Oh yeah I lived in Little Armenia at first. Which was also kinda Thai Town? anyway the real “Little Armenia” now is Glendale.

Had an East Coast Armenian college friend in town and he went touristing in all the Armenian stores and the music shop guy apparently pegged him as just some hipster slumming for cultural authenticity because guy was surprised when the classmate paid with a credit card with an -ian name.

Seen any good chandeliers?

Most commercials are filmed in the “thirty-mile zone” (that’s what TMZ was named for!) around LA outside of which unions require bonus pay, which means that for most car commercials I know not only where they are but how much the actual location does not remotely fit the aesthetic they’re evoking

In retrospect the one halfway real job I’ve had being the kinda entry-level business side of Hollywood role you do to build connections only I didn’t leave with any connections, just a sense of how power structures work behind the scenes that I’ve been chewing over for 20 years, was really on the nose.

(In that this formative experience was somehow in line with the person I went on to become)

Oh my god, those gay thrift stores in LA were part of the zombie nonprofit slumlord empire that was taking over city low-income housing policy?

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

Silversun Pickups – Lazy Eye (2007)

The part of LA where I lived in the late 2000s was a really rich vein of just-breaking-through-“indie” music but then Daft Punk did that Coachella set and everyone sold their guitars and bought turntables.

This was the song coming out of there you’re most likely to recognize, “Silversun Pickups” was actually a reference to a liquor store at the cross of Sunset and Silver Lake.

Like, I kind of felt like a dilettante, but in retrospect going to Spaceland or The Echo at least once a week I was more exposed to that stuff than 99.9% of America.

Great Northern, The Like, and Giant Drag are the real standouts I remember. I saw The Submarines for a monthly Spaceland residency once and came back again the next week but they ended up about properly rated.

The monthly residencies were pretty much as big as you could get there, play once a week as a showcase for A&R reps or – really growing key at that point – people who might put it in commercials or CW shows (which for music somehow went through your publisher?)

kontextmaschine:

Silversun Pickups – Lazy Eye (2007)

The part of LA where I lived in the late 2000s was a really rich vein of just-breaking-through-“indie” music but then Daft Punk did that Coachella set and everyone sold their guitars and bought turntables.

This was the song coming out of there you’re most likely to recognize, “Silversun Pickups” was actually a reference to a liquor store at the cross of Sunset and Silver Lake.

Like, I kind of felt like a dilettante, but in retrospect going to Spaceland or The Echo at least once a week I was more exposed to that stuff than 99.9% of America.

Hm, when I say LA and early Portland parts of my life are starting to become mixed up in memory really that’s late LA after I started going to the dojo. Earlier stuff I can remember by thinking directly about the time but like, people or bars I knew then won’t populate general “people (or bars) I’ve known” memory lists

Lot of parts around this neighborhood look like parts of my hometown, and I’d gotten used to that, but the other day found a part that looked like I remembered from my time in LA, and that threw me.

(It had been built around the same time, and the house architecture, cinderblock store architecture, early mass-automotive collector streets and the earthmoving capacities for what steepness of slope you could go straight up were all the same)

Really if you were trying to politically subdivide LA when I was there you could do worse than doing it by catchment areas of malls. (I was Glendale Galleria. Americana was… not a staple mall.)

retropopcult:

1979

me: huh wow, I know exactly what the rest of that LA courtyard apartment looks like, the whole scene is a little eerily familiar really

also me: that’s because that was only 26 years before you moved to LA, 18 years ago.

Just had cause to be reminded of one more LA peculiarity, “afterparties”. It was totally normal, might even be a planned & scheduled thing to leave one event and go to another that almost might be an unwinding from that one, event 1’s planners are totally not responsible for and can now enjoy, etc.

Whereas basically anywhere else (not Vegas or the Indio Valley, party-wise they’re part of Greater LA) “wow this party’s winding down, better ask everyone if they know of any other parties or bars people are going to” is actually a kinda pathetic alcoholic thing to think

kontextmaschine:

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

ALT

This is just going west on Sunset into WeHo.

Like not much came of my 20s and if I could still regret things the sense of finite lifespan might have me wanting those years back, but I kind of like the fact that Kontextmaschine just incongruously makes LA references sometimes.

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

ALT

This is just going west on Sunset into WeHo.

quoms:

quoms:

“Obviously, the ‘Twilight’ IP was the star there,” said director-producer Aaron Kaufman, who has worked with a number of alums from the vampire-human love story. “The shift to promoting IP over stars may have sounded like a good idea because IP doesn’t overdose or tweet about Nazis. However, this shift has left the cupboard bare when it comes to next-generation stars. This is an issue now that the IP stores have been cleaned out and all that’s left is Tube-Sock Man or whatever Marvel has yet to make.”

This article points to the DVD → streaming transition as a pivotal moment in the decline of the star system for producing and marketing movies, but treats this as a purely technological shift (streaming = greater market segmentation and less marketing for a given release largely due to the nature of the medium) instead of also a shift in property relations. If a star is a leading actor who audiences have a relationship with over an extended period of time, it’s worth thinking about the role that ownership of home video might play in maintaining an actor’s relevance outside the release window of any given film… ‘90s Kids Will Remember™ when watching a movie at home meant picking something off your shelf of VHS tapes or DVDs, and as a result there were movies you watched over and over again years after they came out, not just because they were good but also because they were what was there. Do you know how many times I’ve seen Troy or The Chronicles of Riddick? Not even stone cold classics, just good mid-tier action films that will hold up to a bunch of rewatches. Would I think about Brad Pitt or Vin Diesel in the same way if I only saw their movies in the month or two after release?

The wider selection of streaming isn’t a bad thing in principle, but it means so many movies and TV shows just vanish into the ether after release and are never given the chance to develop that kind of long-term following. They don’t even have to be removed from the service, just buried under the endless deluge of new content. Merchandising 101: if you never see something with your eyeballs, you won’t think about it, and you won’t watch it. If you do happen to remember a movie from a few years ago you’d like to watch, in principle it’s probably available, but there’s no guarantee it’s on the streaming service you subscribe to, and those things rotate every few months. It’s never going to be ready at hand in the way a DVD (or a file on your external hard drive!!!!!!!) would be.

This too damages the long-term star-building potential of movies, on top of the lower marketing budgets and the subordination of actors to IP and the fact that frankly studios know you’re not going to rewatch anything so things aren’t made to hold up to a rewatch. (Just look at “no spoilers” fandom culture and the plummeting multipliers for theatrical blockbusters for confirmation of this strategy and its effects.)

Shortly after leaving Hollywood I remember the thing was “packaging”, agencies would assemble actors, directors, and scripts from among their clients, thus claiming territory (and capturing money and influence away) from studios and producers, how’d that go?

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

And for whoever’s hammering my inbox, no, when I was Hollywood I did work with a management company that had a line in kids/teens but really I didn’t see any dirty stuff

the “dirty, exploitative” gossip I heard was how aspiring stage moms would pay to go to “talent expos” in, like, Hawai’i, where agents would be paid to fly in and sleep with EACH OTHER and have a vacation and AT BEST some of these kids would get a chance to move to LA to try to make money for the agents

for all that there WERE hypersexual 14-year-olds with moms who vicariously enjoyed the attention

and the most earnest stage parents who would bend their morals - I remember an evangelical family who didn’t want their elementary-age angel in stuff that said mild curses, but when Scientologists solicited him for an internal campaign that paid, and I called up saying “you probably aren’t interested but it’s my job to ask?” they were like “welllllll”

The sexualization is probably hardest on girls 14-18 in part because of all the “protective” regulations on young actors, as the result of which they’re part of a set-aside-from-normal life system to accommodate, with all sorts of structures and dynamics and local elites that don’t really interact with anything outside of it, but at that point the parents aren’t a load-bearing part.

But to complicate, actresses that age are selected on being able to (sexily) appear younger, for characters of that age you just cast runty 18-year-olds with a lot less regulatory hassle.

Like not as if without regulation child stars wouldn’t be enmeshed in a parallel world full of scumbags, but point being the existing system was co-opted long ago and is in no way a relief from that.

kontextmaschine:

And for whoever’s hammering my inbox, no, when I was Hollywood I did work with a management company that had a line in kids/teens but really I didn’t see any dirty stuff

the “dirty, exploitative” gossip I heard was how aspiring stage moms would pay to go to “talent expos” in, like, Hawai’i, where agents would be paid to fly in and sleep with EACH OTHER and have a vacation and AT BEST some of these kids would get a chance to move to LA to try to make money for the agents

for all that there WERE hypersexual 14-year-olds with moms who vicariously enjoyed the attention

and the most earnest stage parents who would bend their morals - I remember an evangelical family who didn’t want their elementary-age angel in stuff that said mild curses, but when Scientologists solicited him for an internal campaign that paid, and I called up saying “you probably aren’t interested but it’s my job to ask?” they were like “welllllll”

The sexualization is probably hardest on girls 14-18 in part because of all the “protective” regulations on young actors, as the result of which they’re part of a set-aside-from-normal life system to accommodate, with all sorts of structures and dynamics and local elites that don’t really interact with anything outside of it, but at that point the parents aren’t a load-bearing part.

But to complicate, actresses that age are selected on being able to (sexily) appear younger, for characters of that age you just cast runty 18-year-olds with a lot less regulatory hassle.

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

Something that sticks with me so well I’ve almost certainly posted about it before is once in LA I was walking down Hollywood Boulevard, where they’ve got the walk of fame stars in black terrrazzo with glistening silver inclusions, and I was behind this really stereotypical midwestern tourist family in front of me, puffy overweight with fanny packs, and the dad said to the others “Look, the streets really are paved with broken dreams.”

The actual area there is like big buildings of a ratty but architecturally ambitious 1930s newsie-ass city with one-story retail from when it was the main streetcar corridor of LA since then turned over to tourist trinkets and seedy (with a bunch of old independent motels, it was apparently a major prostitution corridor from the 70s until just before I arrived) low rent stuff

Like the managers I worked for were at literally the corner of Hollywood & Vine, and they did a lot of stuff with child stars and I have to think part of it is that all the flyover stage parents would hear that and draw associations with glamour that everyone actually in the industry knows haven’t been current since the early 1950s

Something that sticks with me so well I’ve almost certainly posted about it before is once in LA I was walking down Hollywood Boulevard, where they’ve got the walk of fame stars in black terrrazzo with glistening silver inclusions, and I was behind this really stereotypical midwestern tourist family in front of me, puffy overweight with fanny packs, and the dad said to the others “Look, the streets really are paved with broken dreams.”

memecucker:

memecucker:

Brits are all like “Los Angel-eeeeeeeeeezzzzeeee”

I was gonna say “like Angelus you know the Catholic devotion” before realizing how unhelpful that is so in terms of local English pronounciation I’ll just post a Bad Religion song

Los Angeles and the whole area was settled by Hispanophones but the existing LA culture comes from Anglophone migrants with no prior contact with Spanish orthography or pronunciation, so there are actually a ton of shibboleth place names today

I was in LA for the ‘07 strike, and I remember it was mentioned that the overwhelming share of membership was not currently working or likely to work again, it was people who had sold one unproduced feature script, and that actual working screenwriters a “pencils down” mandate might affect cast a minority of the votes on striking or contract acceptance. I don’t know how that stands now – I’d believe the feature market buys fewer specs, it sure never makes anything original now – but there might be something there