The Smell of Paparazzi in the Morning

Both yesterday and today, I was woken up at 7:00 am by the sound of helicopters. Not helicopter singular; any Los Angeleno worth his or her salt is used to the drone of a police helicopter prowling around the skies. This was the heavy thunderous sound of multiple helicopters, some sort of weird consumer culture version of Apocalypse Now.

Yesterday I didn't know what it was, but as I walked to the bus this morning, I looked up and saw that there five helicopters circling around my neighborhood. Or rather, not quite my block, but a few blocks up the hill from me, above Sunset Blvd. That's where West Hollywood's orderly rows of apartment buildings turn into the grotesque disorder of Disneyfied modernism that is the Hollywood Hills.

"What important celebrity event has happened in the past few days?" I asked myself. Ah yes, Paris Hilton's release from jail! Paris short-lived house arrest took place just a few blocks north of me, and apparently the world's paparazzi was staking out her new "jail" even from above.

Hearing about Paris's screaming and crying in the courtroom gives me a twinge of sympathy, but I think I have to stay pretty resolutely in favor of jail for her. A friend of mine once got a DUI, had a second offense, and had to spend 30 days in jail. It wasn't fun, I'm sure he was having daily nervous breakdowns and not sleeping, and I'm sure I would too, but you know...he survived. And he wasn't in a special celebrity section of a woman's jail.

Photo: Paris at LA Pride in I think 2005, with Tinkerbell and her mother. She was, I believe, the celebrity grand marshal. She was surrounded by really intense police security that pushed everyone back rather roughly. More than a few boos from my section of the crowd.

Like a Candle in the Wind

In all the hubub over Anna Nicole Smith's death, I forgot that I actually had a close personal connection to her. In 2005, at the West Hollywood Pride Parade, she blew a kiss in my direction. I felt pretty special. I even managed to take this picture. (That's Stravinsky's IHOP behind her.)
The best thing? See the shirtless guy to her left, who looks like he is sniffing something off his thumb? You can click the picture for a larger version. According to TMZ and Defamer, that's a certain Dr. Sandeep Kapoor. He is the doctor who supposedly prescribed poor Anna methadone, two weeks before she was due to give birth. That methadone, of course, probably killed Anna's son, and possibly Anna herself.

See, it's the brushes with fame like this that make living in Los Angeles worth it.

On Blue Books and Movie Stars

Los Angeles is an odd place to be an academic. You know how there are some cities that are safe havens for academics? Obviously, a lot of those cities are college towns. I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a year, clearly a place where my species feels comfortable. Walking around Cambridge, you know that the people on the street understand you. If you were to tell someone you were a graduate student, they understand what that means: that you're poor, over-educated, pretentious, and socially awkward. They don't judge you (much), because they have a slot in their brains where they can place you. Even in a non-college town like New York City, there is definitely a niche for academics. You see a slovenly-dressed person grading a stack of blue books, you know who they are. You see an older man with a comb-over and a tweed jacket, you know what he is.

The citizens of Los Angeles just don't have that slot for us. This town--or at least my corner of it--is so dominated by the Industry (and there is only one!) that anybody who does something different will always be an oddity. When I meet people in bars, they are always fascinated by the fact that I am getting a Ph.D. When I pull out exams to grade at my local coffeeshop, heads across the room look up from their screenplays and stare at me. There are actually a lot of academics in Los Angeles--UCLA, USC, Cal State LA, Cal Tech, and a lot of smaller places--but we are completely subsumed to the Hollywood monster. Sometimes I wish I lived in a city where I had a place.

Of course, if I was in Cambridge I would not, as I just did tonight, have looked up from my pile of blue books at the Sunset Boulevard Coffee Bean to see Eugene Levy, Christopher Guest, and Jamie Lee Curtis walk by on their way to the premiere of For Your Consideration, followed by a swarm of paparazzi. Take that, Cambridge.

A Week in LA

It has been a good week for celebrities. Last Friday, during the conference, I saw Brian Baumgartner at the Century City food court. The American version of The Office is one of my favorite shows, so that was pretty exciting. More exciting, however, was on Thursday, when I saw Morgan Freeman. I was walking to lunch on campus, and he was standing there being interviewed by a reporter. Cool!

Coolest, however, was today. While shopping at Collar and Leash, our local pet supply store, I had a discussion on the merits of different kinds of cat litter with Anna Faris, of Scary Movie, Lost in Translation, and My Super Ex-Girlfriend fame. I've always thought she was pretty cool, and it turns out she was nice in person too. Unfortunately, her cats are having trouble finding the litter box. She ended up going with some special litter that is supposed to attract cats; I went with our usual sawdust pellet standby.

Speaking of naughty cats, Pablo and Carlos have figured out a clever way to express their annoyance when Nikki or I don't feed them breakfast at an appropriately early hour. The hallway outside our bedrooms is wallpapered with New Yorker covers, so when they are hungry in the morning, they start eating the covers. Every morning I wake up to another pile of scrap paper outside my door, and another empty spot on the wall.

Maybe I'll talk to my good friend Anna for suggestions.

He's too pretty to have privacy

Our sighting of Jake Gyllenhaal made it into this week's Defamer Hollywood Privacy Watch, Treo'd to them by my friend less than five minutes after it happened. Too bad they censored his license plate number.

What would we do without the internet?

The Celebrity Sphere

Last night, after seeing The Black Rider downtown, we were hanging around outside talking when we realized that Jake Gyllenhaal was standing next to us, waiting for his car at the valet. He was looking good, with the short scruffy beard he's often sported lately. He and a friend hopped into his car (a silver Mercedes, and yes, we got the license plate number, thank you very much) and drove off into city.

I admit to unreservedly loving the game of seeing celebrities in this town. I love pretending I don't care, and I love then emailing the sighting to Defamer PrivacyWatch. I love the vicarious thrill of participating in the vicious cycle of consumer culture in late capitalism, and the pleasure of bragging about it to people who live elsewhere.

But sometimes I fear that I don't remember all of my sightings. So I'm going to list all I can remember here, and update my blog with them as they happen, so that when I am old and living in a much more boring locale, I'll remember this fun.

1. Johnny Knoxville and Wee Man, from the MTV show Jackass. Spotted at Venice Beach, while my parents were visiting.
2. The midget from Seinfeld, shopping at my grocery store.
3. Sandra Oh walking by the movie theater at The Grove. Just as I was coming out of a screening of Sideways, no less!
4. Speaking of Sideways, the very next day I saw Virginia Madsen pulling out of the parking lot on the corner of my street.
5. Debra Messing coming out of a performance of Sweeney Todd in New York City.
6. The entire male cast of The Sopranos congregating in a hotel bar in Chicago, and, the next morning, checking out of the hotel.
7. Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson drove by me in a black SUV while I was waiting for a bus on Sunset Boulevard.
8. Just tonight, I saw the actor who plays one of Will's gay friends on Will and Grace.
9. John C. Reilly. My roommate and I were backstage at the Mark Taper Forum, meeting a friend, and he was hanging around waiting for a friend too.
10. Movie premieres don't really count, I think. It's cheating if you know a star is going to be somewhere at a certain time. Still, last summer in London, I saw Scarlett Johanssen and Ewan Macgregor at the British premiere of The Island. It kind of counts, because we just happened to be walking through Leceister Square when we stumbled upon the event.


There are more, but that is all I can remember right now.

LA in London

Today we went down into central London, for probably the last time--on Wednesday we are moving into a new flat, and then on Friday Mary and I fly back to the States. The main purpose of our expedition into the city was to go see a George Stubbs exhibit at the National Gallery. It was nice enough, for an exhibit that contains approximately 300 identical paintings of horses.

The real excitement, though, is that afterwards we stumbled across a movie premiere in Leicester Square--the London premiere of the new Michael Bay movie The Island. These things happen all the time in Los Angeles, of course, especially in all of the nice old movie theaters in Westwood. Usually, though, you wait around for a long time, get bored, and never see anybody cool. This time, however, just as we were peering over the crowd to see what was up, a limo pulled up and deposited Michael Bay himself. Then a few minutes later Ewan MacGregor arrived, followed in short order by Scarlett Johannsson. Pretty darn cool, I have to say. I got closeup pictures of them all, but I am too lazy to deal with uploading them right now.

Michael Bay anecdote: Mr. Bay is a graduate of Wesleyan's illustrious film studies program, which gave him the critical acumen necessary for such thoughtful mots du cinema as Pearl Harbor and Armageddon. Bay came back to campus to give a talk while I was there, and was practically scorned out of the lecture hall. One black-clad film studies student asked him point blank, "How does it feel to sell out?" I wish I could say that Bay had a snappy comeback to that, but he didn't.