Make sure you get a window seat, so you can thrill to the horizon-to-horizon sprawl of this giant suburb and imagine how exciting it would be to see an earthquake while still airborne. Nobody gets used to you, you make new friends without having to hear anyone’s everyday problems, and you jet back still feeling like a know-it-all.įlying to L.A. or New York), I’m a perpetual tourist, and that’s the best way to travel. Since I don’t make my home entirely in what the entertainment business considers a real city (L.A. I can’t think of a better place to vacation-next to Baltimore, of course, where I live most of the time. Los Angeles is everything a great American city should be: rich, hilarious, of questionable taste, and throbbing with fake glamour. The most intriguing was the piece on the Buddy Deane show, the Baltimore-based 50s and 60s teen dance show (like Bandstand), written before he decided to use it as the basis for his film Hairspray.Grade: B/B- (the grade is somewhat lowered because the essays don't quite come together as an entire package because they were written for different sources, and some of them seem a little flat 20+ years later)Recommended: You would probably have to be a fan of Waters, or at least a fan of what he is obsessed with (fame, camp, transgressive films, white trash America) to appreciate this, but if you are, you probably will. This book is a collection of essays, most originally published elsewhere, about the various things he is obsessed with, and as one might imagine, some of them are rather strange (prison) and others seem more normal (Christmas) until you read how his obsessions play out. Despite the fact that I am not a huge fan of John Water's films (I'm actually completely uninterested in most of them), I love his writing, and I'm sort of weirdly in love with him, in the way that I think almost nothing would be more fun than to go be his neighbor or secretary or something like that.

Crackpot by John Waters