As for the film itself, I understood more the second time around.  “Mulholland Drive” simply cannot be viewed only once (unless you are in the category of unfortunate people who don’t like David Lynch films, in which case once is probably too much).  But then I did some research, and found out some really interesting things.  Since I rented and do not own the dvd, I did not know that Lynch inserted ten clues to watching the movie inside the back cover of the dvd box.
  I would encourage anyone who is about to watch the movie, whether for the first time or not, to check out Lynch’s clues beforehand.  But, for dvd renters with no access to the box, be warned that every link to the clues that I found online also contains people’s interpretations of the answers, which you should skip until after you concoct your own.

After reading Lynch’s clues and different interpretations of them, I have come to my own satisfying conclusions about what happened in the movie, when it happened, and what was represented.  I really like this video of Lynch explaining (or not explaining, in typically Lynch fashion) to an English teacher who says she didn’t understand the film, “you do know, you do know for yourself, and what you know is valid.”

But beyond the satisfying task of interpreting “Mulholland Drive” lie the film’s lessons about the mythical and real “Hollywood.”  Certainly, these themes are not new, having been explored in many previous films about the movie business, such as “Sunset Boulevard,” “Barton Fink,” and “The Player.” We know them by heart: Hollywood is where naive dreams come crashing against cynical reality, often represented by the loss of innocence of the starlet or the screenwriter fresh off the bus from Kansas, etc.  But I believe that living in the Los Angeles area, where many people work in or with the film industry and all of us know people who do, gives us a different lens through which to view “Mulholland Drive” and other films about Hollywood, and thus another level of satisfaction.

For me, watching a David Lynch movie is like Hollywood itself: it both attracts and repels, sometimes simultaneously.  But at least in the case of Lynch, the attraction always wins out.

Ex nihilo LA fit

Ever since I moved to Los Angeles, and to my dear Fairfax District, I’ve been meaning to eat at the historical Johnie’s Coffee Shop on Wilshire and Fairfax.  Of course, as with most things LA, the shop is a familiar combination of wide repute and complete unreality.  During a week of fiction, simulacrum, and frenzied media creation of a whole lot of expensive something out of almost nothing, it seemed like a fine time for a meal and a photograph: A garish pop star with a history of strange behaviors and legal troubles had died, thereby disrupting all Los Angeles streets, costing the city millions, and turning all national TV news into tawdry melodramatic fiction. Like the city that hosts it, Johnie’s is a movie prop.

To commemorate the event, I flew to New York City the night before the worst of LA’s apoplectic faux sorrow, and found myself at one of the few places in the world rivaling the pure falsity of our local “culture” industry: Times Square.  A funny thing had happened to New York: Times Square itself had become a community space.  A really intelligent bit of urban architecture had been put in place, turning a stretch of Broadway into a pedestrian zone, or really into a sort of concrete park, with the lane painted in decorative green (with spots), and lawn chairs provided by the city to create a kind of beach or boardwalk right at midtown.  Of course, in general, in my few days walking around NYC, I felt this intensifying sorrow at the lack of community space in Los Angeles.  People go out to events, to clubs, to private parties, and so on, in Los Angeles, but the sidewalks and thoroughfares are simply and only means of getting to places where things might happen.  In contrast, these community cities (like New York) have live music, picnics, aggregation of people who show an almost familial geniality, in their public parks and neighborhoods.  The difference is not just, nor even mainly, a distinction of indoors versus outdoors; if anything, on its face, the climate of LA should make it easier to create outdoor public spaces.  But even the outdoors of Los Angeles is enclosed, commercialized, part of a private domain of cultural production, fed back into very private homes through television, newspapers, and so on.  Of course we have isolated outbreaks of things like street art, in which Angelenos try desperately to break the auto-driven social barriers of Los Angeles urbanism; but they so far have rarely succeeded in more than art-school gestures of angst (as well meaning as such things often are).

Los Angeles, I love you, but you’re bringing me down.

In the absence of any actual Johnie’s, I decided to shoot the restroom art of a lovely Indian restaurant in NYC midtown, called Utsav. I had been there before on a couple occasions. Twice with a colleague who works in that other unreality of derivatives financial trading. Other times with my publisher of books printed on real paper.

If you’re the type of person who needs to see fluffy images of sweetness and sensitivity projected in large rooms in 90-minute chunks for entertainment, then this movie of entwined, slimy and squirming characters will probably make your brain swell and explode. Not a single scene relents from the anguish of its characters. It kicks off with a senseless death at a swank party peopled by blonde beauties and descends from there. A pounding ’80s soundtrack, full-frontal nudity and pumping sex scenes make it seem like the new Satyricon, but it isn’t Rome that’s burning– this time, it’s Los Angeles. (R-rated trailer after click.)

Kim Basinger gives a heartbreaking, wounded performance as a woman caught between past failures and current disappointments– or in this case, Winona Ryder and Billy Bob Thornton. The late Brad Renfro delivers a gut-wrenching portrayal of a young man being swallowed by contemporary nihilism as embodied by a horrific Mickey Rourke. Jon Foster is swept up in the madness of choosing between his lovers, male and female, as they abandon him for their own trysts. A softly stunned expression settles on his handsome face and stays there as the harshness marches past.

Unfortunately, The Informers, directed by Gregor Jordan, is getting mostly negative reviews and, according to a review in Film Journal, had scorn heaped on it at this year’s Sundance Festival. It is deserving of neither.

And if you want to catch it on the big screen, which I recommend because a tableaux this unsettling is best seen large and with a group, then you better hurry. Still, although there were only about a dozen people at the 8 PM screening on Saturday in Glendale (and four of them walked out about a third of the way through), the same screening at Arclight Hollywood was sold out by 4 PM, but I assume kindred spirits of the subjects were to credit for that.

Sorry for the technical limits.  I was driving, and not able to get an actual picture of the sticker.  I think my reproduction captures the essence of it though.  For what it’s worth, car looked to be about a 1990’s Toyota, not obviously falling apart, but also not so pricey as the German cars that inhabit my neighborhood.

(for blind readers and robots: the image reads “I’d rather be reading Bukowski”)

A simulacrum of nothing much

One of the many horrors of L.A. architecture is certainly its over-presentation in movies and television. It is comically clichéd to see stories set in other cities, whose framing shots are the same Los Angeles “skyline” that even non-Angelenos have come to recognize as framing shots of every non-L.A. city that makes it onto filmic representation.  What makes this SoCal-centrism so much the worse is the underlying vacuity of buildings in Los Angeles.  Fredric Jameson, following Jean-François Lyotard, famously advanced the notion of postmodernism as pastiche, and Angelena intellectuals often paint the unthinking, seedy eclecticism of Los Angeles as advancing such post-modern ideals (or its anti-idealism, perhaps).

On my recent flight to Chicago, I had the opportunity to read our own Dave Hickey’s The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty. Hickey rails charmingly against an excess of formalism having overtaken art and architecture from the latter half of the 20th century.  He defends an underlying aesthetic of inherent beauty as the mode of effectivity in the political arguments made by important artworks.  I do not wholly buy Hickey’s argument—if nothing else I am something of a formalist.  Or more defensibly, I think that works have multiple modes of effectivity, though I do not deny that beauty is one.  Certainly not one of which anyone can accuse downtown Los Angeles, of course.

Some formalism, however, reaches complete parody of itself.  Notably, most of Frank Gehry’s work embarrassingly eschews either beauty or any other formal or functional aspect other than a garish proclamation of “look at me, I am a great architect.” I was struck by this after watching Sketches of Frank Gehry (on video, accompanied by our own Dr. Koplow and other friends enamored of or just rationalizing the kitsch that is LA).  While the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao has an undeniable elegance, The Disney Hall just crosses that line into empty self-declaration of a parodic post-modernism.

Organic pastiche

Of course, the reversal in all this is that fact that everywhere else has become, at least a bit, like the reflection of a geographically bounded Hollywood location scout’s narrow imagination. Seeing the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago, pictured at top, gave me an eery feeling I had never left home. Well, I had that feeling until I turned around to see the elegant heterogeneity of Chicago’s skyline, just 180 degrees away from Chicago’s monument to Los Angeles simulacra.

Tomorrow, Esotouric, the same unconventional tour company responsible for “The Real Black Dahlia Crime Bus” and the “Crawling Down Cahuenga: Tom Waits’ LA” tour, will be leading an excursion through Los Angeles as Bukowski lived it in, “Haunts of a Dirty Old Man: Charles Bukowski’s Los Angeles.”

Charles Bukowski 1920-1994

A dirty realist, Bukowski’s writing was heavily influenced by his hometown of Los Angeles and now you too can get a first hand glimpse of the gritty world he inhabited.

It’s not too late to sign up for tomorrow’s Bukowski tour, as they take reservations up to the morning of the tour. So stock up on scotch and cigarettes and visit: http://www.esotouric.com/buk-3-14-09 to reserve your seat.

If you can’t make tomorrow’s tour, I highly recommend that you visit http://www.esotouric.com/ to check out the dozens of other strange and interesting tours Esotouric has lined up in the coming months. Also, for the budget minded, KCRW and KPCC members can take 15% off regular bus tour tickets.

“The people walk with such an indifference I begin to hate them, but then again I’ve never really been fond of anything.”

- Notes of a Dirty Old Man (1969), Charles Bukowski

Listen up all you Chandler aficionados, noir novelists, and dark lyricists, there’s a new literary magazine in town (inasmuch as an online periodical can be “in town”), and they are soliciting material for their next issue on noir LA.

Chaparral, which will focus on work from and/or about Southern California, was just announced last week. This inaugural issue features poetry by Amy Gerstler, Douglas Kearney, Dorothy Barresi, Victoria Chang and more. Chaparral will be collaborating with Street Poets for a benefit reading in late May or early June. (Check the Chaparral website for details.)

Following the break is the announcement I got about the upcoming issue:

We’ll now begin reading and soliciting work for the upcoming summer noir issue. We’re looking for anything from typical hard-boiled crime narratives to lyric poems filled with crow imagery to matters of skin color to chiaroscuro in art. If you are a writer who is not living and writing in Southern California, send us work that takes place in or imagines LA. Please note: though the inaugural issue of Chaparral features only poetry, we’ll be including both fiction and non-fiction in this next issue. Deadline May 20th.  submissions@chaparralpoetry.net

Full disclosure: Chaparral is edited by a friend of mine and another friend of mine is on the advisory board for Street Poets. Try not to hold that against them.

Riots? Earthquakes? Wildfires? Mudslides? Ryan Seacrest?

Pfft. We got it covered.

And not surprisingly, according to a new Google mash-up called Ground Zero, it looks like no matter where you’d drop a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles, most of the rest of the County would survive. That’s the nice thing about urban sprawl.

To see for yourself, click here, enter an address, then choose your bomb of choice, from Fatman to Little Boy to a more modern Chinese built warhead, and click “Nuke It!” You’ll see who dies first, and who may get off with just a little necrosis (I don’t know what that means either, but I’m betting it’s nasty).

You can even see the impact of an asteroid collision, which actually might finally do us in. On the bright side, it would take Seacrest with us.

Jeffrey G is laughing because the made-up letter he sent to Dear Abby is running today: http://www.uexpress.com/dearabby/

I had to laugh.  Checking the link takes you to todays Dear Abby “YOUNG WORKERS MUST LEARN HOW TO ‘DRESS FOR SUCCESS“.  Its pure fiction.  

For the full letter, used with Jeff’s permission, you must make the jump.  Anyone care to count down how long before its yanked from the web after this is read?His piece of fiction (he really is a writer) in the Howard Strern Baba Booey prankster vein:

YOUNG WORKERS MUST LEARN HOW TO ‘DRESS FOR SUCCESS’

DEAR ABBY: You’re in a position to do young people a great service by educating a generation that has grown up in a casual-dress world that there’s a line between how one dresses in one’s personal life and how one dresses for work. Cross it, and it could negatively affect your career.

I work for a large multinational company, and I am often shocked at the way people dress. Although there are clear business/casual guidelines, these lines are crossed by men and women alike. Talks behind closed doors have no effect. Sending out the corporate dress code to the staff has yielded no change in behavior. 

I finally consulted the HR department and came up with an approved solution. The dress code was again sent out to all employees in my department, with the warning that the next violation would mean being sent home and deducting the time as a vacation day.

Sure enough, “Disco Dolly” showed up in a sheer, low-cut, sleeveless blouse with a micro-mini skirt and strappy sandals. When I sent her home, she complained that she was saving her vacation days. I told her she had violated the company’s dress code — again. 

I also pointed out that her chances of promotion were now compromised thanks to the demonstration she had given that following simple instructions was beyond her capabilities. If you want to be regarded as a serious professional, dress like one! Some “suggestions”:

1. DRESS FOR SUCCESS, not sex. Women should not dress like streetwalkers. Leave the sexy, short, filmy dresses, cleavage-baring blouses and spaghetti straps for your personal life. This is an office, not a cocktail party.

2. COVER UP. No sandals or designer flip-flops. We don’t want to see your pedicure, your toe rings, the crust on your heels, or smell your feet.

3. MAKE IT FIT. Anything that hugs the body too tightly is not right for the office. We have a woman working here who looks like a sausage stuffed in a floral polyester casing. It’s hard to take her seriously. The same goes for a man whose pants are so tight that you can tell his religion. Ditto for pants that are so loose and low-slung you can see his underwear or her thong.

4. DON’T POLLUTE. By this I mean go easy on the fragrance. Some people have breathing problems and allergies. Do not pollute the office with a scent that arrives 10 minutes before you do and lingers hours after you’ve gone. This applies to men as well as women.

5. BATHE. There seems to be a new “natural” cult popping up whose adherents believe that washing removes vital oils from the skin and should be avoided. This phenomenon is more often, but not always, a male habit. Anyone in close contact with others should bathe or shower DAILY. — TRYING TO RUN A BUSINESS IN FLORIDA

DEAR TRYING: I’m willing to wager that your letter will be posted on millions of bulletin boards in the business world. Your “suggestions” make good sense. While many companies allow employees to dress down on “casual Fridays,” any business that wants the people it hires to be taken seriously should impress upon them that they must present themselves in a professional manner. Some companies do this in the form of an employee manual that lays it out in black and white. Because your directive was ignored, you were right to let “Disco Dolly” know there would be a penalty for noncompliance.

Enough of the levity for one day, with the economy swirling and dragging down the schools we needed this brief distraction.  Call me Nero of the new millennium.

Travel brochure from the Mad Men scrapbook.

Don Draper and Peter Campbell are flying out from Madison Ave., New York on Sunday, representing the Sterling Cooper advertising agency at an aerospace convention. Ever since President Kennedy made that crazy promise to put a man on the moon before 1970, everyone has wanted a piece of the action.

Between wining and dining congressman on their abilities to help secure contracts, I’m sure those boys will fit in some fun time away from the wives.

Since the pair are sharp enough to have recently taken up Twittering, I don’t think its too presumptuous to think they’ll be looking here for suggestions on watering holes or restaurants they should patronize… of course, these places will need to exist in 1962, and they should probably be serving Canadian Club.

Of course, there’s Musso & Frank’s and the Formosa… any other joints this pair should visit?