2005-12-14 - 8:37 p.m.
I was just reading the New York Times, and a whole bunch of things surprised me. I am so out of the loop! That’s what comes of traveling the world, I suppose – you lose track of what’s going on in your own backyard. First of all, did you read how Wormwood, where I worked for years and years, was just bought out by Conglomerex, a gigantic corporate-owned movie studio across town? Part of me is just howling with laughter about it, because it means that all the readers at Wormwood are going to undergo precisely the same thing that happened at Pathetica, where everyone was laid off with impunity. Couldn’t happen to a nicer studio, I can’t help but think.
All those revolting, pompous, non-union freelancer readers – out the door with them! And I can only hope that they’ll do the same to that hideous she-troll who ran the story department. It suits me quite happily for every one of those horrible people to be laid off and put out of work. And the best part is, they put the deal into effect, right at Christmas. The readers at Wormwood are not union employees, so when they are laid off there will be no generous payouts for them. It’ll just be “see ya, glad I don’t gotta be ya!” and out the door they’ll go, including the readers who were there for 8 years or more. And in the spirit of Christmas, my belly is shaking like a bowlful of jelly with laughter as I contemplate the misery at that hellish studio.
Of course, I have no guarantee that the readers shall all be fired. Perhaps the vile Wormwood Overlords will come up with a way of keeping their development and story departments intact. But that is not how the company has done business in the previous years -- so it is hard to imagine that they’ll change their tune now and adopt a policy that is friendly to their workers, whom they have exploited like galley slaves for more years than you’ve had chicken dinners.
What’s that you say? I am being a mean old goat for laughing so gleefully at others’ woes? Yes, of course you are right. And, in fact, the loss of another studio – and, in fact, one which is known for hiring me and giving me work during the lean times – shouldn’t be a source of laughter and ridicule. It’s not a good thing for me how the movie business seems to be contracting, rather than expanding. But what else can you do? When there’s no other response, you might as well laugh. And to sympathize with a studio whose practices I loathed and whose staff I utterly resented – well, that is frankly just unnatural. It would be insincere of me to express sadness that I steadfastly do not feel.
Really, rather than dwell on such depressing and odious topics, I think I would rather talk more about my trip. So let’s drift back in time a few days, as I open my little notebook, and I continue to transcribe my travel adventures.
-jd-
On Sunday in New York, we joined some online pals of my mother’s, who were in town for some kind of a family event of their own. We traipsed all over Chinatown and Little Italy, with the friends and their recently adopted Korean infant son. They were quite delightful people, as folks who are innately “good” often are. It’s a funny thing: I am steadfastly irreligious to the point of heresy and blasphemy and far beyond. Yet, I must admit that I find myself genuinely fond of people who are religious. It dates back, I think, to college when my best friend/ erstwhile lover was the most guilt-racked Catholic boy you ever did see. Oh my, he was a messed up one, as this was in the days before bi- and metro-sexuality were fashionable. But let’s not digress.
Dim sum with mom’s friends was quite delightful and not merely because the wife is a sometime reader of this here blog-a-licious blog. I must confess to loving me some dim sum generally -- and dim sum in New York is about as close as you can reasonably expect to get to Hong Kong dim sum without having to get shots. It was also funny how the little old Chinese ladies pushing the dim sum carts all ooed and awed at the little Korean baby. One wall eyed Chinese lady even picked up the babe and made hand gestures indicating she’d like to whisk the little one into the kitchen, where, it seemed likely, the tyke would be ground into dumpling meat and served for the dinner rush.
And after the dim sum, we just walked a few blocks over to Little Italy for Italian pastries at this incredible pastry shop, the likes of which you could travel far and wide in Los Angeles and simply not find. Ah, the whipped cream! The chocolate! How exceptionally dreamy. I’m embarrassed by how much I love food. And it has taken me years to realize that I am, in fact, a total sensualist. Some folks would call me a sensualist, anyway. Others would say I am just a glutton and a wastrel. But the pastries were sure delicious.
Later that night, Rich Grandma took us out to the Turkish Kitchen for those lovely Cornish game hens stuffed with pine nuts and sage. Turkish restaurants do not exist at all in Los Angeles because the thriving Armenian community, still enraged over the Armenian Genocide of 1913, firebomb them the moment they open. Believe it or not, there shall be more on this particular topic when we get to Venice. And after dinner with Rich Grandma, I briefly escaped to Christopher Street to hang out at what was simply the most dreadful gay bar I ever visited. I swear, the place should have been called “The Cave Under the Bridge” for all the trolls who were lurking about leering at one.
Gins and tonics were about five bucks each, served by a be-whiskered, glaring cub bartender. There was a poster that read, “Hawt Go Go Boys!” but it was quite simply a-lying. At around 10, this geriatric figure in a pair of baggy jockey shorts got up and started gyrating on a pole, while all around him, the trolls and fag hags all squawked and shrieked. There must be other more pleasant gay bars in Manhattan, surely, but I have never taken the effort to find them.
The next morning, we joined for breakfast our old family friend Denise, whom you might remember hosted us in Alaska over the summer. She’s in town to visit her own mother, who lives in the Hamptons, so she bused into the city to join us at this funny Ukranian restaurant on 11th and 2nd. I don’t think they are firebombing Ukranian restaurants in Los Angeles yet, but I haven’t heard of one out here. I had myself some French toast made from Challah, which felt very New York, and some dee-licious kielbasa, a very unusual breakfast snack. We were served by waiters who looked suspiciously like the folks who used to shove my ancient relatives into ovens back when, even though now they were all pleasant smiles and geniality.
At one point, we were talking about the President of the Ukraine – you know, the fellow whom the Russians tried to poison – and I could just not think of the fellow’s name. Then this funny old lady, sitting at a nearby table, who was wearing this beautiful Eastern European peasant gown, her jet black dyed hair in a tight bun, regally turned her beaky nosed-face to us and cackled, from a mouth that had about three teeth in it, “Yushevshenko! His name is Yushevshenko!”
As if invited, the elderly lady, who resembled nothing so much as Baba Yaga done up for a night at the Bolshoi, promptly prated into her life story, much of which was in her impenetrable native Urkanian. Through the corner of my eye, I could see the wait staff rolling their eyes at the old lady’s tirade. Perhaps they’d heard her antics before.
“For 40 years I vas teacher of dance at University of Ukraine! Then move I here to be mit grandchildren! But my heart! Ai! It is UKRAINIAN!”
After breakfast, Denise’s pal, who had joined us, invited us to visit her palatial townhouse, which was just around the corner from the restaurant. The friend – short and stout, with tightly curly graying hair and a round, apple-like face – reminded me slightly of Shelly Winters, and she had the fragmented, speed freaky conversational style of a high IQ New Yorker with attention deficit disorder. Yet, she had the most amazing apartment, located just a few doors from St. Marks, the oldest church in all of New York, where Peter Stuyvesant is buried. The townhouse was from the 19th century, with magnificent ceiling fixtures and ornate friezes along the walls. Yet, the place had gone almost completely to a derelict Miss Havasham-like ruin.
Denise’s friend had inherited the apartment from her parents, but she had almost no income herself, so she basically just filled it with piles of books and a few cheap sticks of furniture, creating the impression of someone squatting in a magnificent home. The dusty muddle of filthy books, mangy cats, and cat boxes overflowing with foul, urine soaked kitty litter was almost entirely infelicitous. Meanwhile, Denise’s pal continued to jabber about this and that, ratcheting one moment from Chinese poetry to Runi philosophy. Other peoples’ lives are so interesting, really.
On my last night in New York, I slipped away to see THE WOMAN IN WHITE, the new musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber, which, I realize probably sounds dreadful to a civilian, but which I was kind of interested in, being an old theater queen. The play was… underwhelming, I’d have to admit. The play’s the story of two sisters, one of whom marries a blackguard and is locked in a lunatic asylum, so the thug can steal the family’s money. The other sister teams up with a helpful ghost to free the woman and destroy the goon. The problem is, Mr. Webber is almost totally tapped out in terms of creativity. The show’s score is almost jaw-droppingly derivative, with the main song being cribbed from the Macarena, for christ’s sake. I mean, that’s NUTS. If you’re going to steal music, at least steal something wonderful, like a Beatles’ song.
The performances weren’t bad: Maria Friedman, who’s being hailed as some kind of a Broadway savior, is a fairly workman-like Sarah Brightman clone. And the guy in the role that the fellow from Phantom of the Opera turned down gives a great turn as an Italian sleazebag. Yet the sound design is so over-amplified as to nearly induce deafness. And the set design, which consists of a sort of cyclorama onto which computer generated images of a mansion, some moors, the lunatic asylum, are shown, is nothing more than irritating and distracting. Those computer generated images just don’t look real to me – you can’t suspend your disbelief. And they just haven’t perfected the technology, yet: The pictures just seem kind of dark and murky, not vivid. It was like being forced to pay Broadway prices to play a videogame. On the other hand, the pair of plump English spinsters whom I found myself seated next to for the show were utterly enrapt by it. At the end, how they cooed, “Ohhhhh! It was fan-TAST-ic!” So what do I know?
And, finally, about the Gaiety. Well, yes, you see it has closed down. I went there when I said I did, and found the place totally shuttered, its once famous canopy empty and derelict. It was so sad! What a tragedy! I was broken hearted. Of course, I balmed my despair with a quick visit to another gay bar, where there was a gorgeous go go boy a-dancing. I plyed him with a few dollars, and during his break he donned his jeans and turtleneck and pranced on over to where I was sitting at the bar. I figured him for a hustler, but he did not seem to want to be “purchased,” which suited me fine: I had other uses planned for my Granny Bucks. But I was amused to listen to him chat about how his dream is to move to LA and get into Spanish language television – he was Puerto Rican, you see. He seemed intent on showing me that he was much, much more than a mere stripper: He was all about telling me he was a grad student, studying Physical Education, which always sounds fishy to me as an avocation, but there you are. He gave me a little kiss as he dashed out to shed his clothes and take his place atop the little box. And I was pleased that, yes, I could still find a way to do something risqué in New York. And next… off to Venice!
