Music / Air Traffic - "Shooting Star"

Just heard the song, Shooting Star, from SXSWesters, Air Traffic. Their first album, Fractured Life, came out in February. They’re what Coldplay used to be before Chris Martin started naming his kids after fruit. Thundering electric guitar, big chorus buildups, tight melody lines, and hooks galore. By the way, something you’ll learn about me is I’m a hook whore. Loves it.

Watch the Video "Shooting Star"

Books / Skull Tattoos Are Cool

Zeroville - By Steve Erickson

A bald-headed loner in a sea of long-haired hippies, Vikar comes to LA the same day the Manson family commits their heinous crimes. This is Vikar’s first day in Los Angeles and the perfect introduction to the world of Zeroville-- one of beauty, artifice, grotesqueness, and brilliance. But that is Hollywood and Vikar, a man with a tattoo of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift on his head, has found his Mecca. In fact, for this Asberger protagonist, film becomes his primary language of communication. Think the brain of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night with the body of Bukowski’s lean muscled LA prose. I loved this book. And yes, I wanted to have its babies; it’s that good. As a film critic for Los Angeles Magazine, Erickson knows his stuff, but beyond an encyclopedic knowledge of film, he is a talented storyteller-- things that rarely overlap (remember Roger Ebert’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls?). Erickson has a penned a love letter to Hollywood and the movies and I’m just glad he’s letting us in on the romance.

Check out this interview with Erickson about Zeroville

Happenings

Friday night a bunch of us screenwriters decided to go see our guru-yoda-sensei teacher, Hal Ackerman, in his new play called Testosterone: How Prostate Cancer Made a Man of Me. Now, b. star does not have the same equipment as the lead actor in this play and, contrary to Freud, does not simmer in hatred everyday because of it, but she can still empathize with coming down with a cancer that puts in question our basic conceptions of what it means to be a man or a woman. The play was funny, self-deprecating, sincere, and above all entertaining. I think my words should carry some weight considering I really dislike plays and I think musicals belong in the fifth circle of hell. Therefore, the fact that I didn’t need to take seven bathroom breaks or internet search the ingredients in marzipan or the benefits of double paned windows on my Blackberry shows that this play can engage even the more theatrically-challenged.

Showings: April 18-May 10

Powerhouse Theatre

Movies / Soylent Green Is Underpaid Extras

In respect to our favorite gun-wielding 70’s sci-fi actor, I popped in Soylent Green this humid morning. I never had the pleasure of seeing this 1973 cult classic before Mr. Heston’s death and thought it was pretty appropriate given our climate crisis and my need to yell from the top of my lungs, “Soylent Green is people,” in my pajamas. Did you know that Soylent Green was one of the first films about global warming and overpopulation? Eat that Al Gore. The future also seems to predict that women will only survive as live-in prostitutes called “furniture.” How fucking amazing is that? Furniture. The female perspective is pretty much absent from the film unless you consider Leigh Taylor-Young’s acting as anything other than robotic. Oh yeah, and then there’s the other pro, a wicked little Afro-chic babe who eats strawberry jam out of the bottle. Yeah, this film is pretty over the top.

TV / Keeping Up with the Kardashians

Okay, before you lose all trust in my critic abilities, let me first say that I had never even heard of this show before last week and stumbled upon it in my boredom. I actually think this is best way to determine a show’s true merit--you’re sitting there with guillotine-remote ready to cut down any unwitting show you find; you have nothing to lose--delirious from the bag of chips and four sodas you just consumed. Click. You’ve given up hope to finding anything actually good on TV and then you find yourself watching the antics of three bullheaded Valley girls (Kourtney, Kim, and Khloe Kardashian) as they vacillate between Hollywood and middle class suburbia...and you can't turn it off.

I think this show has more than meets the eye. A good portion of the plot revolves around the two stores the girls co-own, Smooch and Dash. It was really surprising to see that these girls make a living. Ever since the Middle Ages the idea of handling money and actually “working” was a plebian task, necessary but certainly not something the wealthy did. You can see this in many of the reality shows today. Nobody works. Instead the producers arrange entertaining antics for the leashed celebrities: they go shopping, they prepare for a party, they do a magazine interview, they remodel their house, they train their dogs. Now don’t get me wrong, these are probably all things the Kardashians will do or have done for the HD cameras, but there’s more substance to their narrative. What’s refreshing is I honestly believe these girls have to work beyond the show’s affected scenarios. In one episode Khloe and Kim get into a fight about the Dash website. Khloe is furious that Kim never works at the shop anymore and that she still has not completed their website. What’s more is that Kim’s absence is attributed to fame calling; she is always away doing modeling gigs, interviews, or appearances. The strain of fame is affecting their stores. We see this negotiation between reality and non-reality fame in almost every episode and it’s what makes the show ring true. I realize that “reality” is a cloudy word when it comes to TV programming and I’m sure Keeping Up with the Kardashians is edited to the hilt, but there’s something at it’s core that allows me identify, if only minutely, with these working girls.