Languages in LA

Every job has its lingo. I spent yesterday on the set of the TV show “The Journeyman,” which airs Monday nights after “Heroes.” It’s a new show, and seems to be reminiscent of “Quantum Leap.” I was working as an extra in the background, because I like doing something fun on vacation from teaching. And I thought this would be fun.

 
Fun, however, is not necessarily how I would describe extra work, now that I’ve done it. However, I did at least learn what a martini shot is.

 
The scenes I participated in all take place at an office Christmas party in 1979. I was assigned a slinky black dress and some heavy gold jewelry, and the hairdresser transformed my short shag into a stiff, feathered do with flipped-up wings. The make-up artist went after my cheeks and lips with enough fire-engine red to set off the smoke detector. I was given a pair of shoes that immediately cut into my feet and caused a haze of pain to settle over me, clouding the entire day.

 
For the next six hours, I and 40 other extras were assigned to silently mingle and cross in front of the cameras as the actors moved among us and said their lines. We did this over and over and over and over and over. In painful shoes. For six hours. With no break and no refreshments.

 After lunch, we did it again… until 9pm. We filmed four different scenes, and by seven in the evening, we were too beat to even complain. Finally, the word came around that this was “the martini shot.” Apparently, the last scene of the day is called the martini shot, probably to cheer everyone up and remind them that once you’ve turned in your wardrobe and gotten your voucher, you can go home and have a drink. Which I did.

Here in LA, there is apparently a big call for movies so dreadful that they go directly to DVD. They’re a step above porn, but not a big step; zomblie flicks with lots of gratuitous nudity and blood, that sort of thing. They aren’t even slated for theaters. They go directly to DVD and to the Horror or Adult section of the video store, turn a nice profit, and everyone’s happy.

Enjoying them is a matter of having low expectations, I suppose, or knowing exactly what you’re after when you rent a movie like this: campy gore, played more for laughs than thrills. It’s the artistic embodiment of irony.

I stumbled into these odd thoughts as I was working as an extra for The Journeyman. Between takes, the two leads were joking around and tossing cliché’s back and forth, like “just be yourself.”

Kevin McKidd, who is Australian, suggested “just stay in touch with yourself,” and Moon Bloodgood, who is… well, I don’t know what she is, with a name like that, but she seems to be American, trumped him with “just keepin’ it real.”

“Oh right,” he nodded, “keepin’ it real.” They both laughed.
I cringed. I hate that phrase, keepin’ it real, but it’s nice to see I am not the only one who despises it. It’s not the typical kneejerk hatred of slang that has outlived its cool and begun to stink. Keepin’ it real, unlike most slang, never had a moment in the sun as far as I can tell. It was a stupid statement the minute it was coined. I’ve never heard anyone use it unless they were being ironic or joking. It went directly to DVD, if you know what I mean.

… there is only reality ! I like that !!

It’s funny the way the word adult is used as a euphemism. If you see it on a movie, adult themes, you know this means sex. An adult video store is porn, an adult toy store is sex toys… but this is only half of the story.

I have decided to put my cats on a diet. It’s not that I thrill to the sight of slender felines, it’s just that once they reach a certain stage of complacent rotundity, they have a hard time completing their grooming. If that was put too delicately for comprehension, let me explain: if they can’t wash under their tails, the results can be truly appalling.

I suppose that was clear enough.

I currently have a cat who is a winsome, pink nosed, green-eyed delight at one end and a shuddering brown mess at the other, and if I liked using baby wipes, I’d have had babies. So I have begun to pay attention to what kinds of cat food I buy and how much I put down.

The euphemism for fat pets is, guess what? Adult. I now buy adult cat food, which I ration out as if we were under occupation. The cats are not happy, and are at this moment reclining on various perches in flat-eared, tail-twitching aggravation.

I am left contemplating the wonder of a world in which the two things adult stands for are sex and fat. I should have noticed it before, when clothing for females was sorted into Miss and Women’s sizes. If the only two things that are certain in life are death and taxes, it seems the only things adult in life are sex and weight gain.

Does this mean that if I abstain from both, I’ll never grow old?

I saw something very disturbing outside my school not long ago. One of our middle school students, a tall African-American boy, was at a deli about a block from the school, playing a video game. It was the aim-gun-kill-person type, where you have the plastic gun with which you pop anyone who appears on the screen.

This boy was just mumbling over and over, “Nigga, where you from?” and then shooting. When I asked one of the other teachers about this later, he explained to me that this is a standard opening for gangs before they attack. “Where you from?” means what neighborhood, and if you are not in your neighborhood, you’re about to get jumped.

Setting that unhappy thought aside for a moment, I return to the National Geographic website I was haunting earlier, chuckling about their “Cultural Tips for visiting L.A.” Sure enough, there’s the genteel version of the same geographically-based tribalism:

Where do you live?: The thinly disguised screener for the start of every new relationship.

And, lo, National Geographic is right on this one. It’s the first thing people say, not “what do you do,” but where you from? The dating game operates on the same basic principle as the gang-turf wars. Are you a member of my posh little gang of Weho café-frequenters? Nigga, what’s your gym?

Well, perhaps I’m being too cynical. At the gang level, it’s all about loyalty, safety in numbers, and survival of the streets. At the more one-on-one relationship level, it’s all about how far you have to drive to get laid. Well, with traffic here, that’s a survival-of-the-streets issue in some ways…

But still, it’s strange to contemplate: love or hate, life-making decisions still boil down to location and proximity. Alas, the more things change, the more they remain the same.