8:19 a.m. - 2008-01-11
blvd.
I'd spent the morning across the street, ten floors up in a movie star's new penthouse; installing an elaborate and bizarre set of cabs that I'd invested much time in. They looked OK but my enthusiasm was tempered by my knowledge of the debt this "original" design owed to the work of a more elite designer, and by the realization that this was just the sort of scramble-y, low-budget approximation of a mediocre-to-begin-with idea that I'd vowed not to take on a few years back. Anyway, the logistic challenges of installation had been met, and the clients seemed happy. It was the day before Thanksgiving, warm and breezy out on the balcony and a holiday smash of families crowded the sidewalk in front of the Pantages below. I noticed the propped-open door to the Frolic Room gaping coolly in their midst, encouraging tighter parental hand-holds and drawing nervous little peeks into its manky interior so I wrapped for lunch and headed over.
Inside it was just me and two familiar AM drinking types and old Gita-the-bartender is wondering aloud why the place isn't more packed what with so many people obviously taking the afternoon off and I ask her did she work yesterday, 'cause I figured it must have been crowded after the demonstration.
"What was that? I had yesterday off..."
"The Writer's Guild, they held a strike demonstration down the street...picket signs and the whole nine."
The guy down the bar snorts and, without looking up from his paper, says "Those assholes don't even know this place is here...they just come down from the hills have their little parades and then go home to their BMWs and their Labrador Retrievers."
I looked the guy over: wrinkled oxford tucked into burger-stained jeans, greasy mid-length hair half-obscuring wire-frame specs, an oversize pair of cowboy boots that'd never scuffed pasture -- the uniform of an embittered Hollywood failure, a writer, let's assume. There were men like this muttering into their beer all over town, many of them friends of mine. How persistent, though, was the ego on this one? Was he oblivious to the fact that he's in one of the better-known bars in town (Gita told me later that Brad Pitt had ducked in before a recent screening), surrounded by multi-million dollar lofts, construction cranes, sushi bars and trendy shopping corridors, with busloads of tourists queuing up outside to see the latest Disney musical? Or was it the seemingly relentless incursion of these same elements into what used to be a more traditionally seedy (more romantically seedy?) neighborhood that threatened to dilute his embittered aesthetic? In any case, a plainer elocution of the ego's me-versus-the-world function I hadn't heard: it wasn't that he had failed himself as a writer, it was that the wealthy WGA members had failed writing with their success.
Despite my own booze-swillin' broke-outsider status and concomitant sympathies, I still felt an urge to check the guy. I mean, I'm all for throwing an angst-log on the hearth of creativity...but to disparage Labrador Retrievers? My rancor has its limits, sir.
