I can’t remember why I moved to Los Angeles. I never wanted to be an actor, didn’t want to work in film at all by the age of twenty. I studied television writing in school, but by my second year was so disillusioned with the industry that I hardly considered pursuing it as a career. I used to do stand-up comedy, and did plenty of shows when I first moved west, but they were awful. I can’t remember getting a single laugh, but that’s mainly because I’d black-out the second I walked on stage. Anyways, if my goal was comedy, I would have stayed in New York.
There’s an overly complicated explanation which includes wanting to be a part of an American tradition— of wanting to understand my generation so deeply that I’d perform our most cherished pilgrimage and follow the youthful flow of millions every generation shipping out to California to try vaguely to “make it.” To flee the confines of our sterile homelands and enter the only echelon of society which ever seems to matter.
There is an overly simple explanation that I merely wanted to road trip, and any great American road trip needs a great American destination, and the greatest destination could only be that shining opposite corner of the map. My arrival was brutal. I knew nearly no one, was one of those hapless twenty-somethings stepping off the bus with only the intention of redefining every aspect of my self. I missed my chosen family in NYC, and when Covid hit I descended into one of those deep pits of isolation without any suggestion of light on the other side. This was my second or third death to date.
I hardly wrote, had no sense of identity, no vision of how to possibly work my way up through the impossibly glamorous ranks of the strange and distended city. Eight months after arriving— eight car-less and job-less months, with few friends, zero open doors and little else besides an intimate understanding of the quarantine-version of my neighborhood, Echo Park, explored by foot— I found work as a landscaper. That’s when I became a true citizen of the city, when I became one of the faceless horde, when I entered the system and the system entered me.
The Myth
Miserable as I was, I needed to craft a mythology from the world around me, needed to forge some sort of narrative around my existence to give sense and sensation to the blinding paralysis of aimlessness. The setting for that myth would be Echo Park, historic Edendale, which I believed was no less than the modern incarnation of the ancient city of Uruk. The ‘great-walled’ home of Gilgamesh and, conveniently, the birthplace of writing. Where mythified kings fought for immortality, where the advent of architecture spurred the inherent vice of property rights, possession, havers and have-notters. It boasted the same population— 50,000— as Echo Park, and was 2.3 square miles to EP’s 2.4.
I could see its eponymous ‘great walls’ in the four boundaries of Echo Park itself. To the west, the 2 freeway and Alvarado, which in fifteen north-bound minutes transitioned into the Angel’s Crest Highway, a winding passage through the San Gabriel Mountains. To the east, Elysian park, the second largest woodland in Los Angeles, home to Dodger stadium and the 1932 Olympic Village as well as Caesar Chavez’s revolutionary union movement, and subsequently the front lines of the Battle of Chavez Ravine, which wiped the vibrant Mexican-American community off the map to develop the stadium. To the north is a cliff-side, looking down 150 feet over the bi-secting I-5, beyond that, Mt. Washington, Eagle Rock, the snow-capped San Gabes and the southern tip of the Sierras, and the next forefront of the alternative youth movement which has been slowly bounding East, from Silverlake into Echo Park, and is currently veering north into Highland. To the south, the 101, carrying you from one of the northern-most tips of the US, along the Pacific coast, and depositing you into Los Angeles.
Mythologies are by definition fabrications, urged by foundational instincts in humans to imbue the spiritual into our cacophonous reality. They live beneath the surface, are hardly recognized by those adhering to them, but are our only true shot at transcending time, if only for brief blips. Why should Uruk remain relevant 6500 years after being buried by forty feet of sand? Because it constitutes a myth powerful enough to climb through that erasure and assert itself into alien civilizations which can’t even begin to understand what a moment was like for those ancient people. We are foolish, says Shelley’s Ozymandias, to believe in the staying power of humanity. And yet Ozymandias lives, not for the splendor of his mighty works, reduced to ash, but for the story of which his destruction tells.
The mythology of Los Angeles is strong. It has pulled in fiery spirits for over a century, added them to a mountain of baristas and second ADs upon which only so few can climb. To leave that mythology, to step out of the eternal sunshine, is a frigid experience for a twenty-five year old— akin to stepping away from a flaming pile of trash and into a frozen tundra. One begins to miss the smell.
I landed in LAX two weeks ago and crawled through the famous traffic towards that neighborhood which looms so largely in my memories— the setting for so much of my adult life, the backdrop of so much joy and pain— somehow inured to its incongruent prominence in my soul. Time has passed. And there is a decent sunset, though I’ve seen five hundred better and five hundred worse of these soporific Tuesday eves, and as much as anyone may experience the inconsequentiality of their petty narratives in the face of humankind’s, L.A. will always deal the swiftest ego-kicks with it’s languid quo. There I sit above and beside the flow of life, irrelevant but by the tainted air I briefly deign to breathe. I for whom, as the song goes, only memories remain.
Sun is down. The moon a nail back home in West Virginia, not yet having graced these skies. The cacophonous map of the city, once scripture to me, is now barely legible. Sawtelle— does that run east-west or north-south? Do those words have meaning here, where the compass rose is disregarded for simplicity? Has been vanquished by the magnetism of the San Andreas into obscurity. The dry air holds nothing, not even, perhaps, those memories. Not even, perhaps, a smidge of who I once was when I unflinchingly called this place home. Snow on Baldy. A Taylor Swift music video shot under the Hollywood sign threatening to bring Franklin to a halt. And I begin to wonder if ghosts see us corporeal and fleshy beings as ghosts as well.
Everything in its right place, here, touched lightly by a tasteful brush.
Strolling Sunset last week, eighteen months after stepping away, I saw the next iteration of my cohort populating the streets, bearing subtly altered versions of our threads and opinions, eager to make the same mistakes and live the same glamorous narratives that we did. My own crowd matriculated, spread east and west for one step closer to the heights which dragged them here. It is not progress, but a subtle evolution, a brand most deadly to ego but, still, the most digestible reminder of impermanence one could hope for, if that’s one’s thing. Los Angeles of my nightmares become the shell of the beast it once was. The currency here is dreams, and it bestows those in droves, without restraint, as if it’s all it knows how to do and will be able to do so forever. New beauties and new bros, exactly as artful and soulful as the ones before, here to be exquisitely distracted in ever more inventive ways. What does it all add up to? From the outside, everything. The west pole of the American magnet. Inside the vacuum: songs to beckon the golden hour still less enigmatic than the setting itself. Ever daunting to the aging dreamer, who has necessarily shed her preconceptions of artistry for the pro-forma dogma of a twinkling tundra. A land which refuses to tap you on the shoulder to let you know when opportunity has passed.
If this city is one monolithic legerdemain, one perfectly curated distraction, then what is its prestige? What does Tuesday mean here? What is a spring afternoon in a sempiternal summer? Not the reminder it is elsewhere, not the rejuvenation suggested by the foothill’s Black Mustard bloom, but merely Tuesday. One of fifty-two, a card tossed at random sevenths into a pile of a thousand decks, reduced sevenfold by the mirage of time. A mirage which has willfully duped the wisest and most base in turn, again and again. The wistful and tasteful youth who you will emulate just too late, wherever you are but here. But why should you be anywhere but here? Is there anywhere but here?
I still believe, still vouch (though it doesn’t need me to), that what happens here is historically significant. That the opinions and fads which have and will continue to define eras are at least trial-run, if not forged in this furnace. That the Taix Square weekend flea is ground zero for the trends which will be shipped across America and the world. That the most important bands of our culture must hold residency at the Echoplex. That these kids matter.
It is its birthday today, everyday. Gak in the cracks of WeHo streets, sex workers lining Santa Monica Boulevard and the latest in a long line of dudes ironically sporting staches. Nothing hasn’t been said about this place, no one will ever stop talking about it. Your mid-country narrative, your provincial protest, is strong. It at least exists. But it will not be codified, sanctified, idolized in corners of the globe not yet bestowed by the legacies of your Nashvilles, your Galvestons, your Baltimores your Eugenes. Give it a rest. Book a ticket and cash in on your potential. Sell it all, your soul, your flannel. It is worthless here, thus, everywhere. The twistedly satisfying nightmare of everyone being exactly like you. The indulgent sort of fare which thrives here, the wasting of years in a perpetually dry heat with a group of beautiful twenty-somethings, young forever, your perfect counterpart, the image of what you can be and you in turn the image of what they aren’t. Slowly and blissfully dragged towards the center away from a life worth living.
Just now— in a cold pre-dawn March in Appalachia, silence reigns but for the whirr of I-64, equally distant from me as the intersection of the 101 and 110 used to be. The sound the same if far less trafficked, not through palm trees and eucalyptus but reverberating against desolate hollows. Because for me, these days, it’s weird enough to live in this empire. Living in LA was just rubbing it in.
The most abundant resource in that space is free-time; this, also the most important factor in being definitive, in being ridiculously bold and driving forward the avant-garde of culture. Bullshit jobs growing on trees like loquats, emailing their way into significance like that shunned Samarian who scribbled a fictional story about a beastly king on the back of a tablet meant to decree land rights five thousand years ago. That absolute abandon of purpose the key to prominence. Eternal sunshine plus a spotless mind the finest cocktail for greatness. You wanna be productive? Go to Omaha. You wanna live fast and die young? Light a cig on a fault line at the tail end of 45-minute sunset splendor. Ignore the angry tar beneath your feet, the stolen land, that pervasive haze and the mysterious smell of smoke in the distance. Imminent richters coming for your infrastructure, dust and sun and doxological voluntarism. It’s the fucking end-times. If you want to party, might as well stand by the doors to hell.