I’m standing at the hotel bar. It’s 7:30 in the morning, and despite the fact that it’s a high-end Marriott, this hotel has no complimentary coffee. So I’m forced to order Starbucks from the bar.
A very tall woman (or possibly man who had some surgeries in Thailand?) walks up next to me. She’s dressed in a cowboy hat, lace-up tank-top, and skintight jeans and tall leather boots.
“Two vodka martinis, so filthy a porn star would blush,” she demands of the bartender. Turning to me, she adds, “And you’re having one.”
I muttered something like, “uh, no thanks, ma’am”, scooped up my coffee and ran. Likethe wind.
Welcome to L.A.
I was down in SoCal for the BEA, the biggest book expo and conference in the US of A. Tons of celebrities signing books, such as Alec Baldwin (he’s telling us how to be dads, you pigs), Barbara Walters (spilling her guts), Leonard Nimoy (photography of nekkid fat ladies), and Hugh Hefner (flaunting his shameful life–”Who has two thumbs and has exploited more women than Casanova? This guy!”).
L.A. has always had a veneer of unreality to it, at least when I’ve visited. Everything is just a little too slick, unless you’re in the outer areas, which then are kind of frightening in a way Oakland only wishes it could be. So it wasn’t a surprise that most everything at the BEA relied on artifice and gimmick.
L. Ron Hubbard’s early pulp fiction was being promoted by a British swing band dressed as pirates. Various comic book characters wandered around. A screen with a computer-animated donkey promoted a Christmas book, and a huge tour bus painted with various bosomy maidens and kilt-clad highlanders promoted trashy romance novels. One of my favorites, from the outer rim of the conference hall that all the Ron Paul types and conspiracy theorists had been banished to, was a fellow who had written a book titled “The Death of Freedom”. It was promoted with a faux corpse wearing a t-shirt that read “FREEDOM” in a wheelchair that the author piloted around the hall. Might as well go literal. Across the way from him, a liver-spotted old man leered over copies of his book, the cover of which showed a woman, naked from the waist down, standing in front of a stove. It purported to tell the reader how to cook in such a way that a woman (not unlike the book cover) would drop trou whilst still in your kitchen.
Aside from the kooks and the cooks, there were tons of other authors around. Clinton from “What Not to Wear” signed books for a suspiciously large line of men who, as I passed, each seemed to have a wonderful wife back home who would “just ADORE this! Thanks! Can I give you my card?” Anne Rice was promoting a new book on conversion. And Bill Shatner was there, signing his autobiography. I got it signed to Wavelet (and I didn’t try to pass my card). The Shat, so far as I could tell, does not wear a hairpiece. Looks more like plugs.
I was there for the full three days. It was definitely a learning experience. One thing learned–probably not the best idea to try and promote Catholic books with a life-sized pope cutout. Unless there’s an eight-piece swing band dressed as Swiss Guards backing a Benedict impersonator who’s belting out Dan Schutte remixed, it’s probably not going to make as big a stir as you need. Ah well. There’s always next year.
Filed by wavelet at 1:31 pm under baby
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