Languages in LA

While cruising the L.A. Craigslist hunting for this week’s four writing gigs that will be fought over by 20,000 frustrated screenwriters, I encountered a highlife-observing newsletter/website called Pocket Change (pocketchangenyc.com). This glittering piece of frivolity is spreading herpes-like into Los Angeles via New York (oh, where else??) and features the biting commentary of a smirking fop known as Richard Nouveau.

 
Richard isn’t a real person, he’s a caricature who comments on “the finer things” in L.A., such as where to get good chutney, or a facial, or a spa where they put the chutney right on your face.

 
I should like this character, this Richard. Whoever is doing the writing manages to make every sentence count. Commenting on L.A.’s most expensive personal trainer, he writes: You know, it’s a terrible shame that high-end breeding and bear-like musculature and athleticism seldom go hand-in-hand. Those of us born with a fashion acumen draped over a consumptive frame are fortunate enough, however, to be able to hire someone to do the pushups for you.

 
Clearly, this is Saki’s Reginald reincarnated. In an earlier paragraph he even simperingly mentions hemophilia and asthma… what clearer references to English noble blood can there be?

 
Yes, I should like him. But I already don’t, and I know why.

 
I can be a wee bit snippy but this fellow fairly oozes snark. I imagine him gliding along Melrose Avenue, perilously close to the Pacific Design Center, smirking at Urth Café and the incense-wafting bookstore nearby. He seems downright cruel, and I don’t like the current notion that wit equals sadism. There’s a difference. Witty people have cats. Sadistic people do too, but they refuse to have them spayed because distressed cats in heat amuse them. That’s how this Pocket Change Richard comes across to me. Oh, he’s funny. But I don’t like him.

In keeping with an earlier entry about oddities in my students’ categorizing tendencies, I have noticed another peculiarity among Hispanic youth in Los Angeles. I suspect it’s larger than just here in the city, but this is where I came across it first. When reading a story in the ESL textbook about a Jewish family, I stopped to check for comprehension and found none. Most of them had little idea what Judaism was. A couple had a vague recollection of hearing the word associated with the Bible, and a few with the Holocaust.

I stopped to explain a little and, wishing to begin at a familiar starting point, I asked, “How many of you are from families who consider themselves Christian?”

Only about half raised their hands. Now I was stumped. I’m pretty sure we do not have a thriving Hispanic-Muslim or Hispanic-Buddhist community here in the Los Feliz/Echo Park area. I chose one who had not raised his hand.

“What religion are you?” I asked bluntly, puzzled.

“Catholic,” he said.

“Oh, okay. So you’re Christian.”

There was a chorus of “No!” from those who had not raised their hand. It took some questioning until I finally understood, and found myself staring at them in consternation. They did not consider Catholics to be Christian. And they had never heard the word Protestant as far as they remembered.

I suppose it’s no big deal, but it was one of those many culture-shock moments that has left me staggered since I relocated. Within the public school system, those on high have been concerned about American ignorance of the Middle East, thus the students do rather extensive studies of Islam, and make little picturebook-research reports to show their awareness of the various aspects of that religion. But no one questions how well they understand the religion they actually practice.

One thing I’ll say for Los Angelenos, when they hear sirens, boy, they pull over. When an emergency vehicle comes racing down Sunset, sirens wailing, the traffic parts like the Red Sea and everyone docilely comes to a halt till the ambulance, cop car, firetruck or whatever has gone by.

 
These are the only vehicles that get the slightest consideration from others. The rest of the time it’s dog-eat-dog on the mean streets of LA. Just the other day I was watching a blue hybrid (don’t even get me started on all these hybrids all over the place) waiting impatiently for an opportunity to turn left on Argyle.

 
I contempleted holding back and letting him turn in front of me since traffic had come to a halt on Vine, a block ahead. But I have been trapped before by such a kindness because those in the lane to my right did not feel the same charitable impulse and the turning car was then trapped in front of me, ensuring that I and everybody behind me went nowhere till the intersection-dweller had completed his turn.

 
The only time it’s safe to yield the intersection is if both lanes are so constipated that no one is going anywhere anyway. So I proceeded through the intersection and the blue hybrid made an attempt to bully the person behind me into yielding. I heard a crunch and looked into my rear view mirror to see the hybrid, its front passenger side bumper crumpled, skidding to a halt in the intersection, steam billowing out of it.

 
An accident, even a minor one, always jars one out of the complacent fog of routine. But if there’s one thing we could count on, it’s that the ambulance and police would have no trouble at all getting to the scene. Just blare those sirens and voila, the lanes clear up like a happy sinus, and order is restored.

I have a habit of talking with strangers on the internet. I tend toward politics, movies,  philosophy… all the usual topics. Sooner or later, the conversations turn to more personal subjects, and then, eventually, comes the inevitable question: do you chat?

 
They mean that MSN stuff, I guess. No, I don’t chat. I’ve done it a few times and find it about as enjoyable as leafing through old People magazines in the dentist’s waiting room. People are often puzzled as to why someone who will post all over forum groups and email endlessly hates chatting, and I don’t really know what to tell them. I just hate it.

 
It’s like talking on the phone: I feel trapped. I have to concentrate on hearing the other person, and I don’t have my hands free. I guess I could get one of those headset things but I just… don’t…. want to. Chatting online or via phone is just too immediate, requires just too much focus and commitment. There’s too much pressure to respond right away.

 
And chatting, because it’s so quick, so back & forth, tends to devolve from well-thought-out responses to quick one-liners. Correspondingly, the subject matter deteriorates too. A discussion that began with the surge in Iraq winds down to “u like jazz?”

 
I’m not opposed to small talk, but if I’m going to chat about nothing in such a desultory manner, I want a face in front of me, and a waitress bringing me coffee and pie. I also want a window so I can watch traffic.

 
The nice thing about today’s technology, however, is that there is a method of communication for everyone’s needs. From moderated forums that operate with message-in-a-bottle languor to chaotic chat rooms, now is a great time to be some level of ADD. All you need is the internet. Life is good.

Tonight I came home to my new apartment in West Hollywood and pulled up in front of the house to find a man distractedly puttering around his car, which had a flat tire. He’d retrieved the jack from the trunk but it was some newfangled thing with the lug wrench affixed to the jack itself, and one had to perform a series of feats to disentangle it.

I came up to investigate and the thin, dark-haired man with an accent I could not place, gave a chagrined smile and admitted he hadn’t yet figured out how to maneuver this jack. I joined him in trying to peer at the directions, which may as well have been in Swahili.

As we pondered, he said, “This has not been a very good day for me. I came here to Los Angeles to try to find out more about my daughter, who is missing, and now I have a flat tire.” To say it had not been a good day seemed quite an understatement.

I sat and listened to the man talk as he changed his tire. I wished I could offer more than a towel to wipe the grease from his hands, but in the end, it was all I could do as he told me of his four month struggle to keep his daughter’s case alive with the LAPD.

She was 19 and taking classes at San Diego State. Over the summer she came up to LA where she placed an ad on craigslist offering her services as a math tutor. The man who answered, it would later surface, was a known sex offender. Donna Jou trustingly went to his house… and was never seen again.

Her father is holding on as best he can. He left Iran before the revolution to seek a better, safer life in America. Now his heart is broken. For more information, see www.donnajou.com. And teach your children well.

If you want to be thought sophisticated in L.A., you simply must have a painting or drawing of an ugly naked woman in your living room. And no coy concubines swathed in drapery with only a nipple peeking through will do. There must be pudenda. It’s the only way to show how far we’ve come, apparently.

 
She can’t be beautiful. If she’s beautiful, it might be mistaken for an Abercrombie & Fitch ad. She should be safely beyond the slender age of young adulthood, old enough to have womanly hips and a distressingly sensible haircut. She should be as naked as a plucked chicken and nearly as attractive.

 
Place such a painting or drawing prominently in your living room, and then surround her with other works of art that are much more traditional (as long as the tradition goes back no further than 1920.) Folk art with a Hispanic theme is, of course, an excellent way to compensate for being white.

 
Don’t have too many plants; it’s bourgeois. People will think you spend too much time at home, watering them. You don’t have time to water plants. You’re taking in a concert tonight and a play tomorrow.

 
Once you’ve surrounded your Brunhilde pudenda with works by people named Diego and Sebastian, add a roughweave, natural-textured couch of a color so neutral there is no name for it, and perhaps a table handcarved by someone named Fernando which you bought on a foray in Mexico back in the 1970s when you were young and wild (add self-deprecating chuckle here) and you are ready to earn your LA street cred.

 
I have no explanation for this trend, I only know that it is so: every house I’ve been into so far that was owned by a white person has some variant of the naked Brunhilde in the living room. I’m beginning to think they’re giving them out for free at Bristol Farms.

My best friend lives on Doheny. Doheny runs north/south and divides West Hollywood from Beverly Hills. I don’t even know if it’s a street, boulevard, or avenue. It’s Doheny, for God’s sake. Like Cher, it doesn’t need a last name.

 
There are a few streets like that in L.A., streets for which no further designation is needed. Either you know Doheny, Sunset,  Wilshire, La Cienega, and LaBrea, or you are hopelessly foreign and there is no point giving you directions because you’ll just end up in the Valley anyway.

 
It’s funny about the Beverly Hills/West Hollywood thing. Take the prestigious Four Seasons Hotel (you can’t just say The Four Seasons, you have to say the prestigious Four Seasons Hotel, or they’ll send goons after you.) It’s on the West Hollywood side of Doheny, but they call themselves The Four Seasons of Beverly Hills. West Hollywood not being prestigious enough. So you see, Doheny is very important. It separates the wheat from us chaff.

 
It also provides the final test on whether or not an implant to Weho has truly acclimated and become a denizen, rather than just a squatter. The trick is to ask someone to spell Doheny. I was listening to my friend spell it on the phone to her mechanic, and I noticed that she pronounced the O in Doheny as sort of an /ew/ rather than the plain, midwestern /oh/. It’s almost British sounding but is really just further evidence of the spreading, thinning effect of Valley speak that has pollinated all of L.A. since 1980.

 
But with that /ew/ I knew that my friend has become a true denizen of Doheny. This means that in about a month, she’ll go up to that snooty little vacant lot north of the French restaurant Conversation and pay $300 for a Christmas tree. And it’s not even on the Beverly Hills side! Ew my God.

If plastic is a threat to the environment, it’s cards that will finally fill the landfills. I mean, cards like Visa, Mastercard, Discovery. They started a trend, I think, that has ballooned out of control. Now every business wants you to have their plastic card.

 
I’m sorting through my billfold this very moment. Let’s see. I have, in addition to above-mentioned credit cards, a plastic identification card for my job, which no one has ever  asked me to produce in order to identify myself. I have one from State Farm insurance. I am a member of the Vons Club since I once bought groceries there in 2004. My union sent me a card, the financial advisor who helped me set up a retirement account gave me a card. I don’t mean a flimsy laminated here’s-my-card-if-you-have-any-questions deal, I mean a bit of plastic fit for running through a strip-detector. My health insurer gave me a card. My video store, my gym… even Pet Co gave me a card!

 
Actually, this is not a bad thing. I just moved into a new place dangerously near the Pet Co, and since I have three cats, Pet Co is quickly becoming my Medina, my second-most holy destination (Home Depot being Mecca.)

 
But this card business is out of control. They’ve overwhelmed the seams of my wallet and I need a new one. I wonder if any enterprising college kids have developed a drinking game based on all these cards. I have almost enough cards to play poker. Visas would be Kings, we could have Mastercard Queens, and Discovery Jacks… gym memberships would outrank grocery stores, which would in turn outrank video stores. And Pet Co could be the wild card, because a store that will charge you $40 for an ingloo-shaped piece of plastic called the Booda Kitty Litter Box is capable of anything.

The era of bare buttocks on billboards in L.A. has passed, apparently. Or maybe sex appeal is just a summer/seasonal thing. The current crop of roadside reading features ads that can only be based on snob appeal.

Sunglasses, of course, never go out of season in a city where rain is so rare that people come out and stare at it as if frogs were falling from the sky. So a drive along Sunset Blvd now offers humungous images of thin 12 year old girls with their hair slicked back and a giant pair of sunglasses perched on their tiny noses. I noticed, in particular, a pair which featured the initials of the designers in huge gold letters on the temples.

There is, as far as I can tell, no marked difference in these sunglasses and the ones you can buy for $9.99 at the gas station, except that the massive glasses worn by the starveling 12 year old have the D&G on them.

Lest anyone miss the point, value is now based not on quality but on exclusivity. This was baldly displayed by a nightclub near the famed Chateau Marmont which took for its name PRIVILEGE. Decked in white and blue, it had a grand opening last year, and even Keanu was there. (He has a friend known as a “celebrity wrangler” who has apparently made an entire career out of getting Keanu to go to nightclubs where he gamely has one drink and then vanishes, never to return.) I’m happy to note that PRIVILEGE folded almost the minute Keanu walked out.

But the baldest stance of all is currently on a billboard right over Gil Turner’s liquor store on the corner of Sunset and Doheny in Weho. Belvedere vodka is… “not poured into every martini. Only the right ones.” Alas, I’ll never know if it’s really that remarkable. I buy my shoes at Payless; surely Belvedere vodka would refuse to leave the bottle for someone like me.