Hollywood Book Journal

THE BOOK OF DEAD BIRDS By Gayle Brandeis. It's about this girl who goes and helps the endangered Pelicans dying at the Salton Sea in Southern California. The Salton Sea is a weird place that formed by accident more than a century ago. These dudes were trying to irrigate the Colorado river in a hurried fashion and all this water ran into the desert and it turned into a huge-ass sea that never goes away because of all the agricultural run-off that flows into it. Go check it out on a map. It's this big body of water that you can't miss, yet a lot of people still don't know that the sea exists. I've actually been obsessed with the Salton Sea lately. In the middle of the twentieth century they tried to make the sea into a Palm Springs kind of a place - an exclusive resort where the rich would come to play. But then pollution and levels of salinity began to rise and all the fish started to die. The hot sun fried the fish and the smell of rotting fish got so nasty that everybody abandoned the place. Today the sea is this surreal ghost-town with abandoned buildings and weird people (the weirdest of which is a nudist who waves at people while they drive by). Some of the people are convinced that the Salton Sea will someday be "saved" and become another Palm Springs, as it was supposed to be in the 1950s. But, for now, it's a complete hell-hole; a sort of lost paradise. SCAR TISSUE Red Hot Chili Pepper's front-man Anthony Kiedis' autobiography. What really struck me about this book was how crazily addicted to drugs this guy was. I always thought he was the clean guy in the band and that John Frusciante had all the major problems. Shows you how much I knew.... Kiedis not only gives us a really good portrait of a junkie, but he also introduces an interesting spiritual element to drug-taking that I never heard talked about much. He describes at one point that whenever he did drugs (heroin, in particular) he would feel dark, and that he was attracting all sorts of dark energy around him. He implies that drugs literally take away the light in our souls and make us vulnerable to dark energies. This kind of bad energy can manifest itself in a robbery (acted out against us) or a beating or even something like murder. In other words, drugs don't just harm us physically; they harm us on a spiritual level as well. The cleaner we keep ourselves the lighter we are, and the more protected we are from the dark energy in the outside world. NOBODY WALKS IN LA The book basically consists of some guy driving all through LA, which for him is a trip down memory lane. Everything he passes reminds him of something in his past and he talks about all his memories in great length. This book was kind of annoying because the protagonist (whom the author basically used as a disguise for himself) was kind of a goody-two-shoes dork who liked to throw ice cream parties (WUSS!), but he did manage to portray the City of Los Angeles in a more positive light than most people usually do. He explains that LA is a city with a bunch of potential energy that has not been used yet - or at least not in the right manner. And I think I agree. Los Angeles is home to some of the brightest and most talented people in the world, but most of their intelligence and talents have been used to achieve the wrong thing: money. The Babylon that LA seems to be has so much positive possibility, yet it is undermined because profit and popularity are what have been defined as most important. SLASH Guns 'N Roses' guitarist Slash's autobiography. To my surprise, Slash's life wasn't as excessive as Anthony Kiedis', but it was still pretty intense. One of the more memorable parts of this book is when Slash starts hallucinating when he is high on coke and starts seeing demons. They come into his hotel room, armed with weapons, and go after him. Slash runs naked through the hotel, desperately trying to get away from these things that nobody else can see. He ultimately ends up in a janitor's closet of some sort, naked, and the police arrest him. Slash later tells David Bowie about what happened to him and Bowie says that Slash is in too deep. "Your drugs are bringing you to a point where you are making yourself vulnerable to evil energy." So, like SCAR TISSUE, SLASH's book also brings up this spiritual element to being a junkie. Maybe the "demons" he saw were actual evil spirits coming to invade his soul. He may not have been hallucinating.... It's kind of interesting to think that there may actually be this ever-present evil in the world that can only touch us and come into our world if we make ourselves vulnerable to it. Excessive drug-taking may be one of the ways in which we make ourselves vulnerable. We are a kind of portal that has the power to keep evil contained as long as we stay "in the light" - so to speak - and don't darken our souls. Interesting, don't you think? FAHRENHEIT 451 You probably know the premise of this one already. It's a future world. Dystopia. The firemen go around burning all books, because books make people think and thinking makes people dissatisfied and dissatisfied people are difficult for the government to control. The thing I like about the this book, though - and was surprised to see - was that Bradbury doesn't strictly blame the government for "repression of thought"; he mostly blames the people. People innately prefer not to think because thinking leads to uncertainty about things and uncertainty leads to dissatisfaction, unhappiness and unrest. People prefer to be "peaceful" and "happy", even if it means being ignorant. The world Bradbury creates in FAHRENHEIT 451 is frighteningly reminiscient of the world today in an almost prophetic way (after all, the book was written more than fifty years ago). In the book, it is almost impossible to think because people are either working or at home being distracted by silly television programs and spectator events. Even on the subway or the train or in the store, there is always a radio assaulting your ears or advertisements shoved into your face. People think the news does a good enough job keeping them informed and making them think, but all the news does is provide useless information and facts and statistics that make people feel smart but are really just useless. "Potato chips cause cancer!" "Chocolate lowers your cholesterol!" "Fifty percent of people who floss their teeth live ten more years than people who don't!" Endless surveys are conducted, and they all serve no purpose other than to distract the public and disinform them. ALL of this is in Bradbury's book and it's all happening in the world today! THE HEROIN DIARIES Nikki Sixx (of Motley Crue) tells his story about heroin addiction. The image of him being locked in his Hollywood mansion's walk-in closet was the most striking - surrounded my syringes and drug rigs, aiming a shotgun to the closet door, paranoid that there are intruders in his house (which there never are). NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN I must have some subconscious obsession with drugs. Or maybe there's some higher influence in my life who wants me to read books about drugs. Because most of the books I've been interested in reading lately have been about drugs. This particular story involves a simple welder (Llewelyn Moss) who stumbles upon a drug-deal-gone-bad while he is hunting in the desert. He finds a box containing a couple million dollars and runs off to Mexico with it. A boogey-man type character (Anton Chigurh) whom we initially assume is somehow related to the sour drug deal, wants the money back and hunts Moss down. But what becomes more apparent throughout the book is that Chigurh doesn't really care about the money (and may not have really had anything to do with the drug deal). It seems as though he wants to kill Moss simply because Moss made the 'immoral' choice of taking the money and running with it. In this sense, Chigurh is almost like bad Karma incarnate. He is "what comes around" when people make bad choices in their lives. He assumes that the people he runs into deserve to die; otherwise fate, God, nature, the universe - call it what you will - would have kept them apart. It's almost as though at one point he said, "God, I am going to kill people...that's what I'm going to do in life, and if you don't want certain people to die, then keep them away from me." I think this is why we (if not consiously, then subconsciously) find ourselves NOT hating Chigurh. Because the people he kills made the wrong choices. His killing is understandable (if not justified). As the Sheriff says at many points in the book, Chigurh is like a "ghost". He is the personification of the doom that a person brings upon themselves when they make bad moral choices. HURRELL'S HOLLYWOOD PORTRAITS George Hurrel was one of the most famous Hollywood portrait photographers in the Golden Age of Hollywood. He worked at MGM and Warner Brothers and photographed the most famous stars of the studio era. The most interesting part of this book was realizing how important the "portrait" was in Hollywood. Getting the right pose. The right look in the eyes. The right attitude. The right lighting. The right background. It was all about the image. What the star was really like became irrelevant. It all came down to capturing themselves the way they wanted the public to see them in one incredibly staged pose that would be captured in one single flash of a camera. The portrait turned the person into a persona, and the persona became the reality of who the person was. In a world where portraits like this are everything, reality gets lost. AS YOU LIKE IT Shakespeare's classic comedy. The forest of Arden in the play seems to represent, in many ways, America (well, what America was before it was colonized). It is an untrodden paradise-like place where people escape to and reinvent themselves. It is even more like California, but then again, California is kind of a microcosm of America as a whole. Somebody once said Hollywood is America sent through a movie projector at triple-speed. But the important thing is that America - while Shakespeare was writhing his plays - was this very new, untrodden place. You could go there and completely change your identity. That was its allure, and maybe that was its danger, because people went to escape themselves, which I'm not sure is very healthy. If LA is any indication (a land filled with reinvention of the self and people escaping their respective realities), then this wasn't a very healthy thing. Again, LA is America three-times as fast. And a LA is a troubled place (see Hollywood Station/Hollywood Crows below). THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE Robert Evans' autobiography. Five-hundred pages in length. Evans was the head of Paramount Pictures for a number of years. He was responsible for movies like THE GODFATHER and CHINATOWN getting made. HOLLYWOOD STATION and HOLLYWOOD CROWS Two novels by former LAPD cop Joseph Wambaugh. Perfectly capture how fucked up Hollywood is. And I don't mean the industry or the concept of Hollywood...I mean the town itself, as it exists today. The suicides. The weird murders. The gangs. The meth addicts. The trannys. The prostitutes. Everything. All the incidents in these books are based on real incidents that happened in Hollywood - things Wambaugh witnessed as a member of the LAPD, and things his fellow officers witnessed -- some of the most funny of which occur at the famous Chinese theater, where drug addicts and bums dressed as movie characters harass tourists and get in fights with each other over 'territoriality'. These characters are perfect caricatures of Hollywood. On the surface they are a fun, amusing characters, but beneath the costume, they are a fucked-up mess. Reality being covered up by a shallow unreality -- LA in a nutshell. Here is something I wrote to a friend of mine that relates to this topic: "I think LA is the most intense place I've ever been to, maybe even moreso than the ghetto places you mention. There's people in LA you can't even begin to understand. At least in places like Detroit and shit, there's gangs who are shooting each other out of revenge and retribution - it is senseless but at least you see a reason to why they're doing it. And in places like Iraq, people are fighting for religious beliefs that are definitely extreme but, at the same time, rooted in some form of rationality. But in LA there's people who are whacked out of their mind for absolutely no understandable reason. They're completely illogical, irrational, and impossible to empathize and thus deal with. Mainly I think it's because of drugs and a generally soulless atmosphere where you are nothing unless you have money. I've always thought of the weird fucked up shit in LA as being signs of God's order breaking at the seams. It's like God's trying to hold shit together in that place, but every once in a while the devil gets too strong of a foothold and weird godless shit occurs." FRAMES This a book by Loren D. Estleman about some film restorer from UCLA who buys an old run-down theater in LA and finds a complete full-length print of Eric Von Stroheim's GREED in the basement (which was thought to be lost forever). But with the print there is a skeleton, so there is a murder involved and thus ensues a delicious mystery! The most interesting thing I took out of FRAMES was its depiction of Hollywood as a haunted town. It is a town with footprints of dead people everywhere. And streets named after dead people. Every store and boutique and pizza shop and hotdog stand has photographs and autographs of dead people. There is a sidewalk full of dead stars. Hollywood is a place where people are desperate to leave a mark in the earth before they die. In fact, the whole idea behind Hollywood is that the earth is everything, and if you don't leave your mark in it, then your existence becomes null and void. Some people become so obsessed about this that they never move on from the earth when they die. This is why there are so many hauntings in Hollywood. Nobody wants to let the earth go. They want to keep leaving their mark. They want to make themselves immortal. CHILD STAR: SHIRLEY TEMPLE AUTOBIOGRAPHY I only read half of this because Shirley is kind of a lame writer and didn't have anything too interesting to say about the later parts of her life (where she becomes very politically active). But it was interesting to learn how abusive it could be for a child actor, on the set and off. One director would lock her in a hot sound-recording box as punishment for horsing around, where Shirley would sweat and develop all sorts of health problems. Outside the studio, she'd have to deal with obsessed fans and attempted kidnappings. Crazy for a child. DEATH BY HOLLYWOOD Another mystery taking place in Hollywood. A down-and-out screenwriter witnesses a murder while spying on his Hollywood Hills neighbors with his super-powerful telescope. The book is all about the DESPERATE vibe in Hollywood. No faith in God. Just in money and who's famous and who has the power. In Hollywood there is the feeling that you're a sucker if you don't grab the brass ring when it can be grasped, even if it means doing something wrong or fucking somebody over. But when people grab the brass ring under those circumstances, the money and success is always ephemeral. It's too hard to maintain because it simply wasn't meant to be, and when they do try to maintain it they resort to desperate measures (like make a sex tape for attention or get into a spicey new relationship or have kids or divorce or go into rehab or make a lame - but sure-thing - movie...anything to keep them in the spotlight). This book also got me thinking about sex-tapes. Why are there so many sex tapes in Hollywood? I guess it's another way in which people are trying to leave their mark. They don't value the sex for its in-the-moment spiritual experience. They need to give the moment immortality. Everything in Hollywood is about immortality. COLDHEART CANYON A Clive Barker novel that is around 600 pages. A beast. It's about some action movie star. His career is waning and he gets plastic surgery to maintain his star-quality, but it's botched and he has to hide out in a haunted Hollywood Hills mansion so nobody will see how ugly he is. The house is full of ghosts of former Hollywood movie stars. The book is about the dark spiritual underworld of Hollywood. The world of dead spirits who refuse to leave the earth and move on. They are too attached to the great times in Hollywood. They don't think there is anything better. I felt this world while I was in Hollywood. You feel like you're never alone, even when you are alone. Hollywood is the most haunted place I've ever been to. LOS ANGELES: THEN AND NOW Just a picture-book about LA. Nothing too special. HOLLYWOOD BABYLON Kenneth Anger's book about the seedy Hollywood underworld during the Golden studio era - things like Fatty Arbuckle's rape scandal. This book is everything the star publicists didn't want you to know. It's crazy how history gets so distorted, just because certain things will ruin a stars' image. One particular example is how Clark Gable supposedly let notoriously gay actor William Haines give him blowjobs so that he could land better roles. If this is true, it just goes to show how false history is. Clark Gable is known to be the All-American leading man, but he - just like everybody else - whored himself out to get to where he was. HOLLYWOOD: THEN AND NOW Nothing too special. Picture-book about Hollywood. HOLLYWORLD This book mainly discussed how, in a sense, Hollywood has become the world because of it being the main component behind today's global market. A movie made in Hollywood gets seen all over the world and is therefore the backbone of world Americanization. The moral of the story is that what is happening in Hollywood is anything but unimportant. It's not just sheer, harmless entertainment. It is influencing our politics, our social norms, our minds, our economy, our everything. What happens in Hollywood happens in the world. The problem in the world is the problem in Hollywood. In order to change the world, one must change Hollywood. HOLLYWOOD LIFE Just a picture book about star homes, like Pickfair (Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks' ridiculously nice Xanadu-like home), as well as John Barrymore's house and George Cukor's house. LOST HOLLYWOOD A book about old Hollywood, focusing on relics of its past. Right before the Hotel Hollywood (on the corner of Hollywood and Highland) was demolished a woman who had lived there for a number of years said, "I don't want to go to heaven. I just want to stay here." This kind of sums up the attitude in Hollywood and probably why there are so many ghosts there. The people are too attached to that place, so much, that they stay there after they die. They don't think there's anything better. Another interesting thing the book talks about is the so-called "moral clause" written into a star's contract when Will Hayes came to clean up Hollywood's act in the 1920s. It said, among other things, that a celebrity couldn't shock, insult, or offend the community". And although these contracts don't exist today, the spirit of them stuck around. This is why celebrities are so politically correct these days. It's considered "immoral" to offend, so celebrities just play it safe and say the same old public-pleasing bullshit. FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS My third time reading this book, I think. I like how the paranoia (i.e. the fear) is mostly in the characters' heads, due to the world they think is crazy because of how the media portrays it. After all, Duke and Gonzo never actually encounter anything they are afraid of. Nobody tries to murder them. Nobody wants to arrest them, or do them any harm of any sort. It's all in their heads. Duke is always reading a paper or turning on the news. He feeds his head with fear. The media becomes another drug for him, making him feel safe in telling him what's happening, but at the same time creating a lot of fear and loathing. The book is also about fake idealism turned into something sour. Fake expansion of consciousness through drugs like LSD and acid leading towards something very violent and destructive. Or maybe it was the hippie movement in the 60s turned into something that could be capitalized on and thus made sour in the 70s. The drugs started out as being a means of coming together and loving each other, but then turned into something that could create a huge profit for people. Like I said, that book is about a lot of things. HOLLYWOOD'S CHILDREN A book about the children to the stars. Some of these children have intense struggles with identity, knowing that their parents mostly married because they looked good together, not necessarily because they loved each other. They are byproducts of fame and are forced to question why they exist...or even if they should exist. HOLLYWOOD BABYLON 2 Kenneth Anger's sequel to his first book. More about Hollywood's seedy underworld. THE VIEW FROM BABYLON - NOTES FROM A HOLLYWOOD VOYEUR Donald Rawley's depressing (but truthful) perspective of Los Angeles and Hollywood. He sees Hollywood as a place where everyone lives as though there's going to be a great big earthquake tomorrow and nothing really matters. It's an area always in a state of flux. No sense of history. No coherence. People coming and going. New movies made and forgot about. This weekend's hit becomes irrelevant as soon as next weekend's hit comes around. It's all about what's going to make some quick money before the 'BIG ONE' comes and ends everything anyway. In short, there is a sense that nothing lasts forever, so why should anybody care what they do? THE BRIDGE PEOPLE By Jackson Underwood. A social studies book about a camp of homeless people living under a Los Angeles Freeway overpass. This is a fascinating study of the LA "bum" - how they live, where they come from, why they're homeless etc. A DAY IN THE LIFE OF HOLLYWOOD A book of wonderful photos, taken by a group of the world's best photographers. It documents one day in the life of Hollywood - all the goings on, like pitch meetings, acting classes, movie shoots, as well as all the other non-movie-related stuff going on in the crazy town. CHRIST AND CELEBRITY GODS By Malcolm Boyd. A book about Hollywood's false depiction of God and Jesus, focusing specifically on films like Demille's THE TEN COMMANDMENTS. Discusses how the movie audience becomes detached from God for the sake of making a good commercial movie. HOLLYWOOD ANIMAL Legendary screenwriter Joe Ezsterhas' autobigraphy. The writer of FLASH DANCE, BASIC INSTINCT and SHOWGIRLS reveals the dark side of Hollywood. THE PEDESTRIAN By Ray Bradbury. A dystopic short story about a man who is arrested and sent to a mental institution for simply taking a walk down a street at night. THE DEVIL'S GUIDE TO HOLLYWOOD By Joe Eszterhas. Another book revealing the darkness and absurdity in Hollywood. This book is more for screenwriters than the common Joe. THE DEER PARK By Norman Mailer. This is considered to be the best book about Hollywood. It's about a place in the desert (basically it's Palm Springs) where there a bunch of doomed Hollywood directors, stars and other celebrities hiding out and trying to make some sense out of their phony Hollywood lives. Although they have a chance to adopt a more real (and healthy) lifestyle, they ultimately doom themselves by choosing success and the unreal lifestyle that goes along with it. THE DAY OF THE LOCUST By Nathanael West. A grim book about 1930s Hollywood, which West depicts as a place filled with characters (not people) and uprooted outcasts who "come to Hollywood to die". The architecture in Hollywood is described as being like random scenes on a movie set - all different, all clashing with one another, all from different time periods and styles. One house will be a Spanish stucco and the other will be a Cape Cod Colonial and yet another will be a Roman palace. There is no sense of coherency. Everything clashes. There is no harmony. And the same goes for the people there - they are from different places and have different backgrounds. They are uprooted outcasts running away from wherever they come from. There is so much clashing amongst the people that violence results. This is what makes Los Angeles such a volatile place. THE LAST TYCOON F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished novel. I didn't think it was good...at all. He should have died before he even started it (no offense, Fitzy). PAPARAZZI: AND OUR OBSESSION WITH CELEBRITY By Peter Howe. Really good book about the paparazzi and how their images have become so central to our culture. In the book, the paparazzi argue that they're only giving people what they want. But is this ever a reasonable justification? Like a kid in a candy store, is it always right to give people what they want? The book also talks about how the paparazzi demystify the celebrity by providing the public with more "real" images of stars, ones that aren't perfect and airbrushed. Of course, the photos become deceiving in other ways. In fact, portraying somebody through a photo is inherently deceiving, as it only captures one certain pose or situation, which people then take to be the reality of that person. Photographs unavoidably distort reality, unless carefully used, which they never are (in tabloids). LIFE THE MOVIE: HOW ENTERTAINMENT CONQUERED REALITY Neal Gabler's enlightening book about how entertainment has essentially changed the human race. Everything from politics, to education, to religion. Our culture has become a culture concerned with perception of the self. Appearance has taken precedence over substance (i.e. reality). People are more concerned with looking the part than actually being the part. Gabler also talks about the new "mediated" self, which is a persona everybody now has that has been developed by the movies. People alter their images according to the people in the movies. People alter thier lives according to the plots one saw in the movies. The result is a new self that is a product of the unreality seen in the movies. This new self is a persona different from the person, but, as Gabler argues, the actual 'person' beneath the persona is becoming more and more obsolete. Soon, the 'person' may become the 'persona' and we will become a race of movie-based personas - a culture and race of movie unreality. AN EMPIRE OF THEIR OWN: How the Jews Invented Hollywood Also by Neal Gabler. Understanding how a group of Jews founded Hollywood (i.e. Adolph Zukor of Paramount, Carl Laemmle of Universal, Louis B. Mayer of MGM, Harry Cohn of Columbia, and the Warner Brothers of Warner Bros.) is key to understanding Hollywood culture and, in a broader sense, American culture. Gabler argues that the American Dream was born by Eastern European Jews who were heavily persecuted and repressed. These Jews emigrated from Europe, came to America (and eventually Hollywood) to make money, win success and (most importantly) acceptance and assimilation into the American culture. In Hollywood, the Jews created an "Empire of their Own" - a place where they could create their own values and ideals that they could feed to the rest of America through their movies. The Jews' ideals became the common American ideals, and the Jewish 'Dream' consequently became the American Dream. The problem, however, was that - in the end - the Jews never actually became accepted for who they were; they became accepted for trying to be gentiles. The message their films sent wasn't that the 'outsider' should be accpeted for who he is, but that the 'outsider' should be accepted because he is just like everybody else. In other words, the Jews - if not consciously, then unconsciosly - created an American Dream that said that the outsider can only become successful and accepted when he becomes an insider. So the American Dream, as portrayed by a Hollywood that Jews created, is somewhat of a bogus dream. But this is no fault of the Jews. One can understand how generations of persecution could drive them to create such a fantasy world where they could hide from their real selves and become accepted as gentiles (i.e. someone they weren't). Nevertheless, understanding where our American Dream comes from is essential before we work to fulfill it. Great book. WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN, THE CHEATING CULTURE and BIGGER STRONGER FASTER The first two titles are books written by Budd Schulberg and David Callahan respectively. The third title, however, is actually a documentary film made by Chris Bell sometime at the beginning of 2008. I list the film with the two books because it deals with the same issues. All three of these titles explore the speed of America: why everything has to be so big, so fast, and so strong. "Bigger, Stronger, Faster" focuses on the use of steroids in American culture, particularly sports. Steroid use, according to the film, is just one component of our "cheating culture" -- that is, a culture where people cut corners in order to get ahead. Success, as the author of "Cheating Culture" states, has become divorced from virtue. This is mainly because success in America has become so important that it no longer matters what one does in order to obtain it. Although the source of this problem is never made very clear, "Bigger, Faster, Stronger" implies that it may have been during the Cold War that Americans began this habit of cheating to win. In order to beat the Russians in both the space and economic race, Americans adopted an attitude where success had to manifest itself fast and quick. For athletes, this meant taking steroids, as legend has it that the American Olympians beat the Russians in the 50s with powerful steroids. But I guess you could say that America as a whole during the Cold War became one nation on steroids. Everything had to be Bigger, faster, stronger.... I also think that apart from the need to beat the Russians, America as a whole just has a serious insecurity complex, or a kind of Napoleon complex. This is mainly due to the fact that most people who came to America came here because they were persecuted or repressed in some way (as in the case of the Jews). So in order to make up for their insecurities, Americans felt the need to be BIGGER...FASTER...AND STRONGER in everything that they did. This was and still is the American way. ZEROVILLE By Steve Erickson. There's this interesting blur of reel and real life. Just the fact that Vicar is so much like Travis Bickle goes to show that everything seems to be skewed by the movies, and how there's this weird plot where he's finding frames in different movies, but it doesn't really have any purpose other than to give his life a plot like a movie. I think it's saying that nothing is real anymore because we all are so influenced by the movies. We make our lives plots but throw ourself into an unreality in the process because life can't be reduced to a plot. That's one of my interpretations, anyway. TWEAK By Nic Sheff. IMPOSTERS About the Hollywood Boulevard “characters”. OUT OF MY SKIN By John Haskell. A story about a man who is so terrified to be himself that he pretends to be Steve Martin in order to make a girl love him. This, of course, can only last for so long, and by the end he becomes somebody else, but in a good way. Not somebody else. But a new him. Becoming a new person can be a healthy thing as long as becoming that person is a part of the ever-changing self. But becoming a completely different identity is death to your own self, because it isn’t part of the natural ever-changing self-flux, if that makes sense whatsoever. In LA, there is the temptation to lose yourself. You may think that somebody like Steve Martin is a better identity to be. But as Cary Grant said, “Even I want to be like Cary Grant.” The perfection of a persona is only an illusion. Everybody has problems. Nobody’s perfect.