The emigrant's destiny: The foreign country has not become home, but home has become foreign.
--Alfred Polger (d. 1955), Der Emigrant und die Heimat
Emigranten-Schicksal: Die Fremde ist nicht Heimat geworden. Aber die Heimat Fremde.
Until 2007, I lived in Paris for many years, and had a blog there called Rue Rude.
"Mom, didn't you say we have Jewish ancestors?" L asked me. I'm the genealogy expert in the family.
"Well, we do have someone named Salomon, who married a Catholic ancestor around 1750," I said cautiously. "I can't prove she was Jewish. Why?"
"Oh, I've just been telling people my mother is part Jewish," said L, who works for a studio. "It's really helpful in Hollywood."
On Friday I had lunch with an old friend who is now a HPP-- Hollywood Power Player. He is one of the good guys in Hollywood.
I think he really did want to see me once I moved to Los Angeles, but his office had canceled three or four times. Finally the day came, and it was my turn to want to cancel-- it was inconvenient for several reasons. I called up my own junior HPP (one of my kids) to ask for advice, and received a hissed, "Don't you dare cancel!" So I showed up at the restaurant for lunch, not having seen the old friend since a long-ago wedding in New York City.
We had a really pleasant lunch, laughing and reminiscing and talking about poetry and our families. He had visited my family while driving across country, years ago, and said he still remembers how stunned he was at the number of toothbrushes in the one shared bathroom we had back then.
The food was delicious. He introduced me to someone from our college who walked in, and pointed out the head of one of the biggest television networks, across the room. He knew just about everyone there. They were all dressed in jeans.
Then he said goodbye, and in spite of all the good will, I have a feeling that that was it, unless we meet by accident again some day. He is in the upper atmosphere now, and I breathe the air of ordinary mortals.
It was long ago when I was young. I was living in San Francisco, and people there were snobbish and rude about L.A. and its people: "shallow" was the S.F. consensus.
San Francisco was beautiful and chilly, and when I lived there, before Silicon Valley, it was very much a stronghold of vegetarian/gay/New Age/hippie culture. People would say they were witches, and you were supposed to nod. When you applied to be someone's roommate, they would ask, "What sign are you?" Until then, I had not realized how Southern I really was. I found San Francisco cold and alienating.
My mother had a conference in Los Angeles, and I went down to meet her. I was surprised how much I liked it. It was February and there were flowers everywhere, and good-looking people cycling in the streets. Bright, snow-capped high mountains hung over the city, startlingly close, and the ocean shone in the sun. In the morning I had visited an old roommate who was Mexican-American. She gave me a whirlwind tour of East L.A., where she was loving her work in a health clinic. There were parks with colorful murals and dangerous areas where she warned me not to look anyone in the eye. She was forgetting her English, and introduced me to her husband's parents, who could scarcely say "Hello" and "Goodbye"; their family had lived in Los Angeles since the 1700s (if not before-- they looked very Indian).
A friend from college picked me up then and drove me around Beverly Hills, with its high palm trees along wide empty streets lined with Spanish colonial houses. In the afternoon, I got to see a Bel Air mansion with a screening room in the basement, a white grand piano, and a sweeping spiral staircase worthy of Scarlett O'Hara.
My day in L.A. was the perfect introduction to this wonderful, diverse city.
It seems odd that I am still feeling like an outsider a year and a half after arriving in California, but maybe the truth is, living in another country was just my way of disguising my own sense of being different.
I have a new dentist who has televisions in all his rooms, positioned where you can see them as you lie back in the dental chair. The woman who was working on my teeth had the TV tuned to an animals channel, and I found it relaxing to watch puppies doing tricks and horses being rescued from abusive owners. But then I was moved to a new room where another woman had a celebrity news channel on. The tone of the announcers was urgent and aggressive. This news was important-- that's why the voices come so loud and fast, with images changing every couple of seconds! This news is mean-spirited, cynical and funny! And this news invades real people's privacy and makes them and their families miserable so that someone watching daytime TV is entertained for a few seconds!
"Yeah, it's terrible what they do," said the complacent woman cleaning my teeth. She left the TV on though. I longed for the gadget I carry in my purse, a TV-B-Gone.
What year did public humiliation of other people become entertainment to Americans?
Ads on the side of Los Angeles buses for Gossip Girl (a television show about rich high school kids in New York City).
My children were all laughing when I came home from the Batman movie. They had tricked me into going and knew I would hate it. I would have walked out after ten minutes, except that I couldn't find my companion-- the movie was still so popular its second weekend that we couldn't sit together. My ears are still ringing.
"Do you realize that almost ten percent of the U.S. population went to see that movie in one week?" D said.
A while ago I put up a Joe Eszterhas quote about the difference between American and French movies.
Why the French can't make movies.
French woman wakes up, talks French, gets out of bed, has breakfast, goes shopping, talks French, comes back, thinks about lunch, visits her mother, talks French, maybe goes for a walk, sees child, talks French, movie ends....
American woman is woken up by gunshot, stripped naked and tied up by masked intruder, manages to untie herself with teeth, goes shopping, meets handsome all-action architect in the checkout line, comes back, thinks about lunch, tracks down masked intruder and tries to blow his head off, misses, runs traumatized to handsome all-action architect and fucks his brains out, discovers by chance while looking through drawer that handsome all-action architect is in fact masked intruder, blows his head off in anger, feels empowered, sees child, child says, "Love you, Mommy," end credits.
Result? Four hundred twenty-five million dollars box office worldwide. And not a word of French spoken.
--Joe Eszterhas as told to Craig Brown, in Vanity Fair, March 2008
One of the differences is the scale. American movies think big: big explosions, terrorists attacking the country, global disasters. The French think small: adultery, trouble at the office, not getting along with your adult siblings.
Another difference is that in a French movie, the hero or heroine has a family. In the American version, at most he or she will have a 4- to 8-year-old kid (blond, cute, sassy) or a Significant Other-- this is considered their family. Extended families do not exist in an American movie. When was the last time you saw a grown person's mother as an important character in one? Brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, cousins and grandparents might as well not exist.
The differences go back a long time. Kit Carson and Honoré de Balzac were born only ten years apart, but they might as well have lived on different planets.
Two of my children are working as Hollywood assistants this summer. This much-coveted job involves almost no money, but glamor by association with the famous and the HPP (Hollywood Power Players). Also the occasional incredibly fun tidbit of gossip that they will get fired for if I tell you.
N is in the office of a major movie star. The other day he came in with a stack of new DVDs that the star's main assistant tossed his way. The star gets freebies of all kinds in the mail every day and doesn't ever even see most of them.
"The most awesome thing is that they're asking me to read all the scripts that are submitted for [the star]. The head of the office says she trusts my taste, so she doesn't even read the ones I don't like! The scriptwriters' blood would run cold if they knew it was a lowly assistant deciding [the star] will never read their crappy script!"
It's a one-industry town.
As I sat in traffic on the richest stretch of Sunset Boulevard, I noticed this guy. He had a wire in his ear and an enormous telephoto lens hanging from his shoulder and was lurking in a bush where anyone driving through the Bel Air entrance would have to go by him.
He suddenly started talking into the wire and rushed away to stalk some about-to-arrive celebrity. I thought it was funny to take a photo of him, even though I wasn't fast enough to get a good one.
It's the crack of dawn and I just came back from the airport. I love driving back along the PCH (Pacific Coast Highway) where you often see dolphins as you sit at a stop light. At the Santa Monica pier there was a lot of activity in the huge parking lot: sharp-edgedwhite trucks and brilliant lights aimed at the beach, making part of it as bright as day. A television show was filming at dawn against the twilit horizon.
At the beach, it was easy for anyone driving by to see where they were filming. But in ordinary neighborhoods around L.A., you often see signs like the one above, giving directions to a set. One thing I've learned is that most movies have fake names that are used all during production, especially if a big star is involved. There are too many crazies around.
Actor Bruce Campbell: If you really analyze it, all the A movies are B movies....If you get bitten by a radioactive spider and dress up like a spider and fly around-- that's not only a B movie-- that's a 1950s B movie.
Interviewer: So Sam Raimi went on to make, uh, ...the three big Spiderman movies. And you have a cameo role in all of them, right?
Actor Bruce Campbell: Now, when you say "cameo," I would challenge that. I would go with "pivotal."
--Actor Bruce Campbell on NPR, 28 February 2009
