5th Street Guest Suite

I'm now in the spare room at J&A's place in Santa Monica, which is to be their office. Alex has a huge collection of film scripts from her job at Regency, a mix of big famous movies and projects that never made it. Amongst the unmades is the script for Kubrick's 'Napoleon', which contains some classic Stanley K descriptive passages such as:

'A spectacular shot of the French army on the move. 5000 men. Music.'

'Josephine and Charles making love in her mirrored bedroom at the Rue De Chanterine. Maximum erotica.'

$18.39c I Kid You Not

That's about £12.

Easiest $300 I Never Spent

Jon and his wife Alex are moving from apartment 6 to 5. In return for a week's sofa rights, I'm helping them move, from one side of the landing to another. which for a seasoned mover-arounder like me is like asking Thomas Chippendale to sharpen you a pencil.

They seem very grateful. Alex worked until recently for Regency Films and is going to take my reel to some of the agents and managers in Hollywood that only do referalls, once it arrives in the post. She knows her stuff.

Flat 6 Flat 5

Random observations part 01.

1. For a town reknowned for opportunity and a can-do spirit, it has a fuckload of signs telling you what you can't do.

2. This place must get through literally hundreds of tons of Moleskine notebooks if there's that many writers and 'ideas people'.

3. I've seen two tramps wearing ipods so far.

The Silverlake Sofa Surfer

Accomodation plans have stalled a little, so on her strict instructions I stayed at JDP's place for one night. She's a playwright from New York living in LA, teaching screenwriting at UCLA and trying to get her TV scripts off the ground and into the twinkling diamond studded stratosphere above the Hollywood hills. It's taken her 3 years so far. She's getting close.

Her boundless enthusiasm and positivity is infectious, even if it does go against the natural grain of my British sense of 'all in good time, old chap'. She is very encouraging and supportive of me and my ambitions, willing to spend whatever time is necessary to teach me how to write drama, and I get the feeling she will do anything she can to help me get on in this town. But I think I need to do as much as possible myself.

Americans Can't Rave

Met up with Jasper and Will at the Rose cafe for fish tacos and beer. Jasper is a London boy who runs a company called Rogue Status in Venice, LA. He's mates with some people I know in London, one of which is Will, who is out here at the moment. Rogue Status/DTA (Don't Trust Anyone) http://www.roguestatus.com/ are a clothing company but they seem to be much more than that, owning drift racing cars, speedboats, chainsaws and a record label, either collaborating or going to war with other clothing labels.

What they do for a living could not, in the context of the UK, be considered a job, as it seems to me they get paid for coming up with new ways to have fun, and the more irresponsible that fun, then the more they get paid. Again, this seems totally viable in a place like Los Angeles.

So last night went out with the Rogue Status/DTA mob to a warehouse party in Downtown LA, complete with 16 yr old ravers wearing fluorescent beads and taking industrial strength ecstasy for the first time. The DJs were playing dubstep and drum and bass. Didn't make sense. Americans don't really know how to play that music, which probably means that no-one in the UK really knows how to play hip-hop (sorry Brad, Spindoctor).

It made me think music only really sounds right in the place it originated from - G Rap, Kane, Mobb Deep and Masta Ace sounded so perfect in my headphones walking across Union Square, New York, I listened to Danny Fornaris and Calle 13 all week long in Puerto Rico, and now I can't wait to drive top down around LA to Dre, the Doors & Maroon5 (only kidding about the last one).

A Finnish friend of a Finnish friend, Jon, picked me up from the hotel and drove me around Santa Monica and Venice. He's a writer, music video director, and old skool graffiti artist, so we had one or two things to talk about.

I saw a 70 something hunchbacked old lady yesterday walking along Santa Monica Boulevard pulling a small shopping trolley neatly loaded with a pack lunch and some box files. She was wearing a bright yellow hard hat, and Kanye West sunglasses.

This place is nuts and no one seems to notice. That makes everyone nutters by proxy.

So, I'm here.

It took a while and a little self doubt to finally get out of London, and I can't help feeling slightly empty-handed about something, like I've left a crucial element undone. The prospect of this trip felt like a Porsche behind a plate glass showroom window at times, something you can go right up close to but you can't touch it, much less drive the thing. But I landed in LAX last night, bought a burrito as big as Julio Chavez's forearm, and crashed in a very trendy but ridiculously cheap boutiquey hotel on Lincoln Boulevard. They were playing Beatnuts in the lobby this morning.

LA from the sky as the plane landed was one of the most ridiculously beautiful cities from the air I've seen. It burnt Paris. I suppose it must have been rush hour or something, but the city twinkled on and on as far as the eye could see, and the burberry check of the grid system was slashed with these solid white and red streams of headlights and tail lights, It looked like it would be a great place to be stuck in traffic.

This morning I walked 4 miles in search of an adaptor for the laptop. Should have really sorted that out before I went. They were right, all the people who said you dont walk in LA. Pedestrians and cyclists are on the whole, nutters, or the dispossessed. I jaywalked dangerously. I gots ta get me a whip.