I Love L.A. ...sort of

Fortunate enough to travel to LA for 2.5 of conference last week, and the usual blur of cultural overload ensued. TV people that I met were pretty darn nice, which was a bit shocking. Josh Logan said Hollywood is all about sincerity. Once you can fake that, everything else is easy.

It’s nice to be fooled sometimes.

Stayed at the Grafton, uber-cool on Sunset. It’s a kind of wannabe Standard or W Hotel. With the picture of James Dean smoking in the room; the animal skin poly quilts; the “it’s art, it’s not soft-core” giant photos of, well, cleavage and legs over the bed, and the usual inverse relationship of beauty to civility in the staff (the more of the former, the less of the latter), it was definitely not Kansas. Not that I didn’t like it. Nice pool.

Farewell to the Master.
I once heard a story* about Ingmar Bergman in LA. He was there for a set of meetings, auditions, etc., which he conducted entirely from his hotel, refusing to leave it because he believed the city to be soulless. After a week, his wife convinced him he had no right to his opinion as he had experienced nothing first-hand, and that he ought to go out and see it for himself. Having no driver’s license, he ordered up a limo. It happened to be Thanksgiving Day, which no one explained to himHe rode in silence behind the tinted glass for 20 minutes. Zero pedestrians, zero open shops, little traffic, few signs of human habitation. Bergman turns to his wife and says, “I think I am in Hell.” He goes back to his hotel room , packs his bags, and immediately heads home to his island off the coast of Iceland.**

That’s not me. I love L.A…. sort of.

I like the feeling that it’s not the end of America, where every desperado, Dairy Queen girl and ad exec west of the Mississippi slid like marbles into the canyon, but instead the Easternmost city of this new 21^st century Pacific Rim country… mixing Asian and West, Mexican, Latin American, African-American cultures and a zillion others. How the orientation is so much not European-American immigrant vs. WASP like on the East Coast, how it’s not set, how you have the feeling that really human beings shouldn’t be there at all, it’s a desert and the whole thing is a giant act of will and imagination and greed and love and magic. Unless you get a room with bad air at the Grafton, in which case you come home with a sore throat that lingers for days. Well, you know, read Raymond Chandler and Joan Didion and Steve Martin and Anthony Kiedis for the rest of it, I guess, they can say it better. Or if you want to feel it, go up to the Getty Center, where the air is clear, the marble is white, and the water is running everywhere in Zen-like trickles…. recycling I hope. Yes?

*okay, I'm a name dropper, Sven Nyquist told me. I once worked on the same project as the brilliant cinematographer, who, in the few times I was in the same room as him, was kind, courtly, down to earth, loved tennis and was generous with anecdotes. I see him chuckling. Check out the film his son made about him for a good time.... Light is My Friend, I think it's called.

**(Marginalia: the opening line of Woody Allen’s NY Times review of Bergman’s autobiography: “Mostly, it’s about stomach troubles.” )