LAXicon

Once you step foot on the grounds of an airport, no matter what state or country, you leave your nominal location and enter a not-so-new foreign realm.  The rules of every day life are changed.  Courtesy and expectations are jilted thirty seven degrees from your normal reference.  Reality melds with a Terry Gilliam script in a way that ensures your sanity is tested.

Airports and airplanes have their own economic system that is as arbitrary as it is confusing.  Water is more expensive than coffee, but the latter requires an equal amount of the former.  Both are free when you are sitting.  A meal at a national fast food restaurant is the exact same price as the sit-down spot next door.  Legs of the flightplan are bundled together to save money, but delays force you to deviate from the schedule and purchase a different ticket and a meal while you wait, unless you paid the equivalent of the extra fees at the time of the original purchase in order to secure you flight and fare.  Ticket prices are tied to roulette wheels and are about as predictable.

There are social classes and ethnic groups of a unique sort: First-Classians, Coachonians, Suspicious-ese, Omygodnotanotherscreamingbaby-Americans.  Everyone becomes tribal and territorial and ready to throw social norms to wind at the slightest provocation or elbow infringement.  Nerves fray due to the geopolitical pressures of the just-a-bit-bigger than his seat man nodding off and prodding the cell phone diva next to the upper middle class housewife barbing the college bro who is shaking my seat every time I just enter the sleep cycle.  It is a surprise there are so few outbursts of rage in the friendly skies.

Various airports mirror the regions of a medieval map.  Beware the long cold valley of Minneapolis International, and prepare yourself for the island archipelago that is LAX.  Abandon all hope, ye who enter ATL, for the Terror of the Tram awaits!  Step away from the Doors, for they do NOT rebound or spring back!  Enjoy the bright, sterile canyons of O'Hare, and marvel at the petite swiftness of your non-hub local airport.

This great frontier of lawlessness and strife can be negotiated safely and with aplomb.  Pack wisely, and use your faculties of common sense and courtesy.  Wear clothes that breathe, for you own sake and mine.  Hotels have all the toiletries you may forget.  And for the love of god, try to remember the size of that little carry-on basket.  Your forty pound roller will not fit and just make the rest of us miss our connections while you argue with the stewardess.

Snarky Explosions

I just saw Iron Man and three thoughts immediately hit me as I walked out of the theater:

1. That is how to make a movie out of a comic.


2. I live ten miles from Hollywood, and most of the movies theaters out here are not that great.


3. I wonder if City Of Heroes is seeing a spike from all of these superhero movies.

I used to read a lot of comics, from X-Men on the flashy side to Sandman on the serious side, and up to now only a few have been made into movies that are any good.  The worst offenders are X-Men, Spiderman and god-awful Elektra.  On the other side you have Sin City, Hellboy, and Batman Begins, although that may have more to do with me expecting Bale to go American Psycho at some point.  Those two characters are frighteningly similar.  The bad conversions take all of the depth in the characters and pound them into spandex and pecs/boobs, the two dimensions blockbusters are built on.  Examples:

Punisher turns a poor man's Batman into a flat revenge story.

Spiderman has such terrible casting and acting for the protagonist and love interest that I just can't care what they say.

Elektra has... Jennifer Garner's body.

I think Fantastic Four is a dumb comic, so what can you expect?

Daredevil has... Ben Affleck.  One of the most interesting angles while I was reading the comic was how messed up in the head Matt Murdock is, and you pick Ben Affleck?  When the villain is often inside the hero's head, at least pick someone who can do self loathing.

Constantine tried, it really did, but the main character is a very bad man.  Most of the time he nails the girl, damns her sister to hell, and then sells someone else's soul to get out of the consequences.  And to get rid of pesky things like cancer.

X-Men strips all of the interesting out of the main characters that make them work for more than a splash illustration and then tries to build a franchise.  I mean, where do you go after 3?  The supporting characters that act as foils to the core team are dead, gone, or impotent.  Note to the writers: Scott Summers is supposed to be at least a little bit likeable underneath it all, and Rogue was kind of important.

V for Vendetta was decent too.  It simplified a very confusing story just enough to make it work in a hour and a half, and made the female lead into a much more interesting character.

Superman was okay, and so was the new Batman.  But so far Iron Man is the hands down winner for best overall movie.  It doesn't try to tip-toe around societal issues.  (By this I mean Downey doesn't really need to say guns are bad, the torture does it for you.)  The special effects look like they belong in the movie.  And the actors actually fill in the characters.  The little quips between the Paltrow and Downey come off as actual dialogue.  Good job Marvel Studios, you got this one right.

But when they make Terrence Howard into War Machine, god help us all.

Barnes & Noble: Animal Containment Facility?

I have seen many odd things since moving to Los Angeles, but so far one event takes the cake for sheer weird factor. Shortly after moving to the Valley, I began searching for a bookstore near a coffee shop so I could kill two birds with one stone. I like to buy books and then read a good chunk in will having a "Walter Cronkite" - a straight cup of black coffee.

The Valley is much like a giant suburb nestled in a ring of hills. Every few miles there is a shopping center, usually called a galleria or something similar. I have yet to find a small bookstore I like, but there are quite a few B&Ns and a few Borders. I had decided to stop at the B&N north of Woodland Hills, bought a book, and then a cup of joe. I settled down on the patio with my book and coffee and began to read. A few minutes later I heard what I though was a man coughing as if he had some serious lung damage, looked over, and saw what appeared to be a homeless man seated two tables away hacking his chest apart.

I did what I imagine most people would do. I ignored him and continued reading. His coughing grew more and more guttural, and was picking up in both intensity and volume. I continued reading, starting to wonder if I was going to have to end up calling the paramedics to come help this guy who was obviously having some serious issues. Then I made what must have seemed like an invitation.

I looked up at this man again, and he was staring directly at me. We held eye contact for a moment, and I went back to reading. He then began, for lack of a better term, barking at me. Full volume, stage actor giving his best impression, throat rending barks. At this point I was not sure if I should get up and leave, or if some action on my end would draw out even more from this man.

Up to this point two middle aged women had been sitting at another table near this man's seat and my table. They had also been glancing over at the coughing man, and now his barking caused them to get up and leave. One of them was jerking every time he made a sound. I make the decision not to get up until I had put a good dent in my coffee. Damn if I was going to let this man get in the way of my Saturday morning.

He and I were situated on opposite sides of the door to the Starbucks attached to the B&N, which is a fairly high traffic area. Families, couples, and all sorts of people were walking between and around the two of us while the barker continued. One woman dropped her coffee when she walked out the door mid-bark. Every so often I glanced at the man and each time he was glaring at me, sometimes smoking a cigarette, sometimes just staring.

This goes on for some ten or fifteen minutes, and I seriously began to wonder a lot of things while I pretended to read. Had I done something? Did I rearrange my chair in a way to set this man off? Did he often hunker down for a good barking session on the galleria patio? Was the security patrol going to stop and do something? Had I somehow never appreciated how good a nice bark might feel on a pleasant Saturday morning? While I puzzled over those possibilities, the man added a new sound to his repertoire by scrapping the legs of his iron chair on the cement in addition to barking.

At this point, I had also started watching the people who are watching him as they walk by. I was seated about ten feet from the epicenter of a suburban disturbance unfolding and drawing a fair amount of attention. To a person, there was a studied indifference to the man as passersby filed him into the looney bin of stereotypes that bounce around in everyone's head.

I wish there was a climactic ending to this story, but there isn't. About twenty minutes after his barking began in earnest, the man began to quiet. The barks became woofs. His chair scraped less and less. Eventually he stopped glaring at the side of my head and began studying the pack of cigarettes on the table next to him or just vaguely looking around. The passing shoppers no longer noticed anything more than a homeless man sitting at a table with no apparent reason or aim. After a few minutes of silence, I finished my coffee and left.

For some reason I cannot fully grasp, that morning resonates with the way I see Los Angeles and the Valley.

By way of introduction

I think we can safely say we all know what blogs are, since you have found your way here.  This will be a sounding board for my random thoughts and also ramblings on Los Angeles.  There may not be much coherency or consistency to my posts, so consider yourself warned on that front.

Basic rules I will try to follow:

• I will try to strike through anything I edit


• Feel free to comment, but I reserve the right to delete any comments for any reason

That seems about it.  Cheers.

Fun Facts about the LA

In the spirit of those emails that go around about "Signs you are from Blank", here are some  random observations about LA.

• Distance is measured in time here, too


• Traffic is not as bad as people make it out to be


• Dry heat is different, but 100 F is still damn hot


• When people say no one in LA is from LA, they are very wrong


• Hollywood defines much of what LA is, but much of LA is nothing like Hollywood


• Male celebrities look exactly like you think they will


• Female celebrities do not


• For such a big city, the food selection in the supermarkets is terrible


• Seeing the paparazzi in action may be the most surreal thing you will ever experience


• Bars close at 2, but liquor stores are always open


• If you were wondering, they are fake


• Uggs are apparently comfortable in the middle of summertime


• I don't think there is one real coffee shop in LA


• $120 is an acceptable price for a t-shirt


• "LA time" runs about 45 minutes late


• Shopping carts move by themselves to locations a parkour enthusiast would balk at reaching


• Unattended trash will disappear within  12 hours of being placed on, in or near a dumpster or alley


• The LA River is not a river, was never a river, and usually resembles an empty, blocked off frontage road


• Standard signage on roads is, in most places, optional


• Clouds or rain are a sign of the apocalypse and should be treated as such


• 65 degrees is a reasonable time to break out a winter jacket


• No one talks like a valley girl


• No one talks about, or cares about immigration of any kind


• Donut shops also serve things like fried chicken, and are on every corner


• West coast fast food chains are better in almost every way, except for the fast part


• A 2x2, 2x4 and 4x4 are all something you order at In-n-Out, which only has 6 menu items, but about 100 actual things you can eat


• Standard rules of the road are apparently suggestions


• Schools look like either haciendas, or low security prisons


• If you say "State Trooper", it will sound like Cantonese to most people

That does it for now.