LA en vie

Plastic surgery

Almost the first time I went out in Los Angeles, the morning after I moved here, I saw my first example of bad plastic surgery. Waiting for the car at the pretty Shutters on the Beach  in Santa Monica, where we'd gone for breakfast, I saw a woman my age who was impossibly thin and blond. Her face was weirdly shaped, her lips bloated and her cheekbones golfball-sized. She was wearing pink designer sweatpants that showed off a pert little behind. She was also sporting enormous breast implants that stuck out bizarrely in front of her hipless body.

A huge percentage of older women in this part of Los Angeles have had "something done." Once when I was visiting the dermatologist (I had bronchitis and had coughed so hard that little red spots appeared all over my eyelids), a well-dressed woman came in looking frantic. The dermatologist rushed her into a private room and the nurse apologized to me for making me wait. Something had gone wrong with the lady's botox!

Once in a while I look in the mirror and practice pulling my face in the exact right way for every small wrinkle to vanish. Suddenly I look ten years younger. It's so tempting, if you could do it exactly right. But this website is a good dissuasive.

You're not really fooling anyone. You're still old.

The movie star's assistant

One of my kids has just gotten a summer job with a movie star.

Jennifer Garner, Ashlee Simpson and me

I thought I saw Jennifer Garner in the drugstore parking lot.

"In L.A., if you think you see someone famous, it IS them," said L.

An unusually pretty girl on a bicycle? Ashlee Simpson in jeans.

A strangely thin woman with shorts eating ice cream, with a posse of photographers walking backwards in front of her? Minnie Driver at the Malibu Country Mart.

Bruce Willis in a convertible, passing you uphill.

Lindsey Lohan at the secondhand designer clothes store.

Kevin Bacon and Brooke Shields hiking a trail in the Santa Monica hills (not together), the same morning.

That obnoxious but very handsome blond guy driving so slowly in front of you that you want to scream-- because he is on the phone? You would know, if you watched more TV.

In which I meet Oscar

Today I was one of the few members of the public allowed in to attend a symposium on the Foreign Film Award nominees for the Oscars. The fun part was that it was in the Academy of Motion Pictures, which is filled with larger-than-life Oscar statues. There were even two by the bathrooms.

The five directors of the foreign films nominated for the Oscars were all there on stage, and most exciting, we saw a five-minute excerpt from each film. It was an awkward group of men in some ways: an Israeli film about soldiers in a fort inside Lebanon; an Austrian (Hitler was Austrian) with a film about the Holocaust; a Russian with a film about Genghis Khan, who is the impersonation of evil to many Russians; a Pole with a film about Russians massacring Poles; and a Russian with a film about a Chechen defendant in a murder trial.

This year there was an uproar because two of the most highly praised foreign films, Persepolis (I have been a fan of Persepolis since it first came out as a French-language bande dessinée) and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, didn't even make it onto the short list for the Foreign Film nominations-- not the Oscar list itself, but the group of films that the Oscar nominees are chosen from. I could see why when the emcee asked the Foreign Film voters present to stand up-- they were oooold. Of course an abortion movie and a "comic strip" weren't their cup of tea. Even though those movies looked a lot better than the Russian nomination, which is two hours and thirty minutes of twelve rather ugly men sitting around a table talking....

The Mongol movie, about Genghis Khan, was the obvious crowd-pleaser (so it probably won't win). It was gorgeous, with the actors all speaking Mongolian. The child who plays the young Temujin/ Genghis "was born in the saddle," said the director.

The movie about Katyn, by the Polish director Andrzej Wajda, was very moving in the short excerpt we saw. So it was upsetting to discover that the movie is not even being distributed in the U.S.A.

The Austrian movie, about Jewish criminals who survived the Holocaust as counterfeiters working in Auschwitz, also looked very moving and the main character it is based on, an old man, was sitting in the audience.

The Israeli director spoke without a microphone because of his religious beliefs.

I learned something funny tonight. Some people are hired as seat-fillers for the Oscars! During the show, whenever a star goes up on stage or anyone in the front leaves his or her seat, a seat-filler will rush up and sit there so the theater looks full!

Davening

The other day I wrote about how French social climbers tend to be suspiciously hyper-catho, while for many years, probably not any more, Americans social-climbed in the Episcopalian church. That reminded L., who works in the entertainment business, that things are similar out here in L.A.

"Networking at the synagogue. Everyone goes."

The Christmas burrito

The Los Angeles Times did an article about Don Cheto, the grouchy Mexican co-anchor of a Spanish-language radio show, and I decided to tune in to hear him. Instead I heard a catchy jingle called El Burrito de Belén, "the little donkey of Bethlehem," sung by a Colombian named Juanes. (At first I thought he was a little boy-- but he's 32.)

Listening to the radio is so much fun here. And you do it all day in your car. I've been exposed to so many kinds of music just driving around. Somehow in France I just got got stuck on my couple of stations, and I didn't find the French mix of French (obligatoire, not that I blame them) and English songs inspiring. Here the music seems fresher, newer, younger. Maybe it's just that I didn't give the French stations a chance.

Now I find myself changing lanes singing, "Si me ven, si me ven, voy camino de Belén!"

My cousin the re-enactor

In West Virginia last week I got to see the re-enactment of a small Civil War skirmish. It must not have seemed small to the people who were in it back in 1861-- the cannons' roar was deafening, the smoke blinding, and they scared a lot of the spectators, even though they knew they were safe.

One of my cousins is a re-enactor-- one of those people whose passion it is to dress up in clothes of the era and re-enact battles (Johnny Reb above reminds me of him). Before a re-enactment of the battle of Gettysburg, my brother once asked him whether he really hated Yankees the way he went on.

"No, but no one better say anything disrespectful about Robert E. Lee," said my cousin. He added, "That's why I lift weights."

Re-enacting, though you might think so, is not peculiar to Americans. In 2005, in the Czech Republic, thousands of uniformed soldiers re-enacted the Napoleonic battle of Austerlitz in front of tens of thousands of spectators. When I went to the 60th anniversary memorial of D-Day at Omaha Beach, June 6, 2004, I saw an entire area near the ceremony where the re-enactors had created authentic-looking World War II camps, with genuine old tents, jeeps, tanks, trucks, uniforms and field hospitals.  Surprisingly, a lot of the people in the vehicles, wearing British and American uniforms, were genial Frenchmen who were really, really into it. (Did you know that D-Day is called "le Jour J" in French?-- the J is pronounced zhee.) When I reflected a moment, it wasn't so strange. The war had been fought right where we stood, and much of the matériel never made it home again.

Creative Artists

Someone who has a job in the movie business took me by the Century City building of the Creative Artists Agency.

"We call it the Death Star."

Sean Connery comes to the graduation

A young friend was graduating from the American Film Institute this week and I went to the commencement ceremonies. As I looked at the program, I couldn't help feeling a bit disappointed at the honorary degrees. In every past year, there had been at least one celebrity: Nora Ephron, Sherry Lansing, Ken Burns, Jack Valenti, Karl Malden, James Earl Jones...  but this year there were three names I had never heard before.

One of them was George Stevens Jr, one of the founders of AFI, and there was a collective gasp (remember, these are all movie people) when David Lynch got up to honor him. I would not have recognized him, and I've never seen any of his movies, but he gave a great speech. He said that a phone call from George Stevens had been the turning point in his life. He was getting discouraged about the movies, and living on the East Coast, when Stevens called and told him that he had a scholarship to AFI.

"Did you know that every morning, David Lynch calls in the weather to that indie radio station 103.1?" said L. "He just goes out on the balcony and says what he sees."

The last honoree was Sir Howard Stringer, who was described by his presenter as one of those people you would want to have dinner with if you could pick only ten people in history. He is a Welshman who studied history at Oxford, became a journalist at CBS, then its president, and is now the chairman and CEO of Sony. He is also on the board of AFI.

Just as I was thinking what a great introduction the presenter was giving, I heard bagpipes. "Don't Americans know that he's Welsh, not Scottish?" I thought, and then a murmur ran through the crowd. "It's Sean Connery!" And it was. He was walking down the aisle near me behind a bagpiper, both of them very dashing in kilts. He gave a funny speech in honor of Howard Stringer, his old friend; Stringer then gave a funny speech back, which was even more impressive for being impromptu, as he had not known Connery was coming.

Our graduate told us that only about five people in the class were really graduating before the eyes of their proud relatives and friends. The others still had their thesis projects to finish and the inside of their diplomas looked like this: