So, Forrest Black and I just went for coffee. Well, it was Starbucks, so he went for coffee and I went for ice water and conversation. I was just reading a thing about how Warren Buffet built his business and wanted to talk about some of the interesting ways he approached things. So we are talking about how insurance companies invest with your premiums and that is where most of their profits come from, and how Warren Buffet’s primary holding company Berkshire Hathaway actually failed at its primary business and no longer actually produces anything to do with what the original brand was about, and various other factoids which are intriguing, if you find business structures interesting.

At a certain point, I noticed some security guards hovering kind of close to me out of the corner of my eye and wondered if Starbucks had any special rules against people with purple and green hair discussing high finance. I couldn’t think of anything particularly awful I was doing, so I went back to my conversation, but there was still this sense of bad energy. The security guards went away, but people started shouting. As some of the people shouting were Starbucks employees, I assume security fled so they would not be witnesses to the people who worked at the shopping center braining someone with a coffee pot, if that was about to ensue. These security guys know where their paychecks come from and it is not making coffee-drinkers happy.

So apparently there was a customer there who wanted foam on his coffee or crema on his espresso or something like that. The chick who took the order didn’t really understand his question, so she answered kind of noncommittally on whether or not he could get what he wanted. When he got his order, it was not what he wanted. The barista said their machine could not do that. (This sort of thing is why I get my coffee at Intelligentsia and not Starbucks.) Instead of just apologizing to the guy and giving him his money back with a coupon, as Starbucks used to do when they were a better stock to own, the chick who took the order started screaming at the guy that he should have listened to her when he placed his order. So this dude who was behind the counter but seemed too young and clueless to be a manager came over to try to help, but, by this time, the customer was yelling about his “shitty” service and making a huge scene, while the line got really backed up with people waiting to order. The Starbucks dude, who was hopefully not a manager, took a stab at trying to calm things down, but he had this kinda rude grin on his face the whole time and seemed like he was laughing at the customer. He may have just been nervous, but it really did not help. The Starbucks at Western and Hollywood used to have a really awesome cool manager who we liked enough to give free gifts when we ran into him at a convention Blue Blood was exhibiting at, but Starbucks moved him to Vermont and Hollywood. I don’t even know if the Western and Hollywood Starbucks has a manager any more.

I know Forrest Black was pretty close to handing the customer five bucks himself and just asking the yelling guy to please leave. Instead, once the customer told the cashier, “you can kiss my ass” and she shrieked back, “you can kiss your own ass”, we decided to just leave that classy establishment. This is one of those moments where someone doesn’t realize how much accuracy is in what they were saying. When the Starbucks customer told the cashier to kiss his ass, on some level, what he really wanted was for her to treat him like a customer, rather than belittling him. I would have been opposed to another customer paying the angry customer to leave because I feel like that would just be paying off a terrorist and reinforcing that guy’s behavior where his yelling and expression of rage got in the way of everyone else’s coffee drinking ambiance and even coffee ordering. I thought the Starbucks employees could have handled things much more smoothly to stop the unpleasantness, but I also don’t think people should be rewarding for publicly crying like spoiled children in the cereal aisle and ruining other people’s experience.

People pay five bucks for a coffee because they want to relax. The thing I actually found kind of surprising was that the people behind the counter really did not seem to take any pride in their work or care if they did it well. I mean, Forrest Black didn’t have any problem with his order and I had not problem with mine, so it is not like they messed everything up or anything, but the folks who used to work there always seemed to want to excel.

Now I’ve worked at some pretty terrible jobs. Heck, there are days I come to work and just wish I still worked retail. Even when I have to work on something I do not enjoy, I do try to do it well though. I take pride in a job well done and try to do my best. Sometimes my best is nowhere near good enough, but I strive for excellence and take pride in putting in a good effort. Do you take pride in doing what you do well or at least putting forth a good effort to achieve the tasks at hand?

You know how all 80’s teen romances featured a girl the hero wanted. And you know how that girl was always romanced by some guy with a sort of overdone Kennedy scion kind of haircut, a Porsche or similar ride, and generally some country clubbish or yacht-person sort of clothing? Well, apparently whoever made the introductory Scientology film didn’t get that viewers were supposed to want to be John Cusack’s Lane Mayer in Better Off Dead and not Aaron Dozier’s ski champion Roy Stalin. It’s like rooting for the nameless college guy in the red sports car over Ilan Mitchell-Smith’s Wyatt Donnelly in Weird Science. Weird Science is apt here. More on this in a moment.

So I went to the Scientology Celebrity Centre for brunch yesterday. The building is beautiful and blocks from my house. (I had a friend pick me up in his BMW SUV because, when it came down to it, walking didn’t feel Hollywood enough for such a Hollywood moment.) Food was varied and pretty tasty. Service was friendly and adequate, but unexceptional and could have been mildly more attentive. I particularly liked the crisp waffles and the smoked salmon and capers. The regular water was excellent for Los Angeles, so they must have a good filter, and the orange juice was good enough. Say you saw the brunch in the internet and it is a discounted $25 a person for all you can eat, rather than the walk-in price of $30 a plate.

I had a good time because I went with friends. I will refrain from naming said friends, due to their general nervousness about the establishment in question. Now I have lived blocks from the Celebrity Centre for years and, after my recent Scientology sign maker widget post got such a surprising amount of attention, I thought I might want to actually check it out. So I made a brunch reservation for three people and invited seven or eight of my friends. One person who declined pointed out that perhaps the week a dude with Samurai swords got shot by Scientology security guards in the Celebrity Centre parking lot was not the best timing to extend such an invitation. (I later looked this incident up online and noted that it apparently actually took place in November of last year and not this week at all.) Only one of my pals had the good excuse of being en route to attend the Barack Obama presidential inauguration. Everyone else plead hangover or terror or similar. At any rate, my friends came through for me and exceeded expectations and we ended up being a party of four. The grounds were lovely and we were seated facing indoors, beneath a hand-painted ceiling, by a window facing a garden fountain. There was a kind of terrible easy listening cover band outdoors, but we couldn’t really hear them where we were at. Because the company was terrific and the food was yummy, we had a great lunch.

The Hollywood Celebrity Centre was initially a sort of artists hotel, from the time most noir novels are set, when people would regularly rent hotel rooms by the week. Because of the building’s beauty and history, one of my friends found someone to ask if we could take the tour I’d heard they had. A room where Errol Flynn stayed was quickly pointed out and the gentleman we spoke with also mentioned that Cary Grant had stayed upstairs. Then he ushered us briskly through a hallway, which had at least a few somewhat interesting maxims framed on the walls, and into an office where we were given little questionnaires to fill out. I found it kind of hilarious that the questionnaire included a question about whether one had heard of Scientology. I asked the manager guy we’d been introduced to how many people sitting in that room wouldn’t have? Maybe it is a multipurpose form, but a little customization would seem a lot less silly. The form also asked how I had heard of Scientology and had a long list of boxes I could tick. I made my own box and checked my write-in answer of “Live in Los Angeles”.

One of my friends asked the manager guy where his accent was from and he said Sweden. As both one of my friends and I had been to Sweden, we chatted about that a little. We told him we were a bit pressed for time but had about twenty minutes available for a tour. The Scientologists assured us twenty minutes would be fine and ushered us into a nice little screening room to watch a movie which would answer many of the questions we might have about Scientology. I wouldn’t mind having their comfortable screening room, but they miscalculated wildly with their recruitment movie.

First off, the movie shows incredible footage of spectacular Scientology buildings, including a castle in the UK used as a school. It then immediately cuts to a diatribe against materialism. Uhm, poor segue. Most importantly, all four of us work in some aspect of the entertainment industry in Los Angeles. We pretty immediately became impatient with the recruitment film’s uber-beginners approach for morons. Instead of saying much about Scientology philosophies, such as those framed on their hallway walls, the film was incredibly defensive, going on and on about how it is too a religion and quoting court decisions from multiple countries. The flick drones on interminably about how Scientology is attacked by psychology and government because it is a good replacement for government mind control. Or something like that. They really failed to communicate their value proposition. They would have done much better by actually giving us a tour where a properly trained tour guide could have gauged each of our levels of interest, knowledge, and intelligence.

Most comically, the Scientology recruitment flick had a Troy McClure who really came across like the 80’s movie preppy jerk in the Porsche who treats the female lead so shabbily. I mean, I think tie pins under the tie knot are kinda pretty and I wouldn’t mind if they came back in fashion. But they really haven’t.

Finally, we nominated one of our party to go ask when the actual tour was going to start. They apparently didn’t have enough tour guides to start immediately or something and the movie droned on, so we got up and left. On the way out, the Swedish manager came out to speak to me, perhaps guessing that I had asked for the tour hoping to find something more meaningful and intriguing than dated prep haircuts. I asked him when the movie was made. Without hesitation, he started to say “eighty-” and then cut himself off, paused, looked up and away, and said, “uh, ninety . . . ninety-five.” It is possible that they did some sort of re-edit in 1995 where they added a building acquisition to the beginning or added a postscript to the end, after the badly-acted repetitive part, and we just didn’t sit through enough of it to see the post-1986 part.

So here is my free consulting advice to Scientology: Make a new recruitment movie more often than once every twenty years. If the Church of Scientology would like further media consulting, my rates are available via the contact form on this site.

Fun fact to know and share: Ilan Mitchell-Smith, who played the cute dork who gets the girl, Wyatt Donnelly, in 1985’s Weird Science, pursued a course of medieval studies and is now a professor of English. That’s hot.

I’m not sure modern social science has an explanation for how John Hughes could have done a movie as fun and positive as Weird Science and then done all the wretched values-destroying propaganda he did afterward, so maybe Scientology can trump psychology there and come up with a plausible explanation.

So reality television shows have this creepy format thing where they bring back a season’s cast for a six month reunion. Like being on a reality show was tantamount to going to college or something and the whole class needs to get back together to reminisce and see how everybody turned out.

Admittedly, my family is kinda not into things like reunions or even graduations, so the last graduation I went to was when I finished sixth grade. I somewhat regretted not going to my own college reunion this spring when Barack Obama turned out to be the keynote speaker. So maybe I just don’t get the reunion thing, but I’m still in touch with a lot of people I went to school with. On purpose. Because I like and enjoy them. Because I shared enjoyable and life-forming experiences with them.

College does not seem much like reality TV, but VH1 did recently do a show called Charm School where rock manager extraordinaire and TV personality Sharon Osbourne and seminal nightclub impresario and TV personality Riki Rachtman were the deans. I guess the idea was to teach some manners to chicks who previously tried to date Flavor Flav or Bret Michaels or somebody like them.

One of my most embarrassing Hollywood moments, when I first moved out to Los Angeles, Forrest Black and I went over to visit sexy bassist Megan Maddox, when she was in, I think, Tairrie B’s My Ruin and possibly Taime Downe’s The Newlydeads as well, to shoot her for Tattoo Savage. A couple of other people, who I knew from Los Angeles nights on the town, were also hanging out there, and we all had the misfortune of watching Sheryl Crow do a GNR cover. So we’re all cringing and I tell some anecdote about how Guns n’ Roses changed my life. I cringed a lot more later when I finally put it together that Riki from the club was Riki Rachtman from Headbangers Ball who got the gig via Axl Rose and had a fuck of a lot more claim than yours truly on GNR being life-changing.

To return to reality television programming, still in progress, the second season of the Bret Michaels Rock of Love extravaganza definitely helped turn me off of reality TV. Aside from the way they made it painfully apparent that Bret Michaels is a sucky prize, the dude chose some generic liar chick over beautiful Tattoo Savage covergirl Daisy de La Hoya. Apparently, Bret Michaels just couldn’t get over the fact that Charles Edward from Seraphim Shock is Daisy’s ex and they still spend time together. I’ve shot Charles and he certainly is, circa 2008, a lot hotter than Bret. The Poison frontman apparently felt so threatened by a good-looking gothic guy that the show couldn’t even mention Seraphim Shock. Whatever. Although Daisy seemed to actually have inexplicably warm feelings for Bret, she demonstrably can do better, because she already has.

The reunion show for Rock of Love 2, gamely moderated by Riki Rachtman, was pretty much a horror show. A chick named Heather, who I guess competed on the first Rock of Love and advised on the second one, punched poor Daisy de La Hoya and it was my opinion that VH1, not only allowed it to happen, but was hoping it would. I felt terrible for Daisy, but, in Heather’s defense, Bret Michaels actually let Heather get his name tattooed to her throat in the first season. And then did not pick her. I think it is very bad manners to give someone the go-ahead to get a tattoo of your name if you know you are going to spurn their affections on national television.

So, although I watched none of the seasons of Charm School, I noticed that a number of people have been chortling about how the recent Charm School reunion trumped the Rock of Love reunion for catfight fetish. To make a long story moderately less long, some two-face, mean, drunk, ditzy blonde from one of the VH1 programs, made a crack about another contestant’s child. Sharon Osbourne told her that was not cool. So the drunk ditz, apparently named Megan Hauserman, made some rude cracks about Sharon Osbourne’s family and Ozzy Osbourne in specific. At this point, Sharon Osbourne demonstrated just one of the many many reasons why she is qualified to school these girls. Without a hair out of place, and without appearing to sweat or shake, Sharon Osbourne threw this red drink all over the rude bleach blonde and, although it is hard to make out in the tape above, apparently also pulled out clumps of her hair and scratched her and twisted her arm badly enough that VH1 rushed rude ditzy girl to the hospital. Normally, I disapprove of violence in disagreements, but I do think a lot of people have no sense that some things are sacred. I think that, to someone like this Megan Hauserman, nothing is sacred, so she may truly have no concept that going after someone’s son or husband is crossing a line, put there by civilization, for good reason. Those who choose to be uncivilized in that way to someone as tough and elegant as Sharon Osbourne should consider themselves lucky when they only end up clowned, with ruined hair and makeup, and an arm in a sling.

I walked by the Rock of Love 3 bus on Hollywood Boulevard this Saturday night, walking home from Pinkberry. Living in Los Angeles is surreal.

Los Angeles can be a difficult city to make deep connections with others in. I know literally hundreds of people who I genuinely like and enjoy in Southern California, but I can’t say most of them know me particularly in-depth or vice-versa. Sometimes I find it difficult to escape the feeling that every interaction is somehow tainted with business. And not in a cool getting-neat-creative-projects accomplished sort of way. A lot of people get a certain kind of bone marrow level lonely in Los Angeles and turn to drink, drugs, or specific religion.

I’ve said for years that, if I stayed in Los Angeles for long enough, I would need to end up either in AA or the Church of Scientology. I live walking distance from the Church of Scientology Celebrity Center and this may mean I am required to become a Scientologist because I have a few problems with Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous.

There are a few traits AA and NA folks tend to pick up, which I would really be disappointed to find in myself. AA people are always simultaneously telling you that they are more virtuous and goody two shoes than you and more wild with fuller and more exciting lives than yours. This is rude, but a potentially unavoidable side-effect of working the program.

Secondly, AA and NA people always make their struggle with addiction the whole narrative they hang their existence on. I know some amazingly accomplished Hollywood artists who believe the story of their lives is how they got addicted to something and then dealt with being addicts. The books they have written, music they have performed, and people whose lives they have made better are all footnotes; the real story for AA folks is the road to and from addiction. Even though most addicts relapse at least occasionally, so this self-view does not even really work from a literary narrative structure perspective.

My largest obstacle to joining AA or NA is that I don’t have a particularly addictive personality. I mean, I’ve been enjoying my iced soy lattes made with gourmet, fair trade, artisan-roasted coffee bean espresso, but it wouldn’t kill me not to have them. I love beer, but, most of the time, a beer looks too much like twenty soul-sucking minutes on the elliptical to me and I’d rather spend the calories on something else. Maybe if cocaine and heroin came in tasty beverage form, I’d look into getting addicted to one of those, but I can’t imagine the bother involved with getting into an actual habit of reverse picking my nose or sticking pins in myself. I have enough trouble getting into the habit of working out. I mean, I feel good after I exercise and picking up heavy objects and putting them down again is much less annoying than most of the modes of ingesting addictive drugs.

But I digress. The important thing is that goofy sign generators are fun. Now you can each make your own Church of Scientology sign, hit the upload option, and be sure to use one of the “Hotlink for forums” code copy/paste snippets to share your sign here.

Whenever I travel, I think about buying real estate wherever I am. I live in Los Angeles. I love my Hollywood neighborhood. Due to the peculiarities of the housing market, there are two houses on my block which have been for sale for over a year. I’d be pleased to own either one of them, but they both list at more than a mil, despite the fact that clearly nobody is rushing to pay that for either of them. So I rent. Even if I had a million and a half dollars to drop on real estate, which alas I currently do not, I wouldn’t spend it on something unlikely to appreciate and unlikely to sell for what I paid for it. This sort of thing causes me to drool at the costs for houses in Portland and even shopping malls in Baltimore. I travel and I think I could just write a check for a house in many cities yet I despair of ever buying one in Los Angeles.

But then something like Hunky Santa rolls around and reminds me why I can never leave La-La-Land. For the last half dozen years, my favorite local mall, the Beverly Center in Beverly Hills, has featured a Hunky Santa. (I probably spend more at South Coast Plaza where I get my hair cut, but that is in another county and thus does not count as local.) This year, Hunky Santa has been getting a frantic flurry of attention, way above and beyond prior years, because they cast Eli Wilhide as Hunky Santa and he is remarkably perfect for the role, in both appearance and personality presentation. According to All Things Christmas, in order to play the sexy son of Old Saint Nick, one had to best 350 other applicants for the job of Hunky Santa. Eli Wilhide brings his experience as an Anthony Robbins motivational speaker or Peak Performance Strategist to the role of Hunky Santa. Eli Wilhide certainly works at that peak performance thang, as evidenced by his diet and workout tips for the LA Times and of course the results of his regimen.

As Xmas approaches, during the week and early in the day, the Beverly Center features Classic Santa and then, on weekends later in the day, Hunky Santa and the Candy Cane girls do hourly performances thereafter. A lot of people show up for this hourly act and some dress up their dogs or children in red ribbons or Santa hats to get into the holiday spirit for the occasion. There are two huge red silks hung down multiple floors of the mall for female acrobatic Candy Cane girls to contort on. The shows also feature those dances where the chick waves the ribbon around and does impressive flexible moves, like they had during the Olympics. I admit that, here at Blue Blood Global Secret HQ, we did refer to the ribbon event as the Stripper Olympics, but I digress. The Candy Cane girls also included a particularly awesome and effervescent stilt-walker.

After each show, both Hunky Santa and the Candy Cane girls move through the considerable audience making people feel holiday cheer and just radiating a certain pleasant warmth. I think that kind of intense close-up attention would make me hyperventilate with social anxiety after a few days, but I was extremely impressed with how welcome and joyous Hunky Santa and the Candy Cane Girls were able to make shoppers feel. They really brought an upbeat vibe to an otherwise less-than-cheery holiday shopping crowd.

So I will always love that Los Angeles is the kind of place where they would be able to cast the perfect Hunky Santa and have incredibly talented Candy Cane Girls. Just for weekend performances at the mall.

So I am just clocking in for a day at the orifice, watching porn movies based on World of Warcraft. There are a group of magical “whores” on a quest to battle an evil darkness spreading through the land. The fantasy quest episodes open with some appropriately mood-setting medievalist-feeling music and then get down to doing battle or doin’ it. A demon directs a threesome. An elf gives a pirate her booty in exchange for something decent to wear. Delightfully, a magic-user, played by Bianca Dagger, makes a special prismatic rock a lil bigger for a lesbian tryst. There is a recurring motif of characters, momentarily befuddled by magic and illusion, coming to their senses and being like, “OMG, what did I just do?” The best of these is when a Paladin, played by Monica Mayhem, suddenly snaps out of it and declares that she would never fuck a barbarian . . . while his splam is still on her face.

I think that these swords and sorcery sex videos would have been perfect viewing material when I was Treasurer of Science Fiction Club in college. The sort of group experience where everybody would have gone around afterward for weeks saying, “I would never fuck a barbarian.” Which would be pretty awesome.

The Whore Lore episodes are directed by Dez and the stories are mostly by Dez and Staci with a screenwriting assist from Marcus London. Marcus London also plays a well-built, tattooed, red-cloaked rough partner for some of the whores. He looked familiar and I figured out that I didn’t recognize him for his 2007 win for Best Oral Sex Scene, but I did recognize him because he played a pornstar in a scene on HBO’s extremely porn-cozy hit Entourage.

As I go through the fantasy episodes, I realize that a bit more is familiar and not just because Forrest Black and I have shot some of the armor worn in various scenes. See, there is this castle in the Hollywood Hills which regularly has pretty notorious after-parties. It is a beautiful space, lots of fun to hang out at, and, if there is a drug you’ve never seen anyone in Los Angeles do before, it is definitely the spot to go to rectify that lack of experience. It is also a very enjoyable place to get into the sorts of intellectual conversations which are not as common in Hollywood as I might prefer. The castle peeps keep telling me I should shoot naked gothic girls there and had told me a lot of porn had been shot there (also part of Spinal Tap!) and I always thought it was odd I had not recognized any. That circumstance has also now been remedied. So about a third of Whore Lore sex scenes take place at a place where I have spent some quality late night time. And actually so have quite a few of the people who appear in Blue Blood pictures and post on the boards.

Suddenly I have a whole new perspective on the Whore Lore repetition of scenarios where people are all wondering what they did and who they slept with. Which is kinda awesome. We’ve got a free Whore Lore photo gallery for your viewing pleasure and I recommend checking out the site for the naughty stuff. But I want you all to know I would never fuck a barbarian. To the best of my recollection.

I’ve always thought that the scent of certain foods should be packaged as cologne. Who wouldn’t want to lick someone who smelled like fresh doughnuts in the morning? Baked goods in general can provoke this sense. I find Mrs. Fields cookies uninteresting as a food, but they smell so damn alluring in the mall; I just want to get close to them. Even certain frozen foods, like Stouffer’s mashed potatoes, smell like the sort of thing that could make a prospective partner’s mouth water. I’d love to have a really good coffee body spray. Heck, I want to roll around naked in a two person tub full of Intelligentsia Black Cat espresso beans.

Taking this concept one step too far, Burger King (aka the people who brought you a pervert Subservient Chicken in garters), have introduced Flame body spray for (I think) men.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and admit that, although I did used to enjoy Burger King chicken tenders, I haven’t eaten them in many many years and I never ever liked the Whopper. On school field trips as a child, I did always vote for Burger King where they sort of had food and didn’t object to leaving off the disgusting fast food spreads. BK, where I could have it my way, was clearly superior to McDonald’s where pretty much nothing, except the french fries, was remotely food. Some of my classmates would want to go to a place called Micky D’s and it took me ages to figure out this was a hip (if you are like eight-years-old) way to refer to McDonald’s.

Genius demented ad copy for the body spray scent like working in fast food:

“The WHOPPER sandwich is America’s favorite burger. FLAME by BK captures the essence of that love and gives it to you. Behold the scent of seduction, with a hint of flame-broiled meat.“

My favorite burger is one I cook myself, pan fried well done, with goat cheddar on top, and no bun, and no spread, and no rancid pickles. If we are taking all of the Americas into account, the best burger meat I’ve ever had was in Brazil. My next favorite burger is the Kobe beef burger from Lucky Devils on Hollywood Blvd, well done, with bacon and cheddar on top, bun and aioli and broccoli on the side. And, yes, I know they don’t have it that way precisely on the menu. I’m not sure I’d want to smell like it, even made precisely the way I love most, but so it goes.

Flame Burger King cologne is available for online purchase from Ricky’s Halloween Costume Superstore, the site for which explains that it is “The hottest, funkiest, craziest costume shop in New York City!” At the very least, it is your go-to spot if you want to get that BK burger funk all over your bod.

I wonder if Los Angeles has more unqualified people attempt heists than the average city.

I just came in from my balcony. It is too dark tonight to see the Hollywood sign clearly. Or maybe it is too bright and the sign is overwhelmed by the nearly full moon and the holiday decorations visible on top of the Capitol Records building.

I just finished watching the Halloween episode of Boomtown. Boomtown is a long-canceled crime drama, which starred Donnie Wahlberg as a hard-driving detective with a good heart and a depressed wife. Each episode is shot from the point of view of multiple characters, who come together to show the whole story. I imagine show creator Graham Yost probably referenced Pulp Fiction during the pitch meeting. It is a sympathetic way to tell a story, such that the viewer understands where even characters at odds with one another are coming from.

Boomtown’s “All Hallows Eve”, written by show creator Graham Yost, features, in addition to a pumpkin hunt gone laugh-out-loud horribly wrong, an ambulance hijacked by a heist crew of desperadoes, dressed as cowboys, one of whom has been shot. The ambulance paramedic is one of the show’s more lovable characters, yet your heart just goes out to the lead hijacker.

The heist mastermind, Holden McKay, and his wounded brother Sam, came out to Hollywood to be stuntmen. After working as a janitor in a movie studio, Holden decides that a heist would be easy to pull on Halloween, when masks would not seem suspicious. Even though his master crime obviously failed badly enough that his brother got shot, listening to Holden explain how he could have been a janitor in Tulsa, but he came to Los Angeles for something more, I find myself thinking that pulling a heist would be totally reasonable.

The actor seems so convincing and compelling that I’m sure I must have seen him in a major role in something else. According to the internet, I probably saw the actor, named Tyler Christopher, also dressed as a cowboy on CSI, but his main claims to fame are that he used to be married to Eva Longoria of Desperate Housewives (which I have never seen) fame and, oh yeah, he is apparently a huge soap star, having appeared on approximately nine gajillion episodes of General Hospital. I looked up how many episodes of General Hospital George Clooney was on, so I could make a statement about how every huge success in Los Angeles is somehow dwarfed by someone else’s. Only it turns out George Clooney was on E.R. I’m assuming they both take place in hospitals populated by hunky men, so anybody (who had never watched either) could make the same mistake.

A funny thing about Los Angeles is that there is always the sense that there is something bigger, something really huge, something incredibly larger than the average life. And that something is just barely beyond your grasp. It doesn’t matter how ridiculously successful you are either. You don’t have to be a janitor to feel like this here. There is the sense that if you were just a bit bolder, just a bit more extroverted, just a bit more elusive, or just a bit more in the right place at the right time, then you would finally break through to the big time. I don’t think anyone in Hollywood is ever so rich or so famous that they don’t feel like this, like they could hold the moon in the palm of their hand, if they could just figure out how to possess a slightly better balcony.

In “All Hallow’s Eve”, the ambitious lawyer, played by Neal McDonough, who is planning to run for District Attorney goes to a party at a Hollywood home with lavish Halloween decorations. They are there because the attorney hopes to eventually hit the party-thrower up to film a campaign commercial. He and his wife joke somewhat disparagingly about how their host wrote “that one with the bus” and “that other one”. Graham Yost, in addition to creating Boomtown, wrote Speed, which was okay, was indirectly responsible for Speed 2: Cruise Control, which I had the sense not to see, and wrote Broken Arrow, which was bad enough to stall the careers of both Christian Slater and John Woo in one movie.

Boomtown seems solid so far and I was interested in the show because Graham Yost also created the more recent Raines cop drama, which is pure genius. Raines is brilliant enough that I can forgive Broken Arrow. Jeff Goldblum plays depressed Detective Michael Raines who solves crimes by being a crazy person who hallucinates speaking with dead people, but who has the misfortune to know he is out of his gourd, although very good at his job. Detective Bobby “Fearless” Smith from Boomtown has a cameo on Raines, so they both take place in the same world. It is a world where both horrible and wonderful things happen.

So I wonder if Los Angeles, as compared to most cities, has statistically way way way more giant crimes attempted by amateurs. I’ve also got a pal at the District Attorney’s office I could drop an email, but I can’t decide how a statistician would quantify such a thing. Maybe a statistician wouldn’t quantify such a thing. Maybe the aggregate average of longing for greatness, expressed as the cosine of plucking the Hollywood moon out of the sky, can only really be quantified by midnight philosophers and dudes who create unjustly canceled cop shows for NBC.

So, who wants to pull a heist with me?

The Sisters of Mercy will be playing The Music Box at the Henry Fonda Theater in Los Angeles on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 and you all have one more day to win tickets courtesy of GoldenVoice and Blue Blood.

If you want to win a pair of free tickets, either post in this thread or message privately here or on MySpace or VF. Your post or message should include your thoughts about the band or one of their songs or a personal anecdote about Sisters of Mercy, such as the one I told about me and my friend Jeanne at the Sisters of Mercy show (which she recalls being in DC.)

Basically, talk about something related to Sisters of Mercy and the most entertaining anecdotes or insights win free pairs of tickets to the Hollywood show.

The Sisters of Mercy will be playing The Music Box at the Henry Fonda Theater in Los Angeles on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008. Read on to find out how you can win tickets courtesy of GoldenVoice and Blue Blood.

In the same way perhaps that Guns n’ Roses is essentially Axl Rose at this point, Sisters of Mercy is essentially Andrew Eldritch. Having different collaborators on different Sisters albums gave different ones slightly different feels, but I personally enjoy the music on all of them. I even liked Vision Thing when all my unsavory pals derisively referred to it as the “Sisters Metal Album”. (I maintained that the Egyptian iconography on the cover made it totally gothic, but whatever.)

My friend Jeanne has been emailing me nostalgic photos recently and this made me think of of an amusing related anecdote. Uncomfortable with the goth label, Sisters of Mercy has tended to tour with potentially incongruous acts. So Jeanne and I were at some stadium show. I don’t recall all the acts on the bill, but the arena was probably the New Haven Coliseum or the Hardford Civic Center. This was pre-internet, so she and I were really enjoying the people watching and deconstructing the different tribes which had come out for the various bands playing. And looking for cute boys. So Jeanne spots this totally hot guy with dark hair and pale skin, a type we both favored, and she grabs me to point him out (I’m the forward one), only the guy disappears into some door and we can’t figure out quite where.

Eventually Jeanne figured out that she had been scoping out Sisters frontman Andrew Eldritch. Apparently he had managed to walk around the arena hallways unrecognized, simply by not wearing his trademark sunglasses. Absolutely classic when one can be incognito by taking the sunglasses off.

I’m sure Andrew Eldritch is a difficult man to like in real life, so probably for the best. Sometimes you have to love the art and not the artist. Now I realize that Andrew Eldritch has repudiated the goth label, along with his former music label, bands who wanted to support him, and a laundry list of former bandmates. I find it really tragic that things went this way for someone who could create such consistently brilliant music and intriguing lyrics. I know genius is often tortured and alienated. I have days when I feel stabby too, but I try not to interact too much if I’m feeling like lashing out at everything around me; that feeling is nature’s way of saying to take the day off. I admit that I didn’t create art for years because a junior high art teacher was mean to me, but, in my defense, I was in junior high at the time. The Sisters of Mercy haven’t had a proper new album in years because Andrew Eldritch was on strike because he didn’t like his record label and hasn’t landed with a new one since breaking up with East West.

Word is, however, that you can hear new Sisters material at a live show, so I’d expect to hear some new music in the mix at The Sisters of Mercy show at The Music Box at the Henry Fonda Theater in Los Angeles on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008. If you want to win a pair of free tickets, either post in this thread or message privately here or on MySpace or VF. Your post or message should include a personal anecdote about Sisters of Mercy, such as the one I told about me and my friend Jeanne, or your thoughts about the band or one of their songs. Basically, talk about something related to Sisters of Mercy and the most entertaining anecdotes or insights win free pairs of tickets to the Hollywood show.