20th May 2005
Los Angeles
Shit. I am such a fucking lousy blogger. So, so busy at work, so, so lazy at home. Anyway, I spent last week in LA. (UPDATE: I actually started this blog post last week, so the “last week” noted above is actually going on two weeks ago at this poing.) Been meaning to mention that. Nice place to visit, but…. (Have I mentioned before that cars are evil?)
L.A. What can I say? I’m a New Yorker. I went to one supermarket and three employees greeted with with a smile and kind words and an eagerness to please me as soon as I walked in the door. What the fuck? “Can I help you find something?” asked one sycophant. “Sure. I’m looking for soy milk.” “Certainly. You’ll find that in aisle 3, half way down, on the right hand side. May I show you?” [Me thinking: ‘What, am I a fucking idiot? You just told me exactly where it is. And now you need to escort me to half-way down aisle 3 on the right-hand side because you think I’m too fucking stupid to know my right from my left, or to count to three?’]
L.A. Hmmm.
I describe the above encounter to a friend who lives in L.A., and she said, laughing, “Well, it’s probably just their store policy. I’m sure they’re not really that friendly, but management has required them to greet everyone like that.” No fucking shit. But, I explained to her, in NY, it wouldn’t even occur to management to require the staff to try to be that “friendly.”
I did, however, much enjoy seeing a few friends in L.A. Working in the Internet industry, I manage to get to San Francisco 2-3 times a year, but I haven’t been to L.A. in several years. Driving around there always makes me think one thing: this place is just like New Jersey. Nicer weather, but otherwise the same endless sprawl of roads and highways, strip malls, mediocre restaurants.
Anyway, the only real point of this post (aside from dissing L.A., just because that’s what we NYers do) was to name drop some L.A. bloggers I met at a “Failure Party” BBQ at the bohemian pad of Matt Welch and his lovely Friench wife Emmanuelle Richard, friends of mine from Budapest in the early ’90s. I was particularly excited to meet Tony Pierce, of whose blog I’m a huge fan. I was surprised to what extent he was a goofball (of the lovable variety). Nonetheless, he did not disappoint in my perception that he was always in the company of a hottie, which he was this night. (Goofball hottie-magnet — who would have thought that a likely combination?) Also in attendance were former Prognosticator Ben Sullivan (whom I’m overdue to make rich, he reminds me), the impressively tattooed Sean Bonner, the soon-to-be-rich Marc Brown (if there is any justice in the world), the lucky-to-be-alive Luke Thompson (whose recently extracted, exploded appendix seemed to be repeating a bit on him that night), and film director Michael Wohl, who is planning a film on Gen Expats in Prague, who couldn’t get over his luck at being invited on short notice to this meeting of many such one-time Prague expats after cold-calling Matt via Google. (Michael, a bit of advice on your web site: frames are very 20th Century.)
No tags for this post
Leave a Reply