Summer anthems are not, or are not always, the best song or the most important song. They are the temporary, even disposable songs, celebrating the just right now, even when the just right now combines a terrifying mash up of all that threatens us and all that we want to protect. Yesterday was Bastille day and ...
I’m not a human I am a dove I’m your conscious I am love All I really need is to know that You believe 1) Seeing the movie Purple Rain, as a kid. The scene where he gets Apollonia to jump in the lake, I felt mad at him, and also funny inside, which ...
We spent a few days this winter in Yosemite. I hadn’t been there since I was a child. On the school trip there in 5th grade, I remember seeing a family of six quail walking beak to tail in descending order of size. I remember a Quonset hut. I remember heroic narratives about John Muir. I ...
Sitting in a café at the edge of downtown, I’m near the midpoint in my usual commute to work, at the edge of Los Angeles’s district of gentrified warehouses, the Arts District. A couple of generations of actual artists have lived around here. Some of them are now being edged out, by the successful marketing ...
If I were skating and you were skating and other people were taking a shower in their own golden hair, with pulley systems, and six-pack abs, and splashing in the golden light of the future, if everything were echo deco font and the sphinxlike spaceman bodybuilder were being birthed from the back of a semi, ...
If I’m being honest, I was upset starting last night, because of the silliest of professional slights. Silly, minor. Living this life means feeling invisible or attacked about half the time, and crazy the other half, and sometimes it is my fault. Sometimes I am being, as they say, too sensitive. So I decided to ...
The weather is angry, the heat comes down like a curtain within an hour of sunrise to suffocate the days, these storied Los Angeles days that put your teeth on edge. Los Angeles Is Burning goes through my head. Palm trees like candles in the murder wind. Except there’s no wind. Yesterday, when I went outside to walk ...
Once upon a time, I sold everything I owned and moved to Brazil. This piece, over at Avidly at the LA Review of Books is mostly about that, and also, about soccer: No one in Rio understood why I had come. I wasn’t married to an oil man. I didn’t have a Fulbright. A young woman alone, ...
