EST
“When are you going to get back to our time zone?” Abbi asked.
The days following a long, cross-country business trip are always a bit hazy. Factor in the single-biggest, mission-critical, make-or-break event of the year, and a week of twelve-hour days culminating in an all-nighter and transcontinental flight and, well, you get the idea.
Hence, my wife’s inquiry Tuesday night as she drifted down the hallway to bed, while I sat on the couch channel surfing and flipping through magazines until well after three o’clock in the morning.
There is a jarring, big game-type feeling to working the Video Music Awards. You prepare all year, planning, strategizing and innovating for that big day. When it comes, you push and push and and leave everything out on the field. Win or lose (this year, we won, the days that follow are rootless, meandering, lost in translation. You pick up the pieces again, and reassemble your life.
Like the ten days of laundry on the floor. Or those contact lenses you need to re-order. Or the backlog of email and , un-returned phone calls. Or that pesky thing on you foot you want the doctor to check out.
And save for fire drills, work is a bit of a lost cause.
Yesterday, for example, I did the normally unimaginable. I grabbed a salad, walked to Bryant Park (forgetting it was Fashion Week), and read a while in the sunshine.
After work, Abbi and I met for a much-delayed birthday dinner. Pondering each successive course (More oysters? More sushi? More beer? More ice cream?), I voted yes, stating emphatically (if somewhat annoyingly), “It’s my birthday!”
Back home, we opened gifts, and — wrapping paper tossed asunder, dishes in the sink, and laundry fallow in the hamper — drifted down the hallway to bed at exactly 10:31 Eastern Standard Time.
The Electric Company
By the time I got home tonight, my garment bag was somewhere between Los Angeles and New York, my Blackberry was missing, and both my cell phone and iPod were out of power.
It was that kind of day.
Yesterday’s flight was like the bus home from summer camp. There’s Ryan from news, Jen from Press, Mike from Ad Sales. I slept until roughly Kansas, then knocked out seventy-five pages of Robert Greenfield’s “Exile on Main St.: A Season in Hell with the Rolling Stones.”
We landed just before ten. I was at baggage claim groggily chatting with my colleagues by 10:15. And then, one-by-one, they disappeared as I watched the same two bags circle the baggage carousel. 10:30. 10:38…
Nothing.
I walked in the door just before midnight, hugged Abbi for fifteen minutes, then dug into a late sushi dinner. It wasn’t until later that I discovered that my Blackberry was missing. And it wasn’t until three o’clock eastern standard time that I finally climbed into bed.
I awoke at 8:56, exactly thirty-four minutes prior to my morning news meeting.
It was that kind of day.
So, what to say of today. Well, The Network broke last year’s record by 25% on TV, and 110% online. And we posted some time-lapse of the VMA red carpet. That was cool. I ate lunch at 4pm. That wasn’t.
But I never found that Blackberry. An, being that all my power chords were in my garment bag, my cell phone died, and the my iPod. Which left me fidgety. But fine. Because it ended well.
Abbi met me at The Dead Poet.
So frankly — for a Tuesday, anyway — it wasn’t half bad.
Back In Your Hollywood Arms
I’m gonna argue that Hollywood itself is the biggest brand in the world.
In stark contrast to the lush, Technicolor fantasies in which the place trades, though, the town itself is a dirty mess of bleached concrete, dusty stucco, and drought-ridden patches of weeds. Which is a far cry from the Hollywood director D.W. Griffith founded in 1910.
Griffith and his acting troop (including Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, amongst others) came West to avoid fees imposed by Thomas Edison, owner of patents on the movie-making process. But they stayed for the mild climate, varied scenery, and reliable sunlight.
Reliable light. Hollywood makes billions on light.
By all indications, Paramount Pictures Studio on Melrose was once fueled by that very sunlight. It was surrounded by orange and lemon groves. These days? Not so much. The immediate neighborhood is littered with low-rise, low-cost apartments, strip malls, dollar stores and bodegas. Heck, the nearby Hollywood Chamber of Commerce looks like campaign headquarters for a third-party also-ran.
Inside the gates, though, is a different story.
I’ve wandered the Paramount lot before, but never like this. My work credential gave me fairly significant access. I poked around the “Everybody Hates Chris” set, ate at the commissary, and wandered all over the back lot: from Soho to Brooklyn to Chicago. I watched Pink, Kid Rock and Christina rehearse, and when I couldn’t be there, a camera was. And I spent time in Studio 16, home of this year’s Video Music Awards, and former home of films such like “Vertigo,” “Pretty In Pink, and “Elizabethtown.”
It was backstage there that I had the week’s epiphany. The Big Boss and I were standing back stage, peering through the two-way mirror that acted as a scrim. He was pointing out the lighting, a combination of state-of-the-art, computer-driven lasers, and ancient incandescent fixtures last used by Alfred Hitchcock himself.
“Yunno,” he said, “It’s all about the light.”
37
Hollywood feeds on its young. To celebrate the thirty-seventh anniversary of my birth here, then, is not without irony. To be away from home and enduring what is typically the most challenging week of the year only added insult to injury.
I woke, fittingly, to AT&T’s oft-heard ringtone, a sound that prompts dozens of my colleagues to reach for their hips simultaneously. It was the first of what would tally to well over one hundred hugely-appreciated email, Facebook and cell phone birthday wishes.
I was groggy and tense from another fitful night of sleep, one in which my usual work-oriented ruminations were compounded by life stage worries set to a Talking Head’s soundtrack
You may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?
Having pounded the star-strewn city streets all week, though, I had one goal: run the hills. And so I set out westward on Hollywood Boulevard — past Fay Wray, Grace Kelly and Ingrid Bergman immortalized in the pavement — then turned north on North Vista, entered Runyon Canyon Park, and began my 700 foot climb towards Mulholland.
The jeep trail was crowded with dog walkers, hikers and joggers. It was a gut-busting, lung-searing climb. When I finally approached the lookout, a film crew was setting up a dining room table complete with china, crystal and linens. I crept towards the edge, and looked out over the beautiful mess that is Los Angeles.
Later, at work on the Paramount Studios, I watched Christina Aguilera, T.I. and Kid Rock prepare for the 2008 Video Music Awards from just a few feet away. I climbed high above our red carpet, looked down, and considered that I was further behind-the-scenes than any seventeen-year-old version of me could have ever imagined.
In my backlot office, I overheard a story about a “young Holywood” party we’d covered the evening prior.
“Yunno, I think [name of young couple redacted] just walked the carpet, posed for pictures, picked up their swag, and left. They couldn’t have been there fifteen minutes.”
Driving home, I past a red carpet for HBO’s new vampire series, “True Blood.” As I crawled westward on Hollywood towards The Roosevelt past neon-lit homeless, street kids and prostitute scene straight out of a Guns ‘n Roses video, I thought about youth, and broken dreams.
Back in my hotel room, I cracked a beer, ordered a burger, and sat down to open the two envelopes slipped under my door: a “velvet Elvis” greeting card from my father, and a FedEx envelope from my brother containing drawings by Ethan and Edward.
I called Abbi and delivered a stream-of-consciousness monologue about my day, my job, my life, and the meaning of it all until I was too tired to talk anymore. Room service came, and I leaned back in the couch, and laughed at Steve Carell’s Maxwell Smart. I spotted my old friend Michael Stipe on the cover of a magazine, and took an intermission from dinner and the movie. I slipped on my headphones, and spent a minute reading about R.E.M., that band that has meant so much to my last twenty years.
Just before dozing off on the couch, I listened to Aimee Mann’s new single, “Thirty One Today.” “I though my life would be different by now,” she sings. “I thought my life would be better somehow.”
And as I slipped of into the second day of my thirty-seventh year, I felt the edges of my mouth slip upward, and the anxiety and frustration slip away. I thought about my dear wife, and my charmed life, and that view way up there above Los Angeles.
From the heights, one can see further — even on a hazy day.
Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel #1023
My hotel room is bigger than my apartment.
Downtown Los Angeles sparkles outside my east-facing windows. The Hollywood sign is out the north.
Last night after work, I pulled my Hyundai into valet as Kate Walsh and the cast of “Private Practice” walked a red carpet across the parking lot.
Upstairs, I watched “Wanted” on-demand as Judas Priest played Jimmy Kimmel’s “Pontiac Garage” just below my room (and directly adjacent to Hollywood High School).
The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel was founded in 1927 by a group of Hollywood luminaries that included Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Louis B. Mayer. The hotel’s “Blossom Room” hosted the first-ever Academy Awards ceremony, on May 19, 1929. Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and El Capitan are just down the street. CNN and the Capitol Records building are down the block.
The ninth floor is haunted by Montgomary Cliff. Shirley Temple took her first tap-dancing lesson (from Bill “Bojangles” Robinson) on the hotel’s ornate stairway. Marilyn Monroe posed on the diving board of the hotel’s swimming pool for her first-ever ad, and now haunts a full-length mirror relocated from her former-room to the Roosevelt lobby.
A huge black-and-white photo of David Bowie hangs over my bed. I’ve got a dining room table, and some sort of white leather couch. And every night, when the cleaning staff rolls down my bed, they place a prescription bottle full of white M&Ms by my bedside.
Excepting the gaggle of douche bags mustered around the front door, it ain’t all bad.
(Still, I can’t wait to go home.)
In The Shadow of Seattle
Abbi and I were in Seattle for a pal’s wedding this weekend.
We were full-on tourists. We had a great time riding the ferry to and from Bainbridge, jogging along Peugeot Sound, rambling through Pike’s Place Market, and staring out from the Space Needle.
We ate fresh seafood and drank local beer at every meal.
Skies were blue, and vistas were immense (in fact, check out my photos of Seattle).
Still, it could have been my hangover Saturday morning, or it could just be my generation, but it was difficult for me to walk the streets of Seattle without imagining them from Kurt Cobain’s perspective.
And like most of America, Seattle has a rusty underbelly. There are strip clubs across from Pike’s Market, and homeless under the overpasses. One guy muttered “Howly” at me under his breath. Another peeled out as I passed in front of his pickup truck.
What gives? Is it the weather? The longitude? Latitude? What makes us who we are? What makes our art what it is?
For me, anyway, Seattle is permanently brushed with grunge. At best, it’s Cameron Crowe’s “Singles,”, at worst, the place where Rock’s Savior swallowed a shotgun.
We haven’t heard the end of it since.
In “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle,” Kurt wails, “I miss the comfort in being sad.”
But which came first? The music? Or the misery? The place? Or the philosophy?
In Marcy Playground’s “The Shadow of Seattle,” John Wozniak sings, “Seize all the records from the past / hold for ransom all the artifacts / this ragged town protects them to the last.”
Like Liverpool, Minneapolis, and Athens, Seattle will be free.
It’s just a place. And a beautiful one at that.
Seattle, Washington (Fall 2008)
September 2nd, 2008
