Tuesday, March 31, 2009

TOP 5 WORST LA INTERSECTIONS

Anyone who has ever lived in a city knows about a handful of absolutely ridiculous intersections that should be avoided whenever possible so that your road rage doesn't kick in and you end up smashing up someone’s car with that baseball bat you keep in the back seat to protect yourself from crazies. Below are my top five most hated Los Angeles Intersections.


5. San Vicente and Fairfax
This little nugget doesn’t seem like too much of a pain in the ass until rush hour. Making a left hand turn here is impossible. Go up a block and avoid this disaster.



4. The Airport
This place is confusing when it isn’t busy so when you add another 400 cars full of people afraid their gonna miss their flight this place gets down right dangerous. If you miss your terminal exit it could cost you a half hour of your life. Don’t fuck around here, because LAX will fuck with you.



3. Beverly Drive Interchange
Just south of sunset Beverly drive has this crazy 6 way stop that doesn’t have any lights, just stop signs. Since no in LA knows how to drive or take their turn this is constantly a big cluster fuck where you just never know where that little ol granny is gonna nail ya. She could be coming at you from five sides. Not to mention it is at least fifty yards across. Just crossing the intersection takes a minute.



2. The Los Feliz Boulevard 5 North Entrance.
The thing here is that there are two roads that merge but they don’t realize their merging until the last second. I’ve almost been killed here more times than I can count. Again this is usually a result of people not knowing how to A. Merge, and B. wait their fucking turn.



1. The Downtown Interchange
Whoever planned this should be taken away and shot with a bb gun until they bleed to death. There are no words to describe this mess that causes on average 3 accidents a day. This one half a mile stretch of road keeps me from driving downtown. If you wanted people to take the subway you couldn’t have found a better way of making it a viable option.



The Growing Apocalyptic Trend


Apocalyptic fiction has been around for a long long time. Man has always envisioned the finality of his own presence on earth. Early on it was religious events. God or the Gods would come down and cleanse the world rewarding the good and damning the wicked. The rapture… Or a great flood as is the story of Noah’s Ark. Then as our understanding of the world grew we found more ways that we might be eradicated. What is more interesting is that if you view the time frames and the method of destruction you can see trends in what the public’s greatest fears were.

So for example lets look at film since as it is a much smaller body of work than other types of literature.

The nineteen fifties there were roughly 10 apocalyptic films released. Ex. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Day the Earth Stood Still, War of the Worlds, The Beach….Most of these films had a common thread. Destruction from above. Aliens to be specific. In 1957 Sputnic was launched into outer space and for the first time we had reached beyond our planet. If we could accomplish this there must be someone or something our in the vast expanse of space that could do the same. Still this felt a little far fetched and while people aliens were not as scary as the Russians death from above was a real threat.

The Ninteen Sixties there were almost twice as many apocalyptic films released with titles such as: The Day the Earth Caught Fire, Panic in Year Zero, Night of the Living Dead…. Most of these films had something to do with Nuclear War. There were still films that had the themes of the 1950s, but the new greatest fear was Nuclear War. The Cold war had firmly set in and people were on edge, and people were still coming to grips with the simple fact that for the first time in history man had the power to destroy the world.

The Nineteen nineties were again a mix of the past fears, but with the cold war now at an end fear of Nuclear war subsided and in its place we found ourselves with the growing concern of Artificial intelligence and Celestial objects. Technology was advancing by leaps and bounds and computers were slowly making their ways into the average American home. AI was quickly becoming something that people interacted with on a day to day basis. But what if the computers became smarter than us? The Terminator was the first major film to consider that our own machines might take over one day. Later The Matrix brought this fear to an all new level. These films seemed more like a word of warning than a possible reality though. Such technology still seems far off. While our technology was growing so was our understanding of outerspace. We started to realize that the planet is hit by alien objects each day and it is all together possible that we might be hit by something much larger. Thus born of these fears we get Deep Impact, and Armageddon.

During the last nine years there have been over thirty apocalyptic films ranging from topics as diverse as Nuclear war to disease to the global warming. Our understanding of our planet and our place on it has grown and so has our understanding of how truly fragile our world is. What is more interesting than the sudden diversity of destructive means is the shear number of films that are discussing the untimely end of society.

Every so often I’ll be walking around and I will overhear someone discussing what they would do if the world ended today as casually as if they were discussing what they would do if they won a million dollars. Even scarier is the idea that people think winning a million dollars is just as likely to happen as the world ending. Apocalyptic films act as an fantasy world for people to live in. A world were we are free from the ever tightening grip of consumerism, technology, and debt. I think we all are secretly yearning for a way out the factories and cubical that we spend our lives in, and when we think about the end of days we are really wishing for a simpler life.

Friday, March 20, 2009

21 Century Digital Boy


We are Trophy kids, we are Generation Y. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Y


Growing up I was always pushed to succeed: To have good grades, to be successful socially, to go to a good college and achieve something that most other people couldn’t. To have a career that is both profitable and be something I enjoy. To eventually have a amazing well paid job, and along the way find someone amazing fall in love with and get married. All this hopefully being accomplished by mid to late thirties, and then all that’s left is to live happily ever after. I was taught financial success first, then relationship success, then happily ever after. That was the plan anyway. But the bad economy has gotten in the way and has forced me to reevaluate this life plan that I and so many other 20-40 year old American’s developed.

The culture of today is not who you are but what you can provide. What is your profession? At least in Los Angeles it is almost guaranteed that within the first 3 minutes of meeting someone you will ask or be asked “So what do you do”. Upon answering you as well as the other person will then categorize one another on what you think that person should be like as well as what they can do to help you in your career/personal goals. So you’re an actor, that must mean you are a lively energetic outgoing person who works at a bar/restaurant to support yourself. Oh so you’re a teacher, that must mean you love kids and want a family of your own or you didn’t know what else to do so you choose teaching. Ect. We define people by their jobs. For the last 10 months I have been unemployed and I have felt like I have lost a large part of my identity. What is worse is that people just assume that because you are unemployed you’re to lazy/untalented/stupid… to actually find a job.

So with this stigma ingrained in my head I have excluded myself from society to some degree. I have not allowed myself to pursue many new relationships romantic or otherwise, and I haven’t really grown as a person. In fact I feel like this last year has been a year of stasis. Nothing has happened. It is as if I was in a coma and woke up a year later with nothing different only I was a year older. This year of unemployment aside though I’m not sure how much I’ve grown in the last 2 years since graduation college.

I graduated and then had a whole world of opportunity to wonder around aimlessly in. Fortunately I decided to push for a career in film and have focused so much of my attention to this that I don’t know if I’ve allowed myself to have any sort of life outside of this professional bubble. Even scarier I don’t know if its not that I haven’t allowed myself, but that I just don’t know how to have a life outside of the professional sphere. So I started thinking, if I had all my financial problems solved what then? If I could just skip ahead to happily ever after what would it be like? That’s when it hit me. I don’t know. Everything I’ve ever been taught has been about how to get to happily ever after, but no one has taught me what to do once I got there. Every movie ends at happily ever after. But then what happens? What I’m I supposed to do then?

After thinking about this I realized that my whole life has been about making sure I can succeed professionally to be able to support myself personally. But I since I left high school I’ve been growing up with less of personal identity and more of a professional identity. In College instead of asking what your job is people ask what your major is? Same thing. I don’t know if I know how to have relationships anymore that don’t have some professional affiliation. My best friends are all in some way business partners, and there are so very few people I know that are just friends. On the topic of romantic relationships I find myself being once again goal oriented. There are steps to take to finding the right person to fit the desired mold.. It’s almost like hiring someone. You can go through a few temps because they were attractive or provided something you needed temporarily, but most of the time I write off people because they do not fit all the qualifications that were clearly stated on the application. Happily ever after doesn’t have yellow teeth or crazy piercings, or a hatred for science fiction pieces. These small details stop potential meaningful relationships.

I am a product of a generation where success is measured in dollars, prestige, and appearances. A a testament to this just look at the amount of reality television shows focused on succeeding in a career: Top Chef, Top Model, Project Runway, The Apprentice, and so many more like them. Media and societal values have left my generation discontent with just being happy. We don’t know how to be truly happy being middle class, self dependent and relatively unnoticed by the world. We don’t know how to live if we don’t have something to be striving for. I don’t know if any of us can have a happily ever after because I don’t think we know how to be content. We keep ourselves so preoccupied that we’ve forgotten how to just enjoy life.