Beverly Hills Cliches Sent

This Memorial Day weekend got kind of a lazy start thanks to too much fun at Friday night's Kills/Horrors show, plus visions of hot dogs and burgers kept dancing through my head. Good thing that LA Times made my work easy -- The headline "A Novel With LA Cliches" stared me right in the face when I sleepily picked up Saturday's Calendar section.

Literary critic Mary McNamara's as annoyed with LA stereotypes as we are in her review of Jennifer Steinhauer and Jessica Hendra's Beverly Hills Adjacent:

It's pilot season and Mitch Gold, a working actor, is again driving his wife June, a UCLA poetry professor, crazy. This is a terrific setup -- pilot season is a true only-in-L.A. situation (unlike traffic, smog and plastic surgery, which have become depressingly universal)... Unfortunately Hendra (who is married to actor Kurt Fuller) and Steinhauer run this fun premise through a very familiar wringer, giving us clichéd potshots and an over-abundance of anecdotal
scenes.

Love how she just knocks those well-worn cliches right out of the way and moves on. Who has time when so many of the old standbys are featured right in the novel? The best is her recognition of my not-seen-in-a-while personal stereotype fave, LA's Dark Underbelly:

The Hollywood novel was, of course, built on the rather pleasing revelation that the glamorous, with their lovely faces, swell cars and swimming pools, are in fact insecure, narcissistic loony toons, made so by the corruptive force of the industry. But while this was news for Nathanael West, Evelyn Waugh and even Michael Tolkin and David Freeman, it is decidedly less so now.

That's what we've been saying, Mary McNamara! It's too bad these writers have succombed to such an apparently bad case of LA stereotype-itis, because McNamara does like a lot of things about this book:

The most frustrating thing about "Beverly Hills Adjacent" is that the writing is so consistently good, at times lyrical, and there are some very funny scenes and memorable characters -- June's many automotive mishaps, Mitch's encounters with the playwright who once stalked him but is now super-hot in Hollywood, his rivalry with another actor who is invariably also up for his parts, all of which makes a reader wish very hard that Steinhauer and Hendra had done a better job of ignoring formula and written what they actually know. Not predictable "Tinseltown" anecdotes and marketable versions of people they've met, but what they've actually learned from living in Los Angeles. Because, like it or not, Hollywood is more than just a collection of egos jockeying for power and money, just like a novel is more than just a set of scenes.

Right. People who live here should know better. Steinhauer's a New York Times bureau chief (why am I not surprised?) and Hendra's a memoirist daughter of a memoirist (a somewhat depressing seeming one, to boot) -- are we really to believe they never meet literary types or people with depth out here?

Eh, I can't rail any more; I've got sausages to grill with interesting, educated people in lovely weather. But Mary, call us! We're definitely on your side with this one.

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.

Party Foul!

You know LA stereotyping has gotten bad when it starts making its way into Supreme Court decisions.

To wit, Antonin Scalia's widely-reported quote tossed somewhat blithely into a recent decision about cussing on TV, Federal Communications Commission et al. vs. Fox Television Stations, Inc., et al:

We doubt, to begin with, that small-town broadcasters run a heightened risk of liability for indecent utterances. In programming that they originate, their down-home local guests probably employ vulgarity less than big-city folks; and small-town stations generally cannot afford or cannot attract foul-mouthed glitteratae from Hollywood.

Speculate much, Scalia? Okay, look: I know, you're a Supreme Court Justice and therefore your opinions aren't just considered enlightened, but so enlightened that they're actually made into law. The eyes and ears of the world are upon you, waiting to hear these things. That's a heavy responsibility. So please don't go around telling everyone people in Los Angeles are "foul-mouthed glitteratae" because they'll tend to take your words with a measure of gravity.

Unless they've actually, you know, been to both Los Angeles and a small American town, in which case they'll realize people cuss about the same.

They Don't Know About Us

Why are we in such a good mood around NWILA today? Could it be because it's a glorious sunny Sunday here in Los Angeles? Is it because tomorrow is that day-that-should-be-a-national-holiday-to-be-called-Peeps-Monday, when the Food of the Gods can be found for around five packs for a dollar? Is it because Coachella is right around the corner?

It may be because for the second post in a row, we've found a positive media representation of LA from, shockingly, someone who actually lives here. This time it's British expatriate Tracey Ullman in today's LA Times:

And now I like L.A.: I like hiking in the mountains and tennis and there's things I appreciate. I love the KCRW radio station and music scene and art scene and food. People bitch about L.A., and it's like, oh, shut your Jacuzzi lid and go home. They're people from Chicago.

What's interesting is that this is another Choire Sicha piece for the Sunday Calendar section in which the subject lists reasons for loving Los Angeles. I'm not sure if the Times asks Choire to visit this topic regularly or he's just fascinated by it, but regardless, you know what this means -- he gets his own tag.

ps. That Jacuzzi quote is so awesome I'm making it our new tagline.

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.)

Assholes on YouTube

Here we go. See what I'm over here griping about? I only wish I could view the full-length videos to some of these:



But despite all the videos I've embedded on this blog so far, not every Los Angeles reference on YouTube is stereotyping -- some are in fact quite the opposite. Take this, for example:



And people say Los Angeles has no art community.