LA en vie

Earthquake! (the not-Big One)

I got emails from my sisters and my mother and three cousins and two aunts yesterday, all asking about the earthquake. My own family was rather happy about it. Most of us have never felt an earthquake before, and it was just the right size-- enough to be important, but leaving no damage.

"I was surfing in my office!" said H.

"I was scared," said N.

"The books were moving around," said D, who was still in bed at 11h42 (disgraceful. But don't let me commence.)

"My daughter thought the world was coming to an end!" said the maid, laughing. "She ran out of the building screaming 'Es el fin del mundo!'"

I was just driving on the 101 freeway and didn't notice a thing.

American movies vs French cinema

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.

The Hollywood assistant

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!"

Twentieth Century Fox sponsors traffic sign

It's a one-industry town.

Trader Joe's fights the good fight: Less vs Fewer

La tablée

La tablée is one of those French words you can translate easily into English, but that English doesn't use. That kind of word usually means a cultural difference.

It means a tableful of people.

At this time of year, Paris is softer, slower. The city empties out, and the children vanish. Everyone is at the beach, in the mountains, or at the maison de famille in the countryside, sometimes a large house shared by generations of the same family.

Lunch is outside whenever possible, and everyone eats together. In France, summer is a time for cousins to meet, brothers and sisters to catch up, little children to joke with their great-aunts and great-uncles.

Do you detect a nostalgic tone to my voice?

Here in L.A., no one does this. The summer is work-work-work as usual.

When people here take their one or two weeks a year, they have to choose between seeing their families, usually far-flung, or going on vacation.

Americans have no time off.

Passionate anti-quail poster

Happy Bastille Day!

One more Bastille Day that I'm not in France. Until this year, I spent every Fourth of July in France, and every Fourteenth of July (what the French call it) in the U.S..

There is some strange news coming out of France these days!

--The CD of Carla Bruni, First Lady of France, came out to a storm of publicity. In it, she sings to her various lovers over the years. The Colombian Foreign Affairs Minister protested her referring to one of them as "more dangerous than Colombian white."

--A Moroccan woman who wears the full burqa was refused French citizenship because of  "behavior in society incompatible with the essential values of the French community, notably the principle of equality of the sexes." The judge's decision was almost universally hailed with approval, on the right and on the left.

--A French court agreed with the argument of an automobiliste that, even if it is required to pay for parking, it is not legally required to leave the proof of payment on your dashboard for the pervenches to see. This means, of course, that it will be impossible for the pervenches to give any tickets at all, a loophole in the law that I assume will be rapidly changed!

The Paps

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.

What weather?

Wed

83°F | 65°F

Thu

83°F | 67°F

Fri

83°F | 67°F

Sat

83°F | 67°F

You know you've been living in L.A. too long when you start to complain about the weather.

Or should I say "weather"?