Languages in LA

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.

Little Armenia has their own web page, littlearmenia.com, a truly complete guide to Armenian restaurants, services, churches, etc in Hollywood, Los Feliz, Glendale, Burbank, and Weho. (Weho is West Hollywood, our me-too response to New York’s Soho district.)

Armenians are an interesting bunch for a mid-western white girl like myself. I peer at them often with fascination. This is a group that is in no danger whatsoever of forgetting their culture. Armenian students who cannot remember times tables can still recite every detail of the Armenian genocide. Let me tell you, they know when, where, who, how many, everything. There are Armenian rap songs about it, which they listen to and get fired up about every year around the anniversary of the event.

This in and of itself is not necessarily unique, many of my Hispanic students also show a marked preference for and loyalty to the country of their parents’ birth, and consider American culture of secondary importance. But Armenians, from what I have seen so far, are holding on to their culture without evincing hostility to American culture, which is not always the case with other nationalities.

When the protests erupted last year against pending anti-immigration laws, the latent hostility and frustration in the Hispanic population was manifest. My Mexican students were chanting Si Se Puede!! and waving Mexican flags and yelling “Viva la Raza!” (the sort of chant that only dark-skinned minorities are allowed to utter.) My Armenian students looked on with mild curiosity.

I don’t know if Armenian culture simply has no ax to grind with America, or if they feel compatible with white capitalist culture. But for whatever reason, Armenian-Americans are the benign face of multi-culturalism, where diversity means cool ethnic restaurants and traditional dances in exotic costumes. I confess, I like the Armenian vibe. It’s not threatening. I’m sure this means I’m a bourgeois pig.

Oh well.

Why is there, online, no linguistic map of Los Angeles? How can this be, with UCLA Center for World Languages right here, and all this diversity? I bet such a map would look like a crazy quilt put together by a schizophrenic… which would be way cool.

 Think about it, we have Little Armenia, Little Ethiopia, Thai town… we’ve got enclaves of Russian Jews and Koreatown… if nothing else, it should be a project for linguistics grad students to trudge all over L.A. finding out what language people speak. What a great fieldwork practice, and it’s right here, locally!

 
Boy, if I were a linguistics professor with a bunch of indentured gradslaves at my disposal, there’d be battalions of linguistics students out every year, canvassing a different part of L.A. … this city alone could make for a lifetime of linguistic publications. Hey! Let’s find out if there are any Rhodesians in the valley! Let’s find out if El Salvadorians mingle in with Hondurans, or keep themselves apart! Let’s find out what new arrivals to Koreatown think of the Korean language they encounter from those who’ve been here longer. Is Los Angeles Korean turning freaky? Where do the Latvians gather? Is there a Little Mozambique that I don’t know about, sandwiched between abandoned buildings in South Central? Where’s the New New Delhi? There’s gotta be one.

 Let’s look for little starter pidgins, doomed creatures that will never grow to be creoles: maybe there’s a street in Pasadena where Yemeni grandmothers have no one to talk to during the day but retired Peruvians, and they’ve developed some wild code that enables them to discuss soap operas and exchange recipes.

 Then let’s make a big map, multi-colored, with cross-hatching for blurring boarders, and links to pictures of Orthodox Jews scowling at the camera in front of Gelsen’s grocery in Beverly Hills. What? It’ll be fun!

This is funny: National Geographic has a list of cultural dos and don’ts for dealing with the natives here in Los Angeles. In case you’re visiting from, say Nairobi or New Guinea, and you want to know how to navigate the village without getting eaten by the locals. Not that anyone in L.A. is going to mess up their thousand-dollar teeth whitening procedures gnawing on some tourist. No indeed, you can chip a tooth on those cameras.

But anyway, here’s the first “cultural tip” from National Geographic:

Social etiquette. Business and personal interactions in Los Angeles are usually marked by a cheerful, breezy courtesy and lack of confrontation.

This is certainly true: no one confronts anything here. If they don’t like you, they kiss you enthusiastically, beam at you lovingly, and then don’t take your calls or answer your e-mails. But it’s bizarre to see it offered up in National Geographic. I feel like there should be a picture next to it of some Beverly Hills native with cold cream slathered all over her face like war paint. She should be in ceremonial spa dress (terry cloth robe, herbal tea potion in an earthenware pot nearby…)

But here’s one that’s totally wrong:Road Etiquette. Be as polite on the road as you would in person: Do not rely excessively on your horn, cut off other cars, tailgate, or—for your own protection—express road rage.

Au contraire, mon cher, you must do all three of things if you are going to blend in. Lay on that horn at every opportunity. This is the closest thing you’re going to get to honest communication in this town. The nicer Los Angelenos are in person, the more vicious they are behind the wheel, where foam drips from their whitened fangs.

Just remember that, once you hand your keys to the valet, you have to be nice again. Big white smile: call me! We’ll do lunch!

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.

Okay, do not tell anyone I told you this, but I sometimes go to façade.com and run a stichomancy request. Hey, it’s free.

Stichomancy is when some computer generates a random excerpt from a random book and tells you…

I don’t believe I’m saying this. This is California influence for sure. I’d have never fallen for such nonsense in stiff-upper-lip Michigan.

Anyway, it tells you that you should meditate (…oh please, like I’ve ever meditated in my life. The closest I come to meditation is that trance I fall into whenever Keanu is on the silver screen. I don’t believe I told you that, either. But there’s something about him. Anyway, it tells you that you should meditate) on the following passage.

So this is what my stichomancy said today, and I looked at it, and suddenly I thought, “Dang, lookee here, if this ain’t some deep shi-at.”

It’s an excerpt from John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address. You remember JFK? He was a Democrat from back when Democrats were actually pro-America?

…final war.

So let us begin anew. . .remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate…

Well, heck, that’s enough to set me brooding till November. Let us never negotiate out of fear, but never fear to negotiate. That in and of itself is a headful. That could well last me the rest of my life.

I wrote a screenplay and it has a director and producer attached. We are trying to find funding. Meanwhile, a nearly-nuclear Iran has come to visit Columbia University. These two things put together are a stichomatic moment: I want to get a good deal on my script, in case some nutjob doesn’t end the world, and I am forced to deal with continued life.

Wow. That’s just too much, all put together. I think I’ll go watch Keanu. Look at that mouth. Mmm…

It’s funny the ejaculations we punctuate our speech with. “God, I can’t stand this!” or “Man, you should have seen him run.” Then there’s “Boy, I’d hate to be there right now.”

 
Sometimes it’s hard to tell when someone is being addressed and when it’s merely an emphatic start. It can be a little tricky sometimes. I remember once in the military saying to a co-worker (who was black), “Boy, those stairs look awful.”

 
He snapped “Who you callin’ boy?”

I said, “Huh?” (witty comebacks are my specialty.)

He said, “You better look again!”

 
Once I figured out what was going on, I said with my characteristic grace and good nature, “Oh Christ, if I’d said God, these stairs are a mess would you have thought I was praying to you??”

 
So we didn’t become friends. But it’s something that came floating up from my memory bank the other day when a young co-worker said to me, “Dude, I was so drunk last night.”

 
I thought “Dude?? Am I that flat-chested?” But I didn’t react outwardly. I’m pretty sure she knows I’m female. Now I’m just left to wonder, is dude the new guy or the new boy?

 
See, guy has become standard, already, even when addressing an all-female group. “Come on, you guys, we’re missing the previews!” is perfectly acceptable to hurl at your female friends now as they dawdle in the parking garage. But it’s actually an address.

 
Then there’s the non-address exclamation, boy, as in (and my own sainted mother used to mutter it to me after parent-teacher conference night) “Boy, if I ever see another report card like that again, you’re gonna be sorry!”

So. Is dude a guy or a boy? Or is my co-worker just weird?