As the Omitist, I guess I’ve omitted quite a few blog entries lately, having apparently wasted some of my own "writerly output" exchanging witticisms with a certain "semi-well-known writer" this past week, and spending a lovely week in L.A. prior to that, visiting my fabulous and talented friends like
Shana Ting Lipton in Laurel Canyon and Tina and Dave, the
horror team, in Burbank, as well as friends in hometown Pacific Palisades, Topanga Canyon, and Playa Del Rey. A brief recap:
The Fixer
When I arrived at the lovely Tina’s house in L.A., she was just getting home from a super swank pre-Oscar retreat rubbing elbows with the likes of Madonna, and bore a large goodie bag containing, amongst other superdeluxe gifts, a one year, $10,000 subscription to an "international concierge", otherwise known as a "fixer". The premise is that when you’re a spoiled celebrity in your hotel room at 2 A.M., and you want hookers on the double, the fixer gets you hookers. If you want tickets to "Cats", and there are no tickets for "Cats" available, the fixer gets all up in someone’s face and gets you tickets for "Cats" anyway. If you want Neiman Marcus to open their doors in the middle of the night so you can grab those Manolos you had your eye on, he’s your guy.
While undeniably fabulous, Tina is a (fairly) normal gal, however, and has little use for hookers and Manolo Blahniks at 2 A.M. But the $10,000 VIP membership to the fixer’s little black book still stands, and the fixer claims to be some kind of magician, able to open the doors to Shangri-La. Who wouldn’t want a little VIP treatment? Hence our query. We want our money’s worth. What can the fixer do for people like us? Can he make the cable guy show up on time? Get you a table for eight at the dumpling place on Friday night? Make the jackass with a cartload of groceries get out of the express lane? Explain to the credit bureaus that you did not, in fact, rack up $100,000 of debt in 1960 because you weren’t born until 1972? Now that would be Shangri-La.
The Poem is Bare Ass Nekid
The beautiful and talented Shana and I headed into the Silverlake hills for Adam Parfrey’s Salon, where the L.A. alternative set watch films and discuss them, or rather, drink. I loved the concept and the crowd, but was underwhelmed by the film, A Poem Is A Naked Person, which had been hyped quite a bit, due to the controversy surrounding it and its being prohibited from release for decades. The "documentary" was billed as being about Leon Russell , and featuring Willie Nelson, but I guess they meant that very loosely, because I couldn’t quite figure out what we were supposed to have learned about him, or what exactly the movie documented, besides everything that the filmmaker, Les Blank, who was admittedly wasted out of his head the duration of the filming, could get on film. The result was a mish-mash of unrelated images, with no throughline or explanation of who or what we were looking at. There were attempts at cinematic metaphor, which I am generally a fan of, but I think the filmmaker missed the point: Metaphor is appreciated in addition to a throughline, not in lieu of. So what we had were scenes showing an unidentified elderly couple fishing for catfish, cut to a city building being demolished and watched by more unidentified people, cut to Leon Russell drunk and babbling in a hotel room, cut to a python eating a chick, cut to dozens of unidentified people trying to get on a tractor. No explanation was given as to what relevance these images had to Leon Russell. And I think we saw about 10 seconds of Willie Nelson. I hate to say it, but I’m not entirely surprised that Leon Russell refused to allow the film to be released. I will concede that this was the filmmaker’s first movie, and I’ve been told he went on to make much better films which justify his reputation.
That said, the company at the Salon was stellar, and I met some interesting folk, including the colorful Dan Kapelovitz and foxy Jon Shere, who do a bizarre cable access show in L.A., Threee Geniuses. I love the Salon premise, the return to intelligent discourse as part of a night out, and hope to tag along again when I am next in L.A.
