Languages in LA

I guess this is officially a model-word now. After Tyra Banks appropriated it for America’s Next Top Anorexic, it seemed like every photoshoot featured at least one “fierce” photo of a girl narrowing her eyes. Bad enough, yes.

But now, on Sunset Blvd, is an Ambercrombie & Fitch billboard featuring a naked, headless male torso placed before a rather tame but uninhabited landscape that looks vaguely like summer in Alaska. Next to the torso is the word “Fierce.”

What it is that’s fierce on that billboard, I’m not sure. We can’t see the guy’s eyes so we don’t know if he’s got them narrowed threateningly or not. The landscape certainly isn’t fierce; the mountain is the lowest, most gentle-sloped shape you can offer and still call it a mountain. And unless you have some sort of phobic reaction to pine trees, it’s simply not that alarming.

But it says Fierce, nonetheless.

This perfectly serviceable word is on its way to an ignominious end, and it’s a pity because it’s a very specific and descriptive word. It’s more dangerous than simply wild, more refined than savage… but if it keeps getting applied to people who live on diet pills and have no discernable function in the world but displaying clothing and demonstrating the most elegant way to exit a limo, the word in is trouble.

It’s already difficult to use the word without irony, and soon even those who despoiled it will shy away from it as it becomes a cliché. It’s headed for the same scrapeheap as nice. Maybe they’ll team up and a new saying will emerge: “Oh I love those boots! They’re nice and fierce!” (Which will mean spike-heels and any construction featuring leather or feather.) Word death isn’t pretty, is it?

Is it me or do Californians build houses like they make salads at a salad bar? My favorite walk through Beverly Hills brings me down several streets where the houses begin to aspire to mansion status, although it is still a suburb. They are well-kept and spacious, and it’s a lovely street, but there is something jarring about the houses.

 
There are several elements that recur in house after house, and each house seems to have at least three of them, none of which, as far as I can tell, actually go together.

 
If I were to make a composite house that represents this neighborhood, I’d do it thusly: The fence surrounding the house would be comprised of white painted wrought iron, intricately worked. Very intricate, with curls and coils. The gate, indeed, should look like a big Irish doily.

 
Behind the big Irish doily, the house would sit grandly under a Spanish tiled roof, with big, bright shutters at the windows that should suggest an air rather Flemish. The walkway should be surrounded with Moroccan tile.

 
The front door… and this is absolutely essential… should bespeak a clear Greco-Roman influence, with flattened pillars implanted on either side, and a piece overhead that looks like the roof of a temple.

 
Finally, the house should be banked in roses like a cozy English cottage, while palm trees rise on either side. In other words, they are big and grand, but horrid, a hodge-podge of styles tossed on a plate and smothered in sauce, a pizza of clashing cultures and pointless features. They may be large, may be rich, may be well-appointed and comfortable, but I find them utterly tasteless.

 
Although, of course, if someone gave me one for free, I’d take it. Then I’d build a pagoda in the front. Just for fun!

Someone actually said this in my hearing the other day, and without the slightest trace of irony or playfulness. She just said it like a normal person would say “Great!”

 
It was at the Coffee Bean on Robertson, where I had been hanging out like a seal on a rock because their internet was free. I was standing in line, having just ordered my mocha latte, and to my left was a young woman not of this world. She had apparently just stepped off of a billboard, and was still all shiny from the finishing touches of the hairdresser, make-up artist, and artificial suntan spray-on technician who hover just off camera.

 She was wearing black spandex leggings, because she could, having the butt and legs of a 12 year old boy. Said leggings and legs were tucked into black suede boots with heels so pointed and high they looked like spikes. Under her perfectly tanned skin, her breasts sat on her ribs like two plastic bowls on a xylophone.

 
Her hair was bouncy at the crown,  fluffy at the forehead, tendrilly at the neck, a cascade down her back, thick as a horse’s tail and blonde as some lisping clothesrack in a salon could make it. Her lips were pouty and her sunglasses were expensive.

 
The Coffee Bean barrister, obviously recognizing her, cooed, “How have you BEEEEEN???”

 
“Fantabulous!” She replied, her perfect white teeth flashing, her perfect French manicure touching the counter.  “I was at a party last night, and I had SO much fun…”

 
So that’s what fantabulous looks like, I thought, walking away. No wonder I just say “Fine.”

West Hollywood is so sunny and well-bred that occasionally I am overcome with the urge to do something barbaric just to rattle the natives. Nothing appalling, mind you, like failing to smile at dogs and small children. Nothing that will give me a lifelong reputation, like snarling at those damn Salvation Army bell-ringers.

No, just something unexpected and peculiar enough to set them back on their well-heeled heels, their French manicures fluttering in consternation. Something that will bring a whiff of The Other into the breezeless, blue-skied days.

I hit on the perfect act of rebellion, something that violates boundaries but with perfect moral authority, something that suggests a self-sufficiency combined with a disregard for appearances that, in a woman, raises red flags all over: when I buy a cord of firewood, I grab the whole thing and haul it right into the store and up to the cashier.

This is fun. The accepted method is simply to tell the cashier that you are buying firewood and then you take it on your way out. Or better yet, if you are female, you let a store employee pick it up for you, so you won’t muss yourself.

Muss, hell, I pick that baby up and stomp into the store. The security guard jumps out of my way, utterly baffled. Skeletal matrons with plump lips stare through their sunglasses as I stagger past them. Cashiers’ smiles die on their faces and they shrink perceptably as the ragged wood comes toward them.

My grandfather used to cut wood out back with an ax. Here, people mince up to the cashier delicately extending their Visa cards. Somewhere between the ax and the Visa is me.

One can’t live in Hollywood and ignore the writers’ strike. When I was working as an extra, the shuttle bus carried me every morning from the massive parking garage off the Avenue of the Stars deep into the land of Fox Studios, and past pockets of picketing penmen. (Sorry, couldn’t resist the urge to try to wring one more word out of that alliteration opportunity.)

They are wearing red, mostly, and carrying signs. A crew member on the set of The Journeyman commented that some of those writers are earning up to $12,000 per weekly episode, and it seemed to him that with a little judicious budgeting, one could live on that pretty well even in Beverly Hills. But many people, such as Michael Cieply of The New York Times, sympathize with the writers,  noting that the bulk of the money tends to go to top actors, directors, and producers.

“It all begins with a script,” is the phrase I’ve heard often here in Hollywood as I, too, try to get doors to open. Such phrases are lip service, however. Jokes are more revealing. One common joke is that of a starlet telling her friend that she’s sure to land the lead in such-n-such film because “I’m sleeping with the writer!” (Insert guffaw here, because when the process actually begins, the writer is apparently only one notch above the girl who makes the coffee.)

 
It’s hard for me to pick a side. I am a writer myself. But I’ve seen what passes for writing on some of these TV shows and I have to say, $12,000 seems a little steep for exchanges that require a laughtrack.

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 !!

Due to my long hunt for my new apartment, I am now so emotionally scarred that I lash out at the very mention of the word “trendy.”

What on earth do people mean when they say trendy? I mean, seriously? Is this like upscale which means everything from middle-aged and stodgy to not-quite-paid-for?

You would not B.E.L.I.E.V.E. the apartments I have seen referred to as trendy. Apparently, the adjective trendy can be applied to any of apartment that meets the following criteria:

Vertical blinds

Has a bar

Bars on windows have curly-ques on them

Asymmetrical roof

Designed by cartoonist fired from The Jetsons back in 1967

Any manifestation of the colors pink, orange, or turquoise

Retro

Shag carpet

Mirrored surfaces

Located in an area mostly frequented by gays. - Now look. I am not hating on gays. But just because you guys live nearby doesn’t make it automatically cool, okay? I’m sorry! But there you have it! One dog don’t make it a kennel, dig?

Near organic healthfood store. - Now look. I am not hating on vegetarians. But just because you guys live nearby…

Trendy is quickly becoming the zany of video-rental criteria. That is to say, if I am browsing through the video store and I pick up a video and read the back, the minute I see words like wacky, zany… I put it down. Those are code words for “juvenile.” Now I apply the same guidelines to the apartment rental quest. Trendy=hideous. Okay. Got it.

I’m cleaving toward words like quaint and quiet now. I mean, how can you go wrong with those? Oh, I know. We’ll find out.

There are many guns in Hollywood, and I’ve stared down the barrel of about 20 of them since I moved here. Fortunately, they’re all two-dimensional. I’m talking about billboards. Hollywood for some three decades now has had a tendency to produce action movie billboards with a hero pointing his gun directly in the viewer’s face. He’s usually making eye contact, too, leaving no doubt in mind that it’s you he’d like to blow away.

 How this is meant to lure me closer, I’m not sure, but the film industry seems certain it will.

 Those billboards that don’t feature guns directly pointed at the viewer sometimes include a gun simply pointed away, Jodie Foster’s current The Brave One being an example.

 Occasionally, in the billboards, the viewer has the gun, which you can tell because some starlet is in your crosshairs. No wonder movie stars are scared of their fans. Half of them have faced us over a gun one way or another.

 The other oddity that seems particular to Los Angeles advertising is the plethora of bare buttocks one encounters on Sunset Blvd. And these are big billboards. Big buttocks! Joe’s Jeans has run a particularly infamous ad campaign advertising a product I haven’t seen yet because most of the billboards simply feature naked buttocks. One featured seven naked butts of varying hues all in a row. It was startling enough to make you run off the road. Fortunately it was at an intersection, so you could rest at the red light and take in the huge, butt-y rainbow at your leisure.

 I wonder why they don’t combine these two most-favored images. I haven’t seen a butt and a gun together since James Bond was a brunette. I suppose, however, that it’s only a matter of time.

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.