1. Sob from your front-row seat at the Kodak Theater, thereby underscoring your love for your far more successful spouse.
2. Admit candidly to the Access Hollywood camera that yes, this might just be the most beautiful she has ever looked, right here tonight.
3. Protest early and often what a treat it is to be involved with someone consistently outshines you in your chosen field.
4. Joke publicly about how she makes more money per movie than you do, as if to demonstrate how little you care about the trappings of success.
5. Find and retain a well-known, high-priced divorce attorney.
6. While in the process of #1, strategically meet with all of the best attorneys in town so that they cannot be retained later by your wife.
7. Continue to provide Apu’s voice on The Simpsons — at least that gig isn’t going anywhere.
8. Comfort yourself by reflecting that at least now there’s only one more talented and successful person than you in the Lowe family.
9. Fire up Adult Friend Finder, Ashley Madison, and — why not? — Craigslist: this marriage is already toast.
10. Schedule an intimate dinner with your less attractive and far less successful costar of Stop-Loss.
11. Agree to star with Halle Berry in Cat Woman.
12. Commit adultery; attempt to spin it as an example of your effort to save your marriage.
13. Insist that you and Scarlett Johansson, Lindsay Lohan, and/or Kristen Cavallari are “just friends.”
14. Erase entry in calendar for the scheduled return appearance on this season’s Celebrity Apprentice.
15. Reflect for a moment on the character of Donald Trump; pencil back in scheduled return appearance on this season’s Celebrity Apprentice.
16. Begin outreach to your original fan base by being linked to a stripper with a tattooed forehead ephemeral links to Neo-Nazism.
17. Wait until everybody is distracted with the divorce of this year’s Best Actress winner to announce your divorce from 2009′s winner.
18. Jump on Oprah’s couch because you’re so happy you listened to the studio lawyer who told you to leave before it happened!

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5. Ginger at Ramble Ramble

"Your Wife Or Longtime Girlfriend Just Won The Best Actress Oscar! Now What?" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT and was originally posted on March 29, 2010. Copyright ®2010 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

Yesterday I decided to drive around Hollywood and pretend like I was a tourist, snapping pictures of some of the many things over there that have caught my eye over the years. People say “Hollywood” when they want to talk about Los Angeles or the movie industry, but there really is a Hollywood proper, and it’s not where all of the stars live, except a few who live in the hills above it. Really, Hollywood is a mostly seedy place where there are as many people getting off Greyhound buses from America’s heartland as there are teenagers nodding on heroin lined up on the edges of its sidewalks, all of them peppered with dingy pink stars.

The truth is, even though I lived there for two years, I still feel kind of like a tourist whenever I go to Hollywood. It is a strange place. It is a place where the population is always changing but still remains mostly constant, full of people from another place, a city full of misfits who are all hoping to make it big and who will almost all amount to nothing. But one thing the people in Hollywood have always had on me and others like me is that they are people who dream big and who really go for it. There is some magic in that, especially because it is almost sure to fail.

One time I went to an AA meeting in Hollywood, and they were playing “In Da Club” by Fifty Cent as everybody walked in the door, like we were going into some kind of nightclub. And I thought, wow, I don’t belong here. But there was something about it that was fascinating to me anyway, the idea that somebody might accept their new identity as a sober person as an opportunity to make an AA meeting into an event worthy of a DJ, that arrivals were worthy of a soundtrack. It was ostentatious and totally against everything that I had come to understand about AA’s mission, and many people would have felt uncomfortable and left the meeting under the circumstances, but I stayed, fascinated by the whole spectacle for some reason. And that has been my relationship to Hollywood all along.

Can you imagine? Calling your mother, telling her about the “home” you had found in a motor hotel, just down the street from the Seventh Veil Nude Girls Girls Girls! nightclub? Hoping to get an audition for a bit part in a pilot that never gets picked up? Following one of the many, many classified ads for auditions, or paying thousands of dollars to a subpar photographer for lackluster headshots that will be thrown into dumpsters with thousands of others just like it? Keeping your head up, day after day, because maybe your story will end up being one of the lucky ones? Maybe the door will open just for you?

That, my friends, is what dreams are made of.

"Driving Tour: Hollyweird" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT and was originally posted on January 08, 2010. Copyright ®2010 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

So I was tooling around the West side yesterday, just trying to kill some time while my geriatric cat was having tests done, and at some point I found myself on the third floor of Nordstrom. After a pointless perusal of TBD, I took a right at Individualist and was just about to board the down escalator and check out the cosmetics department when HOLY FUCKING HELL was that a vampire I just saw in Brass Plum?

Hey, he looks just like that kid who played Cedric Diggory in the fourth Harry Potter.

Now granted, the lighting isn’t all that great at the WSP Nordstrom, but it still seemed pretty bright for a vampire to just be walking around like that. And there was definitely some early afternoon sunlight streaming through the windows at the edges of the store, but dude was NOT sparkling for shit. Not at ALL. He was just standing there. Big let down.

Of course, then I realized that there wasn’t just a vampire there. There was also a really stupid-looking werewolf.

But, you're right, you don't really want your dogs to be SMART. You want them to be obedient.

I mean, there are some smart dogs, but it’s not like the species as a whole is known for being intelligent. Still, I feel like this looks like a really stupid breed of dog. I could be wrong. I didn’t talk to him or ask him to fetch anything. Also, sometimes you don’t want a smart dog, right? You want your dog to be obedient, and friendly. That’s why golden retrievers are more popular than poodles. Also, the fact that golden retrievers are way cuter. What was I talking about?

Oh yeah. So all this talk of vampires and werewolves, and I started wondering what I would look like, if I were Bella, tragically torn between two supernatural beings that wanted to devour me. I’m not sure, but I think I’d probably wear a lot of flannel, and be like 40-50 pounds lighter than I am right now, and bite my lip a lot. I can almost picture it.

High-heeled feet are super flattering.

I’m going to have to work on the lip-biting emo stuff. But I’ll get there.

"Vampire In Brass Plum" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT and was originally posted on November 04, 2009. Copyright ®2009 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

This is what you get for peeking in windows. Even if it's the window to the spinning class.

You were not surprised that somebody from spinning class was fucking the instructor.

As it was, the ecosystem of the gym was ripe with inappropriate sexuality on weekday mornings. And besides, was there an outcome that was more likely than an illicit affair, given the mixture of scantily clad, lonely wives with younger, mostly male personal trainers? Set the whole thing to a soundtrack of suggestive pop music created by oversexed teens, and you’ve got a perfect storm of adultery on your hands. You would not have been surprised to learn that it happened regularly, right there in the gym — in some out-of-the way storage room, perhaps, or maybe behind one of the Pilates machines, where frosted glass could hide everything from view. Almost.

No, the part that you didn’t see coming was that it would be this instructor, Evan, who would be the one to become involved with one of his students. Evan, the mild-mannered, almost timid personal trainer whom you could see had to coach himself to get up the nerve to yell out instructions to the class over loud music. Who would start out each class by saying, “Hi, I’m Evan, I’m a personal trainer here. I don’t know your names, but I recognize most of you,” as if to explain, up front, that you shouldn’t expect friendship from him. Though he was clearly an introvert, Evan was not unfriendly, even if personal training was a strange job choice for him to make, what with the large amount of human interaction required, and the need to display enthusiasm, whether feigned or real, to clients in need of inspiration. When he was first chosen as a replacement for Chris, the ill-tempered former instructor of the Wednesday morning spinning class, Evan’s choice of songs for class demonstrated the degree to which his soul was at war with his choice of profession: there was too much Coldplay, too much Keane, too many slower-paced rock ballads from the late eighties in his playlist for Evan to be a natural-born personal trainer, much less a spin instructor. This was a young man unhappy in his own skin, you thought, though you expected his acting-out to take the form of an overdose or perhaps a dramatic public alcoholic breakdown.

You were wrong about that, and you had also underestimated Evan’s commitment to his profession. Because even if Evan was not the type of instructor to stand in front of your bike and scream instructions to you until you decided to work harder, even if he did not yell out your name in the middle of class, to rely upon the threat of public humilation to get you to turn up the resistance on your bike, it was Evan who finally succeeded in bulking up attendance on Wednesday mornings to an almost fully populated class. Before Evan, Wednesday mornings were never more than a few mainstays, plus a new mom or two trying to lose baby weight, and those few older gym members who showed up and pedaled slowly so as to adhere to their doctor’s orders to “get some exercise.” As Evan’s experience with teaching spinning grew — a process that was punctuated by small gestures like the inclusion of more mainstream pop songs on his playlist, louder overall volume for the music he played, and a more judicious use of the cycling room PA system — the Wednesday morning class grew into something like a community, a feat that several previous instructors had quit before being able to establish. And even if you still didn’t have to sign up early to be a part of Evan’s class, you also knew you would not be the only one there. And best of all, to be a part of this community, you would not be expected to make indecipherable enthusiastic exclamations throughout class, to provide the “WHOO!” noises that fuel the atmosphere of spinning classes taught by other popular instructors. To be a part of Evan’s group, you mostly just had to show up. And that was the kind of exercise group you could get behind.

But if things in spinning had changed subtly at first, they had snowballed a bit in recent weeks. For one thing, Evan’s class had been changed to Monday mornings. Also, after about a year of being an invisible member in the back row of the class, people had started to notice you, a tacit understanding had been reached that you were part of the group of spinning regulars. It was as if they had a waiting period before they considered the investment worthwhile — that they wanted confirmation that you were not just another person who was going to show up for a few classes and then disappear — before they made the investment of what? friendship? no, not exactly — comraderie? it wasn’t clear. But your initiation into this social group, such as it was, was made official the day that Jenna, a stay-at-home mother to older children who had what you could say sans irony were rock-hard abs (as well as a husband who was a partner in a downtown law firm) started to talk to you.

“Was I talking to you about Carrie’s baby?” Jenna had asked that morning, as she clicked into bike number 9, directly to the right of you.

“The instructor?” you asked, curiously, because you knew for a fact that Jenna had never spoken to you before. But you smiled, lest she misinterpret your confusion and rethink her decision to start speaking to you.

“Yeah — she lost her baby,” Jenna said, in the kind of conspiratorial whisper, this detail of gym gossip marking the place you now occupied in the social community of the spinning regulars.

“Oh, really? That’s awful,” you said, remembering that Carrie, one of the female spin instructors, had announced to a class that she was pregnant a few months before by saying, “Yeah, that’s not a beer belly, there’s a baby in there,” and pointing at her stomach. You remembered the incident because you had found it odd, at the time, how she had quantified a baby in size that way, and had also found it odd when, later on in class, she had made a remark about “if this baby comes,” as if it wasn’t a given that the baby would come. You had remembered it because it made you realize that you had always thought of your baby, while in gestation, as a “when,” had never considered the “if.” And it had made you wonder why that was.

“Yeah, it sucks,” Jenna said, nodding her head in agreement, and with that some kind of relationship had been forged between the two of you. And though this relationship was not likely ever to amount to more than a friendly wave here or there on the way to class or on the way out of the parking garage, it was also probably what made you notice that Jenna had become much more vocal in class of late. That you could hear, in the gaps between the beats of choruses, her singing along with the songs as she rode, and not just to the occasional Cure or New Order singles that Evan might throw in for nostalgia’s sake, either. You could hear her singing along to mainstream pop, to the cheesy singles that you imagined Evan downloaded based on the Top Tens features on iTunes: she was singing words like, “Wanna make love right now, right now,” and “Gotta make love right now, right now,” and she was adding in the occasional “WHOO!” during the course of class where it was not even required of her. Her freely given enthusiasm was infectious, and its display was like a gift to the instructor, because the more involved the class became, the easier it was for him to teach it. And you started to get that feeling that you had had only one other time in your life before, the sense that something clandestine existed between two of the people with whom you were now sharing a room, and you wondered if you were the only one who could feel it. And then Jenna started to make a comment to you, a joke about something unrelated and unimportant, and you realized that now you would have to make a different assessment of her, but that it probably did not matter in the long run.

And when Evan saw that Jenna was making idle chit chat in the middle of class, he announced in front of the class, exhibiting something like virility that you were not sure you had ever seen on him before, “Jenna, remind me to tell you later why you should always listen during class.” It was at that moment that you knew you were right about them, just as you had been right the time before, even if back then you had not yet learned to trust your gut. And you were glad that this time, it did not matter: that these were choices people made that did not require your approbation, and that you could keep your seat at the back of class all the same.

"Clandestine" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT and was originally posted on September 25, 2009. Copyright ®2009 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

Oh, Bobby. You are killing me, Bobby, with the 'whom's.'

It has become a tradition in recent months for celebrities to autograph the bathroom wall at my eyebrow waxing salon. Astonishingly enough, the staff at Damone Roberts has neglected to invite me to participate in this ritual as of yet, but then my brand of “celebrity” probably plays better in more bookish cities. Also, they may perhaps be running low on purple sharpies. But no matter: they do leave me unattended in the bathroom on occasion, even if I’m armed only with the standard-issue camera on the iPhone 3G. Photoshop and black and white retouching will fix a multitude of sins, my friends.

Michelle Williams' autograph on the wall at Damone Roberts, ca. 2009.

What is more interesting to me about Michelle Williams’ autograph is the way that some of her words (“May God / Bless Your Establishment”) are lined up, but “Richly” appears to be an afterthought, since it’s situated off to the side of everything else. Do you think Michelle Williams got sidetracked in the middle of her autograph — perhaps she was still reeling from the gall of the staff that had asked her to sign celebrity ephemera in their bathroom while she was still in mourning? Or was she initially saying “God bless” the way Southerners say “Well, bless her soul” to refer to crazy people and/or people whom they don’t like? Maybe Michelle Williams has the same understanding of the mechanics of God’s grace as a former sponsor of mine, who instructed me to pray for people I didn’t like (so that they would get what they want and then leave me the fuck alone). I wonder when she decided to add the “Richly” — or if it was the suggestion of somebody else. Also, what’s with all the capital letters? Is she German? If only these walls could talk.

Megan Fox's autograph on the wall at Damone Roberts, ca. 2009.

I don’t really know how or when Megan Fox officially became famous, but as I gather, her popularity among men aged 18-34 is intimately linked to her fantastic body. This must be why she draws the “m” in her first name to look like a pair of really floppy boobs or an upside down butt. She is probably one of those faux-modest celebrities who try to make you feel better about the fact that you wear a size 12. Or maybe she has a sense of humor about it all? Like, “Hey, look at me, I can laugh at myself — sure, I have a great body and everything, but trust me, my ‘m’ is much floppier than yours.” “No, I’m not kidding — you should see my ‘m’ in a bikini!” “You don’t understand how much retouching goes into these things.” “No, you’re the greatest.”

But seriously, megan [sic.] all caps in your homage to the Eyebrow King, and then no caps in the signing of your name? What’s your real story? You can tell me. I know it’s tough to be named after a small animal that has to scratch out its meager living by executing a delicate dance of deception that convinces everyone around them that they are stupid and non-threatening. But tell me, what other dark secrets are you hiding? If you don’t let out the pain in some constructive way, you might end up turning to a life of crime, like your family member, Swiper Fox. Here’s to hoping that your Hollywood story doesn’t every end up on E!

Oh, Bobby. You are killing me, Bobby, with the 'whom's.'

And finally, Robert Downey, Jr. Sigh. I think it must have been very strange to be in an eyebrow waxing salon with your wife, and then asked to sign the wall. Do you expect me to believe that they asked you to sign the wall, despite the fact that you are not actually a client of Damone Roberts? Come on, Bobby. Why do you protest so much here? Why must you attempt to compensate for the two logical (and equally emasculating) explanations for your visit to Damone Roberts ( 1) that you are having your eyebrows waxed professionally, or 2) that you have nothing better to do but to tag along with your wife when she gets her eyebrows waxed) by placing your autograph directly above the toilet, where the most likely person to notice it would have to be another man, as he stands to use the toilet? Was it your thinking that the person who noticed it would have to be, logically speaking, in the same position as yourself, viz. in a Wilshire Boulevard salon without a very good explanation? Or, did you put your autograph beneath the toilet seat cover dispenser to offer a special reward for those patrons who value the illusion of sanitary conditions that only extremely loud and cheap tissue paper cut in the shape of an “O” can offer? Are you a neat freak, Bobby?

But more to the point: what’s with the bumbling language here, Bobby? I know that we often have an overblown conception of the intelligence of actors — particularly the talented ones, such as yourself — because of the roles they play. But come on, Bobby: “whom’s“? WTF? If somebody asks you to autograph a wall in a joint where you’re not really excited about admitting you’ve been, just don’t do it next time! My precious conception of your intelligence was hard-won: starting with your speaking role in Weird Science in the late eighties, through the Charlie Chaplin Oscar bids, only to be made stronger over the course of dozens of Ally McBeal episodes, petty theft arrests, and rehab stints. I’ve even accepted you as an action hero, Bobby! But I need to believe that you’re intelligent — I need to believe that the person who is so supremely talented as to be able to get an Oscar nod for Tropic Thunder can write a sentence that makes more sense than this one: “It is in fact US, (whom’s unruly brows) deserve to not be discriminated against.” What does that even mean, Bobby? Are you talking about eyebrows or a bid for the unsung plight of the hetero white man in America? Bobby? Bobby?

"LA Moments: Celebrity Graffiti" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT and was originally posted on September 16, 2009. Copyright ®2009 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

Photo by Anna for ABDPBT

“There’s a movie in there somewhere.”

“There’s a movie in there somewhere.”

“There’s a movie in there . . . somewhere.”

There are people in Los Angeles–particularly in the general Hollywood/WeHo/Fairfax/Beachwood Canyon areas–who are peculiarly fond of identifying hypothetical movie story lines. Please note that these are not people who actually make movies. They might have been an extra once, or worked as a PA for somebody you’ve never heard of, but generally, to be so enamored with the idea of making movies, you cannot be involved in the day-to-day grind of actually making them. That kind of work would dampen their enthusiasm too much, and instead of always looking for the next big thing, they would start to say, “So the hell what?”

Identifying movie opportunities is kind of like the travel bingo of area code 323. Except instead of barns and water towers, there are hackneyed plots and A-list romantic comedy vehicles vying for the attention of these mostly young people who flock to Los Angeles every year in search of fame and fortune. People who would like, someday, to be in a position to make a movie, to be in the position to declare something “is a movie” and then make it be so–like God, or maybe Steven Speilberg. So they go around congratulating themselves about identifying these opportunities to make movies, usually when they themselves have no ability to make movies, nor do they have any connections to whose attention they might call the existence of this hypothetical movie.

Like most people you hear about in the movie industry, they are full of shit.

Twice in my lifetime–scratch that, twice in the past four years–I’ve had people tell me, upon revelation of my parents’ professions (family law attorneys) and their history (divorced) that there must be “a movie in there somewhere,” I suppose because the concept of divorcing divorce lawyers is kind of catchy, like the anti-met cute scenario. [Who represents whom? Egads?! What if one of them went to the other one to try to get a referral?! Oh the hilarity! &c.] Before they got divorced, well, there would have been a movie in there, too, because what?! divorce attorneys who are married! how cute! Do they work together? And before I was born, well, there would have been a movie in there, too, because divorce attorneys without a kid? What is the deal there? Were they already worried about child support payments?

Or whatever.

The thing about people who are in The Business in LA is that they live in a world where anyone can tell anyone else what makes a movie and what doesn’t. And the storytellers among us are like, “Yeah no shit, Sherlock–there’s a movie in anything, potentially–just like there’s a novel in anything, or a blog post in anything, or a poem in anything. I invite you to check out the movie Adaptation to see how far one can go with this concept, if asked to turn a mostly nonfiction book about rare orchid hunters into a fictional story.

Stories are like assholes, as the (modified) saying goes. Making a story sing is the thing.

Movies are like assholes, and for the most part, they are made by assholes. Not the people who do the bits and pieces, real world, thankless labor parts of it. The animators at Dreamworks or Pixar, for example, are probably not assholes. They’re super talented computer geeks. And similarly, the Key Grip and the Best Boy, and the makeup artists, and the grunt writers, maybe even the Director of Photography–all of these people are not any more likely to be assholes than anyone else in a job in any other industry. They are workers who make things happen. The people who walk around telling each other about how “there’s a movie in there,” who hold “meetings” at the Bourgeois Pig or anywhere else on either Franklin or Cahuenga, or at the Farm, those are the assholes. Because either they used to be just plain old workers and, through fame and money, turned into assholes, or they were assholes to begin with, and came here from wherever–Bakersfield, Barstow, San Bernardino, whatever, and decided to try to get rich off their assholery.

Hollywood might be one of the last places where there really is a successful get rich quick scheme. People want to take that concept and transfer it to other stuff, like blogs, and that’s not how it works. Hollywood runs on beautiful young people who are as expendable as they are numerous. For a few of them, there really is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. But they can lose it just as easily, and it has nothing to do with skill or talent, it has to do with the whims of the market.

Finding the stories isn’t the hard part. It’s finding your place in the story that’s tough. And most industries aren’t too different.

"There’s A Movie In There Somewhere" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT and was originally posted on August 05, 2009. Copyright ®2009 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

When you are in someplace new, you notice shit like this.

While I was on my trip last week, I got a couple chances to go out and look around downtown Chicago. I did this by deciding to run outside instead of in the gym, and though it wasn’t very comfortable because of the heat, it was worth it to see Milennium Park, which happens to be very close to the hotel where I was staying, and think about how cool it must have been to be there last November with all those people. I also saw some interesting article that I suspected must have been by Frank Gehry, but I didn’t have a good camera with me, so I didn’t take any pictures. Which is too bad because I think they would have been cool.

I’ve never been much for travel writing myself, but the thing with going new places or moving new places is that there’s a perspective you get for the first say, six months that you live somewhere new, and it’s like an outsider perspective that you retain before you become one of the natives. You notice stuff. You look around and evaluate your surroundings in a way that just doesn’t seem to happen after you’ve been somewhere for a while.

I remember when I moved to Los Angeles (the actual city, rather than just the surrounding communities, in which i’d lived growing up), I had all kinds of thoughts and experiences about LA that were bubbling over in my brain all the time. I would think about how the signs affected us, the traffic as a kind of lifeforce to the city, and I assure you that however hackneyed it may sound now, it was all very poetic at the time. The thing is, I didn’t write it down of course. I just thought it, entertained some vague ideas about maybe writing a book someday, and now when I try to go back and get those things, they’re lost. Because I cannot see LA as an outsider anymore, however much I might make fun of it or despise certain aspects of it, I’m a part of it now and my experience is woven into it.

Going to Chicago–a city I’ve been to before but not for a few years–reminded me of this. It seemed like all the stuff was begging me to write about it, or at least begging me to snark about it. Or maybe it was the wake of the conference? I don’t know. But it occurred to me that the value of blogging to the aspiring writer is that need to write all the time, if not every day then at least several times a week. It makes you better, even if you cannot see it all the time. And things don’t get away from you like they do when you just sit in traffic, thinking about how some day you will write it all down.

On the way to Chicago, there, and on the way home I was looking at everything and really seeing it for the first time in a long time. And I had all kinds of ideas. Which is good, because there are like three other conferences this year I’m going to have to go to, and if I have to take time away from my boys to go to them, it’s good to have a feeling like I’m on the right path.

Sometimes you have to step outside of your little zone to get inspiration. Sometimes you have to put yourself outside of the story to learn how to narrate it.

"Here’s The Thing With Going To New Places" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT and was originally posted on July 31, 2009. Copyright ®2009 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

Photo by xxpanthernovaxx at DeviantArt

I had the distinct pleasure of being seated next to a guy at a wedding once who was writing a sequel to The Godfather. The book, that is, not the movie–he was writing a sequel to the trashy novel, originally penned by Mario Puzo, that was then made into a masterpiece by Francis Ford Coppola. Because the movie, The Godfather, already has a sequel, of course–it won more Oscars (6) than the original (3).

So to recap, he was writing a book based on an already-made movie. About 30 years after the fact. I think, anyway. It was not completely clear. What was clear, though, was that this guy lived somewhere in Florida and that he felt oppressed by what he referred to as the “Cultural Tyranny of New York and LA.” From what I gather, this guy had been fairly financially successful at his craft–writing book versions of movies, that is–and though his income would have allowed him to live anywhere he wanted, he preferred to live in Florida with his wife and four children because there, in addition to avoiding state income taxes, he was better able to elude the cultural tyranny of New York and LA.

That phrase has stuck with me for years for several reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it’s such a mouthful that I found it fascinating he could mention it so many times over the course of one relatively short dinner. To think of Los Angeles, in particular, as a cultural tyrant–I’ll leave New York alone for now since I hardly feel qualified to speak to its alleged cultural tyranny over the rest of the country, I just figure that the concept of New York having a culture with which to tyrannize is a more acceptable idea in the abstract and less in need of troubling–to think of Los Angeles as being a cultural presence of the stature that could tyrannize a country–well. This a strange idea, I think, having lived here my whole life and having always struggled to figure out how I feel, honestly, about this place.

Please do not misunderstand me–I am well aware that, as a result of the entertainment industry, parts of Los Angeles are beamed into the lives of people around the globe on a daily basis. But that is the culture of celebrity, not of Los Angeles per se, and that celebrity culture does not even exist as such in Los Angeles. Los Angeles is a town always in flux: most people who live in Los Angeles came here from somewhere else, so if you are using those people as the perpetrators of some kind of cultural tyranny–well, then, you are in effect saying that the whole country is culturally tyrannizing itself.

Which is silly, really.

Because two places, no matter how rich or influential, do not decide an entire country’s culture. No matter how much time they get on The Insider. And if we fetishize one or the other, or both, it is not because everyone in the country is striving to be what those two places represent, but rather because those two places tend to be home to the people with the biggest mouths, the largest need for attention, the tendency to say look-at-me! Look AT ME! Why did you stop looking at me?

And if you don’t want to be a part of that, OK, no big deal. Live in Florida. But stop complaining to me about my cultural tyranny.

I bring up the fallacy of cultural tyranny not just for comic relief, but also because it came to mind as I was thinking about these warring “cultures” I see dominating Web 2.0, neither of which I feel particularly attached to, nor am I affiliated with, though some of the proponents of both groups appeal to me more than others. It seems like in assessing culture and cultural productions we are always already assigning each other to factions that suit our need to live in a polarized world of good and bad, right and wrong–when I was in school, it was all about the Western Canon and how it had been corrupted or enhanced, depending upon who you spoke to, based on the inclusion of literary works from other cultures. I will admit that when I took my first course in American Fiction I was taken aback by the fact that there was no Fitzgerald or Hemingway, and that the titles had authors with names like Paredes, Wright, Cisneros and Ellison. But after a while I realized that only a certain amount of books can be taught in a single course. And if you want Fitzgerald or Hemingway, well–you might have to wait. Because these other guys have been waiting a while to be allowed their seat at the counter.

Some of the funniest, most clever things I’ve come across on the internet have been produced by a smallish group of insiders, old skool webmen who threw their roots down early, before there was mass-market access to user-friendly blogging platforms and you pretty much had to know what you were doing, technically speaking, in order to be a part of the conversation. Some of them even had a hand in putting up the roots of the technology we use now that the blogosphere has been democratized. Coincidentally, but nonetheless convenient for my generalization purposes, I believe them to be all white men in their late thirties to early forties who live, with a few notable exceptions, in the San Francisco Bay Area. They are well-educated, smart, and talented individuals. And they are witty. Very witty.

And this is all well and good for them. Because they were here first. And so I suppose we’ll have to forgive them for being a little bit precious in their attitudes about how the blogosphere should be run. Because they are not fond of many people who came after them, those people who farmed out their tech stuff and worked on marketing, or who built blogs from the ground up with the idea of making money. They have particular ideas about how one should conduct himself on Twitter and how blogging should be used to generate income, if at all. They do not want to hear of promotion, because after all they never used it themselves. And if you need promotion–if you need to advertise your creative work on the internet, then you are not one of them, and have missed wholesale the point of this thing that we are doing.

Are they cultural tyrants, circa Web 2.0? I don’t know. But I do know that they operate from a position of privilege, and as such they shouldn’t assume that nothing worthwhile can be created outside their sphere of influence. And I will keep reading them, enjoying their work even if it doesn’t represent my experience, just as I do Fitzgerald and Hemingway. But one day I might also choose to pick up a Sandra Cisneros or a Richard Wright for fun. And maybe a bunch of other people will join me, because they’re ready for something different too. And if we do it won’t mean the end of the old guard, but it might mean the start of something even bigger, something that not even they could have predicted, way back when.

"The Cultural Tyranny of North Beach and South of Market" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT and was originally posted on July 03, 2009. Copyright ®2009 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

The bane of my existence.

Because let me tell you a little something about me and weight: I’m obsessed with it. I hate the scale, but I am ruled by it. I cannot live with it, and apparently I cannot live within the bounds of normalcy without it. I used to think it was because I grew up in Southern California. Then I thought it was because I live in Los Angeles. And I’m sure those things factor into the obsession a good bit, but the reality is that it’s me. It’s just me. I’m totally ruled by a number on a scale, and whatever it is can make or break my day.

I don’t even like food that much, quite frankly. I mean, I need to eat it and everything, and desserts–well, I’ll get into that later–but I’m not one of these self-congratulatory “foodies” you hear about. More than anything, food and the need for it annoys me: it takes a long time to make, you have to stop whatever you’re doing to deal with it, sometimes it makes you feel sick, it’s messy, it stinks (when it’s somebody else’s food, that is), there are always dishes involved, and, now that I have a toddler, I’m often stepping on pieces of it embedded in the carpet. If somebody would just come up with an iPhone app that took away your need for food, I would totally download it.

Sugar (and all white carbohydrate) is a different story, though. I need that stuff. Really need it. If I don’t stop myself, I can easily stuff down four or five pieces of white bread first thing in the morning, just to get a fix. That’s right, I said fix. Because if hunger is a sort of vague need coupled with emptiness in your stomach, my need for sugar/white carbs is like an emptiness in my blood, like something vital is missing, and not just my body, but my brain will shut down if I don’t immediately inhale that box of Raisinettes.

So you see, it’s not so much that my weight is foiled by my own insatiable appetite for sugar, but rather for my body’s physical need–nay, yearning–for sugar. I know that this is in some way connected to my alcoholism, and it’s not a coincidence that many alcoholics have a sweet tooth. We laugh about it, though–give each other cakes on our anniversaries and stock up on Cadbury Eggs at the grocery store. The only time in my life I’ve been with someone who wanted more sweets than I did was with another alcoholic, Kelly, an Irish girl who packed more Red Vines, chocolate, cookies, donuts, and cake into the grocery cart than even I thought reasonable.

I thought that maybe I had found an answer when I learned about The Diet Cure, a book that talks about amino acid deficiencies. I read the book and started taking amino acid supplements to address some of the deficiencies for which I had been exhibiting symptoms. The supplements do help, but you have to take a ton of them, and it’s hard to remember sometimes. I have to carry smaller bottles of them around with me, because I forget otherwise. So I kind of look like some kind of pill-popping member of the cast of the Real Housewives of New Jersey.

These are not controlled substances, I swear.

Also the book suggests that if you change your diet and stick to the supplements for about three months, you should be able to return to not taking the supplements. Let’s just say I’m still taking the supplements.

So when I weighed in at 18 pounds above what I thought I would be the other day, a couple things happened. First, I realized that my whole plan of not weighing myself was a horrible mistake, and that I can never go a year ever again without weighing myself, no matter how awful it is to weigh myself every day. Second, and even though Occam’s Razor suggested that I had, simply, gained 18 pounds, I still questioned the scale’s accuracy. I just wasn’t willing to accept the number without a fight. So I went and bought another bane scale with which to enact a kind of checks and balances system with the original bane scale.

The result? I weigh 5 pounds less on the new scale. But here’s where the real mind-fucking begins: the original scale is more in tune with what a doctor’s scale reads, based on past experience. So, barring any kind of truly disastrous technological meltdown at Tanita, I will always have a rude awakening awaiting me at the doctor’s office if I use the new scale as a measure. Also, what are the odds that a $15 dial-face cheapo scale is more accurate than the fancy $150 one with the body fat monitor, etc.? I mean, just based on rational logic, what do we think? Not likely. Also, even five pounds less, that is still 13 pounds more than I thought. How am I even fitting into my clothing at this point?

So getting back to Maggie’s post. Personally, I don’t have a lot of anxiety about BlogHer in particular and weight: I figure that most people there will be Moms and we all probably have a little extra poundage here and there. There is pretty much zero chance that I’m going to walk into BlogHer and feel more self-conscious about weight than I do when I visit Fred Segal. But her point stands: most people don’t care about how much you weigh because they are too worried about how much they weigh. I do think this is, for the most part, true. I do think that nobody gives you as much thought as you give yourself. I also think that is a good way of approaching life if you want to be sane. But the problem that I’ve always had with looking at things this way is what about that imprint that people have of you–that Blink! moment where they scan you and put a perception of you into their database–what if the perception that is being portrayed there is not what I want it to be? What if I don’t want to be remembered (ever, not just in the context of going to a conference) as this person who has, apparently, gained 18 pounds? If I am not projecting what I want to the world, don’t I need to change it? And if I’m totally out of touch with reality–as I have been, apparently, this past year–how will I know without the damn scale?

I don’t really have a thesis for this post. Believe me, I wish I had the answer. I am definitely not somebody from whom to take advice on this topic. I have struggled with my weight my entire life, which is both crappy and, in an odd way, an advantage, since the post-pregnancy adjustment was not as dramatic for me as it is for some. I fully intend to get a tummy tuck once I’ve decided I’m done with having kids. I have already had liposuction to reduce the size of my thighs. I want to get a lapband but so far Mr. Right-Click won’t sign off on it. In high school, I would hide food in my room, and exercise obsessively to get rid of extra calories. Two times–once when I was in college and the other in my mid-twenties–I adhered to a strict, self-designed starvation diet of one carton of yogurt and one baked potato per day, for well over a month each time. I ended up losing about two pounds per day, until my hipbones were sticking out and my armpits were pits so deep–truly pits, rather than just a fat piece of flab–that I couldn’t even shave effectively. And even then, I still hated my thighs.

On a day to day basis, I struggle to find a middle ground between the Queen-Latifah-Big-Is-Beautiful-Nobody-Cares-As-Long-As-You’re-Confident fairy tale and the Kate-Moss-Anybody-Can-Be-Thin-If-They-Are-Willing-To-Starve-Themselves-To-Achieve-It self-destruction. Earlier in the year, when I was really trying to adhere to a policy of eating when I’m hungry and stopping when I’m full, and staying away from the scale, it cannot be disputed that I was less obsessive and probably overall happier, though there were many times that I’d go into my closet to find something to wear and be nervous to try something on that I hadn’t worn in a while because . . . would it fit? And also, the sugar thing totally screws up your body’s natural wisdom about eating–if you have a hardcore sugar jones going on, you are not going to gravitate towards food that will fill you up and nourish you, you will just head for the white crumbly heroin every time. And most importantly, when I try to ignore the scale, I get fat. And I cannot accept that.

The bottom line is that for whatever reasons–societal pressure or perfectionism, or some combination thereof–I don’t want to be fat. And if I have to obsess over a scale to keep from getting there, I guess it’s better than finding myself one day with 18 (or more) pounds to lose. Because that is a lot harder than just a pound or two annoying you each day. So I guess what I’m saying is that the scale and I are going to be getting back together. For better or worse.

"Bane" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT and was originally posted on June 26, 2009. Copyright ®2009 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.

I have never found an air hand dryer to be satisfactory until this day. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you the Dyson AirBlade.

It seems like whenever we have friends or family visiting from the East Coast, they want to eat Mexican food. I guess they just don’t know how to make it out there or something? Or maybe it’s just very expensive? Not sure. But when my sister-in-law and her family came out this weekend, they specifically asked for Mexican food.

We took them to this strange restaurant in downtown LA called Yxta. As I tweeted Saturday night, the food at this restaurant was unbelievably good. Mr. Right-Click and his sister ate there a few months ago and they both wanted to go back. I admit I was skeptical. I like Mexican food a great deal, don’t get me wrong: but I was really unsure about how good it could possibly be. Most Mexican food seems pretty much the same–beef, cheese, maybe some lard and tortillas here and there and you’re done. I’m no connoisseur of food anyway. Mostly, I just like to get my carbs and get them fast. . . but let me tell you, this place was excellent. Excellent. If you have the opportunity and you’re somewhere near downtown LA–right by Skid Row, in fact–you’ve got to visit Yxta.

More important in my mind than the quality of Yxta’s food, though, is the fact that Yxta has installed the Dyson AirBlade hand dryer in its bathrooms. Now, I never thought a hand dryer would be worthy of comment, mind you. This one is. Like the Dyson vacuum cleaner, which I own and love, the Dyson AirBlade is a truly unique product. Ordinarily, I hate hand dryers. They are inefficient, loud, and leave my hands wet most of the time. Also, how do you keep the button clean? Hmm? Yeah, little bit of a design flaw there, hand drying people. Well, anyway, the Dyson AirBlade takes care of all that. You just stick your hands into it and a gale force wind comes out and scrapes the water off you hands. It is SO COOL. I am totally ready to give up paper towels in public restrooms if–and only if–everyone will just go out and buy one of these things right now. It’s so cool, I want one in my house. I’m not kidding you. After visiting Yxta’s restroom and discovering the Dyson AirBlade, I cam back to the table and informed everyone that they just had to see this hand dryer. As usual, everyone assumed I was crazy. But my nieces were game, and they came back raving about it as well. By the time we left, the only person who wasn’t in love with the Dyson AirBlade was Mini, who was too busy running laps around the courtyard outside to be bothered with washing his hands. Though, in retrospect, he needed it much more than the rest of us.

So what I want to know is, how do I get one of these in my house? How do I encourage home depot to stock them? Do they have a full-body option? Will somebody (a PR rep, perhaps) please talk to AMC Theaters, Target, and Nordstrom about getting these installed? Seriously. Somebody is shirking their responsibility because this thing ROCKS.

"Things You Don’t Know You Need Until You See Them" was written by Anna Viele for ABDPBT and was originally posted on June 25, 2009. Copyright ®2009 Anna Viele for ABDPBT, Inc. and licensed for reuse under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. All other rights reserved.