mimi in NY

WE ARE ALL SARAH MASON

2011-12-16T05:59:00.003-05:00

As a child, I used to read about the ANC, about Feminists, about the Civil Rights Movement, The Black Panthers - without ever dreaming that I would see something as powerful in my lifetime, obsessed as our generation is with generic, mass produced crap like Us Weekly and Keeping up With The Kardashians. As Occupiers, however, we were all universally pleased - if skeptical and surprised - that 'The Protestor' was recognized as Time's Person of the Year. Many of us have put our family lives, our personal agendas, free time, careers and what little comfort we had left in this recession-ridden world, on hold in order to Occupy. Others were at rock bottom, didn't have any of these luxuries, and yet chose to dredge up what last resources, strength and emotions they had, to join the movement. Across the world, our brothers and sisters faced greater adversities and forged the way for us - in Greece, Argentina, in Tahrir Square, Madrid, and more.

As commercial, consumer-based and bullshit as the Mainstream Media may be, and whatever underhand agenda Time magazine might have for recognizing The Protester as the face of 2011, we appreciate the accolade - even more so, perhaps, because one of our own was the face upon which Shepherd Fairey's picture was based. But as the news leaked across the internet that the faceless protester had a face and a name and was, in fact, a real person from Occupy LA, the faceless protester became a hunted figure - even more so because Sarah Mason, the 25 year-old girl upon whom Shepherd's TIME cover was based, neither wanted, expected, nor had any interest in becoming, the media spokesperson and covergirl for a worldwide movement of many faces demanding, simply, change. Sarah was unaware that her picture was being used for the cover of TIME magazine, has not received financial compensation or other material benefits for that fact, and wishes to preserve her privacy at this moment.

In deference to, and solidarity with, our brothers and sisters across the world, we 'protesters' reject the attempts of the mainstream media to seek out and put our sister Sarah Mason in the spotlight. We are disgusted by the fact some 'journalists' have deliberately misquoted our sister by taking an early interview out of context, or claiming 'ownership' of Sarah, as with KPFK's unfounded claim that she worked for them.

Tonight, in reaction to a tabloid journalist attempting to interview Sarah, who has expressed a desire to be left in peace, many of us 'protesters' called the journalist with a message which encapsulates the essence of our leaderless, faceless, movement: WE ARE SARAH MASON.

We will repeat this action to all journalists who attempt to intrude upon our sister's privacy. If you would like to join us, call this number below and say you are Sarah:

Yalda Sadiq
Assignment Editor
Inside Edition
310-642-4176 Direct
310-642-4161 News Desk
Yalda.Sadiq@Cbs.com

I will update this piece with other contact details if and when they become available.

MIC CHECK! Skid Row Allstars Vs. LAPD Young Gunz

2011-12-14T01:26:00.003-05:00

This afternoon, eight protestors connected with Occupy LA (including myself) took up the LAPD's invitation to a basketball game aimed "To bring together the public, law enforcement and homeless communities in an effort to strengthen relationships and bring awareness to those in need." The game was between "The LAPD Young Gunz" - a basketball team from the LAPD that trains all year round - and "The Skid Row Allstars" - a group of players from various missions across downtown LA, who do not have a consistent presence as a team due to time, space and money constraints. This carefully staged PR-event featured a dinner for 500 homeless people, served by (gun-carrying) LAPD at the Midnight Mission on San Pedro in Downtown Los Angeles.

We spoke beforehand to Community Organizer Bilal Ali who works with LA CAN (Los Angeles Community Action Network), an organization that is actively fighting the Failed 'Safer Cities Initiative' established in September 2006 by the Los Angeles Police Department, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo in the Skid Row community. Although SCI was promoted as a means to improve public safety and bring additional homeless services to the community, police enforcement and a crackdown on petty offenses has been the most significant and consistent element of the initiative, and no additional homeless services have ever materialized.

At the cost of six million dollars, 50 LAPD officers were deployed to a 50-square block area surrounding Skid Row (0.85 square miles) -- the equivalent of adding 470 new officers to the Rampart Division or 700 officers to the 77th Street Division in South Los Angeles, and bringing the numbers of police officers in Skid Row second only to that of Iraq, according to Ali. In addition, dozens of undercover narcotics officers were deployed to the same area, resulting in an unprecedented concentration of police resources in a neighborhood with relatively low rates of serious and violent crime.

This has resulted in a massive increase in arrests around the Skid Row area for relatively 'minor' everyday activities which are the natural result of homelessness: sitting on the sidewalk, sleeping in a car, public urination, throwing a cigarette butt on the floor, spitting out gum. An ignored ticket, however minor, results in a warrant for arrest, and the removal of the perpetrator from the street and into jail. Despite the LAPD's saccharine and insincere claim that SCI is "to create an environment conducive to change so that those without hope today may find it tomorrow.", it seems clear that homelessness has effectively been criminalized by the Safer Cities Initiative at the cost of 6 million dollars a year. 6 million dollars the City seems willing to spend in order to remove the homeless from Skid Row, and continue upon its single-minded path of gentrifying Downtown Los Angeles without adequately addressing the homeless problem and finding solutions for those 15,000 people - 75% of whom are African-American - resident on Skid Row. This is further evidenced by the outrageous behavior of City Council and Mayor Villaraigosa in reassigning 1 million dollars in Federal Funding earmarked for Skid Row - to the multi-million dollar NFL-contracted global architecture firm Gensler, in order to entice them to move their offices downtown.

While the action today was not specifically targeting the Midnight Mission, who have done some excellent work in rehabilitating many of the homeless suffering from alcoholism, drug addiction and mental illness, it must be noted that only Missions and Shelters who support the Safer Cities Initiative receive Federal and State Funding, and are graced with the presence of the LAPD, who have a long and outstanding history of being anything but willing to "strengthen relations" and "bring awareness" to the plight of those resident on Skid Row.

Here is the text of the Protestors Mic Check (video to follow):

We, the 99%, do not accept the criminalization of the 15,000 homeless people on Skid Row. Shelter is a human right, an by shelter we do NOT mean jail cells under the so-called Safer Cities Initiative. The police presence on Skid Row is highest in the world, with a greater deployment of law enforcement than anywhere but Iraq. We want real community change, not empty public relations efforts. We are here in support of the RESIDENTS of Skid Row, and all those who are doing what they can despite the violent selective targeting of City Council and the LAPD.

After mic-checking Chief of Police Beck as he stood in his basketball shorts ready to start the game, we protestors read out the text above, and were joined by the audience, one of whom gave us the finger, the majority of whom cheered us on with chants of "Skid Row! Skid Row!", and helped us mic check our statement - before we were told to leave or face arrest.

Bored in Wales

2011-11-11T20:21:00.000-05:00

When bored, put on too much makeup.

Occupy the London Stock Exchange

2011-11-06T09:51:00.000-05:00

I'm waaaaay behind on updating you guys. There's a lot of new writing over here.

First They Ignore You....

2011-10-16T03:40:00.001-04:00

My new blog post at Occupy LA

You Just Don't Get It Yet....

2011-10-10T22:30:00.002-04:00

But you will.

Here's a blog post I wrote about the misconceptions people are having about the scale of this movement.

My Solidarity Blog (below for link)

2011-10-06T03:15:00.004-04:00

It's just after midnight and my head's whirling. I drove up to Topanga in torrential rain, rivers running past me on the PCH, mists rising up off the sea and cloaking my shitty little Ford Escort, blanket-like. I was en-route to CSA California to pick up fruit and vegetable donations from the kind folks up there. CSA, for you folks who don't know (and I had no fucking clue until this morning), stands for Community Sustainable Agriculture, and is basically a bunch of individuals just like you who want to support our local farmers, being pushed out by corporations and increasing land taxes. Those individuals band together to form a collective which shares the risks and benefits of food production. I won't bore you, but here's the wiki explanation. Essentially, it means local people helping local farmers and businesses stay afloat, and providing the community with good, organic produce which is far, far cheaper and tastier than the shiny, waxed, genetically engineered crap you buy at Ralphs, Trader Joe's and Wholefoods. I'm sorry, but apples just don't have that fucking sheen on them, Wholefoods. They don't. Nor do they cost the price of a small condo. I fucking hate Wholefoods. But I still go there, because it's easy, it's recognizable, it has all my hippy shit in one convenient location. I do, however, frequent farmers markets for all my fresh produce, and after meeting the folks at CSA, I'm now one of their customers.

I loved that early morning rainy drive through Topanga Canyon, my car smelling of apples and oranges and Kale. Los Angeles just rained and rained today like the heavens had had enough, they'd just burst. It felt cathartic, in some way. I got home to my rose-covered cottage in West Hollywood soaked to the bone, tired and happy. I mooched around getting dry with Mr Chips, cooked up some winter soup with parsnips and carrots and beans and sweet potatoes, and then went to meet a fellow screenwriter for coffee at The Grove.

I fucking hate The Grove, and though I love movies and writing them, I hate the screenwriting industry. It was an interesting coffee as this screenwriter professed to be the same way, but it was all we spoke about, and my mind kept drifting back to Topanga and the hippies, Burning Man, and Occupy LA. I was at the March Saturday, and since then have kept up to date by following it closely on Twitter, talking to the organizers and checking in with them, and trying to hustle up donations. I finally got an evening off work, and so scooted over with Chips and boxes of organic goodies about 6pm this evening.

I'm pretty tired, so 'scuse the prose. I'm going for brevity, not style here.

Firstly, it's friendly, it's warm, it's open, and it's full of debate. You walk by - maybe it seems intimidating. A bunch of dirty, wet, unemployed people in tents, holding signs. But look at them, and they're smiling at you. Smile back, hold out your hand, ask them questions. They'll sit you down and answer them, fetch you a cup of coffee, introduce you to people. Sure, there's hardcore activists here - the type who hop from protest to protest, cause to cause. And they're working alongside mothers, fathers, the unemployed, the blue collar worker, the middle class dude who just valet-parked his Audi down the street. Everyone's here not to press an agenda, a specific cause. They're here to express their discontent, and to come together to form a conscious movement which simply expresses the desire for change. They want America to change: not to rewrite the constitution, oust the President. Nothing crazy like that. They want America to be the land it was always promised to be: the land of the free, with liberty and justice for all. What is their main complaint? Their main complaint is that corporations - the 1% - have too much power. They wield political power, as recently proven beyond doubt with Citizens United. They wield global power, as demonstrated with the absolute autonomy of the Federal Reserve and the repercussions of this un-audited institution upon the world's economy. Their CEO's advise the President and affect policy decisions. And when they gamble with our money and they lose, they are given more, while we lose homes, and jobs, and our health, and self-respect. And nothing changes even when this comes to light. No one audits or shuts down the Federal Reserve. The CEO's right at the top continue to reap massive salaries and bonuses. They still advise the President.

Occupy Wall Street, and by extension, LA is not 'anti' capitalist, 'anti' globalization, 'anti' government. It's a movement, it's a voice, and that voice is saying 'this is no longer good enough. We demand representation. We demand a change. We demand that this system where massive corporations wield unlimited political, social and economic power - end'.

This is not a march, nor is it a protest, nor is it a mere 'occupation'. What I scorned a few weeks ago as a few trustafarians in a park, what I saw on Saturday, what I've read on twitter and facebook, seen blogged about on liberal media (fucking hate The Guardian) - has evolved rapidly into becoming a truly representative, democratic movement. Outside City Hall has become a camp for Revolutionaries, and I mean that not in the lefty, hemp-wearing, kombucha-swigging, trustafarian blind faith way. I mean Revolutionary in its purest form: as a fundamental change in power. This is the people claiming back their power and their inviting you to join in. There will be the crazies, the nutters and the loonies - and they will be listened to, and their views will be heard by the General Assembly. And as I saw tonight, Mad Vegan who hates meat-eaters will be told politely to deal with them and value her opinions, but not press them on anyone. Crazy group of over-zealous anarchists who hate the LAPD and decided to start a facebook rumor suggesting they'd used violence and pepper spray, will be told this will not be tolerated in a democratic group. Cop-hater will attack me on twitter because I tweeted that LAPD have been great to Occupy LA - as if their kindness somehow undermines or condones the police brutality in New York. This is not the case. We report as we find, and so far, LAPD and the City Council have been exceptionally well behaved, communicative, even supportive and open with us. Boundaries are clearly enforced only with the agreement of the group. Finances are completely transparent, and open for anyone to see. The group is growing everyday.

It's nearly 2am and I need to sleep - have a big day rewriting tomorrow. After tonight's General Assembly I sat and talked for a long time with a Farmer from Northern California. We spoke about pretty much everything under the sun. I told him my reservations about the movement, and he made me feel better by saying faith shouldn't be blind, I should be realistic, and not blindly follow. Mr Organic Farmer was the first person I'd spoken to since Burning Man who made sense to me, and then it struck me, this whole set up was like Burning Man without the art, the drugs, the desert and the costumes. It was Burning Man being put to the test: self-reliance to the core. Those two years I was dying and unemployed, god how I would have loved to have had Occupy LA to keep me alive, to have given me hope and solidarity, to have made me feel I wasn't alone.

Mr Chips, by now. was fast asleep in my arms, and I was exhausted and buzzing and happy, and Mr Farmer had to work, and I had to drive home.

I'm crawling into bed barely sentient, so I'm posting this without editing. But I will be at the Occupation every single day I can manage (bar this weekend, when I'm being sent to the desert to work). OK, so I'm going to Joshua Tree Music Festival, but it is for work!

I have a few plans on how to work with Occupy LA to get more people joining from what I think are under-represented classes: the employed, solvent, affluent, educated 10% with decent jobs and cars, and the very fucking poor and uneducated, so please join me over here where I shall be blogging for the duration of the movement, in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street and Occupy LA. I will be updating much more regularly than I normally do as I write about the growth of the movement, and I also plan to interview as many people as possible and tell their stories on the blog in order to show all the cynical fuckers out there who (like me) think this ain't for them, that they're wrong. This is for you. It's your movement. Join it. Walk up, don't think about appearances, put out your hand, and ask questions. Come down to Occupy LA and hell, I'll even buy you a cup of coffee. Or a kombucha.

(For the final time, I didn't edit this. I'm tired. I apologize for shit writing)

Questions Answered

2011-10-05T00:52:00.006-04:00

People keep asking me why I don't write the blog so much these days. There are numerous reasons for this.

1. I now get paid to write, so I write all day long. I wake up at 6am every morning, drive out to Santa Monica to take a yoga class with Jerome, take Chips hiking up Runyon Canyon for an hour, and by midday I'm at my desk, ready for a stretch of writing which will usually end at 10pm. I'm working on a mix of projects: some are literally soul-sucking money projects - but even those are pretty interesting. Some are passion projects, and they're amazing. I earn money through screenwriting, but I keep dabbling in journalism as well as I enjoy it. My first love is, and always will be, prose. I don't know when I'll have time to write the second book. Having said that, two unfinished manuscripts, both 60k words each, are idling on my desktop, waiting for attention right now.

2. Now I get paid to write, I have more to lose. I bitch like hell about producers in private, but on here I can't get away with it so much. I look forward to the day when I can unleash my fury back upon the blogosphere again - probably after my first Oscar win.

3. From about September 2008 until January 2011, I made barely a cent and was heavily in debt. The recession hit me hard. I survived by going into human hibernation mode: I shut down pretty much everything, including my opinions. I didn't even write for a year after Obama got elected. The last few years have been the hardest of my entire existence, and I'm still, curiously, poking my soul, and examining it to see what I make of it all. It wasn't right to write about it then. It was too raw and real.

4. I got sick of letting people have a direct route into my head. For some reason I'm far more socially eloquent in person than I am on the page. This translates as: far better at concealing what I think or feel. I liked having my privacy back, so I kept stuff in. I don't really like people knowing what I think or feel. Oddly enough, it creeps me out when people - strangers - talk about the book. It creeps me out when boyfriends pretend it doesn't exist, but everyone else has to pretend it doesn't exist, aside from boyfriends. Huh?! I prefer the book to exist independently of me, and for us all to pretend it has nothing to do with me.

5. When I write in the first person, I'm as subtle as a sledgehammer, and I offend people, and it got quite exhausting - being a pariah. The last few years I didn't really exist, simply because I didn't write about me. It was peaceful. I'm not sure why I started writing this thing again. Writing the first draft of a screenplay is basically like hosting a four week party in your head, full of pretty obnoxious people having the same conversation over and over in slightly varying forms. So perhaps I'm tired of facilitating all these other voices, some of whom I love, some I loathe.

6. Another question I get asked is: if you write so many screenplays, how come you don't have IMDB credits? - I started writing screenplays in 2008. As in, I wrote a spec script, it got picked up by an agent, and then she sent my script around, and organized meetings, and for a year, I was unemployed but "taking meetings". After a year, people started asking me to do stuff - write treatments, come up with ideas, pitch them - a lot of it unpaid. And in the second year, I did two scripts on commission, and I got paid. One sucked - because the producers were crap. The second one was brilliant, even though the producers were crap. Now - I work with awesome producers, and I've lost count of how many scripts I've written, and I can't tell if they're crap or not. All my scripts are lounging around 'in development', which means a production company is in the middle of the arduous process of getting funding and a director / cast attached. Sometimes this can happen quickly, sometimes slowly, sometimes not at all. As a writer you have to just brutally detach from the process and the script. Apart from with those one or two scripts you really, really love, and those you can't ever forget. I have one of those scripts written, and two on the boil right now. It's the best feeling ever. Although you're always dependent on someone to channel your words: a publisher, an editor, a press, a magazine - ultimately, a reader. If all else fails - hell, you can find a reader someplace. But screenplays - you really are fucked if no one makes your movie. Screenplays need a director, a producer, a cast, money, love - they need to have everyone converge on the same point, with the same vision, the same aim. Even if it gets made, a shit director will make a great script suck.

For an opinionated prose writer, adopting out your kids to strangers is pretty terrifying. Life is interesting these days.

Detachment. The key to all life's problems. Sigh.

Back to work....

They Took The Bridge

2011-10-03T14:32:00.003-04:00

This is interesting. It appears a very small number "took the bridge" - and then a bunch more followed, without being stopped by cops. There's claims police led them - this may be true. If there was congestion, and the cops are getting yelled at, I can completely imagine a couple of people walked on the bridge, and then the cops just allowing the rest through so they could arrest them. I think the cops have a pretty hard job in this scenario though - I can't imagine it's much fun being there and putting up with the inevitable abuse. It seems more likely a few people took the bridge either to piss off cops, or to make a statement, or maybe even because they were getting crushed. It's pretty ridiculous to arrest people for standing on a bridge - but rules are rules, and to be honest, it's increased media coverage no end, so whether the cops, or the protestors are responsible - does it matter? I just hope this doesn't descend into an LA riots type scenario: hatred between cops and protestors. I think the cops should send men in uniform to join the march - I heard a rumor some military guys intended to do that. Anyway. Back to screenplay.

Occupy LA

2011-10-02T23:50:00.008-04:00

I'm pretty exhausted, so excuse the shit writing.

Yesterday I went down to Occupy LA, and marched with them from Pershing Square to City Hall. I went to show support, although I'm still nursing a (un)healthy skepticism about the movement. I think movement, at a point of stalemate, is good. It has to be. But this 'leaderless' movement quickly needs to get motivated in a similar manner to the unprecedented grassroots support for Obama's campaign in 2008. Like that campaign, there's going to be morons, assholes and pricks on our side. There will be the cool kids, who like the drama and the arrests, but scorn the boring shit (ever canvassed? It will kill your soul). There'll also be the ones with passion and drive and fire and intelligence, who truly believe that this movement can evolve to make a difference. Put me with them, please, I'd like to learn.

In the meantime, I read one of the recent facebook status updates of the protestor who got maced by NYPD. This is what Damian Crisp wrote:

Last weekend I was peppersprayed by the nypd on a sidewalk while protesting. Yesterday I was part of a group nearly pushed off the Brooklyn Bridge because of the violent crowd control tactics of the nypd. I was surrounded by high level officers in white shirts who are beyond prosecution and enact the will of new york's most powerful and wealthiest citizen, Mayor Bloomberg. I was handcuffed for 6 hours, then detained in a small cell with eight people four more hours, given stale bread and a cup of water. A vocal writer and critic of corporations, the nypd, my name and face became known to the nypd after I was peppersprayed and of course I was the last person released. Other protesters were released ten at a time until they got down to myself and two others in my cell. One guy was released... the another... then I waited until I was finally given what amounts to a traffic ticket and released. I was alone with a precinct full of cops at 3 in the morning. These attacks are not a diversion from the cause. They are instances of a power structure revealling its disregard of our human rights.

I do not like cops on a power trip. Cops are assholes at the best of times. But so are regular people. And surely this demonstration, like the Obama campaign, is meant to be about erasing divisions and joining together? Are cops excluded from 'the 99%'? I'd say they epitomize what it is to be an average American: they're doing a shitty job for a boss they probably hate, and getting massive contempt from everyone around them for having to suck it up in order to pay their mortgage. If they were better people, surely they'd have a better job. C'mon kids, we know America doesn't work like that.

While we're at it, Bloomberg - yes, another rich, (ex)Republican asshole - but he does support abortion rights and same sex marriage, and oppose the death penalty. His stance on immigration is realistic - "We're not going to deport 12 million people, so let's give them permanent resident status". He has tried to get through a number of measures to protect the environment, and been defeated several times. Bloomberg's big problem is his support of the Patriot Act and Homeland Security - and the fact he's a mega-rich (ex) Republican. This hating on mega-rich people, by upper-middle class rich people - it's kind of annoying. A woman at the march said yesterday, "I like it when they say 'Tax the super-rich', but when they say, 'Tax the rich' - that's kind of everyone I know'". Hello Los Angeles! Welcome to the throng, and thanks for your honesty! The cities in which the people are mobilizing - they're rich, liberal hubs. It's rich against mega rich, purporting to care about the poor and the "working poor", which have replaced the middle class. I massively oppose the corporations and big business - but let's be honest about ourselves, hey? Nothing wrong with being rich, if honestly earned, so don't lets start having rich people walk around in rags, hiding their PPO Blue Shield Health Insurance cards for fear of reprisal...

Also - hell, I do not like cops. I hate authority figures in general. But if they're confronted with 600 of you sitting in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge, causing chaos to traffic and bystanders - they're going to take action. That's why you all sat down. You sat down in order to provoke the cops into making arrests, in order to gain more publicity for the movement. To then slag the cops off for doing exactly what you wanted them to do, seems more than a little disingenuous and ungrateful. The mace - no, that was idiotic, brutal and pointless. The cop who did that is a schmuck, a moron, and needs his bottom smacked. But the arrests? Come on, kids. Own it.

I'm still not sure how I feel about the mass Brooklyn Bridge arrests - I mean, in relation to its effectiveness as a form of protest. I can't get arrested or I'll get deported, which scuppers my First Amendment rights (or do only citizens get them?). So I always have to be super careful in protests. Of course the point of protest is that your very existence becomes an act of quiet rebellion - but despite being the most angry person I know, (I accept paypal if you'd like to contribute to the anger management course I should be on) I can't help thinking that Gandhi got it right with satyagraha (mass civil disobedience) - and its accompanying philosophy, ahimsa (non-violence).

Brooklyn Bridge was simple provocation. I think there's a time and a place to take this protest from marches and occupations, to direct action, to the more 'fingers up' approach of deliberately stepping into the middle of the road as an invitation to be arrested and manhandled - but is it now? When they haven't clarified their aims, protestors are still stumbling to articulate, Trade Unions and uniforms are starting to join, the movement is growing and changing? I suppose if the arrests get more supporters and increase its diversity, then it can't fail to be a good thing - although ironically, sitting in the middle of the Bridge was itself against direct orders from the 'leaders' of this leaderless movement, which might want to get protestors thinking about what the definition of democracy is. However, I was already proved wrong by dismissing the protestors as annoying white, anti-capitalist, over-educated teens - actually, maybe I wasn't - but they did quickly evolve into something else. Thanks annoying, white, over-educated teens. I hope the movement evolves again, and starts to agree on its aims.

I turned up at the LA occupation with my friend Donovan, who's a very Liberal schoolteacher, in that Liberal "I'm concerned about world affairs and the economy - I regularly tut about them," way, which is probably most people's general attitude. He, like me, felt slightly uncomfortable with the middle class nature of the protest and its definitive lack of aim - we passed, at one point, a homeless bum sleeping with a handwritten sign next to him, "It's OK. Continue shopping", while the march to City Hall led us passed a bunch of Asian and Hispanic store-owners touting cheap plastic crap. It made me starkly aware that this protest is not yet representative of the 99% - but it could be, if it grows into something more than light civil disobedience and becomes mobilized into a political force that speaks for the people and demands government attention.

About 1,500 people showed up to the LA march, and 328 pitched their tents for the first time last night. No arrests, it all went smoothly, a local councilman I spoke to, Richard Alarcón, has been liaising with the LAPD to ensure the protestors could exercise their freedom of speech, and pitch their tents, without arrests. Although if Saturday is any indication, maybe he shouldn't have bothered and everyone should have pitched their tents in the middle of Spring Street to get a bit more press. I sent my report off to The Guardian, and said I'd take them some food this week after I get paid. Next week I'll pitch my tent for a few days.

I wish I didn't have the kind of mind that examines everything minutely. To be a good protestor you either have to be an excitable sheep: not think too deep and just follow the herd, or be truly, wholeheartedly passionate, realistic and educated about the issues. When I worked for Obama I was passionate and realistic, and I became more knowledgeable, and learned from everyone around me - which got me through truly mind-numbing tasks like endless canvassing, and living off KFC for six weeks, with 0 dollars in my bank account (I survived off blog donations - thanks guys!). I'm not truly, wholeheartedly passionate yet about this protest, because there's no leadership, and it annoys me when The Guardian pops up with a sweet, well written, but patronizing Op-Ed from a sexy Hollywood actor. There needs to be some leadership (Yes, I am aware that's not the point) - because right now it's not enough for me to be passionate about the message, which I am. I need to know that passion is going to be utilized in an effective way for real, true change, not just arrests, bitching about the cops, and repeating discontent without knowing what to ask for.

I've been working with my old Obama group on this. Unlike most people I know, I haven't lost faith in Obama, and people who don't understand the separation of power and how that affects Presidential rule need to go back to fifth grade. We're coming up with ways to help mobilize, train and educate the LA protestors into using local action to gain political traction and make demands which will affect the bigger picture, using all the crap we learned working on '08 - dealing with the assholes on your own side is a big, big part of this. Yes, I count myself an asshole.

Interestingly, after having a day of protests and seeing all the gaps and flaws in the movement, and identifying ways we, as over-educated, politically-conscious liberals can help, I ended up volunteering at LA Decom that evening, sitting next to a wonderful, mad, brilliant Persian-American woman in her thirties who had come to this country as a child refugee from Iran. Her uncle, who sponsored her family, was killed by the Iranian mafia (I use the term mafia loosely here) and her entire family then became illegal, because their sponsor had died. Eventually after years battling the system, being denied a college education because of her undocumented status, and having to be a nanny for eight years, this woman was granted resident alien status based upon asylum. She told me about her interview with immigration:

"They sat me in this room, and this woman goes, 'Do you think it will affect your life negatively if we send you back to Iran?' I was like, 'Lady! I'm a bisexual, loud-mouthed, opinionated woman with a nose stud and a tongue ring and a tattoo down my back, who can't speak Farsi and has never worn a headscarf. They're going to kill me if I go back. They'll stone me to death'. And then I start crying, and this woman's like, 'There's no need to get emotional,' and I'm like, 'This is my life! This is my country! I don't know anything or anywhere else. I can be whoever I want to be in America'."

Unless you're gay and in the military, or you're Islamic and your last name is similar to a 911 bomber or... but for the most part, we do have human rights which are enviable here. They're being covertly challenged and tested right now, and the people are responding to that. This country, for all its flaws, for all that it favors the richest 1% over anyone else, for all its healthcare issues, and expensive education, and Guantanamo, and the stupid goddamn Patriot Act - we still believe in it, we still keep believing in it. We have to.

That's why I won't stop criticizing my protestors even thought we're on the same side, because, like them, I believe in my First Amendment rights. But it's also why I will join them, because I believe in the Fourth, and our rights have been violated. I believe in the Fifth - and I wrote an entire screenplay about how Reagan screwed that one up and no one ever notice. I still believe in this country I criticize, fear, love and loathe. I still believe it can be great. I'm British and I love this country more than my own. The first time I said the pledge of allegiance was during the Obama campaign and I stand by it. I was born British and I swear I'll die an American.

A condescending, annoying, patronizing American. I'm going to bed. Here are some crappy twitter pics I took - click on them to get them bigger. If you'd like to help Occupy LA, check out this page and get your butt to City Hall. If you're an ideas person, I guess you should contact me and get together with my old Precinct Obama group and start plotting.

Occupying the Outside

2011-09-30T03:43:00.005-04:00

I got back to Los Angeles after two weeks in London where I literally wrote every damn day until at least midnight every night. The weird thing about writing is you end up with massive holes in your life - September 2010 is completely missing, because of the political drama I wrote about Freddie Laker. January is gone because I was working for Channel 4. April - completely fucked. June? In Scotland researching the mining industry. So I frequently end up with huge gaps where I've disappeared into my own weird little isolated writing world for 4-8 weeks, and I pop up again and find out that Egypt's gone into uprising, or Katrina's destroyed New Orleans, and I'm like WOW! SHIT! while everyone else is bemused by the fact I only just discovered we had a new President or something (I was exaggerating on that one: I did manage to stay abreast of a campaign I worked on).

So anyway. City of Angels. I arrived late on Saturday night after a loooong flight (Justin Bieber movie and four episodes of The Killing). I lined up, stinking of old lady farts from the flatulent Polish bird sat next to me for ten hours, and shuffled up to immigration for my customary crap photo and fingerprint check. The guy at the desk looked at me suspiciously (mohawks tend to make authorities suspicious) and then decided to question me for half an hour, drilling me on every detail of my life. Why was I a chef on boats? Why was I on a B1 visa in 2003? How long did I stay in Florida in 2004? It rattled me to my core, and reminded me of how fragile my time in America is, how dependent on some twat in immigration who might just be in a really bad mood one day, or not like my nose or something. They could decide to throw me out any second, and they wouldn't need a reason. For some reason, my seven years of going back and forth without question gave me complacency, made me feel a sense of entitlement - and the United States does not condone entitlement. You have to earn everything here, sell your soul, act grateful all the time. The only thing they can't take away from you is citizenship. Did you know that? Once an American, always one. I'd quite like my US passport, because I love this country as much as I loathe it. My run-in with USCIS, however, really shook me up, to the extent that I went to see a new immigration lawyer, some guy way out in Encino, first thing on Monday morning. It took me bloody ages to get there, and I later discovered it was because Obama was in town. I'd wondered why everyone was on the streets demonstrating. Yep, missed that one on the last two week blackout. I also completely missed the start of Occupation Wall Street - I discovered that from a bunch of grainy youtube vids featuring earnest, inarticulate teenagers.

I'm glad it's getting more mainstream media attention, because I was really put off by their website, bad videos of kids who had no idea why they were there, online comments like 'the streets of America will burn', and stupid shit like "let's go march on this street and look at the cars we'll never be able to afford which THE RICH own" - probably written by kids skiving off their 40k a year schools. That kind of stuff is alienating, destructive and harmful to the cause. I'm all for anarchy and causing trouble - hell, give me a law, and I have an almost pathological need to break it - but I do not want to join a protest which is a bunch of trustafarians in a park with a well meaning, but vague claim to be 'the 99%' and an inability to clearly state what their aims are. One, the 99%? I think the nutters in middle-America who still believe in big business and hawk American flags on their (soon to be repo-ed) house might not want you to represent them, because they're quite happy in cloud cuckoo-land. Two - the poor, the uninsured, the unacceptable sections of society existed well before Wall St got really dodgy and deregulated, and you didn't represent them then. They're still gonna be there when you middle classes get your credit lines up and running and your savings accounts rosy and flush. What then? Are you still gonna represent the other 80%? Or are you going to be too busy, say, campaigning for undocumented citizens' rights or watching Joey play baseball at his private school at the weekend? And what about the rest of the world, America? Nice to see you get a bit motivated, but you didn't seem too concerned until your comfort got affected, oh middle classes. It's OK, we're all selfish - we're human beings. But don't pat yourself on the back quite yet. Get yourself back on your feet and reserve a little bit of passion for someone else....

Having said all this, I'm totally into the Occupation now the unions are getting involved, it's becoming more mainstream and representative, (yeah, I'm a sucker for Michael Moore, Susan Sarandon and Postal Workers) and that kind of earnest, youthful zeal is being taken up, and metamorphosing into something tangible, something we can all taste and recognize. To a beat-up cynic with recession war scars all over my twisted soul, being lectured at by the over-educated, under-employed and relatively life-unscathed just comes across as sanctimonious BS. That's probably my blatant ageism and it's definitely the massive chip I have on my shoulder against the wealthy middle classes who claim poverty, or continually profess not to be rich but seem to live these amazing lives which to a poor person - it looks like rich, dude. But there it is. We need really young passionate people to provide fire and passion and get the ball rolling - the rest of us are struggling daily with 18% APRs, car repos, jobs falling through and mortgage repayments, and I guess we're still shell shocked that this shit all happened, and doesn't seem to get better. I know dragging my ass through the Obama campaign when I was still reeling from an enormous medical bill for MRSA (uninsured) and losing every single freelance gig I had practically killed me, to the extent that it took me two years of intermittent homelessness and absolute hell before I was finally able to regain some kind of even keel in around March of this year (after I gave up my car for repossession, incidentally).

So we need the yoof for sure, but we also need age, experience and a wise, guiding hand to stop the Occupation toppling over into some kind of London-type riot, or simply becoming a bunch of kids banging bongos, eating pizza and posting on their twitter accounts. I kind of like riots, but the idea of white, middle class kids rollicking through New York throwing Kombucha bottles at McDonalds doesn't appeal. I think that's probably why most liberals were pretty unenthusiastic at the start, as Glenn Greenwald writes in Salon - and let's face it, naked chicks have their place in Burning Man, but on the streets of New York... I just don't want to see your tits, excited girl. It's not going to make me join your cause, it's going to make me think you're an exhibitionist fool and join the GOP.

Just kidding.

So now I'm pretty excited about this whole thing, although reservations still linger. When you've marched for a whole bunch of shit and seen anti-war movements spring up and be ignored by governments professing to be left wing, when you've had Hope and seen it crushed in the onslaught of a GOP which controls the House, when you've watched the horrendous Tea Party crawl out from under a rock and gain political traction, when you've tried in vain to get the media to cover issues like the DREAM act years before it had a chance of getting to the Senate - you have caution, and you have circumspection, and you don't want to join a movement only for it to turn into a bunch of sixteen year old anti-capitalists preaching to you about shit you already know, and joining forces with - I dunno, PETA, who are all fucking mad. (Disclaimer: I bought a second hand rabbit fur coat in London two weeks ago, and I am scared of being sprayed by animal activists who don't distinguish between new dead and old dead. Despite the shopkeeper's reassurances that the rabbit did not die in vain just for the coat, "it was eaten" she said, without irony - I still worry)

So I wonder what will happen now. The government and big business are so deeply intertwined that I personally can't see how you can untangle this mess without massively reforming a White House that's enormously corrupt, that condones Wall St and its excesses, and that feeds off them. I think governmental reform, transparency and bank regulation is the only way to safeguard our future. But then we're still taking for granted that once the enormous tasks of restoring the middle classes, taxing the rich, dismantling Big Corporations, and making government more accountable and transparent - once this is achieved, we kind of assume all the other problems: severe poverty, under-funded public schools, rising costs of healthcare, racism, global warming, communicable diseases, animal cruelty and morons who buy fur coats - are going to follow and become magically solved.

That's obviously not the case.

I can't help thinking that once the middle classes are OK again, they'll go back to being the complacent, selfish assholes that people are - and I include myself in that assumption. I'm fortunate in that being an alcoholic, neurotic mad person, if I lapse even for a second, my life collapses around me. It's pretty exhausting, always policing yourself and paying for minute lapses with minor tragedy and chaos. But in a sense it's pretty lucky, because it means I have to stay on the ball all the time. I don't get to be too complacent. Even on a good day I'm highly aware that I'm a deeply unpleasant person, which...

I forgot the point.

But now - now we're in a situation now where we're teetering on change, on some kind of revolution, and we can't be complacent, we have to be the best, we have to keep learning and evolving, and we have to resolve not to look back, because there was no golden era pre-crash, pre-banks, pre-Bush, pre-Obama, pre-Wall Street. Which means we still have the opportunity to make it happen.

This could be that opportunity, if it's played right.

That's pretty fucking cool.

I still refuse to wear hemp and bang bongos though.

Post Burning Man (Not Decompression)

2011-09-17T07:31:00.016-04:00

I'm still struggling to write about Burning Man. It's probably the most difficult event I've ever tried to put into words. I have such an unusual job: turning real life into unearthly prose, or recreating the frailty and foibles of the human condition in a screenplay. And I'm schtumped by eight days in the desert which were incredible: both grounded in the suffering of what it is to be human, and somehow transcendent of it.

When I write screenplays, producers are always combing through the script, asking whether every action or word attributed to a character is truthful. It annoys me because we never lose the ability for change in life. A person never loses the potential to surprize themselves. I learned to detach and to walk away in Burning Man. I learned to acknowledge a fiery, burning emotion, without feeding it and creating drama. I learned that sometimes, for whatever reason, people put expectations upon you that are driven primarily by their own selfish needs (we're all selfish, it's just a part of being human) - and that you don't have to live up to these expectations if it's not true for you, if it's going to make you unhappy. You don't need to make a big deal about it. You simply set down your boundaries and move on, ignoring their reaction because you're confident you've dealt with the situation wisely and kindly.

The first expectation a friend put upon me was inviting herself along to Burning Man. I had not invited this friend, nor intimated I would like her to come - in fact, I had talked extensively of how happy I was to experience Burning Man alone, and to plunge into meeting strangers. And then she informed me that she was coming with me. This is a friend who has always been loving, generous and kind, and whom I owe a lot to. I was quite happy for her to go to Burning Man, but I didn't want her to come to Burning Man with me. Had I wanted her to come with me to Burning Man, I would have asked her, so I found her behavior odd, threatening and a little claustrophobic. I wanted to go to Burning Man without anyone "knowing" me, or transposing their image of me from the real world into this completely separate reality. Instead of telling my friend "Please come, but not with me" or maybe setting boundaries for ourselves, I felt anxious and trapped, held hostage by her self-invite. I felt like I owed it to her to swallow my annoyance. I was unable to articulate what I really felt.

In the end, the situation was resolved when my camp said they didn't have any room for one extra person. I don't think my friend quite understands that in the end, the camp made the call (because I was too cowardly to!) and she was welcome to have found her own way there without relying on me or my contacts. However, I still think she feels resentful towards me for "blocking" her Burning Man trip - or for being tacitly unwilling to let her come along on mine, as if I unconsciously manifested a too-full camp (I wonder if I did?!).

This was one of those situations where I knew in my heart that I needed those eight days in the desert to be eight days with Burners, not people from my separate work-reality, not people who brought dramas and issues onto the Playa that I wanted to leave behind for eight short days. I will return to Black Rock City next year, and again, there are very few people I would want in my camp for the same overtly selfish reason. I'm quite happy for my friends and acquaintances to go to Burning Man, but I don't want them to go with me, to camp with me, or to be in any way reliant on me.

This is because like most of us, in the real world, I spend a lot of time doing what other people want, being considerate of others feelings, tailoring my own behavior to suit the demands of others. I'm a nanny of broken people - losers are my specialty ; ) these are great qualities. But I did not want to put others first at Burning Man, to wake up and worry about whether X had fun last night, or feel anxious because Y wanted to spend time alone with me, or feel concerned that Z didn't get on with Y and so I should schedule in them before X.... Fuck that. I wanted to roam alone. I intuitively knew that my Burning Man experience must start off a solitary one, even if that sounded selfish and incomprehensible to those closest to me in my separate default-world reality. And it's not that Burning Man is selfish. Precisely the opposite. Burning Man is the most selfless experience I've had for a long time. It's about community and giving - but if you can't throw yourself into that community, and if you can't gift because someone is holding you back, it impedes your experience, impacts negatively upon your stay on the playa. I needed to not give to one or two people who were leaning on me, using me as a crutch because they didn't feel confident walking alone, so that I could give to many instead. Crutches are great, btw. But if both legs are working, you need to have the courage to leave your crutch at home.

The second person with unreasonable expectations was a man I knew from LA. I had been extremely close to this man for a few weeks - he was another casualty, a bird with a broken wing I picked up and nursed - but I was becoming increasingly alienated from him due to his self-destructive tendencies, and his curious blindness to the needs and wants of those around him. This man suffered from "center of the universe" syndrome. He was a queen of misery, the protagonist in a perpetual, pathetic tragedy. His ego, his pain, his suffering, his victimhood, dominated everything and everyone around him, and prevented him from seeing the hurtful affects of his behavior and words on others. He had a vicious, self-loathing streak I probably tolerated back in LA more than I should.

I wanted him to come to Burning Man initially because he epitomized someone who needed it: he was a man who had literally lost all hope, whose self-hatred was actually palpable. You stand close to this guy, and you feel the hate coming off him in waves. It sucker-punches you, and you instinctively want to take the pain away - and then you realize that just makes it worse. His hate actually feeds off attention, off others' desire to help and to soothe. Acknowledging and pandering to his pain actually enabled him to manifest it even more, and generate more negative attention, in a self-destructive, self-perpetuating cycle.

I thought Burning Man would teach him self-reliance and radical acceptance and community - the most important elements he seemed to lack in his private, selfish, self-constructed hellworld where the population was One. Naively, I thought this man would respect my need and desire to "roam alone", and be generous and undemanding of me, because I had spent so much time in LA treading carefully around his broken feelings. When it became obvious that this wasn't the case, and that Man had expectations I did not and could not fulfill, that Man had either not listened to what I said, or was blithely ignoring it and instead shrieking "bitch!" because I refused to change my plans for him, I had to walk away - from the situation, and eventually, from our friendship and acquaintance.

My experience with him was extremely unpleasant, but it taught me a lot about not reacting. As a fiery, passionate Aries, non-reaction is something I will struggle with for the rest of my life, with varying degrees of success.

And so I am back in London, still reeling from Black Rock City. Your heart and your mind and your soul is cracked wide open in Burning Man, and one of the challenges of reintegrating into regular society is trying to maintain this openness, while adopting the necessary shield you need to move and function in the default world, because the default world doesn't understand or appreciate - perhaps a better thing to say is that it regards with suspicion - what fuels us on the Playa. It takes a lot of time and care to sink back in - and then I was thrust into London 36 hours after getting home.

I feel like I spent the last ten days plastering a big, fake smile on my face, my soul shrieking in pain as I sat through meetings, avoided drunk people dressed in Primark animal costumes at Bestival, striving to maintain some semblance of functionality when all I wanted to do was lock myself away in a cabin, alone with my dog and nature, and slowly slide back into life gently.

Thanks to Jimmy and Sophie for looking after me in Dalston, introducing me to the best kebabs in England and making me laugh and find color in a shockingly gray world, and thanks to Tristan and Thomas for early morning philosophy rants and long talks about love and emotion and polyamory, and what jealousy and possession means. These are huge issues for me post-BM, as I've never dated a man who hasn't 'cheated' or 'strayed' or 'lied to me', and I strive now to comprehend whether this is evidence of my unreasonable expectations, whether I need to think about connecting to people in a different way, whether I want a traditional monogamous relationship, or whether questioning monogamy is actually the result of disappointment and disillusionment and a loss of faith. So many questions. Lots of time. Deliberately choosing solitude and reflection right now feels healthy and appropriate. I'm not in the space for sharing, and that's perfectly OK.

This weekend I'm on deadline for a pilot episode outline. I can't wait to fly back home to California and get out of London. I'm obviously here for a reason, but I'm craving my dog, my yoga, my best mate, and my Angeleno Burners.

I love you Burners. Thank you for opening my eyes on the Playa, Camp Jackpot.

Default World

2011-09-11T18:38:00.001-04:00

Back from Burning Man. Flew to London barely 36 hours after I landed back in LA. The default world will never look the same again. I'm a Burner.

2011-08-03T23:14:00.001-04:00

I live in permanent nostalgia for things I have not yet lost.

Paul's New Book

2011-05-23T05:22:00.004-04:00

Forgot to say, Paul's new book came out. There's an extract in The Guardian here. But you should buy it, 'cause I'm in it. I'm also in his first book. And while we're on this road (ie the subject of me) there's a whole book about me out there knocking around, and this book has me in the special thanks section.

I did have a bit of a barney with Paul when I read what he'd written. Without ruining the book, he recounts an incident when he'd called me from San Francisco to say he needed help stopping drinking. I remember this. It was October 2009. I told him to go to AA. He looked up the Twelve Steps online and balked. But instead of going 'Hmm, it doesn't sound like it's for me', he then proceeds to slag off AA as a quasi-religious cult - without ever going to a meeting.

Now, AA helped me get sober, then I stopped going about a year ago. I check in every so often, but what keeps me sober is simply enjoying life without needing to see it differently other than how it is. I don't - and never did - buy into the Higher Power / God bullshit. I did the Twelve Steps, it was kind of a fun task, bit time consuming, and by step twelve, it was fucking boring. But it didn't matter, because by then not drinking was normal to me. And even though there are a few nutters in AA who'll waffle on about God, you can just ignore them, and take from it what you want, as I did. And AA saves lives. All you need is an open mind. I went in with an open mind, decided the god shit and endless step 4 / 10's weren't for me, so I just quit doing the steps and started living my life instead, ignoring the blatantly wrong myth that members advocate - that "people who don't do the steps are going to relapse" (that's bullshit). So I was a little pissed with Paul's AA bashing. It was a bit immature and petulant and reductive. So I told him.

God, we are gonna have FUN living together!

Class

2011-05-18T07:43:00.006-04:00

In between writing for other people on their projects - ie getting employed to adapt a book into a screenplay, or write an article for a newspaper - I'm working on a bunch of my own stuff right now. One of them is very close to my heart, as it's all about class, politics and unusual friendships.

I'm a 'genuine' product of a meritocracy. My grandfather on my Dad's side was a lorry driver in Liverpool, and my maternal granddad was some engineering factory worker type thing. My mum was a nurse after going to Secondary Modern. My dad, who lived in a two-up, two-down with three sisters and his mum (his father died when he was young - dodgy heart after being gassed aged 14 in the trenches in WW1) - won a scholarship to grammar school, and from there went to Liverpool University to study medicine.

Dad became a doctor and moved to North Wales for a job with his three kids, and when my twin sister and I were born, the family moved from a house which was too small to accommodate seven, to a beautiful, rambling old vicarage in a tiny little village called Cilcain. I grew up straddling two worlds though - because while my Dad's occupation and his decent salary meant we had risen to Middle Class, we were not the same as the other doctors' and dentists' kids, whose parents were born into the class my parents had worked their way into. We had a firm foot in that 'other' space: we were English in Wales, we were northern, we were not rich, we were not privately educated, we were not - and could never be - 'posh'.

As the fourth child, I was the first kid in the family to go to 'proper' university. Actually, my older sister and I went at the same time, when she returned to Liverpool, aged 31, as a mature student to study dentistry. We all had our degrees paid for by the government, and receive maintenance grants for living costs from the county council because we were a large family, and because Dad had retired early due to ill health, as a consequence of which we lost our home. I went from a comp school called Mold Alun to an all girls college in Cambridge.

And I suppose it's then that difference really kicked in.

I loved Cambridge and still do, but what happened to me there and afterwards is complex. People from my background rarely go to Cambridge. If they're comp-school educated, they're probably born southern middle class and went to a good comp in a good area - which is radically different to northern middle class risen from working class. What happened to me in Cambridge was that I became hugely aware that money and family and class were just as important as intelligence, and talent, and skill. I got a chip on my shoulder because I didn't have money and class, but the chip meant I had to swallow a little ball of unfairness all day long. Inequality. Life's fucking unfair. I never played the class card, despite the fact I had a bunch of jobs all through university and during the holidays, which made life quite difficult at times. You're hanging with a bunch of people who do not know what it is to be poor, and yet you don't eat at formal halls because you can't afford it on your college bill, you don't even eat in the college canteen because it's too expensive. You don't buy new clothes and you support your smoking habit by cadging off richer friends. You never go to a May Ball because it's a hundred quid plus a ticket, and even if you got a ticket you couldn't afford a dress and the shoes, you work in a pub three nights a week, and you work in the college kitchens serving your peers as it gives you discounted rent.

But in the eyes of those you left in Mold Alun, you already moved up a class. In the eyes of the people you're hanging out with, you're a clever kid with a funny accent who never has any money and is different. Not bad, not wrong, just different.

I never played the class card because it's not really something I think I should play. I have everything they have, apart from money, a family home in London, and connections. I didn't have the posh private school, but I still went to a good university and got a first. I can get all the rest myself. But trying to get that has sometimes nearly killed me. Being completely self-sufficient has nearly killed me. And I've wept and wept and wept over someone saying something as simple to me as: "Why don't you just eat?" when I've been too poor to even afford a 2 dollar bagel. I've cried over people saying, "Well I don't understand why you had to move to New York. Why did you feel you were entitled to work there just because you had a Cambridge degree?"

Why am I entitled to be a writer, to live in New York and California, to have a dream and to get that dream, when thousands of people aren't? Because I'd turned into a toff?

I never really figured it out in my head, until I started working on my screenplay about class. I hung out with very rich Conservatives and I schmoozed with staunch Socialists, miners, Labour party insiders, and questioned them. I'm not a Socialist and I don't believe in it. But after I spent a day in Parliament with Dennis Skinner last week - a mad, lovely, wonderful man who I admire and have so much affection for - it hit me. Me, trying to clamber and hold on for dear life to my poncey life as a writer, jetting all over the world, losing my car, losing my apartment, never having security, biting hard on pride to borrow money and humiliate myself on a regular basis, suffering from mini-breakdowns every two years as a result - my idea of being left wing, my idea of liberalism, my idea, I suppose, of socialism, is that what 'they' have through birth, I can, should, and will, have - by hard work. We already start off the same: with a mind and a body. Yes, some are disabled, some are stupid, some are clever, some rich. But we come into this world the same way: with nothing. We go out the same way. It never occurred to me how far I'd come until I sat and spoke to Dennis by the Thames in the sun that afternoon, and he said to me, "You went to Cambridge? With your background? You must be clever."

I spoke to my old A-level Politics teacher a little about it, and he talked about the difficulties of working in a comp school like mine - teachers are part social workers, part guidance counsellors. We spoke about the problems of battling to get bright kids into Oxbridge - kids who'd never had the luxuries of Eton, and the infallible, bright, burning confidence instilled in them by money, birth, connections and private school.

Despite the fact I despise both Conservative and Labour policies, when dealing with people like Jonathan Aitken and Dennis Skinner, I don't bring that to the table. They're just people to me. People from radically different sides of the political spectrum that I can talk to as equals because I know, after my time at Cambridge, to pass the port to the left, and ask for a top-up with my distinctly northern vowels.

All the miners I spoke to, including Dennis, said we shared something. We knew what it was to lack a safety net, and to stare into the abyss and know that for us, there's no bottom. That's what New York and California taught me, and I will never forget it. I don't think many people living in Britain can comprehend it these days - certainly none of my peers. It's a strange thing to be able to brag about, but I consider those hard times as a blessing, because I can write about it. I can write about it not just as some well-off Oxbridge Liberal tutting over the Welfare Reform Act and worrying about the 'poor people'. I was that poor person, with nowhere to live, no money for rent, no health insurance, no one to turn to - least of all a government who would put me back on my feet. For five long painful, terrifying years. Punitive and ill-thought out cuts now are being made by people who do not, and cannot comprehend the abyss. But welfare and benefits and education policies before it were designed by people who had no comprehension of this fact either, and didn't know how to make the system one that would let no one go hungry, cold or sick, but help them find a way to be proud, self sufficient and mobile.

I don't share much with the Tories, aside from an Oxbridge education, but I get on well with them, the same as I do my radical Union Miners. I understand when they talk about reducing the deficit, but I don't agree with the way they're doing it. I blame both Labour and Conservative for pricing out university and taking it away from people like me. That process started in 1997 when Labour moved universities to the Department of Business, Trade and Innovation and charged people to go, so they could expand higher education in other areas. It's now been made horrendously worse, but I hold both parties at fault for this.

And ironically, though Jonathan and Dennis would be horrified to hear me say it, I see many similarities between them both.

At the end of the day we're all deeply, beautifully, wonderfully flawed humans. I'm so lucky that I'm part poor, part posh in an age where few will have the opportunities I had. I'm so lucky that a poor kid from a comp school in Wales gets to have dinner in Earl's Court with a Tory one night, and tea with a Socialist in Parliament the next day.

Burning Man

2011-05-12T06:55:00.000-04:00

I'm going to Burning Man!

I have the best job in the whole world.

My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding

2011-05-07T09:31:00.008-04:00

I woke up and went for a walk on the Heath with Roland-the-Dog. Coming back, I happened upon My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding being filmed in the Catholic Church in Kentish Town. Enjoy!

Tantrums!

2011-05-04T12:53:00.002-04:00

Oh how lovely, I made Psychology Today! I do adore Stanton Peele. He's such an old grump. Had a lot of fun writing that experts article and speaking to amazing research scientists in America, like Tom McLellan et al. I'm such a geek.

this email made me cry

2011-05-04T05:29:00.001-04:00

Hi! I hope I'm not being intrusive by writing, but I just wanted to let you know your book really touched me. I started dancing in 2000 at the age of 18 with the attitude I was an outsider, from a nice family, not really one of those girls. I did put myself through college but I never got out....as the industry changed and it became all the more difficult to earn a dollar it went from air dance to lapdance to...more. Same with the drinking....Well, I suppose you know because your words could have been mine...thank you for being so brave as to write them. I recently returned to the Midwest from Vegas to pursue a graduate degree and frankly I wonder what life will be like when I'm done, if my alter ego will ever leave me.....or if its been so long we're now one and the same. It's not really something I can discuss with civilians, and my stripper friends don't have the answers either....but all of us girls who've been there, we thank you for puttting your story out there. In some way, it makes me feel a lot less broken

Busy

2011-05-03T18:27:00.007-04:00

Flipping between an article on India, an article about PSA's and a teen comedy script. Last week I did four articles at top speed. I'm about the most anti-social creature in the world right now, but I'm loving being busy and solvent.

Did I mention I'm in England? I even missed the Royal Wedding as I was on deadline for The Fix. I'm in Wales at the moment, London for the next three weeks, then Scotland to research the next screenplay, then Cambridge, then Channel 4 again, then LA mid-June. And possibly NY in the summer. I'm not sure why. I have a hankering for it. I can't get another car in LA until my credit score picks up, which'll take a few more months of diligent non-using of my 24% APR ChaseRape card. So maybe NY. Fire Island. Culture. Decent bagels. Shitty coffee. Too hot summers. Sleazy Investment Bankers in bars. MMMMmmm....

BTW, I'm sure you're all going to mock me for being so behind, but - I just found out about the new Hitler on the blocgk. I've been out of the blog loop so long that I'm hopelessly outdated on this one, but read Pioneer Woman. Makes this paltry effort look very 1990's. I love her extremely professional and expensive site because she's - well - she's just nice. She's just a really nice woman with a nice family and a hot husband and a beautiful lifestyle. She's the American Dream personified. I bet she was a hotty cheerleader in High School but spoke really nicely to the spastic who wore a wrestling helmet because of severe epilepsy, so even the lost, the hated and the forlorn loved her. I bet - despite being Valedictorian and Homecoming Queen - she was universally liked by everyone, and I bet she's never suffered from numerous mental disorders, depression, extreme skinniness or alcoholism. Sigh. I bet Pioneer Woman doesn't get credit card debt, her car repossessed and the Marlboro Man leching over nymphettes on skype. Even cynical old me - I want to be her. I want to go shooting on a Sunday afternoon with my conservative white friends and my Basset Hound. I want to get back to the ranch, home school my perfectly behaved kids that evolution is wrong, and then settle down to watch America's Next Top Model while the meatloaf cooks, before casually helping my mare give birth to a dainty foal. No, I do. I'm not being sarcastic. I'm actually pissed I like writing about other people's lives more than my own, otherwise maybe I'd be heading for world domination, four children, a ranch and the adoration of middle-America.

Happily for everyone, that's not the case, and my peculiar brand of poisonous bile is reserved for you few straggling readers, rather than the Food Network. Ree gives you 'Knock You Naked Brownies'. My readers get - Ramen Noodles and Gatorade! The perfect post-stripping snack!

Her recipes are absolutely amazing though. As is her life. I do believe that some people have great lives, and she's one of them. I always hated those HAPPY blogs. Beneath those bleached, glaring HAPPY veneer-laden smiles, were the eyes of mad women. But I believe Ree's happiness. I believe her life. I want it. Bitch.

I'm actually trying to find a super-cheap but amazing web designer who will help me renovate this rickety blog and make it look a bit prettier. If any of you have recommendations email me - newyorkmimi@gmail.com. Don't email me if I don't like you, as I can guarantee that will make me like you less. You'd be surprised how often I need that disclaimer.

OK, it's 11.30pm and I'm getting phonecalls from LA. I love how no one in LA ever seems to care about the time difference. It's England! They work for us! They'll pick up the phone!

Rich in New York

2011-04-26T07:43:00.001-04:00

I got paid! WOOHOO! It only took them six weeks. Actually, they were meant to make this payment in January, but the contract got held up, and blah blah blah... so it was only four months late, or six weeks, depending on how you look at it.

New York was fantastic. I have to put that as things change so fast in my head, and I forget no one else knows. I spoke to someone yesterday who asked me if I was OK in NY. Was it really bad? Huh? Oh, my last post! People still keep up with me on this thing! I forget other people read it! Maybe I should put some effort into writing my blog instead of keeping it all for screenplays and journo stuff!

I was working on a piece for The Fix so the first thing I did, after crashing out all Wednesday morning from the red-eye, was wander down to Brooklyn to meet Joe Schrank and see The Loft. If you're rich and you're an addict and want to get sober, go to The Loft. If you're poor and you're an addict, you get some shit community center, styrofoam cup of coffee and an asshole with man boobs preaching the Big Book at you. Williamsburg has changed so much. I lived off Bedford, near Marcy Avenue, in the Hasidic neighborhood in 2005. Now - where are all the Jews?! Where are the Hispanics? It's just white hipsters, fancy restaurants, and clothing stores. I mean, I love it. But it's like the East Village or SoHo and the rents are ridiculous now. And I miss the Jews. Thankfully The Bagel Store still sells toasted French-Toast bagels with cream cheese ("You have eyes like a wolf" the bagel man tells me), the Sally Army is still there, and Marcy Avenue remains foul and untouched, still selling single cigarettes for 50 cents. Which reminds me, I am a month into quitting cigarettes and loving optimum yoga health again.

My four days in New York was taken up with paying off two credit cards, an outstanding plumbers bill, the major works charge on my flat in London and a variety of other enormous charges levied upon me by homeowning. Fun! I briefly considered opening a savings account for the paltry amount of ages left, rejected this idea, then wandered over to Mud for coffee, went shopping around the East Village afterwards, ate at Lucien's, hung out with gay friend and mooched around the SoHo and the West Village. I paid a pilgrimage to the studio where I did my first ever yoga teacher training, and discovered my favorite Brazilian cafe, right by my old apartment on Houston and Mott, is now closed. I rediscovered another one when drinking submarinos with my favorite travel writer and the guy who inadvertently got my ass to New York all those years ago - by making me into his intern!

It was the first time, since I've been back sober, that I felt at home in New York again. Before I guess I was haunted by something, the ghost of Mimi, something. But coming back - sober, sentient, happy, money in my pocket, four journalism articles and one screenplay commission lined up - I felt good. I think at some point I'll be back in New York for a six month - year stint again. Venice and New York have become my heartlands. I need both to feel whole.

I'm now in London, staying with the amazing Johanna, whose kindness and tolerance knows no bounds. I spent Easter Sunday eating roast lamb in the sun and walking around Kew gardens with her family, yesterday stuck at the computer for 14 glorious hours of researching an article and interviewing a bunch of amazing scientists - and about 10pm, I got a call from an agent called Bob Bookman at CAA.

And it was then that I knew everything was going to be OK.

Broke in New York

2011-04-18T13:54:00.003-04:00

How come every time I go to New York I'm waiting for a payment?! This will be the third trip in a year when I've arrived totally broke. I thought a payment from March was going to arrive and compensate for the huge sums I spent on evicting evil tenant. Guess what? The money's still not been paid out!

Being freelance really sucks. Last time I got paid was January. Why are there no penalties for people who don't pay writers within a week of signing contracts? Screw thirty days. A person can die of hunger in that time. I just hope the money arrives by Sunday as I'm meant to be flying into London and at this rate I'll be begging in Heathrow, unable to leave, by Easter Sunday....

Any tips on how to enjoy four days in New York with only fifteen bucks?!

New IRS Program

2011-04-12T20:13:00.005-04:00

This is also genius. Besty and I drove home from West Hollywood the other night having an increasingly paranoid, conspiracy theorist convo about how the world is controlled by corporations. And then we realized this conclusion was no longer the realm of will o' the wisps and nutters driving cabs obsessed with magic numbers - it was public knowledge. Ouch. I'm glad I spent three years not earning enough to pay tax! Maybe I should move to Monaco with Lisa Vanderpump et al.

Hey!

2011-04-12T19:05:00.001-04:00

Remember when teachers, public employees, Planned Parenthood, NPR and PBS crashed the stock market, wiped out half of our 401Ks, took trillions in TARP money, spilled oil in the Gulf of Mexico, gave themselves billions in bonuses, and paid no taxes? Yeah, me neither.

LANDLORDS BEWARE: Simon Longo - Worst Tenant in Britain

2011-04-12T15:57:00.006-04:00

Let's imagine you are renting an apartment. You receive TWO MONTHS NOTICE from your landlord to vacate. You ignore it. Only a few days before your lease ends, you tell your landlord you have no intention of leaving.

You seem surprised when your landlord initiates court proceedings against you, even though you've been told this will happen if you break the lease and ignore the Section 21 eviction notice. You argue when you're told you will be held liable for the court costs - it's not fair - even though you've been told that your actions will have this result.

You demand your full deposit back, even though you still haven't left the flat, you've barred your landlord from entering the property, and you've made clear that you don't consider contracts legally binding. Not only do you demand your full deposit back before you've left, when the court sends you a nice email informing you to bring your good self along to a Repossession Notice, you tell the landlord that actually, you will leave on April 13th (two weeks before the court date) but only if you receive 400 pounds, IN CASH, before you've vacated the flat, and before it's been inspected!!

Tomorrow the worst tenant in the world is meant to be leaving my property. I have refused to give him any money, because I don't think it's right to reward such behavior and my solicitor and the government deposit people have told me not to give him anything until he's out and the locks are changed - plus I simply don't have any money left. Having spent a grand on solicitors and court fees and argued long and hard with Camden Housing Office, having suffered twelve months of abuse, sexual harassment and intimidation from this nasty little man, I don't expect him to leave easily. I'm 6,000 miles away and I still feel like it's not far enough. I've warned my lovely estate agents, Olivers, to have the police on speed dial as we have no idea what he's going to do next. He's already tried to get money out of my retired GP father!

Supposedly unemployed Simon Longo has a huge variety of websites online which detail his occupation as a freelance sound artist. This is a man who claims 866.67 pounds a month in Housing Benefit for a flat he occupies only six months a year (the other six he's "caring for a disable relative in Italy"). This is a man who has threatened me with legal action because I asked him to keep the boiler ticking over to prevent corrosion while he takes another six week holiday. A man who forbade me from entering my own flat. A man who asked me on a date and got so offended I said no he told me I couldn't enter my property in his absence in case I 'stole' his 'extremely expensive sound equipment'. This man, thirty-something, able-bodied, university-educated, having claimed benefits for well over a year, living alone, his only pre-school aged son in Italy with his mother, having had sixty days to find alternative accommodation, chose instead to stay in my flat for as long as he wished.

This man today, 24 hours before he is meant to leave, having had Camden, his solicitor, my estate agent, myself and my father explain to him that his deposit cannot be refunded until the flat is vacated, inspected and the locks changed - tried his luck, and went on The Deposit Protection Scheme website to try and get his FULL deposit back. Despite the fact he's been made aware MULTIPLE TIMES he's now liable for my court costs, the cleaning fees, whatever other damage he's caused and the cost of having the locks changed on the flat.

Landlords, BEWARE THIS MAN. Simon Longo must be one of the worst tenants in Britain. He seems like a nice, charming, down-on-his-luck musician, but as this experience has taught me, he's a total chancer who seems to think he's entitled to everything for free. DO NOT LET HIM IN YOUR PROPERTY. Yes, he - oh, I mean, Camden council - will pay his rent on time every month, but you will never be able to get rid of him without a costly legal battle.

Anyone in the UK have advice on restraining orders to make sure pests don't come near you?

Funny

2011-04-11T22:05:00.005-04:00

I used to be Lisa Vanderpump's Personal Chef in Fontvieille, Monaco when I was a wee thing of 23 working on Rich People's Private Yachts. Needless to say, those were the days when her adopted kid Max didn't resemble Lurch, and she had no immobile fluffy dogs. She did, however, harbor an obsession with pink, lilac, polar bears, carb-free fare and possess an extraordinary pillow collection.

Oh those were the happy, happy days of providing cheap, menial labor to the tax-free Mega-Rich. Lisa was an alright boss. It's funny how someone with an undeniably good heart - adopting a foster kid takes guts and love - didn't seem to see her staff as well, people. I doubt the lady even knew my name in three months of working for her and having daily arguments about why, precisely, it was impossible to make a creme brulee carb-free.

Scary Politics

2011-04-09T23:56:00.004-04:00

There's some scary things afoot in US and UK politics right now. I'm glad they've reached a deal of sorts which apparently won't touch Planned Parenthood, but the implications of this budget agreement are tremendous and scary. The Tea Party is like the Republican's darling kid, who turned out just as they planned - and eventually turns around and stabs its proud parent, just as they start to realize they've raised a monster.

It's funny to be over here completely depressed about the cuts in federal funding, and then look at England who need a far less bureaucratic, money-wasting public sector but lack the right kind of direction to achieve that. It makes me so mad that the US, this wonderful country I've called home for six years - is so fucked up politically and socially, and that England have the essentials exactly right: great holidays (six weeks a year), unemployment and other benefits, decent standard of schools, and of course, the amazing NHS - but don't know how to maintain it.

Brits seem to take all this wonderful stuff for granted - because otherwise why would they have supported massively over-expanded higher education which has led to useless degrees and given the Tories the perfect excuse to raise fees on universities? (And who started charging for Higher education? The Labour party in 1997 - fucking hypocrites).

Why would the left be up in arms about the NHS being used for non-essentials: cosmetic surgery, multiple IVF treatments for, until very recently, women over the age of forty, even - and shoot me down and call me a Republican - gender reassignment surgery? Excuse me?

I'm a Liberal who thinks everyone should have free health care but if you want a nose job, a boob reduction, a sex change, and yes, even a baby and life has sadly deemed you one of the unfortunate few who can't bear children naturally - suck it up, pay for it yourself, and feel grateful that the doctors and nurses who cure your cancer and provide you with pre and post-natal care for nothing (min. of ten grand in the US, even with insurance) are well rested, well paid and have no gripes.

Until you've lived in a country like the US without health insurance, where the uninsured buy antibiotics on the black market and live in fear of even minor ailments, you are incapable of realizing how important it is to preserve the integrity of an institution like the NHS. To do that, you need to pay its staff well and make sure it's used for the good of the nation's health.

Ironically, I found out you can't receive sessions with a shrink or a chiropractor on the NHS - I don't see anyone complaining about this, but for someone like me, both are pretty damn essential to my mental and physical health as a nutter with scoliosis. Guess I'll have to suck it up and find the money. So will the couple who need IVF, the man who wants to be a woman, the girl with the big nose. Fortunately, the dad of three with Prostate Cancer will be OK, as will the woman with Cystic Fibrosis, the kid with Leukemia, and the old lady with severe Bronchitis. The point being - calm down Britain. I hate the Tories but they're not getting rid of your NHS. No one's stupid enough to get rid of your NHS, I guarantee it. Even Thatcher wouldn't have done it. So shut your whining, and until they cut doctors, nurses, GP's and cancer wards, I'd concentrate on the terrible truth that corporations are not being taxed enough and the mega-rich continue to receive tax breaks. That there is absolutely mindbogglingly shit. It's awful. It makes me want to cry. And Britain - be grateful your government doesn't come to a standstill over federal funding for Planned Parenthood - an institution which doesn't actually use federal funding to 'fund' abortion, as the right wing claim, but provides uninsured and insured women and men with essential health care and contraceptive advice for as much or as little as you can afford.

I wish America was more like Britain and its welfare state. I wish America had six weeks holiday a year, health care for all, cheaper-if-not-free higher education, more jobs, better schools and I wish they taxed corporations and the mega-rich, the same way they tax regular people. And I wish Britain would learn that they have the foundation in place, but it's getting tired and old. If the last thirty years of government had cared for it a bit better, instead of coming up with stupid expensive ideas which cost money and don't create jobs or nourish the NHS or education, they wouldn't have given the goddamn ConDems exactly the excuse they were waiting for to sweep in with their machete to cut off a vital limb.

It's appalling that higher education now costs so much money. This, undoubtedly, will lead to universities becoming more and more elite. But I think it's a good thing that kids no longer receive the EMA. I mean - fuck off! I had to work in bloody Tesco's through Sixth Form! Are we really disillusioned enough to think that everyone claiming that money would otherwise be condemned to dropping out of school, a life of low paid menial work ahead of them, their wings cruelly clipped just as they spread them, ready to fly away from the council estate and its undereducated vagrants? For fuck's sake. If you want it bad, you'll find a way - like working in a restaurant or bar, like I did, and millions of others did.

Life is hard, and the struggle to get what you want is just as much the point as the getting. If you want something, you work for it, regardless of background or parental income. This is not Victorian England, where children are taken out of school to earn a living for alcoholic, slovenly jobless parents. Doubtless these few evil people do exist - and they'll be claiming a huge amount of benefits already, according to The Daily Mail, an argument I'd like to refute but Simon Longo has turned me into a hater on that matter - but not to the extent that Britain would have us believe. Wouldn't it have been better to have spent EMA money on training nurses, or on teachers and primary schools, on maybe ensuring universities don't have to charge fees to students? If Britain now turns into America, with its overpriced college system, it will be an absolute fucking travesty.

It seems so ridiculously obvious to state that America and Britain should be taxing the big companies and the mega-rich. I hesitate to say merely 'the rich' as we seem to think of posh people who inherited Daddy's money as the problem, and they're not. Difference and disparity and unfairness exist, Liberals. It sucks that you and I have no savings and will never own a Chanel bag and will spend thirty years paying off a mortgage on a shit property. But hating those who own outright their three storey townhouse and have a walk-in closet full of Birkins and party at Mahiki's and vacation in Mustique - this isn't the issue. They may have a nicer life than us. Let it go. Be happy for them. We need them on our side. Believe me, the rich - the millionaires - are small fry compared to the mega rich - the billionaires. It's the mega rich and the big corporations paying minimal or zero tax while federal funding is cut in the US, and libraries are shut in the UK, which makes me so damn sad.

BTW, just as a side note - let's remember who deregulated the banks and paved the way for the last few painful years. The Democrats in the US and the Labour party in the UK. You guys suck. You're inept, untogether, fiscally irresponsible, weak and directly responsible for the world financial mess, the Tea Party in the US and the ConDems in the UK.

Get it together you fucking weaklings.

I'm going to watch Godzilla now.

A Night Out With Daisy '06

2011-04-09T22:25:00.005-04:00

Daisy found a picture from this night! Funny. RIP Kiki the dog. You were adorable even if you didn't move much.

Las Vegas, NV

2011-04-09T01:09:00.004-04:00

We drove North on the 15, through Diamond Bar, Barstow and Baker, stopped off for In-N-Out, drove some more, and then the light started to go down on the desert and all you could see ahead was the luminous glow of Primm in the evening sky. Fake Vegas, I always think of it. You see the lights and think you're nearly there but you still have a ways to go. We arrived on the Strip at around 9pm, and it was wintery and empty. Even though the lights still sparkled they lacked luster and sheen, instead seemed tired, faded, on the point of extinction. It felt like arriving to the party a week too late and finding only the corpse of other people's fun, the whisper of laughter, a sad sigh.

The same could be said of The Sahara. The elevator, stripped of advertisements, stinking of pee and stale cigarette smoke, creaked and whined uneasily when it took us up to check in. It wasn't a good sign. This is my mystery location of glamor and beauty. Fucking Vegas. Not only that, a dying hotel, only a couple weeks to go before it gets closed down forever. My feelings of gratitude towards Paul for rescuing me from the stress of evil Italian tenant hell rapidly gave way to simmering resentment. Then I saw the fat people sitting at the slot machines. This was fat that six years in the US had not prepared me for. This was fat whose mean value was probably more than a fucking house. This was fat that threatened to seep across the torn, frayed, stained, smelly carpet, crawl under my skin and infect me too. This was fat covered in gray skin smoking forty a day and chugging another beer as it wasted your life savings on another lot of plastic tokens for Roulette.

Depressing as all hell. I felt sure our friendship could not survive. We'd been happy that day, driving in the sun, but now all I could think was, "When can I fucking leave?"

We wandered around the Luxor, the Mandalay and Excalibur, looking for food. It was eleven, but everywhere was shut. The only tourists left were fat white men in shorts holding bongs of fluorescent cocktails, and Mexican families pushing strollers full of mewling, sticky children who seemed distressed. I thought we'd hit a low when we went into the Hard Rock Cafe for dinner: we hit a new one when they turned us away and suggested Denny's.

In Denny's. "We have a big, big problem," says the Orca Whale behind me, and her three Obsese sisters nod their head and chins in agreement. "We still don't have the Deep-Fried Mozzarella sticks on the table". Oh tragedy! I changed my order from Pie to Grilled Chicken Salad (the half portion) and wondered whether In-N-Out was the dizzy descent to an ass like a Fire Engine. We went back to The Sahara about midnight, and played a listless game of Roulette. I won 75 bucks on the first two tries, and felt so depressed I thought of giving it away to charity. Fortunately I pulled myself together, pocketed it, and slept long and deep, dreamt about smiling corndogs leering at me from the side of the freeway.

Paul wanted breakfast at Hooters because he'd never been there before. Our server was Ashley. She wrote this down on a paper napkin, with a heart, in case we forgot. Paul forgot. Ashley looked like she'd rolled out of bed with a hangover and a meth-pipe, wiped the cum from between her legs, ignored the supine, nameless dude sweating fumes under her duvet, and headed to work without looking in the mirror. I admired her chirpiness in the face of disaster (her own), but Hooters wings for breakfast made me want to puke so we left and headed over to Circus Circus.

Circus Circus was busy. From nowhere, families had sprung up, grimly determined to hunt down fun, viciously harpoon it lest it might wriggle out of their grasp and head for Hollywood. Paul lined up for an hour to check in, and I slept on the floor, surrounded by large Hispanic families, until he woke me up, forced me reluctantly into the fairground section. And there... We had fun!

Circus Circus is the kind of place which makes me cringe and want to hate-screw a rich white man in the Bellagio. And then I saw hook-a-duck, and I knew that I too, could win the stuffed hamburger, and I felt complete. Everyone in Circus Circus was smiling. Everyone in the Sahara looked like they'd been exhumed earlier that day. That whole 'family entertainment' bullshit does tend to translate in my head as obese middle-Americans with man-tits straining to roam free from their 'I love boobs' t-shirts, sporting beer breath and a semi as they stroll down to Crazy Horse after a night with Barry Manilow. And yeah, that's part of Vegas, and I'd be lying if I said it didn't disgust me, because I'm a liberal snob. But then there's the absolute childlike wonder that plastic crap, a few bright lights and going upside down can create. And that's Circus Circus. I think I'd kind of forgotten the consummate professionalism of Vegas because I was so distracted by watching the Sahara rot and die in front of us. And going to see Absinthe afterwards was perfect.

Absinthe was like The Box - except with fat white people in the audience, as opposed to skinny, trendy, name-dropping New Yorkers. One Spiegel Tent, several burlesque dancers, breathtakingly weird acrobatic acts, two crazy comedians MC-ing everything, tightrope walkers, a chick in a balloon, and a bar throughout it all for regular Diet-Coke top-ups.

We left in a happy daze, and went to a bar in Caesar's Palace to meet my old stripper friends Daisy and G-Cup and record some video for Paul's column.

For those of you who were wondering, here's my pre and post stripping pics. It was hilarious and fun meeting Daisy and G-Cup after so long away from clubs. I'm still a mani-pedi, bikini-wax, make-up girl, but tend to slob out in yoga clothes and Bare Minerals these days. No more fake blond hair, spangly g-strings and pancake slap for me. Plus the short hair was a definite post-strip indulgence for me - I'm sure there are guys out there who dig it, but they never walked into any stripclub I ever worked at.

Paul and I crawled back to Circus Circus that evening at midnight and stayed up until 2am, eating Krispy-Kremes and drinking coffee, passing the laptop back and forth to write the HuffPo piece. I think the definition of happiness is caffeine, sugar and talking to a fellow writer deep into the night in a hotel in some strange city. I guess, even with only 75 bucks from a roulette win to your name, you can be happy anywhere. I love Vegas.

Vegas

2011-04-07T04:23:00.002-04:00

I'm over here at the moment. A sandy start in the dying Sahara, was made up for by Circus Circus, which is loadsa fun. More soon.

True Story

2011-04-03T12:26:00.008-04:00

Last night - SoHo House West Hollywood for a birthday party. Virgin Margaritas laced with Chantix. Dyke boots and slinky plastic trousers. I'm the only size zero in the room and resemble a fourteen year old anorexic going through a gender identity crisis. Get talking to Croatian lead actor in Brangelina's directorial debut. We're walking down a corridor when he grabs me, pulls me by the hand into the photo booth, sits there, looking at me awkwardly, puppy-like. Then he jumps me, tongue a-flailing. I scream, but you said you're married! and Zach Galfianakis pops his head round the corner, grins, and says; "This sounds fun! Can I join in?".

I go back to the party and sit listening to A tell me about how last night she met Tom Cruise with her Mad Man boyfriend, and my boyfriend just gets cooler by the minute! Tom Cruise! (yawn) and Ella and I slink off to sneer, and talk about how growing up in a family of actors (her not me) and living next to Robert Downey Jr. and having a different movie set film on your street every other day means you're immune to celebrity and completely unimpressed by it. And then Zach G walks in the room, waves at me, and we both swoon OH MY GOD IT'S THE GUY FROM THE HANGOVER!

Oh.

Stress-stress-stress

2011-04-01T14:14:00.005-04:00

Exhausting. Evil tenant's rent was paid for the month of April by the DSS. So he's not in rent arrears, but he is in breach of lease and I filed the repossession notice and got a court date. This obviously scared evil tenant as he agreed to leave on April 13th - and then demanded I pay him his DSS rent back.

Firstly, he owes me nothing. I lost a tenant because of this guy, they lost a place to live, and I'm fronting huge court costs and solicitor's fees because of his refusal to leave on March 28th.

Secondly, I don't have his bloody rent as it automatically goes out my account to cover the mortgage. Think I have spare cash lounging in my account Simon Longo? Think again cockface. I have about ten dollars until my next freelance paycheck because of you, and you ain't getting your hands on my coffee money! What next? Sell my eggs to fund your lifestyle?

Thirdly, if any rent were owed back - which it's doubtful it is because of the massive costs incurred by this idiot - it would be owed back to the DSS directly, NOT Simon Longo. I've told him this, my solicitor has told him this, Oliver's Estate Agent has told him this - he says we're trying to defraud him. The guy with a second home in Italy who claims Housing Benefits in the UK claims I am trying to defraud HIM!!

And the one person who needs to tell him all this, the one person nasty little Italian tenant might listen to - Rhonda Clarke at the Housing Office - has gone on vacation. And for some reason, despite the fact I spoke to her replacement multiple times this week on the phone and have emailed his (government appointed) solicitor and they all confirmed that my solicitor was correct - I should not pay any money to Simon Longo - they won't put it down in writing, nor tell him direct, and shut the aggressive little fuck up.

The guy is sending me increasingly erratic and volatile emails saying he wants money transferred else he won't move out. That's blackmail folks.

I'm so tired of this whole bullshit shenanigans, I'm literally at the point of calling the mortgage company and saying "Here, take my crappy flat. You deal with this prick."

In the last twelve months I have spent about 8k GBP on this flat: major works charges, service charges, estate agents fees, solicitor's fees, and now covering this twat's costs as the DSS money no longer covers the mortgage. I just don't think it's worth pouring money into a property anymore. I'd rather never own anything ever again. There's such a huge emphasis on owning property in the UK - not so much the US. In the UK it's a coming of age thing, something everyone must do, quickly-quickly-quickly. Get on the property ladder! Validate yourself as an adult! A mortgage means you've made it! Do it! Standard Variable or Fixed Rate? Mummy and Daddy fork out for the deposit and the furnishings, everyone's happy.

And then you're stuck there, paying huge, extortionate amounts of cash to nameless companies for a place you don't even want that much, but just thought you should get, because it's what you do, in the UK.

Fuck that shit. There's so many ridiculous cultural caveats that come with being British. This is one of them. Why not have a good life and avoid debt and stop feeding your money to your corrupt local council and the banks? My local government, Camden, has fleeced its leaseholding residents of thousands of pounds of cash this year. And for what? Does Camden look clean, feel safe, have great amenities, provide us with 24 hour concierge service, someone who picks up the garbage on time, maintenance in every building? Do we even have great schools in Camden?

I don't fucking think so.

What does eight grand get you in Camden? It gets you a local council who send you letters every week for two years even when you tell them time and time again - and send the bank statements to prove it - that you can't pay them the thousands they want off you, on top of your mortgage and council tax and service charge (and thank god I don't pay income tax in the UK) to 'improve the area'.

It gets you a local council who can give Simon Longo a free solicitor, free advice and his rent paid for 12 months, but can't do the same for you - because as a landlord, even one who's trying to sell property because you can't afford it - you're classified as the person who pays for the person who doesn't want to pay.

I was talking to friends over breakfast this morning. They own property in Westminster (No, they're not Tories). Their service charge for a one-bed which is smaller than mine, better located, more facilities and security, on the fifth floor of an ugly building (just like my flat!) is 30% less than mine. Would I rather live in Westminster than Camden? Hell, yes. And what the hell does that say about the UK and the fuck up going on over there? That a Liberal, left-wing voting, Obama-campaigning flake, suddenly finds that no party says what you believe, or acts on principles you recognize, or puts into affect policies you admire? No party embodies the principles you believe in. On the one hand, Labour spends a ridiculous amount of money expanding the public sector on useless civil service jobs which are wasting taxpayers' money and decreasing the amount of money going towards the core of the public sector - doctors, nurses, teachers. Then you have this sodding coalition government making necessary cuts - and yeah, they are necessary. But they're making them in the wrong areas. Completely the wrong areas. British politics is like watching the final of the World Cup - between two teams you totally hate. That fucking sucks.

I'd like to say it's been a ridiculous year, but it's been a ridiculous decade. Drama! My friends took me out for dinner at Via Veneto's last night to cheer me up with a birthday thing. It was wonderful and awesome and kind and fabulous. But I'd quite like to take them out for a change, pick up the tab for other people, be the person with a sofa to give out to the refugees. The refugees who are not, of course, the Simon Longos of this world.

VYou

2011-03-28T22:58:00.001-04:00

Ask me questions on VYou!

Press Fix

2011-03-28T17:17:00.004-04:00

Some great press for The Fix.

Salon

The New York Times

Womens Wear Daily

New York Magazine

New York Observer

Maer, Anna and Joe, who founded the site, are totally awesome and I love writing for them. It's my birthday today. I got to quit smoking, The Fix launched, and I got a squatting tenant as an added bonus!

The Fix is up

2011-03-28T15:28:00.002-04:00

I keep swooning like they did in the days of Scarlett O'Hara. It sounds romantic, but actually it's quite inconvenient to deal with stress by zonking out in a yoga class.

Anyhow, The Fix is up. Check out two of my articles here and here. And tweet the fuck out of this site. I think it's a brilliant idea.

Dear Camden Council

2011-03-27T20:43:00.001-04:00

Dear Ms Clarke and Mr Zoffman,

I have spoken to the Deposit Protection Scheme and taken a solicitor's advice: they have instructed me that any moneys must be agreed upon in the courts. Tomorrow Mr Longo's tenancy is over and a notice to repossess will be sent. Demands for money from me or my father made by Mr Longo in order to make good his promise to leave my property, I consider blackmail and harassment. Blackmail, I might remind you all, constitutes a criminal offense, and is dealt with as such in a court of law.

Rhonda, please instruct your client to stop demanding money from me or my father as an agreement to leave the flat. It is offensive, distressing and illegal, and should my father (who has severe heart problems) or I suffer any further, I will consider Camden council personally responsible.

I am extremely sad, pained and distressed that both my retired father and I have had to put up with this shockingly unpleasant behavior and that we have to resort to litigation to impress upon Mr Longo the legally binding nature of his tenancy agreement, and the financial, emotional, physical and legal repercussions of his refusal to leave my property.

I would suggest you now ask Mr Longo to leave my property as soon as possible and rest assured all monies will be dealt with legally, by the courts. I am grateful, Rhonda, that you have managed to stop Mr Longo harassing me - until today, when he sent me a threat of legal action and a particularly unpleasant email to my father who is suffering greatly from the unpleasant nature and harassing tone of Mr Longo's communications. Now I must ask that you please stop Mr Longo harassing my father as well as myself. The only communication I wish from Mr Longo is a guaranteed agreement to leave, and rest assured all monies will be dealt with by the solicitors provided by the Government Deposit Scheme to avoid unreasonable demands and threats from Mr Longo.

I have heard that Mr Longo has promised to vacate the property by April 13th. I assume this promise still stands, but unfortunately as we are all aware, a promise from Mr Longo does not constitute a reality, and we will issue the notice to repossess and hope that he leaves without causing any further damage to this family's wellbeing.

Please advise your client more wisely Ms. Clarke and Mr Zoffman. In the past week I have received numerous emails which constitute harassment. I personally, am on the verge of a breakdown, and am being looked after by friends in the US because the stress of this situation, not to mention the financial implications. This has all made it impossible for me to move into the room I had intended to rent in London, rendering me homeless and unable to work. This whole situation has been, perhaps, one of the worst of my entire 32 years on this planet and I find it incomprehensible that a tenant whom I asked to leave my property after his lease had ended - a tenant whom I asked to leave because of sexual harassment, noise, consistent unpleasantness, threats to break the lease, then threats to overstay past the tenancy agreement, a man I asked to leave with good grace because I was worried about benefit fraud being committed on my property - is now being allowed to get away with trying to demand money from my sick GP father, and from a woman who rented her home out to him in good faith, through the right channels, with trust and kindness, because she couldn't pay the mortgage - me.

Please deal with this situation immediately, and I would sincerely appreciate an apology to my father that he has had to deal with threats and unpleasantness from Mr Longo.

The 28th March is my birthday. The best gift I could wish for is this man leave my home because he is scaring me, and I believe the stress of his demands are compounding my father's ill health. I am not asking Mr Longo to leave because I wish him homeless, I wish him ill - I wish him none of this. I believe him a perfectly capable young man who is intelligent and able-bodied enough to find a home he can pay for through his freelance work as a sound artist. I have no prejudice against DSS tenants in the slightest, although my experience with Mr Longo has, unfortunately, proven one that has made me question whether I would ever have a DSS tenant in my flat again, and this saddens me and is against every principle I have believed in my entire life.

I'm asking Mr Longo to leave because he frightens me, and his refusal to leave, his demands for money, are yet another indication of his intent to harass and bully me. This, in itself, is terrifying. Please do everything in your power to get my home back before it kills my father and sends me into the Psych Ward.

Update

2011-03-27T19:55:00.002-04:00

My illegal tenant is now demanding money from my father and I to leave my premises!!! Is Camden council behind this? I notice he cc-ed Rhonda Clarke in. Can't believe they're now endorsing blackmail. Cunts.

And so to....

2011-03-26T03:20:00.009-04:00

When you want something done quickly and you're facing bureaucratic pen-pushing morons, write about people, be ruthlessly indiscreet, and drop the journo card. Thanks to this blog, a notice to repossess and a bunch of journo friends calling Camden, it looks like evil tenant may be on the move. It'll have cost me a lot of money I don't have, but I'm just grateful he'll be gone. What do normal people do when they can't get a tabloid to ask difficult questions in times of need? It must suck having to go through the normal, crappy, ineffective channels.

I was sitting in front of the fire eating smores and watching 'A Few Good Men' when my friend Paul called me from New York, where he's been hanging out with Arianna Huffington all day. She's just taken over the site he writes a column for, techcrunch, and now they seem bestest buddies. So Paul called. Did I want to come to < **insert mystery location** > with him? Well, I would, but I'm completely broke after the last week of solicitors and mortgage and... Oh, no problem. He'll sort me out. Come.

So I'm going to <**mystery location**> with ten bucks in my bank account.

I just finished two articles, a play and my pilot script (hence no juice for blog - sorry guys, you get my sloppy writing these days), so all I have to do - is get on a plane.

If anyone out there is thinking about getting sober, or has got sober and thinks life isn't getting great quick enough - hold on, hold on, hold on. It gets really fucking good. It can take a while. Stuff can even get worse at first. It took nearly two years for my life to go up after a nasty bottom and there are still hugely rocky patches. But I swear magic things have happened this last seven months, and it's all because of quitting the bad stuff. And even when an asshole decided to live in my home in London for free, I didn't have to get shitfaced over it. I think that's pretty cool.

And so to...

lalala

2011-03-24T00:26:00.003-04:00

I got my BAFTA membership through, so even though I'll be bankrupt and homeless paying for those court costs to evict tenant-from-hell.... I can still watch movies! Besty took me out to watch Jane Eyre to distract me from imminent breakdown. Funnily enough, I ended up having a meeting with Ruby Films this morning. Thank god I loved the movie, and the amazing Michael Fassbender and Mia Wasikowska.... it always sucks having a meeting with producers and having to carefully avoid mentioning their work, because you hated it. Not so with Ruby, who also made the incredible 'Temple Grandin'. Ruby kick butt.

I am really, really not good at dealing with stress and money and uber-shit, so I booked in with a shrink and my chiropractor. It's money that should be spent on other stuff, but sometimes you have to invest in a little of you to prevent things like... having an enormous fucking breakdown because you're worried you're about to go into mortgage arrears. Having splurged to a stranger and been bashed into shape and massaged by movie-going, I'm starting to feel better. (Though I'd like to point out to Simon Longo's government appointed lawyer and the Ms Rhonda Clarke who advised him to stay illegally in my property - I'm still absolutely wrecked by this experience. I'll add the shrink and the chiro to the small claims case;) I'm still kind of in shock and awe that the British system, designed to protect people, actually creates massive disparities and bias between tenants and landlords, thus creating and sustaining inequality, and reinforcing difference. It doesn't give landlords and tenants equal power and access to the same resources - it makes people like me at the mercy of a man who refuses to move and has, at his fingertips, resources, money and employees provided by the government, which are denied to me by dint that I own property. It makes landlords powerless.

The worst thing about this whole experience is that I'll never, ever trust a person on DSS again. And most of them are good people having a shit time who need the help to live a proper life and get on their feet again. But some of them are using the system to fund their holiday home in London while they take vacations abroad and break leases. And because of one Simon Longo, the Daily Mail will write a million articles about evil benefits seekers, and anyone who gets screwed by a Simon Longo will feel like a rightwing cunt for complaining. I feel like a rightwing cunt. And yet my future hangs in the balance because my mortgage rates rose on 1st March, and now I'm picking up bills and court costs I never planned for. And I'm being told I'm a cunt by Camden because I'd rather make Simon Longo get off his arse and find someplace else to live so that I don't lose my own property and my credit in the UK.

I'm in LA. My borrowed sofa's comfy. I'm broke and I have loads of work and it's raining and Mr Chips is lots better and I have yoga at 7am tomorrow morning and I'm far, far away from the asshole living in my home.

The world is still a beautiful place.

It's the little things that make life worthwhile, despite the preponderance of cunts in the world.

I do love LA today more than ever.

2011-03-22T19:58:00.002-04:00

Simon Longo now thinks it's appropriate - perhaps with the advice of Camden? - to suggest that I MOVE IN WITH HIM. That way he can stay in my flat, and he can keep squatting on my property.

I think the expression is LOL, except I'm too busy trying to swallow my own vomit and disgust to laugh.

I would feel safer in a jail full of pedophiles, than within five miles of this joker.

Anyone have any advice on injunctions against crazies in the UK? I've already asked his lawyer to instruct him to stop emailing, and he won't.

yuck

2011-03-22T16:00:00.004-04:00

I'm really tired and really down. I think of all the things that have happened in life, this is probably one of the worst. Having your home taken over by another person who refuses to leave is really, really scary. You realize you have no rights - or what rights you have can only be exerted in a lengthy, expensive, nasty way in court. It just frightens the beejeezus out of me that a written contract has no weight or cannot bind anyone to a formal agreement, until it's gone to court! And everyone keeps telling me it's to "protect tenants against evil landlords". I get that evil landlords exploit tenants, but I absolutely cannot believe that as a landlord, you can be made homeless by the simple fact your property is being squatted by an unwanted tenant who refuses to move.

You own nothing in life, that's absolutely clear. And in Britain, the guy who squats your home is given a lawyer provided by the council and you're told you had no right to rent your own flat out on the assumption that same man might adhere to a signed, legal contract. Where's my lawyer Camden? Where's my one bedroom flat? Where's my Rhonda Clarke, telling me that if the friend I'm staying with wants me out, I need to sit tight until the bailiffs forcibly remove me?

Oh yeah. That's right. I'm the kind of person who leaves when asked, who signs agreements and keeps to them, who doesn't work on the side, and claim benefits to top up my life, who doesn't think that they're entitled to an apartment and a lawyer and a Rhonda Clarke, paid for by the government. Because I'm the kind of person, like most of us, who takes responsibility for their own life.

I just don't want to take responsibility for a man called Simon Longo who thinks my home is his because he doesn't want to leave.

I'm beginning to hate my home country with a passion.

Dear Rhonda

2011-03-22T13:22:00.000-04:00

I haven't contacted Simon for months until yesterday, when I reiterated that to him he has been served with the Section 21 Eviction Notice, a Notice to Vacate, and that if he complies with his contract and leaves on March 28th, he will receive his full deposit back and everyone will be happy. However if he does not, he will be liable for numerous costs which will probably mean he will not receive his deposit back, and will actually owe more money to me, to Olivers and to the courts.

As for Simon's "quiet enjoyment" of my home, I would like to point out that a person who voluntarily embarks upon breaking the law and invites court action must naturally expect a degree of communication from the estate agents who he has lied to, the future tenants who have now been rendered homeless by Simon's refusal to leave, and myself, who is condemned to further couchsurfing in order to fund up front the costs - eventually liable to Simon - for removing him forcibly from my home. I would say a person who invites this kind of trouble and disturbance into their lives is not someone who strikes me as one who dabbles in "quiet enjoyment", but rather one who seeks trouble, discord and gains pleasure in other people's distress and difficulties. Further, this is a man who has lied on numerous occasions. I think we need not delve further into the obvious absence of morality such a person demonstrates, but rather concentrate on removing such a person from innocent people's lives. I count myself an innocent person and wish him to leave me alone, and depart my property asap.

Until he does, I am afraid the distress Mr Simon Longo has caused will be palpably evident to all, and "quiet enjoyment" far from everyone's lives.

Ruth Fowler

Dear Ms Fowler

2011-03-22T13:20:00.001-04:00

22nd March 2011

Mr Simon Longo - flat 32, London

I am writing following our recent telephone conversations and e-mails regarding your tenant, Mr Simon Longo. I would like to set out as clearly as I can our advice to your tenant and highlight his rights. I would like to add at this point that Camden does not wish to interfere with your rights to ask your tenant to leave or to manage your property; what we would ask is that you observe the correct process.

Background

As I understand the facts Mr Longo moved into your flat in March 2010 and you signed a one year assured shorthold tenancy with a six month break clause. Due to a number of reasons including noise complaints you decided to ask him to leave and your agents, Olivers, sent him a letter dated 28th January 2011 asking him to leave on or before 28th March 2011. This letter can be treated as notice of seeking possession under section 21 of the Housing Act 1988. You have now signed a tenancy agreement with new tenants due to start on the 29th March 2011, so would like the current tenant to move out when his notice expires as the new tenants would like to move in. He has refused to vacate.

I would be grateful if you could correct any of the above facts if they are not right.

My advice

I have advised that Mr Longo is an assured shorthold tenant under the Housing Act 1988. This means that his rights to reside in accommodation can only be terminated by a county court following possession proceedings.

Once the notice expires on 28th March only one of two things can happen. Either your tenant voluntarily decides to leave or you as the landlord apply to the county court for a possession order.

All residential occupiers are afforded this basic right and for further information please see the Protection from Eviction Act 1977 which explains the obligations of a court order in more detail. You have the right to possession and if you follow the correct procedures the judge has no discretion in this matter. I would be happy to forward more information about this and the legislation if it would help.

As Mr Longo has told us that he is not going to vacate your only recourse is, after 28th March, to commence possession proceedings in the county court. I have advised Mr Longo that he will be liable for your court fees and an order will be made by the court about costs.

I am aware that you are contacting Mr Longo regularly and I would be grateful if you would stop asking your tenant to leave. If you wish to make any representations regarding Mr Longo’s occupancy I would be grateful if you could pass them through me as his appointed adviser. The tenant has the right to live in his home with quiet enjoyment and it would be very unfortunate if this particular issue was escalated. I would also strongly advise you at this time to seek independent advice about your rights and obligations.

I do appreciate that you have entered into a contract with another prospective tenant, but I am afraid that you have jumped the gun as Mr Longo wishes to continue to reside at the flat. I would have hoped that your agent, who should be well conversed in landlord tenant law, had advised you about this prior to committing you to a further contract.

I also understand that you are upset and that this has put you in a difficult situation and it is not my intention to distress you further or create any problems. I do hope however that I have impressed on you that your tenant like all other tenants has rights and there is a due process to follow.
I hope that we can meet or discuss all of this over the phone and I would be grateful if you could give me a ring once you have read this letter.

Yours sincerely,

Rhonda Clarke
Housing Adviser
Housing Options and Advice Service

Dear Rhonda

2011-03-21T23:58:00.000-04:00

Just one more note Rhonda, before I sign off having spent a fourteen hour day crying and facing imminent bankruptcy because of your recommendation that Simon Longo aka the tenant from hell - stay illegally in my own home while I face homelessness... BTW, did you know it's possible for me to seek financial compensation for all the distress and money you and Simon have caused me over the last 24 hours? Yes, it is! Who would have believed that anyone would give a flying fuck that you three - Camden council, Simon Longo and Rhonda Clarke - are about to make me homeless, are on the verge of ruining my life, my credit and my home in the UK, and all this might cause me an expensive emotional breakdown?! Strange isn't it? I guess in your office only tenants are people aren't they? Landlords are just rich cunts who deserve to be ass-fucked for having the gall to own property - particularly if they don't live in their own property because they can't afford to since that teeny thing called the recession. The nerve!

Simon's rent for April will be in arrears on March 24th 2011. If he intends to stay in my property illegally as you have recommended he do, Rhonda, I would appreciate it if you could let me know by this date, as I will then by applying for the repossession notice - and good news Rhonda! It's now available online without lengthy court battles! It seems like we'll be talking to each a whole bunch over the next two weeks - I can't wait!

On Monday the 28th March - my birthday, how wonderful! - I shall be pitching the tent outside my front door. I look forward to you making me homeless, Rhonda. What a birthday present. You seem to have done that to four living beings this month - my future tenant and her daughter (who I have suggested seek compensation from Simon Longo in the small claims court despite your misguided belief that this is not possible), myself, and my small dog. Congratulations on such startling efficiency from the Housing Board! Seeing as Camden is now exhorting Simon Longo to stay in my property without paying rent, will you now be finding us homeless people accommodation from the money you've saved from shifting Simon's expenses to me? Perhaps my flight back to the UK? A meal at a slap-up restaurant? New shoes? I like Manolo Blahnik. Slightly 2005, but still great, and at 500 bucks a pair - cheaper than Simon Longo in your apartment!

I should have been squatting my own property and claiming I had a disabled dog in Los Angeles who I was single-handedly supporting from Government hand outs and freelance work - and then you might have paid my mortgage for me all this time I was sleeping on sofas and lacking my own home!

I look forward to another 14 hour day tomorrow. You must truly sleep soundly at night knowing your job has such an impact on people's lives! Hey - wouldn't it be funny if you went home one day and Simon Longo was in your bedroom and refusing to leave?! Pretty hilarious, right? I guess, because you guys in the Housing Office are such great people, you'd invite him in for a cup of tea and -

Oh. MY. GOD!

I have the solution!

I get my flat back..... and SIMON LONGO MOVES IN WITH YOU!!!

This is such a great idea I think I'll share it with your superior. Who's your boss? Can't wait to chat. Doubt I'll be sleeping at all tonight seeing as you guys have kind of destroyed my life. Feel free to email anytime and pass me on to your superior! Let's all get involved in this! It's like one big jolly 'fuck ruth' party!

Lots of love

Ruth xoxox

Camden's Buttfuck Spectacular

2011-03-21T20:05:00.006-04:00

I bought a one-bed ex-local flat in Kentish Town, London in January 2008. I bought it just after my book deal, when journalism was picking up and life was easy and jobs were growing on trees, and then I had to go to America for the launch of my book and a travel article for The Observer, and then the recession happened, and then everyone was out of work and broke, and scary things were afoot in the world.

I rented my flat out then, just to cover the mortgage. Never made money off the flat, but when I couldn't afford it, someone else could, and it helped me out until the day I could move back in and make it home.

Eighteen months later and I was very nearly at that place, when Camden council sent me a bill for 'Major Works' done to improve the quality of the building and surrounding area. This includes mending a fence which is quarter of a mile from my house, putting in a new lift because the old one wasn't pretty, and installing satellite TV, even though I watch everything on the internet.

I now owed Camden Council five thousand pounds for work I didn't actually see or feel, and they wanted it. Woohee! Did they want it. I think they sent me a letter a week for two years or something. In an effort to pay off that bill and get my place back, I rented my flat out once again, this time to an Italian guy - Simon Longo - who was on DHSS. Like the dumb liberal I am, I figured it was my token charity act, seeing as I've had zero spare cash to give to charity the last few years. His rent didn't quite pay everything, but what the fuck. The majority of the bills were being paid, I just had to dig deep for that extra 5k, and then soon I could move back into my own flat. It pissed me off that people were so mean about DHSS, and so many landlords refused to take them.

The last few months were hard. I just wanted to pay that damn Camden bill. So I gave up my car for repossession, said goodbye to the tiny little wood-floor room by the beach, and turned into a transient. I've been couchsurfing, without a car or place to call my own, for nearly four months now, and what I've lacked for in privacy, I've made up for in friendship. The sheer kindness and patience and love of the people around me is just - well, astounding. It's a beautiful, beautiful thing - I say, sounding revoltingly American - that friends and loved ones help me out, so I can pay off debts which got bigger than me.

I'm nearly there - I mean, completely out of debt. One more credit card, a little bit more Camden left, no Vet's bills, a teeny bit of car repayment left. The end's in sight. Finally - I thought - I could quit being an itinerant and a Blanche du Bois. Maybe by the end of the year I could even move back into my London flat, seeing as I have to be in the UK for a while.

And then a few things happened.

The DHSS guy who was in the flat had always been - well - weird. He'd banned me from entering the property in his absence in case I stole his expensive sound equipment(?!), but he was never at the flat as he was always in Italy - so I didn't get to even see inside it for seven months, which freaked me out. Because he was always away, stuff kept breaking down, and it was costing me a fortune to fix the boiler for the third time in six months. Then there was the noise issue - neighbors had complained about his music so many times Camden was threatening to withdraw the lease. Not to mention the fact he was just odd. OK, I may not have the most white-collar past, but it's a little weird to call someone about the radiator and have them slathering over your pics online and telling you you're "seeeexeeee" and asking you on a date, as if you're a walking, talking porn pic and not their goddamn landlord! And then he'd threatened me with lawyers when I mentioned, casually, I was thinking of selling the flat to pay off the huge major works bill Camden was dangling over my head. This was his home! How dare I sell it? I had no right!

All in all, Italian DHSS guy was - a total creep. So despite the fact it's kind of a hassle getting new tenants in, and I kind of wanted the flat myself in six months, and I don't really have the cash to pay the estate agents and blah-de-blah - on balance, the guy was acting unstable in a 'Fatal Attraction-based-around-a-council-estate' way. So me and the estate agent gave him 60 days notice - which would end his twelve month lease agreement - and told him to leave.

Cut to:

Six days before DHSS Italian creep is due to leave. A woman - Rhonda Clarke - from Camden Council calls me and tells me she wants to know why creepy dude has to leave the flat and why I'm not renewing his lease. It's not, by the way, an assured lease. It's a fixed period tenancy - 12 months, which has ended. I rattle off the reasons, and she says, "Well, he claims he can't find anywhere to live, so I told him he has to stay in your flat."

"Well he can't," I say in response, to which she says I have two options:

1. Essentially, I agree Creepy Italian dude can stay in my flat until June, and he keeps paying me the rent which doesn't quite cover my mortgage. In June, if I want him to leave and he doesn't want to leave, this situation repeats itself, and I have to seek expensive legal action in the courts.

Believe me when I say this isn't an option. It's pretty obvious to everyone that Creepy Italian Dude, on his little 1k government handout for a big one-bed flat all to himself in Kentish Town so he can be a freelance 'sound artist', ain't going nowhere without two big burly cops banging down the door and giving him no option.

2. If I don't agree Creepy Italian Dude can stay, Rhonda Clarke has told him to stay anyway, and I have to seek expensive legal action in the courts to get him out. Which is the same as option 1, but it happens sooner. If I don't want him in my flat, he gets to stay. But if I accept rent from him after I've told him to leave, Ms Rhonda Clarke told me I have 'implied' I am letting him stay legally.

How's that for blackmail?

It'll take me a few months to get the repossession notice, apparently, and I have to suck it up until then.

Do I sound like a cunty Republican instead of a Bill Maher-loving, Obama-campaigning Liberal? A crazy Thatcherite instead of a cuddly Kinnock-kisser? Besty just came home and said: "I bought you a Kombucha, but I'm afraid I gave it away to a homeless person." To which I replied, "Good. They should be rewarded for not squatting on someone's property."

What can I say? This situation has really, really made me hate Camden council, Simon Longo and the DHSS which can screw with landlords so casually. It's as if we're all Wall Street CEO's and deserve to be ass-fucked. We're not. I'm a person who's become voluntarily homeless in order to pay off debt, and is sleeping on friends' sofas. For all my poverty, the debt, the living on sofas and boats and in cars and having a mad, weird, itinerant, poor-person lovely life, I've never, ever claimed benefits. Because I chose to be a badly paid writer, and I don't think the government should have to pay for my job choice. I chose not to live in the UK for the past ten years, because the crappy pay I earned meant the kind of life I would have there would be - gray and shit and overpriced.

Whereas here in California even if I can't eat and can't pay rent, the sun shines, the coffee tastes better, and the sea makes me happy. And because I don't live in England, I don't use the NHS, or go home to claim unemployment, or housing benefit, even if that might pay for a one-bed in Kentish Town that I could never afford myself.

And what about these people - like me - who choose to deal with shit themselves, instead of relying on a government bail-out? Yes, bail out. Is there any difference between the Rich Bankers and the Lazy Benefits Seeker, both of whom are out to screw the system at the expense of the Working Poor? I don't think there is. Nowadays more and more people have to face the hard decision of renting out their mortgaged home to a stranger who they have to trust won't screw them - because as it turns out, a contract means shit. They have to move in with friends or families, or downgrade into a place which is too small for them. They have to sell up, or if the sale doesn't happen, they go into foreclosure and lose their home, their credit, and the savings they ploughed into a house.

But am I a total cunt for wishing 'poor Mr Longo' (who revealed a surprise coup of 'a disabled relative in Italy he single handedly supports' this morning) - to be homeless?

After talking to the estate agents and the busybody lady at Camden, it's become apparent that Creepy Italian Dude hasn't bothered to look for alternative accommodation. He doesn't want to leave, he doesn't want to look for a new place, and Camden have told him he doesn't have to. He can have everything he wants. Because Mrs Camden has told him his landlord won't bother evicting him. His landlord won't bother serving him with repossession papers and going to the court. And if she does do any of this - hey, it'll take 4 - 5 months. Landlord has to pay. Yeah, he's liable, but he can get away with paying off a few grand's debt at a rate of 50p a week in a British court. He can sit pretty and enjoy life at my expense.

I'm basically being held hostage by Camden Council to accommodate this twat in my apartment. Because of his refusal to leave, the new tenants due to move in on Tuesday have been told they can't move in, and my solicitor has suggested they sue him in small claims for their expenses. I've now filed a repossession notice because he's ignored the Section 21 eviction notice.... and Camden are treating me like I'm a big old Tory cunt (I'm more an American Democrat, in case you're wondering) for daring to evict a DHSS tenant who won't leave my property and has broken the terms of the lease - at their suggestion! Not only that, a woman at Camden council told me I "had no right" to rent out my property on the assumption that Creepy Italian Dude would adhere to a legal tenancy agreement and Section 21 notice. It wasn't mine to rent, she told me snootily. Who the fuck does it belong to then you stupid bint?!!

It's completely and utterly crazy, disturbing, confusing, upsetting... not only has it ruined my 'clearing debt' scheme, it's rendered me homeless a bunch of times over. Firstly because of Camden's completely inflated service charges making me rent the place out to pay for massive bills in the first place, and now because I have to foot the court costs and the mortgage and the service charge for a flat I can't even live in! D'you think I can afford to find my own place now? I don't fucking think so. I have to pay for Simon Longo's life. It's scary, scary stuff.

So I did what any good writer would do, and I pledged to write about it. Everyday. Including all of Camden council's emails to me, and all of Simon Longo's emails to me. So that everyone can see how fucking screwed up this system is.

I just don't get England. I love it and all - hell, it's my country. But I just don't get it. And things like this make it impossible for me to contemplate ever returning to live there.

And in case you're wondering, I'm selling that cunting flat as soon as that tosser's out of there.

The Music Never Stopped

2011-03-19T14:45:00.003-04:00

Went to see 'The Music Never Stopped' in Westwood last night. The script was written by a friend of mine, Gary Marks. Totally check this movie out. First twenty minutes was a bit slow, the 'look' of it and the cinematography wasn't great, but the truly brilliant script and superb acting - the relationship between father and son is heartbreakingly brilliant - really made it. It's one of those movies which stays with you in a good way for a long, long time.

Then I went to the after party dressed like a hipster in a cow coat and was completely ignored the entire evening, rendered speechless by sobriety. That was less fun, but hey, I shouldn't have dressed like a bovine.

Tsunami

2011-03-14T00:30:00.003-04:00

Got woken up in the early hours of Friday morning by a bunch of text messages from England: Tsunami hit Japan - headed for LA! Get out!, Please head inland and let me know you're OK, tsunami headed to california

So I read them, and then went back to sleep. I woke up at seven, rolled over, and said to Besty, "Dude, there's a tsunami headed for us." We wandered downstairs together, bleary-eyed and bemused, and D was in front of the TV.

"Oh for fuck's sake Peta, I'm watching the TV right now. People are surfing in Venice, Peta. They're surfing. Of course you can go to work. No, we don't have a contingency plan. If it hits I guess we die. These things go at a million miles an hour for god's sake. I'm watching the news and people are surfing."

People were surfing. I guess when you live in LA you get used to earthquakes and disasters and if it was headed for us, we would keep surfing, not ever quite believe it until the wave hit. I found out later that people who lived right on the beach were evacuated at 5am. We live about half a mile away from the beach, just before Lincoln Blvd - I mean, if it had come, we would have been squooshed. But it didn't come. And we drank coffee from Abbotts Habit and watched BBC Worldwide and soaked ourselves in terrible, awful sad stories, like the woman who grabbed onto a tree and watched her daughter wash away.

I was in India for 9/11, New York for the London bombings, New York for Katrina, LA for Haiti... I've lived outside England for eleven years now. Strange. And I subconsciously punctuate my time away, mark it by milestones of disaster. Weird things are happening in the world. I found out later four people got killed by riptides off California and a harbour was torn up in Santa Cruz. I guess we weren't so immune.

Thoughts and Prayers to Japan. Even when it might have hit us I didn't feel it. And I still can't. Like everyone I guess I'm just numb by the horror and magnitude of someone else's tragedy. Thoughts and prayers. And a little bit of a donation if you have the spare cash.

Puppy Oxy

2011-03-10T00:49:00.003-05:00

Well, how much changes in a week. Mr Chips was born with a luxating patella on both back legs. I was warned by my vet it might need surgery at some point, but to hold off until it caused him discomfort. Unfortunately, over the weekend, he started crying and walking strangely - and we took him into the vet, and he needed surgery.

The vet said he needed both legs done, and it would cost $2600 bucks. OK then. So I cancelled the flights back to England, and used the money on surgery. I picked him up today, and was told - oh no! - that 2600 bucks was only for one leg. It'd cost another 2600 to do the other leg in a few months.

So he's home and he's doped up on puppy Oxy and we have friends looking after us for our unscheduled 5-6 more weeks in California. I'm secretly pleased I get to stay, but sad my poor Pup is on opiates and sleeping the pain away and has a hard recovery ahead of him. All my Brit producers are being very understanding about the fact I can only do meetings on skype, which is very kind of them. Unfortunately, I'm back to being broooooke (I mean, literally, I have about 180 bucks in my bank account right now!) until the next script swings into action - and who knows when that will be. So I may be stuck here living on sofas, carless, for a while... I'm not fretting. Mr Chips is alive and in recovery and that's the most important thing. I love my dog more than anything.

Something Like Happiness

2011-03-04T01:22:00.006-05:00

Have been busy treatmenting to death (I hate treatments) and writing for The Fix, an LA based website about addiction and recovery which launches in March. It's been lots of fun running round Hollywood interviewing sober actors, writing articles, doing reports on issues like vitamin supplements for addicts and alcoholics (believe me, more interesting than it sounds!). I love the fact a bunch of people I knew in my 'old' New York life are now LA-based, sober, and writing for the same site. Pretty awesome.

I'm enjoying life so much at the moment. Haven't felt like that for a long time. There are stresses and worries, but after that horrendous Christmas, life has leveled off and I feel something like happiness. It's hard to hand in a car, get rid of your apartment, and jump into relying on the kindness of friends and family while you work off debt, but it's working out well. Really well. Better than I expected. Like all I had to do was let go, give up, and now life's going OK. They love to say, 'let go' in AA, and it always pisses me off. "Of what you cock?" is usually my first response. But in this case, it was letting go of quite big things: my apartment, my car, the anger I felt towards a shitty production company for screwing me over, the bitterness I nursed towards a person who treated me badly... I had to get over all that in order to pay off debt, emerge from the deepest, darkest, scariest depression, and get back to an even keel. My credit's already back to good in England, and next paycheck clears most of the American debt, while my empty credit cards are ticking away the bad US credit. It's all good. Life's all good.

To celebrate, I watched 'Harvey' and 'It's a Wonderful Life' again tonight with Besty and family in front of the fire. Jimmy Stewart is my favorite actor of all time and both movies make me cry. Check them out, and stay tuned for 'The Fix' when it launches...

Pilot Season

2011-02-25T16:55:00.002-05:00

Spent all morning at the French Market helping actor friends practice for auditions. I now know how to do a northern Irish accent, and what happens in Season 2 of Boardwalk Empire.

Best Dog in the World

2011-02-24T13:24:00.001-05:00

Malibu

2011-02-23T19:33:00.004-05:00

Saying goodbye to LA sucks. It's like breaking up with someone for the dumbest of reasons: like, moving 6k miles away. We drove up the PCH to Malibu today, ate fresh fish and hummus at Taverna Tony's, wandered through Malibu Country Mart, came home to sit in the jacuzzi.

Even when you're working LA feels like a holiday: for 2.5 years I'd feel so guilty about it I'd work right through the sunshine hours until midnight, because otherwise it felt like I was being lazy. Coffee at Groundworks, bagel at Abbots, lunch at The French Market, walk around the canals... Then I'd run out of money and starve for a few weeks but the sun would still shine, and some kind soul would find me and feed me until I got paid again.

I want to come back, I want to come back.

I realized today, driving along the PCH in someone else's Prius, that I live in permanent nostalgia for things I haven't lost yet.

On the plus side, no rent and no car repayments for two months has meant a hell of a lot of debt has been paid off.

Shutters

2011-02-21T00:22:00.003-05:00

Shutters for lunch. First time I ever went to Shutters I was trailing some paparazzi photographers I'd met on a Hello magazine shoot, when I'd been interviewing Sean Brosnan and Brawley Nolte. I thought it'd make a great story to follow the paps for a week and write about it - it was a great story, but sadly none that the mags wanted. However, I did get the privilege of lurking outside Shutters for four hours waiting for Noel Gallagher and his wife.

So I'm in Shutters for lunch, look up, and see two old actor friends of mine who I haven't seen in a while, turn around and bump into director friend who I knew was in town from London, but had completely failed to catch up with. Then I get home, and have an email from old journalist acquaintance asking me to write for her - just as I thought I was quitting journalism for good.

Strange how things turn out.

I'm such a great believer in signs, and signs, and signs. When I first stopped drinking, I was waiting for The Promises. I was holding out desperately for those fucking Promises. If things got better, I was meant to be doing this - the not drinking thing. If they didn't, screw it. I was drinking.

Well, things didn't get better. They got worse, improved a little, stayed level for a while, then went tits up. But I couldn't jump off the edge again - hell, I drank a couple times, but I couldn't jump off the edge. And then suddenly after two years those damn Promises keep showing up. Work in London. Work in LA. Slowly, not so well paid, but opportunities, and suddenly I think I'm kind of meant to be doing it this way.

Besty and I are driving along Stinkin Lincoln, after picking up a bunch of DVD's from Vidiots (which incidentally, needs your support Angelenos, else it's going out of business, so quit netflix) - so we're driving, and we're laughing about bumping into English actors and Brit director in Shutters.

"They're always so fresh faced and nice aren't they? R, N and D." says Besty wistfully, and something that my friend Tristan the gay STD doctor said to me came back.

"There are people in this world who never have a shitty thing happen to them, you know. Not many, but there are."

"I'm not one of them."

"Me neither."

"But it's quite comforting to know that, isn't it?" says Besty. "Maybe they got good karma in a past life."

It never really occurred to me that life's pointless daily pain, life's big daily bullshit, is doled out as unequally as wealth, as privilege, as luck, as opportunity. It never really occurred to me that some people never have a bad thing happen to them. And by bad, I don't mean lose your job. Have a loved one pass away. We all have that stuff. I mean - bad. The kind of bad you glimpse at here on this blog, or in Besty's face, or in the stories of Venice Beach and its people. I mean some people never have a bad thing happen to them, and Tristan pointed this out to me. I find it comforting, for some reason. I find it comforting that staring at R, N and D, wondering how they manage to quiet the crazy - it's probably because they don't have it, not on the same level. Nothing ever happened, real or imagined, to push them there.

"You realize of course," says Besty grandly. "That that cock R will probably sell a screenplay to Scott Rudin now."

And then we laugh, and drive on, and it's a beautiful, bright, cold sunny day in Venice Beach, and for this day only, nothing shitty happens to either of us, and we can smile, knowing it's not forever, but as long as days like this exist, we'll be OK.

Even The Rain

2011-02-20T14:10:00.006-05:00

Went to The Landmark to watch Even the Rain last night. As we bought our tickets the cashier asked us how we found out about the movie, as "it's had, like no press". It only came out on Thursday so I hope this amazing movie does get the acclaim it deserves. Here's a blurb I stole about it:

Even the Rain (Spanish: También la lluvia) is a 2010 Spanish drama film directed by Icíar Bollaín about Filmmaker Sebastian (Gael Garcia Bernal) who travels to Bolivia to shoot a film about the Spanish conquest of America. He and his crew arrive during the tense time of the Cochabamba water crisis, 2000 Cochabamba protests. The lines between past and present, fiction and film, become increasingly blurred in Iciar Bollain's latest feature.

Go and see this film. It's moving - I wept about five times - clever, completely unique, beautifully shot, politically relevant and incredibly interesting, particularly in its sharp comment about the hypocrisy and self-obsession of the movie industry and its place in society. This is the kind of movie I can imagine lies in people's drawers in Hollywood for years and never get read because it's far too uncomfortable, and besides, they have this great script in development about an invincible tank that goes back in time to the era of the dinosaurs... Anyway, Even The Rain. Check it out.

My new California Hair

2011-02-18T17:46:00.002-05:00

Monsters

2011-02-18T13:31:00.004-05:00

Watched Gareth Edwards' Monsters last night with Director friend D and Besty. The cinematography is amazing - apparently he attached an SLR lens onto a digital camera to get DV to have the same beautiful quality as film. It works superbly and the look of the movie is stunning. The only complaint I have is that the lack of script, and only one camera means that improvised scenes edited together sometimes lack life and become a bit flat. One of the joys of improvisation is capturing the other person's reaction to a new line, an offhand comment - and with one camera, you can't really do that, and lines spliced together often don't make sense, so it often came across as a bit meandering. But with a teeny budget and the SFX genius of Gareth Edwards, it's a phenomenal achievement. Director friend D is now obsessed with how to do his own movie on a similar budget with that kind of beautiful look about it.

I'm so deeply in love with California at the moment. Staying present is such a massively hard thing to do for me, it's really blissful to be walking around loving the weather, the rain, walking the pups, hanging with Besty, not mulling on my future fears or my past worries. I swear I'm built to be a housewife who writes. Nothing makes me happier than homemaking, pups and writing. I don't want to be a breadwinner at all (sorry feminism).

Back to work. It's cold and windy outside. The palm trees are dancing. Mr Chips is asleep on my lap. We have a log fire burning. I love it.

Yoga in Santa Monica

2011-02-17T18:09:00.003-05:00

I think Santa Monica has the best yoga teachers in the world outside India - and the greatest philosophy. If you're heading west go to Jerome Mercier's Vinyasa class at Power Yoga. I've learned more from Jerome than any other teacher, and in a world of madness where idiots charge twenty bucks for 90 minutes of preaching spiritual bullshit, blasting out crappy wailing Om music and chanting bad sanskrit at you, Jerome's classes are donation based and a fantastic, amazing blend of traditional ashtanga, Iyengar-like precision, humor and quiet, unpretentious calm.

He also has a lovely dog called Oliver, a funky VW beetle van, and a habit of saying the most perceptive things when you least expect it. Love, love, love. Check his classes out.

Home

2011-02-16T00:29:00.003-05:00

Home! Venice Beach, my little dog Mr Chips, and Besty Mate picked me up at LAX.

I was leafing through Grazia, a shitty British women's mag, in Heathrow departures when I came across an article about Sienna Miller ditching Jude Law for one of her co-stars... they were speculating about who had caused the break up and Besty/Ex was mentioned! I gave him the article just now and he looked at the co-stars, looked at Jude Law and snorted. "You can tell this is made up 'cause no one would leave Jude for any of us lot"

Venice Beach is home. I like that idea. I have to leave it for a little bit this year, but it's definitely home. Funny how a big thing like that can creep up on you... strangely it's where I feel the most comfortable in the world right now.

Fxck Feelings and Other Stuff

2011-02-14T07:57:00.007-05:00

I've been a complete memoir and non-fiction junkie recently - as I've gotten older, I find myself more interested in the nitty-gritty, the true facts of life and people and experience than fairytales. Fiction - presently - doesn't answer certain questions floating around my head, or even make me ask those questions.

I'm currently reading 'The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks' by Rebecca Skloot, a genius exploration into the life of the woman behind the immortal HeLa cells. It's been optioned by Oprah Winfrey (of course!) for HBO and I can't wait to see it onscreen.

Next up is Lyn Barber's 'An Education', which has, of course, already been made into a wonderful movie, produced by Finola Dwyer, a fantastic producer I'm working with in London.

I've just finished Emma Forrest's brilliant 'Your Voice In My Head'. Every time I have a meeting in London people ask me if I know Emma, because she's a kooky British brunette living in LA, working as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter, and she dates - or has dated - Hollywood actors beloved of the Twelve Step Program. Yes, I see the comparisons. Except Emma Forrest is far, far more successful and grounded than broke and flighty me. I expected to hate her memoir. When mine came out I was incredibly disappointed by the complete lack of press it received - the majority opinion was that I'd made most of it up, and no one wanted to review a 'fake' memoir (I kid you not). I also got slammed for being a horrible person, which is nothing new, although I do think if you read my book it goes a long way to explaining why I'm a prickly person and I find it hard to trust people. Emma's had fantastic press, and I first heard about her book through a Guardian extract. I read it begrudgingly, jealously, ready to despise it, and feed the nasty voices in my head whispering enviously about beautiful rich girls with useful contacts.

I was blown away by her honesty, her wit and her beautiful prose.

A few days later I had a meeting with Blueprint Pictures, who optioned Emma's first screenplay, 'Know Your Rights', and she came up in conversation again. Then I read a truly nasty, hate-filled review of her book in The Observer, which really quite shocked me. It was venomous, and needlessly so. I had a writer once ostensibly review my book, and instead end up reviewing my blog, and quoting completely irrelevant pieces out of context. It hurts when people don't read your words and instead apply their own agenda to whatever you say. Although it's certainly true that this happens all the goddamn time in all aspects of life.

Anyway, a few days ago I had another meeting with Ruby Films and the wonderful Alison Owen, and Emma came up in conversation again. I feel like she's always going to be one of those people I never, ever meet, but cross paths with a million times. If there's one book you buy this year, I recommend hers. I've been converted to fandom and for someone who religiously fails to worship other writers except Joan Didion and Nabokov, I am a googly-eyed fan of Miss Forrest.

At the back of her book, Emma references a wonderful site - Fxck Feelings. I wanted to mention it here because I'm someone who definitely struggles with happiness and emotions on a regular basis, and even eleven years of every-day yoga, meditation, AA, dabbling in therapy, avoiding alcohol and drugs, regular sleep etc, is barely enough to 'normalize' me. I've been diagnosed with severe reactive depression many times, but of course, a diagnosis doesn't really help when you're living in a country which demands health insurance to get treated. Instead I just struggle with things the best I can, and rely heavily on AA and my infinitely patient and loving friends. This site is consequently a real find, and I found the following article particularly useful, given recent events and my - shall we say - mishandling of them because of a huge resentment I've nursed against a boy who didn't treat me with respect:

Life is an endless series of assaults on your respect. Your kids don’t respect you, your Starbucks cashier doesn’t respect you, the people who write ads for the Superbowl certainly don’t respect you. Alas.

So, no matter how much right you have to feel disrespected, and how hard it is to ignore the feeling, disrespect is not the issue you should be addressing, or really bother addressing, ever.

As the wise Carrie Fisher once said, “resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.” Focusing on this other guy and his perceived slights just distracts you from your own agenda.

If only the anonymous person behind fxck feelings was my life guru, my head would be a far safer place:)

24 hours left in Blighty! Spending Valentines Day with my wonderful, gay, married doctor friends watching a musical. It does make me giggle to be sitting in between my married gays on Valentines Day.

Welcome to the First Meeting of Tweetaholics Anonymous

2011-02-11T17:18:00.000-05:00

Courtesy of Huffington Post

This is the Life

2011-02-11T05:44:00.000-05:00

So apparently there's a new feature on google which keeps track of where you log in from - it stores all your IP's. I woke up this morning and had a security flash saying someone had logged into my google account from America. I changed the password and did all that blah, but now I'm wondering if that message was from google. Did I just fill out a form spamming myself? I have no idea as now I can't find a feature on google which stores all the IP addresses I've logged in from... if anyone can help, email me, I'm curious. I'm also curious as to who would log in from America to check my account. My Ex / Best Mate can barely figure out his blackberry so it's definitely not him. No weird emails were in my sent mail, so it's not a spammer / phisher. Bizarre.

I'm still in Wales with the fam. Drank a ton of coffee last night and stayed up writing a HuffPo piece as haven't written them for a while. Had a lovely email this morning from a director I'm working with: "You're bonkers, but all the best people are." Spoke to best mate in Venice, who pointed out that when I was in Venice I couldn't wait to leave. "Why are you so anxious to come back?" he asked. Because London is a decision of the head, and my heart's still split between NY and LA, I told him.

Just after Christmas, when all the shit went down with work, money, friends etc, we were sitting in front of a log fire, eating fresh pasta, Red Vines for dessert, watching The West Wing with Best Mate's little nephew. Best Mate poked him with his foot. "This is the life! This is the life! You'll look back on this in ten years time, nephew, and think this. is. the. life. It doesn't get much better than this." Nephew looked up from youtube and grunted disinterestedly, and I suddenly realized Best Mate was totally right. It was blissful that night, it was perfect, it was 'the life'. I guess part of me wants to run back to Venice to cram a few more nights in just like that, stock up, get as many memories as possible to keep me going through London and six months without my surrogate family, best mate, and little village by the sea.

It's funny how things work out, because back in November, just after working for BIFA, I was so sad to leave London. So exhausted by the prospect of more California. I guess Best Mate wasn't around then, which made it harder. Now I kind of know - recognize - that those teeny pockets of perfection which pop up unexpectedly now and then, that's the point. This is the life.

Very happy about seeing Venice Beach, Mr Chips and Best Mate again. Four more days.

Paul Carr

2011-02-10T12:03:00.005-05:00

A year ago I'd just arrived back in Venice Beach after a thousand mile drive from Portland to San Francisco. I stopped in San Fran to catch up with the amazing Paul Carr. I met Paul in New York in 2005, and was very flattered when he wrote about me in his first book. We drank together in London, partied in SoHo, vomited all over Kentish Town and bonded over a shared drunken habit of offending everyone we knew. We eventually got sober in 2009, a couple hundred miles apart in California. I love Paul. The night I arrived in San Francisco there was heavy snow on the roads and I didn't get into town until 3am. Paul valiantly met me outside a swanky hotel, in which he'd managed to blag me a free room. I handed my keys to the valet, and we wandered down the street and sat in a coffee shop in the Tenderloin talking bollocks until sunrise. And then I walked back to the hotel, and my car had not been valeted, and had, instead been broken into - the GPS, my laptop, two screenplays I'd been working on, my new yoga mat, Chips' stuff - everything gone.

Fortunately I had insurance. God Bless America. I am not the kind of person who ever has insurance for anything, but my car people forced me to get it. I think they might regret that decision.

Anyway, I'm reminded of all this as I just had a phone call from the amazing Paul. His new book is out in the spring. This is all a circuitous way of saying 'buy it'. No one else makes me feel so very OK for being so very not OK and obviously quite mental, as the wonderful, funny, sober, kind Mr Paul Carr. I can't wait to read his new book.

Carless

2011-01-17T10:12:00.002-05:00

Here's something I learned today: even if you voluntarily surrender your car for repossession and have paid 2.5 years of debt on time and agreed a time for the company to pick it up and have no intention of running away and had even picked out the types of cookies you were gonna offer the white trash repo assholes - those cunts will not trust you, and will take the car in the middle of the night.

Carless in LA. The adventure begins....

Stephanie

2011-01-10T15:19:00.006-05:00

I used to work at this place in New York City. One of the girls I worked with - Stephanie - always stuck in my head because she had some crazy story about working for Star magazine, writing a roman a clef novel loosely based on her experiences with Bonnie Fuller, and Star had tried to sue her ass off and stop her book coming out. This story - well, it's typical Steph. A small, pretty, slim dark haired girl with big eyes and a wicked sense of humor, Stephanie said what she thought, and didn't let anyone bully her. Stephanie was one of the only people I stayed in contact with when I left the office, and she started up her own blog. We used to email each other and talk a lot about writing. Bonnie Fuller nixed her book and it never came out, but Steph started on a new one, and a new one. And then, a few years ago, Stephanie posted on her blog that she had breast cancer.

I've known a few women in my life who've suffered from this disease, but I guess the presence of social networking and blogs and twitter and everything nowadays gives us a direct link to what someone's thinking or feeling, so it felt, in a sense, that we were right alongside Stephanie as she went through chemo, Herceptin infusions, mastectomy, breast reconstruction, early menopause, weight gain, constant nausea.... She told us exactly what she was thinking, exactly what made her feel better (pot cookies, her dog, partying, shopping at Bergdorf's). She was hilarious, real, loud, angry, sad, scared - and she shared it all with us. She started writing a book based on her experiences, but she never managed to sell it, despite being a fantastic writer. The publishing industry's all about names nowadays.

Just before Christmas, Stephanie posted on facebook that her cancer had come back. Again. It had come back so many times in these last few years. I kept meaning to email her, send her a message, but I didn't, mainly because as a doctor's daughter, I knew what it meant. I knew my 35 year-old friend had run out of - what, luck? choices? and this time she was going to die. How could I send her some inane prattle about 'winning the battle' when we both knew it wasn't going to happen? That cancer isn't a damn battle anyway and talking about it that way implies there are winners and losers, and I hate that idea? The only fight someone can put up is the mental fight, and Stephanie sure did that. However low she got, she was still doling out love and advice to strangers with her disease, spending time with her friends and family, dragging her ass to a birthday party - "thirty five and still alive!" it said on the poster - cracking jokes.

Stephanie passed away yesterday. She was 35. It makes me so sad that she spent the last few years of her life having to be brave and courageous and all those words we attribute to people who've had cancer and been through grueling treatment. What makes me saddest is the lack of rhyme or reason in who life doles out the Aces to, who gets the Joker. But what makes me happy is that Stephanie had friends and family around her, and so much love right to the end. I hope her book gets published.

Sorry, not very articulate today.

Happy New Year

2011-01-01T13:03:00.003-05:00

My ex and his parents rescued me on Christmas Eve - called me late at night, pulled up in a Ford Thunderbird, took me to Santa Monica for Prime Rib at Boa. I guess it was some rescuing. Boxes and living in a car, to a five star restaurant The next day I slept for 20 hours, right through the time I was supposed to be cooking, and by the time I woke up it was the evening, and people were arriving at ex's house for dinner.

A note about the ex: we dated, on and off, for two years. He's my 'real' ex, not the fake internet ex. He's an actor. He's British. He's loaded. I love him and his family. If he wasn't a relapsing alcoholic with a fidelity/intimacy problem, I'd marry him in a heartbeat.

So this week, life in boxes, I got to forget about the fact everything in my world is crumbling, and enter someone else's. Afternoon tea in the Hollywood Hills, breakfast at The Georgian, walks along the beach, an evening in The Magic Castle, dinner dates and movie dates and talking, and the more talking you do, the further removed you are from your own mess.

The ex's parents left yesterday and we stayed at home on NYE, eating takeout and watching movies. 127 Hours - hated it. The night was nice, though. 'Nice'. It was just that. Having genteel English ladies and elderly Conservative men around somehow eased my soul a little, and now it's back to flapping around wildly as I try and figure out how to get Chips and me back to the UK for a while. I honestly couldn't tell you why I'm so anxious. Maybe the bills and the lack of money, maybe the concern about putting my pup in an airplane hold in March, maybe, probably, because I miss talking to douchebag internet boy - but I feel so truly terrible about the whole incident that I know I just can't have someone in my life like that. I guess I just stopped believing he's a good person. I can have my messed up alcoholic ex and his massive family in my life - god, these people have loved me and cared for me and screwed me over so many times I know they'll always be there. But douchebag internet boy - I just can't trust him. I guess I don't respect him or something. I stopped - liking him. It makes me sad.

The whole happiness thing - I have to tell you, after ten years of being broke, it certainly is connected to money and career. Because without those things, you can't enjoy friends, or lovers, or family to the extent you should. You always find the people with security, the people who don't have to worry about a roof over their heads, or food on the table - they're the arseholes who make all these assertions about money not making you happy. Money doesn't make you happy, or give you friends and loved ones and the career of your choice - but it takes away the frantic, frenetic, scary knife edge of fear which stops you enjoying the things you have.

Oh life. I'm going to walk the dogs. I feel a bit scared and a bit sad. I need to just jump off a cliff. I've moved countries so many times it's meant to be easy now, and it never is. I hope you had a good NYE.

"There's an art to leaving, a perfection, a symmetry"

2010-12-23T03:15:00.005-05:00

Here's how you leave: you sit, you cry, you call a million people you haven't spoken to in months. You want someone to say the right thing, and you don't know what it is, but you know you haven't heard it, so when the words dry up, you go quiet. You live off caffeine and nicotine for three days, and when you try and swallow soup you gag it up again. You skip yoga because you're too dizzy - you can't not smoke for a whole 90 minutes - and you spend the morning, instead, with the Repo Man. You tell him you'll come back tomorrow. You're lying. You cry a little more, you call the ex and talk for three hours and say 'I love you' more times than you ever said it in two years of fights and punches. Your dog sits at the end of the bed and starts to whimper when the case comes out because he's seen it before, and he knows what it means. You have one pile for taking, one for storage, one for charity. You take the jeans that you bought two years ago, wore once, place them in each separate pile at least three times, change your mind, hand them to your roommate. You scour the internet for evidence that everyone else is more successful, less single, less crazy, just as confused as you. You wallow a little in the sting of being reliably, perpetually a wild card, the only prediction that anyone can make about you being that at some point, at some time, you'll pack and leave in the night, a few broken pieces scattered behind. You pile the bags in the car, you call some people to take the furniture which you inherited from the last person, you go round to Jules' and you sit and laugh and laugh and laugh with people you don't know, drinking coffee well into the night, your dog cuddling up close because he wants to smell you and feel you for as long as he can, because he knows it'll be a while until the next time. Some guy you've seen distantly, the hipster who works in the coffee shop, kisses you, trails off with a hug that you can't tell is for you or for him. He kisses you again, and it tastes of coffee and Parliaments, and it seems appropriate, a little sad.

You leave and you don't say goodbye to many people, and you stop checking your email and your facebook and all that bullshit, because there's no one you want to talk to, and you don't have anything left to say. You kind of wish you hadn't spent so much time working-working-working, because you forgot to feel a little too, see-smell-touch and there won't be California, not for a while, not when you've skipped out on the debt and in four weeks time the angry letters will start arriving to an address which is no longer yours.

You don't really know where you're going, but you know where you have to be, so until then you just let things slide a little, hope the money people sent you is enough.
You buy a pack of cigarettes and a coffee. The bottom of your trousers are wet because it hasn't stopped raining. The Uggs are melch and mildew. You can see Christmas trees in people's houses, blurred by rain. You don't know what you feel. You don't particularly care.

2010-12-21T17:31:00.001-05:00

So much kindness. Thank you.

x

Pathetic Fallacy

2010-12-21T12:34:00.000-05:00

It's been raining in LA for five whole days nonstop. The house is leaking, the dogs are stir crazy and restless, the rest of us just smoke cigarette after cigarette, drink coffee, wait for something to change. If you asked me if it was worth it - when I'm in the middle of writing everything else disappears, and it's worth everything. It's worth being broke and never having nice clothes and always borrowing money from people and turning down trips to the movies and ordering the starter in a restaurant the rare opportunity you can afford even that. It's worth trips to the foodbank and being humiliated by assholes and wishing you were anyplace else but here. It's worth self doubt and self hatred and the crazy inner monologue which never lets up until you distract it with words and characters. But when you can't get it right, it sucks worse than your overdraft, your cheating lover, your broken heart.

I was planning to go back to England for good in March, when Chips is allowed out the country. But now there's a big kerfuffle with a job which was definite and now has a lot of clauses which aren't in my favor. And I don't know if I can afford it because I just lost work worth about 20K USD. And really I'd just like a fairy godmother to swoop in, eliminate the debt, get my ass to England, find me someplace safe and dry to live for free for a while until I get on my feet, and let me write.

My pathetic fallacy is I always attribute human qualities, like pity, to inanimate objects, like fate.

It's still raining.

Hungry

2010-12-21T02:25:00.004-05:00

You get used to long, lean stretches when you freelance. Everyone tells you that you should put away savings for these times, but it never seems to happen like that. Money takes months to come through, so by the time it does, it's already spent, and the bills are pressing up against your door, squeezing in through the cracks, and you gotta let them in. Sometimes I think it undoubtedly helps: that sense of urgency, that hunger. But most times it just gets you to a point of blinding, suffocating panic. I had my first ever panic attack in 2008, over money, and I had my last one this afternoon, over money. I'm sure they'll be a few more. It's funny but you don't ever get used to it: the fear. Even though you know you've gotten through it before, and so rationally speaking, you can do it again, it still hacks away bits of your flesh every time. You wonder if one day it'll lob away something vital, and then you'll be fucked.

Christmas always gets me down. I'm from a big family (five kids) and we all used to live in a huge, rambling old vicarage in a tiny Welsh village called Cilcain. My siblings are all older than me, so we were spoiled - the last ones to get the benefits of a Christmas which was entirely centered around us, or so it felt. I honestly believe Christmas is so much better when kids are around. We were those kids for a really long time, and my enormous family would spend the entire holiday drinking, laughing and partying. And then one day the family kind of fell out, and since then Christmas hasn't ever been spent with anyone in the same room. Things changed. My sister had kids. My brother had kids. My other brother moved abroad. My parents squabbled with one or other of us, and disappeared to Spain for ten years. My twin and I suddenly were no longer the babies, and Christmas became just another holiday to endure. Every Christmas I check in, see what's different. Boyfriend? Nope. Nice home? Nope. Financial stability? Definitely not. My neighbor downstairs made us gingerbread cookies today. When I make gingerbread cookies in my own oven and hand them out to people I love, that's when it'll be OK. I'm not sure why that's a marker but it is.

I know that I have to make it on my own. I can't expect someone else to pay my rent if I can't make it, buy me food if I can't afford groceries, give me a Christmas if I can't give myself one. But sometimes I look at people and wonder how they do it. How they manage to help each other and it's just normal. Like my friend who moved to LA with no money, no visa, only a very kind boyfriend who put her up, fed her, scrounged her a visa, and helped her get work. Another good friend Jenny had her car repo-ed and lost her apartment, and moved in with this lovely guy who helped her out, until she got her book deal last week. I can't imagine having someone lay out the mattress to cushion my fall. Sometimes I dream about it, and most times I just figure it's not meant to be like that, so there's no point thinking about it. I don't know if I want it or I don't. Maybe it's one of those things I secretly covet but never want to admit to. It's a dirty secret, like reading Us Weekly, or yearning for a big, white wedding. I've always hated big white weddings. But they kind of linger in my head quite a lot, a bit like the faceless person who'll catch me when I fall. There's no one person, but many people with deep pockets of kindness. Chicken soup left over from Billy's dinner, warm gingerbread cookies from Annie's oven, a packet of cigarettes paid for by a stranger in line at CVS when my card gets refused.

I'm working on a job and I can't do it right. They keep asking me to treatment a script. Firstly, they haven't paid me, and I've been working for three months now. Secondly, they got the money for development from two years of work I did for them for free. I'm tired and I'm hungry and my brain won't work. I'm resentful. My friend sent me this new age psychobabble about positive attitudes and a bad workman blaming his tools, and blah de blah, and I think, yeah, she's got a point. I have no frigging idea what these people want from me, and obviously I'm pissing them off because I'm not giving it. But I also think they're giving me contradictory orders and sending me off on wild goose chases down a route of eternal treatment. I just need to get paid, sign off on a basic plot, and write the damn script.

I'm so sad today. I'm so anxious. I spoke to someone once about breakdowns - like when d'you know when you're having one? and we agreed you don't know. There's a frantic, scrabbling sense of clinging desperately onto something, and the painful relief that you can glimpse a bottom, but you're not there yet. But if you're being honest, you're pretty damn close. I'm like that now. I want to come home so bad. I want my bills to be paid off. I want my own apartment, with a TV and a sofa and a teapot and no leaks. I want the ability to shove my own mattress outside the window in case I choose to leap off, or get pushed. But you know, I've wanted this for a while now. And even though things are so much better this year, sometimes, especially at Christmas time, when you're being yelled at and you can't get anything right and you're hungry and the bills are clambering into your throat and making you gag - it's really hard to see that this time a year ago, things were a hell of a lot worse.

I want to go home to England. I want to go home.

Shit Jobs I Have Had / How to be a Writer

2010-12-14T21:00:00.006-05:00

1994: Waitress at Plas Hafod Restaurant
1995: Checkout Girl at Tesco's Supermarket
Props Maker at Theatr Clwyd
Wardrobe bitch at Theatr Clwyd
1996: Waitress at St David's Hotel and Restaurant
1997: Bartender at the ADC Theatre, Cambridge
Waitress at New Hall (my Cambridge college)
Bartender at The Castle Inn
1999: Waitress, Grosvenor Hotel and restaurant, Chester
2000: English Teacher in Argentina
2001: Ladies Leisurewear Sales Advisor at Marks and Spencers (that was my title. Do not mock)
Camp counsellor at some summer camp for Chav kids
2002: Begging on the telephone for King's College, Cambridge
Working behind the bar at King's College, Cambridge
Sandwich Maker at O'Briens Irish Sandwich Bar
Ticket Person at the Arts Cinema, Cambridge
Chef at Le Vieux Logis, Alpe D'huez
2003 Private Chef/ Deckhand / Stewardess on Yachts for Astronomically rich people - including our very own Real Housewife of Beverly Hills, Lisa Vanderpump. She didn't like carbs or paying her staff.
Boats worked on: MY Kirsty Mary, SY INXS, MY Polar Star, SY La Bella, SY Sea Hawk, SY Catbird, MY some shit in Cannes, MY Turmoil, MY Sea Jewel
2005 Waitress / Hostess at Ciao! Restaurant on Spring Street, NYC
Watching shit TV for some product placement job on Madison Avenue
Working in a celebrity staffing agency providing brown people to white people to be humiliated for minimum wage
Cocktail Waitress at Flashdancers stripclub, NYC
'Dancer' at Flashdancers, Private Eye and New York Dolls stripclubs, NYC
Freelance writer for The Village Voice
'Dancer' at Lace Stripclub
'Dancer' at Scores West, NYC
2006 'Dancer' at VIP, NYC
2007 Wrote my book, and freelanced for The Guardian, The Observer etc
Editorial Assistant at Yale University Press. They fired my ass when they found out I used to be a stripper.
Yoga Teacher NYC / London / India
2008 Brief, unfortunate stint at Cheetah's in Silverlake, LA
Wrote two spec scripts that got me an agent
2009 Freelancing and being broke, dog walking for monies, did a few script rewrites
2010 Screenwriting, playwriting and other writing for realz. Involves being patronized and humiliated sometimes, and mixing with lovely people othertimes.

Places worked in: France (Antibes, Cannes, Nice), Monaco, Italy (Portofino), Gibraltar, Tenerife, Palma (Spain), Tobago, Trinidad, St Maarten, St Thomas, Grenada, St Lucia, Haiti, Jamaica, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, Tobago Cays, Mustique, Florida, St Vincent, Anguilla, Aruba, Guadeloupe, Dominica, Dominican Republic, St Barts, BVI's, India, Nepal, Thailand, Egypt, Argentina.

Been to Kenya, Tanzania, Cyprus, Uruguay, Brazil, Czech Republic, Poland, Greece and Paraguay too. Oh and Tibet (China).

You too, can have this much success if you get a first in English Literature from Cambridge University and manage never to utilize it.

Am still broke, but thanks to the kind people who sent me cash. I still need some more squids but am feeling generally - well, actually I'm in a foul mood. But that's because I'm on the 'being patronized' phase of my job at the moment. But thanks xo

Rhodes / Roads

2010-12-13T15:52:00.001-05:00

Spelled his name wrong: Rocky Rhodes. Has a father called Dusty, and siblings called Sandy and Windy. How exciting. I should try and sell my car more often. Incidentally, who would like to buy my car? Any takers?

Wassup

2010-12-13T15:19:00.002-05:00

What happened since January 2009?

Well... I caught MRSA, it wiped me clean of savings, I got evicted from my apartment in Silverlake, an actor I was dating let me move into his house in Venice Beach, I was broke, miserable, suicidal and poor for a year, but I gave up drinking and started screenwriting (that was unrelated). I earned about 5k in 2009 and was supported - begrudgingly (I don't blame the begrudgement part, bit annoying to have me end up on your bill) - by the actor. I was homeless for most of 2009, living on sofas etc - end of 2009 I wrote a script which never got made but gave me enough cash to rent a place in Venice with two former junkies. I got a dog called Mr Chips, I wrote a few more scripts, I wrote two plays, I suddenly started earning money, and then I stopped earning money when Camden council slapped me with a 7.5k GBP bill for major works on the flat I own in London. So now I'm still living in Venice, but moving back to London in March for work. And in case you're wondering, I'm still not drinking, and I'm still broke, but I've managed to reduce the Camden bill down to 4.5k. However, now I need to find 714 bucks before the start of January to pay for a flight back to London so I can do this TV drama pilot scheme for a UK channel. Yes, they are paying me. But they won't pay me until I hand the script in, come June.

So that's what's happened so far in my life. I didn't write this thing for a while as I've been writing other stuff and generally scraping by through life and every time I write, I seem to piss someone off, and it gets a bit much sometimes. It's quite hard for even me to believe I'm meant to be clever as I do end up in some shit.

Anyway, I'm in Venice, California. I live with my dog, and Billy (63) and Lori (40) the nicest people on earth. I'm no longer dating the actor. I have debt but it's going down. I still do yoga everyday and I don't drink or do drugs, but I'm quite happy about you lot doing it, so feel free. All I want for Christmas is enough money to get my flight home so I can schmooze with the TV lot and write a pilot and make some money.

Yes, I am accepting donations through PayPal.

Some guy called Rocky Roads just called me. I must go attend to his call.

California Dreaming

2010-11-28T03:27:00.003-05:00

Exactly five years ago I was working in Scores and a chick from Flash Dancers got stabbed and killed and Eton's bro OD-ed and died. Weird thought.

Tonight I'm writing with my dog in my lap, listening to my neighbors dance downstairs, and California's blowing through my window, and I'm thinking where next, where next...

In Defense of Hookers

2010-04-29T19:02:00.000-04:00

Let us start off with a simple statement which precludes analysis, debate or discussion: Give a man pussy on a plate, and he's gonna take it. I'm not interested in why Tiger did it, what motivates Hef, whether soccer players are ever capable of keeping their dicks in their pants, why some men pay for it and others don't. Doesn't interest me. From my bleak, subjective standpoint, I'm working from the crude assumption that man in general is not going to say no when presented with a willing, pliable female who may or may not be hotter than the official girlfriend or wife back home.

That sorted, let us move swiftly on.

The 'other' woman in these affairs fascinates me. I can't figure out if this is a consequence of media-portrayal, or my own past as a stripper, but it seems that the professional sex worker - more specifically, the hooker - seems to emerge unscathed from sex scandals with a bizarre kind of dignity intact, a perpetuation of their illusory, mysterious, night-time selves. While the right wing may condemn the morality of selling sex for financial gain, on the whole, I'd hazard a guess that we as a public get it. It's a simple transaction: I give you cash, you suck my cock, and variations upon this theme. It makes sense. We can see there is an evident exchange of goods going on here. I can't help but admit to a certain admiration for those such as Ashley Alexander Dupre, Spitzer's call girl, Belle de Jour or the sweet-natured teenager Zahia Dehar, who was making up to 30k USD a month as a prostitute in Paris.

"I love them all," proclaimed Zahia to the press, breaking the silence hanging over the news that among her clients are prominent French footballers who may face jail time for paying for sex with a girl under eighteen. Her magnanimous and wonderfully French effusiveness probably paves the way for a torrent of outraged articles from middle-aged feminists on the deluded nature of these poor females selling their bodies and their souls to earn that Birkin bag. But Zahia, Dupre and Belle rise effortlessly above ideological condemnation, because in this age of shameless self-promotion, celebrity, reality TV and the relentless quest for exposure, the position of prostitute is a simple and honest one. Compare Zahia, Dupre and Belle, none of whom actively sought media exposure, (Belle's understated outing as Brooke Magnananti was the height of grace) to the bevy of brainless, big-boobed idiots smiling inanely for the paps, feeding into their own demise and criticism, suckered into a perpetuating lie that there's no such thing as bad press. Ladies, learn from young Zahia. That's how to handle the media.

Men go to prostitutes because the transaction is cut-and-dried. The code of silence surrounding sex work means the chance that one's indiscretions are revealed by a woman blabbing to the tabloids is sorely lessened. Admitting to being a prostitute, to me, implies an honesty that Tiger's bevy of sluts didn't possess. They all knew he was married, he travelled, he was a superstar sportsman. Do we really believe that any of the women he cheated on Elin with actually believed that what they had with him amounted to a relationship based on anything more than sex and mutual using?

These types of women are the worst. They're amateurs. They understand the basic distinction between sex and love but claim not to, perhaps because they're in denial with themselves about their motives, perhaps because they're obsessed with the media representations of themselves. Let my hypothetical husband screw a prostitute any day over these rank amateurs with their lack of morals.

Amateurism is not confined to the multiple tabloid mistresses feigning affection for their married man. It's spread to everyday life. Recently a girl - Alison - I had struck up a friendship with disappeared off the radar, only to reappear, drunk, outside my boyfriend's house at 11pm, calling him ten times in a fury because he was with me. My boyfriend (of a year) and I had broken up for a couple of months at one point, and I found out that she had dated him for ten days or so during this time. I recall having a coffee with her when she grilled me about my then-ex, feigning sympathy with my heartbreak and grilling me about my relationship. Unknown to me, she was going on her 'first date' with him later that evening. He ditched her after a couple of dates, and we reunited a month later. At no point was he made aware by this girl that she had an acquaintance and friendship with me. However, seemingly oblivious to the irony of the situation, she pursued him for four months afterwards, hanging around his house like a vapid blow-up doll with stalker tendencies, running around offering to make him dinner and fetch him groceries.

Like I said, the point of this article is not to examine the man's motives, or assess man's blame, for infidelity or otherwise. It's evident that my boyfriend is a cock for dating a woman with a mouth like a combine harvester, the IQ of a pea and the morals of an alligator. In all honesty, these two broken people deserve each other. But to my way of thinking, only a disgusting person would relentlessly pursue another woman's man, ex or otherwise, fresh out of a grueling stint in rehab, with a frank disregard for anyone's feelings but her own. This woman works in a predominantly female industry. I wonder whether her job prospects would be improved should a google search provide the information that blond, British, Alison ----- of Venice Beach, CA has proven herself to be a rank amateur when it comes to the unwritten rules of sex and love, the unwritten codes concerning female solidarity.

Women who kiss-and-tell, women who have affairs with married men, women who boost their self-esteem with sex and cry love to assuage their conscience, women who use sex as revenge, women who pursue off-limits men.... Women's immorality in the 21st century seems to be perpetuated by sex scandals involving females who'd scream blue murder if you referred to them, even vaguely, in connection to the prostitute title. Perhaps because they misunderstand the basic honesty of this position and confuse their own immoral motives with a purity of purpose that simply does not exist. Love doesn't come into the equation with these reptiles. It's simply about self: selfishness, self-promotion, self-satisfaction. Female solidarity is kicked carelessly to the kerb in its pursuit.

It seems strange to me that so much female venom is directed towards women in the sex industry, as if they are the ones with designs upon your husband, desperate to get your boyfriend in the sack. Yet they are the ones who never confuse the transaction. For a price, Belle, Ashley and Zahia give men what they want, provide a fantasy that is unsustainable in the real world, and then leave them alone to carry on with their lives. The real danger to your marriage is lurking under an insidious coating of normal, bleating pathetically that they've been used when the shit hits the fan, when they've been rejected or their selfish demands have not been met. The professionals, however, are the ones who can smile to the camera, say with genuine affection, 'I love them all', and retire gracefully, to sleep easy at night, knowing that whatever they did with your man, it was better them than a rank amateur who might have pulled that house of cards called 'a relationship' down. I learned more about sex and love in a strip club than I ever did on the dating circuit, from the pages of 'Us Weekly' or from my fellow females.

Prostitutes of the world: I salute you. Should my hypothetical husband ever stray, I pray that he wanders into your professional midst, you fuck him hard, send him home STD-free, and that I never, ever know about it.

No one Ever Really Dies

2010-04-27T18:18:00.004-04:00

On January 24th 2008, in the midst of her well-publicized breakdown, Britney Spears made two late-night trips to Rite-Aid, followed by her usual baying pack of personal paparazzi. In the videos her face looks puffy, ill. The lips are thick and slimy, two badly painted snails crawling limply, shell-less, across a pale, bloated face. Her hair is dark this time, and seems to be receding across a greasy scalp. She wears oversize Chanel sunglasses, a shapeless black tank top, an ornate gold-and-black jacket. She walks out of Rite-Aid with two staff, a man and a woman. The man, short and a little porky, wearing sweats and a baseball cap, waspishly attempts to usher the waiting paps away while Britney smiles briefly, regal, distant, a little coquettish; basking in the flash of lights ricocheting off her reflective lenses.

The video jumps to Britney sitting in her car in the parking lot. She is behind the wheel. The window half-lowered, she runs her fingers through stringy hair, twists it into a careless ponytail, messy and unfettered. She reaches for a packet of Marlboros in the glove compartment. “Damn Brit, you look good, though,” says one of the paps, a sycophantic fabrication somewhat diluted by the qualifier “though” which suggests, “despite” hinting at the unspoken theater played out in this late-night freak show, this circus, this cheap number: the ridiculous puppetry in the complicity between hunter and prey.

Britney sits, eyes averted, that same smile playing upon distended lips. Her reluctance to drive away invites the waiting paps to attempt conversation.

“Are you sad, Britney?” one asks.

“Oh no, I just need to get home,” comes the response, in an odd, convoluted, affected British accent.

“No I’m talkin’ about Heath Ledger. You sad about that? 28 years old, two year-old daughter…”

“Oh,” she murmurs nasally, and the oh is protracted, reflective, almost surprised. In that same jolly, comforting British cadence, she responds flippantly, reassuringly, simply - as if she cannot believe this has not occurred to anyone else - regarding the tragedy of Heath Ledger’s prescription drug overdose.

“He’s still here.”

“He’s still here?” The pap sounds confused.

Britney turns around and fiddles with her purse in the backseat of the car, attempting to retrieve a light.

“Oh, yes.”

That elongated, gently surprised oh. Britney turns back, lighter in hand, and glances sideways at the camera through those oversized Chanel sunglasses, droplets of rain still clinging to the half-lowered window, windscreen wipers swishing rhythmically from side to side.

“No one ever really dies.”

Britney lights a cigarette.

Two New HuffPo Pieces

2010-03-11T16:02:00.003-05:00

More articles at the Huffington Post

The last time I got paid for work was December 1st.

The thing about being freelance is you work all the damned time but no one ever pays you. If I had all the money I was owed I'd be able to live an OK life for a year. As it is I keep staring at 2 dollars in my bank account and getting my friends to feed me. Fucking sucks.

Rant over, bitterness forgotten, back to work. Chips is very happy right now, mange gone, just been neutered, full of the joys of life. He eats far better than me (brown rice and organic chicken) so the little fucker had better be happy.

Shiloh Jolie-Pitt: Shameless Cross-Dresser

2010-03-06T11:42:00.001-05:00

I have a twin sister. We shared a womb, a gender and eyes which have been described as "like rugby balls." However, when we were around three years old, my sister declined to wear female underwear, and insisted on dressing in what we Brits refer to as 'Y-fronts' - men's tighty whities. She adopted a male name. I can't remember what it was, but for the sake of this article, let's call her Barry. Barry told everyone she was a boy. She insisted on it, and my parents, smitten by their youngest offspring, bowed down weakly to her fervent, masculine demands. Barry played with Action Men (her favorite was an armless black storm trooper called Steve) and spurned My Pretty Pony. Barry sneered at dresses and favored flannel shorts over her tighty-whities. Barry sometimes pulled the dog's tail and liked to make mud-patties. Barry's playmates all had peni.

In later years, the damage this indulgence had wreaked was clear. My sister Barry never achieved the dizzy pinnacle of feminine heights that I had climbed. She never, like me, became a stripper and dated abusive crack addicts and suffered from anorexia and an obsession with yoga. Barry went to Oxford, got a first class degree, and is now studying for an MFA in Film at Columbia.

My sister Barry is normal.

Which is why I am totally in agreement with Life & Style's insightful cover story on Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, that shameless little gender-bender.

"Shiloh is pushing the boundaries of a tomboy look and crossing over to cross-dresser territory," Alana Kelen, senior fashion stylist at VH1, tells Life & Style, and I cannot agree more. The female offpsring of stars have a responsibility to their fans and the media machine to develop childhood drug addictions, eating disorders, obsessions with shopping and designer (appropriate gender) clothes, such as slut heels for three year-olds. We get plastic surgery, we comprehend body dysmorphia. This is what we, as a public, demand of our starlets. I can only say that it's a disappointment to find out Shiloh Jolie-Pitt's major transgression seems to be boy's clothes.

Let's set it out clear for celebrity parents, we want our female starlets to be:

1. Stupid

2. Famine-Skinny

3. In possession of a DUI before the age of 18

4. Wracked with insecurities and complex psychological problems

5. Straight

6. Lesbian only if they look like they stepped out of a porn movie (eg. Tina Tequila, Lindsey Lohan)

7. At the mercy of the dictates of fashion

8. Addicted to alcohol, prescription drugs and / or illegal substances

"Little girls have never been women before," Glenn Stanton, director of Family Formation Studies at the conservative organization Focus on the Family, tells Life & Style in a breathtakingly astute comment that I urge you to reread to yourself, over and over, because it is genius. "They need help, they need guidance of what that looks like. It's important to teach our children that gender distinction is very healthy."

Why have Brad and Angelina not liposuctioned their child, gotten her hooked on Xanax and given her breast implants already? Her outfit is appalling! She looks so dowdy! What if Shiloh turns out to be.....

normal?

Or what if the constant negative media-attention from glossy mags desperate to sell copies by ridiculing a child and impinging upon a family's privacy gives her the kind of issues we seem to demand of female stars for our own crass consumption? Will we be happy only if we see Shiloh with the kind of issues celebrities should, by our own negative media standards, have?

HuffPo

2010-02-23T00:37:00.000-05:00

My latest tyrannical rant about people who can't write.

Back in Venice

2010-02-06T21:50:00.003-05:00

So sorry for the radio silence - my laptop was stolen in San Francisco (valet parked car in hotel, hotel forgot to valet car, car broken into, lawsuit against hotel pending...) and I've only just received the insurance check to replace everything. It was a bummer at the time, but having a nice new Mac nearly makes up for the inconvenience.

Chips is doing really well. He's on the strong meds (Ivermectin), and when he finishes a 90 day course he'll go back to the Vets to have another skin scrape to determine if the mange has gone. Thank you so much for your donations to his mange fund! I would post pics but the camera went in the break-in. Soon though!

I'm back in Venice beach after a thousand mile road trip south (Portland - San Francisco - Los Angeles), followed by a long day shooting an indie movie, and then a flight to New York to talk to some peeps about a screenplay I'm writing this year. All very exciting and I feel very blessed in this shitty, recession-ridden economy to have work. Many people are still really struggling - most of my friends in Portland and Venice are on benefits at the moment and we're all (myself included) going through those long hard weeks where you make five bucks last as long as humanly possible, trying to field all the calls from collection agencies, not freaking out you're on one meal a day. Thank fuck I don't drink, that's one less expense to worry about. Though a glass of red wine to forget about the world really does sound appealing right now. Please don't flood my inbox with concerned emails, I'll stick to the camomile tea.

I moved into a great new apartment courtesy of my friend Jules. It's meant to be temporary while she goes to New Orleans, but I'm hoping she'll let me stay longer than the intended three months. It's the first time in a while I've felt peaceful and whole anywhere. Portland OR certainly did a lot to heal a few big rents and tears I'd accumulated in the last year. Love and thanks to my very patient friends and family up there who helped me out a lot.

Life is quiet and good - writing, hanging out with Chips, getting my head down and seeing where the writing takes me. I loved New York and missed it very much when I was back last week, but I need to make some decisions based on writing rather than the heart. And I filled out a lot of application forms in 2009 which may lead me to some interesting new places this year...

Here's an article I wrote on Venice Beach which just came out in the UK's The Observer. Any ideas for travel pieces in and around the US, then email them to me.

More Mange

2010-01-10T13:42:00.002-05:00

I have $116 dollars! Still a way to go. Chips' mange has improved in that the infection has gone but the mange is still there, so he needs to go on this horrible oral med called Invectin or something which can make dogs very sick. Bit worried about it but that damned mange hasn't gone...

If you have any spare dollars please donate to Chips' mange fund using the paypal button....

Mr Chips' Mange Update

2010-01-07T17:42:00.003-05:00

Two lovely readers have sent me eighty pounds so far - thank you so much! Just a little bit more to get his treatment...

Mr Chips is lying in bed feeling very sorry for himself right now.

Mr Chips' Mange

2010-01-07T16:18:00.005-05:00

I just spent my new Capital One card on my puppy's mange.

Sadly it hasn't improved and I have to go back to the vet for a stronger oral med. and topical cream - probably about 200 bucks - but I'm broke until mid Feb when I should get a check from some travel journalism I did for The Guardian. Yep. I know I'm always broke. But if any doglovers out there would like to contribute to Chips' vet fund it would really help him - there's a paypal link on the right.

Mr Chips is, without doubt, the best dog in the world (all 3.2 pounds of him), even if he has cost me about 2 grand since I rescued him on Venice beach in September.

Celebrity - Hollywood's Crack Habit?

2010-01-07T14:38:00.001-05:00

This article was too mean for the HuffPo! Guess you can't piss off those celebs too much...

Mariah Carey shuffles uneasily up to the podium with the confidence of someone who knows that given the chance, we would snap the sinews off her bones and consume them. We might spend a considerable amount of time rooting through layers of fat to get to said sinews, but we would persevere. Her piggy little body is encased in black glittery couture that hinders her movements, giving her the air of a constipated mermaid. But Carey is sublime, radiant -- seemingly ignorant that she walks like someone who has been brutally sodomized by a kebab.

Footage of Casey Johnson is unearthed, talking to an interviewer about the impending adoption (of her now motherless) three year-old Kazakhstani daughter. Her face is petrified, frozen by juvederm and botox, two sluglike, injected life-preservers-that-used-to-be-lips mumbling inanities about the "billions of orphans out there who need homes".

As celebs take to twitter to bestow upon their minions heartfelt pearls of wisdom dredged up from the fog of their pharmaceutically-fucked brains, the pantomime of celebrity is played out elsewhere, in Thailand with those who don't-give-a-flying, in artfully-posed shots of horror and despair upon yachts in St Barts, in pressing questions about hair extensions and other issues of vital importance.

Samantha Ronson writes (on twitter, of course, celebs don't write anyplace else), that she is "so sick of those 3 letters [RIP], so tired of losing friends to something as senseless as a drug overdose". The problem is not, as Samantha Ronson implies, that drugs are the problem, are the addiction, are the downfall of the Hollywood elite. It's simply that celebrity is the new drug, and the public are their dealers.

Casey Johnson, case in point. For someone as bonkers, as talentless and as fucked-up as Casey Johnson, an unexpected and tragically squalid death has led to the kind of fame and exposure Casey yearned for most of her life. It must suck just to be a heiress when all your friends have their own reality show. The front page articles and reams of twitter eulogies provoked by her death are a publicist's dream. Her fiance, Tila Tequila, seems to be selflessly riding the death train on her behalf, constantly asking for 'privacy' on her twitter account, before twittering yet again (about her grief and need for privacy), and then giving interviews to TMZ (during this same period of privacy and mourning) about her deep and profound grief. She follows this up with a very public twitter catfight with the reptilian Perez Hilton about her 'personal loss' and his lack of respect for this.

Reality shows and TMZ and twitter and trashy weeklies have reduced celebrity to whichever car crash looks the most brutal, has the most victims. Rarely do we pick up a magazine or trawl through the internet to look for a well-balanced, successful person in the entertainment industry who has a happy marriage, lives in a modest, subdued mansion, has respectable accolades, a stable career, loving friends, a loathing for plastic surgery and an enjoyment of the simple pleasures in life, like walking through the garden or shopping at Trader Joe's. Fuck these people. They can have their Oscars and we'll clap them on the back, but their stability is boring. These people survive the Hollywood cesspit because they have the talent and the contentment to ride through it. They are probably happy, relatively at peace with the world, and rarely feel the need to reassure us of this fact in print. They are, let us say, the normal enjoying the privilege of stardom without succumbing to the small print of celebrity. These people exist to star in great movies, direct and produce amazing films, write superb books - they are Julianne Moore, Marion Cotillard, Matt Damon, Scott Rudin, Scorsese, Aronofsky, Toni Morrison to name but a few - and then fade away into their private lives, leading the path of exposure clear for the hungry and the talentless.

The hunger of celebrity is astounding. If celebrities were people (they are not) they would have a spiritual eating disorder, constantly chowing down on attention to feed their starving souls. The ego is bulimic. It swallows attention, it vomits it right back up again, leaving a foul taste in the mouth. It allows Mariah Carey to stand on a podium looking like a fool spouting inane crap in the bizarre conviction that anyone is interested. We are. It leads to public tantrums and breakdowns and self-inflicted tragedies, with a helpful tip-off to the baying pack of paparazzi who are always hanging around waiting for the publicists to call. These same 'celebs' complain bitterly about the price of fame, how they are hounded by the public and the paps, because acting like they didn't pre-arrange that photo opp gives off the impression that they aren't hungry. No one wants to look hungry. If you look hungry you end up where Casey Johnson is - famous for being dead - or where Tila Tequila is - famous for being nearly married to a rich dead person - and even though that's better than nothing, it's not ideal. It'd be better to be famous for being famous and talented when you're young, then screwing up, and then reinventing yourself with a critically acclaimed film - a la Mickey Rourke. Or being famous and talented when you're young, screwing up, and then reinventing yourself by adopting third-world children (because America doesn't have any eligible kids for adoption, right?)

For the talentless, selling one's soul for fame in whatever goddamn way possible is probably the most feasible route. The tools for shameless exposure are numerous: twitter, Us Weekly, rehab for drug/sex addiction, fucking a married celeb, or a stint on a reality show.

I'm so over being told that, as a young writer in Hollywood, I should do a shitty reality show to 'gain some exposure'. I should hang out with the 'right' people, frequent the Chateau, and never reveal my pitiful finances to the world lest I appear too hungry. I should perhaps, for guaranteed career advancement, develop a crack / oxycontin habit and freeze my face into a permanent expression of 'oops! not that hole!' so that no one knows I am actually thirty.

I don't buy the shit mags. I don't give a fuck about the crazies. I don't click on the links to watch the videos of these useless people burbling about themselves and wasting my time. I refuse to be an enabler of these idiots who invariably die in bed alone. I resist absolutely the urge to be part of the celebrity addiction.

Does this article count as a relapse?

Latest HuffPo Piece

2009-12-21T15:57:00.001-05:00

Brittany Murphy and the Hollywood Fishbowl

America in Crisis

2009-12-14T15:17:00.001-05:00

I wrote about chihuahuas and loneliness this week....

Elin and Tiger

2009-12-08T20:49:00.002-05:00

Elin and Tiger: A Just Invasion of Privacy, my first Huffington Post blog, has gone up. Please feel free to comment. I don't allow comments on this blog so it's your chance to let rip over there.

Huffington Post

2009-12-06T19:13:00.002-05:00

I'm blogging over at the Huffington Post these days. Email me if you've got any suggestions for topics.

I'll post the link for my first blog when it's up.

Rest In Peace Devin Petelski

2009-10-19T23:53:00.008-04:00

I live at the intersection of Venice Blvd and Glyndon Avenue in Venice Beach. On Thursday 15th October 2009, I went to bed early - about 11pm. I woke up briefly when I heard a horrific screech of breaks and a terrifying crash - but to be honest, when you live in Los Angeles, you hear this stuff all the goddamn time and you learn not to pay attention to it. I've never been in a city so rife with traffic accidents.

Just before 1am on Friday 16th October 2009 I woke up again as my puppy needed to pee, and when I walked into the living room my roommates were standing there looking shocked and shaken. "How the fuck did you sleep through that?" Rob asked me. "A girl just got killed right outside our apartment."

We went outside together and a mangled black BMW was sitting inches away from my Mercedes Benz parked on the South-East corner of Venice and Glyndon. My car was covered in glass and detritus, but was otherwise completely, miraculously, untouched. The BMW was completely caved in on the driver's side, and facing the wrong way. A cop car was on the sidewalk, at the steps to our apartment, smashed against a tree and with a broken sign next to it. Three fire engines were on the opposite side of Venice Blvd, and there were about ten cop cars.

Rob had told me everyone had been ordered off the sidewalk and into the apartments when the crash had happened, and only now were they being allowed outside. I walked down to my car and spoke to a female cop. She said the girl in the black BMW was in bad shape and they didn't know if she was still alive. Perhaps she had been drunk, she said. The cops had walked out of the car but had been taken to hospital with broken arms and concussion. She didn't know whose fault it was. I took some pictures and we hung out on the balcony to our apartment block watching the cops start to arrest a bunch of Mexican guys and lead them away. This confused us. Were they in some way responsible for this horrific crash? What had gone on? Was the driver of the BMW drunk as some of the cops implied? Why had the cop car t-boned the BMW as it eased out from Glyndon Avenue attempting to turn right on Venice?

I took some pictures with my cellphone and eventually went to bed at 3am.

The next morning I found out my friend Krysta had been a passenger in a car traveling right behind the cop car. Her friend Zach had been driving her home. They had seen everything. Krysta said the cop car had been traveling at speed on Lincoln with its lights on, and then had turned onto Venice, turned its lights off but had maintained the same speed - in excess of 50mph - and had veered into the kerb lane. It had then t-boned the black BMW easing onto Venice Blvd from Glyndon. Krysta maintained the driver of the black BMW had not been at fault. She and Zach had gotten out of the car to assist the girl in the BMW who was unconscious. Apparently ten or twelve cop cars then turned up to attend to the cops - but no one attended to the unconscious girl who was still trapped in the BMW, until Krysta started screaming at them. Zach was an off-duty EMT guy so he gave the girl medical assistance. She could not breathe on her own. It was only 10 or 15 minutes after the accident that an ambulance arrived, and according to witnesses, it departed at leisure without its emergency lights on. At this point the girl was still alive but in critical condition.

The story got worse. It turned out the driver of the black BMW was a friend of many of my friends - she had been working as a counselor at a recovery center on Glyndon Avenue until late at night. She had left the center, driven down the road, and had then been subject to this horrific accident. Later that day - I think if I'm correct, on Saturday - the girl's life support was turned off and she passed away. Four of her organs were successfully used in transplants to save four anonymous people across the US. The girl's name was Devin Petelski and she was a 25 year-old Los Angeles native with two years sobriety who helped other addicts in their recovery and was in her last year at Grad school. Thirty minutes before the accident Devin had been on the phone to her father, who had just told her he had managed to find the money to pay for her last semester of college.

Looking online at the reporting on the accident, I was immediately struck at the discrepancy of the news reports, many of which seemed to imply Devin had been responsible for the accident. None mentioned the speeding cop car with no lights on. No reports mentioned why it took seconds for ten or twelve cop cars to turn up at the scene, but 10 - 15 minutes for an ambulance to arrive. Some reports suggested the cop car was responding to an emergency call - if this was the case, why did it have no lights? Other reports referred to a bus which had apparently pulled over on Venice Blvd, obscuring Devin's view as she tried to turn right - but this bus was not noticed by any eye witnesses, nor was it made clear why this bus might have been allowed to leave the scene of such a horrific accident. Many reports said Devin had gone through a red light at Glyndon, omitting the fact there are no red lights on Glyndon Avenue - only a stop sign. Others suggested there was a white van which had driven through the accident scene.

I don't know what the truth is, but I do know Devin Petelski was a sober, intelligent, beautiful, loving girl who shared many of my good friends here in Venice. Her hospital reports show that she was indeed free of any intoxicants or drugs of any kind at the time of the accident. I know that Glyndon Avenue is full of speed bumps and it's impossible to build any speed on that road. I know that the way the accident scene looked, it was clear that her car was hit at high velocity by the cop car. I know that it must be a heartbreaking thing for her family to have to wonder why that ambulance didn't arrive sooner, and why an off duty EMT guy who was a civilian witness had to keep their daughter alive while ten or twelve cop cars attended to the cops in the other car - victims who were luckily able to walk free from their wreckage while Devin could not.

This was a terrible, horrific night for many, and what's worse is the fear that LAPD will be unable to carry out a fair and unbiased investigation into the accident. The implications of this can be seen clearly here.

I was outside my apartment block today where many of Devin's friends, family and loved ones gathered to pay their respects. There was sadness, there was anger, but there was also joy and happiness that their beloved Devin had helped save four people's lives despite losing her own. I think all any of these people want now is a fair and unbiased investigation into what, exactly, happened that night on Venice Blvd and Glyndon Avenue. Was this a police joyride that went tragically wrong? Is there some kind of strange cover-up going on? Responses to news reports have been overwhelmingly in agreement that the cops were at fault - though a few unpleasant internet trolls have made their own untrue assumptions.

I have to say, my faith in an institution that is meant to protect the people has been radically shaken since I arrived in America in 2005. Like many people who didn't know Devin but saw the strange aftermath of this tragedy unfold, and have seen the grief and the pain of those left behind, I would like to know the truth, and I would like to believe that the justice system in this country will uphold the rights of an individual against the establishment when the establishment has acted in error. The people have a right to know the full facts. To know why those random men were being arrested at 1am at the scene of the accident. To know why a speeding cop car - which may or may not have been responding to a call - did not have its lights on. To know why it took so long for an ambulance to attend to an unconscious girl in a critical condition.

If you or anyone you know was a witness to this horrific tragedy, or saw the immediate aftermath of the crash, please email family friend Christopher Medak at Guvnor@mac.com

Rest in Peace Devin. I'm sorry I never got the opportunity to meet you. Thank you for touching so many lives while you were living, and after you have passed.

Habit

2009-07-30T21:14:00.002-04:00

"I dated this chick, right, and she loved me, she cared about me, she worried about me, she wanted the best for me."

"That's fucked up."

"I know. I had to end it."

Abbots Habit, July 28th, 2009

Months later I’ll be sitting outside a coffee shop on Abbot Kinney Boulevard on a hot July day, talking to an artist friend of mine about love, and where that takes us. Love, she insists, does not happen after thirty. What happens then is merely familiarity and comfort, a cosy feeling of acquaintance, a false sense of intimacy and affection that serves to stave off the void for a little longer. It is, perhaps, telling, that this friend is an ex-heroin addict, someone intimately acquainted with the void and the filling of, someone that has now gone sober and crawled back from the mouth of hell to sit in paradise on Abbot Kinney Boulevard, to acknowledge that whatever happens in this sober life, whatever perception we make of our own experience, it is always, somehow inadequate in comparison to that chemically induced manipulation of our senses which passed for pure ecstasy, and that having filled the void so easily then, we will spend a lifetime merely gesturing limply towards that fact, disabled and mute without our tools of alcohol and drugs to rely on.

We sit, she and I, contemplating life on Abbot Kinney Boulevard on a hot summer’s day, sipping iced coffee and smoking cigarettes, at peace with what we know, what we have learned from our stories, our narratives, our past: that real life is always inadequate until the retelling of it makes it glorious, victorious, tragic and beautiful. That real life is never enough for us writers and artists. That we have to capture it in the realms in which we rule - conquer it, dictate it, crush it, reform it: and yet in the end, we are always, ironically, its slave.

Saturday Night

2009-07-12T02:35:00.003-04:00

I never wanted the night to end, those gloriously liquid LA nights. When the sun rose I'd still be there, clutching a bottle of Veuve, staring into the hills, ignoring supine bodies petrified with cocaine stirring restlessly in nightmares I was unwilling to have. The night didn't end for me, it never fucking ended. Now I want the night to end. I hate the fucking night. It's full of ghosts and dreams, whispers and taunts, and when I wake up it's to an empty bed and feelings so acute that being awake is like a permanent scream.

I saw someone from New York in an AA meeting today. I stared at him a long time and then I went over to say hi. He didn't recognize me without the fake blond hair. I guess he only knew Mimi, come to think of it. Last time I saw him was Billy Marks circa 2005, and here we were, sitting together in a fucking AA meeting in Venice Beach, California: two burnt out writers, ass-fucked by life, sadly, confusedly sifting through memories of times when we didn't give a shit, because now we did, and it hurt pretty bad.

I realized the other day that I spent thirty years waiting for life to start, without ever fucking realizing it had.

That kind of sucked.

Crescent Heights

2009-06-03T16:13:00.000-04:00

In some ways, I suppose, our addiction is not just to a substance but to the exotic conditions surrounding that substance: the intricacy of plotting where to meet the dealer at what time to least arouse suspicion, the adrenalin of finding a liquor store across town so that you don’t bump into someone from rehab, the ambrosiac taste of a beer in a dive bar at the precise moment some fat idiot drones ‘Keep coming back…’ in a striplit community center, balancing his styrofoam cup of coffee between quivering thighs. Similarly, we become addicted not just to the affect of the drug, but to the grandiosity of our own sublime, majestic tragedy: the sunlight filtering through blinds, lighting up dust motes settling on skin ashy and gray, stretched taut against a hollow skull, a body beaten, defeated and whimpering as the comedown grips hold. Vile and loathful we may be, but there is something about what others view as pitiful, as the lowest of the low, as filthy and execrable, repulsive and inhuman, diseased and outcast, that appeals to us passionately, and once we have glimpsed the quickest path of descent, we are racing down it gaily like children on some grand 1950s adventure story - Biggles does Blow, Nancy Drew and the Missing Crack Pipe - at once hating, loathing, despising ourselves, at once adamant that nothing in sobriety could ever taste quite as delicious as our own spectacular, superb self-destruction.

Girl, Undressed

2009-06-02T19:54:00.002-04:00

'No Man's Land' came out in paperback - but it's got a new cover and a new title. Join my fbook group!

I'm writing a script of 'Alice in Wonderland' at the moment, and it looks like a kid's book I'm adapting into a movie is just about to get greenlit. Good times.

fate

2009-03-26T22:38:00.003-04:00

I have this friend, Bob. He's sixty or so. I met Bob in Colorado working on the Obama campaign. I didn't like him as he smelled and always had his ass hanging out his pants and kept going on about Roosevelt and giggling a lot. But then we became friends and I drove him everywhere in my goddamn money-draining fucking Mercedes and we used to scrabble through the office to find quarters until we had enough for a packet of cigarettes. Bob still calls me occasionally. Last time he called it was sometime after christmas and he was drunk and holed up in a motel with some woman called Shanice he'd just met. He seemed happy. Bob had a sweet deal running weed and mushrooms to Chicago and San Francisco. He grew them for some drug dealers in Sonoma County. Then he got caught with 20 grand of cash stinking of weed trying to board an Amtrak train in Union Station. The DEA confiscated the money and Bob was too scared to go back and tell the drug dealers he'd lost all the money so he joined the Clinton campaign, and then the Obama campaign. Bob was someone who was always fucking happy, you know those people? Always goddamn smiling away despite sitting in a pile of shit. I really wish I had that ability. Somedays it's OK and I accept there's nothing I can do except take the sofas people offer me, and the money, and keep writing the novel and hoping something will happen so I can go back to LA. But most of the time I'm anxious and pissed and I can't eat and there's nothing to do all day except stew in words and go to AA meetings with a bunch of tattooed, transgender hipsters, who are pretty awesome, but they'd be more awesome if they were in LA.

There's something to be said for not struggling against fate, but my question is, when is not struggling against what seems to be fate, instead simply giving the fuck up? It would be awesome to be happy like Bob, but I don't want to be happy with a bottle of Jack, a motel room and some chick I picked up that morning in the free clinic. I can't figure out if that's wrong or right.

Dune

2009-01-31T10:15:00.003-05:00

We spend the day in a taxi shuttling between Giza and Sakara for six hours with a wrinkled little driver who snickers audibly at our stupidity. The scene demands I laugh at Donovan as he receives an important gift from me. By the end of the day my laugh has become a hideous, emphysemic croak from all the fumes consumed through the window of the cab. I crawl into bed with advanced lung cancer, and sleep badly, gnawed on by money worries and paranoia of yet another eviction of some unknown kind, perhaps from Clive, the Hotel Lialy, or The Godfather, who can't evict me as I don't live in his house, but knowing him, he'd have a good try anyway.

I email evil roommate the next day to ask if I could get the rest of my rent back for January seeing as he has, in all fairness, evicted me and I could do with the cash (for online shopping). He tells me to fuck off, so I set my Liverpudlian family on the case. Scousers enjoy arguments and are like vicious, abused little dogs, particularly with money matters: the more one kicks at us, the more we sink our teeth into your wallet. My father emails triumphantly to report that evil roommate hung up on him after a threat of legal action. I like to see father so youthful and invigorated by dissension. I feel in many ways he would have an awfully dull retirement without me to liven it up.

My mood is foul. Cairo is cold and dirty and stressful. I grunt in monotones at Gabe and Donovan for two days, and they, sweet boys, try and appease me with chocolate and sympathy, but to no avail. It is only after a night of beer and a morning of yoga that my chemical cocktail coalesces into an uneasy harmony of Margarita-proportions, and I feel less suicidal, although still anxious to return home to California.

Cairo is a foul place. The people are nice, but still, Cairo itself is a bit shit. It attracts a certain kind of tourist: the common and the stupid. I am constantly amazed at the number of white women walking around in see-thru, skimpy outfits, seemingly oblivious to the fact they are in a Muslim country. Walking rape, I mutter when I see these women. Whores. Bitches. Gabe and Donovan look at me in consternation but I remind them I am a writer and merely a cipher for the prevailing emotions and attitudes of those around me, and in a sense, devoid of any free-will or determination of my own, and thus accusations of misogyny are completely unfounded. Also it's kind of like being a Jew. You can't be mean about Jews unless you are one, and then it's totally allowed. Ditto bitches, sorry, women.

We went to Giza to shoot today. Walking rape with a visible g-string sauntered past and the gods obviously disapproved as a raging sand storm whipped up in furious objection, and we were forced to retreat to KFC and the comfort of online shopping for consumer items we neither needed nor could afford. Cairo brings out the worst in me and my ailing credit card. Because of the sandstorm, shooting has been postponed for several days and it looks like I can't fly back to LA until Thursday, rather than Tuesday as originally planned. I hate indie filmmaking. I like order and planning and a big fuck-off trailer filled with organic foods and hot beverages and people to talk to, not a desolate corner of Egypt and public transport home.

The week stretches before me, empty, desolate, pocked only with visits to pyramids to shoot painful scenes in sandstorms, and the lure of online shopping outlets. The insanity creeps closer everyday. My editor at Penguin emails and informs me I should take a writing course with "people I really respect," not "effete snobs". I can't think of anything more conducive to self-loathing and writer's block than a room filled with a bunch of earnest, poetry-reading wankers all slathering for a chance to rip my prose to shreds and reduce me to a blubbering, self-harming, broken mess. I thank her for the advice, and steer my reply onto a different, more interesting subject. Me.

Have not heard from Clive for weeks, months, years, since Tuesday. I fear he is plotting my eviction.

The shoot rolls on, relentless and unceasing. I wonder vaguely if I really needed the black, shiny, lame yoga pants and whitening toothpaste, but fortunately I registered for free shipping because of the size of my purchases.

Cairo has been a learning experience. I feel I know myself after Cairo. It is a horrendous acquaintance, and I am looking forward to the selfish oblivion of California once again.

Children with Moobs

2009-01-27T14:44:00.003-05:00

I arrive in Cairo. Predictably, given the nature of indie filmaking, it turns out Mr Gabriel Fleming, Director, has not yet written the script.

We sit in a restaurant over chicken shawarma and debate possible plot options.

"So there's a scene where you and Donovan have to escape these two guys, and I can't figure out how you would do that..."

"Banana peel," I suggest helpfully. "Potholes. Hiding under a burqa. We both get dressed in burqa. I scream 'RAPE' and point at our pursuers and the milling crowd mob them in outrage while we slip quietly away."

"Don't be silly," says Gabe briskly. "This is Egypt. They'd probably turn around and stone you."

We all snicker and then pretend it wasn't funny because, let's face it, it was a rampantly racist joke and Gabriel should know better.

"Chunky children. Children with moobs."

"That doesn't work with the plot Ruth!"

"No, I was looking at the fat kids on that table."

An array of plump blond children wibble into the restaurant and shriek delightedly as they surround an empty table. They quiver like finely set jello.

"Shut the fuck up, I'm trying to eat!" I scream before I can stop myself.

Gabe and Donovan look at me in horror. I realize my personality problems have become more pronounced. I am plagued by paranoia and misanthropy at the moment, not helped by the constant stares you get wandering the streets of Cairo as a white woman, even when every inch of you is covered. Cairo is like a grimy Paris, full of sheeshas and dodgy mustached men and skinny dogs with curly tails. Tall twenties buildings are faded and dirty, ramshackle iron-wrought elevators shuddering and sighing to a halt in between floors. I get up after a sleepless night and wander down to hotel reception, where I sip treacly Turkish coffee in between two burqa-clad matrons and watch an episode of American Gladiators from 1987. Tracy Hutton from Texas wins the elimination round. We sit there, transfixed. The lady from reception, wearing a gaudy hijab, glides over and touches my sleeve, a gentle smile playing upon her lips.

"You must leave room. You can stay in friend's room."

"But we're not married!"

"So sorry. You go."

I am constantly being evicted. This new eviction sinks me into a deeper, ash covered gloom, shrouded by cheap cigarette smoke, heavy lidded eyes peeping over beige knitted cable sweaters, peeking and prying and watching. There's no privacy in Cairo. It's too gray. Gabe and I shuffle around town to find me a new room, and I think longingly of Clive, my infidelitous actor, and sleeping away comfortably on his sofa while his dog licks my face and he ignores me and leers at on-screen large breasted hot women.

I sleep in the new room all afternoon, and awake to a huge mosquito supping away on my blood.

Sporting a new itchy red spot on the side of my face, we regroup and go out to dinner at a fast food place which sells some kind of macaroni with spicy sauce. There seems to be a trend for the owners of such establishments to commission faux-oil-painting airbrushed portraits of themselves sporting seedy, masturbatory grins upon their faces. These are hung at all convenient wall spaces, so you are constantly being watched by multiples of lairy man as you eat. I assume the pose of one of these men, fat grin, money eyes, leaning on thumb and index finger, and a lady catches my eye and giggles appreciatively.

Thank god we start filming tomorrow. Insanity is near. Chunky children, children with moobs.

Cock.

Inauguration Day

2009-01-20T15:53:00.002-05:00

I avoided it. I couldn't go and that made me sad, so I listened to Public Radio and shed a little tear instead.

Enough schmaltz. The week has been taken up with moving, packing and running annoying errands around LA. I finally got to let loose at the weekend with a trip to the Chateau avec Le Godfather. We were immediately besieged by his boyfriend's pussy-posse, who unbeknowst to me, bombarded his boyfriend, who is currently shooting a movie in Rome, with texts such as 'Come back to LA, he's with that slut again', 'Your relationship is in danger' etc. Now as fond as I am of the old codger, the idea that I'm sleeping with him is pretty repulsive. Yes, I am extremely good at talking to old men and making them think they're attractive by laughing at their crap jokes, but I'm not so good at bedding them, so I don't. Yeurgh.

I went to Malibu at the weekend for a drink to get over the trauma and met an interesting blond lady who told me she used to be an escort and once got paid 3k for sucking (insert famous black comedian's name here) dick at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Apparently his pseudonym for such encounters was Curtis Koplin.

I am blatantly in the wrong profession.

I spent the week after this plunged into depression again. The worst thing about my depression is it takes two forms: self-pitying sloth, or self-destructive mania. I'm currently on a mania ride and have managed to insult a variety of very lovely people who I have friend crushes on, and now probably don't want to know me.

So I moved to Venice to look after Clive's dog and house. It's very fucking nice. I wish Clive would marry me, but I'm too young to be yoked to matrimony to infidelitous actors. I am still at my prime 'other woman' stage of life, as proven by the slut comments which consistently surround me. If I got laid as much as everyone thought I did, my vagina would be the size of the Chunnel by now.

In 48 hours I fly to Egypt to finish shooting the India movie. I shall keep you informed of my actions and fuck-ups.

India

2008-12-19T16:43:00.004-05:00

It looks like I'll be in India for the first half of January to be in my friend Gabe's indie movie. As I have 23 bucks in my bank account, he's paying for my flight and accommodation and visa fees, thank fuck. God knows how I'm going to make it through January with no income (bills! bills! bills!) but this is far too good an opportunity to pass up - particularly as xmas is gonna be miserable and poor this year. I'm going absolutely bonkers working in a bar six nights a week and making dreadful money right now, so fuck it, I'm going to India.

If you would like to contribute to the 'Pay a Poor Brit's January Rent so she can enjoy India' fund, feel free to click on the paypal link.

Happy Holidays....

Skylight Books

2008-12-11T18:16:00.000-05:00

I went into Skylight Books on Vermont in Los Feliz to sign some copies of the book today. Go buy them!

Recessionary Tales

2008-12-10T17:12:00.004-05:00

I arrived back in Los Angeles to find my 37 year-old 'resting actress' roommate had moved her 19 year old boyfriend into the apartment. Normally, this would not bother me, particularly since I already knew the little twat from when he'd stayed there in the summer for a couple of weeks. However, it became apparent ageing pussy had induced a degenerative effect upon his personality, and sweet 19 year-old fresh-out-of-the-midwest Marlow had now turned into an American-Apparel adorned arrogant hipster cunt. Marlow and resting actress' favorite pastime had become slowly and methodically turning a decent apartment into a cesspit of filth, hairballs, dirty dishes and unemployment checks. They wafted around in dead people's clothes purporting to have weighty discussions about art and movies and really talking absolute bollocks, eating my food and discussing their feces over breakfast ("Homes, come check this floater out"). They looked at me pitifully as I emerged from yet another chain-smoking session on the verandah, and tched lightly if I ever reached for the bottle, which I did infrequently now as I couldn't even afford a fucking Corona. The apartment had become a groundhog day of hipster judgment, and despite the kindness of resting actress, I couldn't deal with their combined craziness. They had bad vibes dude.

Yet again it was time to move on. As I was now unemployed, still waiting on several delayed checks from newspapers and absolutely bankrupt from hospital bills, auto-repair bills, overdraft charges and insurance pay-outs (Flat in London - now 10k to fix, fuckers), moving out didn't seem too likely. Until the boys next door asked me to move in with them. Two weeks back I grabbed my two suitcases, a borrowed mattress and two stolen chairs, and shuffled across the hallway to Flat 4 instead, leaving hipster hell stewing gently in filth behind me.

The unemployment thing was still getting to me. I had forty bucks in my bank account and so I tried various normal jobs until I got my freelance checks in the post. I canvassed for a homeless charity, still riding high off the Obama campaign, but discovered I had a deep-seated aversion to motivational talks and bearded wannabes waffling on about how great they were for giving up their time to help homeless people (but you get PAID you wankers, I wanted to cry. It's not selfless if someone hands you a fucking check at the end of the month). I hated knocking on doors asking people who couldn't pay their own mortgages for money for a shelter, knowing that 40% of the money I collected was going to the bearded hippies to pay for their fucking ganja. I ditched it, after a week. They didn't pay enough to keep me alive, but they paid too much for my conscience to feel good about taking donations.

I worked at a bikini bar for a few weeks. Good decor, nice people, shit money, goodbye. I started volunteering for clinical trials, swallowing vast quantities of pills for 100 bucks a week. I offered my eggs up online, but doubted privately whether anyone would want these defunct infertile fuckers. I fineagled my way into a gig interviewing some actors for Hello magazine in the UK, and spent a day clutching a voice recorder watching photo-shoots and interrogating kids about having famous parents, and I forgot, for a time, that my life was back in Silverlake freelancing for shit money, and that it wasn't this round of mansions and restaurants with beautiful people in Malibu. The photographer I worked with, Sam, brought his friend Sean along for the shoot. It turned out Sean was a paparazzi, and he offered to take me out for a few days on the job.

Sam, Sean and I cruised along Santa Monica in a blacked-out SUV clutching DV cameras and telephoto lenses. We picked our way through Bel Air and Beverly Hills, staked out hotels and restaurants and addresses in Brentwood and Hollywood and Los Feliz. We papped Dustin Hoffman, Sigourney Weaver, Jennifer Aniston, Jason Segel, Helena Bonham-Carter, Lisa Marie Presley, Matthew Broderick, Emma Watson, Noel Gallagher and I forget who else. I sat in the Chateau Marmont waiting for an up-and-coming actor to meet with a more famous actor one day, sat outside Shutters Hotel all morning for a rockstar to emerge the next. We followed people, hid in public bathrooms and bushes, behind walls and in the backs of cars, and then sometimes when some muppet Pap came along and made it too obvious, we jumped right on in and got down to hosing some inane celeb in a gang-bang of flashes and shots, wide angle lenses blinking and clicking ferociously, tempers short and vicious.

Sam and Sean were hilarious. They had morals, sure. "No sneaky-beaky's under the skirt," Sean used to say primly, but you knew, after a day or so, that when the hunt was on those morals would trickle away, and in that moment when the prey was found all that mattered was getting blood, regardless of how much it might hurt them or us. It was interesting, being so hated for a few days. A band-member of Oasis saw me with the paps and told me to fuck off in a voice dripping with hatred and venom like I was vermin, and I didn't have the heart to tell him I was just there for the ride, writing about this shit for a magazine article. I guess when you're in that frame of mind where you hate life and you don't give a fuck, doing a job which instantly turns you into scum, - well it's fine isn't it. It's exactly where you want to be, exactly where you should be, exactly where you deserve to be. Being a pap for a week was perfect, in this shit black-hole of a recession.

And now I'm back to 40 dollars in my bank account, all these fucking 'projects' in the works, and meetings, and smile, smile, smile, pretend everything's OK, when of course it's not because you have bills to pay and you can't afford to even eat, and everyone around you is losing their jobs and their homes and you're just staving it off for as long as you can in the City of Angels, and all you can think is fuck, let me cash in some of my good karma now, please?