50 on 50

A little comic gem coming from Ray Richmond at Past Deadline:

"In preparation for turning age 50 on Friday (10/19), I share the following 50 things taught me by Hollywood:

1. When the going gets tough, the tough get a lawyer.
2. If you're an actor who isn't lying about his age, you're probably unemployed.
3. Biggest Lie in Showbiz: "I haven't had any work done."
4. 2nd Biggest Lie: "It's not about the money."
5. 3rd Biggest Lie: "It's an honor just to be nominated."
6. 4th Biggest Lie: "We'll call you when we're staffing up."
7. 5th Biggest Lie: "I would never do that to a friend."
8. Seating is always limited.
9. They aren't laughing with you but at you.
10. 40 is the old 40.
11. People who say they watch no TV watch the most.
12. The most sexually-charged workplaces on Earth are hospitals and law offices.
13. Sex sells. Money talks. Religion divides. And everybody loves Pixar.
14. A lot of people believe that Oprah Winfrey is God, seemingly including Oprah.
15. But it's Jerry Bruckheimer who rules the world, of course.
16. Overrated: Conan O'Brien, Rachael Ray, "Grey's Anatomy," the 18-49 Demographic, TiVo
17. Underrated: Rainn Wilson, Keith Olbermann, "Rescue Me," Susie Essman, TV Downloads
18. It's not what you know, it's whose ass you have to kiss.
19. You're only as popular as your job. Lose it and watch your "friends" disappear.
20. An agent, however, is a true friend who will stick by you always.
21. All Ben Stiller comedies are exactly the same.
22. Writers deserve far more credit than they ever get.
23. Reality TV isn't.
24. When someone leaves a job to "spend more time with my family" or "explore other opportunities," they've been fired.
25. If they leave to take a post with an Internet start-up, they soon WILL be fired.
26. If you're a celebrity, it's far easier to adopt kids from Africa.
27. People who make a lousy movie or TV show are always the last to know.
28. Being rich means never having to say you're sorry.
29. The heftier the marketing/promo budget, the less interest I have in seeing it.
30. Most big hits happen by accident.
31. Having one hit will buy a producer four flops.
32. If you're British, your chances of winning a Golden Globe increase tenfold.
33. Anything worth creating is worth stealing.
34. If you're an actress on a TV series, you're expected never to eat again.
35. Great acting can't save a bad script, but bad acting can undo a great one.
36. There's far more quality to be found on television than at the movies.
37. If you want your book to sell, be sure it has a character named "Harry" or "Potter" (or both).
38. If you crave respect, try dying.
39. Critics care far less about enlightening consumers than they do impressing other critics.
40. It's all right to make fun of white guys but nobody else.
41. Michael Jackson is a white guy.
42. People can be made to say and do (and sign) anything if there's a camera nearby.
43. The cost of free speech keeps rising.
44. Multiplex Law #1: If you attend a slasher film, at least one mother will have brought along her baby.
45. Multiplex Law #2: The person sitting behind you always has Restless Leg Syndrome.
46. Multiplex Law #3: And ADD.
47. Multiplex Law #4: And just ate a massive bean burrito.
48. Multiplex Law #5: Popcorn tastes much better in the dark.
49. Hollywood thinks people care far more about its inner workings than they actually do.
50. Confessing to being 50 is truly idiotic."

Not funny.

Los Angeles county is beseiged by the worst wildfires in it's history currently. They won't stop until Friday, it seems. Luckily, there are fires to the North, to the South, and to the West of Burbank/downtown LA. So we're surrounded (glass half empty) but more importantly not on fire (glass half full). This area, currently, is all right, but the magnitude of the fire threat is still terrifying. The sky hasn't been too clear and glowed a deep, deep orange as the sun set. Yesterday night my lips parched and chapped and I thought nothing of it until I realized that it was happening to everyone... it's because the fire is sucking all the moisture out of the air. Dry skin, dry lips, dry hair. And San Diego is in flames.

Black Widows, Bronchitis, and Wildfires all within the first month of arrival... I'm almost expecting an earthquake to happen by the end of the week.

As a matter of fact, in all seriousness, I'm going to buy an emergency relief kit and safebox tomorrow. Scary, I know, but a necessary measure.

Broken Taillight

No, it hasn't happened yet thank god, because my Prius is barely two months old, but such a thing repeatedly appears as one of my biggest fears. Since buying the new car, I've developed a terror that there are controls on it I am forgetting about or don't understand. Sometimes the futuristic thing gets confusing; the car has no key start, for example, but a power button. Like a vaccum cleaner or an electric toothbrush. The wipers have four settings all on the same handle but none are pictured, they are implied. When I first drove it from the dealership with my mother I was driving at 30 miles an hour on the highway because I accidently had the digital display on kilometers (it took a few miles before I felt there was something horribly wrong and pulled over to proceed pressing every button on the dash to get it to get it back to American settings). The worst, though, is the lights. Although simple, there's three settings and none are automatic. When I first drove in the dark, nearly every car I passed was signaling me, but I didn't gather that my high beams were on until later. Until I finally figured out the headlights, I'd become completely paranoid about the lights as a whole, unsure if my automatic starting of the car turns the signals or the parking lights on, too. Lately, I've been driving and get hypersensitive towards fellow drivers. I play my electronic music very loudly through closed windows, and if I do anything wrong, it isn't likely that I'm going to quickly hear other people spewing road rages at me. I shrug it off when some asshole of a driver seems particularly bent on focusing his evil stares through my windows, but every time it happens, with my car in the pristine shape it is, I can't help wondering if it's me. Did I do something wrong? Because most of the time I probably wouldn't know.

Sometimes driving through LA is like walking in public with toilet paper stuck to your shoe. Except the toilet paper can cost you hundreds, everybody's hatred, and you know, even maybe your life.

Financial Security!

Congratulations to Lou, blog-filiate and friend, for securing a permanent job at a certain awesome studio (that made the moderate successes "Finding Nemo" and "Toy Story" and et cetera) before even graduating college. Yeah baby, tell me all your industry secrets.

Stop the Presses

powered by ODEO
Yes! I'm back!

Restart the Remix!!!

Sincere apologies to the readers of this blog (of which there are three!) for my deserting you. Now I probably have half a reader left, and will have to win the masses back because, you know, it will make me feel good inside.

I worked a film two weeks ago that I had to quit because my housing situation was too pressing. The movers brought in everything in the middle of the shoot and the living room was a sea of cardboard for a week before enough was enough. It took me over a week to finally unpack and organize things to my liking. Moving is an exciting yet hellish experience, especially when every day you're shopping and ringing up prices that make your eyes roll into the back of your head. I rearranged my room three times, pushing a desk, dresser, and full size bed around a 15x15 carpeted room in some sort of horrific act of zen-achieving masochism.

Things have calmed down recently. The walls are still bare around the building for I have yet to risk my life hanging posters framed with glass. My closet still has no door, and I missed yesterday's episode of "Heroes" (DON'T TELL ME!). But still, things are calm.

Lacking the Jaded gene has been fun as of late. I drive around and actually enjoy my surroundings, knowing that it'll only be a (very) short time before I ignore all of it, a New Yorker who's never ridden the red bus. I drove by Mulholland Drive. I went to see a movie in a Hollywood cinema and there was a separate VIP ticket line I wasn't allowed in. I saw the 30 Days of Night Premiere maddness outside of the Grauman's Chinese and spotted Sam Raimi. I had a job that took me driving to Beverly Hills, where I parked outside a Bentley dealership. I've never seen a Bentley dealership before, hell, if I knew anything about cars, I might know whether I've even seen a Bentley before. I even saw the LAPD arrest someone.

Before long such starry-eyed images will surely fade into the grim silly putty that is a diluted and corrupted future. A future of movies. How does one survive such a future? By laughing at it of course. Laugh. Have fun with it. Point and stare, pick out the inconsistencies, take it all in stride and never seriously. The funniest thing about Hollywood is the obvious two-faced philosophy of its existence. Thus, the key to survival Hell-A. That's probably why I somehow, in someway, even having come from the tightass of New York, I'm having plenty of fun here.

Did I mention that I have a Prius Hybrid Car? That helps me have fun, too.

I discoverd some amazing Techno that was playing over the loudspeaker at Virgin. The artist is Digitalism and the album is "Idealistic". It makes for amazing diving music. The sample above is a Digitalism remix.

Break

I've hardly started and I'm already a flake. Psychologically it is impossible to keep this blog until my life is somewhat in order, and by order I mean get my possesions in my possesion. The movers are a week late in getting them here and it's made me unable to focus on anything that has to do with a computer. Don't give up on me yet.

Transition

Captain's Log

First impression of Los Angeles was sun. Lots of sun. I'm reminded how four years in the shadow of skyscrapers has turned my skin its pearly pale, completely inadequate for the desert heat. The second impression was space. Highways and byways and crossways and longways, and of course, the car culture that comes with it... but everyone knows those two factors of Californay. What it did was put me in an immediate sense of vacation and I suddenly understood why the lackadaisical nature of working here is so attractive to some people. New York is my first love but it's much easier on the blood pressure to stress out on the beach than on the manhattan roofdeck.

I found my apartment by moving in with a friend who graduated from NYU two years ago. I didn't know what the apartment looked like really well or, frankly, cared where it was or its size, because I was just thankful I didn't have to bear the search for housing after coming over.


I live in this beautiful condo complex in Burbank, such a far cry in design from my apartment in a Financial District high rise. The apartment itself just stuns me because it has a living room, dining room, kitchen, second floor and separate bedrooms, four times as many rooms as my place in Manhattan, and only half the cost. We even have a balcony (although the only entrance is through someone's bedroom) with the best view of the community pool:


To think that I even have access to a pool is blasphemy to me. In addition to two flatmates there are two kitties as well, one of them an adorable kitten named Lyra that I'm having a blast messing with.

But these treats don't come without peril. I'm barely out of the concrete jungle and I've already had a brush with nature. The kitten ran out the front door one time and I had to stick my hand into a den of cobwebs to retrieve her from behind a flowerpot. Later on my roommate freaked out upon discovering the spider the nest belonged to was a Black Widow. She poured the entire contents of a spider spray bottle on it and it laid on its back with its thick, sticklike legs twitching and the red hourglass like a beacon on its abdomen. It appears I unknowingly had miraculously evaded being bit by the most venomous spider in North America.

Despite such brushes with death, I've accepted LA wholly in a matter of days. I actually very much like it here, and have no real qualms yet about driving short distances in traffic, as long as I have my iPod running which I listened to incessantly on the subway anyways. Many of the major Studios are located in Burbank (Disney, Warner Brothers, NBC), and it is often in a normal commute to have to drive alongside them. It's probably just me being a newbie to this whole thing, but there is a comfort (or maybe an excitement) in being in a place where film is so highly celebrated.

The sun sets in alignment with the street.

Entry

Captain's Log
Moving out of New York was pretty smooth. It happened so long ago I really don't remember it. Instead of going home I went to visit friends at Umass Amherst before missing a bus to take me to Newton, Massachusetts to see the family before we don't see each other for forever (but not really). I got there eventually, of course, celebrated the Jewish new year together in one absolutely gigantic feast of a dinner. My mother and I woke up at the crack of dawn to get an early flight direct to Los Angeles, carrying, due to the weight limit, two suitcases and two carry ons each. Her stuff took half a suitcase, one of my hard drives alone took the other half.

Our plane took off and started making its turn around the bay. But then it kept turning. It seemed to me that we were definitely doing a whole lot of turning. For a moment I was trying to figure out the route we were going to fly to the west cost exactly, considering it's, well... west, when the captain's voice crackles, "Prepare for landing." After only 15 minutes in the air we landed.

We were debarked; turns out some passengers smelled burning and after investigation there had been some electrical issue causing it. As we waited for the mechanics to right our plane, after about an hour they said they figured out the problem, had fixed it, and were going to run the series of rote tests that every plane gets before boarding. Apparently it must have been something freaky, because they followed by cancelling the flight altogether and accommodating all passengers on something else. We took four extra hours and a stop in Chicago to get to LA. The lesson (if I make something out of nothing) is not that American sucks, which it may, but that you should still let attendants know if something's burning or the back of the plane is falling off. I caught "Snakes on a Plane" on one of the movie channels the night before the flight and although it didn't affect my comfort level with flying it may have affected fellow passengers as they were long subjected to terrible snake jokes.

L.A. from the plane is a massive, sprawling metropolis with no downtown visible, highways snaking around like veins on an 80-year old geezer and clay-shingled houses clumped together on roads so that from above they look like those candy necklaces you got in party bags when you were a kid.

It was kind of freaky to be talking about earthquakes with insurance agents.

Also, this guy is a dick.



NEXT TIME: The apartment, the pool, the spider, the car.

Goodbye

Today is my final day in New York.



Damn straight.

Soccer Mom sneak preview

I shouldn't be putting unfinished work on here, but this is pretty buzzworthy and makes me all happy inside. From the upcoming short film "Soccer Mom", to be completed October 2007

Sketchy Sketchy

It's not very good, but it's also pretty good for me being bored tonight and not putting in a lot of effort.

(PS: Too many episodes of Death Note in succession..)

Drawing

What happens when you listen the the Idan Raichel Project albums four times through without pause.

Animation Test!

The firs color export from Animo of "Zombie Gets A Date". It's just a taste of what's to come...

Welcome me to blogspot. This will soon become the place of discourse for a displaced girl, once she sets foot out of the comfortable (un-comfortable) world of New York City into the uncomfortable (comfortable) world of Los Angeles.

It's enough for a reality show! Or at least an interesting public blog, I guess.

-L