My sister and I both say that we moved around as adults because we moved around as kids (the product of my parents chasing the best life for their family from Brooklyn to upstate New York, to eventually, Detroit). I’m not kidding: there was a time in my adult life when I moved back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean every year for five years.
Did I crave change? Or was I just in that season of life where my many selves wanted to self-realize at every turn – trying on new neighborhoods, commutes and entryways - hoping to find that golden slipper of fully-formed adult identity.
Los Angeles was the surprise of my life. I came here by accident and have now lived here longer than any other place in my life. By 2020, I had been living in the same apartment for six years and had the same job for five. This sense of longevity was unlike me, and it caught me off guard because I liked it.
However, when 2020 turned cataclysmic, I felt the need for change returning like an old friend. I left my job, moved out of my rent-controlled bungalow in Echo Park (whoopsie!), and started to carve out a path to a new future, uncertain of exactly where I was headed.
As I continued to experience my own fits of change, so did Los Angeles. To put it bluntly: I feel like I went to bed at 36 in a city I loved and woke up 40 in a place I no longer recognized. The traffic is 24/7 now (just check out the chaos in the Silver Lake 365 parking lot at any time of day!), real estate is sky-high, and I fear we’re turning into a coastal Manhattan in terms of who can afford to live here. Meanwhile, my body is changing and the things I did in my younger adulthood don’t necessarily mirror the things I want to do now.
It makes me feel old to reminisce on things like karaoke nights at the Smogcutter (RIP!), or grabbing burritos wrapped in plastic wrap at Chango (now Canyon Coffee), or trekking to the west side to have a rice bowl at Axe (back then I used to go to the west side!). But it also makes me feel proud. It’s not a lifetime but it’s not nothing either. One way or another, I’ve put in the time, and I can call myself an Angeleno. That’s the beauty of staying put.
Yet I’m left wondering, what does it mean to live somewhere for a long time? Last month I finally went to the Philosophical Research Society, a bastion of witchy history & spiritual-seeking since 1934. I was there to check out the Death Café – an event that normalizes conversations about grief and loss (always over tea and cake!). It felt fitting, as I grapple with so much change around me. I even made a new friend, Veronica, a therapist in her 50s who moved here a year ago after 20+ years in New York. It turns out she’s my neighbor. We have plans to go for a walk together soon, and I look forward to hearing her reactions to Los Angeles, seen with fresh eyes.
An even more challenging quest is to get to know the Los Angeles for the me of today. In this new stage of life maybe I’ll take up the theater (shout-out to some great recs from Loose Land friend and avid theater goer Chambers Stevens), or start going to screenings of The Met Opera in HD (charmed, I’m sure). Or dive into old Sophia Loren movies and eat my way through the trattorias of this town (I’m just back from a trip to Italy!). In the meantime, I challenge you to get to know your Los Angeles, whether you’ve been here 6 months, 6 years or 60 years. It won’t stay the same, that much I can guarantee.
-Meredith Rogers
(License plates at bottom, as ever.)
Cultural Happenings
Left to Right clockwise: Met in HD, Flux Festival, Still Life, Oasus + DJ Big Boss , Urban Bush Women, Two Women Film Still
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Nov 1 - Color Compton’s Annual Gala: Emerging: Art & Liberation (Ken Miller Recreation Center) The 2nd annual gala supports Color Compton’s mission of honoring BIPOC history and empowering youth through the arts. Each ticket will help fund current programs as well as the development of the nascent Compton Art & History Museum. If you can’t make the gala, make sure to go see the current show Corridos from the Hood. (MR)
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November 6 - Waiting For Godot (Geffen Playhouse) The theater world was shocked when it was announced that Waiting for Godot was opening on Broadway with Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Not to be outdone, our own Geffen Playhouse decided to beat them to the punch with their own production starring Rainn Wilson from The Office and Aasif Mandvi from The Daily Show. Take that, New York! (LL Contributor Chambers Stevens)
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November 7-30 - Sophia Loren: La Diva di Napoli (Academy Museum of Motion Pictures) In celebration of Sophia Loren’s 90th birthday, the Academy Museum will present a limited screening series of some of Loren’s best performances. Thirteen titles in total will be screened over the course of the month and la donna herself will make an appearance at two of them: Two Women (Nov 7) playing in 4K, for which Loren won the Oscar in 1961 for Best Actress, and The Life Ahead (Nov 8). Bellissima! (MR)
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November 07 - Mary Lattimore (Largo At The Coronet) The ethereal harp in Mary Lattimore’s hands feels like a therapeutic correction to the pre-election anxious din that is currently on blast in my head. And at this performance, her opener will be the woman we all should thank for her existence - her mom! An intergenerational harp concert is the aftercare we will all need after this election. (BK)
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November 8 - Mariah Carey’s Christmas Time (The Hollywood Bowl) Mariah is bringing her Christmas show to the bowl! It’s scheduled to start at 7:30, but you know a diva: it won’t start til 9. There’s also a rule at the Bowl that if you go past 11pm the artist is charged $10,000 per minute! I heard Vegas is already taking bets! (LL contributor Chambers Stevens)
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November 14 - Still Life Book Launch (Murmurs Gallery) In Still Life, Kate shares intimate stories about family, relationships, love, life, and death. I went to the NYC launch a few weeks ago and I understand the LA event will be similar—with a quick (but genuinely moving and worthwhile) reading approx 1.5hr in, followed by drinks and mingles. Top notch people and top notch vibes! (LL contributor Alana Lowe)
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November 16 - Noon To Midnight: Field Recordings (Walt Disney Concert Hall) If you live in a city, your attentiveness to the sounds of the natural world is probably a bit rusty. Well, consider this event from the LA Phil — a 12-hour marathon of performances and installations throughout Walt Disney concert hall — as your chance to exercise your deep-listening muscles. The event is curated by Pulitzer-prize winning composer Ellen Reid with a focus on recordings of the natural world that aim to ignite your “sonic imaginations.” (BK)
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November 20-23 - Flux Festival (The Hammer) Meg & Jonathan Wells, founders of Flux, have been bringing the filmmaking community together for 15 years. Their ongoing series at The Hammer pulls together the brightest in short-form filmmaking from music videos to short films and more. This year they are growing the party and launching the Flux Festival celebrating bold innovations in moving image & sound. Featured artists include Lucy McRae, Shantell Martin, Paul Trillo & an AV set by Nosaj Thing. (MR)
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November 21 - The Death Cafe(Philosophical Research Society - ongoing monthly series) Amidst the frequent inauthenticity of modern life, we yearn for a place for real talk. Held regularly every third Thursday and fourth Saturday, the Death Café is just that. A place where talking about death is welcomed and celebrated, followed by tea and cake! Normalize scary things with snacks :) (MR)
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November 22 - Friday Night Moonlit Hike (Mulholland Drive) There are a million ways to spend a friday night in this city, but live music under the trees and then a moonlight hike sounds like one of the very best. Tree People and Living Earth co-host this monthly event with rotating artists (this month it is Lake Mary and Patrick Shiroishi) playing for an hour before a guided night hike. So bundle up and let’s meet up on the mountain for a change. (BK)
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Nov 22-24 - Urban Bush Women Dance Performance (Mark Taper Forum) Urban Bush Women is a dance company thats's been reimagining the boundaries of dance for the last 40 years thanks to the visionary founder/choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. Zollar’s interest in “experimental ensemble theater and magical realism [and] embodying narrative in complex and nonlinear ways” (NYT) has shaped how the ensemble tells female-centered stories of the black diaspora. Zollar’s final show, which is not to be missed, entitled “SCAT!… The Complex Lives of Al & Dot, Dot & Al Zollar,” is inspired by a dream of her parents and her native Kansas City’s legacy of Black floor shows. (BK)
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November 24 - The Met in HD: Tosca (USC) I like opera well enough, but the performances I’ve enjoyed the most have come with minimal fuss -- small shows at small venues with heavily reduced casts. It’s not like the big-ticket shows aren’t great, but low expectations (and shorter run-times) rarely fail to improve the experience. The Met in HD delivers on both fronts, with elite, accessible productions of perennial favorites. Check ‘em out! (DH)
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November 26 - Oasus and Big Boss DJ (Zebulon) It seems like people still really like Oasis, right? I mean, how much were folks (aka blokes) willing to pay for tickets to the reunion tour? (Answer: tonnes of pounds.) And leaving the possibility of on-stage brawls out of it, wouldn’t it be just as fun, and much more free, to scream along to an Oasis cover band more locally? In their own words, Oasis is “familiar to thousands”; I, for one, appreciate their modesty. (DH)
Plate of the Month
Back when tweeters still tweeted there was that thing where people would change their aliases (not “handles” – that’s the word for tiny hands!) every October to make them spookier. So Neil Gaiman would become Squeal Flayman, or whatever. And maybe in the future our license plates will go digital and allow for that kind of nimbleness, but for now it’s just a reminder that plates are not generally relevant. (...) That said, some plates do manage to findtheir relevance, and those are the plates that I’d like to focus on today.
MASCULINITY. That’s more than you can fit on a license plate, I tell you what. And from what I hear, it’s relevant to the upcoming election too, where we have several alternatives on offer, none of which I will analyze further here. Numerous plate-watchers have also submitted variations on “NUTS” plates of late, so perhaps that’s the thing that got me started down this road, but things took a sharp turn recently when a yellow sports car cut me off and proclaimed itself: “1DABOYS.”
Now, on a scale of manliest to boysiest (see below), this has to wind up near the bottom, but it also forces us to ask some interesting questions, such as: Is this driver one of the boys, or the first among several impressive boys (ie King of the boys, though not necessarily a true boy king)? Alternatively, is he enduringly devoted to the Michael Chabon novel and/or its 2000 film adaptation, which has its own interesting reflections on masculinity? (I don’t think so, as that would clearly be more properly rendered: “1DRBOYS.”) Also, is this a stated commitment to being a boy for life, and how do we feel about that choice? (It doesn’t seem likely to me that he ever graduates to 1DAMEN, based on his driving.) Much to think about, as I say.
FULWNSR, however, is stylish, restrained, and appreciates the finer things in life (hard shell carriers) without being obnoxious about it. Menschy to the max!
And now to the rankings, not necessarily in order of sophistication!
MOST MANFUL:FULWNSR (I believe this car can tie a knot, somehow.) MOST BROFUL:FOAMBRO (This is the rare plate where not knowing exactly what it means somehow makes it even better.) MOST BOYFUL:1DABOYS (See below.)
Thanks as ever for all the contributions, and see you next month for Vanity of Vanities: The Celebrity Plates Edition!
