On-air challenge

I’m going to read some sentences. In each one find the name of a national capital hidden somewhere in it phonetically.
 

Ex. On eBay, rutabagas are seldom seen.  –>  BEIRUT

1. Where is the handbag daddy bought?

2. Throw the anchor away.

3. To an all-round athletic phenom, pentathlon is the ultimate sport.

4. We have tickets to see the Fighting Illini, Row B, seats 1 and 2.

5. During the Civil War sausage was scarce.

6. The gala was attended by many black tie-paying guests.

7. Let the music of Metallica rock us all night.

8. This is the sidewalk we’ll be washing tonight.

Last week’s challenge

Last week’s challenge came from Ed Pegg Jr. The onetime country duo Montgomery Gentry and the classic song “Go On with the Wedding” have a very unusual wordplay property in common. What is it?

Challenge answer

In each name, every letter appears exactly twice.

Winner

Clive Jerram of Rockville, Md.

This week’s challenge

This week’s challenge comes from Andrew Chaikin, of San Francisco. Think of a famous current actor. His first name is also the name of a famous movie character. Drop the middle letter of his last name and you’ll name another famous movie character. Each character is a central figure in a dozen or more films. What actor is this?

If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it below by Thursday, June 5 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle.

Marriage has been ingrained in me since I could form memories. That my purpose in life is to get married and have babies. I know this sounds old-fashioned and maybe that has something to do with the fact that I was born a girl in the Soviet Union to a Jewish family, but I’ve spent my life toggling between the tradition of marriage and the liberal Los Angeles ideologies I internalized. I’ve often found myself wondering if it is even possible to be a good writer, an artist and be married.

At 11 years old, I was a flower girl at my cousin’s wedding in Calabasas. I remember walking down the aisle with a tiny basket of rose petals, a pair of adult-sized breasts and a petrified look on my face, unable to smile even though I was a generally happy kid. The horse and carriage, the vintage bridal kimono, the perky orchids, the flash, flash, flash of cameras, the expectations on everyone’s faces, the stressful night’s sleep no amount of Valerian root could remedy — I wasn’t sure if all this was for me.

But I loved love. I had grown up on an unhealthy dose of Disney princesses and fairy tales and the idea that one day my prince will come. I memorized the entirety of the film “The Notebook.” I would often fantasize about lying on my deathbed with the love of my life, hand in hand, like Noah and Allie.

In my teens, I flirted for hours with strangers on AIM. I hooked up with boys in the landscaping at the Century City mall after sharing a bowl of orange chicken at Panda Express. I had boyfriends and friends with benefits and cutouts of my idols: Victoria’s Secret models like Adriana Lima taped to the walls of my childhood bedroom. I was fully liberated by the over-sexualized, MTV-obsessed early aughts.

Then I lost my virginity to my high school sweetheart who soon became my boyfriend of seven long years.

In a conversation I don’t remember having, my cousin asks me when I think I will be married. I reply matter-of-factly: “By 25.” She then scoffs and laughs in my face. “Yeah, right.”

By the time I reached my mid-20s, I had broken up with my high school sweetheart whom I had little in common with other than the fact that we were supposed to get married. I was living alone in a studio apartment in Palms, sleeping in the same room as my refrigerator. I had stacks of books near my bed, a county government temp job in a downtown L.A. skyscraper and a stream of notifications from a dating app lighting up my apartment at odd hours of the night.

Marriage was beginning to seem impractical, uncool. I was living a life my immigrant parents deemed “acceptable,” but what I really wanted was to be a writer, although I was too scared to even utter the fact that I was an artist back then. I honed my craft and spent my nights in adult-education writing classes.

Meanwhile, I dated plenty. A musician. A botanist. An artist. An art writer. I fawned over a co-worker, a photographer a decade older than me. Eventually I met someone my own age: a graphic designer from work who I ended up dating for 4 ½ years.

A year into my relationship with the graphic designer, marriage began to follow us around like a hungry dog. I was a bridesmaid in two different weddings, one week apart. I wore a grass-green, floor-length dress. I wore a lace, Champagne-colored floor-length dress. I got my face airbrushed. My lips lined. My eyes powdered. My cheeks contoured. My hair sprayed. I looked like a Russian mail-order bride. I was a reverse mail-order bride, born in Belarus, now an American. Actually, no one had ordered me. I had never been so unlike myself. My graphic designer boyfriend noticed. His knees buckled as he watched me dance the hora and attempt to catch the bouquet again and again.

What’s funny is that my own parents didn’t get married until their mid-30s. My dad was divorced, and my mom was an old maid by Belarusian standards. But I was raised on their love story: the couple of life-altering years in which they got married after three months of dating, had me and moved to the U.S.

The graphic designer and I broke up in 2020. I was a mess, but it was clearer than ever what I needed to do: stop trying to control everything and just let life happen. A few months later, a kind, gentle, handsome, funny, optimistic, wildly creative man replied to one of my prompts on Hinge, agreeing that mayonnaise was indeed disgusting.

Tyler and I fell in love and dated for four years. Together we lived through family tragedies, the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, my grad school, his grad school, supporting each other’s creative practices, quitting jobs, finding jobs, moving in together, adopting our sweet mutt Agnes. In the summer of 2024, he proposed at Crater Lake, surrounded by a swarm of dragonflies.

At first, I felt weird talking to people about the engagement. Some of our friends were newly married, some were single by choice (or not), but most were in long-term monogamous relationships with no plans for marriage. I had never been happier, but I still housed the fear that getting married was too status quo, out of fashion, an uncool thing to do. My favorite writers certainly thought so with the most popular books that year being about divorce and self-actualization: “All Fours” by Miranda July, “Splinters” by Leslie Jamison and “Liars” by Sarah Manguso.

The Paris Review once asked writer Helen Garner whether being a writer and marriage are generally compatible. She replied: “They probably are, but it probably takes a lot of generosity and flexibility. If you’re burdened by a classic idea of the artist as a figure to whom everything is owed and whose prerogatives are enormous and can never be challenged, forget it.”

In one of her more judgmental essays titled “Marrying Absurd,” Joan Didion chastises those who choose to get married in Las Vegas. She insists that they are doing it not out of convenience, but because of the fact that they don’t know “how to make the arrangements, how to do it ‘right.’”

How do you do it right, Joan?

Tyler and I got married in January (nine years after the age I insisted to my cousin I would get married) in Las Vegas, by an Elvis impersonator singing “Can’t Help Falling in Love” at the famous Little White Chapel with three dozen of our closest friends and relatives in attendance, two weeks after L.A.’s devastating wildfires, and the week of Trump’s inauguration.

While I had my hair and makeup done in front of the hotel window overlooking the faux Eiffel Tower, with the Bellagio fountain going off every 30 minutes, I was weepy. But not because of the usual suspects: cold feet or the last-minute cancellations or the eczema reappearing after years of dormancy on my arms or the lack of sleep, although I did forget to pack some Valerian root.

At some point, I had convinced myself that getting married was uncool, not what an artist does, but here I was doing it. In fact, I was marrying the man who supported my creative pursuits the most. I had changed my mind about marriage yet again. It’s a symbol of hope in a hopeless world, a sacred pact between two people, and it can be whatever the hell you want it to be.

And yes, it might not work out, but also, it might.

Maybe the question isn’t: Does marriage make you less of an artist? Maybe the question is: Who gets to be an artist anyway?

The author is a freelance writer from Los Angeles. She’s on Instagram: @druzova_.

L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.

The new film Mountainhead, written and directed by Succession creator Jesse Armstrong, is about the super-rich, so people may expect something Succession-ish: a tragedy studded with dark humor. Instead, in the tradition of Armstrong’s work on the British series The Thick of It and the film In the Loop, Mountainhead is a comedy — a bleak, brutal comedy, but a comedy nonetheless.

The action unfolds at the titular mountain mansion newly built by Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), a millionaire hundreds of times over who is trying to figure out how to take his meditation app to the next level. Hugo — whose friends call him “Souper” for reasons that will be uncovered — has invited three billionaire buddies for what’s ostensibly a poker weekend: Venis (Cory Michael Smith), a social media titan casually referenced as the richest man in the world; Jeff (Ramy Youssef), a rival to Venis with a powerful AI company; and Randy (Steve Carell), a venture capitalist who has just received some bad health news that he has decided not to believe.

As the men arrive at Mountainhead, they see online that the new generative AI features in Venis’ social media app have led to global mass violence as fake videos bait people into conflict and panic. Economies are beginning to collapse. As all four men take in the potential downfall of civilization on their phones, they’re not sure how worried to be. Jeff is against all the death and suffering, but he also sees opportunity. See, Jeff’s AI technology has the ability to distinguish truth from fiction, meaning he has the cure to the disease Ven has unleashed. Ven wants to buy his company, but Jeff isn’t inclined to sell. After all, the more desperate the world grows, the more valuable Jeff’s product might become. For him, it makes sense to get as close to the apocalypse as possible before he cashes in.

While the four men at Mountainhead are targets of Armstrong’s withering stink-eye for their amoral, antisocial approaches to the world — less fiddling while Rome burns than doing molly and scheming to corner the market on fire extinguishers — the stake he drives through their hearts is how unremarkable they are in every way except that they are rich.

Hugo is a grasping coward. Venis is a vain, foolish, unloved dweeb who is probably also a sociopath. Randy is a bloviating, self-important tangle of resentments who fancies himself an intellectual but believes immortality is five years away and can’t boil an egg. Playing Jeff, Youssef is the only one of these actors whose natural charisma is allowed to fly free. Jeff is, if you will, the Roman Roy of this enterprise — the character who is obviously also a terrible person, but whose capacity for humor keeps making you wish he weren’t. And even he, in the end, is an insecure and awkward poser who couldn’t read a room with a book light and a magnifying glass.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that in the hands of a terrific writer of comedy, a terrible sense of humor marks characters as untrustworthy and dull. In the opening moments of the film, Ven is in a big SUV with a couple of his lead sycophants, and he chuckles at the fact that he posted about his product launch with one word — “F***” — but he accidentally spelled it with two u’s. He thinks it’s hilarious that he wrote it with two u’s, and the members of his team say they agree. He should leave it like that, they all say. It’s hilarious. Two u’s! Ven is blissfully unaware — and he probably wouldn’t care — that everyone is lying to him, just as he is later blissfully unaware that everyone at Mountainhead is talking behind his back about how weird he’s getting as the worldwide chaos expands and the pressure on him to stop it grows.

Ven, Randy and Hugo are all devoid of wit at an atomic level, greedily slurping up cursory chuckles at their shriveled one-liners. They sometimes take a smidgen of true pleasure in cruelty or vulgarity, or in the fact that being trapped with people who believe it’s financially advantageous to laugh at their jokes is the closest thing they experience to friendship. But they have no charm, only money. Armstrong is pitch-perfect at writing weak jokes for great comic actors so that, for instance, Steve Carell is very funny even though Randy is hopelessly, painfully not. More than once, you may find yourself thinking that Randy, minus his money, is a close relative of Michael Scott.

Eventually, a divide between Jeff and the other three men forms and then deepens, mostly because Ven is angry at Jeff for not selling to him, and Randy and Hugo are attached to Ven like parasites desperate to get promoted from barnacle to tapeworm. This divide takes a dark turn that sends the whole thing into farce and slapstick, as it turns out that these particular masters of the universe, for all their bravado, wouldn’t have the fortitude to push over a trash can without outsourcing it to an underpaid permatemp.

At times, Mountainhead‘s bleakness will take your breath away. The dangers of losing our hold on reality come to the forefront both because of the central storyline about AI and because these men are so fully cleaved from the rest of humanity that they might as well already be living on Mars the way they dream of doing.

During one conversation, Ven asks Randy, “Do you believe in other people?” He isn’t asking whether Randy believes in the goodness of other people, or whether he trusts other people. He’s asking whether Randy believes in other people — skeptically questioning that there can really be “eight billion people as real as us.” The tentacles of a quasi-spiritual denial of reality already are wrapped around Ven’s ankles, and that’s part of why he takes in scenes of death and destruction on the internet with a shrug. When he says those scenes on his app aren’t real, he means the videos might be AI. But he also seems to mean that those things aren’t real, because they aren’t happening to him. They’re happening to 8 billion other human beings who are such abstractions that he’s beginning to think they don’t exist, or at least they don’t exist in the same way he does.

There might be hope that Ven will get better at some point, but the keenest observation in Mountainhead is that all of these men pose the same threat, which is that as the world changes rapidly and their power expands exponentially, they never learn anything. They can’t. They can’t learn from experiencing consequences, because their money means they never do. They can’t learn from other people, because nobody they listen to is willing to tell them the truth. They can’t learn from history, because they believe they belong to a special class of superhumans to whom the rules of history do not apply. And traditional learning has been a bust: Even though they are superficially educated, these guys possess no insight. Randy loves to cite tidbits of history and philosophy, but he doesn’t understand any of them.

On the one hand, Mountainhead is just a despairing wail into the sky. After all, however foolish they may be, however little they know, these guys have the power they have and the money they have and the attendant ability to do harm, and there are no obvious solutions to that (other than perhaps a well-timed avalanche). Their world is stuck with them.

On the other, watching a writer as skilled as Armstrong create these characters with such queasy believability and then poke them in the eye over and over again for almost two hours is profoundly pleasurable. After all, the point of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” was less that it’s shameful to be naked and more that it’s shameful — and funny — to be a dope. It may not be obvious how to take power back from people who shouldn’t have it, but the least we can do, Armstrong demonstrates, is to see them for what they are with clear eyes, and to refuse to pretend they are anything else.

This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.

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