Industry insider

I may take meetings. I may go to Urth Café on Melrose. I may see my old pals Jack and Warren up in the Hills. I should bop onto the Paramount lot to check up on a few projects I have buzzing - after I score an In-N-Out burger or three. I'll look up Eisner to make sure the old boy is doing OK after the acrimony. When it gets dark, I'll call my pal Rande and see if my corner table at Sky Bar is available. Then we'll drop into the Belushi suite at the Chateau to see if the furniture is as I remember.

L.A. - one of my new favorite places, a thrill I only discovered last year. The good-man Rich is kind enough to allow use of his three-seater for The Salad to rest his jet-lagged husk, and his Culver apartment as home base. I've been to many cities that vibrate with energy (and some that haven't - I'm looking at you, Greensboro, N.C.) and there is an immediate kinship that Los Angeles shares with my adopted homeworld of Nueva Jork. They are not at all similar to one another, but they are also exactly the same.

The one thing that Los Angeles has that New York doesn't is the constant din of show business - on every corner, in every parched fountain, in every palm tree. The deceitful lure of fortune/fame seeps into my fair skin and burns with the intensity of the U.V. heat that blankets the desert metropolis. After 24 hours in downtown L.A. last year, I was ready to trade in my Polo and loafers for rainbow suspenders and an accordion on Venice Beach - that's how powerful the feeling of all-I-need-to-do-is-make-my-art-and-I'll-score-fame-and-that-Armenian-chick's-phone-number actually is.

My hard-core relations love to defame the City of Angels, and perhaps their associated derision of The Salad is correct... but for five days in March, I'll be right, and they'll be wrong.