The Ghosts in Hollywood

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. I moved to Los Angeles in 2004 at the beginning of November, and moved in the day George W. Bush was re-elected. The more things change. With no family to speak of nearby, my friend Paul Prischman invited me to a friendsgiving that year and it was something we did most years. At least, until 2009 when Paul died.

I got up this morning and ran errands. In 2017 I moved away from the Franklin/Beachwood area for the first time since I moved here as my then-roommate decided to stop paying rent and basically fled the state. I tried to help them as much as I could, but even shoring back rent up wasn't enough to make coming back to LA an option. As they were my closest friend on some level there is a grief to this I don't really know if I've fully addressed. So I moved to Silver Lake for a couple of years. I had to leave Silver Lake during Covid because my roommate moved out because they were furloughed and it did not appear that their work would be coming back any time soon. They also had a unreliable partner that I think they thought being closer to with the thought that that might solve some problems. Don't know. After a couple of months where the owner wanted me to pay an extra $400 a month to have the place to myself and I was like "Yeah, no." the owner was losing their mind and wanted to get me out so she could rent the unit in total, so I moved out and back to the exact same block I was on before. Just a different building/company/etc . But when I left living in Hollywood, I stopped smoking the occasional cigar, so for the most part I generally don't travel down to La Brea near where I would get them, maybe partly because the best way to avoid temptation is to not be close to anything that's tempting. But today I went that direction to go to a store I hadn't been to before: Total Wine to get booze for the holiday.

After twenty years in one town - especially here in the last 20 years - that walk meant going by places that used to be places.  The Cat and Fiddle is now something else. The Sharky's is boarded up. Amoeba's old location is now an art gallery? The still shuttered Arclight sits next to a Veggie Grill that is shockingly still in business. There are many places of sacred memories that no longer exist as they once did. There is some humor in it too, as certain locations turn over so often that you don't feel sorry for the businesses so much as think some rube got rooked by a real estate agent. But then it fades. That time you had that amazing date, was the name of that place 33 Taps? Was it something like that? We watched the soccer game I didn't care about but every dude was jealous of me, and I could tell? The burger joint that was like Devil themed or some shit on Hollywood that did a damn good burger. Umami burgers and American Apparels now just memories.  

Some stuff hasn't changed. The bar across from the Chinese seems to be still going. I used to meet up with James Rocchi there before screenings. When Covid was almost done with the first wave, and vaccines were out but it was still not really over, James and I had reconnected (we were both out of the critiquing game)  and had spoken about going out dancing as middle aged white dudes looking for more friends and maybe someone to talk to when not flirting. Covid scuttled those plans. Sometime thereafter Rocchi had a heart attack and died. James loved cooking. Every time I make rice in a rice cooker and I get a good flop I think of him. 

I got to Total Wine. It's about two blocks away from BevMo but looks exactly the same in a lot of ways in that I can't tell if it's competition or just the same company but different. Going in I felt like I was giving money to Republicans, the discounts weren't great, and I got stuck behind a guy who spent $340.99 on bottles of booze that needed a discount code the cashier was unable to provide. 

Paul died and left some things to friends. One got a bottle of - what we called - Ridley Scott Scotch. It was a gift as Paul had worked on a number of Rid films, but he wasn't much of a drinker. And so every year when friends from the Friendsgiving got together, The bottle's owner Chris and I would have a drink to Paul. So I went to get a nice small bottle of Whiskey as - even when we friends don't get together - I always drink to Paul. Over the course of the years that Friendsgiving group saw multiple divorces, people moving away and death. With the industry such as it is these days, a lot has changed, and it seems whatever was of that tradition is mostly extinguished. I would find this sad if I didn't - like most people I know here - feel like it's hard to know where things are heading, and as work for many has either dried up, or hits in fits and starts, it's hard to be celebratory or even sure if anyone will still be living here in six months, and worse even than that, no longer working for the circus.  

The last couple years have been - especially since Covid - very rocky, and sometimes incredibly lonely. Outside of a month or so working on site for a specialty project (where I was in a room by myself for the most part), I've been work from home for over four and a half years now. I go into the office maybe once a month or so - mostly for pick ups - and as I am the sole person who works the night shift, I sometimes don't go in for events because they tend to be timed for people who work 9 to 5. Last year was the exception. I went to the Christmas party as I was told to come, but back then there were two of us on the evening shift. And so when the party ended (the owner got us barbeque, which was a brilliant choice) I went with my friend and co-worker Steve Kille to get a zombie at a tiki bar. He was big into that stuff. We ended up hanging out for an hour or so as he lived an hour outside of town and traffic hadn't died down  (and I was nursing the drink as I hadn't been drinking at bars in years) and talked all kinds of stuff. When we were slow, we would often video chat about whatever. He was a musician, I told him about something I was writing about groupies and he told me some fun stories. When we were hanging out he was rail thin and I told him, "man, you don't look good."

The last thing I told Steve Kille was I loved him. That, in retrospect, is a nice (albeit small) comfort. As he was going through Chemo, he was already less likely to answer when I called (which I had done a couple of times), and when he was put on call - basically "let go" though I don't know exactly how that worked and I was told the company was trying to help him so there could have been more to it that I don't know about, dude had cancer, his attention span wasn't doing well, etc. - I didn't know what to say. I don't know when Steve died, but as we were work friends, and as the whole social media + work friends thing isn't always great (often I think most of my old coworkers stay friends in case we need to find work, whereas I like to sometimes post things that people find combative), I never tried to friend him, and I don't know if he had socials. All I know is that one of my supervisors let me know he died and all I had was a phone number. Not an address or anyone else I could contact about it. What am I going to do? Call a dead man's phone to find out about a funeral that I wasn't invited to?

During quarantine we both got into making deluxe drinks and my go-to has been the White Russian with fruit as ice. He loved his zombies, but I am not making that, so I also got White Russian makings while out. 

I went to Trader Joe's off Hollywood and Vine. One friend works there and they told me today is their busiest day of the year. but when I went in, I got some frozen fruit and breezed out. The cashier lady I was talking to was also surprised it was quiet, but then after I paid I scoped the place out some more and saw that they no longer had any turkeys or ham. Any. "Yeah, we sold out on Tuesday."

Tomorrow, for the first time in my life I am cooking a proper Thanksgiving meal for myself. I have done a big ass cut of meat and scotch and Bond films, and other somewhat festive but not terribly elaborate dinners before on Holidays, but I've never done a turkey or ham. I generally top out at two stove tops in use at once. Tomorrow I've got a ham, stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, and green beans to make (along with cranberry sauce, which is good to go) so I think I will be hitting a full house, or four up one down or whatever cool expression there is for using the whole stove. I would buy bread or deserts, but as an adult booze and beer kind of takes their place. And though there will be leftovers, I won't be dining by myself. Those ghosts aren't all bad, you see. And though they might not be a comfort, they aren't always a burden either. It is better to live with ghosts than not. 

On Dakota Johnson (NSFW)

Without going through the history of nudity in cinema, which I'm kind of prepared to do, I think I can safely say that everyone understands movies aren't the hot beds of lust they once were, and as much as that has to do with foreign markets, the fact that you can watch whatever porn you desire on whatever device you're using to read this is a bigger factor. People used to go to movies for pornography, like how people used to masturbate to clothes catalogs. And though there are people who will tell you that the hint of sex is more erotic than sex itself, and that there's something infinitely more erotic about seeing but maybe not seeing a nipple or the hint of areola than someone spread eagle showing all, the former takes work, and involvement. Porn skips to the end.

Which is why it was something of a big deal for an actress to play the lead in FIFTY SHADES OF GREY because that book talks about the "Dirty Sex" that one woman wanted the leads in TWILIGHT to have, so it's something of a bait and switch. You might be drawn in by the idea of butt plugs and leather, but the end result is of course, marriage and domesticity. Having only worked on it without watching in total in the final film, they get married and I don't think anything actually naughty happens by the end. They have married sex. No one gets peed on. The sex contracts are a thing of the past because Christian is I believe "cured." Because it's a pornographic fantasy. No one's throwing a finger in the other's butt for old times sake because that would connote a real relationship. 

Taking on the role of the girl (I am not looking it up, its Anastasia Steele or something IIRC) in the film was a big deal, and made Dakota Johnson's career. And yet the films - like the books - have fallen off the world. Though recently How Did This Get Made did the first film, and I think they were planning on watching all three (they still might) but I got the impression that the film sucked too much for them to continue. As Jason Mantzoukas so eloquently put it "Why am I bored when there's this much nudity on screen?" Which is basically asking the question "Why isn't it erotic when Dakota Johnson is naked?"

I'm about to show some NSFW images of Miley Cyrus to make a point. So, if you're embarrassed easily, I'm sorry. 

Hopefully you've seen these before, I'm only using them to make a point. But here we see Miley Cyrus felating both a Billy club and an actual dildo. These are provocative images, and you can make an argument that Cyrus is bold and transgressive for doing this. 

But, and hear me out: What if she's not? What if instead of this being revealing (and there are less censored versions of these images), she just doesn't actually care? And that lack of care is actually just privilege? 

For generations, people who have posed nude for photos and cinema knew what they were doing and that it could come at a societal cost. Or if nothing else they were being revealing, that they were showing themselves in a way that was - for lack of a better word - naked. That people were so desperate to see Halle Berry topless that she could get paid a million dollars to do a nude scene. That attractive people could get naked and make a living at it. There is good and bad to this, but it isn't my point. Outside of actresses seemingly convinced they should after the big phone hacking, most new starlets don't really want or have to do nude scenes any more because that's the province of television. But we've seen a lot of nepo babies being almost cavalier about nude scenes. Dakota Johnson, Zoe Kravitz, Margaret Qualley, Maya Hawke, Lily Rose-Depp, etc. etc.. But at a time where most stars don't have to. 

But as the math is different, a lot of their nudity doesn't feel revealing or intimate. When Miley Cyrus is doing what she's doing in the pictures above, it might be shocking but I don't think it reads as erotic. Arguably it isn't meant to be erotic. It achieves a blatancy as does a lot of aggressively sexualized behavior that it's no longer recognizably human. You may want to sex someone so hard their eyes cross and their toes curl, but you can cross that line into it being so performative it isn't actually about the thing anymore. These are pictures that are so about sex they aren't. Because I don't believe Cyrus is wrapping her lips around that police pole with the intention of getting cops turned on, nor is it much of a commentary on policing, etc. It's pointless provocation and weirdly sexless sexuality. But maybe the point is its pointless if - and only if - Miley does it. From a semiotics viewpoint, she isn't giving anyone pleasure but herself, it's pictures of auto-fellatio. She's sucking her own dick, not anyone else's.

There's the old quote about rich people not being like you or I, but one thing that's changed is that the ability to be bubbled is greater than it's ever been in the history of the world. Angelica Huston saw some shit, but a lot of these nepo talents, born into fame and into ridiculous money, given the best private schools, told that they are special from birth, gifted into an industry through easy connections, never having to worry about paying for things or needing things or not getting free things... perhaps there is an entire class of people who - if not removed from humanity - have no idea how it functions for everyone else, and have no interest. Maybe we can feel that Johnson doesn't care. Maybe what's happening is that we know they're bragging that they can do this and there will be no consequences because they've proven they can do it without consequences so it doesn't have an erotic charge of being revealing. Maybe Miley Cyrus isn't celebrating the freedom that everyone can suck a cop's Billy club and not get in trouble or have people look at you funny, or in any way endanger your career. Maybe she's showing that she can, and most everyone else can't. And maybe Dakota Johnson isn't bad at acting or line deliveries, maybe she's just trying to act like a normal person but doesn't know how to, because she doesn't actually understand things like hunger or desire on a primitive level as she's never experienced them. And maybe we've got an entire generation of famous actors children who are incapable of emoting certain levels of remorse or despair because it's just not in their wheelhouse. Why should it be, they didn't have to work to get it.