Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Saving the World. Killing Animals.
I watch the baristas (if they're male is it baristos?) at King's Road scoop their potently dark coffee beans from giant gray trashcans into petite brown paper bags. That's gross, I think. The fact that these receptacles have most certainly never been used as proper waste baskets for old food leaves my irrationality undeterred. I will forever associate a trash can with the smell of curdled chocolate milk and sour ham sandwiches. I'd like to not see my precious coffee being stored in such a container of ill repute.
You see, Senior year of high school I become quite familiar with these bins. A recycling club was formed by students and spearheaded by Dr. Foffanoff - a man whose name appropriately and with almost onomatopoeia-like accuracy described his demeanor, gait, and hand movements. His ambiguous sexual orientation was due less to actual ambiguity but rather the strict Catholic school that he had sadistically chosen to exist within. And of all things he was a religion teacher. You could almost see the self-flagellation wounds bleeding through the back of his button up shirt.
We were attempting to save the planet, to see further than beyond our upper-middle class and sometimes plastic surgeon adjusted noses. At the end of the semester we were to donate all of the proceeds of our recycling dollars to a charity of choice. I think it had something to do with homeless kids or hungry kids or kids without books. Whatever. The effort entailed topping the aforementioned cans with state-of-the-art lids, replete with a four inch circular holes, thus separating them from the "I don't give a shit about the planet" cans. The idea was that if teenagers saw the shape of the hole, they would place things of the appropriate size...something akin to that blocks game everyone played when they were babies. X's went in the X holes, Os went in the O holes, and if you got tired of banging them around to see what went where you could opt to just chew on the pieces.
As rudimentary as this plan sounded, it was almost impossible to illicit cooperation from my lazy and ignorant peers. Every lunch a few of us would stand up on chairs and make a reminding announcement over inane chatter about who hates who and who blew who. But our red-faced requests to "PLEASE REMEMBER TO RECYCLE!" were always drowned out by "Chad did WHAT to WHO?!"
Twice a week after school our group of tree-hugging blessed souls would snap on some thin latex gloves and dig through our treasure bins, separating the wheat from the chaff if you know what I mean. The four inch opening never appeared to indicate it's intention. People preferred to interpret the specialized lids for little trash for little trash collectors to take to little trash dumps. Like Lilliput for garbage. Wads of chewed gum, half-eaten BBQ chicken pizza, open containers of ranch dressing, banana peels, etc. Fifty percent of the bins would be filled with toxic rotting shit and the other half full of germ ridden sticky cans not worth the five cents we were trading them in for. It was a thankless job.
One day, doing more of the same, we heard a panic within the ranks.
"OHMYGOD.OHMYGOD.OHMYGOD."
Being the good rubbernecking, eavesdropping seventeen-year-olds that we were, everyone ran to the direction of the squealing. By the front door of the cafeteria and up the stairs from my World History class, a blue trash can lay on its side, cans and garbage spilling out from it like a cornucopia. A girl stood above with her arm held against her nose. Closing in, we all did the same. Amongst the Tang, Pepsi, and Diet Dr. Pepper was a dead squirrel, stiff, having drowned in a mound of filth and good intentions.
The most ineffective recycling program in the history of West Hills ended soon after the slaughter. We earned about $51 from all of our manual labor and lunch hour PR efforts - a sum I would have gladly donated from a week of blending Mahalo Mangos at my juice bar gig. Anything if it would have saved that poor animal. Recycling kills. Trashcans are dirty. The end.
(What our squirrel might have looked like had he/she been able to pursue a long, happy life)
You see, Senior year of high school I become quite familiar with these bins. A recycling club was formed by students and spearheaded by Dr. Foffanoff - a man whose name appropriately and with almost onomatopoeia-like accuracy described his demeanor, gait, and hand movements. His ambiguous sexual orientation was due less to actual ambiguity but rather the strict Catholic school that he had sadistically chosen to exist within. And of all things he was a religion teacher. You could almost see the self-flagellation wounds bleeding through the back of his button up shirt.
We were attempting to save the planet, to see further than beyond our upper-middle class and sometimes plastic surgeon adjusted noses. At the end of the semester we were to donate all of the proceeds of our recycling dollars to a charity of choice. I think it had something to do with homeless kids or hungry kids or kids without books. Whatever. The effort entailed topping the aforementioned cans with state-of-the-art lids, replete with a four inch circular holes, thus separating them from the "I don't give a shit about the planet" cans. The idea was that if teenagers saw the shape of the hole, they would place things of the appropriate size...something akin to that blocks game everyone played when they were babies. X's went in the X holes, Os went in the O holes, and if you got tired of banging them around to see what went where you could opt to just chew on the pieces.
As rudimentary as this plan sounded, it was almost impossible to illicit cooperation from my lazy and ignorant peers. Every lunch a few of us would stand up on chairs and make a reminding announcement over inane chatter about who hates who and who blew who. But our red-faced requests to "PLEASE REMEMBER TO RECYCLE!" were always drowned out by "Chad did WHAT to WHO?!"
Twice a week after school our group of tree-hugging blessed souls would snap on some thin latex gloves and dig through our treasure bins, separating the wheat from the chaff if you know what I mean. The four inch opening never appeared to indicate it's intention. People preferred to interpret the specialized lids for little trash for little trash collectors to take to little trash dumps. Like Lilliput for garbage. Wads of chewed gum, half-eaten BBQ chicken pizza, open containers of ranch dressing, banana peels, etc. Fifty percent of the bins would be filled with toxic rotting shit and the other half full of germ ridden sticky cans not worth the five cents we were trading them in for. It was a thankless job.
One day, doing more of the same, we heard a panic within the ranks.
"OHMYGOD.OHMYGOD.OHMYGOD."
Being the good rubbernecking, eavesdropping seventeen-year-olds that we were, everyone ran to the direction of the squealing. By the front door of the cafeteria and up the stairs from my World History class, a blue trash can lay on its side, cans and garbage spilling out from it like a cornucopia. A girl stood above with her arm held against her nose. Closing in, we all did the same. Amongst the Tang, Pepsi, and Diet Dr. Pepper was a dead squirrel, stiff, having drowned in a mound of filth and good intentions.
The most ineffective recycling program in the history of West Hills ended soon after the slaughter. We earned about $51 from all of our manual labor and lunch hour PR efforts - a sum I would have gladly donated from a week of blending Mahalo Mangos at my juice bar gig. Anything if it would have saved that poor animal. Recycling kills. Trashcans are dirty. The end.
(What our squirrel might have looked like had he/she been able to pursue a long, happy life)
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Review: Metric at the Wiltern
The curtains come up. I look over at Brett and yell, "It's 30 Seconds to Mars! And that's Jared Leto!" The guitarist's hair is straight and shiny and as the light reveals him more honestly he more so resembles Michael Pitt during beer drinking phase. The opening act, Sebastien Grainger, is a motley crew of queer doppelgangers. The lead singer wears a Nascar/Elvis inspired jumpsuit, looking like Freddy Mercury as played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers with facial hair. The keyboardist is a strange lovechild of Mario and Luigi. He's got the height of his momma and the 'stache of papa. He hangs a tambourine around, gyrates epileptically in his designated area. His curly hair shoots out of a sweatband and his stiff, white over-sized shirt reminds me of the waiters at the Red Dragon Chinese Restaurant in West Hills.
They rock out admirably hard for an opening band. They even go through the dramatic trouble of removing the whole band, save fake Freddy for a sentimental solo. He is bathed in the white spotlight and I feel like I am watching The Phantom of the Opera all over again. When he's done crooning thirty seconds later the band is back on the stage perform the rest of the song. In between songs the singer makes what I think are jokes but he snorts them out pretty quickly. I can't decide if I'm at an Eagles of Death Metal show or watching Dane Cook at the Laugh Factory.
Brett has given me a pair of white earplugs to soften the blow to my delicate hearing and I am appreciative. I do, however, liken it to wearing a condom. While you are safe and protected, you just don't feel it. During Metric's last song later in the evening I entice him to take them out for just a moment while they do a quiet acoustic set, just to hear the hum of the speakers and the rustling of the crowd...all of the details that get censored when you attempt to save your ears. When it sounds as though they're going to crank up the tunes again, we slip the plugs back into their appropriate holes. I look over at Brett and yell, "It's like playing 'Just the Tip'!"
The earplugs have the added bonus feature of making the conversations around me more audible than the music being played on stage. The girls behind us are loud and yell things like "I love your mustache!" and "I want to fuck you!" and when the roadies are on stage moving equipment they yell "I want to have sex with all of you...at the same time!" I turn to investigate the age of these potty mouth horn dogs, guessing 7th grade in maturity but most likely 10th grade in reality. I am assaulted by one pair of ironic hipster glasses and four pairs of rather large boobs. I had assumed that their hollering and panting would cease when Metric comes on (female singer, Emily Haines) but these girls are unstoppable maniacs.
"I would go lesbian for you!"
"Emily!!! Emily Haines!!!"
"You're so sexy!!!!!!"
"She's so sexy!"
"OH MY GOOODDDDDDDDDD!!!!!!!"
They're right to be riled up for her. She's petite and adorable and thoughtfully fashionable. She comes on stage silent and covered in a form-hugging, gold-sequined dress, platinum blond shaggy hair, and a sparkly Chanel-esq black jacket. They start playing. She headbangs dangerously while she toys with the keyboard. She is most definitely a good time. At the end of their first song a cobalt blue light pours over them and on us like a technicolor fog. The effect is used multiple times, interchanging between that blue and a gold that matches her outfit. It doesn't get any less mesmerizing.
It's a good time this show. The group to my right bounces up and down endlessly. The floor thuds under the pressure of moving bodies. I note that they too are about ten years my junior and I wonder if I'm too old to like this music. Brett reassures me that there are other people here our age and I stop worrying. A group of girls look at each other and scream the lyrics, dance holding hands, bound about spryly. I am reminded of a piece of myself. Their mother's are probably picking them up afterward. For most of the show I am trapped behind two taller boys with shaggy hair, whose backlit forms open and close to reveal the stage like prop wooden forests in a ballet production. Occasionally the screaming girls behind me catch strands of my hair with their bracelets and I'll feel the twang of my locks being removed violently. The place liberally layers the smell of vomit, Barbasol shave cream, and human sweat. Oh rock and roll, I love thee.
Rutherford Dr.
Up a winding Hollywood hill, at the end of an ungenerously narrow cul-de-sac, stands a 1920s Tudor style home painted brown and tan. It is meant to whimsical and in many ways it is. The realtor greets me from the door while I am still getting out of my car. She has short hair a la the Golden Girls and red lipstick that had been applied earlier in the day, all that remains of her efforts is a stain of the color on her lips. When she says hi she is friendly and jovial and well-intentioned. I walk through the door and understand that such a personality is precisely what is going to be needed in order to sell this place.
What has become a common expectation of mine in this house hunt are strange smells. One I am particularly fond of is cat piss and this place provides plenty. Confirmation of the owner's pet of choice is in the form of two bags of Friskies near the entrance. The carpet is a deep and dark ruby red, obviously worn over the course of time to something more accurately resembling drying blood. The ceilings are coved and completely cracked with water damage, the old sooty cream paint often morphing into a muddied brown. Glass Christmas tree ornaments hang from the fifteen foot ceiling.
I ask the woman how long the previous tenant had lived here although the answer is an obvious "forever." She tells me the man had been here since the 1940s and had passed away this year (not in this house she assures some other prospective buyers...a pair of contractors that leave within five minutes, knowing that this place is in need of more than cosmetic resurfacing). An easel sits in the corner, covered in drawings that I assume to be his own. "He was an artist," she tells me, "An eccentric old codger."
The place is categorically frightening, but an odd feeling of dilapidated calm prevails in this crumbling old house. I walk into the room with two chairs and "a million dollar view" as the agent puts it. And that it is. The house faces the entirety of Los Angeles...the beach, the hills, downtown, the flats, all of it. The clouds are big and rumbling today. It is clear. This man literally watched LA develop from dust. Piece by piece by piece the surface of the city changed in front of these lead glass windows. Airfields turned into office buildings. Barren dirt turned into shopping centers. Freeways sliced through stately neighborhoods. I wonder if he was sad about it. Disappointed in some way. This place was his city much more than it is mine.
I agree with the woman about the view and move into the dining room with lumberjack plaid wallpaper peeing away from the walls. From there I go to the kitchen and then out a door to the patio. The breeze blows hard from the beach and my hair whips back behind my shoulders. There is something about this place that reminds me of Disneyland and what would happen if its dreams were abandoned.
More details are provided to me by what has turned into two realtors, a man in addition to the woman with red lipstick. It was supposedly quite the Hollywood party place. "Swank," she calls them. The owner was ninety-eight when he passed. The house is 2500 square feet. There are maid's quarters on a detached lower level, complete with laundry chute. There is an attic upstairs...
On second floor are the bedrooms. The first is quite small and I try to relate to the gentleman realtor by saying that my brother always got stuck in rooms like this growing up. The master room shows the same signs of neglect as the res of the home. There are few things in it aside from an uncomfortable and dusty looking bed and a few old lighting fixtures. The next room is cluttered with pictures and birthday cards and stacks of books. An adjustable hospital bed points at me from the door. I offer that this was maybe the old man's room but he tells me that he thinks this is where the granddaughter who lived with him stayed. Yikes.
The realtors direct me back upstairs and to the attic. When I am told that there is an inoperable bathroom there I sense it is less to tell me about an convenient design feature and more to warn me not to venture into it. There are windows on three of the four sides of the roof. This was his artist's studio and I can see why. It is 4 in the afternoon and the light on the wood floor is generous and still.
Before I head down to the maid's quarters, the man walks me over to the outdoor stairs and makes sure I watch my step. These people feel like grandparents and I want to have holidays with them. Twenty some-odd rough-hewn steps later I am in a floor of the house that hasn't been occupied or used in at least thirty years. Leaves lay carelessly on top of paper thin wood floors. Slats underneath the walls peer out of gaping holes in the plaster. Window panes are missing. There are two industrial wash bins that were probably used before the advent of washing machines. The view is still spectacular and despite it's ill repair, there is something quite lovely about it. At some point in time this housed one of the luckiest maids in the word.
When I walk back to the main floor I talk to the realtors for some length. I feel slightly guilty knowing that I am not going to buy this home. They offer to contact me about another that needs "less work" and I agree. I say that I hope someone else does right by this house and I do, if it's even possible. I get into my car thinking about that house as less of a piece of property and more of a testament of time and of life, of how a house deteriorates as you deteriorate...everything sinking into disrepair until the day you're not there anymore to care about it.
What has become a common expectation of mine in this house hunt are strange smells. One I am particularly fond of is cat piss and this place provides plenty. Confirmation of the owner's pet of choice is in the form of two bags of Friskies near the entrance. The carpet is a deep and dark ruby red, obviously worn over the course of time to something more accurately resembling drying blood. The ceilings are coved and completely cracked with water damage, the old sooty cream paint often morphing into a muddied brown. Glass Christmas tree ornaments hang from the fifteen foot ceiling.
I ask the woman how long the previous tenant had lived here although the answer is an obvious "forever." She tells me the man had been here since the 1940s and had passed away this year (not in this house she assures some other prospective buyers...a pair of contractors that leave within five minutes, knowing that this place is in need of more than cosmetic resurfacing). An easel sits in the corner, covered in drawings that I assume to be his own. "He was an artist," she tells me, "An eccentric old codger."
The place is categorically frightening, but an odd feeling of dilapidated calm prevails in this crumbling old house. I walk into the room with two chairs and "a million dollar view" as the agent puts it. And that it is. The house faces the entirety of Los Angeles...the beach, the hills, downtown, the flats, all of it. The clouds are big and rumbling today. It is clear. This man literally watched LA develop from dust. Piece by piece by piece the surface of the city changed in front of these lead glass windows. Airfields turned into office buildings. Barren dirt turned into shopping centers. Freeways sliced through stately neighborhoods. I wonder if he was sad about it. Disappointed in some way. This place was his city much more than it is mine.
I agree with the woman about the view and move into the dining room with lumberjack plaid wallpaper peeing away from the walls. From there I go to the kitchen and then out a door to the patio. The breeze blows hard from the beach and my hair whips back behind my shoulders. There is something about this place that reminds me of Disneyland and what would happen if its dreams were abandoned.
More details are provided to me by what has turned into two realtors, a man in addition to the woman with red lipstick. It was supposedly quite the Hollywood party place. "Swank," she calls them. The owner was ninety-eight when he passed. The house is 2500 square feet. There are maid's quarters on a detached lower level, complete with laundry chute. There is an attic upstairs...
On second floor are the bedrooms. The first is quite small and I try to relate to the gentleman realtor by saying that my brother always got stuck in rooms like this growing up. The master room shows the same signs of neglect as the res of the home. There are few things in it aside from an uncomfortable and dusty looking bed and a few old lighting fixtures. The next room is cluttered with pictures and birthday cards and stacks of books. An adjustable hospital bed points at me from the door. I offer that this was maybe the old man's room but he tells me that he thinks this is where the granddaughter who lived with him stayed. Yikes.
The realtors direct me back upstairs and to the attic. When I am told that there is an inoperable bathroom there I sense it is less to tell me about an convenient design feature and more to warn me not to venture into it. There are windows on three of the four sides of the roof. This was his artist's studio and I can see why. It is 4 in the afternoon and the light on the wood floor is generous and still.
Before I head down to the maid's quarters, the man walks me over to the outdoor stairs and makes sure I watch my step. These people feel like grandparents and I want to have holidays with them. Twenty some-odd rough-hewn steps later I am in a floor of the house that hasn't been occupied or used in at least thirty years. Leaves lay carelessly on top of paper thin wood floors. Slats underneath the walls peer out of gaping holes in the plaster. Window panes are missing. There are two industrial wash bins that were probably used before the advent of washing machines. The view is still spectacular and despite it's ill repair, there is something quite lovely about it. At some point in time this housed one of the luckiest maids in the word.
When I walk back to the main floor I talk to the realtors for some length. I feel slightly guilty knowing that I am not going to buy this home. They offer to contact me about another that needs "less work" and I agree. I say that I hope someone else does right by this house and I do, if it's even possible. I get into my car thinking about that house as less of a piece of property and more of a testament of time and of life, of how a house deteriorates as you deteriorate...everything sinking into disrepair until the day you're not there anymore to care about it.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Celebreality Bites: The Poser Edition
In my experience, the flight between New York and Los Angeles has always been fraught with interesting characters. I once had the opportunity of sitting six bodies away from Catherine Keener, whom I identified first by her booming alcoholic witch cackle of a laugh. Needless to say, I felt very honored to be in the same vessel with such a talented actress. That and having a celebrity on a plane usually makes me feel more at ease with the flight, as I would like to believe that God would not strike down an aircraft carrying that variety of superior human. Celebrities die in private planes, not a Jet Blue Airbus.
More often, though, I am surrounded by people that God would gladly take down during Freak Accident Quota Deadline, weather permitting and myself included. Back in 2002, I got trapped in between a drafty window and an young vaguely Indian man who introduced himself as Anand Jon. I am tirelessly wary of people who introduce themselves to you using both their first and last name. These are people who want to establish "Names" for themselves. These are people who want you to remember them down the road. These are people desperately attempting to prematurely stake out a legacy for themselves or are sociopaths who believe they've already done so. These people are douche bags. Apparently Anand Jon does double duty, also taking some time out of his busy schedule being a lame ass to design clothes.
Quickly into the flight, Anand Jon puts his press kit in my lap. At this point in my life I was a first year Communications student who got drunk on Long Island Iced Teas because it was economical. I bought burnt orange Jones New York sweaters from Century 21. The closest thing I had come to regular perusal of a fashion magazine were the issues of Seventeen I subscribed to back in middle school where I learned to mash avocado and mayonnaise together as a remedy for dull hair. I had no idea what a press kit was or what designers were cool. Nothing. I was delightfully immune to the whole machine; as immune as someone who had grown up in South Jersey.
So when the black binder of magazine clippings and badly written articles gets passed my way I did not know that I should have pretended I didn't speak English and ask him to kindly leave me alone in the universal language of physical violence. Nor do I laugh in his face and tell him he's an attention grubbing egomaniac and I'm just a college student who really doesn't care about his clothing line. Instead, I politely flip through page by page while he breathes over me, superfluously pointing out which pictures were of him with Paris Hilton.
Despite being an age when I was not so fashionable, I recognized that these bedazzled, Bollywood-inspired hankerchief dresses were not fashion. Wet Seal wouldn't even sell this stuff. But I smiled and placated, said "Wow..." a few times. And eventually the flight was over.
Aside from the irritation I developed like a light rash from the five hours I spent being a captive audience for the equivalent of an Amway salesperson, I also honed in on something else. This guy was creepy. The creep seeped out of his pores and over his seat and into my seat. This was before I really developed a radar for this kind of thing. But humans are animals and the "Fight or Flight" instinct is alive and well. I surmise to guess that the only thing stopping Mr. Jon from touching me inappropriately was the plane full of bothersome witnesses.
A few years later I get a casting to shoot for his clothing line. The address is on Maple Street, a residential area. I realize it is his apartment when I park my car. This is something that happens often in this industry and goes against all common sense and rules of safety that your mother teaches you when you're in kindergarten. Hold hands when crossing the street, don't eat candy you find on the bathroom floor, when a strange man asks you to come into his car/house/pants you run away screaming "Fire! Fire! Fire!" A few months into modeling I had to put all of this training behind me for the sake of actually booking work. Although I do admit that in the beginning I would say a little prayer and hope that this wasn't the last casting I would ever go on.
When I got inside, there were a few other girls trying on jeans. He was in the living room taking pictures with a digital camera. There was no music. There were no sounds. Just the eerie quiet that usually signifies ill intentions or judgment (most often it's just judgment). When he didn't recognize me I decided not to offer our shared plane trip as a proverbial olive branch. He pointed to the bathroom and told me to try on a pair of jeans on the counter. There was another girl in the bathroom. She was quiet as she pulled on her pants.
A sneaking suspicion crept over me that it would be reasonable to think that he had cameras hidden in between towels and toilet paper rolls and that this casting was only a ruse to acquire more footage for his personal perv collection. "At least I'm not getting raped outright," I think reassuringly.
I leave the casting and like hundreds of times before, I don't book the job. This time I really didn't care. I do, however, take interest when three months later I hear that Anand Jon has been arrested for the sexual abuse of minors and young women, some models. Apparently instinct isn't as sharp in some people and for this I am terribly sorry.
When I Google Anand Jon, a website comes up asking to support him in the egregious injustice he faces. There is a quote from Ghandi and a picture of him looking like a doe-eyed, innocent angel. Even facing life in prison, this guy is a completely ridiculous tool.
More often, though, I am surrounded by people that God would gladly take down during Freak Accident Quota Deadline, weather permitting and myself included. Back in 2002, I got trapped in between a drafty window and an young vaguely Indian man who introduced himself as Anand Jon. I am tirelessly wary of people who introduce themselves to you using both their first and last name. These are people who want to establish "Names" for themselves. These are people who want you to remember them down the road. These are people desperately attempting to prematurely stake out a legacy for themselves or are sociopaths who believe they've already done so. These people are douche bags. Apparently Anand Jon does double duty, also taking some time out of his busy schedule being a lame ass to design clothes.
Quickly into the flight, Anand Jon puts his press kit in my lap. At this point in my life I was a first year Communications student who got drunk on Long Island Iced Teas because it was economical. I bought burnt orange Jones New York sweaters from Century 21. The closest thing I had come to regular perusal of a fashion magazine were the issues of Seventeen I subscribed to back in middle school where I learned to mash avocado and mayonnaise together as a remedy for dull hair. I had no idea what a press kit was or what designers were cool. Nothing. I was delightfully immune to the whole machine; as immune as someone who had grown up in South Jersey.
So when the black binder of magazine clippings and badly written articles gets passed my way I did not know that I should have pretended I didn't speak English and ask him to kindly leave me alone in the universal language of physical violence. Nor do I laugh in his face and tell him he's an attention grubbing egomaniac and I'm just a college student who really doesn't care about his clothing line. Instead, I politely flip through page by page while he breathes over me, superfluously pointing out which pictures were of him with Paris Hilton.
Despite being an age when I was not so fashionable, I recognized that these bedazzled, Bollywood-inspired hankerchief dresses were not fashion. Wet Seal wouldn't even sell this stuff. But I smiled and placated, said "Wow..." a few times. And eventually the flight was over.
Aside from the irritation I developed like a light rash from the five hours I spent being a captive audience for the equivalent of an Amway salesperson, I also honed in on something else. This guy was creepy. The creep seeped out of his pores and over his seat and into my seat. This was before I really developed a radar for this kind of thing. But humans are animals and the "Fight or Flight" instinct is alive and well. I surmise to guess that the only thing stopping Mr. Jon from touching me inappropriately was the plane full of bothersome witnesses.
A few years later I get a casting to shoot for his clothing line. The address is on Maple Street, a residential area. I realize it is his apartment when I park my car. This is something that happens often in this industry and goes against all common sense and rules of safety that your mother teaches you when you're in kindergarten. Hold hands when crossing the street, don't eat candy you find on the bathroom floor, when a strange man asks you to come into his car/house/pants you run away screaming "Fire! Fire! Fire!" A few months into modeling I had to put all of this training behind me for the sake of actually booking work. Although I do admit that in the beginning I would say a little prayer and hope that this wasn't the last casting I would ever go on.
When I got inside, there were a few other girls trying on jeans. He was in the living room taking pictures with a digital camera. There was no music. There were no sounds. Just the eerie quiet that usually signifies ill intentions or judgment (most often it's just judgment). When he didn't recognize me I decided not to offer our shared plane trip as a proverbial olive branch. He pointed to the bathroom and told me to try on a pair of jeans on the counter. There was another girl in the bathroom. She was quiet as she pulled on her pants.
A sneaking suspicion crept over me that it would be reasonable to think that he had cameras hidden in between towels and toilet paper rolls and that this casting was only a ruse to acquire more footage for his personal perv collection. "At least I'm not getting raped outright," I think reassuringly.
I leave the casting and like hundreds of times before, I don't book the job. This time I really didn't care. I do, however, take interest when three months later I hear that Anand Jon has been arrested for the sexual abuse of minors and young women, some models. Apparently instinct isn't as sharp in some people and for this I am terribly sorry.
When I Google Anand Jon, a website comes up asking to support him in the egregious injustice he faces. There is a quote from Ghandi and a picture of him looking like a doe-eyed, innocent angel. Even facing life in prison, this guy is a completely ridiculous tool.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
House Hunt: Experience One
Veronica's mom, Kathy, is helping me on my quest for a reasonably priced home of reasonable size, reasonably close to Los Angeles. These small requests typically add up to a 1,100 square foot, 1.2 million dollar house down the street from a 7/11 decorated by homeless people asking for spare change.
This is a bank owned house for sale on the edge of Hancock Park, a place I aspire to live when I'm 36 with small children and a book deal. The surrounding neighborhoods are tree lined and darling. It is, however, spitting distance from Wilshire and La Brea. Paranoia permits me to imagine armed robberies and blaring traffic ruining the enjoyment of drinking my iced tea in the backyard. The price is $509 K - a relative steal. Buyer beware, of course.
I pull up to 624 South Orange and survey the outside: wood-slated, white-painted, big-ish mismatched windows. I move closer. I begin to notice strange additions, rotting wood, clues to what might be inside. Kathy isn't there yet so I wait on the front patio that has been overzealously covered almost completely with cement. The previous tenants obviously had an aversion to yard maintenance. I can hear a pair of competing buyers walking around inside, the wood floors audible from where I sit. They leave and I wait until they're out of sight until I go snoop around the backyard. As this is my first stop on my real estate tour de force I have no idea what protocol is involved in house hunting. I'm four steps into the backyard when I notice a french window has been left entirely open. So much for the lock box on the front door. I innocently step through the crumbling threshold and into the dining room. There is a strange odor that persists the entire length of my stay; a combination of cat piss, toxic mold, and old lady.
As the MLS description attested, there is hardwood flooring in the living room and dining room. The rest of the house is suffocating under thick cream carpeting that closely resembles a dirty, murdered polar bear. The stains are suspicious. I suspect foul play. I admire that they attempted to deep clean it, not knowing that whoever is going to buy this pieces of property will most certainly not be holding onto that soiled mess. The thought of walking barefoot on it scares me more than a HoJo in Vegas.
There are a reported 3 bedrooms and 2 baths, 1 of which has been done without permits. When I discover this room, which has the architectural bones of the outhouse I used to use at the ranch while my dad and brother killed ground squirrels, I sense that this is the culprit of at least 33% of the smell I previously mentioned. Tucked sneakily in the corner of the rear bedroom, the undocumented 2nd bathroom had a large hole in the ceiling allowing for a modest view of the sky above. How lovely. The ceiling bared no trace of a legitimate barrier from the elements. All I could see was broken orangey drywall and thin slats of wood supporting it. This is the same "roof" utilized over the "laundry room." When Kathy eventually meets me inside she ponders what they did when it rained. This is a very thought provoking question to which I have no concrete answer. As the mold creeping up the wall of the adjacent bedroom might indicate, these people did nothing to thwart rain from pouring into their house, seeping through their walls, drowning whatever insulation might exist there.
The kitchen is large...extremely large. A "cooks kitchen!" I might have exclaimed if I could ever imagine sanitarily handling food that would enter my body in there. The floor is linoleum, the counters are that thick plastic nonsense, the cabinets are that fake birch people buy at Home Depot and use in rooms they don't care about (i.e. the lavatories of an ice factory or the tool shed of a fish farm). There is an inexplicable row of bricks that emerge from the wall and then disappear into the shiny white paint again - gone forever, having shown no integral use or purpose for the space. There is an "island" in the center room that Kathy good naturedly points out that it is movable. I would move this whole kitchen straight into a giant blue dumpster if I could. She then looks around and asks, "Where do you put the refrigerator?" Valid point. Apparently in the tragedy of this kitchen "remodel" the contractor failed to install any electrical plugs...anywhere...literally. I don't think the people who lived here (shudder to think) ate anything but canned beans and tuna fish.
The bathroom looks like it underwent a similarly inspired renovation as the kitchen. Both fireplaces have suspicious holes, one I surmise is where the rat that pooped in the closets got in. I feel as though this house is crying from the trauma it has been through and those tears are evident in the water damage that soaks through the cottage cheese ceilings. It's so depressing to think that this was once a lovely and cared for home. One that was loved nearly 100 years ago. People that treat properties like this are the Michael Vick's of home ownership.
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