Tagged — Jamie Lyons
Los Angeles sprawls like a dream someone forgot to wake up from, all concrete ambition and palm tree delusion stretched across a desert that never wanted it there in the first place. This is the city that runs on bullshit and gasoline, where everyone's selling something (themselves, mostly) and the currency is whatever story you can make stick.
The light here does something to people. Maybe it's the perpetual golden hour, that cinematographer's wet dream bleeding across the smog, but it convinces you that transformation is possible, that you can shed your skin like the city sheds its failed strip malls. Pure American lunacy: the belief that geography equals reinvention.
You've got your Venice boardwalk prophets screaming manifestos at the indifferent Pacific, your Laurel Canyon ghosts still haunting the winding roads, your downtown towers where money goes to fuck itself stupid. The whole sprawling mess connected by freeways that are really just parking lots with delusions of motion, everyone trapped in their climate-controlled pods, breathing recycled air and recycled dreams.
But here's the thing about LA, the dirty secret nobody wants to admit: it works. Somehow this impossible, unsustainable, completely ridiculous experiment in how many humans you can pack into a semi-arid basin keeps generating the myths we all live by. The movies, the music, the whole self-creation hustle.
It's a city built on the premise that reality is negotiable, that you can be whoever you claim to be, at least until the money runs out or the wildfires come or the earth decides to shrug. And every day the sun hammers down like a relentless promise, or threat (hard to tell which) that tomorrow could be the day it all finally clicks, or finally collapses. Either way, the show goes on. It always does.
FalseArt / Industries 2018
RULE ONE: Find a place you trust, and then, try trusting it for awhile. RULE TWO: General duties of a student — pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students. RULE THREE: General duties of a teacher — pull everything out of your students. RULE FOUR: Consider everything an experiment. […]
ReadWanderlust 2017
Here’s the thing about Burden’s forest of castiron streetlamps standing there like some municipal graveyard outside LACMA: it’s the kind of gorgeous, stupid, absolutely necessary gesture that makes you want to laugh and weep simultaneously. Two hundred and two vintage lampposts salvaged from the gutted streets of Los Angeles, arranged in rows like soldiers who’ve […]
Read
Speculation 2014
I know this thing is doomed. Katie knows it too, though we don’t say it out loud during our afternoon rehearsals in that sweatbox of a studio space in Los Feliz. Michael doesn’t know, which is somehow worse. Or maybe he does. The heat in LA is biblical, relentless. Beckett. Happy Days. A woman buried […]
Read