Christa Fausts new novel Choke Hold is a sexy and violent thriller, and though its a sequel to her earlier novel Money Shot, its a very different book.
Faust has spent her career writing a series of decidedly different novels, from the Porn Valley set noir of Money Shot to the Lucha Libre detective tale Hoodtown to an investigation into New Yorks S&M subculture in Control Freak to a strange erotic tale of the Peking Opera, Hollywood and homophobia in Triads (which she co-wrote with her friend Poppy Z. Brite). In between these heavily researched projects she writes tie-in books for Supernatural and other television shows and novelizations of films like Friday the Thirteenth and Snakes on a Plane. Faust, who has worked as a professional dominatrix, is also known as the writer-director of the bondage serial adventure Dita in Distress. She recently announced her next project, Butch Fatale: Dyke Dick in Double-D Double Cross, which will be released as an ebook in February (a NSFW excerpt is previewed on her website).
A longtime resident of Los Angeles, she spoke with SG on the phone.
ALEX DUEBEN: Im glad we could talk. Ive been a fan of yours for a while now and I really enjoyed Choke Hold. Why did you decide to write a sequel?
CHRISTA FAUST: Its funny because there was never any intention to make any series or write a sequel. If you look at the end of Money Shot, its pretty final, but in the world of crime writing, people are very series-oriented. If I had a dime for every time somebody said, so whens the next Angel Dare book, Id be a millionaire. I figured, hey, I like a challenge. Lets see if I can get her out of the corner that shes painted into at the end of Money Shot.
AD: I wanted to ask about the setting because Money Shot and your last couple books are very L.A. novels while Choke Hold takes place mostly in these desolate desert areas in Imperial County and the Mexican border.
CF: That was not planned or intentional. It just seemed to be an actual setting for that kind of events. I live in Los Angeles, so its easy for me to set things there, but I wanted to shake things up a little. Theres something very creepy to me about that desert environment the few times that Ive visited. Im such a city girl. Im from New York originally and Im so used to noise and light and sound and chaos and people and you go out to this desolate wasteland and its like youre on another planet. I thought that was really evocative and wanted to use that in Choke Hold. And Angel is a city girl too, and so putting her outside of her comfort zone was part of my intention as well.
AD: In Choke Hold, you really draw a parallel between Mixed Martial Arts and pornography and Im not sure how intentional that was.
CF: Oh that was very intentional. Its something that I noticed from the beginning that really fascinated me. Part of the reason why I chose mixed martial arts for the backdrop of Choke Hold is because I really do see an interesting parallel there. The MMA fighter is the ultimate man and the female porn star is the ultimate woman. Theyre like the ultimate expressions of their gender on opposite ends of the spectrum. What theyre doing is theyre selling their bodies. Theyre pushing their bodies beyond endurance to extreme ends for the entertainment of others. Having spoken to so many young fighters and so many porn stars, there are a lot of parallels in where theyre coming from. The daddy issues are so prevalent that its a cliche. Everybody kind of jokes about it how daddy doesnt love his little boy so he becomes a fighter, daddy doesnt love his little girl so she becomes a porn star. Really, what are they looking for? Theyre looking for that approval from daddy that was never there when they were growing up. Thats obviously oversimplified and definitely not the case for everyone, but Ive seen it enough times that it really struck a chord with me.
AD: In all your books you use a genre framework to explore a subculture. As part of that, do you do a lot of research into MMA, lucha Libre, Peking Opera?
CF: My favorite way of doing research, and Ive said this a thousand times, is just be a good listener. Fuck wikipedia. Be a good listener. If you want to know about something, go talk to people who do it. More importantly, listen to them, because if youre non judgmental and willing to listen, people will open up to you. People like to talk about their job. Whether their job is a file clerk at the DMV or a porn star or a Peking opera actor, people like to talk about their job. All you have to do is listen.
AD: When Money Shot came out it was described as shocking because you portrayed the porn industry as a business and not some level of hell, but did you censor yourself in some way?
CF: Not normally. I dont feel that anything is gratuitous. There are plenty of details that could have been added that were not necessary, but I dont feel that I do that in order to coddle peoples delicate sensibilities. I do it based on the story. If the story warrants a detail, I put it in. If the story doesnt warrant that detail, I leave it out. There are aspects of the adult film industry that may seem shocking but are really very workaday and ordinary to the people who do that job. Whats funny about Money Shot is that people talk about how sexy it is but really theres hardly any sex on camera in that book.
AD: Theres far more violence than sex.
CF: Theres far more violence than sex and the one actual sex scene is off camera. You dont actually see anything. But I think theres a level of a reaction like that of Psycho where people go, oh, that movie was so bloody. Really its not. It just gives that impression of violence even though you dont really see it.
AD: Choke Hold is much sexier, both in terms of more sex on the page and having a sexier tone.
CF: Oh absolutely. And whats funny about Choke Hold is that I am a fan, as a reader, of bad sex. I love bad sex, and by bad sex I mean unsuccessful sex. Awkward sex. Sex that just doesnt work or isnt right for whatever reason. The mistake that so many writers make when they write sex scenes is that they go through so much to be so honest and to describe things so truthfully and they get to a sex scene and its like turning on MTV where theyre always orgasming at the same time and its all so awesome and and its like, what happened? You shouldnt pull over by the side of the road and insert sex scene. It should be a natural part of the story. The way that people fuck tells you who they are. We dont all fuck the same just as we dont all eat the same. Sex can be a vehicle for character development. And if it isnt, that scene has no business being in the book.
For Angel as a character, sex is her default setting. Thats the way that she relates to everyone because its easy for her. Its the path of least resistance. So when she encounters somebody for whom sex is not easy, she cant use that as a distraction. Now all of a sudden you have to show all this other stuff that you can normally cover up with sex. A lot of people feel that sex is the most intimate possible act but not for Angel. Sex is not intimacy for her. Its kung fu.
AD: I like that metaphor.
CF: Well, the whole book is about her intimacy issues. A lot of the women that I met in the adult film industry have these tremendous intimacy issues. Theyll fuck anybody, but they wont let you in.
AD: I know that many years ago you directed Dita in Distress, which is series of famous fetish videos.
CF: I did indeed. It was a blast. I have got to find a way to digitize all that old footage because we made that for ten cents right on the cusp of the whole digital revolution. We have VHS copies of some of the episodes, but lord only knows what happened to the unedited master tapes. Its just a big mess. I would love to be able to take those old episodes and digitize them and make them available because it was just so much fun. It was just a wild, crazy, wacky adventure. And let me tell you something, that Dita, she was a trooper. She let us torture her for days and days and days. [laughs] She was just fantastic. It was really really fun.
AD: Are you interested in doing more film projects?
CF: Im always open. Im dealing with one deadline after another and I never seem to have extra time to do those fun, goofy projects, but I would love to be able to do something else like that.
AD: If you had that chance, what would you do?
CF: Well, one of my personal fetishes is that damsel in distress kind of jungle adventure type of thing like what I did with Dita. Anything that involved bondage and trying to escape. I love that. I would love to do more episodes of Dita in Distress, because at the end of the final episode, shes in the future. Of course its a 1930s future, a Flash Gordon future with zeppelins and clothes with fins so that would be just a blast.
AD: You worked in different genres earlier in career, but what is it about crime fiction that you enjoy?
CF: Its funny, I went through a sort of evolution of genre as far as what I was reading as I grew up. When I was a kid, like third grade, I was reading a lot of heavy science fiction. I was really into Frederick Pohl and Isaac Asimov and hard sci-fi. Then puberty hit and it was all about horror. I was really into splatterpunk. Then when I turned thirty I became really interested in crime fiction. So Im forty-two now and havent given up the crime fiction yet, but who knows? Well see whats next. But really, I dont see horror and crime fiction as being all that different, because what are they dealing with? Theyre dealing with death, murder, the darkness inside the human heart.
AD: You write a lot of novelizations and tie-in novels. What makes it interesting for you?
CF: I often make a comparison to being a pro domme cause I worked as a professional dominatrix for one a hundred and one years. When you do pro sessions, you have to go along with the client. The client wants you to wear a chicken suit, you wear a chicken suit. Thats how it works. Its not the same as playing in your private life where you get to do whatever you like. The way I see it, novelizations and tie-ins are a lot like pro domme sessions in that theres a structure, youre given a list of things that you have to include in the scenario, but within that structure that youve been given, you have the freedom to do whatever. Its like that cooking show where they make you have to cook a meal using certain ingredients. You dont get to pick the ingredients, but you get to pick how you cook them. So I didnt invent Sam and Dean Winchester but I can make them do what I want.
AD: Now you as the author have to like and relate to your characters, but with crime fiction you have to be willing to torture them.
CF: Exactly.
AD: Is there a contradiction?
CF: I dont think so, but maybe thats the sadist in me. [laughs] Part of what I love about crime fiction is watching the way that people fall apart. Putting people under stress and seeing what happens. Thats what good hard boiled or noir fiction does. Its not about the mechanics of the heist. Its about the way that people who are perpetrating the heist fall apart. Thats only interesting if you care about those people and the ways in which they come apart.
AD: In that sense, Money Shot almost doesnt live up to the back of the description of a porn star out for revenge.
CF: You have to understand, this was all part of my evil plan. I wanted men to read about womens fear of aging. I wanted to get women to read about violence against women. I want people who would never read a book about a woman losing her sense of beauty and trying to understand who she is if shes not beautiful, how do you sell them that book? A hot porn star with a gun goes on an ass-kicking rampage and gets revenge. So they buy it. But now theyre going to see all these other things. Were exposing them to things that they may not have ordinarily picked up. And it goes the other way too. Because I can sell the book to female readers who would never read about an ass-kicking porn star with a gun but are very interested in the real meaning of beauty and what happens when you lose it. If you give them a pop pulpy idea on the surface and if you just read that surface novel, you can enjoy it. But if you want to dig deeper, that other stuff is there.
AD: It occurs to me weve never actually discussed what the book is about.
CF: [laughs] What do you want to know?
AD: Well anyones whos read this far is clearly interested. Say what you will.
CF: For me, the spark that really made me interested in writing about MMA, in addition to this funny parallel that I saw with porn, was the issue of Chronic Traumatic Endocephalopathy, or Punch-drunk syndrome. When I first started looking into MMA and thinking about writing some kind of character who was a fighter, I started thinking about CTE and what those guys are going through. I dont know if you remember the case of the pro wrestler Chris Benoit where he murdered his wife and son and then killed himself. It was revealed that it was not steroids, it was CTE, dementia caused by repeated concussions. Choke Hold doesnt reflect that true crime story at all, but that was the spark that made start thinking about what would it be like to be right on the cusp of that. You are still aware enough that you can see it coming. Youre not so far gone that you dont know any better, but you know thats where youre headed. How would that feel and how would that affect the choices that you make.
I spent a lot of time with a young eighteen year old fighter training for his first fight. Like I said, I like to do my research with real people and so I spent a lot of time with him, following him around, watching him train. I asked him, do you know anybody who is suffering from memory loss and concussive-related problems and he said, no, I dont. So I bumped into his trainer, whos my age, and I said, so, do you know anybody whos been suffering from these problems. He said, yeah, me. After this interview is over, Im not going to remember your name. To me, that in a nutshell is whats going on in Choke Hold. You have this young man who doesnt see any of this even though its right in front of him. Youre training with this guy every day and you dont see the problems that hes having. Its like wanting kids not to smoke because its not healthy. They know that but they dont really know it. They just dont see it. I guess part of what I was trying to do with Choke Hold was put Angel in between these two extremes this young guy whos got his whole life in front of him and doesnt see any downside and this older guy whos right on this cusp where he knows its all downhill from here.
AD: Now just to end he conversation one a lighter note, what do you love about Los Angeles?
CF: Part of what I love about L.A. is the fact that everybody else hates it. [laughs] Im contrary like that. There are so many things about L.A. that are hidden. I grew up in New York and in New York, everything is right there. You can walk the same route from your house to the subway station every day and youll see something different every day. Its vibrant and dynamic and in your face. L.A. is very spread out and diffuse so if you dont know anything about the city, and somebody just drops you in the middle, youll miss ninety percent of whats here. Theres no serendipity out here. You dont accidentally stumble across something. You have to drive fifteen minutes. You have to know in advance where youre going. What I love about L.A. is its like a thousand cities bolted onto each other and instead of a thousand cities connected, theyre a thousand cities on top of each other. You can be standing on one corner and be in four cities simultaneously because there are these different levels that people see and levels beneath that.
I love the history. I love all the crazy true crime stories and all the wild adventures that have happened over the course of building up this dream factory that we live in. I also love the non-Hollywood aspect of L.A. because people always assume that L.A. is Hollywood. Blondes with fake tits and the beach. There is that. The entertainment industry is like our factory and we live in a factory town so a lot of people who live here work in the factory but there are plenty of people who dont, whose whole lives never touch the entertainment industry, but they are Angelenos too.
My mother still lives in the same apartment on 45th street and 9th avenue. Shes been there for years and wow when I grew up there Hells Kitchen was a little different. Now its like Citywalk 2. How scary is that? That bulbous artificial environment for tourists that has taken over so much of Los Angeles has spread like a cancer throughout the country. Its terrifying. But I refuse to let people hate on LA because yes, we have Rodeo Drive, yes, we have Citywalk, yes, we have Muscle Beach, but if you think thats all we are, thats like reading Money Shot as just a novel about a porn star with a gun. You can look at LA on that level, and none of it is a lie, but thats only one level.
Faust has spent her career writing a series of decidedly different novels, from the Porn Valley set noir of Money Shot to the Lucha Libre detective tale Hoodtown to an investigation into New Yorks S&M subculture in Control Freak to a strange erotic tale of the Peking Opera, Hollywood and homophobia in Triads (which she co-wrote with her friend Poppy Z. Brite). In between these heavily researched projects she writes tie-in books for Supernatural and other television shows and novelizations of films like Friday the Thirteenth and Snakes on a Plane. Faust, who has worked as a professional dominatrix, is also known as the writer-director of the bondage serial adventure Dita in Distress. She recently announced her next project, Butch Fatale: Dyke Dick in Double-D Double Cross, which will be released as an ebook in February (a NSFW excerpt is previewed on her website).
A longtime resident of Los Angeles, she spoke with SG on the phone.
ALEX DUEBEN: Im glad we could talk. Ive been a fan of yours for a while now and I really enjoyed Choke Hold. Why did you decide to write a sequel?
CHRISTA FAUST: Its funny because there was never any intention to make any series or write a sequel. If you look at the end of Money Shot, its pretty final, but in the world of crime writing, people are very series-oriented. If I had a dime for every time somebody said, so whens the next Angel Dare book, Id be a millionaire. I figured, hey, I like a challenge. Lets see if I can get her out of the corner that shes painted into at the end of Money Shot.
AD: I wanted to ask about the setting because Money Shot and your last couple books are very L.A. novels while Choke Hold takes place mostly in these desolate desert areas in Imperial County and the Mexican border.
CF: That was not planned or intentional. It just seemed to be an actual setting for that kind of events. I live in Los Angeles, so its easy for me to set things there, but I wanted to shake things up a little. Theres something very creepy to me about that desert environment the few times that Ive visited. Im such a city girl. Im from New York originally and Im so used to noise and light and sound and chaos and people and you go out to this desolate wasteland and its like youre on another planet. I thought that was really evocative and wanted to use that in Choke Hold. And Angel is a city girl too, and so putting her outside of her comfort zone was part of my intention as well.
AD: In Choke Hold, you really draw a parallel between Mixed Martial Arts and pornography and Im not sure how intentional that was.
CF: Oh that was very intentional. Its something that I noticed from the beginning that really fascinated me. Part of the reason why I chose mixed martial arts for the backdrop of Choke Hold is because I really do see an interesting parallel there. The MMA fighter is the ultimate man and the female porn star is the ultimate woman. Theyre like the ultimate expressions of their gender on opposite ends of the spectrum. What theyre doing is theyre selling their bodies. Theyre pushing their bodies beyond endurance to extreme ends for the entertainment of others. Having spoken to so many young fighters and so many porn stars, there are a lot of parallels in where theyre coming from. The daddy issues are so prevalent that its a cliche. Everybody kind of jokes about it how daddy doesnt love his little boy so he becomes a fighter, daddy doesnt love his little girl so she becomes a porn star. Really, what are they looking for? Theyre looking for that approval from daddy that was never there when they were growing up. Thats obviously oversimplified and definitely not the case for everyone, but Ive seen it enough times that it really struck a chord with me.
AD: In all your books you use a genre framework to explore a subculture. As part of that, do you do a lot of research into MMA, lucha Libre, Peking Opera?
CF: My favorite way of doing research, and Ive said this a thousand times, is just be a good listener. Fuck wikipedia. Be a good listener. If you want to know about something, go talk to people who do it. More importantly, listen to them, because if youre non judgmental and willing to listen, people will open up to you. People like to talk about their job. Whether their job is a file clerk at the DMV or a porn star or a Peking opera actor, people like to talk about their job. All you have to do is listen.
AD: When Money Shot came out it was described as shocking because you portrayed the porn industry as a business and not some level of hell, but did you censor yourself in some way?
CF: Not normally. I dont feel that anything is gratuitous. There are plenty of details that could have been added that were not necessary, but I dont feel that I do that in order to coddle peoples delicate sensibilities. I do it based on the story. If the story warrants a detail, I put it in. If the story doesnt warrant that detail, I leave it out. There are aspects of the adult film industry that may seem shocking but are really very workaday and ordinary to the people who do that job. Whats funny about Money Shot is that people talk about how sexy it is but really theres hardly any sex on camera in that book.
AD: Theres far more violence than sex.
CF: Theres far more violence than sex and the one actual sex scene is off camera. You dont actually see anything. But I think theres a level of a reaction like that of Psycho where people go, oh, that movie was so bloody. Really its not. It just gives that impression of violence even though you dont really see it.
AD: Choke Hold is much sexier, both in terms of more sex on the page and having a sexier tone.
CF: Oh absolutely. And whats funny about Choke Hold is that I am a fan, as a reader, of bad sex. I love bad sex, and by bad sex I mean unsuccessful sex. Awkward sex. Sex that just doesnt work or isnt right for whatever reason. The mistake that so many writers make when they write sex scenes is that they go through so much to be so honest and to describe things so truthfully and they get to a sex scene and its like turning on MTV where theyre always orgasming at the same time and its all so awesome and and its like, what happened? You shouldnt pull over by the side of the road and insert sex scene. It should be a natural part of the story. The way that people fuck tells you who they are. We dont all fuck the same just as we dont all eat the same. Sex can be a vehicle for character development. And if it isnt, that scene has no business being in the book.
For Angel as a character, sex is her default setting. Thats the way that she relates to everyone because its easy for her. Its the path of least resistance. So when she encounters somebody for whom sex is not easy, she cant use that as a distraction. Now all of a sudden you have to show all this other stuff that you can normally cover up with sex. A lot of people feel that sex is the most intimate possible act but not for Angel. Sex is not intimacy for her. Its kung fu.
AD: I like that metaphor.
CF: Well, the whole book is about her intimacy issues. A lot of the women that I met in the adult film industry have these tremendous intimacy issues. Theyll fuck anybody, but they wont let you in.
AD: I know that many years ago you directed Dita in Distress, which is series of famous fetish videos.
CF: I did indeed. It was a blast. I have got to find a way to digitize all that old footage because we made that for ten cents right on the cusp of the whole digital revolution. We have VHS copies of some of the episodes, but lord only knows what happened to the unedited master tapes. Its just a big mess. I would love to be able to take those old episodes and digitize them and make them available because it was just so much fun. It was just a wild, crazy, wacky adventure. And let me tell you something, that Dita, she was a trooper. She let us torture her for days and days and days. [laughs] She was just fantastic. It was really really fun.
AD: Are you interested in doing more film projects?
CF: Im always open. Im dealing with one deadline after another and I never seem to have extra time to do those fun, goofy projects, but I would love to be able to do something else like that.
AD: If you had that chance, what would you do?
CF: Well, one of my personal fetishes is that damsel in distress kind of jungle adventure type of thing like what I did with Dita. Anything that involved bondage and trying to escape. I love that. I would love to do more episodes of Dita in Distress, because at the end of the final episode, shes in the future. Of course its a 1930s future, a Flash Gordon future with zeppelins and clothes with fins so that would be just a blast.
AD: You worked in different genres earlier in career, but what is it about crime fiction that you enjoy?
CF: Its funny, I went through a sort of evolution of genre as far as what I was reading as I grew up. When I was a kid, like third grade, I was reading a lot of heavy science fiction. I was really into Frederick Pohl and Isaac Asimov and hard sci-fi. Then puberty hit and it was all about horror. I was really into splatterpunk. Then when I turned thirty I became really interested in crime fiction. So Im forty-two now and havent given up the crime fiction yet, but who knows? Well see whats next. But really, I dont see horror and crime fiction as being all that different, because what are they dealing with? Theyre dealing with death, murder, the darkness inside the human heart.
AD: You write a lot of novelizations and tie-in novels. What makes it interesting for you?
CF: I often make a comparison to being a pro domme cause I worked as a professional dominatrix for one a hundred and one years. When you do pro sessions, you have to go along with the client. The client wants you to wear a chicken suit, you wear a chicken suit. Thats how it works. Its not the same as playing in your private life where you get to do whatever you like. The way I see it, novelizations and tie-ins are a lot like pro domme sessions in that theres a structure, youre given a list of things that you have to include in the scenario, but within that structure that youve been given, you have the freedom to do whatever. Its like that cooking show where they make you have to cook a meal using certain ingredients. You dont get to pick the ingredients, but you get to pick how you cook them. So I didnt invent Sam and Dean Winchester but I can make them do what I want.
AD: Now you as the author have to like and relate to your characters, but with crime fiction you have to be willing to torture them.
CF: Exactly.
AD: Is there a contradiction?
CF: I dont think so, but maybe thats the sadist in me. [laughs] Part of what I love about crime fiction is watching the way that people fall apart. Putting people under stress and seeing what happens. Thats what good hard boiled or noir fiction does. Its not about the mechanics of the heist. Its about the way that people who are perpetrating the heist fall apart. Thats only interesting if you care about those people and the ways in which they come apart.
AD: In that sense, Money Shot almost doesnt live up to the back of the description of a porn star out for revenge.
CF: You have to understand, this was all part of my evil plan. I wanted men to read about womens fear of aging. I wanted to get women to read about violence against women. I want people who would never read a book about a woman losing her sense of beauty and trying to understand who she is if shes not beautiful, how do you sell them that book? A hot porn star with a gun goes on an ass-kicking rampage and gets revenge. So they buy it. But now theyre going to see all these other things. Were exposing them to things that they may not have ordinarily picked up. And it goes the other way too. Because I can sell the book to female readers who would never read about an ass-kicking porn star with a gun but are very interested in the real meaning of beauty and what happens when you lose it. If you give them a pop pulpy idea on the surface and if you just read that surface novel, you can enjoy it. But if you want to dig deeper, that other stuff is there.
AD: It occurs to me weve never actually discussed what the book is about.
CF: [laughs] What do you want to know?
AD: Well anyones whos read this far is clearly interested. Say what you will.
CF: For me, the spark that really made me interested in writing about MMA, in addition to this funny parallel that I saw with porn, was the issue of Chronic Traumatic Endocephalopathy, or Punch-drunk syndrome. When I first started looking into MMA and thinking about writing some kind of character who was a fighter, I started thinking about CTE and what those guys are going through. I dont know if you remember the case of the pro wrestler Chris Benoit where he murdered his wife and son and then killed himself. It was revealed that it was not steroids, it was CTE, dementia caused by repeated concussions. Choke Hold doesnt reflect that true crime story at all, but that was the spark that made start thinking about what would it be like to be right on the cusp of that. You are still aware enough that you can see it coming. Youre not so far gone that you dont know any better, but you know thats where youre headed. How would that feel and how would that affect the choices that you make.
I spent a lot of time with a young eighteen year old fighter training for his first fight. Like I said, I like to do my research with real people and so I spent a lot of time with him, following him around, watching him train. I asked him, do you know anybody who is suffering from memory loss and concussive-related problems and he said, no, I dont. So I bumped into his trainer, whos my age, and I said, so, do you know anybody whos been suffering from these problems. He said, yeah, me. After this interview is over, Im not going to remember your name. To me, that in a nutshell is whats going on in Choke Hold. You have this young man who doesnt see any of this even though its right in front of him. Youre training with this guy every day and you dont see the problems that hes having. Its like wanting kids not to smoke because its not healthy. They know that but they dont really know it. They just dont see it. I guess part of what I was trying to do with Choke Hold was put Angel in between these two extremes this young guy whos got his whole life in front of him and doesnt see any downside and this older guy whos right on this cusp where he knows its all downhill from here.
AD: Now just to end he conversation one a lighter note, what do you love about Los Angeles?
CF: Part of what I love about L.A. is the fact that everybody else hates it. [laughs] Im contrary like that. There are so many things about L.A. that are hidden. I grew up in New York and in New York, everything is right there. You can walk the same route from your house to the subway station every day and youll see something different every day. Its vibrant and dynamic and in your face. L.A. is very spread out and diffuse so if you dont know anything about the city, and somebody just drops you in the middle, youll miss ninety percent of whats here. Theres no serendipity out here. You dont accidentally stumble across something. You have to drive fifteen minutes. You have to know in advance where youre going. What I love about L.A. is its like a thousand cities bolted onto each other and instead of a thousand cities connected, theyre a thousand cities on top of each other. You can be standing on one corner and be in four cities simultaneously because there are these different levels that people see and levels beneath that.
I love the history. I love all the crazy true crime stories and all the wild adventures that have happened over the course of building up this dream factory that we live in. I also love the non-Hollywood aspect of L.A. because people always assume that L.A. is Hollywood. Blondes with fake tits and the beach. There is that. The entertainment industry is like our factory and we live in a factory town so a lot of people who live here work in the factory but there are plenty of people who dont, whose whole lives never touch the entertainment industry, but they are Angelenos too.
My mother still lives in the same apartment on 45th street and 9th avenue. Shes been there for years and wow when I grew up there Hells Kitchen was a little different. Now its like Citywalk 2. How scary is that? That bulbous artificial environment for tourists that has taken over so much of Los Angeles has spread like a cancer throughout the country. Its terrifying. But I refuse to let people hate on LA because yes, we have Rodeo Drive, yes, we have Citywalk, yes, we have Muscle Beach, but if you think thats all we are, thats like reading Money Shot as just a novel about a porn star with a gun. You can look at LA on that level, and none of it is a lie, but thats only one level.