"LA Ink" - The longest hour of my life

Previously in the life of Kat Von D:

• Kat does many realistic portrait tattoos of dead babies, grandparents.
• Kat threatens the masculinity of Ami James by virtue of her mere presence.
• Kat ditches inexplicable, trolly husband.
• Kat loses roughly 25 lbs, probably at the behest of network executives.

All of which seems much more interesting than anything that happened on Monday night.

I watched "Miami Ink" more regularly in the first season that I do now, but I always liked Kat. She seemed low-key and cool, and I thought it would be fun to go drinking with her and Kelly Clarkson. And she is tall, which I appreciate. So I was happy that she has her own show, and I'm thoroughly fascinated with watching the motley parade of folks getting tattoos. Seeing people justify why they want a dolphin holding a rose - graffiti-style - to commemorate their divorce (they're FREE now, you see!) is always entertaining.*

But, for the love of gawd, how did it actually take 42 minutes (excluding the airtime devoted to the GEICO cavemen) for the following to occur:

Walking around Hollywood. So edgy! So awesome! It's like the "Welcome to the Jungle" video where Axl gets off the bus and is seduced by the glamorous rock and roll underworld. Also heroin. Except Kat isn't shooting up in the bathroom at the Whisky - she's meeting with her contractor. Dude, talking about construction is almost as rad as WATCHING IT HAPPEN. But don't worry, there will be some of that later. But Kat's contractor has full sleeves and wears an ironic fedora so it's totally edgy.

To be fair, Kat does do a tattoo for Eric Balfour, whose character on "Conviction" was cute and charming and evidently nothing like how he is in real life - which is sort of a tool. His tattoo is a skull with butterflies, which somehow represents that he really digs living in LA - because it's awesome! Kat agrees that LA is awesome. The design is based on (wait for it) the album art for HIS BAND. Of course he's in a band. They show a brief clip of Eric Balfour's band - wow, OK. Do not want.

Kat walks around LA some more, and it's still awesome! She tries to convince Corey Miller, one of her mentors, to come work at her shop instead of his. Even though his shop actually exists and hers...not so much right now. Corey makes like he won't do it, but we've all seen the print ads, and so we knew how that's going to end up.

Seriously? We're only 20 minutes in? Dude.

Then it's off on a countrywide "search" to introduce us to the other artists that have already been hired. Many shots of planes taking off and other cities that are not as awesome as LA. Which is obviously why Kat is able to get them to pick up and move pretty easily. I mean, her argument is basically, "Dudes! I'm opening a shop in LA - which is awesome, by the way! Come work for...I mean, with me! In my shop! That doesn't exist yet!" She could sell ice to Eskimos, that one.

Kat does another tattoo (we're up to 2, if you're counting and you shouldn't bother) - a half-sleeve consisting of (I am not making this up) the LA skyline. What? LA has a skyline? I wasn't aware of any building there having more than 5 floors. Kat explains that she really wants to do a good job, since she would be totally dissing the awesomeness of LA if every little detail isn't perfect. Truly, I had no idea that the LA skyline was so distinctive. But I do not for one second question it's awesomeness.

Oh, PS, Kat is really glad to be back in LA. Because it's her hometown. And because LA is amazingly awesome. Those of us who don't live in LA...well, we can never truly understand the awesome awesomeness that is LA.

Is it over? Finally? Thank God. I mean, it's not like TLC isn't going to rerun it 150 times before next week's exciting installment - when Kat gets to watch more construction in action (rad!) and sit around at sidewalk cafes with her newly relocated staff. Because the shop? Still? Not so much.

* I have tattoos, and I intend on getting more. So I feel fully entitled to pass judgement on people who get completely asinine - albeit well-executed - body art. Especially people who make it my business by getting said body art on national television.

Virtually reality

In my spare time, I'm reading a novel about the music industry.

Like most of the books I've read since college, my mother sent it to me. I don't read nearly as much as I once did. I really don't have the time - unless I'm trapped on airplane with 5 hours to kill and my movie choice is something involving Adam Sandler and/or talking animals - and the idea of sifting through the enormous stacks at Barnes & Noble exhausts me. So I rely on Bling Judy, who is an avid reader, to pass along books that she think might interest me. She tends to stick to things she knows I like, and most of the time she's not wrong - with the possible exception of the book she sent by the girl who lived in New York City, describing how she paid off her astronomical credit card debt by begging money off strangers on the internet. I mean, seriously - fuck her and her Gucci shoe habit. I feel sorry for her not at all.

This particular book, while intriguing on the surface, was a similar gamble. I almost never read fiction, first and foremost. So I'm already biased going in. And I haven't finished the book yet, so it's probably unfair of me to pass judgement. But if you want to step up and fictionalize my everyday experience, you're opening yourself up to a whole world of judgement.

It's not a novel in the traditional sense of having a linear storyline, only that it's made up. It's really a series of short stories focusing on one character, each of whom have a different perspective of the music business - the performer, the label drone, the fan. A critical blurb touts that it has "an insider's touch to its depiction of the music industry and its denizens." Hmm. OK. I noticed that the author was in a band. Not a band I had heard of, and I've heard of things that never see the light of day beyond, say, the lead singer's mom's stereo. So I was a little suspect as to how insider the touch was really going to be.

The first chapter is about a 26 year-old A&R rep, condemned by the back cover as "arrogantly hip." For the most part, I cringe at fictional depictions of the music business - especially things like A&R, which is often put on par with being Mick Jagger, and this was no exception. A&R is not a hard gig, but it's a cruel one. Your value rests solely on how much weight your opinion holds on any particular day. Job security there is not, and much of your time is spent in crappy rock clubs or being criminally insincere. On the other hand, it's not that I haven't encountered a fair share of people my own age who act especially entitled to their padded expense accounts and dubious clout by virtue of their American Apparel hoodies and having their picture taken at the right parties. But it's the exception, not the rule.

A few years ago, I was in the Los Angeles office of Atlantic Records, who employed me at the time. It was my first time there, and I was making the rounds, putting faces to the people I communicated with on a daily basis. One of my last stops was the VP of A&R, who hadn't signed anything of real importance - most recently a band called Audiovent who's primary allure was that it contained the brothers of two of the guys in Incubus. But nevertheless he had a large office and unlimited supply of complimentary soft drinks, no doubt. Standing by his desk was a ruddy-faced kid, younger than me, probably about 19 or so. The department intern, I thought.

"Oh, have you met Kevin?" the VP asked.

"Hi," I said to the kid, extending my hand. "I work in the New York office." To be honest, I felt vaguely superior. I was only an executive assistant, but people knew me. After all, I had just walked into the office of the VP of A&R without knocking. While I had neither business cards nor any real influence, at least I didn't have to share a desk or spend my entire day stuffing padded envelopes.

"Kevin is our newest A&R rep," continued the VP. At this, Kevin smiled awkwardly and looked at his shoes. "He helped bring Audiovent to us."

This was the first time I realized that my very expensive college degree was no match for smoking weed with the brother of the guy from Incubus, as far as qualifications.

As I recall, Kevin was neither arrogant, nor especially hip. As the ideal demographic for pop music skews younger and the heavyweight executives get older, there occurs a frantic scrambling to latch onto anything or anyone who carried any semblance of relevance. So obscenely young and inexperienced people are hired, and their opinions are afforded an outrageous level of weight. Sometimes this goes to their head. But more often than not, they are shitcanned inside of a year when "restructuring" rolls around.

If anything, I'm a little amused to witness how an artist perceives the thoughts and motivations of those of us who work on this business side. Those of us who have to be somewhere every morning, sit at a desk and go through the motions of hawking art. Maybe we seem arrogant or self-important, incapable of understanding the artist since we must be analytical of mind and pretty much without a soul. We are, after all, agents of The Man.

Part of the artifice of the novel is how, on the surface, it's a series of independent vignettes about particular characters, the stories are all woven together in subtle ways. Central characters from one chapter pop up in the background of another as I read on, giving the whole thing a sort of loose structure. That's the one thing that I think rings true. This is a small world, this business - and a caste system in some ways. At the larger companies, unless you have a certain title, your usefulness is stripped down to whether or not you can be sent to Starbucks for lattes at 3PM. On the other hand, a person's overall clout is really nothing more than an illusion that can be crafted. It's all about getting your name out there, making sure everyone knows that you're a force to be reckoned with. I need to get better at this, I admit. My personal glory is never a concern, and I'm terrible at networking. My people will not be calling your people, and working a room gives me hives. But sometimes a reputation happens on its own.

Exhibit A: I was at a release part at the Hudson Hotel, thrown by Atlantic Records. It was a year or so after they had laid me off. Someone introduced me to Keith, who managed the Atlantic street teams. I had never had cause to deal with him while I worked there, but I had heard his name in passing. I shook his hand.

"Oh, wow, I've heard of you, " said Keith reverently. "They still talk about you. You wouldn't take shit from anyone."

There's also a healthy amount of self-loathing among almost all of the characters I've met so far in this book - the A&R guy is apathetic about his job, the rock star hates his fame, the label president feels like an inhuman dream-crusher, the sound engineer mourns the wife and children he left behind. I have to say, I have my moments of self-loathing, and they never have anything to do with my chosen line of work. Usually it's the result of stuff I do when I'm drunk. I mean, honestly - I've never met anyone who felt so resoundingly trapped in a gilded case littered with broken CD cases that they couldn't pack up and go work for a PR firm. This line of work is not as glamorous as it's often made out to be (we use a lot of Excel spreadsheets just like everyone else - sorry to disappoint), but I know that I wouldn't be happy doing anything else. At this point, I'm not sure I'm really qualified to do anything else. Besides, I think I still have some remnants of my soul left.

What struck me this weekend, as I finished the chapter about the newly signed band member who struggles with the suicide of his ex-girlfriend (replete with shout-outs to Natalie Merchant, natch), is how utterly depressing the whole book felt. All of the characters seemed so painfully isolated. There is no mention of them having friends, and especially not friends within the business with whom they can commiserate or laugh about its inherent absurdity. This is the biggest fiction of all, at least given my own experience. The friends I've made over the course of my tenure in the music industry are my surrogate family, sometimes only because they can most acutely appreciate the singular experience of what we do. "It's like being in Vietnam," I sighed to my lawyer friend. "You can try to explain it to people who weren't there, but they can't really understand what it's like."

This all sounds quite romantic, I suddenly realize. How trite. That wasn't my intention. Every Tuesday at my office I have to take out the trash. There are certainly days when I question whether or not it wouldn't be better to move to Minnesota and work at a truck stop. At times I go home feeling like I had a productive day, but more often I find myself exhausted by the struggle of fighting against an industry where logic goes to die. It's like any job.

"You should write a book," Mike said to me once. More than once. We sat next to each other for three years, tortured in similar ways by the unglamorous and often ridiculous mechanics of selling music for a living. "You can't make this shit up."

Maybe I will write a book someday. Except it would be non-fiction. And it would be a comedy, I think. After all, it's only entertainment.

The single parent

(DISCLAIMER: This is more of an writing exercise than my usual conversational rant. Which is not to say that it's any less true. I've been working with it, on and off, for about 3 months. I will never be happy with it, but today seemed like an apt day to finally stop tinkering and post it.)

My father is dying. Slowly. Statistically.

He had a 1% chance of not making it through his last surgery, but a 90% chance that this recurrence of his cancer will kill him, quickly. His kind of cancer usually has a 5-year survival rate, and his first episode was two years ago.

He called to tell me all this a few months ago, as I was driving down an endless stretch of desert highway in California's central valley. It was the first time I'd spoken to him in almost year.

Before I was born, my father wanted to name me Darryl if I were a boy. My mother says this only would have happened over her dead body.

When I was 6 years-old, my father taught me how to ride a bike. "Don't be a afraid of it," he said. "If you're afraid of it, you'll fall down." I fell down a lot. He showed me how to swing a bat, forcing my right elbow up and always telling me to follow-through. I was good at softball, and he was proud of me.

When I was 9 years-old, I used to take the bus to my after-school program at the YMCA, even though it wasn't all that far. The day that I missed the bus and nervously decided to walk, a fire engine pulled up as I was waiting to cross Purchase Street. My father waved to me and lifted me aboard. We rode together to the YMCA, and he let me ring the siren.

When I was 13 years-old, my father moved back to his hometown with his wife. He left me with my grandmother, instructing me not to tell my mother. The custody arrangement had been acrimonious and, as the primary guardian, my father was not supposed to leave the state. Fifteen minutes after the car left the driveway, I called my mother. I started at my third grammar school a week later.

My father sometimes writes me letters. They are always on yellow legal paper, torn from a pad that he keeps on his dining room table. His handwriting is in all capital letters. He tells me about the weather, my cousin and her kids. He always ends with "be careful."

When I was 18 years-old, my father stopped paying child support. He refused to give me any money for college since he felt there was no reason I ought to waste my time with such an expensive school. The campus at UNC was lovely, he'd said, and I could live with him.

Whenever I visit him in North Carolina, my father tells me how much cheaper it would be for me to live there instead of New York. He says I must have forgotten what trees and grass look like. He glares disapprovingly at my tattoos. He talks a lot about his will, what furniture I can have, if I want it. He enthusiastically tells me stories about his friend Jeff's two little girls, his adopted grandchildren of sorts. They adore him, his wife agrees. They are smart and talented and say the sort of funny, precocious things that 5 and 8 year-olds do. I've noticed that he has more framed photos of them in his house than he does of me.

When I was 24 years-old, my father called two weeks before Christmas to tell me he had cancer. It was raining, and I was walking down 2nd Avenue to my tiny studio apartment that I could barely afford. It was rare, this cancer, he told me. I should think about coming to visit - that is, if I had the time.

A few weeks ago, I turned 27. My father didn't call to wish me "happy birthday." There had been complications with his surgery, and he was in the hospital much longer than the projected 10 days. When I called to thank him for the card he sent, he sounded tired, beaten, but still unwilling to admit that both of us were just going through the motions. "I love you," I said reflexively before hanging up. "Bye," was his reply.

My father is dying. He is a chain smoker. He has congestive heart failure.

Today is his 59th birthday.