Bit of a Hollywood Anarchist
A lil' fun excerpt
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Welcome, Sternal Journalists old and new!
Last week, I was at my friends Ray and Sivan’s excellent comedy show, Mail Time. It’s at Brews Brothers in the valley. Good beer, good comedy, they did not ask me to plug, but it was the setting for this little anecdote so I thought I might as well.
Also, it’s where I took this picture that I hilariously captioned:
Gentle incoherency-shaming, always a good time.
Anyway, my friend Scottie, another comedian whose home I had the pleasure of visiting a few weeks ago sidled up to me during the show and said, “You know, once a week, my roommate will be like ‘I’m a bit of a Hollywood anarchist.’”
I laughed, Scottie laughed, we both knew exactly what he was talking about. Because when I was at Scottie’s home a few weeks ago, I was seated next to Scottie’s roommate while drinking beers and talking about the ins and outs of the entertainment industry.
And pretty much whenever I am drinking beers and talking about the ins and outs of the entertainment industry, I will at some point utter the phrase, “I meeean, I’m a bit of a Hollywood anarchist.”
And I’m not talking scary-violent anarchy1, I’m just talking about (figuratively) dismantling or minimizing some of the institutional power structures that are currently in place, changes which—by the way!—are called for or wished for by pretty much everyone I know who has “made it” to the other side.
But I’m also a realist (sometimes) and know that, as much as I can create an entire fake management company with phone numbers, e-mails, and fake employees who I give different voices on the phone2 in order to subvert the traditional representation system, it’s unlikely that things will change overnight.
So in the meantime, one of my myriad side projects is a big story or little novella inspired by my love-hate relationship with entertainment and industry and Los Angeles and Hollywood. It has much more love than hate in it because I have much more love than hate for all the above, but it does get a little sassy at times.
This week I’m sharing an excerpt from the still quite rough first chapter (I apologize to my writing group for not having yet changed a goddamned thing since I got your wonderful feedback):
BEGIN EXCERPT
Here’s a thing about Los Angeles whether you’ve been or not: yes, it’s spread out. Everyone knows about the sprawl to some degree, whether they’ve viscerally learnt it while crossing the chasm of “places I don’t need to be” between two places they very much do; or they just know it because they’ve heard about the importance of highways and cars and never walking. It’s sort of like a joke that’s not a joke. The sprawl of LA is more parable than punchline.
And so everyone does know that, but they don’t quite get (I don’t think) that every piece of LA is also spread out. That’s what makes the sprawl. That you simply can’t live a life just in one part of Los Angeles. The city forces you to know all of itself. Los Angeles is the municipal embodiment of “If you can’t handle me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best.”
So the entertainment industry, this big thing that globally controls the narrative of Los Angeles, it’s just—in the right light—funny how much L.A. bats it around and really doesn’t give a damn. You could even let yourself laugh about it. You could be running 35 minutes late because a trip that should take 20 minutes but normally takes an hour, is currently taking an hour and 35 minutes, and instead of cursing and rueing and texting while driving, you could just laugh!
You could think about all the people purple in the face that, yet again, their self-importance is failing to propel their Audis and Lexes and Minis over the other cars―over the little pockets of weather that are a city completely bereft of Industry. You could enjoy the fact that the city beats the industry every day, every single day.
You could go down the rabbit hole of remembering that, if the industry had it’s way, the most important people would get to live in Malibu (as, well actually, many of those who think themselves that, do), then their offices―the places they have to actually go and work most days—would be a pop down the PCH in Brentwood and Santa Monica, and then West LA/Palms/Mar Vista would be plowed―razed(!)―for all the studios to relocate, so that when these Malibu dwellers had to occasionally go shake things down and point what’s what—take up space and time, so to speak—on the actual sets where the actual work is done, it would be but a 15 minute drive tops with the other traffic being only the other Malibutians.
And so, remembering that, you could really, truly enjoy that that is not the case. These people, this machine, who anywhere else in the world, whisper “we run that town,” that the town very specifically runs them.
Because they made the huge mistake. They acted as though they are all that is there, that anything not industry is simply weather. A non-carbon-based, if scientifically-founded entity to contend with. But when you treat something as weather, you make it weather.
And the whole thing about weather is that it can not be, will not be, simply is not ever to be controlled.
END EXCERPT
Oooh, spooky, right? Okay, maybe not spooky, but ominous! I hope not too ominous. It’s going to be a story heavily involving a 300 year old tortoise and his human companion who is trying to win the tortoise’s life rights back from one of the major entertainment conglomerates. It won’t be too spooky or ominous.
Neither will this week’s:
Recommendations!
Los Angeles. Poem. A really nice poem that gets to the push-and-pull of LA way better than I’ve achieved so far, recommended by someone who was giving me notes on the above!
The King’s Man. Movie. Very popcorn-y action spy movie that takes place over the backdrop of World War I. It is very historically inaccurate, but still pulls in a lot of real events that had me googling every ten minutes saying “Damn, that’s actually how that happened??” Has like 40% on RottenTomatoes, but I liked it. Felt like a lowbrow Grand Budapest Hotel (also stars Ralph Fiennes).
Stay Away From Matthew Magill. Podcast. This is a podcast about a mysterious conman type. It, at some point, recognizes the world doesn’t need another podcast about a mysterious con man type and shifts gears in a way that’s worth listening to find out. If you’ve ever gotten lost in the sauce on a work project, this is for you.
Rothanial. Stand-Up Special (HBO). Another excellent showing from Jerrod Carmichael. If you haven’t heard what it’s about, try to watch it before you do! I went in blind and found it all the more fulfilling for it.
Alrighty, that’s all! Be weather! Be a little bit of an anarchist! Next week, that interview I’ve been promising!
Love,
Julian
P.S. I spend anywhere between two and twelve hours a week on the Sternal Journal. If you enjoy receiving it (and are RICH) consider becoming a paying subscriber. For just a few bucks a month, you can provide me with a bit more time to come up with fun topics, poems, and interviews; and you with probably fewer typos.
Many who are more theory-educated than I would surely point out that anarchy isn’t even violent at its essence, but just saying it to be perfectly clear!
Real thing I did! Got at least two meetings from it. Anyone can!