Well, I’ve done it again. Which is to say, over done it.
I just went back home to LA to write and shoot a coupla stories — home-home, as in you-can-never-go-home-again home — and am (obviously) sort of tottering into delirium. The total word count of the pieces I was commissioned to do is around 2k, combined. And I reckon I wrote… 10,000? before I even got to California. oy. A master of moderation, I am not.
If I knew that this trip was gonna be hard, and heavy, I was a bit surprised by how emotional my visit to LA was. For a variety of reasons: watching so many of my friends lose everything in the fires; applying the same techniques I do in my work on the road to my hometown; feeling the changes, losses, of late, including that of my dad, who loved a very specific part of LA (his mother’s ashes were interred in the Palisades), it’s hard even to describe. In a way both of the pieces are about LA lore — about the collective construction of a fantasy, of the “LA” in which we all participate, and which we all receive. For one, I spoke to half a dozen of my most beloved LA oracles. And for the other I tried to sort of write a little ditty to the guys whose vision of LA shaped my own: the designer Paul Fortune, the photographer (and my fake godfather as I’ve always called him) Paul Jasmin, and the great writer Gavin Lambert. We’ll see.
Yes, you can never go home again, and perhaps for good reason. There was a day when I went back to Park la Brea, to the apartment where I grew up, and then walked around The Farmer’s Market, where I had spent so much of my youth, and felt totally overwhelmed. Felt acutely how much it has changed (like, how did it all get so much smaller, lol), how I have changed, and how the world around us has changed.
But if my own little sorties into my sentimental past were humbling, my conversations with a series of LA oracles was flat out inspiring. There is, I found, such an incredible amount of vigor and optimism in the city (and not just because Luka is in town). I left feeling that wonderful sense of pressure, that something had/is happening and I had better do it justice in the piece. As if.
Some bits and bobs: I like how this little ditty on Hong Kong came out. Going to do an LA version of that, so stay tuned. My piece about riding the Eastern Oriental Express through Malaysia, and thinking about the ways in which the post-colonials, from Maugham to Graham Greene and the like inform the way we travel now, has just been published in the new Neptune Papers. I love the way Neptune put together the pieces I have been doing for them — in Iraq, in Tanzania, on Route 66, etc — and this one looks so incredible. I hope you’ll pick it up. Also out this week is the new “music” issue of 10 Magazine for which I did two stories, one on New Orleans, and the other a portfolio of musicians in Nashville. The latter was well outside my recent comfort zone and I am over the moon that the subjects as well as my editors at the magazine, Maura and Dora, trusted me with it. It is one of the things I am most proud of from last year.
More to come. Wishing you a happy … Thursday?
What a pilgimage! Nicely told.
Well Mr Wallace I'd like to say you've produced some very readable copy about Hong Kong, just as the LA portion was as insightful as it was pleasurable. But I am at odds. You see, I only managed to get to the second para of the HK copy before I got to scratching my head, trying to recall any building in HK going by the name Liddo Centre. Finally I decided that it must have been a typo that the copy editors/chief sub didn't catch. If they had fact checked they would have come to the realisation that the Paul Rudolph building in question goes by the name Lippo Centre. A fascinating building for its backstory of financial dealings and infamously bad feng shui...but that is another story possibly for another day!