Its all about the pixels

anthony, can't sleep? It must be past three AM there isn't it? I'd answer your question, but you see, it's past five here and I'm in no state at all...

havent got to sleep before three for months .

I have absolutely no idea what this question means. You have won, Anthony. You have defeated my mind powers. Hats off to you.

Magnolia was about the despartion and lonliness inherent in the people of Los Angeles. Blind Date is about the ennui and deperation of people from Los Angeles. One is high market, one is low class.

The 'desperation/loneliness' LA description is primo bullshit -- it's an effective enough artistic device, but it is not reality, just like saying anyone off in the prairie somewhere is an incest-lovin' redneck with guns. ;-)

I live on the praries and the redneck trope has its accurcies. I am not talking about what really happens. I am talking about how these two phenomonea happened at the same time and how they seemed to say something abput how we view L A .

I take it we are not talking Blind Date the piss poor Blake Edwards screwball comedy which almost destroyed Bruce Willis's film career before it started. Are we?

Is Cilla Black involved?

not sure if the word about should be used anywhere near the words Blind Date or Magnolia, and quiet desperation is so overrated.

Is it really desperation and loneliness or is it how adept people are at marketing their own garbage/ego/bill of goods?

(a) People who make movies about the lonely desperation of LA are people who came to LA to make movies, and so I suspect some of them might kinda be projecting their skepticism toward the movie-making world out onto the actual place around them? "Loneliness and desperation" seems like exactly the sense you get of any place when your social experience of it is organized mostly around one industry's bubble.

(b) I also get the sense that the social connections of LA are less dense and obvious than in some similar cities -- more home-based, more self-organized through circles of friends, less ... public. And if all you see publically is atomization and distance and bubbles (which seems to certainly exist in LA, in a unique way; the question isn't whether this exists but rather whether it's all that exists), it's easy to start imagining...

(c) This is something that's interested me a whole lot: while watching Friends with Money, I suddenly started connecting the experience with watching Curb Your Enthusiasm, and it occurred to me that they were both based around a certain type of upper-middle-class adult socializing that seems really specifically LA to me. Possibly I'd always assumed that aspect of Curb Your Enthusiasm was just a product of that particular show, and then seeing Friends with Money allowed some kind of comedy/drama triangulation, and suddenly it seemed to me that they were reflecting some kind of real and totally fascinating LA-based mode of socializing.

(I think the high point of this in Friends with Money was when the neighbor invites Keener over to see the view of her house's addition and says -- in a way that's angry but totally friendly and respectful, kind of just no-bullshit -- "What the fuck, did you think we could see through it?" Something along those lines. And something about that speaks to a whole way of being, socially, that reads to me like a total LA thing.)

not sure how you can move from "one industry's bubble" to "LA-based mode of socializing" nabisco. industry = tiny percentage of l.a. population. people i've met thus far = not in same dimension as tv show characters, even skew on the sociable/amiable/friendly end of things compared to other places i've been. of course, i'm sure you can get w/ as fierce a crowd as you want to, although i wonder if this is more within the realm of possibility than other places that have more entrenched/impenetrable circles the higher up you go?

I don't understand what you mean. Those are two separate comments: (a) that people who make films about LA desperation might be influenced by how the film industry itself feels -- plus, on an unrelated note, (b) sometimes I see things that suggest this unique LA social world that I find interesting.