Microserfs

We phoned Mom, and she said Ethan was woozy from today's treatment. Lindsay is pleasingly, Gerberishly plump, and former bodybuilding enthusiast Dusty is eating my family out of house and home. Misty, who hasn't shed an ounce since starting her diet last year, follows the "Madonna and child" everywhere. "Dusty's a sucker for dog-begging," says Mom, "and I keep trying to tell Dusty not to feed the dog, but it's not working." Mom sounds pissed, but she has to learn that her dog is never going to be slim. So, all in all, it sounds like things are fine there.

Mom asked, half-jokingly, but also for real, if Dad was pulling his weight as our company rep, but I said we wouldn't be able to tell until tomorrow.

* * *

The ten of us double-cabbed (20-minute cab wait) up the Strip (clogged) to a Sony party Todd had gotten us semi-invited to, and dropped Dad off at the MGM Grand along the way. All three Chyx in the two cars shouted in practiced tra-la-la voices, "Good night, Blake Carrington, you hulking piece of man meat!" Dad's ears turned bright red. I think the porno awards were a bad influence on them.

At the Sony party, we all got weirded out because suddenly all of the people at the party looked like they were porn stars, even though they were just real people. It was only because all of the Stiffie Award winners and their film clips were still in our brains that we were perceiving this. And then we realized that viewed from a certain perspective, all people can look like porn stars. So for a few minutes there, humanity seemed really scary indeed. I wonder how porn people's mind-body relationships are - I can't imagine. Their bodies must be like machines to them, or products to ship, but then they're not the only ones - Olympic athletes and geeks and bodybuilders and people with eating disorders.

But the Sony party . . . we checked out the live-action footage in the new Sony games, and the acting - it was so cheesy. It was like porn acting. This merely reinforced our collective impression that the real world is a porn movie. Talking to a Sony executive named Lisa, I asked her how they went about recruiting talent for games, without actually saying that their live action sucked. She told me that industry people aren't realizing yet just how unbelievably expensive it is to shoot any sort of game with live action. "Just say the words 'live action,' and the price goes up a million dollars," she said.

I then wondered out loud if starring in multimedia products is going to be the modern equivalent of appearing on the Hollywood Squares. Michael and Amy lapsed into a lovebird recital of questions from an old version of the Hollywood Squares board game they both had as children:

"Q: True or false: Frank Sinatra never wears jewelry of any kind."

"A: False."

"Q: True or false: The average person can hold their breath for 45 seconds."

"A: True."

"Q: According to Cats magazine, should you tranquilize your cat before taking it on an airline flight? " "A: No."

The two of them irritated all the Sony people, because everyone was trying to be so smooth and Hollywoodish tonight, and not be geeky, and Michael and Amy were destroying the illusion. And then they started smooching, and this confused everybody further. Geeks smooching?

* * *

You could tell the LA people there - the attitude - they all looked like - minifigs, I guess. Wait . . . am I being tautological? But really, Los Angelenos are like a completely different species from Bay Area people. There really is this whole North/South dichotomy in California. They truly are two different states.

Michael said, "Los Angelenos dress like they've been focus-grouped." We decided that in game shows in the future, contestants will win a free focus-grouping, where they spend six hours with ten demographically preselected focus-groupers commenting and criticizing all aspects of their lives. Then, they get to watch the next winner get ripped apart behind a two-way mirror. Forget year-supplies of Rice-A-Roni and bedroom sets.

We were talking with another woman, also named Lisa (which wasn't hard to remember because every single woman we met there was named Lisa). "Last year all of the studio executives were bluffing it about multimedia," she said, "but this year they're starting to panic - they don't have a handle on what they're doing and it's starting to show, and mistakes are costing them a pile of money - trying to spooge Myst into a feature-length movie; trying to spooge movies into CD-ROMs. It's a mess. And New York still doesn't have a clue. Usually they're first, but with multimedia, they're babies and it annoys the hell out of them. The people who really do know what's going on are the people who aren't posing as visionaries."

I thought about it and she's right - the geeks aren't flying down to LA to take studio executives out to schmooze dinners at Spago. Spago has to come to the geeks. Spago must hate that.