During last month’s Cinemacon I realized that the working-class Joes who flock to Las Vegas are in love with the massive scale of the place. 75% of the buildings in the Vegas tourist district are five, ten or twenty times bigger than similar establishments in Wichita Falls or Cranford. 

These same culturally-challenged types are quite impressed by super-sized homes. If I was handed a gratis deed to a McMansion I would sell it and buy a regular people-sized home…you know, the kind of place that Americans and Europeans lived in for several centuries before the oversized aesthetic crept into the culture.

If you were loaded and could live anywhere you want, would you have the character and the taste to live in a home of sensible proportions? Two or three bedrooms and bathrooms instead of six or seven? Cozy dens, fireplaces, kitchens built for a family of four or five? The kind of homes that Joan Crawford, Kim Novak, Charles K. Feldman, Ronald Colman, Rod Serling and Cary Grant used to live in? Or the kind that Bob Evans, George Clooney and Jack Nicholson live in now?

I loathe gargantuan as a design concept. Giant-sized homes smell of arrogance and entitlement. Or insecurity. An architectural blight.

Another thing you want to avoid are restaurants and bars with a beautiful view, and especially people who love to patronize such places. Does this mean I don’t like the view from WeHo’s Soho House (9200 Sunset Blvd.)? No — I love it as much as the next guy, but I don’t want the company of people who flock there every night because of the view. I prefer to hang with people who think like me, who patronize a place because they’re down with the special vibe or atmosphere. Great-view restaurants on the penthouse floors of buildings are always a must-to-avoid — always jammed, always too pricey. If you’re out with a girl and she says “let’s go to that hot rooftop place,” drop her like a bad habit.

And while I’m at it I also hate gay club music, or more particularly the metallic, throat-slitting sounds that they play inside Georges Greek Grill (8806 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood). I was there last night. Three or four months ago the managers began playing sickening, idiot-throb dance music in order to attract the gay-bar crowd, and it’s a struggle to eat their dishes (which are quite good) with those godawful sounds blaring out of their dinky little speakers.

This was taken from a train moving south through mid-Vietnam in November 2013. Notice any McMansions?