Voices in My Head

New York smells both wonderful and disgusting at the same time.

So Martha and I went to this gala thing at the Marriott in Times Square. At our table were two very nice people, both of whom are in advertising and both of whom have absolutely nothing to do with a creative like me. I’m not quite sure how people who have jobs in media, (selling media) still have jobs and people like me, (who create media), are unemployed. Like I said, I’m not sure how that works.

But anyway, we looked fantastic, well Martha did, I kind of look ugly and weird.

Dress Up

Room 16H at the Waldorf-Astoria is beyond ridiculous. It is a one-bedroom apartment with an entryway;

Welcome Home

a living room; separate bedroom; a separate dressing room;

In the Drama of it all

and a bathroom the size of our living room in Hudson. Speaking of the bathroom, it has a soaking tube, and a separate shower both of which I used within the first two hours of arrival.

Whatever you do Danny, don’t go in room 16H.

The entertainment center in the living room is as big as our garage door. I figure that the whole apartment just might be the size our house laid out flat. I have never, ever been inside something like that that wasn’t roped off in a museum.

Martha and I need to find someone who is going to keep us in the style that we have decided we want to be kept in.

There are so many ghosts living at the Waldorf it is amazing that things don’t just constantly shape shift and fall off the walls.

If I have to say anything bad about the Waldorf is that they are not on the technology speed wagon. Internet is not free and it should not be an ala cart thing. It should be blindly included in the price. Wi-Fi in every room for everything, including that little room with just the toilet in it. Sure most of the folks who come here are older, expect the fantastic charm and no kids thing, but you can’t tout out a five star rating and still have fifteen-twenty-five year old technology in the rooms.

Instead of 24-hour room service and turn down service; (What is it with rich folks inability to touch linens?), I would rather have:

1. Netflix’s first streaming box.
2. All forms of cell phone charging stations.
3. An in-room computer, printer, fax, not something located in the business center.
4. The ability to video conference.
5. A whole bunch of gadgetry that I’m not even aware of. Wow me.
6. And… I would like to know that after the $100 a plate Sunday brunch is over, instead of throwing all that crap out they donate it to the church across the street where all the homeless are.

Temporally living in ridiculous excess during a week when the economy and world took another nosedive was surreal. Martha managed to get everything at such a deep discounts, or for free but these people wake up everyday in this lifestyle. It must be fantastic to be wealthy.

Our hard landing home came when we had to go to the Laundromat and then the store. But hey, at least it was the last ever show of The L Word and my GOD did that suck. Seriously. I’m a combination of angered and embarrassed for them after watching their hour long, celebration their own self-importance.

They really are disgraceful to the creative process and the notion that they would laugh at the massive plot inconsistencies speaks more to how insulated they are from, oh I don’t know, maybe the rest of US. The US that they are supposedly breaking ground for. The US that looks nothing like Katherine Moennig or Jennifer Beals.

In episode 601. Long Nights Journey into Day, Jennifer Beals tirade at the woman in hospital admitting shows just how harmful Ilene Chaiken’s thinking is. Beals character Bette Porter laid into the receptionist with such hateful, upper-class loathing, even going to far as to call her a maggot, indicates a complete lack of understand of what it is to be a middleclass working woman.

The woman was simply doing her shitty paying job in the middle of the night at an LA Emergency Room. Third shift emergency rooms are total hell, and usually reserved for the newest members of the medical profession. Hospital admitting nurses are not paid well and Beal’s character shit all over her when all the woman did was insist that there be only one name listed as the mother. And she didn’t even insist in an aggressive way. It was more of an overworked, dead fucking tired, if you are not here to kill me then go away, type of thing.

Rather than trying to relate to the woman and negotiate a better scenario as an Ivy League educated lesbian might actually do, Bette’s words lash out at the woman to such a frightening extreme that impending violence appears to be the only outcome. Flip the gender of Beals’s character and how would that scene have come across? The hospital’s policies are certainly flexible, but this woman was in no position to bend them. She might very well have lost her job.

Placing class status and or privilege above the rest of us and our employment is exactly why everyone should have hated this show.

Simply saying that Beals’s reading of the Bette Porter character was reacting on the fear that her child was very, very sick doesn’t work in 2009.   She isn’t in a scene from Terms of Endearment, and they were no where near Houston Texas cir 1983.

By Ilene agreeing to this type of exchange, (being the creator, writer and executive producer she is ultimately responsible for it), she does nothing more than push women further back and away from each other instead of ‘ground breaking’ them together and forever forward.

I understand that you cannot be all things to all people, but in six fucking years, they never tried to be anything other than what they were, pretty girls in eyeliner with an endless stream of stupid shit coming out of their mouths. Never once stepping outside of the limited imagination of Ilene, the show relied on a formula that was not only laughable…

WAIT!!!!!
OMG Last week I was only joking about the Alice in prison thing.   Are you  fucking kidding me?

Spin-Off
Series creator Ilene Chaiken recently wrote and produced a 20 minutes presentation for a possible spinoff centering around women’s prison in which Leisha Hailey’s character Alice Pieszecki is detained. The project was shot in December 2008, while the sixth and final season of the L word premiered in January 2009. Famke Janssen, Melissa Leo and Laurie Metcalf were part of the cast.

Showtime’s CEO Matthew Blank first announced plans for the new show at the Television Critics Association press tour in July 2008. “We’re doing this interesting thing: The storyline at the end of The L Word, the final episode in the final season, there will be an open-ended component to it,” Blank confirmed. “And Ilene is going to carry that story along on the Internet, which we think is an interesting way to keep The L Word experience going. Then if we decide to go ahead with the spinoff that storyline will segue into the new series – Wikipedia

Yep, it must be fantastic to be rich and stupid.