At last night’s Chateau Marmont Boyhood party I said hi to an L.A.-based female journalist who shall not be named or described. I mentioned that I’d just read something about one of the Charlie Hebdo killers having surrendered with the other two still at large. She looked at me with a friendly but uncertain expression. It was like she was saying “and…?” I could have been talking about fishing in a mountain stream near Yosemite. Her eyes shifted slightly, looking for a way to politely disengage. I should have known better than to talk about something that was of absolutely no interest to her, particularly at a party for Boyhood. I didn’t want to make it worse by saying something like “oh, sorry…I thought you might have a passing interest in discussing the murder of several French journalists” so I just smiled and said as little as possible. I’m sure that right after this she made her way over to where Patricia Arquette was sitting.


Illustration from the pen of Dutch political cartoonist Ruben L. Oppenheimer