We’ve always had to reinvent, though. Even in the golden years of the movie business, writers hopped between different forms of artistic labor to make ends meet. My theory is that the imagined community of Los Angeles was formed in the spaces between…
I was in Middletown, and then New York and Chicago. Good conversations and visits and then a conference. At ASA, I was talking about belief, Sam Altman, the mediating crust of AI, and money.
I published an article in the LA Times about a children’s book that charted just above “Heated Rivalry” in overall online sales — coming in at No. 10 to the steamy ice romance’s No. 11. That book is: “Our World Is a Family: Our Community Can Change The World.”It’s a children’s book, also about love, but not about romantic love. Instead, it’s about welcoming refugees and immigrants into our communities.
Some unforeseen circumstances fell into place (do those two idioms work together? maybe no), and I added an upper level media studies class to my slate this semester: Reality TV.
I went to New York in October for a seminar in ASAP, the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present. I did write about improv, college, stripping & Marx? See the seminar description below. I took almost no pictures of people, even though it was so sustaining to reconnect with friends I only see at conferences.
I walked the Highline down the waterfront and then across the Brooklyn Bridge. I saw the extraordinarily moving Alvin Ailey exhibit. I let my friend in Brooklyn spoil me, while I fell in love with his cat. We went to a play and a Knicks game and a comedy show, and nothing has ever been more glorious.
And I got to put in some quality time with my uncle, Paul Chihara, and his lovely wife Carol, who teased me about Marxist humor and told me stories about the past.
At the time of my article, I was training in the Brazilian martial art and dance form capoiera. I knew guys who were also training in Gracie jiu jitsu. At one point, someone gave me a classified ad: An anonymous donor wanted to pay two women to fight for him, on tape. Did I want to answer it?
In college when I was taking a film class, I opened one of those books that existed before the internet, a compendium of famous people born on each day of the year. We had just screened The Blue Angel, in class, and there, on my very own birthday page, was Marlene Dietrich. She of the vertiginous cheekbones and the intense eyes.
Last November, I went with a group of friends to see an art project at the Los Angeles River called What Water Wants. We all wore headphones and listened to Rosten Woo’s project about the LA basin’s watersheds.
Activists and artists and planners and researchers have been working for decades on a new plan to reclaim the river. In the ‘30s, the Army Corps of Engineers strait-jacketed it with concrete channels. But last year, my friends and I saw a heron pecking in the grasses at the foot of a tree. We watched water flow towards the ocean. The area across from us would soon be turned into a park. What Mike Davis once called “the redemption of Los Angeles’s riparian landscapes” seemed so close we could taste it.
I wanted to enter SOULHOUSE. But they were closed. So I snapped a picture and ended up, in an insomniac moment at 2am, distracting myself not with an appointment for inner crystals but with a rabbit hole of questions about this house of soul: Why does a music producer and “sound healer” by the beach have an Alzheimer’s nonprofit that he started with Dionne Warwick and an OnlyFans model?
Perhaps this doesn’t happen to you.
Research about anonymous corporations and money laundering is a minor habit. It can be a useful lens through which I see the business world, or it can be like an inner hammer, where, when some part of me is longing for escape, everything I see in the world looks like a distracting nail.
My theory is that the confusion on Alex Turner’s face was about me, and whether it was a good or a bad thing that I was a fan of his band. S. looked great in black pants and lipstick. But I had hurried out to the bar in an old sweater and a ponytail. My five year-old daughter had made me a necklace out of rubber bands on her Rainbow Loom. I was wearing it. And S. and I were so direct, so unfazed, so over caring what people thought of us. S. reassured them that “Mini Mansions” was also a very good name for a band. Were we flirting? Or being patronizing? I landed right on the cusp — cute girl in a bar? or soccer mom? Unclear…
I once read a parenting blog entry that made me so angry, I pretty much stopped reading parenting blogs. It was an interview with a woman who had a high-level position in finance. Yes, she was a banker, so, perhaps I’m biased. But when she was asked for tips about how to get your kids out in the morning, she said something about making organic oatmeal in large batches on Sunday night so that you could spend your precious minutes in the morning “eating together.”
On the most recent episode of The American Vandal Podcast, Matt Seybold is joined by three scholars of Critical Finance Studies and Economic Criticism to talk about the current speculative episodes, as well as what preceded it.
