrating coming from a guy completely obsessed with self-reinvention and image, who hung out with Bianca Jagger and Liza Minelli and the rest of the ultra-fabulous at Studio 54, who had a coterie of gender-benders surrounding him at all times, who infamously dyed his hair silver and wore wigs.

All this is fine. It's fantastic! If I could go back in time and visit any era, it would be to go hang at the Factory and watch the Velvet Underground with you and Edie and Candy and Joe and Ultra. But don't act as if all this is fine and dandy and hip and superstar when in New York, but the exact same behavior is plastic when in Los Angeles. Dig?

(Here's where I would have posted a YouTube link to E-I-E-I-O's "Andy Warhol's Dead But I'm Not," but it's not on there. I thought perhaps it got caught up in the Warners boycott, but now I realize I'm probably the only person who remembers that song, even among the entire YouTube nation.)

Cliche Writer's Blues

Oh, yeesh, I hated this song, Soul Coughing's "Screenwriter's Blues," back when it was first released in 1994, and somehow managed to erase it completely from my mind until a mention in today's LA Times (sorry no link -- it was in their Calendar section's apparently non-web-worthy "Underrated/Overrated" column).

The Times has the band, and particularly this song, listed as "Underrated," which is only really applicable if you're me and forgot how valuable its inclusion in a blog about LA cliches would be:

Exits to freeways twisted like knots on fingers.

Jewels cleaving skin between breasts.

Your Cadillac breathes four hundred horses over blue lines

You are going to Reseda to make love to a model from Ohio

whose real name you don't know.

You spin like the cadillac was overturning down a cliffon television

And the radio is on and the radioman is speaking

and the radioman says women were a curse.

So men built Paramount Studios.

And men built Columbia Studios.

And men built Los Angeles.

It is 5 am and you are listeningto Los Angeles.

And the radioman says it is a beautiful night out there!

And the radioman says Rock and Roll lives!

And the radioman says it is a beautiful night out there in Los Angeles.

You live in Los Angeles and you are going to Reseda;

we are all in some way or another going to Reseda someday to die.

And the radioman laughs becausethe radioman fucks a model too.

Gone savage for teenagers with automatic weapons and boundless love.

Gone savage for teenagers who are aesthetically pleasing, in other words, fly.

Los Angeles beckons the teenagers to come to her on buses;

Los Angeles loves love.

It is 5 am and you are listening to Los Angeles.

I am going to Los Angeles to build a screenplay

about lovers who murder each other.

I am going to Los Angeles to see my own name on a screen,

five feet long and luminous.

As the radioman says it is 5am and the sun has charred the other side of the world

and come back to us and painted the smoke over our heads an imperial violet.

It is 5 am and you are listening to Los Angeles.

You are listening...

You are listening...

You are listening...

You are listening......to Los Angeles.

I'm unconvinced that M. Doughty's prior incarnation as the NYC-based Knitting Factory doorman would provide him with the deep insights about Los Angeles that he's professing here.
We get it: The name "Reseda" sounds like a grim, soulless place in the same way that say, "Soul Coughing" sounds like a pretentious faux-beatnik band, but it's really no more a place where people go to die than, say... well, any suburb or city in America.

Let's see what else we've got: References to car culture and driving, we sexualize our cars, everyone's a model, the models are so fake you don't even know their names, gorgeous young people flock here (I love the use of "fly," which didn't sound any cooler then than it does now), everyone's here to work in movies, everyone's here to be famous. Where's mention of our dark underbelly?

Then again, according to Wikipedia, the band broke up over years of feuding over songwriting credits. Because wanting "to see your own name on a screen" is such an LA thing, right, M.?

If You Get Caught Between the Moon and New York City

I have to admit I'd been procrastinating getting this blog up and rolling, what with the beautiful summer weather, hanging out at the Glow Festival and Little Radio Summer Camp, and starring in the latest Fatty Arbuckle film, but this latimes.com article really got me going. It's just an overflowing cornocopia of anti-Los Angeles-isms (and from someone who should know better, too), perfect for our first post, kind of like a grand opening number with singing, dancing, fireworks, and poodles jumping through flaming hoops. Quoteth Jay Babcock, editor of formerly LA-based Arthur Magazine and fresh New York transplant:

New York is just a more hospitable environment than L.A. ever has been or will be. L.A. is devolving quickly, and I think I got out in the nick of time. The L.A. Times is imploding, our public radio is terrible, the [L.A.] Weekly’s been devolving for years. Local media’s being run into the ground and I don’t think anybody cares. The public’s dumbed down and poorly educated. L.A. is a psychic death hole to me, and I don’t want a part of that. There are so many impending crises — the political structure, the traffic, the educational system. L.A. is failing worse than ever, and I felt that if I can get out, I should. I found a way out. For a long time now I’ve been going back and forth between L.A. and New York, and every time I got off the plane in L.A. I felt dumber.

Of course, who wouldn't want to head off to New York, a city known for its lack of traffic, squeaky clean political structure, and excellent radio stations? But one whiny failed 'zine editor isn't really the best part of this. It's the blog comments, people. (And, by the way, please leave us some. We're new and feel lonely.)

The Times article was re-posted on Gawker, where commenters left the expected fair share of antipathy toward LA and California in general, even wafting over to San Francisco. But not so at the Times! Our coast rose up with a swell of civic pride that left me proud. Like these three posters:

"Here we go again, a holier than thou hipster wannabe cultural elitist attempts to tell us the true value of our society. Just because your preconceived nation of what Los Angeles is or was didn’t work out doesn’t mean Los Angeles isn’t real in any sense of your retarded reality. Seriously, grow up. I’m glad you’re leaving. The irony is that you’re only contributing to the cultural decay of New York City by pushing the original inhabitants out of their neighborhoods. You’re the reason Los Angeles is the way it is, thank god you’re gone."

"I lived in NYC for 12 years and now teach at a university near Baltimore. If I could find the job I want I’d take this guy’s place in a minute.Everything he says about LA is true for NYC and he’s trafficking in stupid cliched cultural criticism."

"Never heard of this clown but I’m glad he’s getting out of my hometown. Anyone else who bad mouthes LA on a daily basis is welcome to turn around. In fact, we should probably kick out all the midwest/east coast transplants who come here for a tan and end up Clipper fans."

129 comments as of this posting. About 120 of them are along the lines of the above, about 7 agree with Babcock, and 2 are from a chastened Babcock himself, backpedaling and listing things about LA he loves. You people are bringing a tear to our eyes, seriously. Come, come with us.