Part 1 of 2: Hooray for Hollywood.

I’ve spent 18 years here and really have never fit into to either the Southern California crowd or the “L.A.” crowd (those are two separate subcultures out here). But I do love living here for the opportunities that it presents, not only in simply being a multi-cultural urban setting, but for the two events I went to this weekend.

Friday Night – Henry Rollins

Now, I’ve never been a Punk fan. My "background", if you will, is Heavy Metal and Alternative back when that meant something. However, many moons ago someone handed me the Rollins book “Get In The Van”, which is an account of his days with Black Flag, probably The Seminal American Punk band. Rollins immediately struck me with his stark perception and eloquence, but also with an honesty that is not simply brutal, it’s barbaric. You don’t read Rollins to be entertained, you read him to be challenged. I don’t always agree with what he has to say, and sometimes he makes me flat out uncomfortable, but he always makes me think. (“The Portable Henry Rollins” is a good way to get introduced to his written works since it covers a wide variety of his poetry and prose from different periods of his life.)

Rollins had a series of charity shows over the weekend on the tiny little "basement club style" stage (maybe 100 people squeezed in the audience there) at McCabe’s Guitar Store in Santa Monica. It’s hard to imagine any band standing up there since the high energy, in your face, Henry Rollins took up the entire thing and held the audience, just talking, for almost two hours.

On neo-conservative pundits: “I’m not one of these tree hugging, patchouli smoking, hacky-sack playing liberals. I want the 24 hour house party with the Ramon’s and they are standing in my way God damn it! The line is drawn in the stand. This will happen on my watch!…..Actually, Bill O’Reiley and I are very much alike, except I’m right and he’s a dick.”

Now on the surface a Rollins performance may seem like mere stand-up comedy, but it isn’t. There’s much more here than funny anecdotes as Rollins takes you through the tragedies and send ups, the silly and sublime that life entails. The juxtaposition of being present at the death of one of closest friend’s mother, whom he had known his entire life, to his finest comic moment on the set of films he was shooting a scant couple days later drives home the wide range of human experience.

One thing I have always liked about Rollins is that while his viewpoint is resolutely masculine, it is not at the expense of the feminine gender. Often when you encounter someone as testosterone rich as Henry Rollins is, they don’t actually like women all that much. Oh, they like sleeping with them, but after that they just wish they would go away so they can hang out with their male friends and play video games or whathaveyou. They don’t really like women as people. In fact, one macho type I dated for sometime admitted that he thought that women in general were “naturally treacherous and vicious”. (Mind you, this was the guy who spent three years lying to me about his work/travel and sleeping with anything in a skirt. Projection much?) Rollins isn’t that way, he is confidant enough in his masculinity that he doesn’t feel the need to degrade women to make his masculinity look better. Oh, he has no issues pointing out our foibles, but he just as honestly points out his own and that of the male gender. Shown last Friday the most in his relations with the “Cosmo for Men” (my comparison), “Maxim” magazine whom he pointed out encourages men “to treat women like barnyard animals” and just like Cosmo, gives a completely materialistic and unrealistic picture of what the “American Man” is supposed to be like as well as the completely unrealistic ideal that women are looking for too.

I wish I could throw more quotes up here, but A. I don’t want to infringe any of Henry copy writes because he’s self published, and B. I can’t remember how he said it exactly, which was so funny and insightful, and I’ll probably mangle it. It was a great show and if you find out he’s coming to a local club or college campus near you, go and see him.

Saturday Afternoon – Hugh Laurie.

The Screen Actors Guild Foundation has a series of talks with professional performers called “Conversations with…” and by luck, I got clued into Hugh Laurie’s appearance there this weekend at the SAG Center downtown. It was a small venue as well, though very well appointed. The room was probably meant to hold 150 or 170, but we had well over 200 squeezed in there. They previewed the episode that will air this coming Tuesday (all I am going to say is “No, don’t thank me. I’m just that kind of guy.”) and then Mr. Laurie came out and took questions from the audience.

It is always interesting sitting in the middle of “Industry people”, who really are a breed apart, and getting a glimpse into their world. After running through various events and seminars that the SAG was giving, the MC extolled the audience that they were the “heart and soul of culture”. I guess with the amount of rejection these people have to deal with in their chosen careers, anytime they can get a boost it’s a good thing. Unfortunately, most of the questions from the audience were more fan-related than art related. I figured a bunch of actors would want to know more about acting, but I guess that goes back to the old joke: “How many actors does it take to change a light bulb? 100. One to do it and 99 to stand around and say “I could have done that better””. *chuckle* I guess there simply is nothing like “Inside The Actors Studio”.

Anyway, had I known I would have thrown something in about characterization, physicality, choice of roles and possibility of directing an episode or two, maybe ask if there is some sort of class rift in Britain between the RSC folks and the British actors who haven’t gone through the Royal Shakespeare Company. Silly me. But there were lots of questions about his work with Stephen Fry and two invitations to dinner. He did address the second most hotly debated issue on the boards (After Thank-God-Juvenile-Twit-is-Gone-Cameron) which is the focus of the show: medical vs. story/character development. It seems this show will be heading in the direction of all of David Shore’s shows: character/relationship heavy. Which I hope doesn’t go too overboard because I was looking forward to a show that dealt with more science and ethics. He also discussed some of the errors and fudging that happened to serve the story and camera angles “I know the patient couldn’t possibly be sitting up after that procedure, but it was the only camera angle they could get that way would have been looking up their nose”, some of which I understand. Yes, the medicine needs to serve the story, but there have been a couple unforgivable errors (such as the “brown eyed parents cannot have blue eyed children” bit) in the show that simply cannot be chalked up to “helping the story along”. Good writers can work with the facts, not fudge over them.

There was some discussion of the book and the status of a second, which is now “properly three years overdue”. I hope he gets a chance to work on it, because the first was just a cracking good read. He also commented on filming British TV vs. American TV:

“Are you a seven day or eight..”
“Eight, eight day schedule."
"12, 14 hour days?"
"14. Though I use the term "Day" loosely. I think there’s day in January that’s still going on….”

On filming sex scenes: "It's not that sexy really. 30 other people in the room and you hear them whispering, "Is that the way he's thinks it done?""

And he addressed Hollywood’s rehashing of old material because studio execs are too scared to underwrite new material anymore. And here I thought they simply had run out of ideas. ;)

But all in all, Mr. Laurie was quite charming and funny. Engaged the audience, addressing each person who asked the question, personally and very personably.

There was an opportunity afterwards to go up and meet him and ask for autographs and such, which I was not expecting. But I didn’t have my copy of The Gun Seller, I was wearing sunglasses inside because I was a twit and in running late had left my regular glasses in the car and there was a big crowd of people waiting to talk to him so I figured he would probably appreciate one less person coming up and saying “Gee, you’re really swell!”, especially when he looked very tired and …

Awright! Awright! I’m shy!

So I just stood there and “window shopped”, if you will. *wistful sigh*

Happily married with three kids, of course. Damn! ;) *chuckle*