Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "los-angeles"

I can’t believe the extent of the corruption being uncovered in Israel’s government.

My predecessor as Prime Minister drifted home from vacation yesterday – without any envelopes stuffed with cash, as far as we know -- and made a mopey statement about yet another investigation into bribery and fraud and breach of trust on his part. He’s alleged to have been in cahoots with a bunch of shady property developers, lawyers and municipal officials, so that a big, tacky building could be put up in southern Jerusalem to provide luxury dwellings for property developers and lawyers. Oh, and the former State Prosecutor, too – apparently she has an apartment there. I don’t draw any conclusions from that, though. I'm not an investigator. I just run the country.

It looks like poor old Champagne Ehud is broken by his long ordeal. Finally. He’s been brazening it out, but there are limits to the shamelessness even of an Israeli politico. If only he’d done what I did – go to the U.S., spin out some waffle about the Middle East strategic outlook, throw in a few phrases of steely determination that the Holocaust shan’t happen again (as if anyone would expect the former Israeli Prime Minister to say, ‘Well, why not? It's been a while. Let’s have another Holocaust.’), and charge them fifty grand to listen to it while they eat their shrimp. Their chicken, I mean.

Who needs corruption, when you have a public speakers’ circuit for former politicians?

By the same token, why does Tony Blair insist on keeping his job as Mideast envoy of the Quartet? It’ll take more than a skeletal smile and a familiar glottal “t” in the middle of the word “wha’ever” to extract a Nobel Peace Prize out of this place, I can tell you. What does he need such grief for? He’s one of the best paid speakers in the world (200,000 pounds for a half-hour speech, and 15 million pounds in two years since leaving Number 10.) Forget the Mideast, Tony. Creep off to the U.S. and stay there. After all, that’s the only place in the world where they think the “Prime Minister of England” is a relative of the Queen. It’s probably why they’re paying you the big money. It certainly can’t be because you were so stupid you allowed George W. Bush to fool you into going to war.

Once you’re at the top in politics, you never have to pay for dinner again. But it’s a mistake to think you don’t have to pay for your house. You just don’t have to WORK to pay for your house. A few dates in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Florida and I was well on the way to the cost of my villa in Caesarea. That’s what poor old Champage Ehud forgot.

That reminds me, I must send over a few Cubans to him. He's a big afficionado, but he might be running low. He’ll need them, given how much smoke he’s going to have to blow to cover all this up.

The real speaker’s fees are only for the top guys. The Prime Ministers whose reputations were soiled by Iraq, the Presidents who soiled their intern’s dress, the former US Secretaries of State who were so stupid even George W. Bush could fool them into going to war in Iraq, the …uh, the movie stars (Nicole Kidman got $435,000 to speak to a global business conference) who can teach us how to cry without having our nose-jobs run and still look fabulous.

Maybe I could look up Kidman’s speech on Youtube. I might be able to figure out how to use some of it for next year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day speech – this week at the memorials I feel I was a bit “same same,” having used up my best stuff at Auschwitz a couple of months ago. Nicole was very good in “Moulin Rouge!” Sometimes I dress as a woman and sing “One Day I’ll Fly Away” to my wife Sara, but she doesn’t seem to get the message. The messages, I mean.

Yes, speaking fees are where it’s at. Small fry have to promote themselves by writing blogs and op-eds, and even authoring their own books, as if ghost writers didn't exist. Like that writer Matt Beynon Rees. I heard that sometimes he even speaks to people for nothing, just because they want to hear him and he wants to talk about his books.

Now that’s really corrupt.

“Exotic” crime fiction has taken off in the last decade. People want to read about detectives in far-off places, even if they don’t want to wade through learned histories of those distant lands.

Many of the biggest selling novels of the last decade have been “exotic crime.” You’ll find a detective novel set almost everywhere in the world, from the “Number One Ladies Detective Agency” in Botswana through Camilleri’s Sicily to dour old Henning Mankell in the gloomy south of Sweden.

The success of my co-bloggers at International Crime Authors – with their detectives plying their trade in Thailand, Laos, and Turkey, alongside my Palestinian sleuth Omar Yussef – is also proof that this taste for international crime is more than just a publishing fad. The novels aren’t just Los Angeles gumshoe stuff transported to colder or poorer climes.

Here’s what I think is behind it:

Read a history book or a book of contemporary politics. Often you’ll find a list of the enormous numbers of people destroyed around the world by war and famine and neglect. You won’t get any sense that the world…makes sense. Crime fiction doesn’t purport to save the planet, but it does demonstrate that one man – the detective – can confront a mafia, an international espionage organization, a government and come out with at least a sliver of justice.

And justice is one of the few ideas which can still inspire.

Readers also prefer crime fiction about distant countries over so-called “literary” fiction about such places.

That’s because crime fiction gives you the reality of a society and also, by definition, its worst elements — the killers, the lowlifes — but it also gives you a sense that a resolution is possible. (See above.)

Literary fiction, by contrast, often simply describes the degradation of distant lands. If you read Rohinton Mistry’s “A Fine Balance,” for example, you probably thought it was a great “literary” book, but you also might’ve ended up feeling as abused as his downtrodden Indian characters without the slightest sense of uplift.

Crime fiction doesn’t leave you that way.

Now, that’s also true of the Los Angeles gumshoe. But the international element gives us something else to wonder about in these new novels. Not just because the scene is alien. Rather, it’s because we all trust to some extent that bad guys in Los Angeles will go to jail — or become Hollywood producers. We have faith in the system. So a detective has some measure of backing from the system, and consequently novelists have to push credibility to its limits in order to make him look like he’s taking a risk, to make him look brave.

International crime, when it’s set in the Developing World in particular, can’t be based on that same trust in the just workings of the system. The lack of law and order in Palestine, as I observed it as a journalist covering the Palestinian intifada, was one of the prime reasons I had for casting my novels as crime novels. It was clear the reality wasn’t a romance novel. Gangsters and crooked cops in the West Bank suggested the more vibrant days of the US crime novel back in the time of Chandler and Hammett, when it was much harder to argue that a city or mayor or police chief wouldn’t be in the pocket of the bad guys.

When a detective goes up against such odds in international crime fiction, it’s truly inspiring.

For books that start with a murder, that’s not what you’d expect, but it’s the reason for the success of this new exotic avenue of the crime genre.

Eric, the scion of a soap fortune, pressed the "Wolf kills visitor" button inside the entrance of his Malibu beach-house. Outside his front door, I heard the approaching growls of an angry hound; a hatch opened and out sprang the three-foot neck of a blue-haired, red-eyed, mechanised wolf, drooling viciously over the welcome mat.
"That's cool," said Eric's friends. Eric smiled and led me inside to his pool, where, he said, there was a monster.
"It's down this end," he said. As I peered at the cartoon mermaids on the pool's floor, a Freddie Kruger model jumped up behind me and sprayed a jet of cold water down my back.
"I got you pretty good," Eric said, shaking my hand. A tanned girl in a bikini looked up from her deck chair and smiled, as if she'd seen this all before. I went out onto the veranda to watch Nicholas Cage playing in the sand with some children and a chubby blonde in shiny black-plastic trousers. The move star was without his toupee.
Los Angeles is full of the outrageously banal, the irresistibly empty, like Eric's $12 million home. Still, it's somehow one of America's most attractive cities, striving after substance in an instant kind of way, just as everyone here seems to feel they're only moments away from status and recognition in the entertainment business.
The city's most expensive shops, on Rodeo Drive and Via Rodeo, all decorate their windows with tastefully printed poetry by "y.o." -- none other than the artfully inane Yoko Ono. As Yoko orientalised about "following footprints in the sand / in the water," it seemed Los Angeles was the perfect place for her words. Only here could shopkeepers imagine a use for this most insubstantial of art, hyped and unread, as a way to make the act of consuming somehow more thoughtful, more deep. Just as most of Hollywood's movies are about dollar signs more than creativity. (At Universal Studios, tourists watch the less than terrifying spoutings of a mechanical shark and are told they've "survived Jaws, brought to you by Ocean Spray," a brand of cranberry juice.)
There's a conglomeration of ideologies in Los Angeles, as if it formulated its thoughts through the smog that hangs over the San Fernando valley, blurring the stripes of spinach-green foliage on the khaki hillsides. Like a radio that can switch bands instantly from AM talk shows to an FM rock station, Los Angeles is the ultimate American city, always seeking its next gig, hovering on the edge of the country. It threatens to break off in a techtonic cataclysm and fall into the Pacific, glimmering beneath the mountains along the coast road. The hip melange is there to greet you at LAX, the airport, where Hare Krishnas eschew their telltale robes and lure you into conversation with a high five from behind baseball caps and baggy homeboy jeans.
In a play I saw by one of Los Angeles' hottest new writers, Thomas M. Kostigen, a young man is described by his girlfriend: "He's thoughtful, but he's not thought-through." That's Los Angeles. And perhaps it took a Boston transplant like Kostigen to see it.
Los Angeles is no ardent, committed city of anger, like New York, with its downtown activists handing out needles to junkies, and arrogant Wall Streeters, crisp and one-dimensional in Ralph Lauren Polo shirts. It's no Frenchified town of think-tank pseudo-intellectuals like Washington D.C., and its snobbery can't compare to Boston's more desiccated variety.
In this city, they believe anything can be dressed up like a dream with a little cash, whether it's the backlot at Universal or a fat girl. An Argentinian who runs a West Hollywood salon selling extravagantly beaded wedding dresses for as much as $18,000 mimed the act of forcing fat into a
brace of petticoats and sneered at his customers. "They come in and think we can make them look like Cinderella. Well, for 90 percent of them, it just ain't gonna happen."
There's a danger in the dream, too, something of a nightmare quiet and smoothness, like riding in an air-conditioned Mercedes (leased not bought, of course, as most cars here are) through the shadows of the inner city. The riots of 1992 that wrecked South Central L.A. in the wake of the Rodney King trial showed how keyed the rest of America is to Los Angeles. The shock spread throughout the country. Even imperturbably ballsy New Yorkers called each other frantically with reports of shots fired at aeroplanes taking off from J.F.K. airport and massed blacks marching down from Harlem to pillage the Upper West Side.
That tension remains in Venice Beach, home to hippies and drug freaks, the place that spawned Jim Morrison. As tanned rollerbladers wind in their own Walkman-worlds down the path that twists along the beach, they're watched by crowds of blacks, milling about the cheap T-shirt stores and bargain shoe shops along the front.
A spray of cold water doused the back of my neck and I turned to see a seven-year-old black girl with a plastic cup in her hand run to her family, which giggled at her prank. I felt like a ringleted Jew strolling through the car-park outside a Nuremburg rally, waiting for the joking to turn harsher and, in the meanwhile, a game target.
A group of Black Hebrews stood in ranks between the rollerbladers and the crowded strip. A dozen black men in bright, satin turbans, they read from the Bible. One of them held a six-foot Star of David; another held a placard that listed the 12 tribes of Israel, redubbing them the 12 tribes of negroids. "Jesus was a black man," read one of their T-shirts.
Their leader, incongruously attired for the beach in the black, grey and white of arctic combat fatigues, held his microphone to the mouth of his acolyte reading a line from the Bible. Then he banged out his interpretation of the biblical verse with the venom of a rap song.
"That mean the white man and the white woman, the white race has done all that's evil; they are evil. He's oppressed and killed and raped and maimed. When the white man dropped the atomic bomb on the so-called Japanese at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they shall reap that destruction, that's what that says there. That means all this, this crap -- " he waved an arm along the beach, left and right, taking in all of Los Angeles "-- is going to get wiped out. Read!"
The reader stumbled over the words "perpetual destruction." "Say what?" the leader said into his microphone. Then he gave up and pulled in the man with the Star of David to read instead.
With his clothing and imagery, the Israelite could have been a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Sikh, or a corporal in the U.S Army -- just about anything except a so-called Japanese, in fact. Thought-through? Whatever, it looked good to him. He had to live in L.A., after all, until the crap was destroyed.
Yet the ideological confusion is one of Los Angeles' most engaging qualities for any visitor, because it's the muddleheadedness of those who are at least striving to figure it all out, to understand what they want. Like the bearded Harley Davidson rider rolling along La Cienega Boulevard, long hair flying from under his helmet. His bike bore the traditional Harley motto: "Live to ride." Below was a second slogan, of high-speed recovery: "Ride to live sober." Kick some of your dangerous habits -- just some of them.
I heard that same tone, confidently doubtful of its own effectiveness, in the voice of a man in the pool at the Jewish Community Center in West Hollywood. He couldn't stop talking about the muscle-relaxants he was taking for a firmer erection and the stool-softeners he hoped would cure his constipation. There's a solution for everything, but, if it doesn't work out, find a new guru, or a new pharmacist. Or a new producer.
A casting agent who works at MCA talked about the city's Museum of Tolerance, where displays on the Holocaust stand beside exhibits on racism in America's old south. "It makes you think," she breezed. "But that doesn't last."
In fact, Los Angeles' apparent vapidity brings with it an inverted snobbery of superficiality. Every time I suggested to Angelenos that their city is a pleasant place to be and, maybe, to live, they pounced on the chance to show how they'd seen through it all. "Oh, but it's really superficial," they'd say. And you'd have to be deep to see just how superficial everyone else is, wouldn't you. See what I mean?
Perhaps you can't think too much, when that might mean facing up to the idea that success isn't just round the corner. At a party thrown in a gigantic Italian restaurant by one of the city's biggest acting agencies, the Dolce & Gabana suits spoke of wealth. But few of those at the party were agents; most were struggling actors, trying to persuade those agents to take them on as clients, or they were clients eager for the agents to send them to better auditions.
"They're not actors," said my friend Avital, a successful stage and film actress with an Israeli Oscar under her belt who's trying to get ahead in Hollywood. "But they have to face so much rejection, they've got to really love something about what they do."
When I left the party, a slicked-down 26-year-old was trying to persuade the man with the guest list that he was supposed to have been invited. He was the same hopeful who'd been badgering the host when I arrived two hours before.
And rejection can come quickly, just like success. Jeffrey, a transplanted New Yorker with a trim grey beard and a collarless Armani shirt, told me about his plans for the modelling agency he founded 10 years ago. "I want to take over a bunch of small, Mom'n'Pop agencies," he said. I couldn't imagine Mom and Pop mixing with Hollywood's top models, and perhaps the people who now ran Jeffrey's agency couldn't either: three days later Jeffrey handed in his notice. When a friend learned Jeffrey had resigned from the agency, she said: "Again?"
Back at Eric's Malibu beach-house, I walked out along the private road and passed a minor film star I vaguely remembered from a role in some kind of comic vampire film. "Isn't that...uh?" I asked my friend.
"In this town, you see a lot of people who are someone, but you don't remember their names," my friend said. "In a while, no one else will, either."