briefest of visits to southern calif this wknd. the 'why' is difficult to answer succinctly but involves attending a play (twice in 20 hrs!) as well as the good fortune of some jet-blue vouchers which made it even remotely possible.
as w/ our last visit - in mid-december - being there was a strange collision of past/future; a seemingly contradictory interplay of who we are and who we were for 7 yrs there, but this time in a highly-compacted short amount of time.
we landed in LB, drove to LA, had dinner and went to play. afterward, by the sheerest of coincidences c was in town (playing w/ viva voce) at the freshly reopened regent theater [which was directly across from a vacant lot that i happened to be in some 10 years earlier setting up tents for a film during the stretch that m and i refer to as "peanut butter summer" as due to horrid $ situation we subsisted on nothing but pb. what gorgeous memories those are].
next day we had coffee and went for a hike w/ A & I. The canyons were actually green the sun was un-oppressive. back to home-base and then to the play again, this time w/ different cast in key roles, which changed the entire timbre and tone of play but not harmfully. Then dinner, then home-base w/ too much champagne and script notes and war stories. next morning millies w/ E, walking around the grove and pan pacific park w/ S and then back to LB.
LA is fixed in amber, a pulsing flow of ambition/desire held in a small untranslate-able box. Living there - for us anyhow - required a tacit agreement to peer past the unpleasantness. Probably this is common in any metropolitan area but in this case the trade off is housed in the abstract ("this will all pay off when i sell my script sells...") rather than some definite or absolute benefit. It is the ambition that pulls you through, makes the compromises, allows you to let yourself do things you wouldn't normally do. There are multiple personal components to this for me that I won't get into about screenwriting and directing so these reflections are all informed by that. Which is all a tortured way of saying: we are glad to be home...
3 comments:
At least you got to live in Los Angeles! That's the dream for some of us with creativity aspirations and such.
uh, thanks.
mmmmmmmmmmmm. having grown up there, i could say that there's enough 'the biz' bullshit in hell-lay to permanently stifle your creativity for the rest of your life.
sad, but vrai. that kind of merde happens.
but, the smell of the eucalyptus groves, or the sight of thousand year old oak trees on the low hills are two things that redeem the place. (those, along with the delightful fantasy of bogart and bacall necking in a parked car on mulholland drive) but what was i saying? oh yes... the land. the land, when you can get to it, is remarkable.
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