Wow. I’m totally spent from that trip… I’m glad I gave myself the weekend to recuperate.
So, Los Angeles. Yeah. Well, I’m glad I went and got a chance to see California. But LA… man, much nicer place to visit than it would be to live, I think. Very rundown, and while the weather is that of a tropical vacation paradise, the smog is a sight to behold. The class division is a lot starker than it was in NYC… it seemed like we were the only middle-class people riding the public trains, and the panhandlers gave their spiels in Spanish. It’s way seedier, too… probably a lot closer to what Broadway was like 20 years ago.
Then there was the convention. Wow. My mind staggers at imagining the kind of money that goes into the construction of those exhibits. The whole thing was phenomenal. That said, I took an hour to be impressed with it then was stuck with two days of walking around, feeling incredibly out of place. There are people who are absolutely thrilled to go from exhibit to exhibit, playing five minutes of some game and getting their picture taken with the booth-babes… turns out I am not one of them. I love the art and science of making games, but I guess I had to go there to discover that the glitz and glamour side of it is a real turn-off for me. Which surprised me as much as anyone, frankly… as an actor I thought I would dig all that hollow, superficial stuff.
Part of what made it more laborious than enjoyable was there wasn’t nearly enough swag, and that which there was, wasn’t very good. There may be something counter-intuitive about flying a thousand miles and staying at expensive hotels with the primary expectation of getting your hands on some quality fifty-cent goods, but treasure-hunting is a way of life. As it stands, the neatest thing I got was a Mario-Kart stylus that I can use with my Nintendo DS at work. A few others made out much better… there was a poker tournament where if you spent the necessary time and won the necessary games you could take on celebrity players, and one coworker of mine beat Phil Hellmuth in heads-up and won both a tee-shirt affirming that he had done so and a really sweet wooden chip-caddy. I could never figure out how to get involved in the earlier tournaments, though, and the best I could manage was to get Phil Hellmuth to sign a picture of himself made out “to eBay”.
In my attempt to make this a vacation as well as a work-related adventure, I’d given myself Friday as an extra day to spend freely. L.A. was seedy, though, and my hotel was right next door to Universal Studios, so I wound up going there. Which was reasonably fun, and I suppose I can now cross it off of the list of big attractions I’ve never been to. I made the mistake of going on the Back to the Future ride, though – I have always had horribly nauseating experiences with those turbulence-machine rides, but the last time I’d been on one was probably fifteen years ago or so, so I figured it was worth checking in to see if I’d grown a more flexible constitution since then. Well, it turns out I haven’t… and I suppose I won’t be eligible to become an astronaut any time soon, but I can live with that; at least I know now.
Of course, I also had to give Back to the Future a shot because of the nostalgic importance it holds for me. I was able to appreciate that they haven’t updated the thing at all since it opened about fifteen years ago, including the state-of-the-art computer-generated graphics from that era. The other attractions were also fun (and a whole lot less nauseating), and I got to do a tour of the actual studios, which was more interesting than exciting since almost all of the productions are vacationing right now, so hardly anyone was recording.
My return flight was delayed by about an hour, which meant I didn’t get home until after midnight. Then I had an audition on Saturday, and there was some kind of fundraiser party I was supposed to go to that evening but wound up skipping because I was just too drained. Today I’m going grocery shopping in a bit, but other than that I’m hoping for a nice, quiet day in. At last.
Dan.