At age 35 I felt my body change: I had detectable HPV for the first time (all adventurous women do!) and ureaplasma. I had lost an alarming amount of weight after quitting drinking and had spent all my new found free time doing the opposite of what they tell you to do (sleeping with anyone and everyone, sorry dad). My body changed again at 37 and 38. I …

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A viral TikTok trend called “Scientology speedrunning” has young people—mostly teen boys and young men—rushing into Church of Scientology buildings in Hollywood and beyond, often in costumes and masks, to film themselves getting as far inside as possible before being stopped and thrown out.

Inspired by video game “speedruns,” participants frame it as a mix of prank and internet spectacle. Some say they want to expose Scientology’s secrecy and controversial history, including past allegations of abuse and coercion, while others seem motivated mainly by viral attention.

LAPD reported five trespassing incidents this year at Hollywood Scientology properties, with one larger incident investigated as a possible hate crime. To which I ask—how is trespassing part of a hate crime? Former Scientologists are divided: some support the embarrassment tactic, while others, like Leah Remini, argue it may only strengthen members’ isolation and loyalty to the church. Meanwhile, the Church just bought another historic building in Hollywood, cutting the public off from one of the best rooftops in LA, so say a few gay guys in an Instagram comment section I can’t seem to find.

In the last month, the doorknobs have been removed off exterior doors (a fire code violation, someone should call that in) and a handful of videos show Scientology members linking arms and building a human barricade behind the glass door entrances, like they were protestors at Selma. The Church calls the acts trespassing, harassment, and disruption of religious spaces, saying staff have been injured and property damaged. A rather insipid NYT headline asked if it were a “trend or hate crime.”

But listen—it wasn’t always so difficult to waltz into the Scientology buildings in Hollywood.

Back in 2005, for a week when I was 19 and on a Christian proselytizing trip to Los Angeles, I hid out in the Scientology museum on Hollywood Boulevard to avoid telling strangers about the Gospel of Christ. I was in the eighth month of a nine-month monastic discipleship program living deep in the National Sequoia Forest devoted to the teachings of Christ and I had cabin fever. I had become snagged on a theological idea called the hypostatic union (don’t ask). I had come to concrete conclusions about the teachings of Christ, mostly that he was a mensch and a socialist and rather stoic in his approach to human rights, but I wasn’t sure what I thought about Christianity anymore. I was ready to defect but felt trapped.

Per my contract with my woodsy cult, I had abstained from listening to music, watching movies or TV, and by no means had I touched another’s body in any way other than holding hands during prayer for the duration of my stay. On top of that, I lived in a giant rustic dorm house with fifty-seven other pent-up Christian twenty-somethings. Telling people about Jesus throughout Los Angeles was our final outing in an exhaustive series of monthly mission trips, including pushing elderly folks in wheelchairs at the Billy Graham Crusade (yes, he actually historically called them crusades) in Missouri, building houses for deaf orphans in Mexico, and now, sitting next to homeless folks on the sidewalks of L.A. to tell them about Salvation (one man asked me if I genuinely thought he didn’t already know Jesus Christ and to tell him to come pick his ass up since I was so close to him, a formative moment for my eventual deconstruction).

I couldn’t do it anymore, and I didn’t want to. Our director had explained to us that telling people about Jesus should feel like good news, but did not offer advice for what to do if it didn’t. It never felt like an option, none of it ever did. So instead of spreading the good word to strangers on sidewalks, I let pale-faced women in light blue suits determine my Thetan levels while I clutched Dianetic cans in the air-conditioned halls of the L Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition. Anything was better than the Gospel.

For the week, my Christian comrades and were sleeping on wood bunk beds stacked three beds high with no mattresses and ate breakfast and an asphalt parking lot that shared defense with the Scientology HQ. After breakfast in the mornings we sat quietly reading our Bibles doing our devotions while the Scientologists did theirs: we peeked over the fence and watched groups of men and women and head to toe powder blue jump suits tossing around an industrial sized cardboard tube in addition to a series of weird trust exercises— not unlike the ones I had done earlier in the year with my fellow Christian classmates. In a way we were doing the same thing trying to convert souls on the sidewalk and arguably the Scientologists had better outfits and better buildings.

In 2005, the Scientologists’ left their doors open—at least the ones I tried. Back then, the world barely knew who they were or thought them eccentric. The documentary Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief wouldn’t come out until 2015. In 1990, journalists Joel Sappell and Bob Welkos completed a five-year investigation into the Church which culminated in the poisoning of his german shepherd, an accusation that was mostly unknown or forgotten by the mid-aughts. Cedric Bixler-Zavala, known for his work with The Mars Volta and At the Drive-In, wouldn’t accuse the Church (by way of convicted rapist Danny Masterson) of killing his dog until 2020. So by the time I learned who they were, the Sea Org members stayed highly visible and wandered up and down Hollywood Boulevard like determined ants, in their pleasant workwear suits. In official online images, they’re wearing nautical regalia, but in my mind’s eye, I distinctly remember them in head to toe powder blue.

The L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition where I’d ducked into, describes the life of Scientology’s enigmatic charlatan founder L. Ron Hubbard, told through a sensationalized and scripted tour, doctored footage, and waxy mannequins installed into animatronic displays that burst to life with bad eighties music. The tour’s finale includes a floor to ceiling wall of framed awards that opened to another nearly identical wall of framed awards that opened to another wall of the same, then another--this time with a large black and white photograph of a grinning Hubbard at its center, all while the sound of canned applause loops overhead. I remember being agog, trying not to laugh, wondering if the experience was really happening or not.

The tour cost zero dollars, lasted forty five minutes, and included free conversion if you were game. I figured if I acted just interested enough, I could easily kill 2- 3 hours a day while I avoided evangelizing, while also avoiding being evangelized to or worse, kicked out and put on a list. I played double-jeopardy with my indecision. My logic was desperate, and my body tense and closed off. The days I was meant to be outside converting the lost souls of Los Angeles to a life with Christ were spent indoors with Scientologists who did their best to recruit me, while I did my best to recruit no one.

So when I saw video after video of kids in their late teens and early 20s giggling while forcing their way into Scientology buildings, I felt immense pride. A part of my doubting-Thomas-havin’ ass was vindicated at the reveal. The plush hunter green carpets, the shabby walls and framed photos—the interior, however blurry as kids streamed through while clutching their smartphones—revealed nothing. These “sacred” interiors were un-updated holdovers from the 1970s and 80s, they looked like any church interior I’d spent hours of my girlhood in, feeling bored and unmoored by the garish decor. How, if they had so much money, were the interiors stuck in the 1980s? If we speedran into any contemporary church, we’d likely find the same tacky interior. The carpet at my own Christian cult interiors, some 250 miles northeast of Hollywood, was also held-over from the 1980s and frankly, ugly and uninspired.

The work of conversion—of evangelicalism, of apologism—is the work of coercion, not persuasion. Scientologists and my team of evangelical classmates were on the same game. Even the director of my cloistered program would bum-rush Scientologists on the sidewalks before they could approach him. “I’m so thrilled at the advances you scientists have made,” he’d say then quickly push past before they could even correct him. He also warned us not to look them in the eyes or follow them into buildings (oops!). What could they tell us that we didn’t already know or have rehearsed? Our aims were parallel—to convert the cursed or ignorant, to restore order in individual lives and to offer relief from well, one’s self. I could relate.

I want to note: there are clear differences between the contemporary evangelical Christian church and Scientology (and when I mention a monolithic “Christian church” here, I am referencing evangelical Christianity), but side by side, and at the tender age of 19, I really couldn’t tell the difference.

By 2005, Christianity had sprouted a liberal-leaning arm; for example, the book Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller came out and gently offered my generation an alternative type of faith that included a humanist angle. (Miller, not unlike Josh Harris, the author of the very popular I Kissed Dating Goodbye, have deconstructed from the faith, each in their own ways. Deconstruction is huge at the moment, as many Millennials who grew up subscribed to the Christian faith have left it entirely, myself included. Some have only left the church like Jinger Dugger Vuolo who calls it “disentangling”).

Christianity had taken a decidedly contemporary journey by first, chasing counter culture in the 1960-70s, amassing political power in the 1980s (the rise of the Moral Majority), and by the 90-00s, had infiltrated pop culture by way of MTV marketing tactics (see this incredible essay by Meghan O’Gieblyn).1 The premise for both religions hinge on the idea that a person, on their own, is broken and misguided—making them perfect candidates for coercive control.

I remember vividly a classmate who, while holding the Dianetics cans, saw her needle bend past the normal Thetan scale after being asked to focus on something traumatic by the Scientologist in charge. “Like a car accident,” she had said. Afterward, the classmate confessed to us that she had been thinking of nothing traumatic at all, in fact she had focused on a meadow of flowers, she said and that the needle was probably programmed to move on its own.

We were on the second floor of this vaulted old bank building in which the Life Exhibition was installed. I remember looking at my feet and noting the similarity between the dingy but plush maroon and forest green plaid carpet back at the mega-cabin in the woods back north. These interiors will not reveal any secrets as religious cults hide in plain sight, the power is soft, the violence is casual. There is no glittering inner-palace or extravagant dungeon, when it’s just as likely that the money spent goes towards building a façade or to the top leadership. Churches can be used as tax havens, they’re often run like corporations, especially mega-churches where commercial enterprise like book imprints or products are seen as effective, capitalist-driven methods for bringing money back to the church and by way, I guess, to the glory of God.

Being trapped inside a tacky interior could be an apt metaphor for the spiritual claustrophobia I felt in the Baptist megachurch I attended, against my will, every Sunday—an ugly cavernous basketball court turned contemporary sanctuary, later my parents attended a church that lived in an old department store in a strip mall. What does cheap design say about spiritual decay? Even ugly things happen in beautiful spaces.

A lot of the interiors I found myself occupying growing up in the church and the ones I spied through blurry footage on TikTok during speedruns were not just ugly, they were void of life. They looked like flipped McMansions, bereft of beauty and thoughtfulness, using the cheapest materials possible, with whatever real estate was available. These cult spaces looked uninspired and reflected the cult’s priorities: for Scientology, amassing wealth for the top 1% of their constituents while exploiting the labor of the lowest, most Thetan-filled losers in Sea Org. For much of the evangelical church, uh, the same. Have you ever seen footage from megachurches that have light shows and pyrotechnics and costumed actors flying on harnesses? Those same churches who won’t feed their local hungry or help a struggling mother with diapers? More is spent on presentation than, say, serving the local community.

The prosperity gospel (think Tammy Faye and Jim Baker and early 19th and 20th century charlatans) would want its believers to have big churches and big wallets, where poverty is a sign of sin rather than systemic inequality. It goes hand in hand with the very Protestant American (United States) idea that work is virtuous and that if you’re rich, it’s because you worked hard and God rewarded you, and by the 1980s, that greed was good, especially if it helps you and your family—especially if your family was white.

That same mission trip in 2005, we stopped by Angelus Temple for a rousing sermon on asking God to fill our bank accounts, to pray that money would fall from the sky like a storm on a dried prairie. “I wish God would fatten MY wallet,” my director leaned over and whispered to us. Yeah, me too! Why is it that lately God is only talking to tech bros, pedophiles, and predominantly male youth pastors?

These speedruns—made by young enough men who have an unmatched dumb fearlessness—are nothing new, in fact they could be considered a continuation of a decades-long tradition of punking and exposing Scientologists.

Project Chanology in 2008, for example, began as Anonymous’s response to the Church of Scientology’s attempt to remove a leaked Tom Cruise video and grew from online attacks into global masked street protests against censorship, secrecy, and Scientology’s institutional practices. Speedruns are not so political nor strategic, but they are arguably, more effective in disrupting the day to day operations of a mega-million dollar cult. These speedrunners are young enough to forget what the Church did to Bixler-Zavala’s dog, or how they poisoned journalist Joel Sappell’s dog for exposing them, and have only lived in a world where Scientology is largely considered a joke.

Since 2008, Scientology has mostly moved off the streets, offline, and into more protected channels. They run Golden Era Productions and have a dedicated public access channel (I watched three hours of it in a hotel in Santa Fe once), have purchased major properties overseas, and utilize high-tech, 500-acre media centers for production and have converted to in-depth online engagement. Once a year, Tom Cruise (who still does all his own stunts!) flies in via helicopter to kick off the annual Scientology gala. The spectacle is not unlike a megachurch at Christmas.

The Church of Scientology (by way of affiliate nonprofit Building Management Services) just bought a new building in Hollywood for $16 million, the Mediterranean Revival style Hotel Wilcox built in the 1930s—one of the few Hollywood hotels featured in the Green Book and welcomed Black visitors to stay between 1949 and 1963. Some speculate it will be used as Sea Org housing since it was utilized as such back in the 1970s under different ownership. Until the kids speedrun the structure, we’ll have to wait.

A parallel can be drawn here between spiritual decay and boring interiors which show the backend of cults—the droll administrative work behind shame, the hard wood planks for young converts who work for free, the corny aesthetics of coercion. That an eccentric cult would downgrade their aesthetic choices to blend in with the drab palette of late stage Capitalism takes out all the novelty but none of the abuse. It’s like when trust-funded tech bros take over historic spaces and flip them to be “new” but patently ugly, like when those same losers raze gorgeous natural land to build data centers for which no one asked.

Part of my frustration with patriarchal Christianity in the first place was that men with inferior taste, ideas, and vibes were telling me what was up from down, and for a while—for much longer than was probably healthy—I did my best to believe them. ☼

In the summer of 2018, I spent ten days in a writing intensive hosted by my grad program at School of the Visual Arts in Manhattan. At nights, I crouched over the desk in my sublet room with chopped cheeses and light beers, working for hours on drafts I’d present to a small coterie of equally dedicated writers the following morning.

Lead by the talented Jarrett Earnest (you can follow his work here), who was also one of the first instructors who made me feel brilliant and capable writing about art, a small group of us wandered through galleries, museums, and other art spaces while working on assignments based on those experiences.

For what became my most generative assignment, we read Lynn Tillman’s “The Museum of Hyphenated Americans,” an art critique of Ellis Island, which she wrote through her fictional persona, Madame Realism. We then visited MOMA, selected an art work, and created our own personas through whom we described the work.

I foolishly chose a set of films, Ernie Gehr’s Essex Street Quartet (2004), and spent the rest of the afternoon trying to figure out what type of character would be light sensitive enough to care about beautiful footage of old Manhattan. Then it struck me: a vampire, a teenage vampire with no fixed gender, who had lived in New York City long before electricity hit the city, who saw it change over the decades. (This was well before I saw the criminally underrated Vamps (2012), featuring Alicia Silverstone (!!!) and Krysten Ritter, in which Silverstone’s character had seen all of NYC change through her long years of vampirehood. The film is a deeply underrated treatise on female friendship, aging, and gentrification!!!). This character, named Baby, became a channel for me to funnel all my rage, disdain, and teenage love for art and the art world, and I wrote subsequent pieces in her tone, the pages of which have never seen the light of day.

Apropos of nothing, I’ve decided to unleash Baby onto the world of Substack and present to you that first assignment from 2018, Baby Sees a Film.

Baby Sees a Film

On a cold evening, Baby emerges from the cagey depths of the subway halls and sneaks into MOMA by way of a loose air duct grate. Deep winter is the only time she can visit the museum because the sun goes down at 4:30pm and Baby needs it dark.

Baby is a connoisseur. She values a particular quality of light, one that makes day look like night, dramatic and theatrical; it suits her. Alighted on a bench and feeling especially thirsty, Baby watches Essex Street Quartet by Ernie Gehr, mostly on accident while keeping to the lower lit galleries. She’s allergic to fluorescent lights. Annoyingly, a flabby man in a red polo shirt with a notebook insists to sit next to her and eagerly explains that he spent the morning interviewing the filmmaker, Ernie. “He’s out of this world,” the man spits. “I’m writing about him for The Brooklyn Rail.”

Cool, says Baby, feeling harassed. The man in the red polo goes off on how Ernie filmed the original footage in 16mm, following strangers through their respective days in early 70s New York. The man taps his pen excitedly. Baby forms her lips into the shape of a wan smile. She turns to the screen, ignores the man, and sinks back into Ernie.

Ernie is a voyeur and Baby is a vampire: both float through particular but timeless hours.

Throughout the short film, which is black and white and drained of color, Ernie’s vantage point is distanced and watchful. Baby can relate, but feels each shot is a total tease. During Essex Street Market and Noon Time Activities she drools over the swanish napes of women’s necks and the bulbous waists of butchers. Baby has no interest in the market’s offerings, no interest in shrimp or apples. Fish? Disgusting. And onions? Never. Noon according to Ernie looks like the inside of a movie theater. Daytime never looked so dark and even under lights the cantaloupe seller with his skinny limbs (he’s of no use to Baby, he’s totally anemic) looks voluminous under his sweater, the deep grooves in high contrast feign muscular definition.

Light is fraudulent in Ernie’s world, an occurrence, a negative shape. His subjects live in permanent chiaroscuro. They, like Baby, glow faintly in shadow. Faces are contours, lines are suggestions. The video is hazy, smoothed over by digital conversion, not grainy like the dotted skin of film. Baby remembers the way Manhattan was, the way Times Square was lit by warm and dusty theater lights rather than blinding LED screens.

From behind, from below, and just off of center, Baby creeps with Ernie through a long-dead New York. Shot to shot, a series of tantalizing and soft-jowled faces hover on the screen, three-quarters either to the right or left, like dull planets glowing in a gray-washed sky. The pulpy cheeks of a dark-haired woman undulate as she scowls into a low-contrast void. Who is she even talking to? She looks mean, Baby likes her. She’d bite her.

And this shoe seller, wow. His thumbs look plump and pale as he hands over a polished Wingtip to a customer, the vantage point tucked behind his pyramid of loafers and lace-ups at stage right. His hands creep out of the dense composition like eels. And in the next shot, a fishmonger, shown from below, angled with a perfect view of his meaty jaw, even better. Young but thick with a shiny knife in hand, he smokes the cigarettes of Baby’s youth in dirty New York, long before this guy was born, long before the 70s. But some of these people are incredibly old (but younger than Baby, let’s be honest) and probably not that tasty. Nevertheless, Baby feels nostalgic for the silvery quiet the world used to offer. She keeps watching like a moth to a flickering candle flame on the other side of a pane of glass.

Baby is all but melted by the time the third movement of the quartet, Workers Leaving the Factory (After Lumiere), rolls gently across the screen. Shadows stretch longer by the minute and long shadows mean night is on its way. Girls aren’t supposed to walk by themselves at night, but Baby is a crone, wizened to a crisp, kept in the body of a teen still sneaking into movies.

Baby’s eyes follow Ernie’s camera underground. His subway is a buffet, a cathedral of poles and a vaulted arcade of metal hand straps. Kneecaps and fat ankles slither out in angular lines from behind opened newspapers all in a row. The train car bobs and weaves to the rhythm of the track, metal on metal. A tunnel sealed like a tomb, the car rocking gently. The film is silent, an homage to early cinema of the past, ageless, like Baby.

Baby doesn’t just avoid light, she seeks shadows like gradients, night tones like music. The choreography of the city is only slightly diminished by the hours Baby keeps. Her city is one of silhouettes that drift ghost-like under street lamps. Ernie’s is a city where humans breathe into frame like apparitions, segmented like the seconds in a minute. His is a crowd of excerpts. Baby’s crowd lives to be unseen or seen less, wafting under sunless sky.

Then suddenly: a panel of slanted light across brick. Watching Greene Street, Ernie’s final vignette, Baby tenses with the screeching effect of temporality. But she’s lost in an image, trapped like a mouse. Tormented, she watches the sun fade, then set, pure pleasure at first, then somehow the light works in reverse and lifts like the blade of a guillotine. Ernie has come home but Baby is out. Scratchy red brick stretches and yawns over an agonizing five minutes. The man in the red polo is yammering, “Isn’t that something?”. He squawks and Baby bolts while a voice on a speaker announces closing time. ☼

I am among them, as I no longer live in LA proper (I live upstate), and drove the two hours down to the city (with a quick hour lost in the parking lot of Uniqlo where I lost my keys). What follows below is a day by day account of where I was, who I saw, what I filed, and everything in between. I wrote it as I went along so some of it is in active voice, some of it is in past tense, and I refuse to edit it so turn your copy-editor brains off, please!

I heard quite a bit of gossip (allegedly!) that I’ve tucked at the end of this newsletter behind a paywall, if you’re interested in hearing me speculate about bad actors, naïve property owners, and corny edgelords with questionable morals.

Day 1 WEDNESDAY — DESERT X BRUNCH AT A GORGEOUS SPANISH STYLE MANSION

I’m feeling abject levels of class shame as I drive to Santa Monica with my box-dyed hair in my wool blend Theory pants that I got on the Real Real for 50 bucks last year and my knock-off Bottega ballet flats. Every time I head to a fancy art thing, I feel this pressure—then I remember that I have a full head of hair, clear skin, and a relative amount of youth on my side. As expected, I am the third youngest person there. Being an art writer is strange because you interact with so many wealthy people who act like you have a bit more than they do. I often call to mind the time when my least favorite classmate in grad school asked Hannah Black how she spent her cultural currency and she snapped back with, “Do I look like I eat well to you?” (for the record she looked fabulous, but the point was made).

I eat molé chilaquiles with publicist Shaquille Heath, legend Lita Albuquerque, and a woman whose name I woefully forget and we talk about desert people, the sun as a timekeeping tool, and memory loss. A lovely woman with a property in Pipes Canyon tells me about an art installation I’ve never heard of. This is A Thing in the desert…people install art and then everyone forgets it’s there. There’s apparently a Nam June Paik television in someone’s back yard being pulled apart by the wind as I type. My dear friends who hosted my birthday dinner in January live near the Rachel Whiteread homestead sculptures, for example. This lovely woman with the pink cabin in Pipes tells me about a rich gallerist who lives three doors down from the Spanish mansion we’re eating brunch in, and who has art installed in his house. I skipped it on the way out because I need to save my energy for tomorrow, my big reporting day. Later in the week, I am violently reminded that he is a raging Irani-Zio so I thank the spirits for making me tired.

By the end of brunch, I forget how much I love to shmooze. I start to miss LA, the art world. Then I sit in traffic on the 10 East for another forty-five minutes and remember why I left. On my way back to my friends’ place in Cypress, I wander the cold interior of Eagle Rock Plaza and hunt for gojiberries in Seafood City (did not find them!).

Day 2 THURSDAY — FRIEZE VIP DAY SALES REPORTING

It’s my big reporting day: for the second year in a row, I’m working on-site in Barker Hangar with The Art Newspaper for three days reporting on sales, parties, and other fairs. I love having coworkers and an office, even if it’s under fluorescent lighting in an airless room attached to a giant airplane hangar where the art handlers smoke inside (!!!) and move art that’s been sold in huge crates.

Every morning is a new opportunity for fresh gossip. Every writer in town that I know is DM’ing each other about the 99 cent store drama. I don’t stand in lines so I’ll never know what I’m missing. Admittedly, I love the concept—art installed in an old store—I love that it features artists with less than 1000 followers on social media. But I don’t love the galleries behind it, the fact that the landlord’s son was wildly misled but also acting a bit like a douchebag (allegedly he said to a writer: “I don’t care who you write for! Here’s your scoop: New York City is screwing over Los Angeles!” how cryptic…but maybe not given one of the gallerists’ reputation.

I yell hello to Amanda Ross-Ho who is mid-performance in the grass field outside the fair, pushing a gigantic inflatable globe, I make my yearly unintentional eye contact with Hans Ulrich Obrist, and put on my sunglasses. Last year, I got a migraine and it sucked ass so I prepared differently this year by hydrating for 24 hours, taking Ibuprofen on my way into the tent, and wearing warm-toned sunnies. I hit Make Room and Sea View’s presentations, I do my little interviews, I hang out with Botanica Ambos while I wait to grab quotes from the fair director (who had a migraine!). I love to talk a little shop shit then say OFF THE RECORD into my phone mic while whoever I’m talking to giggles. We know the routine, it’s a strong pas de deux. I peeped Conny Maier’s big brushy vibrant paintings about oranges and the Dust Bowl, and Chantal Peñalosar’s polyptych of photographs of the sky above the Tecate, MX border (the one I grew up crossing as a teen) and scurry back to the office to wait for sales numbers to pour in.

In the office, waiting for proofs, sweating like pigs, we all perk our ears to a phone call our editor is having with Jori Finkel, who is breaking some horrifying gossip to our editor. I spend another hour on the 10 West trying not to touch my phone, then spend the evening texting my powerful group chat consisting of critic-artist Juliana Halpert and gallerist baddie Alex Nazari, cry-watching the latest episode of Love Story, and then promptly pass tf out.

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Day 3 FRIDAY — POST FAIR AND PARTIES???

I used to be a party girl dammit!!! I used to sleep five hours and get back up and do it all again! Now I can barely rouse myself after ten hours of sleep and get wrecked after 1-3 diet cokes. Getting a late start after my big deadline, I check my Insta dms for more takes and gossip of which there is a’plenty. Someone is ALLEGEDLY getting sued over the 99 Cent store drama, but no one says who. I find out there’s a nice exposé coming out about a gallerist who cheats literally everyone (her time was coming) ALLEGEDLY. Kristen, my new favorite critic, posts the one sheet from D*va C*rp’s “exhibition” at Pio Pico and I read the case summary mentioned in the text and goddamn these three are total alt right edgelords. I guess we’re doing rape culture as ragebait now? Cool cool.

I’m scheduled to cover Post-Fair today and what a joy to catch a fucking breeze near the promenade in Santa Monica. When I was 17, I saw Alanis Morissette here once in line at Barnes & Noble, an absolute thrill for me at the time. I’m full of diet coke and protein bars as I talk to House of Seiko, Ehrlich Steinberg, I met Jonny and Sophie from Harlesden High Street (the homies! I’ve been in a funny group chat with Jonny for almost two years, what a treat to meet IRL. Somebody get me a trip to Europe STAT), and finally, the organizer Chris Sharp who was wearing an incredible linen printed shirt from some French boutique. I spot Paul McCarthy and his majestic beard blowing in that breeze on the sidewalk on the way out before I stop and kiki with the fine men of Uhaul Gallery parked out front.

I wait for proofs then hit Friday night traffic on the 10 West, my new home, laughing at myself for thinking I could hit up Club Tempo for gay cowboy night and not stay up all night, get back to my guest room in Cypress and mindlessly scroll.

Wait, what’s this? A parody D*va C*rp account? Called N*ggaCorp?! I can’t type out the word because that is not my lane but the man behind the account is an absolute sweetheart and we exchange critiques and roasts and giggles. His review of Felix Art Fair is hilarious and also, extremely accurate. You should read his art week scene report on Tasbeeh Herwees No Bad Days. My friend texts me some gossip about a reading event, which she left almost immediately after arriving. I read more weird takes on the 99 Cent Store Drama™️ (it WASN’T abandoned, ok?!) and pass tf out again.

Day 4 SATURDAY — WILSHIRE ONLINE, I GUESS

There’s a breeze on Wilshire and I’m feeling the city big time today. Maybe it’s the fact that the adrenaline and stress of deadline work has left my body and settled into my jaw resulting in a throbbing case of nightly TMJ. I’m breaking my rule of NOT going to midtown for the block-long art bonanza because I know the parking and hype will put me into a spiral but alas, I found $10 parking right across the street. The line to 99 isn’t very long, there is next to no one in the office building that hosts my final destination: Pamela Ramos!!!

I’ve come with offerings to the goddess: two Tequila ‘Rita flavored BuzzBalls and all the ones left over in my wallet. She’s locked herself in a small boxy office space with a telephone not unlike that final scene in Paris, Texas. She’s installed a mylar mirror wall and tiger print carpet. Ramos’s performance features her as an exotic dancer trapped in an office where visitors can pay for a dance or a phone call. I look like her married-in white auntie so I tuck myself into the corner behind the door where we catch up on gossip. She looks absolutely incredible and has worked so hard perfecting her pole dance prowess. Four years ago she was on the hunt for pleasers with homies cast into the heels when she first got her pole (sorry I’m acting like a mom, I love her so much) and if I ever come across some in the wild in her size it’s on sight. “White boys won’t look me in the eyes, I think they’re scared of me,” Ramos tells me as two of her friends pull up. She does a lil dance for some passersby to Rihanna’s Kiss it Better in her day three outfit: a lil bikini set with FRIEZE printed across the chest. We say goodbye over the phone with me saying “just send me that man’s number and address,” like a mob boss because some loser has hurt her feelings and my elder sister energy was activated.

On my way home, I hit up Koreatown Plaza for fried chicken. I have never felt more relaxed sitting in the cafeteria until I open my phone lol. I watch Iran bomb Tel Aviv aglow in pink ambient mall lighting. I stare into the eyes of the giant Pikachu stuffie across from me. Never tear this place down, city council, I pray. The pink and green tile alone is priceless. The experience of gobbling up Korean fried chicken while staring at a giant stiff Pikachu in a claw game is invaluable to me. Satisfied that the gods have heard me, I make the trek to my original destination: H Mart, where an employee is playing Korean metal. I watch a throuple of lesbians fight over fruit in the tea aisle where I make peace with the gods over gojiberries that cost $27.99.

Day 5 SUNDAY — WOLFPACK HQ ZOE KOKE READING IN GARDENA

We made it. My friend Zoe Koke was closing out her gorgeous painting show at the archive of Luchita Hurtado and Lee Mullican (!!!), run by Marie Heilich, the quiet archivist legend herself. Pri started us off with a vibey piano set, followed by Koke’s ambient project, Trio, with her partner Nick Flessa (on sax), and Lauren Strom-Berg (on theremin). The vibes were immaculate for an art reading in Los Angeles, although I am biased because I tested my new fiction out on the crowd (rave reviews so far, thank you Poetry Field School and religious trauma). I gave Juliana a pair of pants out of my trunk, picked through Hurtado’s clothes archive (she sewed her own shirts, which were this Japanese style of tunic, I am obsessed to say the least), hugged my friends in the parking lot for a really long time, then drove back to the desert under a melty east LA sunset blasting Bay Area rap as the gods intended. ☼

☼

AND NOW: GOSSIP (ALLEGEDLY! FOR ENTERTAINMENT & RECREATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY!!!)

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1

At some point in the last month, a trio of short sunflowers appeared behind my trashcans. I figured I hadn’t noticed them before but found them striking and odd. Had they grown and bloomed after the rain? Had they been planted there by the last tenant and I just hadn’t noticed? They were almost a foot tall by the time I saw them and I made a mental note to dig them up after the rain slowed down to put them in my yard instead of behind the bins.

2

My current writing challenge is finishing a book proposal for a project I started roughly 6 years ago, maybe longer. It hangs over me. The feeling is claustrophobic. Everyone is sick of me talking about it. I feel like I’m wearing a coat that no longer fits me; the arms are too tight, the wool down-at-heel, loose threads everywhere and I know the second I finish this project and take off the coat I’m going to feel like a brand new person and it’s that sensation and accomplishment I’ve been chasing since 2018 or so when all this ghost town research began. It’ll feel like the summer I finally passed calculus and never had to do math ever again.

3

I’m writing about an old adobe theater in Death Valley Junction for a magazine. The entire complex with a cafe, a hotel, several dilapidated cottages, and an old car garage and gas station across the street was built for millhands in the early 1920s. A rich boss built a whole town after western romance writer Zane Grey wrote an out-of-character hit piece on the Borax Company because of the conditions workers lived under while digging up soap. I can’t get over this fact for some reason, that a Manifest Destiny motherfucker like Grey would advocate for labor rights resulting in the construction of an entire company town. This was Grey’s west coast version of an Upton Sinclair moment, despite Grey being a writer of myth-making pulp.

As the story goes: By the 1960s, the town was abandoned and an eccentric ballerina named Marta Becket and her husband got a flat tire and she fell in love with the old theater where millhands used to watch films in, rather than waste away in their tents with the rattlesnakes. The couple bought the complex and effectively, the whole town. Over time, Marta painted the interiors of the hotel with frescos and trompe l’oeil paintings. In the theater, she expanded the stage and painted an audience onto every wall, floor to ceiling. Even if no one but the winds of the Mojave were blowing through town, she performed. For years she staged hundreds of one-woman shows to a painted audience. In 1970, some journalists stumbled into her opera house and immortalized her vision in the pages of National Geographic: she was a star.

When I walked in with my tour guide, Tammy, I imagined the ghosts of the millhands clapping. On one wall Marta had painted a guy who had once scammed her, painted his nasty little face into an audience section of people she hated, all of them grotesque and pitiful. He had a carrot for a nose. Another section had a row of nuns looking over at a row of sex workers staring back at them. No one is allowed to go backstage except performers and Fred, the board director. He’s one of the last people Marta appointed herself. He called me this week to explain the history of the cafe and I listened to him for about an hour. I’ve been on the phone with a range of characters this week and that’s just part of writing stories and doing cultural journalism, if we could call it that. Anyway.

4

I went to the hot springs first. I love the drive northeast out of Yucca Valley. It’s rocky, then it’s flat, then it’s dunes and steakhouses and abandoned gas stations, then a stretch of cities like Barstow; down through Yermo and Daggett, two types of ghost towns: one is converted into a recreational park with people dressed up like its 1885 and silver is up; and the other is a one-street stretch of gorgeous classical old west bank buildings, a market, and a cottage or two. A visitor’s center with a curly roof and a big yellow arrow that points to nothing. Around the main street are small dusty houses and RVs bisected by the Union Pacific railroad tracks. I stopped to photograph a yard memorial sculpture and saw a disgruntled man pull out of a parking lot in his blue semi truck while his girlfriend sifted through a ravine full of stuff.

After that, a long beautiful desert basin with mountains that make me consider deep time; driving through a flat plane in the middle of nowhere, trying to understand what appeals to me about these far-flung places and what the meaning might be behind my desire for being completely alone or to be in a place where I can’t be easily reached. I don’t know if it’s a control issue or a spiritual issue or if I’m waiting to hear from some divinity or even just myself. Ellen Meloy says we’re lonely because we’ve lost touch with animals, that we abandoned the benefit of living among them. My favorite story in the Bible is the parable of the lost sheep in which a shepherd abandons all 99 of his sheep so he can go look for his one lost lamb. I think being a shepherd is a perfect job—to stare at animals all day, an art that John Berger says the industrial era took from us, I agree. I think of Leo and Mohammed in Gaza. I think of my eighteen year old cat being put down last week. For 48 hours after, I paced the house convinced my other cats would die, desperate not to lose their spirits.

5

At first I started visiting ghost towns because I believed they told us something about society. In the absence of people, the way a built environment reflected how people lived threw my own life into relief. Next, I thought maybe ghost towns were just places I went to hear myself think and or to hear from a higher power by virtue of them just being spacious and empty and haunted. When I started roadtripping to them, it was Covid era so they were doubly empty and I had no idea if we were all going to live or die. I thought maybe the ghosts could reach me here. Maybe they could tell me something about the way we live now and what the bones of belonging really are and maybe we can pull everything down to the studs and start over because this nation is lost. Maybe the clarity is the decay itself, it’s the wind that slowly dissembles every project humans ever made into a holocene settler’s dust.

6

A brood of wild horses and donkeys used to run through Death Valley Junction to see Marta who fed and cared for them while letting them run free as they please. The hotel staff says they haven’t seen them in awhile. They say the monsoons have only gotten worse. They say they spend most of the hours vacuuming dried mud off the carpet and that the pipes are always breaking. On my last morning, I walked around the entire perimeter of the complex and looked at all the structures, read the messages and names scrawled into the dust on the cafe windows. I stood in front of the old car garage like I was visiting a temple. Why do I love this so much? I’m not nostalgic for the old west but I spent my formative years imprinting old west Americana as standard because I lived in the city built over the first pueblo in California. Everything around me was built in 1902. So this colonizer’s aesthetic is familiar like an old blanket. And what does it mean now? How should I respond to it?

7

For a while, I thought I visited ghost towns to stave off the extended hours I earned while being sober. Being bored is so important to human development, but I had forgotten how to sit quietly with myself for the decade I erased myself with booze. I was a ghost. The horses Marta cared for are buried out behind her cottage with her cats. Her own ashes were spread across Death Valley with sunflower seeds. Sunflowers in the desert. The names of her donors are engraved onto bronze plaques adorning the theater seats. She has her own chair in the front, alongside her parents, draped with her pink gauzy robe and bouquets of dead, dried roses. Her mother’s epitaph in the Death Valley Junction Pioneer Cemetery: I have spread my dreams under your feet. Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

8

I can’t see the hot springs from the road but I can see people in towels. A kind Japanese tourist tells me the best way to get to them is to roll up my pants and walk barefoot over a hill four inches deep with squishy mud. How did the mud feel under your feet? There were rocks that hurt my soles. For half an hour, it’s just me and a naked man with a ponytail in the hot water. I stare into the sky and practice my breathing and think about the life of a wild horse in Death Valley.

6

On the walk back to the hotel after my tour of the theater in the cold wind, arm in arm with Tammy, one of the outdoor theater lights started flickering. Tammy held my arm tighter. “Is that Marta?” I asked. “She is definitely here,” said Tammy. The light strobed as we approached. It finally stopped. “Hi Marta,” I said. The light flickered back in response. Turning down the colonnade, a sparrow appeared under the awning and fluttered ahead of us as we walked along—it flew into the black night as we reached the door. We ate cookies in the lobby.

The next day I went to the casino over the border to get snacks and met a cat named Jackpot whose striped body was draped over the digital black jack machines at the bar. A statue of a giant pig sat in the parking lot for no reason at all except that the owner loved it. On the drive out, I stopped at Dublin Gulch, a hillish ghost town in the center of another one street town where men had carved houses out of caliche clay rock formations. One side held a field of rusted cans from the 1920s that ran up against the perimeters of the city dump. On the other side of the rocks sat another pioneer cemetery. In the town’s museum, I found an old magazine that featured the opera house and bought it. When I finally pulled into my driveway three hours later, it was desert midnight and pitch black out.

When I got up the next morning, the sunflowers were gone and in their place were three small piles of fresh dirt. ☼

In the 1928 silent film, The Wind, a young eastern transplant finds herself destitute and headed west where she is tortured by the incessant winds of West Texas. One of the opening intertitles refers to the over-plowed prairie as the “domain of the winds” at the onset of the Dust Bowl. The film follows the woman deeper and deeper west as men chase her and winds assail her. A similar tack is surfed by Joan Didion’s essay on the Santa Anas, an it girl favorite (despite the concept possibly being pulled from this film), in which she conflates rising crime rates and murderous housewives to the phenomenon of the Foehn winds that blow leeward down our eastern mountains and across southern California. Makes sense that The Wind was filmed in the pits of the Mojave, not the prairie, in hundred degree Fahrenheit heat and airplane propellers were used to create the ever-present dust storms the heroine faces. I hated the ending which diverged from the book—the latter featured the young woman accepting her fate and merging with the wind itself, leaving the lean-to shelter one proposing man after another dragged her to and burying herself alive. These wind storms, called “Northers” by cattleman and cowboys personify desire and Western precarity, some obnoxious film bro Letterboxd reviews equate it with the danger of frontier living itself but I found this too on the nose and low key, feeding directly into the propaganda of the era. Women couldn’t survive the frontier under this narrative but in Dorothy Scarborough’s literary version, women are nature themselves, afraid of nothing.

What also struck me was how prescient The Wind was regarding the Dust Bowl which historians mark as hitting full force between 1930 and 1941. In the film and the public imagination, the “land of the winds”—i.e. the mythic West (which was considered first, the prairie during Western Expansion) serves as the domain of rugged individuals and dangerous itinerants, let alone a delicate woman from the Eastern seaboard. To me it seems that the gale forces in The Wind form a sibylline metaphor for the violent wave of migration that would push Okie settlers, intent on escaping the misery of the prairie, further west, merging Puritan impulses with the longing for pure air during an era of labored breath—from tuberculosis, to “gassed” men suffering from lung damage after WWI, to the discovery of Valley Fever, to pollution from industrialization—nature cleaned and purified of toxins as a type of religious fetish.2 I somehow never learned that the Dust Bowl was completely avoidable, that it was a human-made ecological disaster only undone by socialist-leaning New Deal regulations and subsidies. How it wasn’t some freak occurrence or an act of God, but a result of an over-extractive system. I have a theory about flipped desert houses, vacation rentals, and a contemporary social Dust Bowl, but I’ll save that for another day.

Last week I took a quick drive down the 62 to visit the Campbell Wind Phone in Joshua Tree. Created by locals Colin Campbell and Gail Lerner in dedication to their children, Ruby and Hart, who were killed in a drunk driving accident in 2019, the Campbell Wind Phone sits waiting for anyone who needs to make a phone call to a loved one who is no longer with us. “We miss and talk about them every day,” reads their website. “We talk to them as well, but there are days when they feel so far away it’s hard to imagine our words reaching them.” Inspired by the original wind phone, assembled in Japan by Itaru Sasaki who, while grieving his cousin, bought an old fashioned phone booth, installed it in his garden, and placed in it a broken rotary phone with no wired connection. Sasaki called it Kaze No Denwa (風の電話), or Wind Phone.

I believe that the wind carries messages and spirits. The year my great granny died at age 95, I found myself in Joshua Tree on my hands and knees in the dust, creating a small medicine wheel out of rocks, just as she had taught me as a child. She was fierce, spooky, and with formidable hospitality, a legend in her own right. When I placed the last stone, a wind rushed me and nearly knocked me over. When I texted my Grandmama what had happened she said, “That was her, no doubt. She was saying hello back.”

After a friend sent me a link with the directional coordinates to the Wind Phone, I hopped in my car almost immediately to make a quick call. I didn’t think to call my granny because I knew she was already there in the desert with me most of the time. So before the sun set and in crisp wind, I sat and dialed my friend Alan, who passed in 2023, and I told him how the Dodgers had won back-to-back World Series—something he’d be absolutely thrilled by—since he left our earthly plane. A desert altar of sorts, of which there are many along the back roads of the Mojave and other desert cities, the Wind Phone is a reliquary worth a pilgrimage, even if you have no one to call.

I’m reading:

This essay, My Truck Desk by Bud Smith altered my brain chemistry. “Really it mostly comes down to that first thing: finding time. When I talk to people who want to find more time, I repeat something an old-timer said to me early on: ‘You’ve gotta make your own conditions.’” One’s own conditions. I also also recently heard about a painter who worked as a trucker until Hilton Als reviewed his exhibition and his career took off before he could start nursing school (which he had chosen as his new career path). There is incredible dignity in doing art part time, to value all labor as equal instead of putting yourself at the mercy of the market as a creative person. It’s brutal! I’d rather be doing mindless tech stuff for $150 an hour!

I’m amidst a career shift. Writing full time freelance was a dream I held and achieved within the first five years of trying it out. I feel accomplished and proud but I was also constantly broke and frazzled. I had no real schedule, I was on press trips every other month, and while that ragged lifestyle suited me into my thirties, I found myself wondering how my nervous system might feel if I had a consistent income and schedule, what it might feel like to go to an actual office. I looked around at my other creative friends. What does continuity feel like? Living in one city for longer than three years?

So I made a decision without ruminating—something I gleaned from my guru, Doechii—and for the last six months, I’ve been in paralegal training with the plan of working in the legal field, which is not unlike journalism or reporting. When my painter friend Bruna asked me how paralegal school was going, I told her that I felt like my dreams were dying. “They’re evolving,” she said and I like that better. My dreams are being melted down in some crucible of force and habit. I’m an accountant of my own ambitions and the number sheet is feeling a bit unbalanced.

Not everyone needs to be an artist—I do, I can’t help it, the gods spoke and I moved—but everyone does need to eat and make money and I’ve done so much juggling and struggling and being clever trying to piece everything together, I don’t see why I can’t write, for myself3, part time, rather than pacing in agony writing about subjects I may or may not care about for pittance for magazines that are long past their heydays.4 I’m not sure a. when I’ll land an entry level job in this absolutely cursed job market or b. how I’ll balance time off for press trips (I refuse to give them up!) but I look forward to figuring it out and focusing on writing stories I deeply care about and that serve my ambitions. I could discuss writing and money all day but it’s been done better and by greater writers than I.

Someone cribbed my signature sun icon (☼) this month for some goofy design project, a woman who often steals from me. It wouldn’t bother me but I know she knows I use it here and have since 2019. I see you girl, I’m petty, stop stealing my shit! It’s been three times now! And you’ve made MONEY from it! You know who you are!

Editors, this is a grammar free zone, please don’t copy edit mentally, it’s bad up there. Unless you’re offering and in that case, I could use the help.

And to the rest of you: Thank you again for reading! May your haters be vanquished and may the wind carry you along. ☼

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I woke to a dead kangaroo mouse on my door step last month. A gift from an animal predator perhaps like an owl or a hawk, or maybe the small creature was struck dead on its journey to my door to deliver a message. The cats were crying in the windows trying to get to it, while the yard regulars (mourning doves, house finches, scrub jays, and jackrabbits) stayed clear. It felt like an omen, a metaphor, maybe even an initiation. For the month I’d been discussing with a friend how to get on the ravens’ good side so they’d bring me shiny gifts and vanquish my enemies. But the mouse, with its sweet outsized ears and delicate whiskers looked like she was only sleeping and would wake up to deliver a message if I stood and watched long enough.

When I first moved into my brick bungalow, I was determined to get everything installed and unpack every single box as quickly as possible. I spent a week in a pizza and diet coke haze, slicing through packing tape and flattening boxes, scurrying around from room to room with my drill, determined to feel settled.

After mounting a mirror above my desk (so I could look up and out the window behind me in moments of paralysis), I caught a glimpse of myself: wild dilated pupils, a halo of stray hairs in a cloud around my face, a visage of frenzied solitude. I resembled what I imagined Annie Dillard looked like in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, in which she locks herself in a cabin to write upwards of 15 hours a day, subsisting only on coffee and Coke.

Self-imposed solitude—writers and artists apparently thrive under it. I personally have an alarmingly high tolerance for it that intensified when I was twenty-one and trying to figure out who I was without the Christian church. I was a very self conscious kid who grew up around a lot of extroverts and concept of god consistently confused me. I’ll never forget sitting alone in my first studio apartment, watching movies and drawing on my thrift store couch, luxuriating in the loneliness. No one around me to disrupt my thoughts or the shape I felt I lost when I was with others. I’d learn decades later that this was some sort of a pendulum-swing trauma response but at the time it felt like jumping into a cool lake after feeling like my skin was on fire for my entire life.

In Tell Them I Said No by Martin Herbert, the art critic describes painter Agnes Martin’s famous departure from New York City after she used a grant to buy a pick up truck and got the hell out of Manhattan, driving west to the deserts of New Mexico desert where she lived, almost completely alone, for the next 42 years. Her life parallels several other creative lives: her studio building was being demolished for high-rise apartments, she was becoming too popular for her liking and her mental health was beginning to fray. She sought relief in a quieter landscape. Herbert writes: “Martin says that ‘if your mind is full of garbage, if an inspiration came you wouldn’t recognize it anyway. So you have to practice quiet, empty mind.’”

Another Martin quote (Agnes not Herbert lol): “If you’re alone you focus in on everything. You’re just affected by everything. The sky and wind and air and nature, all of nature, and you’re responding 100 percent.” I’ve experienced this here in the Mojave; the desert land is never empty but the mind can be vacated just by sitting still with the wind. Movement, spiritual or otherwise, reveals itself. I become a sensitive instrument picking up frequencies like a theremin. I feel privileged to never have been fearful of total silence, to have the kind of busy mind that isn’t easily quieted but embraces a moment to feel still. Martin lived off and with the land, in a type of communion, used reclaimed rainwater to drink, lived without radio, television, newspapers, or electricity. She rose with the sun and painted without outside interference, perhaps she felt her muse was noisy enough. Her legend grew in her absence back in New York, the city she left behind, while she transmuted herself into the dust, light, and endless sky of the Chihuahuan desert.

As Herbert notes, Martin’s work is experienced, not interpreted (at least not easily), and I have an eidetic memory of my first month in New York City, a city of blurry steel grey, and how I found every door heavy and every staircase unyielding beneath my feet, and how I sat quietly in front of Martin’s ephemeral grid paintings, tired and only a little homesick, meditating on how the sky felt back in California and how the land went on forever. “One might (many have) hallucinate in them New Mexico landscapes—peachy glare as native light, adobe ciphered in dusty reds—and be led astray,” writes Herbert. “A local world glimmers in the work but, when indulged, it weighs the paintings down, limits them.” Her work is a gift in meditation, of cosmic belonging made with that “quiet, empty mind.”

Half the battle of creative isolation is getting past the loneliness of it all—getting past the extroversion of ego long enough to find that solitude to be as generative as it could be, to fight the temptation of compulsive connectivity, to refuse to enter the realm of the quiet, empty mind.

Doechii, god herself with the BBL of an angel, and who just finished a world tour for her Grammy-winning album, Alligator Bites Don’t Heal, has been posting sermons on social media about creative isolation. “Set more intentions to have a richer inner world,” she tells her phone camera. “Have the self confidence to be content in isolation because you tend to be isolated when you’re ahead.” A richer inner world begins with stillness, with peace made with silence. What’s so wrong with sitting still and waiting for the muses to move? Don’t let an algorithm tell you what you like or who you are, ask yourself in sensory deprivation, whether that’s meditation or staring into space or mindlessly feeding birds seed in the freezing morning desert air—what do I think? What does this mean to me?

Housekeeping:

I’ve rebranded my Substack to free myself up. I will still be riffing on California and the U.S. West but I also want to write about my latest OOO-driven1 EBay obsession or pen a quick movie review that has nothing to do with my realm of book research. So West Ends is still the name, but I now do whatever I want and frankly I think it will be more enjoyable for everyone involved. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I profiled L.A. Taco for Study Hall. Since the ICE raids kicked off in Los Angeles, quickly spreading like fire to other cities like Chicago, New York (well, they tried), and now Charlotte, many ad hoc coalitions and community groups have risen to the challenge of defending ourselves against the tyranny of our fascist admin and its ruthless, faceless, bully-ass thugs that are ICE agents. The cabinet is full of pedophiles and abuse enablers but sure, let’s throw the flower vendors and the tamale guy into prison. Covering the Los Angeles and the great southern California region, L.A. Taco, a scrappy, tireless team of freelance journalists have dedicated themselves to documenting ICE-related news in addition to culture and culinary happenings in the Latin communities of the area. I remain one of their biggest fans. Both Study Hall and L.A. Taco rely on subscriptions so please click through and give them both some love. Also the latter has really good merch.

I wrote about a group of millennials who bought an entire town for Dwell. I visited the hotel twice in the last year and those mineral pools are no joke. What I found most inspiring was not so much the design or the offerings but the fact that this group of friends essentially bought an entire town and have been serving the community the best they can since. Most memorable was visiting an elder local named Ellen who was halfway through feeding her mini-ponies while simultaneously trying to find her dog who had eaten a poisonous toad that made her high. When we asked her if she’d be coming to dinner with us at the Hotel that evening she said, “No! I’m staying in to smoke weed while my dog comes down from that psychedelic toad.” What a town!

This Cultured story (that I did not write) on the Morongo Basin area (read: what city folk think Joshua Tree is lol) made the rounds in my DMs and texts, mostly because, well—we hated it! I typically appreciate Cultured’s art coverage, more so since they hired Johanna Fateman, but any time a wealthy person deigns to visit my freshly-adopted dusty enclave, it’s hard not to cringe at the product since no one ever visits say Pancake Breakfast at the Copper Mountain Mesa Community Center, or anywhere else that isn’t La Copine2 (Patti Smith’s favorite). Perhaps it’s jealousy because I’d love to be assigned a story over duck confit and everyone agrees that Lily Stockman’s house and dinners are gracious and well-appointed. He did use the phrasing: “dropouts, hippies, and rednecks”…forgive me sir, but did you mean meth-heads? Also is it 1995 where you live?

Home wares hack: I bought a bag of 20 old unstruck matchbooks from EBay for my bathroom and for general whimsy (they look fun piled into a bowl), then found five of them inscribed with a mysterious person’s memories, penned into the top flap of the matchbook. I googled all the proper nouns and put together that the matchbook owner was a patron of the theatre in late 1980s New York. But still I wonder, who are they?? ☼

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Thank you for reading! See you soon!

After months of searching for affordable housing in Los Angeles—and finding some really small rooms in good situations that just didn’t work out—I found a brick house to rent in the high desert and moved. I’m two hours east of whatever life I built in LA, a place that felt both overwhelming and alienating.

For a girl born in southern California, an hour’s drive in traffic to the beach and another looking for parking felt sacrilegious and excessive; I had inconsistent part time and freelance work so disposable income was hard to come by; I was burned out by the art and lit scene to the point where I couldn’t recognize myself in it. I could’ve fought harder to stay but deep down I think I knew I needed a change. I’m in town every other week for my beloved writing group and to see friends and art, but for now I live in the dusty wind tunnel of the high desert.

I’ve built a small routine for myself while I adjust: when I wake up I walk the perimeter of my property and scatter bird seeds, then sit at the table with the cats and we watch the sparrows, mourning doves, and scrub jays snack. I have creosote bushes all around me, which if you’ve been following me for awhile, you know it’s one of my favorite plants and smells in the world.

Annoyingly and somehow on brand, I am waiting on a sum of money to arrive. It’s three months late, I built my schedule around it arriving (foolish), and my brain has begun to adjust to the idea that it may never arrive (it has to, it’s financial aid lol), but as I wait and watch my bills pile and foodstuffs dwindle, I find myself in a forced meditation. My checking account is negative—an embarrassing admission, unfortunately one I’m used to as a paycheck to paycheck freelancer, but I feel it’s worth mentioning since the only time I see people in creative fields discuss money, it’s a money diary for people who have full time work, trust funds, or spouses with money.

Writing for money is not as viable as it was, and though I’m making more money than I have before, I, like many other Americans, are more broke than ever before thanks to inflation, high cost of living, and wage stagnation. Boomers were more angry at Jimmy Carter for a similar economy—one he didn’t create—than they are with Tr*mp. It’s so depressing and heartbreaking to see that the Boomer generation refuses to acknowledge their role in our current hellscape, or that they’re not even remotely bothered by the fact that Millennials are the first generation in decades to be worse off than their parents.

My beautiful friend Myka sent me the poem New York Address by Linda Gregg as I moved, my friend J sent me a snake catcher (I am afraid of snakes!!!), my mom sent me five different bug repellents and even a kitchen Katchy (not an ad, but I do love mine), my first postcard (from Rachel) arrived in my black widow infested mailbox (I use tongs and close my eyes to get my mail).

The desert has been welcoming, I feel good here. My first week it stormed. The sound of the rain on my new roof sounded cinematic. When it ended I opened every window and let the heavenly scent of creosote waft through my house. At the monthly pancake breakfast on the mesa, I made new acquaintances, old and young, and found a book a friend had encouraged me to read two days prior. When I gushed about this to the cashiers, an older blonde woman in a “You belong here” t-shirt told me the “desert was loving on you.” I’ll take it!

Fellow desert dweller and effervescent human Caroline Partamian hosted a listening party for her latest compositional project, Z at Compound YV last weekend.

I drove to a ghost town that isn’t quite a ghost town. Roy’s Cafe and Motel was founded in 1938 by Roy Crowl as a gas station and gradually expanded to include a café, motel cabins, and repair services for Route 66 travelers. Its neon sign and mid-century modern design became iconic during the post-WWII boom when it operated 24 hours to serve motorists. Business sharply declined after Interstate 40 bypassed Amboy in 1972, and operations dwindled over the following decades. In 2000, a photographer purchased the property, maintaining limited operations, and in 2005 it was sold again to Albert Okura, who began restoring the site and held a neon re-lighting ceremony in November 2019. Motel rooms are still abandoned for the most part but a teenager was working the cafe when I popped in, along with twenty, very loud Italian tourists and an old man photographing the moon.

I hit a five year milestone with not drinking. I even forgot my sober anniversary the day of! Felt great and I still have plenty of work to do.

Listening to Tyler the Creator’s new album, DON’T TAP THE GLASS. I love zooming down the road to the title track, Don’t Tap the Glass/Tweakin’ and growling, there’s a monsterrrrr. I am also a huge NTS head and religiously listen to the Early Bird Show and the Breakfast Show but recently, I’ve been writing to this mix of Western ambient.

This essay, A Map for a Place that No Longer Exists by Abdullah Hany Daher was the most beautiful and painful essay I’ve read in a very long time.

“And when a city forgets, the people lose more than shelter—they lose themselves, the proof of their existence and belonging[…] In the months after my house vanished, I began noticing how the absence of buildings changes the way you move through the city. Streets lose their logic. You turn corners expecting a wall that is no longer there. You look for shade that once came from a row of homes now replaced by a flat expanse of rubble. Even sound changes—footsteps echo differently when there’s nothing for them to bounce off of. In time, you start to mistrust your own sense of direction, as if your internal map has been quietly rewritten without your consent.”

A lot of other news happened this week but I won’t be mentioning it because I’ve had my fill of US x Israel-made neo-nazis this week, and I’m sure you have too, thanks! ☼

Three years ago I moved into my current apartment in what is, somehow, the last remaining block of Chavez Ravine. I’m moving again in August and since making that decision in April, I’ve fallen in love with my apartment and neighborhood in a way that can only happen when you know you…

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Papa Cristo’s, a beloved Greek restaurant in the Byzantine-Latino district of Los Angeles, closed last Sunday, May 4th.

Owned by the Chrys family since 1948, a recent real estate trust transfer resulted in a prohibitive rent increase and the family made the difficult decision to shutter. Taking up a corner at Pico and Normandie, Papa Cristo's was a commu…

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I still love art—I hem and haw on the “art world” whatever that means, the mealy pit at the center of a rotted fruit long fallen from its tree with all its corruption, soured taste, and bad actors—I still love and en…

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This month the Norton Simon Museum acquired EST (Eastern Standard Time), 2022 by Light and Space Movement artist Laddie John Dill—an ephemeral light based work featuring an unspecified tonnage of sand and tube lights. I always found it odd when institutions “acquired” installation work whose concept hin…

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A shorter version of this piece first appeared in a round table hosted by Dirt ☼

"Finally, I sat in front of a curious man, beaming with light, speaking words from another era, making me laugh and feel at ease. How did he even ‘see me’ when I was so well hidden, and l'd even lost sight of myself?!" —…

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When I start to talk about routes and Southwestern highways is what my East Coast friend Taylor calls “California Talk.” A language of it’s own that we slip into easily, discussing hilltops and freeways, passages and landmarks.

This recent spat…

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For the last month, I’ve dreamt of death, of bare feet in theaters, of my friend laying lifeless in a field; the veil is thin. My friend whose grandfather was a Bulgarian dream interpreter told me that dreams of death signal new beginnings. On the solstice, the day after my birthday, old friends gathered at the Center of the World, declared by an old Fr…

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Greetings from the coin laundry mat where I await two loads of laundry on a crispy Sunday afternoon. I’m rereading Marguerite Duras’ banger of a book, Writing, which describes, in agonizing detail, how lonely is writing and how empty is the house a woman writes in alone. She writes, “My room is not a bed, neither here nor in Paris nor in Trouville. It’s…

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When I finished high school I went straight to the monastery. I’m not kidding—I lived in a cabin with 50 other people my age in the Kings Canyon National Park attending a weird “discipleship school” dedicated to figuring out how Christ would live in the 21st century through reading the bible, volunteer work, and manual labor. I call it a monastery because I signed an agreement that avowed me to abstain from all media consumption for the 9 months i went to this weird, but useful christian conservative cult school. A lot of people broke the rules, but that option hadn’t occurred to me and so I cleansed my brain and confronted my darkest, worst thoughts, straight out of high school in my first experience away from home. Pure terror in sublime nature.

Silence was good for my smooth marble Christian girl brain. My teenage emotional habits reformed themselves, and instead of becoming attached to content, I grappled with intense self-loathing and joy. That was my first taste of mental solitude that wasn’t prayer and while it was agonizing and partially damaging to my psyche, I survived it, mostly, and it made me who I am today. I’m unafraid of silence and deep self-examination, skills that have served me well for decades.

These extreme but temporary constraints plunged me into deeper work with myself; I processed things with more clarity. On it's own, my mind has the sonic quality of a Dave & Buster’s; my inner monologue is already competing with the noise of the genocidal world and the 110 highway outside my apartment window.

So, how do I create an open space to slug through my research and subconscious—especially when I have an extremely difficult time getting started or switching gears—especially when I’m attempting to assess an era of life I haven’t taken much inventory of yet. I need to feel clear, but safe, supported and diligent. Here is my game plan, pulled together by supportive friends and fellow writers:

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I was speaking with a friend this weekend and she mentioned that from where she sits it looks like I’m very successful so she was shocked to hear that I was crying every day, struggling to pay rent and to eat and that I was generally having a tough lonely time. Writing is really lonely. I struggle to care for myself for various reasons across a spectrum of mental health, general broke-ness, feeling isolated, etc.

I also live on my own and haven't had a partner or dated anyone seriously in years. I feel old in the sense that I’ve been contending with time and struggling against internalized misogyny about my value as a ~ feminized subject ~ (aka, a woman under patriarchy). I asked another friend who is a painter if she questions why she's a painter, and if she asks herself if the world needs her to paint and she said, “Every day, baby.” So though I feel alone, I know for a fact, I am not.

I've been working on a book proposal for four years. It's embarrassing, but sometimes books just take that long nonfiction is difficult to organize and when I'm not writing for money or panicking or taking extra classes to earn skills, I'm staring at a document that I've written three or four times, sifting through sentences that no longer make sense to me since I've let them sit so long and wondering if I'm ever gonna finish this thing and move onto the next phase of my career. And what’s the point of a career if I can’t even support myself?

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