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Thoughts on the rain

Recently, when I can’t think of anything substantive to write about I have been forcing myself to write about anything. The other day it was raining, so I made myself write about rain. 

Thinking about rain almost always makes me think about Manhattan; of waking up as a child and knowing it had rained in the night before I even opened my eyes. 

First it would be the sound, the way the tires moving down Broadway would swish along the pavement. A sound like the suction of a kiss, or a long lick by a rough tongue. And the metallic sighs of the buses and the garbage trucks, which seemed to rise from the street into my ears at a more leisurely pace after a storm. Then would come the cool grey sensation of the air inside my nostrils. In the fall it smelled like dead leaves, on hot summer mornings it had the quality of damp coal. 

Waking up after a rain in my parents’ ninth-story apartment may be my most powerful sense memory from childhood. One that unfailingly fills me with the particular sleepy comfort of being young in the bed I grew up in, the security of home soft around me even, or especially, in unconsciousness. When I think of what it felt like to be a kid in Manhattan, this is one of the pleasures I remember. Floating high above the street, with the sounds and smells of it seeping in through an open window. Reminding me that I was a part of the city, that all I needed to do is rise and step outside. 

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Thoughts on Dreamville, USA

My obsession with “Hollywood,” even more than the films themselves, has also always been about a cultural idea: a literal place that stands in for an imagined place, a sensibility.  A reflection of the way America has designed and redesigned the ideal lifestyle, the way we want, or need, to see our dream lives lived by someone, no matter how unsustainable. The idea that with Los Angeles, or at least the version of itself it presents to the world, a city was conjured to reflected not our realities but our desires even, and perhaps most importantly, our desire for vice. That’s why Hollywood, and Los Angeles, often seems so at odds with the soul, so rotten, so fake. It is built not on our realities but on our dreams, and any society constructed as such is going to fissure and crack and be stitched hastily back together, is going to have monsters lurking under the bed. 

What the Getty exhibit did for me was that it helped me to articulate the idea that Los Angeles, rather than a city in the continental sense, is a hodge-podge of ideas about what the ideal American life should look like. How and under what conditions, in what spaces and weather and culture, it should be lived. This to me is what unifies an otherwise disconnected physical and even psychological landscape, in varying states of disrepair reflecting which dreams were abandoned and when.

Los Angeles can achieve this kind of disconnect because the space allows us to expand outward instead of up. Instead of rebuilding over the ideals we’ve opted to put behind us, we can pick up and leave them behind, and the cars and the freeways allowing us to pass them by without even so much as a glance if we so choose. Starting over again, building a new avenue of dreams, from a far enough distance that we don’t have to see, deal with, figure out how to think about, what and who we have left behind. 

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Thoughts on driving off a cliff

Driving back from Malibu with Natalie through the canyons, I thought about James Dean and how he liked to race cars. How he died in one, though nowhere near the canyons. 

But in that moment, listening to Beach House and staring at the golden rocks with their scrubby trees rising around us at every turn, I began to see a virtue in it — racing your car through those winding roads, going off the side of one. Your last moments soaring through the gold 5 o’clock light.  

Something about California makes it feel inevitable that you should one day fly off a cliff. Some quality of the landscape, all of that bare golden rock with the blue ocean pooling in the distance, visible between the peaks. In Los Angeles everywhere you look there is so much sky to get lost in. Maybe that’s why so many who come there to dream big flame out in such dramatic fashion; no dream can ever be big enough to compete with the earth itself, rising all around you, rushing to the sea.

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Old thoughts on Los Angeles, recently dug up.

Last night as I walked down Broadway towards Houston street I thought about California. I’m not sure why. It was cold and something between rain and snow was dripping lugubriously from the sky, slicking the sidewalks and causing light to streak garishly across the pavement in a way one wouldn’t associate with Los Angeles, where it is never more than chilly and everything, including rain and light, seems to lack the determination required to make it to the ground. But I was thinking of Los Angeles.

Specifically, I was thinking about my time in Los Angeles, and how it grew to be defined by the absence of love — or the love of someone absent.  If Los Angeles is a place where things seem to stay suspended then I adapted myself by suspending my heart, refusing to invest in  anything that could pull my emotions as far from him as my body happened to be. Which is how I spent two years in a place without really learning to live there. 

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