I don’t know if any of you are watching, “The Holiday,” the Nancy Myers vehicle about two women who swap houses in the Cotswold and LA, this season. (It appears to be a favorite for a lot of people). For me, the redeeming part of that movie is Kate Winslet’s friendship with Eli Wallach — his regaling her with stories of Old Hollywood while she listens, rapt and entranced.
I was looking for some other audio file from my time in LA (early 2019 to early 2020), when I came across this conversation I had with a man named Joel, with whom I shared a taxi from Atwater Village to Los Feliz.
(Oddly enough, this Joel is not the only magical Joel I feature on my Substack: if you missed my post about Joel Singer, read it here).
I remember exactly the day: I had taken a hip hop dance class that morning — the one and only time I’ve ever done that — before going to a thrift store and then meeting my friend Agatha for some writerly conversation before heading “home.”
It was my own version of meeting Eli Wallach, and the man I met was just as delightful, as you can hear.
I had only the barest memory of this conversation, but it’s one that would have given me delight then, especially since I knew almost no one in the city, and have a lifelong love of movie-making. Los Angeles was brand spanking new to me around then so everything was shiny and colossal and not a little overwhelming.
Here’s the bridge that Joel talks about, Franklin Bridge, which is also called Shakespeare Bridge:
Disney bought in about the 1920s — “I wasn’t around then,” says Joel playfully — and installed fanciful little towers.
I’m currently in a region which doesn’t see the sun much, and have been dreaming of going back to LA for a visit for at least the past couple of years. This photo just reminds me how bursting with light and life LA is.
Last weekend, I watched “Clueless” (1995), which was the chosen movie of my friend group when it came out.
Whenever I watch anything that takes place out in LA, I can smell the fragrant air — no, not of the freeway — in the neighborhoods I’d walk around which were bursting with strange vegetal life and succulents and Seussian cacti.
I think that was a Painted Lady (Vanessa cardui) butterfly, right before the Big Migration began in earnest in March, 2019.
Here’s a typical(ly magical) neighborhood walk in Los Feliz, one of two neighborhoods I lived in.
“It’s not quite as warm as it looks — I have a jacket on — but it’s nice enough to walk around!”
And I can still smell the wet clay and dew from morning walks up to Griffith Park, which was walkable, ish, from my then-apartment.
Incidentally, around then is when I had one of my first comics published, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, about those morning walks.
The link takes you to two different comics published there, kind of in a jumble, but the one that begins “Woke up at 6:30. Had promised myself I’d go for an early walk to manage this anxiety around being somewhere new” is the first one I published with them.
I also put up a comic a few months later about spending time with an illustrator friend out there,
(who just joined Substack herself and is marvelous company).
Creativity is in the air there, so I made some 150 (!) posts when I lived there of comics and writing. You can access them here. It’s some of the work I’m most proud of — free-wheeling, vulnerable, honest, boundary-pushing.
One reason I didn’t settle there, at least not for now, is the heat and the wildfires — as we endure global warming, I thought it wasn’t a good long-term plan to live in a city sometimes on fire, with little humidity to speak of.
Also, though I delighted in its strange magic, the landscape also felt perpetually foreign to me — no forests, few clouds, no crisp air. And you can’t walk anywhere, even though I DID walk — everywhere, including Downtown LA, to my sometime-endangerment.
Also, the people can be great, and are brilliant creators, but sometimes it felt like a giant madhouse, equal parts intriguing and unsettling.
A vague plan of mine then was to get into a writers room — a couple of friends had done just that — but then COVID hit and I found myself back on the East coast on another winding path.
Two stories:
1 I was on a plane from Los Angeles to London (incidentally, the coldest and most uncomfortable 10-hr flight of my life on a budget Nordic airline!).
Two LA women and I were chatting onboard. I told them I’ll be back in LA probably in September or October, and one said, “Oh, right in time for fire season! I usually try to get out then.”
I thought misheard, and I laughed: “You know what? I thought you just said ‘fire season!’”
They looked at me seriously: “That’s not a joke. September and October are fire season… When all the wildfires tend to be… That’s what we call it…”
::cue Edward Munch’s scream face::
2 One afternoon, back in LA, I was meeting a comedian who had bought an original drawing of mine from a recent comedy show. I was meeting him to drop off the goods.
We were sitting on a deck near some narrow winding highway or other, around Echo Park, talking about LA (we’re both East Coasters), and enjoying our coffee.
“Look at how beautiful the mist looks,” I say dreamily. “But it’s strange that there’s mist at 4 PM…”
“Uh, honey?” he says (he’s a gay man). “That’s not mist. That’s smoke. There’s a fire nearby.”
Still and all, I look forward to whenever my next visit will be. Some of the most inspiring people I’ve encountered in my life, I met there.
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