Entitlement

A sense of entitlement is one of the things which disgusts me most as a character trait.
Self centered narcissists and their offspring make me want to quit humanity.
This is why I do not want to work at Bar Mitzvahs anymore.

Pull yourself together

As I write in this blog for the 1st time in over a month, I wonder whether I'm actually capable of staying with anything for an extended period of time.
I feel like the only things I've done consistently throughout my life are breathe, and sleep, even eating had its moments when I'd put it on pause.
I need a closer. A finisher. Someone who will get on me 'til the job gets done. Someone relentless with a mountain of patience.
Now accepting headshots and resumes:
msmighty@gmail.com

Love

I love the existence of the following:

libraries
co-ops
Meals on Wheels
public bicycles
ride shares
the Getty center
Griffith Observatory
moms and dads
crossing guards
public radio and television
hostels
recycling
public gardens
free walking tours
volunteers

Eat. Pray. Love. Rethink Genius.

Elizabeth Gilbert talks about how to calm the anxieties associated with being an artist.

Thanks Jennrock!

Box of Broken Dreams: In Search of a Soul Lost and Found in LA

Work was soooooo slow last night. Nobody wanted sushi on Superbowl Sunday. I had the rare chance to read an entire story in LA Weekly. I just couldn't put it down. It's a long read but well worth it.

BOX OF BROKEN DREAMS: IN SEARCH OF A SOUL LOST AND FOUND IN L.A.
A young photographer's belongings are abandoned on a Hollywood street, leaving our writer to piece together the fragments of his life.
BY MARK GROUBERT

Oh, yeah, sure. Tell me you haven’t done it. You’re walking along and you see that box of stuff near the curb. You know the box. The one with scratched picture frames, a pretty darn good dish rack, slightly scuffed shoes, a VHS copy of Jagged Edge, maybe a tattered Friends script next to a torn Scarface poster. There are books you don’t have but don’t really want, various half-used toiletries and some clothing that looks really interesting, if you lost weight. A lot of weight.

You know the box. The box that’s left by folks who are not moving to another place in Los Angeles, but home. Home to Wallace, Idaho, or Quincy, Illinois. Home to Greenville, Alabama, or Ardmore, Oklahoma. Small-town America. The places where dreams are born. The box is the stuff that can’t fit in the back of the U-Haul. The box is the life being left behind.

It is the box of broken dreams.

Sometimes we stare in wonder. Sometimes we turn away in embarrassment. Sometimes we just keep walking. Sometimes we actually rustle through the box. At least, I do.

FULL STORY

It was a great night for women and the men who write for them.

Evangeline Lilly Wins 'Best Wet T-Shirt Fight Scene' At Strong Women In TV Awards

I heart the onion. Thanx Jenn

Message of the Day from Mom (pronounced "mum" in Canada)

Hi Sara
Thought you would like this....xoxox Mom
Today's Message of the Day is:

Life is short, Break the rules, Forgive quickly, Kiss slowly, Love
truly, Laugh uncontrollably, And never regret anything that made you
smile.

Life may not be the party we hoped for, but while we're here we should
dance.

Be Unstoppable

I just took a great workshop with Lauri Johnson. She left us with these words on commitment.

"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans:

That moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never have otherwise occured. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforseen incidents and meetings of material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.

Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now." - Goethe

too. tired. to. blog.

Hollywood Hills Sunsets

R.I.P. Bettie Page

LA's I.C.E. squad cracking down on illegal Canadians

Thanks Cole!

I would say that I'm pro-union

Attractive Girls Union Refuses To Enter Into Talks With Mike Greenman

It makes no rational sense to live in a place so dangerously unstable.

I love Martini Shot, one of the programs I podcast that is broadcast on KCRW.


This is Rob Long with Martini Shot on KCRW.

Southern California is burning again, just like last year. But unlike last year, when the heart of the blaze was tony, expensive Malibu, this year, maybe in honor of the universally diminished financial picture, the blazes are mostly in Sylmar.

Last year, when the fires hit Malibu, I went to Shutters Hotel on the Beach to have dinner with a friend from out of town.

The place was packed with rich people – seriously rich people – camped out in the lobby after evacuating their houses along the Pacific Coast Highway. Incredibly beautiful women and their perfect children milled around merrily, comparing iPhones and James Perse pullovers. Surfer dudes sat outside, on the patio, knocking down Mexican beer and telling filthy jokes.

A few days later, the Malibu fires were joined by fires in the Valencia area – a community of million-dollar McMansions – the gold coast of San Diego County, and the swish areas of Orange County. At a certain point last year, there were so many expensive areas blazing away and so many displaced, homeless rich people that it felt a little like the southern California version of Hurricane Katrina – sort of “Katrina II: The High Net-Worth Edition.”

That night, I took the dog out for an illegal walk on the beach. I live in Venice, which isn't a fire zone but lies just low enough to be officially a flood plain. (In Los Angeles, it seems that each area has its own designated natural disaster: fires in the canyons; mudslides on the hills; floods along the basin; and, of course, earthquakes all over town.)

Silhouetted against the Malibu hills in the distance, I could see flames licking the ridge, lighting up the night sky. It's a pretty amazing sight, to stand ankle deep in the Pacific Ocean, watching flames leap off a distant hillside. Natural historians insist that this kind of thing would happen twice a year at least, and did, before people and irrigation dotted the brown hills with million dollar houses. They tell us that this isn't really a place for people to live and work. And it must be true: Los Angeles does its best to drive us all out and back where we came from with all sorts of biblical weapons – fire, mud, shaking the earth beneath us. But we stick around and write our pilots and make our movies, we go to yoga and buy electric cars, we eat salad and drink vitamin water. And we try not to notice the place burning and shaking and sliding.

Also: we have other disasters on our minds. With the global financial meltdown, recession, and the collapse in advertising rates, it's looking like a very tough 2009 following a very tough 2008.

Maybe that's a sign. Look, I've been living and working in Los Angeles for almost 18 years. As they say about comedy writers and dairy cows, I've had some “good, productive years.” But with the city on fire and an industry-wide contraction about to get even more contracted, it's hard not to ask yourself: “Is it time to go?”

Hard, but not impossible. You have to put some effort into it, some commitment, but it's possible to ignore the constellation of raging natural disasters, all of which are screaming at you to pack your bags and get out. You just have to take the dog to the beach, throw a tennis ball, and turn away from the burning hillside. Plug in your iPod, unroll the yoga mat, and get into half-pigeon. It's the smart thing to do. Because as anyone who has ever dated a rail-thin actress will tell you, this is a binge-purge kind of town. The hills are either soft and green or brown and firebox-dry. When the money isn't roaring torrentially into your bank account, it's racing out to pay the nanny and the yard guy and the BMW and the jumbo mortgage. If the phone isn't ringing a lot, it's probably not ringing at all.

It makes no rational sense to live in a place so dangerously unstable, just as it makes no rational sense to work in a business where fortunes are made and lost at the whim of a focus group. But for those of us who work here – that is, for those of us who realize, deep down, that we have no other marketable skills – you adjust to each disaster, whether natural or career. You refuse to see symbols in the earthquakes. You ignore the message in the mudslide. When the canyons burn, you spend a few nights at Shutters, head back home, and start again. When one network passes on your script, you wait a day, and then you pitch it to the next one.

And that's it for this week. Next week, the high seas. For KCRW, this is Rob Long with Martini Shot.

How do you hug a wall?

Shari, Nicole and Kristen are working on Women of Manhattan, the play my Moonstruck writer John Patrick Shanley.
Something really resonated with me in their scene in class tonight. I guess I just really saw myself in Rhonda.
An excerpt:

RHONDA. I know what you think this is, but it's not. I don't keep the sneakers because I love him.

JUDY. Uh-huh.

RHONDA. I didn't love him. Not in a way that led anywhere. I mean, I loved him but it was like trying to hug a wall. How do you hug a wall?

JUDY. I don't know.

RHONDA. I guess my big mistake was I revealed myself to him. That's where I really went wrong. You know, that thing that most people can't do? That thing that's supposed to be like the hardest thing to get to with another person? It took me time, but I struggled and strove and succeeded at last in revealing my innermost, my most personal soul to him.

BILLIE. And what is that?

RHONDA. Never you mind.

JUDY. And what did he do?

RHONDA. Nothing. Zip. Nothing. He just sat there with a coke in his hand like he was watching television, waiting for the next thing. Like that was a nice stop on the way to WHAT I CAN'T IMAGINE! The whole thing with him was such a letdown. But why am I surprised? You know? I mean, here I was congratulating myself on being able to show myself, show my naked self to a man. But what's the achievement? I chose to show myself to a wall. Right? That's why I was able to do it. He was a wall and I was really alone, showing myself to nobody at all. How much courage does that take? Even when I got it together to throw him out, and I made this speech at him and got all pink in the face and noble as shit. He just said alright and left. What did I delude myself into thinking was going on between us if that's how he could take it ending? "Alright. Just lemme get my tools together, Rhonda Louise, and I'll get on to the next thing." You know how in that one school a thought you're the only thing real in the world, and everything else is just a dream? All these people and things, the stars in the sky, are just sparks and smoke from your own lonely fire in a big, big night. I always thought what a lotta intellectual nonsense that was until Jerry. I mean, to tell you the naked truth, I'm not even sure there was a Jerry. It seems impossible to me that there was. Sometimes I think I just got overheated, worked myself into a passion and fell in love with that wall right there. It must've been! It must've been that wall and me, crazy, loving it cause I needed to love. And not a human man. I couldn't have poured everything out to a really truly human man, and him just stand there, and take it, and give nothing back. It's not possible. But when I get too far gone in that direction of thinking -- and alone here some nights I do -- at those times it does me good to look and see these sneakers there sitting on the floor. His sneakers. He was here. It happened.