Wake Me Up

I make some guacamole, buy a radioactive flagon of mojitos, and we sit down to watch the 83rd Academy Awards. 

- What's wrong with James Franco's face?

asks my husband, thirty minutes in.

I don't know. 

I thought Franco was behaving oddly during the pre-show interviews, but assumed -- he's a clever sort -- that it was some sort of hilarious bit that I was just too slow to understand.

Perhaps I am slow, because Franco's performance throughout the whole show is similarly enigmatic. His expression defies description. A statistical analysis:

80% nonplussed Keanu Reeves 
15% the peevish face my cat pulls when you put something too close to his nose
5% the half-smirk Rhett Butler makes during Scarlett O'Hara's violent tempers

It really is the Mona Lisa of awards show performances. Anne Hathaway isn't too bad, albeit very GO TEAM GO perky-shrieky-yay in a way that sees me topping up my drink frequently.

Google 'James Franco Oscars' now, and the second most popular option is 'James Franco Oscars High'. Or is it a case of Occam's Razor -- simple nerves, an over-tight truss? 

Monday is dull enough as it is. I give you five drug-free explanations for the James Franco Oscars Face:

- hacked teleprompter screen full of obscenities so vile they make a Mel Gibson rant look like a Charlie Sheen rant, and a Charlie Sheen rant look like a Julie Andrews song  

- sentient hologram of Bob Hope wandering backstage harvesting souls

- contractually-obliged colonic irrigation immediately prior to show (Franco told it was 'standard beauty treatment, kind of like a facial')

- at the dress rehearsal, Anne Hathaway baked a metaphorical cake of rainbows and smiles, sprinkled it with ground-up cheerleaders, Wolverine's nail-clippings and Zoloft, and stuffed the entire thing, whole, into her enormous maw. Nauseated and traumatised by this, Franco decides to go the other way, method-acting a mouthful of lye-flavoured sourpatch candy

- is that... is that Kim Basinger in the wings? She's not presenting, is she? Oh dear god, no -- this is still a dream within a dream within Alec Baldwin's dream, and it's about to get stabby. WAKE ME UP!

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Trying to Get Inside James Franco's Mind

You're Invited!™ (No, Not You)

You're Invited!™

say the 2011 Academy Award billboards; we're not, but we go anyway. At least, we go to the Kodak Theater, twenty-four hours before the event, for a little light gawping.

We could do with the exercise. On Friday, I didn't leave the house at all; first there was a hangover -- grade 'nuclear winter' -- and then there was a migraine. I lay on the sofa for several hours, unable to find the remote or otherwise escape 'Maid in Manhattan'. The cat clambered over me, dribbling. Eventually I went back to bed; Dr Strangename came home, at the end of his working day, to find me in exactly the same position as when he'd left that morning. He can be very sarcastic.

Today I'm up by ten-thirty and we manage to leave the house before two. There's just no stopping us. We get the 12 to Westwood and, in undeserved good bus karma, transfer quickly to the 302.

It's always a relief when the bus behaves itself, as, approximately once a fortnight, Dr Strangename puts his foot down, shakes his fist, and says we'll never go on the Metro again. But this Saturday it's swift and uncrowded, and Dr Strangename laughs at the potholes on Sunset that threaten to disengage your cranium from your spine and roll your head down the bus like a bowling-ball.

We pass though Beverly Hills, with its ice-cream stripes of strawberry, vanilla and mint -- bougainvillea, white-washed walls, lemon-trees and lush hedges, almost pretty enough to distract you from its purpose (keep your dirty little bus-rider eyes off my lawn).

In West Hollywood we pass everyone's favourite artificially-enhanced-sex superstore:

JOIN THE HUSTLER FAMILY!

says a poster in its window, next to the shamrock-themed erotic outfits. I imagine the Hustler family: mom showing plenty of underboob in a sawn-off t-shirt, bending cheerfully over the (unlit, but no one notices) BBQ; dad doing some suggestive business with a foot-long; daughter eighteen yet still obliged to wear an undersized Catholic schoolgirl uniform.

Prohibition Is Over

appears in white on a sober black billboard across the road. No, thank you; after Thursday night, prohibition is back, and this time it's personal.

(I was drinking these lovely, faux-Japanese martinis, made from elderflower and lychee and gin, and they were as light and meadow-fresh as a fabric softener commercial. Friday morning, they may as well have been Clorox.)

Just as bus sickness and residual hangover are about to cause disaster, we reach Hollywood. Apart from Downtown -- where a woman directed a canary-coloured rain of junkie vomit at me -- Hollywood is the least glamorous district of LA we've seen so far. It's a particularly unappealing combination of genuine grot, tourist tat and anodyne chainstores. But everyone who visits us wants to go there, and, god, here we are again, of our own volition. You feel guilty for patronising it, as if encouraging some morally-dubious commerce that lowers us all, like a nice young man who keeps finding himself in Thai brothels.

But this weekend Hollywood is brisk and professional, full of tents and trailers and people with clipboards. Hollywood Boulevard is closed to traffic for several blocks, and we skirt alongside a screened area that is the Oscars red carpet. We can't see it, but we know it's there.

After being diverted through some battleship-grey service corridors -- it's no more than we deserve -- we find ourselves in the Kodak Theater. An Italian correspondent in a backless evening dress and a lot of panstick is making a broadcast. I take a photo of a sign saying NO ACCESS, and am reprimanded. There's more red carpet, a cinematic sweep of stairs, and some shrouded Oscar statuettes. Although the carpet is covered in polythene, we aren't allowed to step on it. I take several more photos. Even Dr Strangename is awed.

Eventually, we get to the top of the Hollywood and Highland mall, where you can look down fifty feet onto the transparent tent and red carpet walkway below. I see the public audience bleachers; I applied for a seat, but it's something like a 0.035 chance and I didn't win. Can't catch a break. This aerial shot is the closest we'll get.

We briefly consider throwing ourselves off the mall terrace onto the plastic roof, where we'd bob, waving at celebrities, for a short while, before being shot down like a couple of rogue parade balloons. But the celebrities aren't here until tomorrow, and we can't be bothered to take the bus again.    

They told me to come to Hollywood,
that it was the third biggest industry in the world.
Number one was safety razors.
Number two was sticking plasters.
Hollywood was number three. So I came.
-- Cowboy Actor

This is written on the mall's floor, along with lots of other dubious stories relating to The Road To Hollywood. Outside, we're filmed by someone getting establishing shots for The Lead-Up To The Oscars -- do look for us on Belgium TV -- and I linger outside a production van for Channel WowWowWow Japan, hoping to be discovered as a new Gaijin Tarento.

In the end, we walk south back to Sunset and wait for the Metro home. Our companions here are a guy with a guitar and gas mask, and another man who looks exactly like the reprobate who shot Sam in 'Ghost'. But on the way back through West Hollywood, I see a sign saying

Pierced People Pray Too

and resolve to be less superficial.

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Hermetically Sealed Hollywood

Bloody Foreigners

Ten Things That Happen When You Live Overseas

(especially, but not exclusively, in non-English-speaking countries)

- You spend a week thinking you have a terminal illness, and then you realize you've bought decaffeinated coffee. You also think that supermarkets should put alcohol-free beer in a separate aisle.

- When you visit your hometown, and people ask "How's [new country]?" your answer is either incomprehensibly specific: 

"...well, my Steuerberater just told me that the Finanzamt have declared our 2000 Euro freelance tax exemption invalid because I was working on a Lohnsteuerkarte for the first half of 2009; that's bloody Germany for you"

     or merely witless:

"...s'nice thank you".

- You get annoyed when: Germans claim that Japanese people eat cats; Japanese worry that Britain is overrun with football hooligans; Brits say they met an American once and he was a right prick; Americans ask if Germany still has a Nazi Party.

 - You become so accustomed to no one understanding quick, idiomatic comments that you will remark, loudly, on a busy Newcastle street, that "it's always the heifers that wear tube tops, isn't it?" 

- You are fluent in zero languages, but able to mime 'our broadband connection is running very slowly today, please tell me if there's a local problem'. You can also order a meal via interpretive dance: "uh, boss? There's a foreigner out here prancing like a chicken and waggling her fingers to indicate noodles. Should we give her the poisonous blowfish?".

- Your voluminous correspondence with the Student Loans Council rivals that of the Mitford sisters.

- You're glad you wear the largest shoe-size for women, because you don't have to bother remembering that you're a British 8, a European 41 and an American 10. You just follow the trannies to the right part of the shop.

(In Japan your footwear choices will be restricted to a mistakenly-imported pair of white Birkenstocks or the men's department.)

- You prefer moving west, because you're several hours younger there.

- You understand that bitching about the NHS is like complaining that the hem is down on your inherited mink coat.

- You only know you're British because all your underwear says 'Marks and Spencer'.

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Duck Soup, Düsseldorf

Exposition Boulevard

I forgot to wash any clothes this weekend; really, my housewifing standards are getting very lax. Sometimes Dr Strangename is reduced to quark-wrangling in yesterday's socks. On Presidents' Day I leave the house dressed, for lack of any other choices, in United Nations blue: blue blazer from California, blue t-shirt from Germany, blue jeans from England and blue plaid scarf from Japan. In my handbag I have a blue beret in case it starts raining again, but the storms are over; our building's swimming pool is a bright aquamarine, rippling to koi-gold in the sun.

On the streets of Los Angeles, in the Westside, the walking wounded are out again. A tall, thin man in an old-school business suit -- pinstriped with matching waistcoat, and I'm sure there's a watch in those pockets -- comes along very slowly, more slowly than anyone with business. His face says nothing. Another middle-aged man pootles past on a mobility scooter, exercising a cheerful dog that is raw and pink with a skin condition. 

Sepulveda Boulevard, as I walk northbound, gets dirtier and dustier.

Bungalows offering Psychic Readings and Garage Sales turn into construction warehouses and lumberyards, with a handful of South American laborours lingering outside. They're there every day, wearing trucker caps and thick jackets, leaning against the fence, not talking; I assume this is a bad day, as it's already mid-morning and work would have presented itself by now. Cornerstone Mantels has eight Stars-and-Stripes fluttering from its roof, and a FOR LEASE sign. Nearby, The Best Little Doorhouse in Town is doing brisk business.

At my destination, I wait in an empty, high-up, doctor's office. Its inland-facing picture windows show a city panorama -- more tall mirrored buildings, SunAmerica and MGM and the Die Hard tower, and glittering lines of traffic, and usually the snowy mountains beyond. Today, even though the sky is a clean arctic blue, the horizon fades into a white blur and the mountains are invisible.

(Last week, at my volunteer job in West Hollywood, I was enjoying a similar view from a picnic table in the playground while I waited for my student. A small boy came up, stood in the herb garden and -- kicking wildly at some lavender -- remarked

- I need someone to keep me SAFE I ate too much SUGAR and now I think of SCARY THINGS.

Then he ran off shouting

- BLEEEEEEUUUUUUU.)

After ten minutes with a laptop-tapping doctor, I'm walking back down Sepulveda. I have to pass under the freeway to get home; two freeways, actually, the north-south 405 and east-west 10 that meet here in a compass-pointed rose, forming one of those looping cloverleaf patterns so beloved of LA aerial views.

But, underneath the intersection, nothing is clear, and all you know is a terrible moaning cathedral of concrete joists, shade and strange detritus: a pair of trousers snagged on a tree, a water-bottle of piss, fluttering reams of toilet paper. Abandoned vehicles are parked at the curb, with cars full of stacked trash, and a duct-taped RV covered in hand-written signs.

YOU ARE UNDER SURVEILLANCE

says one, and I hurry past before the fat man sleeping at the wheel wakes up.

The only cheerful point around here is Exposition Boulevard, regarding which I've prepared a laboured witticism: I would take Exposition, but it's long, pretty dull, and I'm not sure if it leads anywhere particular.

(Except I do know, at least, that it passes the astonishingly shabby local Postal Depot -- but why let this ruin a bon mot?)

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