My brother and his girlfriend, both teachers, are stranded in Beverly Hills.
Originally due to fly back to the UK last Thursday, they now find themselves, along with thousands of others, unable to take to the ash-laden skies because of the volcano in Iceland.
They are booked to fly again this Thursday, but with another ash cloud apparently heading towards southern Britain, even that journey is under threat.
They acknowledge that there are worse places to be stuck, and Air New Zealand, together with the exceptionally kind and efficient people who operate the concierge service that goes with my Centurion Black Amex (oh, how I am glad I decided to go for it), have kept their stress levels to a minimum.
I have friends currently in transit with BA in similar positions, but they have not been so lucky. Their travel insurance does not cover them for an “act of God”, and they have basically been shown a hotel room, which they have to pay for, and left to fend for themselves (BA – Bugger All, in other words).
I can’t see the airline ever recovering the kudos it once had; in response to the horror stories I have catalogued in this blog and in newspapers, so far only one person has contacted me with something positive to say about them.
I have also suggested that trapped passengers vent their annoyance by doing what Billy Connolly’s advocate character Steve Myers did in the 2001 Australian movie, The Man Who Sued God.
When his insurance firm won’t pay up after his fishing boat is destroyed by a so-called “act of God”, Myers files a claim against God, naming church officials as representatives of God, and thereby the respondents.
If they admit the destruction of the boat was an Act of God, they have to compensate Myers; if they deny it, they will be denying God’s existence. It’s a story that would run and run in the courts.
There have been more positive stories from people dealing with Air New Zealand and Virgin, my two favourite carriers. Thierry, who manages the Air New Zealand executive lounge at Los Angeles airport, could not have been more helpful, keeping us up to date with daily reports. Air New Zealand’s cabin crew are just as impressive onboard, as are Virgin’s: cheerful, always helpful staff, who get paid a fraction of BA employees’ wages and receive none of the perks.
I know that the issues between management and staff at BA are more complex than most passengers really know, but who, in their right mind, would risk flying anywhere with them now. A pair of home-made wings would be more reliable.
But back to my brother and his girlfriend. They have enjoyed doing all the touristy things that LA has to offer.
They went to San Diego to watch Shamu, the whale from Free Willy, leap about in the water (it’s something of an irony that the film about freeing the poor devil now sees him incarcerated in Seaworld, splashing kids – still, at least he’s nowhere near a volcano).
They’ve been to Hollywood and Universal Studios, three of the surrounding beaches, and numerous bars and restaurants.
They’ve met friends and lunatics, experienced the faultless Beverly Hills service, and barbecued on the roof terrace of my apartment block.
They’ve mingled with celebrities, sat in the audience at American Idol, visited Simon Cowell in his trailer, and have learned a great deal about Ukrainian history in conversation with taxi drivers.
They also heard, by means of an introduction at a private party, four words that I never expected to hear in the same sentence: “Jaci Stephen, Gore Vidal.”
By now, they would have been back in Clacton where they live and work. They are both concerned about missing the start of term and their pupils’ forthcoming exams, but still, there really are worse places to be trapped than Beverly Hills (even if my brother is pining for a pint of real ale in his local).
It’s the launch of Brit Week tomorrow night, which is rather apt, given how many Brits are trapped here. The annual festival celebrates British contributions to LA, and it goes on for about three weeks (a very loose interpretation of “week”, therefore). The number of Brits establishing themselves here also seems to be growing – actors, presenters, agents – and despite everyone telling me that the allure of La La Land would quickly wear off, it hasn’t yet.
True, it doesn’t have the cultural range of London or New York, but there is an incredible, positive energy that is generated by its being an industry-focused place, in which everyone feels that anything is possible.
Who cares if some of that self-belief is delusional; people are willing to get up, get out, and have a go.
And if that ash cloud moves any further south, expect to see my brother and his girlfriend marking registers in Beverly Hills High in the autumn term.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Monday, April 12, 2010
To Pad Or Not To Pad, That Is The Question 4/12/10
Now, I know it for sure, and I can stop practising writing my surname as “Cowell”.
Despite the fact that becoming the first Mrs Cowell would have solved all my financial problems, plus those of every living relative and a couple of dozen friends to boot, I know that it is over. The dream.
Because I have, quite simply, seen That Ring. Yes, it’s for real. Having been invited onto the set of American Idol this week, I can confirm that there really is a future Mrs Cowell waiting in the wings.
I know, because I have seen the diamond evidence, and it is very firmly on the hand of the beautiful, very slim and very charming Mezhgan Hussainy. My mission to get Simon interested in short Welsh birds has ended in failure.
Well, you can’t say I didn’t try. Fifteen years, to be precise.
Now, let’s get back to That Ring. The stone alone is bigger than my en suite bathroom. I could park my car on it and there would still be room for a small music festival. Having recently lost the diamond tennis bracelet I worked 30 years to be able to afford, I was a breath away from grabbing the nearest knife and taking Mezhgan’s finger home in my bag; but I resisted.
Good luck to them both, although I will be the one singing It Should Have Been Me at the reception.
I was at the show because my brother and his girlfriend were visiting and, as my first house guests here, I wanted to show them as good a time as possible. They were thrilled to be invited into Simon’s trailer (if That Ring is the size of my bathroom, the trailer is my entire house), and the show was terrific.
I saw more of LA during my guests’ visit than I have managed in the past year. Normally, I have to be excavated out of the Golden Triangle of Beverly Hills, but my brother was keen to explore.
One friend drove us all to Laguna Beach, Newport Beach, and then up into the hills of Palos Verdes. I took them to Soho House LA, Santa Monica, Hollywood Boulevard – all on the bus. They set off for San Diego and Seaworld on their own; enjoyable and cost-efficient as I find the buses, the idea of sitting in one for six hours in a day is about as appealing to me as a day trip to Guantanemo Bay.
One highlight of their trip was getting to see the iPad in advance of its UK launch.
To Pad or not to Pad – for those of us in love with all Apple products, it’s the question that has been occupying us for some weeks. When I spot an iPad across a crowded dining room, I approach with stealth, like David Attenborough coming upon a new and rare species, hoping to get just the merest glimpse before the owner snatches it meanly away.
Stephen Fry has written a wonderful piece about the iPad in the current issue of Time magazine, and after bumping into him in LA, I learned more about the product than I had from the hopeless assistant in Fashion Island’s store in Newport Beach (“It’s like a big iPhone,” he said – and that was it).
Stephen posted the opening of his iPad on You Tube, and his “Oooh” as the final layer of wrapping falls, is as glorious as the squeals of a four year old, finally winning Pass the Parcel at a birthday party, after a week of bullying at school. It’s a lovely “Suits you, sir!” moment, and Apple should use it in their advertising.
Stephen reckons that we relate to Apple’s products as we do to animals or humans, and I’m totally with him on that; it explains the Apple cemetery that I have in my attic, as I am unable to throw away even completely clapped out computers and phones.
But I’m still torn, in a way that I wasn’t when trying to decide whether to go to Seaworld, but I know that I will weaken. I’ve now spotted three iPads in LA, and they are undoubtedly jewels that single out the men from the boys in town (I have yet to see a woman with one, so that may end up being reason enough to indulge).
I am not a big shopper normally, but Apple draws me in with an alacrity that Versace or Armani never quite manage.
I don’t need the iPad; I’m not sure that I think it will offer any more than my MacBook Air currently does.
Oh, but how I want one. Nothing says more about your Hollywood status at the moment than wandering into a restaurant or bar and opening up your new best friend. Forget the boob job and tummy tuck, girls; it’s the iPad that has the real pulling power. I’m going to call mine Simon.
Despite the fact that becoming the first Mrs Cowell would have solved all my financial problems, plus those of every living relative and a couple of dozen friends to boot, I know that it is over. The dream.
Because I have, quite simply, seen That Ring. Yes, it’s for real. Having been invited onto the set of American Idol this week, I can confirm that there really is a future Mrs Cowell waiting in the wings.
I know, because I have seen the diamond evidence, and it is very firmly on the hand of the beautiful, very slim and very charming Mezhgan Hussainy. My mission to get Simon interested in short Welsh birds has ended in failure.
Well, you can’t say I didn’t try. Fifteen years, to be precise.
Now, let’s get back to That Ring. The stone alone is bigger than my en suite bathroom. I could park my car on it and there would still be room for a small music festival. Having recently lost the diamond tennis bracelet I worked 30 years to be able to afford, I was a breath away from grabbing the nearest knife and taking Mezhgan’s finger home in my bag; but I resisted.
Good luck to them both, although I will be the one singing It Should Have Been Me at the reception.
I was at the show because my brother and his girlfriend were visiting and, as my first house guests here, I wanted to show them as good a time as possible. They were thrilled to be invited into Simon’s trailer (if That Ring is the size of my bathroom, the trailer is my entire house), and the show was terrific.
I saw more of LA during my guests’ visit than I have managed in the past year. Normally, I have to be excavated out of the Golden Triangle of Beverly Hills, but my brother was keen to explore.
One friend drove us all to Laguna Beach, Newport Beach, and then up into the hills of Palos Verdes. I took them to Soho House LA, Santa Monica, Hollywood Boulevard – all on the bus. They set off for San Diego and Seaworld on their own; enjoyable and cost-efficient as I find the buses, the idea of sitting in one for six hours in a day is about as appealing to me as a day trip to Guantanemo Bay.
One highlight of their trip was getting to see the iPad in advance of its UK launch.
To Pad or not to Pad – for those of us in love with all Apple products, it’s the question that has been occupying us for some weeks. When I spot an iPad across a crowded dining room, I approach with stealth, like David Attenborough coming upon a new and rare species, hoping to get just the merest glimpse before the owner snatches it meanly away.
Stephen Fry has written a wonderful piece about the iPad in the current issue of Time magazine, and after bumping into him in LA, I learned more about the product than I had from the hopeless assistant in Fashion Island’s store in Newport Beach (“It’s like a big iPhone,” he said – and that was it).
Stephen posted the opening of his iPad on You Tube, and his “Oooh” as the final layer of wrapping falls, is as glorious as the squeals of a four year old, finally winning Pass the Parcel at a birthday party, after a week of bullying at school. It’s a lovely “Suits you, sir!” moment, and Apple should use it in their advertising.
Stephen reckons that we relate to Apple’s products as we do to animals or humans, and I’m totally with him on that; it explains the Apple cemetery that I have in my attic, as I am unable to throw away even completely clapped out computers and phones.
But I’m still torn, in a way that I wasn’t when trying to decide whether to go to Seaworld, but I know that I will weaken. I’ve now spotted three iPads in LA, and they are undoubtedly jewels that single out the men from the boys in town (I have yet to see a woman with one, so that may end up being reason enough to indulge).
I am not a big shopper normally, but Apple draws me in with an alacrity that Versace or Armani never quite manage.
I don’t need the iPad; I’m not sure that I think it will offer any more than my MacBook Air currently does.
Oh, but how I want one. Nothing says more about your Hollywood status at the moment than wandering into a restaurant or bar and opening up your new best friend. Forget the boob job and tummy tuck, girls; it’s the iPad that has the real pulling power. I’m going to call mine Simon.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Death Wish In Soho House 4/6/10
My visiting friends had been warned. It was Earthquake Preparedness Month.
They asked me about the posters and, now that I’ve been here a year, I was able to tell them exactly what the heralding of the great event entailed.
Having learned from my experience during my first earthquake last May, this time round I had heeded the advice of the Pioneer hardware shop that first put my preparedness kit together and gave me advice.
I sleep with money and a torch by the side of my bed, and a lot of bottled water in the apartment. I know to run to a door-frame or under my dining table when disaster strikes.
My friends were impressed.
Or would have been, had we not been 14 floors up in Soho House’s new members only club, when Mexico’s 7.2 earthquake struck on Sunday afternoon.
The new Soho House venue is spectacular, as all of Nick Jones’s ventures are. When I briefly returned to the UK a couple of weeks ago, I stayed at the London Club’s new hotel in Dean Street, where the pillows are so spectacular, you need crampons and a compass just to make it into bed.
If I had picked up anyone en route, I wouldn’t have known, as I wouldn’t have been able to find them among the Himalayan linen.
Soho House LA is a mixture of modernity and old Hollywood, and has quickly become everyone’s favourite place. I have been a member of the London Club since day one; I had my 40th birthday party there, and I adore the new place even more. So, with 360 degree views over the city, and the best roast dinner I have had in years, I was quite content when the light fittings started to shake.
Shortly followed by the room.
It was only when I saw the fish clinging with their gills for dear life in the restaurant’s lake that I really started to panic.
The whole scene appeared to pause in freeze-frame. I hadn’t ordered flying fish for dessert, but one looked suspiciously close to landing on my plate.
These were the people I was going to die with.
I thought that the man on the next table, who had brought his brand new Apple iPad to lunch, would never get to use it (although it would be the first thing I was going to steal when the walls started to crumble). Gone.
We would never again see the beautiful Ally, who had welcomed us, or the immaculately turned out Phil, who had served us (I want to employ whoever does the Club’s laundry to do mine). Gone.
The cocktail glasses, apparently modelled on Marie Antoinette’s breasts, would be nothing but shards among the rubble. Gone.
OH, YEGODS! WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!
The eerie silence lasted for about a minute, but felt like ten. Then, when the shaking stopped, and we realised that the earth had moved but not caved in, a strange thing happened. People started to chat to complete strangers, almost deliriously, relieved that we were all okay.
Or, I wondered, maybe we were not, and we had already gone to the afterlife. I wouldn’t have minded, to be honest. With its open roof, imported olive trees that canopy the restaurant, and great food, if Soho House was Sixth Sense II, I wasn’t going to be complaining.
There were worse places I could have died. Rite-Aid, for a start. I wouldn’t want them to find me among the hundreds of products in the Feminine Hygiene aisle that have so fascinated me since I came here (by the way, the TV commercials say that Refresh beats the others hands down, ladies, and I concur).
Or I could have been in Sports Club LA, where they would have found me like an inflated lobster as I tried to keep up with Victoria Beckham on the next treadmill.
Or in Century City’s AMC cinema, with the Buffalo Burger and fries down my front.
Yes, there were definitely worse places to die than Soho House.
We quickly learned that the earthquake had registered as 6.9; then it was up to 7.2. Our new best friends thought that for dramatic purpose, we would tell everyone back in Britain that it was 11.3.
We also learned that the building that houses the Club is on wheels, which apparently make it earthquake-proof. This worried me even more, as I had visions of us free-waying our way down the Hollywood Hills into unsuspecting Big Mac diners, who had not been so fortunate as to have just enjoyed the dining experience that we had.
The whole event has made me reassess my plans for Earthquake Preparedness Month. If you’re five miles away, what use is a torch sitting in the drawer of your bedside cabinet?
Now, I am going to carry my EPM kit around with me, and it will consist of just two things: my Soho House membership card and a corkscrew.
Because, at the first hint of another rumble on the news, I’m going to be out of my place quicker than Marie Antoinette’s breasts in her boudoir, and over to Soho House.
And when the fish start to fly, I just want to be drunk as a skunk before they find me among the rubble, with a goldfish up my nose.
They asked me about the posters and, now that I’ve been here a year, I was able to tell them exactly what the heralding of the great event entailed.
Having learned from my experience during my first earthquake last May, this time round I had heeded the advice of the Pioneer hardware shop that first put my preparedness kit together and gave me advice.
I sleep with money and a torch by the side of my bed, and a lot of bottled water in the apartment. I know to run to a door-frame or under my dining table when disaster strikes.
My friends were impressed.
Or would have been, had we not been 14 floors up in Soho House’s new members only club, when Mexico’s 7.2 earthquake struck on Sunday afternoon.
The new Soho House venue is spectacular, as all of Nick Jones’s ventures are. When I briefly returned to the UK a couple of weeks ago, I stayed at the London Club’s new hotel in Dean Street, where the pillows are so spectacular, you need crampons and a compass just to make it into bed.
If I had picked up anyone en route, I wouldn’t have known, as I wouldn’t have been able to find them among the Himalayan linen.
Soho House LA is a mixture of modernity and old Hollywood, and has quickly become everyone’s favourite place. I have been a member of the London Club since day one; I had my 40th birthday party there, and I adore the new place even more. So, with 360 degree views over the city, and the best roast dinner I have had in years, I was quite content when the light fittings started to shake.
Shortly followed by the room.
It was only when I saw the fish clinging with their gills for dear life in the restaurant’s lake that I really started to panic.
The whole scene appeared to pause in freeze-frame. I hadn’t ordered flying fish for dessert, but one looked suspiciously close to landing on my plate.
These were the people I was going to die with.
I thought that the man on the next table, who had brought his brand new Apple iPad to lunch, would never get to use it (although it would be the first thing I was going to steal when the walls started to crumble). Gone.
We would never again see the beautiful Ally, who had welcomed us, or the immaculately turned out Phil, who had served us (I want to employ whoever does the Club’s laundry to do mine). Gone.
The cocktail glasses, apparently modelled on Marie Antoinette’s breasts, would be nothing but shards among the rubble. Gone.
OH, YEGODS! WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!
The eerie silence lasted for about a minute, but felt like ten. Then, when the shaking stopped, and we realised that the earth had moved but not caved in, a strange thing happened. People started to chat to complete strangers, almost deliriously, relieved that we were all okay.
Or, I wondered, maybe we were not, and we had already gone to the afterlife. I wouldn’t have minded, to be honest. With its open roof, imported olive trees that canopy the restaurant, and great food, if Soho House was Sixth Sense II, I wasn’t going to be complaining.
There were worse places I could have died. Rite-Aid, for a start. I wouldn’t want them to find me among the hundreds of products in the Feminine Hygiene aisle that have so fascinated me since I came here (by the way, the TV commercials say that Refresh beats the others hands down, ladies, and I concur).
Or I could have been in Sports Club LA, where they would have found me like an inflated lobster as I tried to keep up with Victoria Beckham on the next treadmill.
Or in Century City’s AMC cinema, with the Buffalo Burger and fries down my front.
Yes, there were definitely worse places to die than Soho House.
We quickly learned that the earthquake had registered as 6.9; then it was up to 7.2. Our new best friends thought that for dramatic purpose, we would tell everyone back in Britain that it was 11.3.
We also learned that the building that houses the Club is on wheels, which apparently make it earthquake-proof. This worried me even more, as I had visions of us free-waying our way down the Hollywood Hills into unsuspecting Big Mac diners, who had not been so fortunate as to have just enjoyed the dining experience that we had.
The whole event has made me reassess my plans for Earthquake Preparedness Month. If you’re five miles away, what use is a torch sitting in the drawer of your bedside cabinet?
Now, I am going to carry my EPM kit around with me, and it will consist of just two things: my Soho House membership card and a corkscrew.
Because, at the first hint of another rumble on the news, I’m going to be out of my place quicker than Marie Antoinette’s breasts in her boudoir, and over to Soho House.
And when the fish start to fly, I just want to be drunk as a skunk before they find me among the rubble, with a goldfish up my nose.
A Sherpa Is Not Just For Everest, He's For Life 4/6/10
Finally, I know the kind of man I want.
A Sherpa.
He doesn’t have to talk to me or sleep with me; in fact, I am happy to walk three steps behind him – just so long as he is carrying my bags.
After deciding not to take the multiple amounts of medication given to me by doctors for my bad back, I spoke to an osteopath, who put the problem down to the immense bag carrying I have been doing on my Transatlantic travels – usually two cases that come up to my elbows, a back-pack, camera-case and equipment, and a handbag as big as a moose.
One of the cases is generally stuffed with dozens of books, and on one trip, before my back went, I managed to re-locate my entire collection of Italian, Spanish and French language learning sections of my new US home library, back to the UK.
Quite why I thought I was going to learn three languages on my ten-day break is a mystery.
If I had a Sherpa, he could also carry back and forth the Russian language learning section, which I bought when I recently decided to read Tolstoy in the original, too (I got as far as “Zavoot Jaci”, plus one obscene word, which is apparently the same in Polish).
Each decade brings about a big difference in the kind of man a girl wants, and travel has a lot to do with it. Between the ages of one and ten, she looks for The Protector, who will walk her to school and carry her satchel.
Eleven to 20: Protector turned Welcome Predator, who will start by carrying her satchel, but only with the aim of whipping her off to a quiet secluded spot when he acquires his driving licence at 17.
From 21 to 30, it’s The Wooer, who whisks her off to Paris and makes her cry (or was that just me?).
Thirty to 40, she wants The Provider: someone with a job, security and a bit of money, who will pay for a second home abroad.
If she’s still on her own at this time, or has dumped, or been dumped by, any of the ones she has acquired from the previous decade, from 40 to 50 she will simply start looking for The Available.
And if she hasn’t pulled post 50, all she wants is The Sherpa. Trust me: I’m there.
I have done more travelling since hitting 50 than I managed in the previous five decades, and having spent 25 years swearing I would never cross the Atlantic again, after visits in New York and LA in my twenties, now I can’t wait for the 11 hour journey, during which my mobile won’t ring, I can watch a couple of films, read a book, enjoy a decent meal and generally live a very comfortable life – albeit a mini-one.
And whether I travel with Air New Zealand or Virgin (forget BA; I’ll probably be able to buy a plane with my unused BA points, the way things are going), I know that I can rely on both to get me to my destination on time a darn sight more than I can rely on the First Great Western Railway to do the same between Paddington and Cardiff, when I hit the UK.
But the bags. The bags. Oh, how I need a bloke to help me with the bags. It’s the only thing missing now. At this age, I’m really easy maintenance otherwise.
Although my sexual desire has increased a hundredfold, post menopause, I’m really EPCM (Easy Post-Coital Management). Forget all that after-sex cuddling and kissing (and, heaven forbid for men, talking), that I wanted years ago, now I want him out by midnight so that I can watch the back to back CSI episodes from what feels like a hundred US cities.
Actually, I don’t even want him to hang around that long, and now I think I think that if I meet any halfway decent men, I’m going to have to establish some sort of shift system for my new lifestyle.
As I’m generally working by about 5.30am (and up at four, if I need to catch people in the UK before lunchtime), early mornings are out. Then, when I’ve managed a few hours work, it’s over to the gym and back at the apartment to watch Judge Alex over lunch.
It’s work again in the afternoon (there are so many more hours in the day over there – weird!), until two episodes of Two and a Half Men at seven; major dramas nine till 11, then late-night Chelsea Handler and Letterman, before CSI starts all over again.
So, basically, any man I meet has a brief window of opportunity between eight and 9pm – without food, and he’d better be quick about whatever it is he wants to do. Actually, on past experience, I’m now thinking that even an hour may be too long.
Like I said. Easy maintenance.
When I was back in the UK last week, nearly everyone asked me: “Have you got a man in LA?” I found it faintly irritating. It was never my top priority anyway, and it’s certainly not what I came here for. It’s not even on my radar.
And unless James Spader, David Letterman and Judge Alex are going to come up with an idea for how a foursome might work between us, that is unlikely to change.
But I’ll make an exception for a Sherpa.
My only worry is whether there will be time between the specified minutes for him to pack the travelling homes that have become my luggage.
A Sherpa.
He doesn’t have to talk to me or sleep with me; in fact, I am happy to walk three steps behind him – just so long as he is carrying my bags.
After deciding not to take the multiple amounts of medication given to me by doctors for my bad back, I spoke to an osteopath, who put the problem down to the immense bag carrying I have been doing on my Transatlantic travels – usually two cases that come up to my elbows, a back-pack, camera-case and equipment, and a handbag as big as a moose.
One of the cases is generally stuffed with dozens of books, and on one trip, before my back went, I managed to re-locate my entire collection of Italian, Spanish and French language learning sections of my new US home library, back to the UK.
Quite why I thought I was going to learn three languages on my ten-day break is a mystery.
If I had a Sherpa, he could also carry back and forth the Russian language learning section, which I bought when I recently decided to read Tolstoy in the original, too (I got as far as “Zavoot Jaci”, plus one obscene word, which is apparently the same in Polish).
Each decade brings about a big difference in the kind of man a girl wants, and travel has a lot to do with it. Between the ages of one and ten, she looks for The Protector, who will walk her to school and carry her satchel.
Eleven to 20: Protector turned Welcome Predator, who will start by carrying her satchel, but only with the aim of whipping her off to a quiet secluded spot when he acquires his driving licence at 17.
From 21 to 30, it’s The Wooer, who whisks her off to Paris and makes her cry (or was that just me?).
Thirty to 40, she wants The Provider: someone with a job, security and a bit of money, who will pay for a second home abroad.
If she’s still on her own at this time, or has dumped, or been dumped by, any of the ones she has acquired from the previous decade, from 40 to 50 she will simply start looking for The Available.
And if she hasn’t pulled post 50, all she wants is The Sherpa. Trust me: I’m there.
I have done more travelling since hitting 50 than I managed in the previous five decades, and having spent 25 years swearing I would never cross the Atlantic again, after visits in New York and LA in my twenties, now I can’t wait for the 11 hour journey, during which my mobile won’t ring, I can watch a couple of films, read a book, enjoy a decent meal and generally live a very comfortable life – albeit a mini-one.
And whether I travel with Air New Zealand or Virgin (forget BA; I’ll probably be able to buy a plane with my unused BA points, the way things are going), I know that I can rely on both to get me to my destination on time a darn sight more than I can rely on the First Great Western Railway to do the same between Paddington and Cardiff, when I hit the UK.
But the bags. The bags. Oh, how I need a bloke to help me with the bags. It’s the only thing missing now. At this age, I’m really easy maintenance otherwise.
Although my sexual desire has increased a hundredfold, post menopause, I’m really EPCM (Easy Post-Coital Management). Forget all that after-sex cuddling and kissing (and, heaven forbid for men, talking), that I wanted years ago, now I want him out by midnight so that I can watch the back to back CSI episodes from what feels like a hundred US cities.
Actually, I don’t even want him to hang around that long, and now I think I think that if I meet any halfway decent men, I’m going to have to establish some sort of shift system for my new lifestyle.
As I’m generally working by about 5.30am (and up at four, if I need to catch people in the UK before lunchtime), early mornings are out. Then, when I’ve managed a few hours work, it’s over to the gym and back at the apartment to watch Judge Alex over lunch.
It’s work again in the afternoon (there are so many more hours in the day over there – weird!), until two episodes of Two and a Half Men at seven; major dramas nine till 11, then late-night Chelsea Handler and Letterman, before CSI starts all over again.
So, basically, any man I meet has a brief window of opportunity between eight and 9pm – without food, and he’d better be quick about whatever it is he wants to do. Actually, on past experience, I’m now thinking that even an hour may be too long.
Like I said. Easy maintenance.
When I was back in the UK last week, nearly everyone asked me: “Have you got a man in LA?” I found it faintly irritating. It was never my top priority anyway, and it’s certainly not what I came here for. It’s not even on my radar.
And unless James Spader, David Letterman and Judge Alex are going to come up with an idea for how a foursome might work between us, that is unlikely to change.
But I’ll make an exception for a Sherpa.
My only worry is whether there will be time between the specified minutes for him to pack the travelling homes that have become my luggage.
Monday, March 29, 2010
The Better Half Of Two And A Half Men 3/29/10
It’s been hard for me to reconcile what appear to be Charlie Sheen’s auditions for The Shining II in real life, with the truly extraordinary actor.
I watched him in Wall Street again the other day, and it is a performance of incredible range and talent for such a young man.
Every night, I watch double episodes of the sitcom Two and A Half Men, whether I am in the UK or the US; I can pretty much recite them all by heart now, but Sheen still makes me laugh out loud every time, just as the brilliant Jon Cryer (who won an Emmy as Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series this year – so, so deserved) makes me both laugh and cry, as his character lurks often pitifully in his seemingly more successful brother’s shadow.
The character Charlie (played by Sheen) is the drinking, fun-loving, sex-craved one; Alan (Cryer – his character often lives up to the actor’s surname), the divorced one, has been living in Charlie's Malibu beachside home since his marriage broke up, and appears to have very little going for him.
He has virtually no luck with women, gets a hangover if he so much as breathes the same air as a Budweiser, and has the greater moral conscience.
But he is much nicer to his mother than Charlie is, and tries to keep his own food-obsessed son Jake on the straight and narrow, as the boy is passed from mother to father and back again, with several pizzas and buckets of fries acting as the middle men.
But why, in many US comedy shows, are there so many women have absolutely no, or certainly very well hidden, redeeming qualities? Lilith (Cheers, Frasier); Ros and the unseen Maris (Frasier); housekeeper Berta (Conchata Perrell), Alan’s ex-wife Judith (Marin Hinkle), and the brothers’ mother Evelyn (Holland Taylor) in Two and a Half Men?
True, many of Charlie’s women have some nice qualities, but these fly-by-nights are generally out of the door quicker than Charlie can say . . . Well: “Don’t slam the door on your way out.” Fiancée Chelsea was a very rare exception; it is the three monstrous women who dominate the female part of the show.
In the UK, it is generally the females of sitcoms who set the moral barometer; they are the ones to whom the other generally hopeless characters (usually men) turn to, in order to find clues as to how they could, or should, be running their lives.
In the US, you wouldn’t look to any of the above-named women for directions to the bathroom, let alone your life path; you know they would only point you to the cellar, lock you in and throw away the key.
So who sets the moral barometer in Two and A Half Men?
It’s Alan’s son, Jake, played by Angus T. Jones, who was just a month off his 10th birthday when CBS first aired the show in September 2003 – and it is this character who ultimately defines the show as the most moral comedy on television.
That’s right: Two and A Half Men is the most moral comedy show on US television. And that is the real key to its enormous success as a family comedy.
It has the most promiscuous sex, the most heartless and cruel women, the rudest (though most daring and riotous) jokes, and yet, at its heart, a very moral tale: two grown men, seemingly at odds, little realising that what binds them is not only their relation to each other by blood, but the thing for which they are both searching, albeit in very different ways. Namely: how do you find the right person to love?
It's a primal journey, common to most people, of both sexes, the world over. It's just that Charlie gets his end away more often en route - as it were.
But Jake is the touchstone to which they both keep returning. Jake's curious questioning of life and sexuality is governed by Charlie; the importance of having a conscience is monitored by Alan.
But in both men essentially (and in Charlie's case, unconsciously) competing for control of the youngster, the men constantly have to reassesss their behaviour and lifetyle while in his presence: the young spectre at the grown-ups' feast.
In reality, Jake is saner than both his father and uncle (and certainly saner than his mother). He is the calm voice of reason, questioning both men’s behaviour, as he grows up surrounded by people who don’t know how to love because they were not, quite simply, loved by their mother.
Jake is loved by everyone, which automatically gives him the moral high ground. His security in being wanted by mother, father and, jokingly reluctantly, by Uncle Charlie, enables him to look with bemusement and wonder at the people denied what has always been given to him freely and unconditionally.
He’s a young child of divorced parents (which helps); he has crushes – on girls and older women; he loves telly; and we’ve seen him grow from pre-pubescent into handsome, funny and smart young man – without his incurring, or our ever having had to see, all the problems that this transformation usually entails in real life.
Oh, yes; and he’s always been very cute – and Jones is a damned fine young actor, as both the pre- and post-pubescent Jake glaringly reveal.
After Sheen’s recent spell in rehab, recordings for the new series were put on hold, but filming resumed two weeks ago.
I really can’t wait for it to come around again. My guess would be that it will now be Jake who starts competing with his Uncle Charlie for the same girls, which will bring Charlie’s insecurities to the fore.
That’s Charlie the character, not Charlie from The Shining II, by the way.
I’m not suggesting you swop your Bible for DVDs just yet, but there are a lot of moral lessons to be learned in Two and A Half Men, where love really does conquer all.
Even if it is often Jake’s love for whatever he’s thinking about putting in his belly next.
I watched him in Wall Street again the other day, and it is a performance of incredible range and talent for such a young man.
Every night, I watch double episodes of the sitcom Two and A Half Men, whether I am in the UK or the US; I can pretty much recite them all by heart now, but Sheen still makes me laugh out loud every time, just as the brilliant Jon Cryer (who won an Emmy as Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series this year – so, so deserved) makes me both laugh and cry, as his character lurks often pitifully in his seemingly more successful brother’s shadow.
The character Charlie (played by Sheen) is the drinking, fun-loving, sex-craved one; Alan (Cryer – his character often lives up to the actor’s surname), the divorced one, has been living in Charlie's Malibu beachside home since his marriage broke up, and appears to have very little going for him.
He has virtually no luck with women, gets a hangover if he so much as breathes the same air as a Budweiser, and has the greater moral conscience.
But he is much nicer to his mother than Charlie is, and tries to keep his own food-obsessed son Jake on the straight and narrow, as the boy is passed from mother to father and back again, with several pizzas and buckets of fries acting as the middle men.
But why, in many US comedy shows, are there so many women have absolutely no, or certainly very well hidden, redeeming qualities? Lilith (Cheers, Frasier); Ros and the unseen Maris (Frasier); housekeeper Berta (Conchata Perrell), Alan’s ex-wife Judith (Marin Hinkle), and the brothers’ mother Evelyn (Holland Taylor) in Two and a Half Men?
True, many of Charlie’s women have some nice qualities, but these fly-by-nights are generally out of the door quicker than Charlie can say . . . Well: “Don’t slam the door on your way out.” Fiancée Chelsea was a very rare exception; it is the three monstrous women who dominate the female part of the show.
In the UK, it is generally the females of sitcoms who set the moral barometer; they are the ones to whom the other generally hopeless characters (usually men) turn to, in order to find clues as to how they could, or should, be running their lives.
In the US, you wouldn’t look to any of the above-named women for directions to the bathroom, let alone your life path; you know they would only point you to the cellar, lock you in and throw away the key.
So who sets the moral barometer in Two and A Half Men?
It’s Alan’s son, Jake, played by Angus T. Jones, who was just a month off his 10th birthday when CBS first aired the show in September 2003 – and it is this character who ultimately defines the show as the most moral comedy on television.
That’s right: Two and A Half Men is the most moral comedy show on US television. And that is the real key to its enormous success as a family comedy.
It has the most promiscuous sex, the most heartless and cruel women, the rudest (though most daring and riotous) jokes, and yet, at its heart, a very moral tale: two grown men, seemingly at odds, little realising that what binds them is not only their relation to each other by blood, but the thing for which they are both searching, albeit in very different ways. Namely: how do you find the right person to love?
It's a primal journey, common to most people, of both sexes, the world over. It's just that Charlie gets his end away more often en route - as it were.
But Jake is the touchstone to which they both keep returning. Jake's curious questioning of life and sexuality is governed by Charlie; the importance of having a conscience is monitored by Alan.
But in both men essentially (and in Charlie's case, unconsciously) competing for control of the youngster, the men constantly have to reassesss their behaviour and lifetyle while in his presence: the young spectre at the grown-ups' feast.
In reality, Jake is saner than both his father and uncle (and certainly saner than his mother). He is the calm voice of reason, questioning both men’s behaviour, as he grows up surrounded by people who don’t know how to love because they were not, quite simply, loved by their mother.
Jake is loved by everyone, which automatically gives him the moral high ground. His security in being wanted by mother, father and, jokingly reluctantly, by Uncle Charlie, enables him to look with bemusement and wonder at the people denied what has always been given to him freely and unconditionally.
He’s a young child of divorced parents (which helps); he has crushes – on girls and older women; he loves telly; and we’ve seen him grow from pre-pubescent into handsome, funny and smart young man – without his incurring, or our ever having had to see, all the problems that this transformation usually entails in real life.
Oh, yes; and he’s always been very cute – and Jones is a damned fine young actor, as both the pre- and post-pubescent Jake glaringly reveal.
After Sheen’s recent spell in rehab, recordings for the new series were put on hold, but filming resumed two weeks ago.
I really can’t wait for it to come around again. My guess would be that it will now be Jake who starts competing with his Uncle Charlie for the same girls, which will bring Charlie’s insecurities to the fore.
That’s Charlie the character, not Charlie from The Shining II, by the way.
I’m not suggesting you swop your Bible for DVDs just yet, but there are a lot of moral lessons to be learned in Two and A Half Men, where love really does conquer all.
Even if it is often Jake’s love for whatever he’s thinking about putting in his belly next.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Ready For My Handcuffs, Judge Alex 3/25/10
Judge Alex Ferrer.
He keeps me awake at night.
Seriously, I think I am in love. I know he wears a wedding ring, but I figure that with all the TV commercials asking people to pack up their gold in brown envelopes and send it to places like “We at the mail office steal your gold marked GOLD ENCLOSED”, he might be tempted to ditch it.
Then he would be free. For me. For all I know, he is married to a stunner, but then so was Tiger Woods, and that didn’t stop him trying to land a few more holes.
I confess to being addicted to the US celebrity judge programmes. In the UK, it started with Judge Judy, who hasn’t changed her hairstyle in a decade, and is terrifying in a head teacher kind of way.
I don’t want to sleep with her, which helps me concentrate on the legal aspects of the programmes, and I now feel that I could sit as a High Court judge in the US courts and act just as efficiently as she does.
I can’t help noticing, though, that the people in her courtroom are fatter than the ones on any other, and that if Judge Judy just sent them all off to Weight Watchers for a couple of weeks, they might drop a few pounds and resolve their differences more calmly.
I like People’s Court, with Judge Milian, who is, like Judge Judy, seemingly right about everything, but I just want to know who her dentist is. She really does have the best teeth of any of the judges, and she also has Harvey Levin, who stands outside the courtroom, chatting to locals about what they think should happen inside.
Poor Harvey. I specially feel for him on days when it is raining and no one gives him an umbrella. The general opinion of the hapless bunch that surrounds him is “String ‘em up”, irrespective of the crime, and when Harvey says “Goin’ back inside the courtroom,” there is more than a hint of “Thank the Lord for that, get me away from these lunatics asap” about him. He is the Ryan Seacrest of the legal world: central to the action, but always a Cowell away from true glory.
But back to my beautiful Alex, ex-Florida Court circuit judge (the only time I have ever been tempted by the idea of enrolling for "circuit training", to be honest), who I would happily disrobe in less time than it would take you to say “Guilty m’lud.” He is clever, funny, he loves the narrative of the absurd stories that unfold before him, and he always manages to get to the sexual nitty-gritty in which the other judges show relatively little interest.
So, let’s say you stole a vase from your ex-boyfriend’s mother’s house. Within seconds, Judge Alex would have managed to extract from you exactly how many times mom and pop had had sex before they bought the vase (and in which positions), where said vase was on the dresser the last time they had sex before it was stolen, and even whether the vase was used for any improper purposes before it took up residence in the new (illegal) home.
If I were to choose anyone to sit down and watch a porn movie with, it would be Judge Alex. Fully robed. Briefly. Then I would want him to handcuff me, put me behind bars and make me beg on all fours . . . Well, you get the picture. And if you don't, apparently it's illegal for me to text it to you.
A man is never more sexy than when he is at work; and a clever, witty man, who holds power, and who is articulate, who stands on the moral high ground, yet with just a hint of smut on his shoe, is always going to top my list.
Forget Judge Judy, I am saving up my Air Miles just to steal a vase in Miami, purely so that I can be on the receiving end of one of Judge Alex's admonishments. I’m not looking for life imprisonment, just a slap on the . . . Well, you get my drift.
We don’t have cameras in courts in the UK, and it is yet another reason I love being in the US. Judge Alex is my lunch hour, and as I can barely eat with excitement when watching him at work, he is proving very good for my weight loss, too.
I’m keeping an eye on that third finger, left hand, just in case he becomes available. But while that gold stays in place, lock up your valuables; I am a woman on a mission.
The only flaw to my reasoning will be when I end up in Judge Judy’s courtroom, after Judge Alex takes out a restraining order on me.
This week, however, I have been facing a dilemma as to what I do about my future: Judge Alex Ferrer every lunchtime, all-day marathons of Law and Order, and, at night, the hilarious and sassy Chelsea Handler on the telly.
Sunrise and sunset over LA, beside the pool of my Beverly Hills apartment’s huge rooftop terrace. The staff at my favourite local restaurant, Il Pastaio, and most-loved hotel, the Beverly Wilshire.
The almost endless sunshine. Martinique tea at the American Tea Room. The Container Store at Century City. The endless floor to floor joy of Bed, Bath and Beyond – best store and service of any in the world.
And Judge Alex. Every day. Yes, I know. I mentioned him. But oh, Judge Alex. Tall. Dark. Handsome. Smart. Hilarious. Way and above the best and most compelling of all the TV judges - and happily married with kids, alas, but hey ho, a girl can dream.
And will. Ex-cop, attorney, and now in robes. Uniform, authority, handcuffs. Call me old-fashioned, but 6,000 miles away from home, a daily dose of the awe-inspiring judge on TV more than makes up for several decades’ worth of British guys offering you half a Stella before throwing up their previous 18 over your new dress.
Every time I come back to the UK, I add to the list of what I miss about LA. Unfortunately, each time I return, it is usually for a funeral or memorial service, and although I haven’t been left anything in anyone’s will, some of my dear departed friends are doubtless laughing in their graves at the number of Air Miles I am acquiring on their behalf, even if those miles might land me in jail (bad) or handcuffs (less bad).
It’s been a strange week. I missed so much about LA, I put my UK house on the market and thought I would make LA my main base. Then I thought about my wonderful mum and brother, the friends I have spent decades making, and took it off again.
As I was brought back in a wheelchair, after the back problem I wrote about last week, it’s been a time of reflection. In the UK, I was told that the drugs I had been given in the US were drugs given to kidney transplant patients (at the last count, I still had two – of my own). My doctor substituted the five lots of medication for a stint of something else, but I am reluctant to be on medication for that long.
Apologies for sounding melodramatic (you can take the girl out of LA . . . ), but is it a metaphorical weight I am carrying, as well as the very real one? One night, I found myself on the driveway of my Cardiff home, crying as I tried to sort the bin bags, because they hadn’t been taken the previous week (wrong colour, wrong plastic, wrong handle position – you know what a bloody nightmare putting out your bins in the UK is these days) and wondering: Where do I really want to be?
I went to Los Angeles to change my working life, and the man who became my friend and mentor, Blake Snyder, died. I love more and more about the city and, back in Cardiff, I have no real social life.
As an older single woman, never married, never co-habited, no kids, not a lesbian, I don’t get asked anywhere. In LA, I meet gay, straight, couples, singles, all the time, all from different professions, every day.
Age never feels an issue; moving on in my professional life feels like a real possibility and very unlike what seems to be the position in the UK, where everyone appears to be running very hard – just to stand still.
Is this a woman thing? An everyday thing? A worldwide recession thing? I just know that having been in America rather than Europe for the first time in my life, I am re-assessing everything, in ways I never believed possible.
The US is an amazing country, with a variety of people, cultures and, in LA, which is pretty much all I know, a heady, inspiring experience. I also know that it can be short-lived. But then so has everywhere I have ever lived.
I want it all - at the time. I love it all - at the time. Then I want something different. Maybe, what I have discovered, in LA, is that I was right all along: I was born a writer who thrives on change.
I just may need a little more time in Judge Alex’s handcuffs to reflect on the matter.
He keeps me awake at night.
Seriously, I think I am in love. I know he wears a wedding ring, but I figure that with all the TV commercials asking people to pack up their gold in brown envelopes and send it to places like “We at the mail office steal your gold marked GOLD ENCLOSED”, he might be tempted to ditch it.
Then he would be free. For me. For all I know, he is married to a stunner, but then so was Tiger Woods, and that didn’t stop him trying to land a few more holes.
I confess to being addicted to the US celebrity judge programmes. In the UK, it started with Judge Judy, who hasn’t changed her hairstyle in a decade, and is terrifying in a head teacher kind of way.
I don’t want to sleep with her, which helps me concentrate on the legal aspects of the programmes, and I now feel that I could sit as a High Court judge in the US courts and act just as efficiently as she does.
I can’t help noticing, though, that the people in her courtroom are fatter than the ones on any other, and that if Judge Judy just sent them all off to Weight Watchers for a couple of weeks, they might drop a few pounds and resolve their differences more calmly.
I like People’s Court, with Judge Milian, who is, like Judge Judy, seemingly right about everything, but I just want to know who her dentist is. She really does have the best teeth of any of the judges, and she also has Harvey Levin, who stands outside the courtroom, chatting to locals about what they think should happen inside.
Poor Harvey. I specially feel for him on days when it is raining and no one gives him an umbrella. The general opinion of the hapless bunch that surrounds him is “String ‘em up”, irrespective of the crime, and when Harvey says “Goin’ back inside the courtroom,” there is more than a hint of “Thank the Lord for that, get me away from these lunatics asap” about him. He is the Ryan Seacrest of the legal world: central to the action, but always a Cowell away from true glory.
But back to my beautiful Alex, ex-Florida Court circuit judge (the only time I have ever been tempted by the idea of enrolling for "circuit training", to be honest), who I would happily disrobe in less time than it would take you to say “Guilty m’lud.” He is clever, funny, he loves the narrative of the absurd stories that unfold before him, and he always manages to get to the sexual nitty-gritty in which the other judges show relatively little interest.
So, let’s say you stole a vase from your ex-boyfriend’s mother’s house. Within seconds, Judge Alex would have managed to extract from you exactly how many times mom and pop had had sex before they bought the vase (and in which positions), where said vase was on the dresser the last time they had sex before it was stolen, and even whether the vase was used for any improper purposes before it took up residence in the new (illegal) home.
If I were to choose anyone to sit down and watch a porn movie with, it would be Judge Alex. Fully robed. Briefly. Then I would want him to handcuff me, put me behind bars and make me beg on all fours . . . Well, you get the picture. And if you don't, apparently it's illegal for me to text it to you.
A man is never more sexy than when he is at work; and a clever, witty man, who holds power, and who is articulate, who stands on the moral high ground, yet with just a hint of smut on his shoe, is always going to top my list.
Forget Judge Judy, I am saving up my Air Miles just to steal a vase in Miami, purely so that I can be on the receiving end of one of Judge Alex's admonishments. I’m not looking for life imprisonment, just a slap on the . . . Well, you get my drift.
We don’t have cameras in courts in the UK, and it is yet another reason I love being in the US. Judge Alex is my lunch hour, and as I can barely eat with excitement when watching him at work, he is proving very good for my weight loss, too.
I’m keeping an eye on that third finger, left hand, just in case he becomes available. But while that gold stays in place, lock up your valuables; I am a woman on a mission.
The only flaw to my reasoning will be when I end up in Judge Judy’s courtroom, after Judge Alex takes out a restraining order on me.
This week, however, I have been facing a dilemma as to what I do about my future: Judge Alex Ferrer every lunchtime, all-day marathons of Law and Order, and, at night, the hilarious and sassy Chelsea Handler on the telly.
Sunrise and sunset over LA, beside the pool of my Beverly Hills apartment’s huge rooftop terrace. The staff at my favourite local restaurant, Il Pastaio, and most-loved hotel, the Beverly Wilshire.
The almost endless sunshine. Martinique tea at the American Tea Room. The Container Store at Century City. The endless floor to floor joy of Bed, Bath and Beyond – best store and service of any in the world.
And Judge Alex. Every day. Yes, I know. I mentioned him. But oh, Judge Alex. Tall. Dark. Handsome. Smart. Hilarious. Way and above the best and most compelling of all the TV judges - and happily married with kids, alas, but hey ho, a girl can dream.
And will. Ex-cop, attorney, and now in robes. Uniform, authority, handcuffs. Call me old-fashioned, but 6,000 miles away from home, a daily dose of the awe-inspiring judge on TV more than makes up for several decades’ worth of British guys offering you half a Stella before throwing up their previous 18 over your new dress.
Every time I come back to the UK, I add to the list of what I miss about LA. Unfortunately, each time I return, it is usually for a funeral or memorial service, and although I haven’t been left anything in anyone’s will, some of my dear departed friends are doubtless laughing in their graves at the number of Air Miles I am acquiring on their behalf, even if those miles might land me in jail (bad) or handcuffs (less bad).
It’s been a strange week. I missed so much about LA, I put my UK house on the market and thought I would make LA my main base. Then I thought about my wonderful mum and brother, the friends I have spent decades making, and took it off again.
As I was brought back in a wheelchair, after the back problem I wrote about last week, it’s been a time of reflection. In the UK, I was told that the drugs I had been given in the US were drugs given to kidney transplant patients (at the last count, I still had two – of my own). My doctor substituted the five lots of medication for a stint of something else, but I am reluctant to be on medication for that long.
Apologies for sounding melodramatic (you can take the girl out of LA . . . ), but is it a metaphorical weight I am carrying, as well as the very real one? One night, I found myself on the driveway of my Cardiff home, crying as I tried to sort the bin bags, because they hadn’t been taken the previous week (wrong colour, wrong plastic, wrong handle position – you know what a bloody nightmare putting out your bins in the UK is these days) and wondering: Where do I really want to be?
I went to Los Angeles to change my working life, and the man who became my friend and mentor, Blake Snyder, died. I love more and more about the city and, back in Cardiff, I have no real social life.
As an older single woman, never married, never co-habited, no kids, not a lesbian, I don’t get asked anywhere. In LA, I meet gay, straight, couples, singles, all the time, all from different professions, every day.
Age never feels an issue; moving on in my professional life feels like a real possibility and very unlike what seems to be the position in the UK, where everyone appears to be running very hard – just to stand still.
Is this a woman thing? An everyday thing? A worldwide recession thing? I just know that having been in America rather than Europe for the first time in my life, I am re-assessing everything, in ways I never believed possible.
The US is an amazing country, with a variety of people, cultures and, in LA, which is pretty much all I know, a heady, inspiring experience. I also know that it can be short-lived. But then so has everywhere I have ever lived.
I want it all - at the time. I love it all - at the time. Then I want something different. Maybe, what I have discovered, in LA, is that I was right all along: I was born a writer who thrives on change.
I just may need a little more time in Judge Alex’s handcuffs to reflect on the matter.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Wheel Me Up, Scotty 3/15/10
There are many things I fantasised about doing in the heady, showbiz city that is LA, but being driven around LAX airport in a wheelchair wasn’t one of them.
In fact, until this week, I had never even touched a wheelchair, much less sat in one, and my admiration increased a thousand-fold for people who have to view the world from that level and constantly be subjected to the bullying of the mobile chaos around them, not to mention being at the mercy of the pusher with delusions of Formula One.
The problem started the week before last when I woke one morning, completely unable to move. I had made a joke about falling off my Jimmy Choos in the excitement of my finally having met the actor Matthew Rhys, but it certainly hadn’t been enough to incapacitate me to the degree of pain I found myself in two days later.
It was so bad, I couldn’t even reach out to my bedside table to my phone and, living alone, there was no one I could call even to ask for a cup of tea.
This is how I was going to die, I thought. It was The End. At just 51, and having been blessed with a relatively healthy life (apart from a bout of glandular fever when I was seven, I can count my bedridden illnesses on one hand), I was now going to rot to death.
No food, no water, and, worse, no TV, because the remote was on the chest of drawers several miles away from where I was lying. If I could have passed on with CSI comforting me during my final hours, it would have been something, but dying to the accompaniment only of your own screams isn’t much fun, I can tell you.
It took me four hours to roll, inch by inch out of bed, onto the floor, and over to the kettle in the kitchen, by which time I had lost roughly three stone in the effort.
Then I remembered my black, Centurion American Express card, the all-singing, all-dancing bit of titanium I wrote about some months back, trying to decide whether it was worth paying the increased annual fee of £1800 (up from £650) for all the benefits that I could never see myself either wanting or needing - three million points for a pink Pringle sweater; etiquette evenings, where you learned how to hold a fork, that kind of thing.
D Day was imminent, and as their concierge service had still not provided me with anything that I had not been able to get myself for considerably less money, I was pretty sure I would not be renewing.
But I remembered the travel insurance, allegedly one of the most comprehensive in the world. I phoned them (another eight miles to my handbag, in which the card resided); they had AXA, their delightful, impressive insurance people on the phone within three minutes, and I was offered a house call (in the UK, I’d have to book one now if I wanted to have a doctor’s home visit in 2014). I was also told that all my travel arrangements (I was due to fly back to the UK) would be taken care of, if the worst came to the worst.
In the end, I had to take a trip to a local clinic, all paid for upfront by AXA and Medical Express. I was seen instantly, given an injection for the pain, and a couple of bottles of painkillers and muscle relaxants.
Now, the only thing I know about prescription painkillers in the US is that you die not long after taking them.
It’s the reason I was once very reluctant to have a general anaesthetic, because everyone who has one on Casualty or Holby City never wakes up. Having been reassured by the pharmacist that I was not en route to becoming the next Michael Jackson, I went home to recuperate.
And got worse.
A week later, and still rolling to the kettle, I had a proper home visit, and this time was told I would have to be treated more “aggressively”. And I mean aggressively. Methylprednisolone, Motrin, Norco, Soma, Diazepam – or, for those of you not in the know, the latter four are Ibuoprofen, Hydrocodone, Carisoprodol, Valium. Any clearer? No, me neither.
All I can tell you is that I had no pain – the reason being that I was unconscious. Out cold. I missed the whole of the first half of the Ireland/Wales rugby match on the telly, the second half of the Scotland/England game, and eventually came to in about 1971, thinking I was on the Lions tour.
The doctor insisted I be upgraded to a Business Class on my flight home, which would ensure me of a bed in which to relax, and the insurance came through with everything they had promised, including ground transportation and a wheelchair at both airports.
The wheelchair rides were more terrifying than the drugs had been. Blimey, those things can whizz along. I needed another bottle of Valium, just to get me over the trauma of the rides.
I’ll need another bottle when that Amex bill comes through, too, asking me for the £1800 annual fee.
But even with doctors’ fees and medication, I’m still not sure the titanium card has earned its full quota (I’m also not sure that the pills they provided did much more than a pint of Stella and a couple of aspirin would have done).
When the drugs finish me off (which I have no doubt they will do), maybe Amex will make up the deficit in a nice floral arrangement for my funeral. That may be their only option, as there isn’t a stonemason in the world who could find enough room on my stone for the names of those damned drugs.
But at least I can now say that I have experienced the US healthcare system, and have joined the long list of Hollywood celebrities on prescription painkillers.
It’s my biggest leap up the showbiz ladder so far.
In fact, until this week, I had never even touched a wheelchair, much less sat in one, and my admiration increased a thousand-fold for people who have to view the world from that level and constantly be subjected to the bullying of the mobile chaos around them, not to mention being at the mercy of the pusher with delusions of Formula One.
The problem started the week before last when I woke one morning, completely unable to move. I had made a joke about falling off my Jimmy Choos in the excitement of my finally having met the actor Matthew Rhys, but it certainly hadn’t been enough to incapacitate me to the degree of pain I found myself in two days later.
It was so bad, I couldn’t even reach out to my bedside table to my phone and, living alone, there was no one I could call even to ask for a cup of tea.
This is how I was going to die, I thought. It was The End. At just 51, and having been blessed with a relatively healthy life (apart from a bout of glandular fever when I was seven, I can count my bedridden illnesses on one hand), I was now going to rot to death.
No food, no water, and, worse, no TV, because the remote was on the chest of drawers several miles away from where I was lying. If I could have passed on with CSI comforting me during my final hours, it would have been something, but dying to the accompaniment only of your own screams isn’t much fun, I can tell you.
It took me four hours to roll, inch by inch out of bed, onto the floor, and over to the kettle in the kitchen, by which time I had lost roughly three stone in the effort.
Then I remembered my black, Centurion American Express card, the all-singing, all-dancing bit of titanium I wrote about some months back, trying to decide whether it was worth paying the increased annual fee of £1800 (up from £650) for all the benefits that I could never see myself either wanting or needing - three million points for a pink Pringle sweater; etiquette evenings, where you learned how to hold a fork, that kind of thing.
D Day was imminent, and as their concierge service had still not provided me with anything that I had not been able to get myself for considerably less money, I was pretty sure I would not be renewing.
But I remembered the travel insurance, allegedly one of the most comprehensive in the world. I phoned them (another eight miles to my handbag, in which the card resided); they had AXA, their delightful, impressive insurance people on the phone within three minutes, and I was offered a house call (in the UK, I’d have to book one now if I wanted to have a doctor’s home visit in 2014). I was also told that all my travel arrangements (I was due to fly back to the UK) would be taken care of, if the worst came to the worst.
In the end, I had to take a trip to a local clinic, all paid for upfront by AXA and Medical Express. I was seen instantly, given an injection for the pain, and a couple of bottles of painkillers and muscle relaxants.
Now, the only thing I know about prescription painkillers in the US is that you die not long after taking them.
It’s the reason I was once very reluctant to have a general anaesthetic, because everyone who has one on Casualty or Holby City never wakes up. Having been reassured by the pharmacist that I was not en route to becoming the next Michael Jackson, I went home to recuperate.
And got worse.
A week later, and still rolling to the kettle, I had a proper home visit, and this time was told I would have to be treated more “aggressively”. And I mean aggressively. Methylprednisolone, Motrin, Norco, Soma, Diazepam – or, for those of you not in the know, the latter four are Ibuoprofen, Hydrocodone, Carisoprodol, Valium. Any clearer? No, me neither.
All I can tell you is that I had no pain – the reason being that I was unconscious. Out cold. I missed the whole of the first half of the Ireland/Wales rugby match on the telly, the second half of the Scotland/England game, and eventually came to in about 1971, thinking I was on the Lions tour.
The doctor insisted I be upgraded to a Business Class on my flight home, which would ensure me of a bed in which to relax, and the insurance came through with everything they had promised, including ground transportation and a wheelchair at both airports.
The wheelchair rides were more terrifying than the drugs had been. Blimey, those things can whizz along. I needed another bottle of Valium, just to get me over the trauma of the rides.
I’ll need another bottle when that Amex bill comes through, too, asking me for the £1800 annual fee.
But even with doctors’ fees and medication, I’m still not sure the titanium card has earned its full quota (I’m also not sure that the pills they provided did much more than a pint of Stella and a couple of aspirin would have done).
When the drugs finish me off (which I have no doubt they will do), maybe Amex will make up the deficit in a nice floral arrangement for my funeral. That may be their only option, as there isn’t a stonemason in the world who could find enough room on my stone for the names of those damned drugs.
But at least I can now say that I have experienced the US healthcare system, and have joined the long list of Hollywood celebrities on prescription painkillers.
It’s my biggest leap up the showbiz ladder so far.
Monday, March 8, 2010
Time To Hit The Grecian, George 3/8/10
Please tell me he’s done it for a part.
Please tell me that George Clooney’s badly styled, greying locks at the Oscars, were not the result of a decision on the actor’s part to grow old gracefully.
Please tell me that it wasn’t George at all, but an aging cousin drafted in as a body double because the real George was at home with flu.
Anything. Please tell me anything other than the inconceivable truth that George Clooney has gone totally grey.
Being the only Brit in LA not to have received an invite to Elton John’s post-Oscar bash, I watched the awards on the TV at my favourite restaurant, the Grill on the Alley, in Beverly Hills.
Far from feeling left out of the party, I was grateful to have been saved the pain of seeing Katie Price turn up as the Big Purple One from the Quality Street collection. According to reports, she hadn’t been invited to Elton’s, either, but managed to blag a ticket.
In the build-up to the big day, I saw Katie’s name appear on one invitation list as “actress” which, given that her whole life is a performance, I suppose that is pretty much what she is. Arriving at LAX with an army of minders and sunglasses the size of shields, I am now convinced the woman is suffering from an acute case of Adult Attention Deficit Disorder.
Katie the “actress” hadn’t arrived by the time I left the pre-Oscars pampering night at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, but real celebrities gathered on the pool terrace to sample the free massages, make-up and Moet and Chandon.
It was one of hundreds of events in a week that saw the city turn into an Oscar theme park. Previous Oscar winners were wheeled out on TV to talk about their bygone days of glory, and previous winners of Best Picture dominated the film channels. I re-watched The Godfather. Twice. And although I still haven’t summoned up the emotional energy to watch The Hurt Locker, or the time to watch Avatar, I felt that I knew them backwards as a result of the thousands of clips shown throughout the week.
I began the night in the Beverly Wilshire, which I have come to regard as my local. British PR supremo Neil Reading was there, and also Michelle Collins, looking stunning, and obviously fully recovered from her stint playing Cindy Beale in EastEnders. Any woman who survived (well, until her death) marriage to Ian deserves high praise in my book.
I love this hotel, and have done ever since Warner Brothers put me up there at a pre-Oscars bash over 20 years ago. Alex, the current manager of the Boulevard Bar and restaurant is an absolute sweetheart, brilliant at his job, and a million times better than his predecessor, who would have been more at home running Guantanemo Bay. For all I know, that’s where he’s been transferred. If he has, I know he’ll be very at home there.
The staff are the best in the business. I love the way Pepe calls me “My lady”, doubtless a translation he once picked up from a phrase book, and it has the desired effect of making every woman feel very special.
It’s a great bar if you are a woman eating or drinking alone, because you always meet people. On Sunday I hooked up with some Canadians, who were in town to watch the ice hockey. After the Olympics, Canadian ice hockey enthusiasts are very smug, following their team’s gold medal. Still, Canadians don’t have much to celebrate very often, so no one minds very much.
The hotel didn’t have the volume on, so I watched the Red Carpet (which is almost as big as the Oscars themselves) with subtitles. This made everything pretty incomprehensible, with phrases like “Globe All Odd” (global audience) confusing things somewhat.
And apparently, Sandra Bullock was the star of a film called “The Blend Side”, presumably a movie about getting to grips with your Kenwood Chef.
You could spot the Brits in the crowd because they were the only ones with yellow teeth; you could spot them even more easily later on, because they were the only ones not carrying any statuettes.
Over at the Grill, the sound was turned up for the event, and I sat through what has to be the dullest Oscars in living memory. If you thought Jonathan Ross’s script at the Baftas was leaden, the one spouted by Oscars co-hosts Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin felt like treading mercury.
It’s a tough gig, but just didn’t work with two presenters and, more to the point, two presenters normally dependent on better writers than the ones who produced this tosh.
Still, it was good to be in town to savour the atmosphere, and at least George made quite a few people’s nights, by rewarding their long wait with signing autographs.
Lovely man, terrific actor.
And the Grecian 2000’s in the post, George.
Please tell me that George Clooney’s badly styled, greying locks at the Oscars, were not the result of a decision on the actor’s part to grow old gracefully.
Please tell me that it wasn’t George at all, but an aging cousin drafted in as a body double because the real George was at home with flu.
Anything. Please tell me anything other than the inconceivable truth that George Clooney has gone totally grey.
Being the only Brit in LA not to have received an invite to Elton John’s post-Oscar bash, I watched the awards on the TV at my favourite restaurant, the Grill on the Alley, in Beverly Hills.
Far from feeling left out of the party, I was grateful to have been saved the pain of seeing Katie Price turn up as the Big Purple One from the Quality Street collection. According to reports, she hadn’t been invited to Elton’s, either, but managed to blag a ticket.
In the build-up to the big day, I saw Katie’s name appear on one invitation list as “actress” which, given that her whole life is a performance, I suppose that is pretty much what she is. Arriving at LAX with an army of minders and sunglasses the size of shields, I am now convinced the woman is suffering from an acute case of Adult Attention Deficit Disorder.
Katie the “actress” hadn’t arrived by the time I left the pre-Oscars pampering night at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, but real celebrities gathered on the pool terrace to sample the free massages, make-up and Moet and Chandon.
It was one of hundreds of events in a week that saw the city turn into an Oscar theme park. Previous Oscar winners were wheeled out on TV to talk about their bygone days of glory, and previous winners of Best Picture dominated the film channels. I re-watched The Godfather. Twice. And although I still haven’t summoned up the emotional energy to watch The Hurt Locker, or the time to watch Avatar, I felt that I knew them backwards as a result of the thousands of clips shown throughout the week.
I began the night in the Beverly Wilshire, which I have come to regard as my local. British PR supremo Neil Reading was there, and also Michelle Collins, looking stunning, and obviously fully recovered from her stint playing Cindy Beale in EastEnders. Any woman who survived (well, until her death) marriage to Ian deserves high praise in my book.
I love this hotel, and have done ever since Warner Brothers put me up there at a pre-Oscars bash over 20 years ago. Alex, the current manager of the Boulevard Bar and restaurant is an absolute sweetheart, brilliant at his job, and a million times better than his predecessor, who would have been more at home running Guantanemo Bay. For all I know, that’s where he’s been transferred. If he has, I know he’ll be very at home there.
The staff are the best in the business. I love the way Pepe calls me “My lady”, doubtless a translation he once picked up from a phrase book, and it has the desired effect of making every woman feel very special.
It’s a great bar if you are a woman eating or drinking alone, because you always meet people. On Sunday I hooked up with some Canadians, who were in town to watch the ice hockey. After the Olympics, Canadian ice hockey enthusiasts are very smug, following their team’s gold medal. Still, Canadians don’t have much to celebrate very often, so no one minds very much.
The hotel didn’t have the volume on, so I watched the Red Carpet (which is almost as big as the Oscars themselves) with subtitles. This made everything pretty incomprehensible, with phrases like “Globe All Odd” (global audience) confusing things somewhat.
And apparently, Sandra Bullock was the star of a film called “The Blend Side”, presumably a movie about getting to grips with your Kenwood Chef.
You could spot the Brits in the crowd because they were the only ones with yellow teeth; you could spot them even more easily later on, because they were the only ones not carrying any statuettes.
Over at the Grill, the sound was turned up for the event, and I sat through what has to be the dullest Oscars in living memory. If you thought Jonathan Ross’s script at the Baftas was leaden, the one spouted by Oscars co-hosts Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin felt like treading mercury.
It’s a tough gig, but just didn’t work with two presenters and, more to the point, two presenters normally dependent on better writers than the ones who produced this tosh.
Still, it was good to be in town to savour the atmosphere, and at least George made quite a few people’s nights, by rewarding their long wait with signing autographs.
Lovely man, terrific actor.
And the Grecian 2000’s in the post, George.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Salieri vs Mozart 2/28/10
Reader, I met him.
Finally, after months – no, years – of suspecting that Matthew Rhys was a hologram that would never materialise in my life, I got to meet him. And not just once, but twice.
The first time was at the King’s Head in Santa Monica on Friday, where all the Welsh gathered to watch our national side against France in the Six Nations rugby.
The second time was on Saturday, where even more Welsh were gathered in West Hollywood, to celebrate St David’s Day.
And yes, he is every bit as handsome, charming, funny and delightful as everyone had led me to believe. If I were ten years younger . . . (Oh, come on, this is the Cougar capital of the world).
I didn’t think I was going to make the party, as I fell off my shoes on Friday and have been in agony with a bad back as a result. Weird as it sounds, falling off my Jimmy Choos is something I regularly do. Unlike Victoria Beckham, who negotiates five-inch heels with seeming ease and grace, I have always been someone who, in high heels, bears a closer resemblance to the leaning tower of Pisa – a leaning tower of Pisa trying not to spill a pint of lager, to boot.
Sometime between Wales almost getting back into the game and subsequently losing, I slipped and did my back in. It was probably the excitement of meeting Matthew that sent me flying, but the result was that I spent the whole of Saturday laid up, watching wall to wall Law and Order, in the hope that I would be well enough for the party.
It was by far the best night I have had here so far. I’d been a bit emotional on Friday, as I always am when there is rugby happening in Cardiff and all my friends keep texting me to tell me what a great time they are having. But on Saturday, it was a home from home at the Palihouse Hotel.
Paul McKenna, who has lived in LA for two years, was there. Then Stephen Fry turned up, with an enormous leek in his jacket. I also met Luke Macfarlane, who plays Scotty in Brothers and Sisters, along with Dave Annable, who plays Justin. Lovely, lovely men, both incredibly funny, delightful company, and they each told me what a joy Matthew is to work with.
Many Brits are doing very well in LA, and every week it seems as if there are more of them here. But here’s the interesting thing: the ones who are doing really well can’t do enough to help their countrymen; the mediocrities can’t do enough to hold newcomers back.
I call it the Salieri Complex. Lacking the gifts they recognise all too fully in others, their lives here operate in a circus of paranoia and insecurity.
Their ears are constantly twitching for news of a meeting with X, Y or Z, that they have been trying for years to accomplish, without success; they clock up failures as “networking”, and harbour resentments at others’ successes by bad-mouthing them behind their backs. Just like at home, really – only worse.
In the working environment, it is very much a sheep and goats mentality. The real successes – Simon Cowell, Paul McKenna, Matthew Rhys, Ioan Gruffydd, Hugh Laurie, Catherine Zeta Jones (I could go on) – have nothing to prove. They have all achieved success through incredibly hard work, together with a fair degree of talent, and made their respective marks in the toughest of cities. And what they also have, that the Salieris don’t quite get, is individuality.
Nothing succeeds here more than being different. We Brits are instantly attractive because of our accents – they really, really love our accents and think we are all related to the Queen; we also have a quick-wittedness that the Americans really do understand (forget what they say about them not understanding irony – it simply isn’t true), but can’t quite match in terms of speed.
For every funny thing you say, you have to allow for a two second delay while the Americans wait for the dime to drop. Then, they stare in open-mouthed wonder at the brilliance of your delivery and proceed to tell all their friends that you are the funniest person in the world.
And then there is that something that just sets one person apart - the X Factor. You've either got it or you haven't. Mozart. Salieri.
The influx of Brits has been huge the past few weeks, as we are in the middle of “pilot season” here, and actors come looking for that one big series that might make their name.
But for every Matthew or Hugh, there are dozens of non-starters, and most will return to the UK with more of the shattered dreams that are so much part of the backdrop in this extraordinary, bizarre place.
The Mozarts will rise to the top; they always do. They have the talent, but also the drive, enthusiasm, passion and positivity.
The Salieris might reckon it is all down to luck; but as Samuel Goldwyn said: “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”
The Salieris of this world would do well to remember that.
Finally, after months – no, years – of suspecting that Matthew Rhys was a hologram that would never materialise in my life, I got to meet him. And not just once, but twice.
The first time was at the King’s Head in Santa Monica on Friday, where all the Welsh gathered to watch our national side against France in the Six Nations rugby.
The second time was on Saturday, where even more Welsh were gathered in West Hollywood, to celebrate St David’s Day.
And yes, he is every bit as handsome, charming, funny and delightful as everyone had led me to believe. If I were ten years younger . . . (Oh, come on, this is the Cougar capital of the world).
I didn’t think I was going to make the party, as I fell off my shoes on Friday and have been in agony with a bad back as a result. Weird as it sounds, falling off my Jimmy Choos is something I regularly do. Unlike Victoria Beckham, who negotiates five-inch heels with seeming ease and grace, I have always been someone who, in high heels, bears a closer resemblance to the leaning tower of Pisa – a leaning tower of Pisa trying not to spill a pint of lager, to boot.
Sometime between Wales almost getting back into the game and subsequently losing, I slipped and did my back in. It was probably the excitement of meeting Matthew that sent me flying, but the result was that I spent the whole of Saturday laid up, watching wall to wall Law and Order, in the hope that I would be well enough for the party.
It was by far the best night I have had here so far. I’d been a bit emotional on Friday, as I always am when there is rugby happening in Cardiff and all my friends keep texting me to tell me what a great time they are having. But on Saturday, it was a home from home at the Palihouse Hotel.
Paul McKenna, who has lived in LA for two years, was there. Then Stephen Fry turned up, with an enormous leek in his jacket. I also met Luke Macfarlane, who plays Scotty in Brothers and Sisters, along with Dave Annable, who plays Justin. Lovely, lovely men, both incredibly funny, delightful company, and they each told me what a joy Matthew is to work with.
Many Brits are doing very well in LA, and every week it seems as if there are more of them here. But here’s the interesting thing: the ones who are doing really well can’t do enough to help their countrymen; the mediocrities can’t do enough to hold newcomers back.
I call it the Salieri Complex. Lacking the gifts they recognise all too fully in others, their lives here operate in a circus of paranoia and insecurity.
Their ears are constantly twitching for news of a meeting with X, Y or Z, that they have been trying for years to accomplish, without success; they clock up failures as “networking”, and harbour resentments at others’ successes by bad-mouthing them behind their backs. Just like at home, really – only worse.
In the working environment, it is very much a sheep and goats mentality. The real successes – Simon Cowell, Paul McKenna, Matthew Rhys, Ioan Gruffydd, Hugh Laurie, Catherine Zeta Jones (I could go on) – have nothing to prove. They have all achieved success through incredibly hard work, together with a fair degree of talent, and made their respective marks in the toughest of cities. And what they also have, that the Salieris don’t quite get, is individuality.
Nothing succeeds here more than being different. We Brits are instantly attractive because of our accents – they really, really love our accents and think we are all related to the Queen; we also have a quick-wittedness that the Americans really do understand (forget what they say about them not understanding irony – it simply isn’t true), but can’t quite match in terms of speed.
For every funny thing you say, you have to allow for a two second delay while the Americans wait for the dime to drop. Then, they stare in open-mouthed wonder at the brilliance of your delivery and proceed to tell all their friends that you are the funniest person in the world.
And then there is that something that just sets one person apart - the X Factor. You've either got it or you haven't. Mozart. Salieri.
The influx of Brits has been huge the past few weeks, as we are in the middle of “pilot season” here, and actors come looking for that one big series that might make their name.
But for every Matthew or Hugh, there are dozens of non-starters, and most will return to the UK with more of the shattered dreams that are so much part of the backdrop in this extraordinary, bizarre place.
The Mozarts will rise to the top; they always do. They have the talent, but also the drive, enthusiasm, passion and positivity.
The Salieris might reckon it is all down to luck; but as Samuel Goldwyn said: “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”
The Salieris of this world would do well to remember that.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
And The Award For Bullshit Goes to . . . 2/23/10
Before I visited LA in November 2008 and subsequently moved here in April last year, I had visited the city just once, over 20 years ago.
A national newspaper, which subsequently went bust (not, I hasten to add, as a result of my expenses), sent me there to cover a pre-Oscars party, and I was more excited than I had ever been about covering any other story in my early career.
Certainly a great deal more excited than when the London Evening Standard dispatched me to Hampstead to dress up for a human chess game and made a little girl cry when she was made to hand over her pawn outfit to me.
And certainly more excited than when I had my hair bleached white blonde and ended up looking like Myra Hindley’s less attractive sister.
I said yes to everything in those days. New to London and living off chicken drumsticks stolen from functions I gate-crashed and smuggled into my handbag, I was desperate for work.
I once sobbed to my dear friend, the late Keith Waterhouse, that I really didn’t want to do some godawful piece I had been commissioned to write about dogs.
“How much are they paying you?” he asked. “£200,” I wailed.
He whipped out his cheque book: “Then I will pay you £200 NOT to write the article!”
The uncashed cheque still sits in my drawer, a salutary reminder not to say yes to things you hate.
The newspaper put me up in Burbank’s Holiday Inn, a hotel without a hairdryer and miles from Hollywood, where the party was to take place.
When Warner Brothers heard that a member of the press was being treated in this way, they moved me to a suite at the five-star Beverly Wilshire at the bottom of Rodeo Drive, and there I stayed for four days, a reluctant evictee every afternoon at 4pm, when management begged me to let the cleaners in.
I did some interviews from the red carpet, including one with Joel Grey, who in 1972 had won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his portrayal of the Emcee in Cabaret.
At the do itself, I sat next to Tom Hulce, who had played Mozart in the Oscar-winning Amadeus, but in 1985 lost out in the Best Actor category to F. Murray Abraham, who played the musician’s rival, Salieri.
I was new to London, new to Fleet Street, new to Hollywood, and I loved it.
As the city prepares for the 82nd Academy Awards on March 7th, I am reminded more than ever of the industry that is the heart of this place.
Will it be Sandra Bullock or Meryl Street for Best Actress? Will Katherine Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker triumph over ex-husband James Cameron’s Avatar, and will Bigelow become the first woman ever to win Best Director? Will co-hosts Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin pull it off? What will everyone be wearing?
At the moment, there is talk of little else, and at the pre-Oscars nominees’ lunch at the Beverly Hilton last week, everyone put on a smiling face while clearly spitting blood about their rivals.
The Bullock/Streep rivalry is barely out of the news, with Bullock joking about tripping up her rival if she beats her to the podium. Streep is maintaining a dignified silence.
Bullock did not reveal what she will be wearing on the big night, unlike Victoria Beckham who, we have learned, will be wearing a sophisticated flowing gown of her own creation. Our own Piers Morgan and Amanda Holden will also be there, reporting from the red carpet.
So far, I have just one invitation to a pre-Oscars party. It’s from my old friends, the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, who on Wednesday are holding a poolside event of “treatments, consultations and amazing gifts” from their own spa and associated companies, “to get you ready for the red carpet”.
Naturally, I will be there, among the Moet and Chandon and Sprinkles Cupcakes that the invitation has promised, and although I am not going to the actual ceremony, I already feel part of what is undoubtedly Hollywood’s biggest event of the year.
It’s hard not to be caught up in it, but in the big build-up it’s also easy to forget what I have so far learned about the movie industry in my brief time here.
It’s tough. Incredibly tough. For actors, producers, directors, writers. Especially writers. It’s cut-throat. Ruthless. It’s an industry in which bullshit invariably triumphs over talent.
The movie-making process is a long and laborious one, a money-making machine that chews people up, spits them out, and moves onto the next course without so much as a backward, guilty glance.
But it’s still Hollywood.
And hey, as bullshit goes, it’s still the best bullshit in the world.
A national newspaper, which subsequently went bust (not, I hasten to add, as a result of my expenses), sent me there to cover a pre-Oscars party, and I was more excited than I had ever been about covering any other story in my early career.
Certainly a great deal more excited than when the London Evening Standard dispatched me to Hampstead to dress up for a human chess game and made a little girl cry when she was made to hand over her pawn outfit to me.
And certainly more excited than when I had my hair bleached white blonde and ended up looking like Myra Hindley’s less attractive sister.
I said yes to everything in those days. New to London and living off chicken drumsticks stolen from functions I gate-crashed and smuggled into my handbag, I was desperate for work.
I once sobbed to my dear friend, the late Keith Waterhouse, that I really didn’t want to do some godawful piece I had been commissioned to write about dogs.
“How much are they paying you?” he asked. “£200,” I wailed.
He whipped out his cheque book: “Then I will pay you £200 NOT to write the article!”
The uncashed cheque still sits in my drawer, a salutary reminder not to say yes to things you hate.
The newspaper put me up in Burbank’s Holiday Inn, a hotel without a hairdryer and miles from Hollywood, where the party was to take place.
When Warner Brothers heard that a member of the press was being treated in this way, they moved me to a suite at the five-star Beverly Wilshire at the bottom of Rodeo Drive, and there I stayed for four days, a reluctant evictee every afternoon at 4pm, when management begged me to let the cleaners in.
I did some interviews from the red carpet, including one with Joel Grey, who in 1972 had won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his portrayal of the Emcee in Cabaret.
At the do itself, I sat next to Tom Hulce, who had played Mozart in the Oscar-winning Amadeus, but in 1985 lost out in the Best Actor category to F. Murray Abraham, who played the musician’s rival, Salieri.
I was new to London, new to Fleet Street, new to Hollywood, and I loved it.
As the city prepares for the 82nd Academy Awards on March 7th, I am reminded more than ever of the industry that is the heart of this place.
Will it be Sandra Bullock or Meryl Street for Best Actress? Will Katherine Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker triumph over ex-husband James Cameron’s Avatar, and will Bigelow become the first woman ever to win Best Director? Will co-hosts Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin pull it off? What will everyone be wearing?
At the moment, there is talk of little else, and at the pre-Oscars nominees’ lunch at the Beverly Hilton last week, everyone put on a smiling face while clearly spitting blood about their rivals.
The Bullock/Streep rivalry is barely out of the news, with Bullock joking about tripping up her rival if she beats her to the podium. Streep is maintaining a dignified silence.
Bullock did not reveal what she will be wearing on the big night, unlike Victoria Beckham who, we have learned, will be wearing a sophisticated flowing gown of her own creation. Our own Piers Morgan and Amanda Holden will also be there, reporting from the red carpet.
So far, I have just one invitation to a pre-Oscars party. It’s from my old friends, the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, who on Wednesday are holding a poolside event of “treatments, consultations and amazing gifts” from their own spa and associated companies, “to get you ready for the red carpet”.
Naturally, I will be there, among the Moet and Chandon and Sprinkles Cupcakes that the invitation has promised, and although I am not going to the actual ceremony, I already feel part of what is undoubtedly Hollywood’s biggest event of the year.
It’s hard not to be caught up in it, but in the big build-up it’s also easy to forget what I have so far learned about the movie industry in my brief time here.
It’s tough. Incredibly tough. For actors, producers, directors, writers. Especially writers. It’s cut-throat. Ruthless. It’s an industry in which bullshit invariably triumphs over talent.
The movie-making process is a long and laborious one, a money-making machine that chews people up, spits them out, and moves onto the next course without so much as a backward, guilty glance.
But it’s still Hollywood.
And hey, as bullshit goes, it’s still the best bullshit in the world.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
The Only White One On The Bus 2/20/10
There has never been a moment in my life when I thought that “the only white person on the bus” would be a sentence in my repertoire.
But returning from Santa Monica late on Friday night, I really was the only white person on the bus.
Blacks, Hispanics, Chinese, Japanese, and a few aliens that looked as if they had been out on day release – I felt as if I was travelling on the United Nations tour bus.
Yes, I have still resisted getting a car, not least because the buses here are incredibly cheap, efficient, and run all night.
The real price you pay is that you sometimes feel as if you have inadvertently wandered onto the set of Fraggle Rock, albeit a Fraggle Rock in which, my nervous friends with cars inform me, half the residents are probably armed.
Take Friday. I was off to the coast to meet a friend in the bar at the top of the Huntley Hotel and got on a number 4 bus that goes from outside the Hilton Hotel near my apartment.
You have to choose who you sit next to very carefully on these buses, especially when going to Santa Monica, which is a place that attracts people stuck in 1963.
By “stuck”, I mean that they have failed to relinquish their hippy lifestyle, still seem stoned out of their minds, and can’t remember what a bar of soap looks like.
I chose to sit next to a lady at the front, who appeared to be travelling with the contents of her house, complete with cat. She was the best option. The seat was also the furthest I could get from the screaming woman further up the aisle.
Accompanied by two children, she was in the middle of informing the entire bus that the boy and girl were twins, the girl was autistic, the government were doing nothing to help her, she didn’t take drugs, she didn’t drink, her husband had walked out because he couldn’t handle a special needs child, and she had been forced to get off the previous bus because people were being mean to her. You don't say.
It was way more information than I needed. It was certainly way more information than the poor woman whose ear the mother was bending needed. She indicated that she couldn’t understand a word, at which Mom launched into the same version of events, but in Spanish.
“Get away from her, she’ll freak!” she then yelled at the boy. Next: “AAAAAAAAAAAGHHHHH!”
We quickly learned that he had smacked his sister. “You’re lucky I didn’t smack you right back,” said Mom. “I don’t know how many mommies wouldn’t smack you right back. I can’t be proud of you today.”
I learned from the lady with the travelling house, whose name turned out to be Mercy (which, ironically, I had been praying for), that Mom had, in fact, been beating the hell out of her kids before I got on. Now that the boy was screaming at a pitch even above Mom’s own shouting, she adopted a new strategy: “Shut yer goddam mouth!” she bellowed. He yelled some more.
Dad has the kids just once a week, and, we learned, had left them because he “couldn’t step up to the plate” to deal with his daughter’s disability. Call me psychic, but my guess would be that Dad left because he couldn’t deal with Mom.
The need to share every aspect of your personal life is quite common here, and especially so on the buses. I suspect that the real reason everyone gets a car isn’t because they need one to get around, but because it is the only guaranteed means of avoiding the all too colourful locals.
Mercy turned out to live up to her name, and kept me calm as the rather terrifying hysteria mounted mid-bus. “D’you have grandkids?” asked Mom, selecting a new target a bit too close for comfort, when target one got off, clearly having reached breaking point.
When Mom gathered up the troops to get off at her stop, she struggled with the leash to which her kids were attached, as the daughter fell to the ground. Passengers held their breath as she whacked the pair like a pair of shuttlecocks towards the exit.
“Try talking to them, rather than at them,” suggested Mercy, calling after the trio.
Oh, dear God. Mercy. Mom turned around with a look that couldn’t so much kill as assassinate.
“D’you have special needs kids?” she fumed. Oh no, we’re all going to die. She didn’t mean it. Please, please don’t shoot.
My nerves managed to calm themselves throughout a very pleasant evening at the Huntley’s penthouse bar, which has the most spectacular views over the city; but after my earlier experience, I was a bit apprehensive about the journey home.
In the end, it was an event-free trip back to the safety of Beverly Hills.
Even being the only white person on the bus, I felt a damned sight less conspicuous than I had starring in Honey, I Killed the Kids.
But returning from Santa Monica late on Friday night, I really was the only white person on the bus.
Blacks, Hispanics, Chinese, Japanese, and a few aliens that looked as if they had been out on day release – I felt as if I was travelling on the United Nations tour bus.
Yes, I have still resisted getting a car, not least because the buses here are incredibly cheap, efficient, and run all night.
The real price you pay is that you sometimes feel as if you have inadvertently wandered onto the set of Fraggle Rock, albeit a Fraggle Rock in which, my nervous friends with cars inform me, half the residents are probably armed.
Take Friday. I was off to the coast to meet a friend in the bar at the top of the Huntley Hotel and got on a number 4 bus that goes from outside the Hilton Hotel near my apartment.
You have to choose who you sit next to very carefully on these buses, especially when going to Santa Monica, which is a place that attracts people stuck in 1963.
By “stuck”, I mean that they have failed to relinquish their hippy lifestyle, still seem stoned out of their minds, and can’t remember what a bar of soap looks like.
I chose to sit next to a lady at the front, who appeared to be travelling with the contents of her house, complete with cat. She was the best option. The seat was also the furthest I could get from the screaming woman further up the aisle.
Accompanied by two children, she was in the middle of informing the entire bus that the boy and girl were twins, the girl was autistic, the government were doing nothing to help her, she didn’t take drugs, she didn’t drink, her husband had walked out because he couldn’t handle a special needs child, and she had been forced to get off the previous bus because people were being mean to her. You don't say.
It was way more information than I needed. It was certainly way more information than the poor woman whose ear the mother was bending needed. She indicated that she couldn’t understand a word, at which Mom launched into the same version of events, but in Spanish.
“Get away from her, she’ll freak!” she then yelled at the boy. Next: “AAAAAAAAAAAGHHHHH!”
We quickly learned that he had smacked his sister. “You’re lucky I didn’t smack you right back,” said Mom. “I don’t know how many mommies wouldn’t smack you right back. I can’t be proud of you today.”
I learned from the lady with the travelling house, whose name turned out to be Mercy (which, ironically, I had been praying for), that Mom had, in fact, been beating the hell out of her kids before I got on. Now that the boy was screaming at a pitch even above Mom’s own shouting, she adopted a new strategy: “Shut yer goddam mouth!” she bellowed. He yelled some more.
Dad has the kids just once a week, and, we learned, had left them because he “couldn’t step up to the plate” to deal with his daughter’s disability. Call me psychic, but my guess would be that Dad left because he couldn’t deal with Mom.
The need to share every aspect of your personal life is quite common here, and especially so on the buses. I suspect that the real reason everyone gets a car isn’t because they need one to get around, but because it is the only guaranteed means of avoiding the all too colourful locals.
Mercy turned out to live up to her name, and kept me calm as the rather terrifying hysteria mounted mid-bus. “D’you have grandkids?” asked Mom, selecting a new target a bit too close for comfort, when target one got off, clearly having reached breaking point.
When Mom gathered up the troops to get off at her stop, she struggled with the leash to which her kids were attached, as the daughter fell to the ground. Passengers held their breath as she whacked the pair like a pair of shuttlecocks towards the exit.
“Try talking to them, rather than at them,” suggested Mercy, calling after the trio.
Oh, dear God. Mercy. Mom turned around with a look that couldn’t so much kill as assassinate.
“D’you have special needs kids?” she fumed. Oh no, we’re all going to die. She didn’t mean it. Please, please don’t shoot.
My nerves managed to calm themselves throughout a very pleasant evening at the Huntley’s penthouse bar, which has the most spectacular views over the city; but after my earlier experience, I was a bit apprehensive about the journey home.
In the end, it was an event-free trip back to the safety of Beverly Hills.
Even being the only white person on the bus, I felt a damned sight less conspicuous than I had starring in Honey, I Killed the Kids.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Friends, Romans, Countrywelshmen 2/15/10
Does Matthew Rhys actually exist?
It’s the question I’ve been asking for almost a year now, as I continue to chase the shadow of the Welsh actor who has made it big in Hollywood.
Matthew is one of the stars of my favourite TV show, Brothers and Sisters, in which he plays gay lawyer, Kevin Walker.
Good looking, charismatic, and an actor of extraordinary range and depth, he also manages one of the most convincing American accents of any non-American actor on the screen.
Despite my living in what most would regard as the acting capital of the world, Matthew remains one of the few actors I have a burning desire to meet. Matthew, you see, in addition to being a great talent, is (in case you haven’t worked it out) Welsh.
I was told when I came here that there were dozens of Welsh people in LA. I have yet to meet one. At a Brits in LA lunch, I met a Scot, loads of English, a couple of Australians and Americans, but none of my kinsfolk.
Downtown, there is a Welsh church, they tell me, but when the words downtown and church appear in one sentence, I am guaranteed to run for cover.
But I still want to meet my compatriots. The Welsh are very tribal, and wherever we go in the world, we try to hunt down our own kind. I like the self-deprecating humour, the easy conversation, the warmth in the comradeship.
They aren’t characteristics common to all Welsh people, of course, but they are noticeable enough to call them national traits.
So when I return home to Cardiff, I am questioned not about Hollywood celebrities born and bred in the US, but about the Welsh “community” my friends imagine lurks somewhere beneath the Hollywood sign.
“Have you bumped in Catherine?” they ask. “Have you seen Ioan’s house?” “Have you been to Andrew’s for Sunday roast?”
That’s Catherine Zeta Jones, Ioan Gruffydd and Andrew Howard, for those of you not quite up on modern Welsh thespianism.
But most of all they say: “How’s Matthew?”
I wish I could tell them. I wish I could say: “Well, I was only saying to Matthew, when we worked out . . . “ Or: “Matthew mixes a mean Martini”. To be honest, I’d be happy enough being able to say: “I saw Matthew waving to me from afar”, but I can’t, because, quite simply, I haven’t had so much as a sniff of his whereabouts.
When I returned home at Christmas, I explained my dilemma to some friends in Boomerang Television. “Oh, he was filming with us,” they said. “We know his sister. We’ll get you an introduction.” They didn’t.
“Ah, you want to go to The Plough in Whitchurch on Christmas Eve; he’s always there,” said a radio producer.
Ha! This was more like it: date, time, venue.
Had I remembered the name of the pub correctly, I wouldn’t have spent the night in the Fox and Hounds, nursing a pair of binoculars.
“Yes, he was in the Plough,” said the producer, the next time I saw him. “He was there Christmas morning, too.”
With the start of the Six Nations at the weekend, and Matthew being a rugby fan, I thought I was pretty much guaranteed a meeting. “All the Welsh actors go to Santa Monica to watch the games,” said my Boomerang friends. “We’ve filmed them there.”
Great. Another date, time, place.
This is the first Six Nations I will have spent in LA, and for Saturday’s game against Scotland, if it meant getting to the pub for the 6.00am kick-off to bump into Matthew, then that’s what I was going to do.
I had heard that the lads go to the Britannia or the King’s Head to watch the Wales games. Alas, I slept late and only made it down to the King’s Head for the France/Ireland game, by which time all the Welsh had left.
It transpired, though, that there weren’t many Welsh out anyway. BBC America is, for the first time, showing the games live, so everyone can now stay at home in their dressing gowns.
Everyone tells me that Matthew is a delight to be with, both personally and professionally, and he still feels his roots very strongly, not least because Welsh is his first language.
I am therefore brushing up on my Welsh in readiness for St David’s Day, when I have been assured there is a big Welsh event at which Matthew will most definitely be.
I can already hear the words “You’ve just missed him,” ringing in my ears.
It’s the question I’ve been asking for almost a year now, as I continue to chase the shadow of the Welsh actor who has made it big in Hollywood.
Matthew is one of the stars of my favourite TV show, Brothers and Sisters, in which he plays gay lawyer, Kevin Walker.
Good looking, charismatic, and an actor of extraordinary range and depth, he also manages one of the most convincing American accents of any non-American actor on the screen.
Despite my living in what most would regard as the acting capital of the world, Matthew remains one of the few actors I have a burning desire to meet. Matthew, you see, in addition to being a great talent, is (in case you haven’t worked it out) Welsh.
I was told when I came here that there were dozens of Welsh people in LA. I have yet to meet one. At a Brits in LA lunch, I met a Scot, loads of English, a couple of Australians and Americans, but none of my kinsfolk.
Downtown, there is a Welsh church, they tell me, but when the words downtown and church appear in one sentence, I am guaranteed to run for cover.
But I still want to meet my compatriots. The Welsh are very tribal, and wherever we go in the world, we try to hunt down our own kind. I like the self-deprecating humour, the easy conversation, the warmth in the comradeship.
They aren’t characteristics common to all Welsh people, of course, but they are noticeable enough to call them national traits.
So when I return home to Cardiff, I am questioned not about Hollywood celebrities born and bred in the US, but about the Welsh “community” my friends imagine lurks somewhere beneath the Hollywood sign.
“Have you bumped in Catherine?” they ask. “Have you seen Ioan’s house?” “Have you been to Andrew’s for Sunday roast?”
That’s Catherine Zeta Jones, Ioan Gruffydd and Andrew Howard, for those of you not quite up on modern Welsh thespianism.
But most of all they say: “How’s Matthew?”
I wish I could tell them. I wish I could say: “Well, I was only saying to Matthew, when we worked out . . . “ Or: “Matthew mixes a mean Martini”. To be honest, I’d be happy enough being able to say: “I saw Matthew waving to me from afar”, but I can’t, because, quite simply, I haven’t had so much as a sniff of his whereabouts.
When I returned home at Christmas, I explained my dilemma to some friends in Boomerang Television. “Oh, he was filming with us,” they said. “We know his sister. We’ll get you an introduction.” They didn’t.
“Ah, you want to go to The Plough in Whitchurch on Christmas Eve; he’s always there,” said a radio producer.
Ha! This was more like it: date, time, venue.
Had I remembered the name of the pub correctly, I wouldn’t have spent the night in the Fox and Hounds, nursing a pair of binoculars.
“Yes, he was in the Plough,” said the producer, the next time I saw him. “He was there Christmas morning, too.”
With the start of the Six Nations at the weekend, and Matthew being a rugby fan, I thought I was pretty much guaranteed a meeting. “All the Welsh actors go to Santa Monica to watch the games,” said my Boomerang friends. “We’ve filmed them there.”
Great. Another date, time, place.
This is the first Six Nations I will have spent in LA, and for Saturday’s game against Scotland, if it meant getting to the pub for the 6.00am kick-off to bump into Matthew, then that’s what I was going to do.
I had heard that the lads go to the Britannia or the King’s Head to watch the Wales games. Alas, I slept late and only made it down to the King’s Head for the France/Ireland game, by which time all the Welsh had left.
It transpired, though, that there weren’t many Welsh out anyway. BBC America is, for the first time, showing the games live, so everyone can now stay at home in their dressing gowns.
Everyone tells me that Matthew is a delight to be with, both personally and professionally, and he still feels his roots very strongly, not least because Welsh is his first language.
I am therefore brushing up on my Welsh in readiness for St David’s Day, when I have been assured there is a big Welsh event at which Matthew will most definitely be.
I can already hear the words “You’ve just missed him,” ringing in my ears.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Is There Anybody Out There - And Does Anybody Care? 2/9/10
Dead never means dead in Hollywood, which, I have discovered, is the Lazarus town of the west.
The promise of connecting with loved ones on the Other Side is ever alive, and an enormous volume of programming is devoted to it.
They don’t say the word “dead” here, though. Ever. It is too dramatic a sounding syllable; too final. They say “passed over”, which is more in the spirit of “Just nipped into the kitchen to put the kettle on”.
And, when you want to contact a loved one in said kitchen, you only have to talk to the right people – any number of psychics, whose speciality is conveying messages from the next room in order to comfort those left behind.
If you want to experience how the more glamorous corners of the other side operate, Psychic Hollywood is the show to watch and leads the field in its ability to contact the star-studded heavens.
Take Farrah Fawcett’s best mate, Alana Stewart. She was worried that Farrah might be feeling her friends had let her down and might be a bit stung about Michael Jackson’s death taking the limelight away from her own. She was also writing a book and wasn’t sure whether it would meet with approval.
Well, not to worry, psychic James Van Praagh was able to to talk to Farrah directly and come back with some answers.
No, she didn’t feel let down, no she didn’t mind about Michael Jackson, and she was thrilled about Alana’s book.
Lucky, that, because it reached the top of the New York Best Sellers' list. I wonder what would have happened if Farrah had replied in the negative; something tells me that Alana would not have shelved the project, psychic or no psychic.
Just to be on the safe side, James took Alana to a quiet place, where her friend allegedly told her: “Just scream at me in the air like you’ve been doing.”
This she did. Loudly. “It was like being with her!” cried an excited Alana. Phew. I’m glad I was never around Farrah’s place for a barbecue.
Psychic Hollywood also features Derek Ogilvie, who goes by the title “baby whisperer”. A man called Ryan came to him because his two-year old son Max was scribbling strange pictures and words.
Derek sensed “strange energy around the genital area” and was able to ascertain, from this, that Ryan had “intimacy issues”.
Derek wondered if he had been molested, but it transpired that Ryan had once had a tumour in one of his testicles.
Somehow, from this melee of information (and I’m still not sure quite how the connection was made), Derek and Ryan pinpointed the intimacy issues as having stemmed from Ryan’s childhood, when the family dog had to be put down.
I am now wondering whether any issues I have had in my adult life might be traced back to when Sally our Chihuahua and Tara our poodle paid their last visit to the vet’s.
It might explain a lot. Or not.
Derek sent Ryan and Max off to the park, where they were to address the intimacy thing that might explain Max’s drawings. After a group hug, Ryan tried to strike up a conversation. Max, however, had other ideas.
“Plane!” he cried, pointing to the sky.
For poor old Ryan, it was like pulling teeth. “I try to talk about the relationship issue . . . you just wanna look at aeroplanes,” he said, sorrowfully.
“Plane!” said Max, pointing to the sky once more. Ryan reported back to Derek that he thought Max wasn’t understanding what he was getting at.
He’s two, for goodness sake! I’m over 50 and I wasn’t getting it, either.
Derek’s speciality as a “baby whisperer” is helping people “use old knowledge for modern times”, and one aspect of this is clearing away negative spirits to make room for new energy. Having failed with Ryan (who he claimed had not done what he asked him to), he moved on to Mark.
“We’re gonna start off by sageing you”, he said, an operation that required calling forth the Archangel Michael, who would open Mark’s mouth and push the Jagwar spirit (whatever that is) through his body.
“Archangel Michael, push deeper into his body!” he cried. “Lock him down, angels! It’s really time for you to be who you’ve come to be!” I don’t know about Mark, but I was exhausted.
Mark insisted that he felt an “emotional connection” and something leaving his body. Miracle of miracles, Mark suddenly felt his fears subside and able to face life head on.
Quite what Farrah and Michael in the next room think about it all is anybody’s guess; but I suspect they are both in a safer place than a world inhabited by the likes of Derek and James.
The promise of connecting with loved ones on the Other Side is ever alive, and an enormous volume of programming is devoted to it.
They don’t say the word “dead” here, though. Ever. It is too dramatic a sounding syllable; too final. They say “passed over”, which is more in the spirit of “Just nipped into the kitchen to put the kettle on”.
And, when you want to contact a loved one in said kitchen, you only have to talk to the right people – any number of psychics, whose speciality is conveying messages from the next room in order to comfort those left behind.
If you want to experience how the more glamorous corners of the other side operate, Psychic Hollywood is the show to watch and leads the field in its ability to contact the star-studded heavens.
Take Farrah Fawcett’s best mate, Alana Stewart. She was worried that Farrah might be feeling her friends had let her down and might be a bit stung about Michael Jackson’s death taking the limelight away from her own. She was also writing a book and wasn’t sure whether it would meet with approval.
Well, not to worry, psychic James Van Praagh was able to to talk to Farrah directly and come back with some answers.
No, she didn’t feel let down, no she didn’t mind about Michael Jackson, and she was thrilled about Alana’s book.
Lucky, that, because it reached the top of the New York Best Sellers' list. I wonder what would have happened if Farrah had replied in the negative; something tells me that Alana would not have shelved the project, psychic or no psychic.
Just to be on the safe side, James took Alana to a quiet place, where her friend allegedly told her: “Just scream at me in the air like you’ve been doing.”
This she did. Loudly. “It was like being with her!” cried an excited Alana. Phew. I’m glad I was never around Farrah’s place for a barbecue.
Psychic Hollywood also features Derek Ogilvie, who goes by the title “baby whisperer”. A man called Ryan came to him because his two-year old son Max was scribbling strange pictures and words.
Derek sensed “strange energy around the genital area” and was able to ascertain, from this, that Ryan had “intimacy issues”.
Derek wondered if he had been molested, but it transpired that Ryan had once had a tumour in one of his testicles.
Somehow, from this melee of information (and I’m still not sure quite how the connection was made), Derek and Ryan pinpointed the intimacy issues as having stemmed from Ryan’s childhood, when the family dog had to be put down.
I am now wondering whether any issues I have had in my adult life might be traced back to when Sally our Chihuahua and Tara our poodle paid their last visit to the vet’s.
It might explain a lot. Or not.
Derek sent Ryan and Max off to the park, where they were to address the intimacy thing that might explain Max’s drawings. After a group hug, Ryan tried to strike up a conversation. Max, however, had other ideas.
“Plane!” he cried, pointing to the sky.
For poor old Ryan, it was like pulling teeth. “I try to talk about the relationship issue . . . you just wanna look at aeroplanes,” he said, sorrowfully.
“Plane!” said Max, pointing to the sky once more. Ryan reported back to Derek that he thought Max wasn’t understanding what he was getting at.
He’s two, for goodness sake! I’m over 50 and I wasn’t getting it, either.
Derek’s speciality as a “baby whisperer” is helping people “use old knowledge for modern times”, and one aspect of this is clearing away negative spirits to make room for new energy. Having failed with Ryan (who he claimed had not done what he asked him to), he moved on to Mark.
“We’re gonna start off by sageing you”, he said, an operation that required calling forth the Archangel Michael, who would open Mark’s mouth and push the Jagwar spirit (whatever that is) through his body.
“Archangel Michael, push deeper into his body!” he cried. “Lock him down, angels! It’s really time for you to be who you’ve come to be!” I don’t know about Mark, but I was exhausted.
Mark insisted that he felt an “emotional connection” and something leaving his body. Miracle of miracles, Mark suddenly felt his fears subside and able to face life head on.
Quite what Farrah and Michael in the next room think about it all is anybody’s guess; but I suspect they are both in a safer place than a world inhabited by the likes of Derek and James.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Rumble In The Media Jungle: Leno vs Conan 2/2/10
You know when something is really big news here when the essence of the story can be reduced to just four words.
One of the hottest topics of recent weeks has been “Rain in Los Angeles”, a headline of such cataclysmic proportions, it dominated not only local news bulletins, but every dining table conversation within a 50 mile radius.
You would think the city had never seen water, let alone seen it pour from the heavens.
People caught unawares emerged from restaurants, staring blankly into the street like assistants of Dr Who arriving at a designated departure point, only to find that the Tardis had already gone.
Coming from Cardiff, one of the wettest cities in the UK, I was invariably one of the only people on the street with an umbrella (habit - I never go without one, even in LA), as soaked pedestrians gazed on enviously.
Ha! I thought. They hadn’t read their Bibles; I was all too aware of the parable of the ten virgins, five of whom hadn’t taken enough oil for their lamps, while waiting the arrival of the bridegroom.
Some say the story is a warning to people to be prepared for the day of reckoning; to me, it means never, ever, go without an umbrella, bridegroom or no bridegroom, so there.
“Will Brangelina break up?”
That’s been another four-word obsession and a topic for which people have an almost pathological obsession in Hollywood.
The ongoing saga about the celebrity couple’s marriage, and whether Brad Pitt will leave current wife Angelina Jolie to return to first wife Jennifer Aniston, is one of the major soap operas of the day.
At Sunday’s Grammy Awards, E! (Entertainment) Channel reliably informed us from the red carpet that the previous night, the couple had been seen very much “into” each other. Purely on this evidence alone, said an interviewee, they were definitely not going to be breaking up.
I don’t care two figs one way or the other, but I do wonder how Angelina manages to sleep at night next to Brad’s weird new beard. Waking up next to that facial yeti must put more of a dent in her love than ever our Jen could manage to do. To be honest, the only way I can see Angelina could get “into” Brad at the moment would be if she were to employ a topiarist to pave the way.
Even bigger than the rain and Brangelina, however, has been the “Jay Leno versus Conan” story. This plot has rumbled on for weeks, both on and off screen, and the network NBC, on which both men have shows (at the moment), continues to be strangely fascinating.
In brief: Veteran Jay Leno was hosting the Tonight Show at 11.35pm, and, when he moved to primetime last year, failed to attract the same ratings. Now, in March, he’s getting his old show back, while his replacement, Conan O’Brien, who didn’t want to move to a later slot (and why should he, having landed the top prize – it’s humiliating), is leaving with £20 million.
To be honest, in the humiliation stakes, I’d strip naked and allow myself to be pelted with cow dung (thrown by Sarah Palin) for that sort of dosh, but I’m new to LA and doubtless I will learn.
Humiliation? Drive it over here in that fleet of Ferraris.
But I can’t help noticing that successful US male hosts are known only by their surnames (Leno, Letterman), and the females by their first (Oprah, Ellen, Chelsea). In this, Conan was doomed from the start. He will doubtless rue the day he was not Christened a boy named Sue.
The Leno/Conan story has become one of the major sources of material for comedians, coast to coast. David Letterman, who hosts his late-night TV show from New York, is enjoying it hugely, reportedly never having forgiven Leno for taking over the Tonight Show from Johnny Carson when he so wanted it for himself (I wanted it for Letterman, too, but if I’d known the queue of adoring women was as long as we now know it to have been, I might have hitched my flag to another, er, pole, as it were – but that’s another story).
Meanwhile, in LA, Conan puts on a brave face, trying to make light of what is clearly a very hurtful situation.
Leno continues to milk it, sparing viewers no details about the whole history of the story, right down to the nitty-gritty of NBC executives’ part in the drama, adding that he bears Conan no animosity. I’ll bet he doesn’t.
It is inconceivable that any British TV host, in the light of such a debacle, would ever spend 15 minutes of their show making jokes at the expense of the network on which they were appearing. The most Jonathan Ross, for example, has ever managed, has been a couple of light-hearted jokes about what he can or cannot say in the light of “Sachsgate”, the now infamous phone-call he and comedian Russell Brand made to the actor Andrew Sachs.
Yet Leno, telling viewers that they had a right to know what had really been going on behind the scenes, made fun of NBC executives in the most extraordinary manner – after he knew he was being handed back the best gig.
It made a very funny story and he told it well - bemused, baffled, and, let's not deny it, faintly smug. The fact that he was allowed to tell it at all was, in itself, hilarious.
Viewing figures are, of course, important to any network, but in the US they are everything, and late night TV has a kudos here that it has never managed to acquire in the UK.
Quite why this particular story should be deemed to be a ratings puller is anathema to us Brits, yet O’Brien’s ratings have increased dramatically as the story has unfolded.
The difference is, that in the UK, our TV scandals are played out in our newspapers, especially where licence-payers’ money is concerned.
Personally, I think it’s a shame.
Leno versus Conan is the new Rumble in the Jungle, and I, along with millions of others, just can’t get enough of it. Leno? Floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee, is my guess.
But the real winner? Letterman.
At least it’s distracted viewers from simply wondering why he can’t keep his flies done up.
One of the hottest topics of recent weeks has been “Rain in Los Angeles”, a headline of such cataclysmic proportions, it dominated not only local news bulletins, but every dining table conversation within a 50 mile radius.
You would think the city had never seen water, let alone seen it pour from the heavens.
People caught unawares emerged from restaurants, staring blankly into the street like assistants of Dr Who arriving at a designated departure point, only to find that the Tardis had already gone.
Coming from Cardiff, one of the wettest cities in the UK, I was invariably one of the only people on the street with an umbrella (habit - I never go without one, even in LA), as soaked pedestrians gazed on enviously.
Ha! I thought. They hadn’t read their Bibles; I was all too aware of the parable of the ten virgins, five of whom hadn’t taken enough oil for their lamps, while waiting the arrival of the bridegroom.
Some say the story is a warning to people to be prepared for the day of reckoning; to me, it means never, ever, go without an umbrella, bridegroom or no bridegroom, so there.
“Will Brangelina break up?”
That’s been another four-word obsession and a topic for which people have an almost pathological obsession in Hollywood.
The ongoing saga about the celebrity couple’s marriage, and whether Brad Pitt will leave current wife Angelina Jolie to return to first wife Jennifer Aniston, is one of the major soap operas of the day.
At Sunday’s Grammy Awards, E! (Entertainment) Channel reliably informed us from the red carpet that the previous night, the couple had been seen very much “into” each other. Purely on this evidence alone, said an interviewee, they were definitely not going to be breaking up.
I don’t care two figs one way or the other, but I do wonder how Angelina manages to sleep at night next to Brad’s weird new beard. Waking up next to that facial yeti must put more of a dent in her love than ever our Jen could manage to do. To be honest, the only way I can see Angelina could get “into” Brad at the moment would be if she were to employ a topiarist to pave the way.
Even bigger than the rain and Brangelina, however, has been the “Jay Leno versus Conan” story. This plot has rumbled on for weeks, both on and off screen, and the network NBC, on which both men have shows (at the moment), continues to be strangely fascinating.
In brief: Veteran Jay Leno was hosting the Tonight Show at 11.35pm, and, when he moved to primetime last year, failed to attract the same ratings. Now, in March, he’s getting his old show back, while his replacement, Conan O’Brien, who didn’t want to move to a later slot (and why should he, having landed the top prize – it’s humiliating), is leaving with £20 million.
To be honest, in the humiliation stakes, I’d strip naked and allow myself to be pelted with cow dung (thrown by Sarah Palin) for that sort of dosh, but I’m new to LA and doubtless I will learn.
Humiliation? Drive it over here in that fleet of Ferraris.
But I can’t help noticing that successful US male hosts are known only by their surnames (Leno, Letterman), and the females by their first (Oprah, Ellen, Chelsea). In this, Conan was doomed from the start. He will doubtless rue the day he was not Christened a boy named Sue.
The Leno/Conan story has become one of the major sources of material for comedians, coast to coast. David Letterman, who hosts his late-night TV show from New York, is enjoying it hugely, reportedly never having forgiven Leno for taking over the Tonight Show from Johnny Carson when he so wanted it for himself (I wanted it for Letterman, too, but if I’d known the queue of adoring women was as long as we now know it to have been, I might have hitched my flag to another, er, pole, as it were – but that’s another story).
Meanwhile, in LA, Conan puts on a brave face, trying to make light of what is clearly a very hurtful situation.
Leno continues to milk it, sparing viewers no details about the whole history of the story, right down to the nitty-gritty of NBC executives’ part in the drama, adding that he bears Conan no animosity. I’ll bet he doesn’t.
It is inconceivable that any British TV host, in the light of such a debacle, would ever spend 15 minutes of their show making jokes at the expense of the network on which they were appearing. The most Jonathan Ross, for example, has ever managed, has been a couple of light-hearted jokes about what he can or cannot say in the light of “Sachsgate”, the now infamous phone-call he and comedian Russell Brand made to the actor Andrew Sachs.
Yet Leno, telling viewers that they had a right to know what had really been going on behind the scenes, made fun of NBC executives in the most extraordinary manner – after he knew he was being handed back the best gig.
It made a very funny story and he told it well - bemused, baffled, and, let's not deny it, faintly smug. The fact that he was allowed to tell it at all was, in itself, hilarious.
Viewing figures are, of course, important to any network, but in the US they are everything, and late night TV has a kudos here that it has never managed to acquire in the UK.
Quite why this particular story should be deemed to be a ratings puller is anathema to us Brits, yet O’Brien’s ratings have increased dramatically as the story has unfolded.
The difference is, that in the UK, our TV scandals are played out in our newspapers, especially where licence-payers’ money is concerned.
Personally, I think it’s a shame.
Leno versus Conan is the new Rumble in the Jungle, and I, along with millions of others, just can’t get enough of it. Leno? Floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee, is my guess.
But the real winner? Letterman.
At least it’s distracted viewers from simply wondering why he can’t keep his flies done up.
Monday, January 18, 2010
The Not So Golden Globes 1/18/10
How upset can a locker be?
What on Earth do you say to a locker to produce such an effect?
“You need a paint job”? “You smell of stale sneakers”? I mean, come on: even if upsetting filing cabinets were your number one aim in life, would you want to go and see a movie about it?
These were just some of the questions I asked (along with When did Tom Hanks get so fat? Has Martin Scorsese shrunk?) to pass the time through Sunday’s coverage of The Golden Globe Awards.
Having established that The Hurt Locker was not about a sensitive piece of storage furniture, but a bomb disposal unit in the Iraq war, I lay on the sofa and gave thanks that I wasn’t at the actual event a stone’s throw from my apartment.
There was a time when I would have carried out contract killings just to get into an awards ceremony. Back in my early days of journalism, I even managed to crash a few, one night taking a place on the South Pacific table at the Laurence Olivier Awards, oblivious to the fact that people had purchased tickets in advance for members of the company.
If the legitimate guests on the table were shocked or horrified, they were too polite to say so, and by the end of the night I was singing I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair like an old pro.
Sunday’s Golden Globes, which celebrate achievements in both film and television, were taking place at the Beverly Hills Hilton. From my apartment, I can see the hotel, where, for the big event, a plastic tent had been erected on the roof for the NBC/Universal post-show party.
The hotel was closed to the public for the weekend, and when once I would have taken wire cutters to the fence I know can quite easily get me to the pool area, I was happy to stay at home and watch the event on television.
Awards ceremonies US style are very different from those in the UK, not least because by the time you have cleared security to get in, you probably would have died of stress, or even old age.
To get into the Globes, journalists had to apply back in November, and the list of requirements and credentials was so long, I could have founded a newspaper and seen it go under in the time it took me to read the rules, let alone get round to acting upon them. Getting into the White House is easier – as people have discovered.
My friends who have been to the Oscars assure me that the event is not worth sitting through for the privilege of nursing a full bladder for eight hours; and even those with tickets to the Golden Globes said they were going for the experience of seeing Ricky Gervais live, rather than getting the chance to rub shoulders with the superstars.
There was, nevertheless, an air of excitement in the air that permeated the city, irrespective of whether one was attending the event. The Regent Beverly Wilshire, a short distance from the Hilton, and The Peninsula, which is even closer, were packed with celebrity spotters who looked to the door every time a new person entered (and, in my case, looked disappointingly away again).
After I watched the event on TV, I hung out at the Peninsula where, if you happen to have a miner’s lamp in your handbag, you might be able to make out a few faces in what has to be LA’s darkest bar.
Everyone who was no one was there. A university lecturer, a very drunk Estonian woman, whose head looked in immediate danger of separating itself from her body, and an even drunker man who introduced himself with the question: “D’you mess around?”
He also said that he was waiting for a call confirming that Quentin Tarantino was hosting a party nearby. It was now getting close to two in the morning, an hour when, for me, messing around always takes second place to tuning in to yet another interminable CSI marathon on the telly; but heck, this was Quentin - who knows, he could direct my movie - and if I had to kiss a boozed up guy in a penguin suit just to get to Quentin, what the hell.
In the event, I didn’t even have to debate the issue. The man received a call to say that there was no party, news that instantly turned me into the Mother Teresa of the night and telling the bloke where to get off. Inglourious Basterd as he was.
Meanwhile, the lecturer was telling the Estonian how interesting she was, while the management were trying to throw her out for losing touch with gravity. “Is she with you?” they asked me.
I was horror struck. “No!” I squealed, disgusted.
Even more horrifying, I remembered that that used to be me. But if there is one thing that LA has taught me, it’s that sitting at your desk, doing the work you care about, really is more enjoyable than falling about in bars, stalking celebs.
When I saw my final bill from the Peninsula, I realised that it’s cheaper, too.
What on Earth do you say to a locker to produce such an effect?
“You need a paint job”? “You smell of stale sneakers”? I mean, come on: even if upsetting filing cabinets were your number one aim in life, would you want to go and see a movie about it?
These were just some of the questions I asked (along with When did Tom Hanks get so fat? Has Martin Scorsese shrunk?) to pass the time through Sunday’s coverage of The Golden Globe Awards.
Having established that The Hurt Locker was not about a sensitive piece of storage furniture, but a bomb disposal unit in the Iraq war, I lay on the sofa and gave thanks that I wasn’t at the actual event a stone’s throw from my apartment.
There was a time when I would have carried out contract killings just to get into an awards ceremony. Back in my early days of journalism, I even managed to crash a few, one night taking a place on the South Pacific table at the Laurence Olivier Awards, oblivious to the fact that people had purchased tickets in advance for members of the company.
If the legitimate guests on the table were shocked or horrified, they were too polite to say so, and by the end of the night I was singing I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair like an old pro.
Sunday’s Golden Globes, which celebrate achievements in both film and television, were taking place at the Beverly Hills Hilton. From my apartment, I can see the hotel, where, for the big event, a plastic tent had been erected on the roof for the NBC/Universal post-show party.
The hotel was closed to the public for the weekend, and when once I would have taken wire cutters to the fence I know can quite easily get me to the pool area, I was happy to stay at home and watch the event on television.
Awards ceremonies US style are very different from those in the UK, not least because by the time you have cleared security to get in, you probably would have died of stress, or even old age.
To get into the Globes, journalists had to apply back in November, and the list of requirements and credentials was so long, I could have founded a newspaper and seen it go under in the time it took me to read the rules, let alone get round to acting upon them. Getting into the White House is easier – as people have discovered.
My friends who have been to the Oscars assure me that the event is not worth sitting through for the privilege of nursing a full bladder for eight hours; and even those with tickets to the Golden Globes said they were going for the experience of seeing Ricky Gervais live, rather than getting the chance to rub shoulders with the superstars.
There was, nevertheless, an air of excitement in the air that permeated the city, irrespective of whether one was attending the event. The Regent Beverly Wilshire, a short distance from the Hilton, and The Peninsula, which is even closer, were packed with celebrity spotters who looked to the door every time a new person entered (and, in my case, looked disappointingly away again).
After I watched the event on TV, I hung out at the Peninsula where, if you happen to have a miner’s lamp in your handbag, you might be able to make out a few faces in what has to be LA’s darkest bar.
Everyone who was no one was there. A university lecturer, a very drunk Estonian woman, whose head looked in immediate danger of separating itself from her body, and an even drunker man who introduced himself with the question: “D’you mess around?”
He also said that he was waiting for a call confirming that Quentin Tarantino was hosting a party nearby. It was now getting close to two in the morning, an hour when, for me, messing around always takes second place to tuning in to yet another interminable CSI marathon on the telly; but heck, this was Quentin - who knows, he could direct my movie - and if I had to kiss a boozed up guy in a penguin suit just to get to Quentin, what the hell.
In the event, I didn’t even have to debate the issue. The man received a call to say that there was no party, news that instantly turned me into the Mother Teresa of the night and telling the bloke where to get off. Inglourious Basterd as he was.
Meanwhile, the lecturer was telling the Estonian how interesting she was, while the management were trying to throw her out for losing touch with gravity. “Is she with you?” they asked me.
I was horror struck. “No!” I squealed, disgusted.
Even more horrifying, I remembered that that used to be me. But if there is one thing that LA has taught me, it’s that sitting at your desk, doing the work you care about, really is more enjoyable than falling about in bars, stalking celebs.
When I saw my final bill from the Peninsula, I realised that it’s cheaper, too.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Sunrise, Sunset 1/9/10
Above clouds, you can believe in anything.
Flying west to east, into daybreak, the sun is always rising; east to west, it sets in silence, always perfect.
Sometimes, I feel close to the heaven of my childhood imagination.
Up there. Beyond. Closer to the God I was told lived in the sky.
The transatlantic journeys that, just a year ago, were filled both with excitement at the prospect of change in a new country, or coming home to see family and friends, are now times of strange, intense reflection in a year that has seen so many loved ones disappear from my life.
My screenwriter friend Blake Snyder, who inspired me to come to LA, and who I have written about so much, died suddenly in August. My dear friend Keith Waterhouse died in September. Yes, he had enjoyed a long life, but that never makes a loss less keenly felt.
My Auntie Monica, who had known me since I was a baby, died suddenly in October. And, this week, my dear, beautiful and talented friend Angharad, who had been ill for some months, died, suspected of having taken her life at the age of just 47.
Each time I fly now, it is to attend a funeral, memorial service, or to be close to people with whom it is possible to share memories. This week, in particular, knowing the devastation that Angharad’s siblings and young daughter must be feeling back home, I just wanted to get on a plane again and head back to the UK.
Until I know what plans there are for any service, I am staying in LA, but have again been astounded by the enormous comfort Facebook has provided during this time.
I found out about Blake’s death on Facebook, and shocking (literally) as that was, over 600 people left messages on his page that made one feel part of a community united by a shared grief.
On Saturday, messages started to appear on Angharad’s Facebook page, too. A clever, funny and insightful woman, she still seems very much there, and it is hard to imagine the pain and desperation that brought about this tragic end.
Having spoken only to a couple of friends and left messages for one of her sisters, being such a long way away I felt able to make some kind of contact through Facebook, with strangers feeling just as helpless as I did.
The experience of these very personal losses is in stark contrast to death Hollywood style, and makes life here seem even more unreal. In 2009, the non-stop TV coverage of Michael Jackson’s death, and the way the town came to a standstill for what felt like weeks, turned death into the must-have accessory of the season. Some people have indeed turned their experience of the star’s passing into a full-time job.
Celebrity death is always big news here. Before Christmas, we saw the death of actress and singer Brittany Murphy and, last week, the Johnson and Johnson heiress Casey Johnson. TV cameras were outside the latter’s home for hours, continually reporting that there was no news and nothing to report. But that didn’t stop journalists standing outside the dead woman’s Hollywood home, continually reporting that there was (still) nothing to report.
Then, on Friday, there suddenly was. There was a fracas outside the home, from which Casey’s two small dogs were being taken, allegedly to be put down so that they could be buried with their owner. Casey’s girlfriend/fiancee Tila Tequila, was hysterical, as the pooches were bundled into another friend’s car.
Hollywood death is such big business here; there is even a site called hollywoodmemoir.com, which features “recently died famous Hollywood celebrities, actors’ health, accidents, and major news”. “Searching for Hollywood death?” says one headline, before pointing you in the direction of “Death Hollywood at Amazon”.
There are discussion boards and blogs to which you can contribute, too. “Is it just me?” asks one, “or are there almost no deaths in Hollywood lately?” Moral: never write a blog like this on 8th December.
Death can be a niche market, too: for example the section detailing “Wrestlers Who Died” (Bad News Brown, aged 63; Hercules, 46; Johnny Grunge of Public Enemy, 39 – of sleep apnea complications - there really is a Hollywood movie just crying out to be made here).
And should you wish to do your research according to method of passing rather than profession, you can just click on one of the headings under “Major Causes of Death”, which are: accidental, cancer, drug, heart attack, heart failure, lung, natural cause, suicide.
It all feels a far remove from the real thing, yet for every one of these Hollywood deaths, too, there is a band of friends and relatives mourning their loss.
Life doesn’t get any easier.
But above clouds, you can sometimes believe.
Flying west to east, into daybreak, the sun is always rising; east to west, it sets in silence, always perfect.
Sometimes, I feel close to the heaven of my childhood imagination.
Up there. Beyond. Closer to the God I was told lived in the sky.
The transatlantic journeys that, just a year ago, were filled both with excitement at the prospect of change in a new country, or coming home to see family and friends, are now times of strange, intense reflection in a year that has seen so many loved ones disappear from my life.
My screenwriter friend Blake Snyder, who inspired me to come to LA, and who I have written about so much, died suddenly in August. My dear friend Keith Waterhouse died in September. Yes, he had enjoyed a long life, but that never makes a loss less keenly felt.
My Auntie Monica, who had known me since I was a baby, died suddenly in October. And, this week, my dear, beautiful and talented friend Angharad, who had been ill for some months, died, suspected of having taken her life at the age of just 47.
Each time I fly now, it is to attend a funeral, memorial service, or to be close to people with whom it is possible to share memories. This week, in particular, knowing the devastation that Angharad’s siblings and young daughter must be feeling back home, I just wanted to get on a plane again and head back to the UK.
Until I know what plans there are for any service, I am staying in LA, but have again been astounded by the enormous comfort Facebook has provided during this time.
I found out about Blake’s death on Facebook, and shocking (literally) as that was, over 600 people left messages on his page that made one feel part of a community united by a shared grief.
On Saturday, messages started to appear on Angharad’s Facebook page, too. A clever, funny and insightful woman, she still seems very much there, and it is hard to imagine the pain and desperation that brought about this tragic end.
Having spoken only to a couple of friends and left messages for one of her sisters, being such a long way away I felt able to make some kind of contact through Facebook, with strangers feeling just as helpless as I did.
The experience of these very personal losses is in stark contrast to death Hollywood style, and makes life here seem even more unreal. In 2009, the non-stop TV coverage of Michael Jackson’s death, and the way the town came to a standstill for what felt like weeks, turned death into the must-have accessory of the season. Some people have indeed turned their experience of the star’s passing into a full-time job.
Celebrity death is always big news here. Before Christmas, we saw the death of actress and singer Brittany Murphy and, last week, the Johnson and Johnson heiress Casey Johnson. TV cameras were outside the latter’s home for hours, continually reporting that there was no news and nothing to report. But that didn’t stop journalists standing outside the dead woman’s Hollywood home, continually reporting that there was (still) nothing to report.
Then, on Friday, there suddenly was. There was a fracas outside the home, from which Casey’s two small dogs were being taken, allegedly to be put down so that they could be buried with their owner. Casey’s girlfriend/fiancee Tila Tequila, was hysterical, as the pooches were bundled into another friend’s car.
Hollywood death is such big business here; there is even a site called hollywoodmemoir.com, which features “recently died famous Hollywood celebrities, actors’ health, accidents, and major news”. “Searching for Hollywood death?” says one headline, before pointing you in the direction of “Death Hollywood at Amazon”.
There are discussion boards and blogs to which you can contribute, too. “Is it just me?” asks one, “or are there almost no deaths in Hollywood lately?” Moral: never write a blog like this on 8th December.
Death can be a niche market, too: for example the section detailing “Wrestlers Who Died” (Bad News Brown, aged 63; Hercules, 46; Johnny Grunge of Public Enemy, 39 – of sleep apnea complications - there really is a Hollywood movie just crying out to be made here).
And should you wish to do your research according to method of passing rather than profession, you can just click on one of the headings under “Major Causes of Death”, which are: accidental, cancer, drug, heart attack, heart failure, lung, natural cause, suicide.
It all feels a far remove from the real thing, yet for every one of these Hollywood deaths, too, there is a band of friends and relatives mourning their loss.
Life doesn’t get any easier.
But above clouds, you can sometimes believe.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
New Year Chimes At 4pm 1/3/10
Did everyone go to Barbados for New Year?
Simon Cowell, Sir Philip Green, Emma Forbes, Michael Winner . . . Oh, no, I forgot: Michael Winner decided, for the first time in 30 years, to spend it in Miami, with Michael Caine.
Knowing that neither of them would be in Barbados was the only thing that made the island sound remotely appealing to me, both men having been appallingly rude to me at various points in my career; but still, I was happy to be spending the festivities in LA.
I can’t ever remember a New Year’s Eve when I have been so hot, I thought I would have to don a bikini. As my friends froze in temperatures of minus six back at home, I delighted in texting them to inform them that I was off to Santa Monica to celebrate in Ye Olde King’s Head, a British pub near the beach.
Transport is so ridiculously cheap, not to mention efficient, here (the buses run 24/7), I still have no need of a car. The journey from Beverly Hills took just under half an hour and cost $1.25 (about 75p), and as a bus is going to be sitting in the same traffic as any car, it still seems to me the best way of getting around.
I also ensure that I make friends only with people who come to Beverly Hills in their cars, or who are on my bus route, or within walking distance of my home. So far, it’s worked out rather well.
Ye Olde King’s Head was so packed, I had to beg to gain entrance. It’s the place to go if you want to watch sport, too, although I didn’t make it to their 5am showing of Leeds United’s 1-0 FA Cup victory over Manchester United on Sunday morning.
A pity. I am a lifelong Leeds United supporter and remember their only FA Cup final win over Arsenal in 1972. I only became a Leeds supporter because they beat Manchester United in some game, and there was a big anti- Man U faction even in my day.
I adored Eddie Gray and when I met him in southern Spain last year, spent an hour reminiscing about the good old days. It’s just a pity that it was Andy Gray to whom I was chatting, and when I later realised my mistake, Andy confessed that he had been a tad confused as to why I had been banging on about Leeds for so long.
Clearly, after my Gareth Edwards/Tom Shanklin case of mistaken identity two weeks ago, I need to pay more attention to sports personalities’ photographs.
The sun was streaming into the YOKH as customers counted down the last minute to midnight/4pm local time, and that was really weird. In the UK I am usually wiping somebody’s vomit off my dress by that time, but YOKH was a very civilised affair, and I met some really terrific people – French, German, American, as well as Brits - in what appears to be quite a friendly community down in Santa Monica.
I returned to Beverly Hills, thinking what a strange year 2009 had been. I came to LA to do a writing course in March, and, encouraged by the screenwriter and teacher Blake Snyder, moved here on April 1st.
Under his guidance and support, I felt more creatively inspired than I had done in years. When he died suddenly on August 4th, I felt, and continue to feel, a hole in my life that makes me breathless with the disbelief of losing what once filled it with such joy and love.
I can only try to work as I know Blake would have wanted me to, and try to fulfil the potential he recognised and which had lain dormant for so much of my pre-LA life.
Blake’s third book on screenwriting has just come out (Save the Cat! Strikes Back), and I know that it will it inspire me just as much as his first two did.
I’ve also been reading Rilke (not in the original German, I hasten to add), a poet whose verses and prose are full of such wisdom and insight, it is impossible not to feel the stirrings of optimism, even in the face of grief.
In Letters to a Young Poet, he writes to Franz Xaver Kappus on the nature of sadness, a “new thing” that enters our hearts and changes us “as a house changes into which a guest has entered.” It is these moments, he says, in which “our future sets foot in us”, “in order to transform itself in us long before it happens.”
Blake believed in the power of transformation; it is what predominantly informed his life and the screenwriting techniques that he so brilliantly taught.
At the end of the decade, I regard my coming to LA and meeting him as one of the most transformative, blessed, and, yes, lucky, experiences of my life.
The American Dream may not be all it’s cracked up to be, but there are still some pretty good slumber parties to enjoy.
Welcome, 2010.
Simon Cowell, Sir Philip Green, Emma Forbes, Michael Winner . . . Oh, no, I forgot: Michael Winner decided, for the first time in 30 years, to spend it in Miami, with Michael Caine.
Knowing that neither of them would be in Barbados was the only thing that made the island sound remotely appealing to me, both men having been appallingly rude to me at various points in my career; but still, I was happy to be spending the festivities in LA.
I can’t ever remember a New Year’s Eve when I have been so hot, I thought I would have to don a bikini. As my friends froze in temperatures of minus six back at home, I delighted in texting them to inform them that I was off to Santa Monica to celebrate in Ye Olde King’s Head, a British pub near the beach.
Transport is so ridiculously cheap, not to mention efficient, here (the buses run 24/7), I still have no need of a car. The journey from Beverly Hills took just under half an hour and cost $1.25 (about 75p), and as a bus is going to be sitting in the same traffic as any car, it still seems to me the best way of getting around.
I also ensure that I make friends only with people who come to Beverly Hills in their cars, or who are on my bus route, or within walking distance of my home. So far, it’s worked out rather well.
Ye Olde King’s Head was so packed, I had to beg to gain entrance. It’s the place to go if you want to watch sport, too, although I didn’t make it to their 5am showing of Leeds United’s 1-0 FA Cup victory over Manchester United on Sunday morning.
A pity. I am a lifelong Leeds United supporter and remember their only FA Cup final win over Arsenal in 1972. I only became a Leeds supporter because they beat Manchester United in some game, and there was a big anti- Man U faction even in my day.
I adored Eddie Gray and when I met him in southern Spain last year, spent an hour reminiscing about the good old days. It’s just a pity that it was Andy Gray to whom I was chatting, and when I later realised my mistake, Andy confessed that he had been a tad confused as to why I had been banging on about Leeds for so long.
Clearly, after my Gareth Edwards/Tom Shanklin case of mistaken identity two weeks ago, I need to pay more attention to sports personalities’ photographs.
The sun was streaming into the YOKH as customers counted down the last minute to midnight/4pm local time, and that was really weird. In the UK I am usually wiping somebody’s vomit off my dress by that time, but YOKH was a very civilised affair, and I met some really terrific people – French, German, American, as well as Brits - in what appears to be quite a friendly community down in Santa Monica.
I returned to Beverly Hills, thinking what a strange year 2009 had been. I came to LA to do a writing course in March, and, encouraged by the screenwriter and teacher Blake Snyder, moved here on April 1st.
Under his guidance and support, I felt more creatively inspired than I had done in years. When he died suddenly on August 4th, I felt, and continue to feel, a hole in my life that makes me breathless with the disbelief of losing what once filled it with such joy and love.
I can only try to work as I know Blake would have wanted me to, and try to fulfil the potential he recognised and which had lain dormant for so much of my pre-LA life.
Blake’s third book on screenwriting has just come out (Save the Cat! Strikes Back), and I know that it will it inspire me just as much as his first two did.
I’ve also been reading Rilke (not in the original German, I hasten to add), a poet whose verses and prose are full of such wisdom and insight, it is impossible not to feel the stirrings of optimism, even in the face of grief.
In Letters to a Young Poet, he writes to Franz Xaver Kappus on the nature of sadness, a “new thing” that enters our hearts and changes us “as a house changes into which a guest has entered.” It is these moments, he says, in which “our future sets foot in us”, “in order to transform itself in us long before it happens.”
Blake believed in the power of transformation; it is what predominantly informed his life and the screenwriting techniques that he so brilliantly taught.
At the end of the decade, I regard my coming to LA and meeting him as one of the most transformative, blessed, and, yes, lucky, experiences of my life.
The American Dream may not be all it’s cracked up to be, but there are still some pretty good slumber parties to enjoy.
Welcome, 2010.
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