When I first moved to LA, I remember sitting and looking out at the new skyline of my city and my only thought was, “this place will try to make me the same”. I think this was maybe me looking out at a place that I knew I understood culturally more than I did of previous places I had lived. Living abroad, feeling a bit like an outsider at all times, made it that I never was inclined to move with the undercurrents of a city, because I wasn’t really aware of what was going on with the body of water that was the city.
Culture can be both an inspiration and a weight. In some ways, it is a Janus word meaning two things that are at odds with one another. Culture railroads us into norms, without us ever really being aware of what is happening. Being an outsider — not by choice, but by context — means you never have anything you are trying to become; you are free from the undertow. Culture is something we want to fight against while we also create it; it is the bedding of our daydreams. If you’re lucky the bed just has some sweat in the sheets, but there’s a good chance that at some point, someone’s going to shit the bed you’re sleeping in.
I used to live in this apartment with this artist. She was very beautiful and I’d wake up in the morning to look out my open bedroom door, down a hallway in plaster white — everything seems in the memory to be washed in white — to a stove top where she would be wearing square-heeled black boots, black jeans, a loose top. She’d be loading the percolator coffee maker with cheap Tesco pre-ground coffee that smelled like tar and cigarettes, concentrating through perfectly round glasses with one nose pad missing. Her ass always looked amazing.
A few years ago the story of her standing there meant something very different than it does now. I forget quite what it was then, but to me that moment was something about lust and heartache and me wanting to be seen as a certain type of artist. It was about a perceived loss in the moment. Now the details of it are zoomed out and branching to different things. That story of the hallway and coffee is sadly not what it was, but also is thankfully something different. Little details like pillow cases, scars on backs, and cinder blocks that looked like snow, are all grabbed with a different part of my heart, or maybe not my heart at all, but more a connection that I know my body was there.
Outside the window of that apartment, cobblestones were rubbed round, and water, dirt, and old cigarettes flowed through the patchwork maze; driven around by Skoda’s and rain. A marble dropped along those cobblestones would take a new route like so many stories sitting on the backs of particular memories, but ordered in a different way.
And maybe the desire to be in an old memory as it was then is a bit like the feeling of being driven to a certain expression of self by culture. It is a contortion of what I could be, but am not.