Saturday 30 April 2011

By the way, in case you were worried I missed the Royal Wedding...

The more time I spend with the rich, the more I fear them..

So as a precursor to this evening's preceedings, let me tell you, it went something like this:

HH:  No, really, I can't, and anyway, that guy creeps me out.

Mad Ferrari:  No, sure, it'll be fine, I'm sure he's not a serial killer.

And so we ventured into the territory in which Jack Nicholson has two houses... God knows you don't need that face staring up at you off of a wall...

Genius as it may seem, two bottles of champagne and one miniskirt later we were in the depths of what was in fact engineering territory; much to my chagrin for an operating table and a blunt saw...  Full legnths of cable (oh my dear, but how easy to strangle you with) and still I remained unconvinced, but really, how could you ever expect to be taken down by a Miller Lite?  The mind boggles...

Saturday 23 April 2011

She just sat like a lobotomized duck in a cage...

That's it, I have at last found a blog to rival Dlisted in the hilarity stakes, and God it's good.

Let me preface this by informing you that this week was the first time I have had a car in LA.  And perhaps, this has not been the most beneficial to my fellow drivers.  Take exhibit A:



Yes, this occurred when I tried to parallel park between two ginormous (aka American standard) trucks up in West Hollywood.  Let's just say that: (a) it's a rare skill to be able to pretty much hang your car off of the rear bumper of another; and (b)  it's a long time since I have driven anything other than a bicycle, and there's probably a reason for that.  It's all boding so well for my California driving test next Tuesday; remind me to pick my short skirt up from the dry cleaners...

Anyway, back to my new discovery:  L.A. Can't Drive.  Seriously, crying with laughter as I peruse comments on dumb-ass manouvres executed all over town.  For example:

"In all fairness, this motherfracker hails from Alaska. However, with the way she was driving, she might as well hail from Venice Beach"

"However, whenever he wasn’t texting, he had the gall to morph into an impatient, zigzagging, tailgating, non-signaling jackass."  

"There were plenty of moments where she had clearance to cross the westbound lanes of Sunset, but she just sat like a lobotomized duck in a cage, while narrowly missing one collision after another with eastbound vehicles."

I fear I may be appearing on there soon...

Friday 22 April 2011

Lights, Camera, Body Bag

"So I've been up in Hollywood all day and I still can't find a body bag...":  this was the Future Director's preoccupation earlier this week as I worked my way through a foot-long hot-dog.  "Really, you would think that in this town it would be easy.  I mean, I have the syringes and the drugs already."  

Now, before you start freaking out thinking that this has become a 'snuff blog', be reassured that this is in fact, all in the name of art.  Namely, the art of visual fiddling (Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Orson Welles:  fiddlers all).
Lest I digress (snuff and fiddling in the same sentence, that should cause some interesting traffic on Google), let me tell you that this was for a 60-SECOND movie.  Yet it took all day.  And apart from actively ravishing some chicken wings (we were in Compton, of course there was good chicken...) my job as set-bitch assistant to the Future Director involved the following:  cleaning the floor, flower arranging, being a plastic surgeon and a hair-stylist, wardrobe-monkey and er, my personal favourite, dog-sitting (really, the dogs in this town:  so tired).
Honestly, this thing spent more time attached to my boob than... let's just leave it at than.

Anyway, it is going to be one hell of a one-minute movie, you can be certain of that.  Of course, I'll let you judge for yourself:











Did you guess it was about the dangers of Hollywood?

Thursday 21 April 2011

Obama is the Marie Antoinette of the 21st century, allegedly

This morning, following my 6.30am Hot Yoga Barre class (no judgment, you wear a bikini all year here) as I drank my morning cup of coffee (what, no tea?), I forgave the BBC for CBS (sacrilege!) and tried to embrace America.

 And then it happened:  " As Obama prepares for his visit to Los Angeles today...".  "Oh shit" I thought, "that's really going to fuck up the traffic."

What have they done to my brain?!  I have been here barely a month and already my number one concern when the President of the United States comes to town is the TRAFFIC?!  This can't be normal; so I checked in with the Hopa.  "Coincidentally, that is exactly what I thought when I read the news re: Obama.  Welcome to your new order of priorities."

Apparently, we are not the only ones:  "Obama is the Marie Antoinette of the 21st century." and other comments...

The philosophy of less, is more

I'm a pretty black and white kinda gal, so really doing things in halves is not an option.  Which is why I feel obliged to stick my neck out and just tell America:  no.  Is it too much to ask that for once you think (really, that's a request in itself...), and then go full fat?  Why is it necessary to ruin the pleasure of eating in order to eat more?  There's just no logic to it.

Take for example this:

Why would you eat a sugar-free cupcake?  Why would you not just eat the full sugar version, but in smaller quantities?

Now consider this:

Part of a VEGETARIAN diet?!  Are the meanings of their words different as well as their pronunciation?

And lastly, this: 
ORGANIC?!  It's supposed to be made out of shit.  That's the whole point of a hot-dog!!!

Feast your eyes on how it really should be done.
No, I couldn't eat a whole one either...

Saturday 16 April 2011

Bohemia by the bay, paradise on the skids....

"Venice is like doing acid. If you can't take it with you after you either come down or move away, you were never really there in the first place."
Anne Alexander
"Fear and loathing meet the best sunsets this side of Hawaii; dog shit meets a sweet ocean breeze; golden tans meet boozy pallors.....This place is so odd, unique...."
Michele Kort
"America's smorgasbord of the rationally challenged."
Doug Lansky
"Venice West is to Los Angeles what the Left Bank once was to Paris."
Lawrence Lipton
  "...only artists and criminals in those days. Venice West was a city of outsiders. It was (and still is) a last stop-off at the edge of America. ...Ocean and outlaws. Its setting is a perfect balance for poetry. Beauty and danger. Agony and rapture."
Philomene Long
"Ah, Venice, where one crazy man's canal dream has spawned more California stereotypes, hack artists and hippie coffee houses than anywhere outside of Santa Cruz."
Stephen Blackmoore
"Venice was and is full of lost places where people put up for sale the last worn bits of their souls, hoping no one will buy."
Ray Bradbury
"You used to be able to have a fat ass and wear a string bikini and shades; you could walk down the Venice Boardwalk with a joint in your mouth and fall in love. Now it’s an audition."
Susie Bright
"San Francisco may be slightly more sophisticated and cultured than Venice, but the only difference is in the apparal. The tiedye remains eternal..."
Vinnie Caggiano
"Venice Beach: proof of the biological impossibility of imagining a person being simultaneously good-looking and poor."
Douglas Coupland
 "Venice is as far west as you can get - in every way."
Keith Kirts
"I have looked for the center of the art scene. I went to Paris as a student. I lived in Venice, California."
Eleanor Coppola
"I don't know of any place that loves so passionately, hates so vehemently, or forgives so easily as Venice. "
Moe Stavnezer
"This is the only place that I don't feel out of place, because everyone here is out of place."
Arnold Schwarzenegger

And finally, a little bit of trivia:

Venice had changed in thirty years. The big indoor swimming pool and the amusement pier, with its Race Through the Clouds, were gone. Most of the canals had been abandoned or were filled with stagnant water. There were still trams that ran up and down the deserted beach walk, carrying a few elderly Jewish passengers, but most shops on Windward Avenue and on the ocean front were empty. The little grocery store on the corner sold maggot-infested meat. The whole neighborhood was so creepily shabby, so oddly macabre that Orson Welles used it as a set for his noir movie, Touch of Evil.
George Garrigues

If it's good enough for Orson...

Friday 15 April 2011

When London and California collide

I believe you can tell a lot about a nation by its choice of politicians (just as you can tell a lot about a man by his shoes), and so, the jury is out as I ponder the following, as twittered by my adopted (let's say, kept at arms length) Governator: 


It's the comments I find most disturbing...

Wednesday 13 April 2011

Because a dog got an agent before me...

It all started with this:


Let me put you out of your misery.  This dog looks exactly like the dog in Turner and Hooch.  I know this because I wasted minutes of my life debating what film the dog had starred in with the Handsome Neighbour whilst out shopping.  This, my friends, takes Hollywood star-spotting fuckery to a whole other level; one I am not entirely sure I am proud of.  Of course, neither of us could remember the name of the movie which is why, sober as a judge on an average Wednesday, I find myself IMDb-ing a dog... 

FYI, this is not the dog that starred in Turner and Hooch, that dog died in 1992, with more film credits to his name than I and most of the waiters in this town.  Why must this be?

Now I think of it, the dogs are everywhere.  Take a recent copy of the intellectually trying 'Star' magazine.  Breaking news... this dog also has an agent (and someone signed off on copy about it):




And this one gets to hang out on set:


I think I'll just give up now and write a screenplay about an American that inherits a frog's legs factory.  That should sell...

Presenting The Gorgeous Ladies Of Denny's (G.L.O.D.)

Presenting The Gorgeous Ladies Of Denny's (G.L.O.D.)

DListed, we love you.

Saturday 9 April 2011

The cliché is dead, long live the cliché

Whilst in a class on how to flog the same idea reworked and packaged with sponsorship from McDonalds (aka Marketing Entertainment: Strategies for the Global Marketplace), I learned that there is a film about to shoot in France in which an American will inherit a snail farm and thus have to move to France.  Really?  Who has written this?  Has the writer ever been to France?  Because this to me seems like the laziest concept to be pulled out of a writer's ass for a long time; I'm sure they were very handsomely paid...


Anyway, as much as I want to get on my soapbox and demand why you must all tarnish France with the same garlic coated brush, there is something irrisistabley easy about the French (draw from that what you will...).  So today, as I sit in Le Pain Quotidien roaming the free wifi from Hooters across the street (metaphor for?) I have decided to magnanimously share with you two of the most hilarious clips about France I have recently viewed.     God I miss Paris.


The American perspective, courtesy of Saturday Night Live:






And the British, merci, Catherine Tate:






Friday 8 April 2011

This morning whilst riding Doris...

This morning whilst riding Doris (yes, I know) I was stopped at the lights by a couple of van-drivng Mexicans who needed directions.  This begs questions on so many levels, mainly:  did I look that bad that they thought I was a Venice resident (God help me if I have lost the essence of Paris already)? Have I become so aggressive at driving a bicycle across two lanes of traffic when making a left turn that I clearly scare the crap out of people enough to warrant road-respect and thus, implied knowledge of where I was going (ha!)?  Or was it that they wanted to get a better look at my cycling-appropraite footwear?


Either way, Patti LaBelle would have approved of my jumpsuit this morning and so, I entered the bowels of the DMV.
For the uninitiated amongst you, this is the California Department of Motor Vehicles and has been championed by those less fresh off the boat and more jaded than I as the worst possible place to spend a day (and it will take that long), worse even, than the US Post Office.  The reason for my jolly into administrative hell?  An administrative clusterfuck courtesy of the UK Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency; this, my friends, is what you get for trying to lead an international life:  a headache in three nations, on two continents.  Gracias.

After handing over the paperwork, I finally got to take the written test which, if passed, permits one to drive whilst waiting for an appointment to take the practical test (is 'valet' an accepted response when asked how to park?  Just a thought).

I passed of course, but not because of anything I know about driving, but because of my knowledge of the American psyche.  Take note.  To each multiple-guess question apply the following criteria:  take three parts common sense; weigh up the option where you are most likely to get sued; add in a little American paranoia about health and safety; cross out the option you would apply if driving in Rome; and sprinkle with a little incredulous 'this coffee is hot' no shit Sherlock Big-Brother-ism.  Et voila, full marks!  Sometimes it pays to have been a lawyer...