Tommy C's Blog

With four of his followers - if not friends - the world's greatest pick-up artist rents a mansion, just up from Sunset Boulevard. An after-party party palace. To take wannabee film-stars, porn-stars and strippers, tourists and odd-jobbers from the nearby clubs. Into an LA lair made for sex. And one day destroying a wardrobe, the next serving lemonade to all the strangers there - while wearing nothing but knickers - Courtney Love drifts, bangs, demands and babbles about their rooms. Welcome to Project Hollywood.

And he makes a living from this lifestyle, by teaching it. They fly in from all over the world, the men who come to be taught how to pick-up the cheap-chicks by him; they fly in and pay in their thousands. But they do not learn from him the art of seduction. They learn the science of it. The science of speed hypnosis. Of how and why and when to lower a woman's self-esteem. Of when to ignore her and when to call her. In fact, not only science, but an amateur philosophy, too (something like Nietzche's cheap take on Darwin, but lensed through their misunderstanding of Dawkin's concept of the selfish gene) was preached in this church of the chase. And so many routines and jokes, so many manoeuvres. And - for the extra-talented few - how to massage two strangers; down to a threesome. Yet most of the mass weren't talented; the mass shaved their heads like him, dressed in flash shirts like him, learnt lip-reading techniques like him; the mass cloned themselves for the sake of sex, with porn-stars and strippers, and various other strangers.

Come deeper - for the story goes deeper. Much deeper, say, than the insincere disclaimers scattered throughout his book, the out-of-the-blue announcements that deep-down this wasn't really him. His position - this playboy lord of these losers-turned-lovers, and all the other flies buzzing about the glittery plastic gardens of LA - would not last. Two other pick-up artists, Papa and Tyler, plotted against him. They turned Mystery, his guru-turned-wing-man-turned-fan, into a mental wreck. Pushed him to almost the point of suicide, by seducing his favourite girlfriend, and other contrivances, lies, cruelties. Mystery left to live rather than stayed to die, and in less dramatic fashion, they soon usurped their king, too. He walked from his creation, as it turned out, into a movie ending: chasing his true love, a rock-star called Lisa, finally into his arms - after so many months of trying. By simply, after all that time, dropping the act and being himself.

What does this all mean?

That the freedoms of our modern lives doom men to re-enact Lord of the Flies - mixed with Fight Club - for sex? Even there, in such a rich, luxury pad? There at the top of the world, there in Hollywood? Hollywood: the Tinsel town that turned film, a minor entertainment medium from the start of the twentieth century, into a global industry by the end of it. Into the centre of everyday culture. Into the commander of money and power. Into the inspiration for ideal lifestyles and lovelife’s. Yet even here, in Neil Strauss’s odd, true, tale, a familiar moral of the Blockbuster irresistibly suggests itself: That destiny in mysterious ways brings couples together.

Or perhaps we conclude something different, different from that prosaic hope. That even for those who’d never, not even once, think to treat the world as a troubled, complex friend, for those whom love is thus as unlikely as aliens, they’ll still take a risk on its rumour, take a break from their routine.