slow-fires-blog-blog

[slow-fires-blog-blog]

so what's it like to live in los angeles haha

Writing about Los Angeles is such a tired thing to do, especially knowing that you’re never going to top Bukowski. Everyone who lives here and fancies themselves a Creative Individual of some sort has penned the experiencing-LA-as-a-hip-young-twenty-something treatise in some form, to the point that it’s virtually become a rite of passage. Okay, sure. So here’s mine.

From time to time, someone who hasn’t spent much time here will ask me what living in Los Angeles is like. It’s like a lot of things,and I mean that literally. Its most distinctive feature is that it utterly lacks an identity of its own because it’s always relied on its penchant for absorbing others: landmarks old and new borrow from a library of precedents that ranges from ancient temples to European villages. Grauman’s Theatres, Hollywood and Highland, The Grove and Farmers Market, and all their shiny ilk transmute historical images into scenography in order to generate atmosphere and a sense of place, along with billions of dollars in revenue. Not even the city’s iconic palm trees are completely native; in actuality, the preponderance of palms from Pasadena to Playa del Rey is an absolute marvel of civil engineering that reflects the tremendous advances in municipal infrastructure that took place here in the early 20th century. The city can only spin yarns from distant lands into a flimsy but vibrant urban fabric. And that’s what makes Los Angeles, Los Angeles. 

Everyone is a transplant except for the natives, and the natives are constantly fighting to get the hell out of Dodge. Los Angeles is a place for the placeless. We leave our hometowns to overpay for school, chase pipe dreams of stardom and success, or sometimes just to chill out by the ocean and surf, breh. We come to expand our horizons and find ourselves somewhere in the vanishing points. And that’s why we’re all so walled off from each other, why we ensconce ourselves in our dingbat apartments with air conditioning, why we text clandestinely as we inch down the highway in our stuffy cars instead of rolling down our windows to say hello, why we reflexively jam plastic buds into our ears on our occasional walks in hopes that the panhandler at the end of the block won’t trouble us for change. We double-check our doors to make sure they’re locked and breathe sighs of relief whenever the bars over our windows come into view. Because everyone here is running scared: scared of losing everything, our belongings, our dreams, our safety. All of those are tied to one thing that drives humanity as a whole, but the people of Los Angeles most of all: the infinitely frustrating search for identity.

We spend our days hunting for that which will make us unique, that which will give our lives meaning and grant us a momentary respite from the horrible realization that we are all no more than tiny little ants crawling on top of a gargantuan asphalt anthill. This particular anthill is so very gargantuan that to losing oneself within its chambers and crannies can become obscenely easy, so we allow ourselves to be led around by hype. Yelp will tell us where to eat, LA Weekly will tell us what to see, Groupon will tell us where to work out. We spend an inordinate amount of time reading and writing player’s guides to Los Angeles, because finding what you want, understanding what you need, and reconciling the two is HARD. It's especially difficult to negotiate in a city that feels blank and unfriendly for such large stretches, only occasionally punctuated by bastions of bourgeois cuteness marked by the presence of “village” in their names. Compare this to San Francisco, an approachable and lovable city that lends itself to play in Easy mode by default.

Four million people live in Los Angeles, and we’re a uniquely self-absorbed lot. We’re all embroiled in mutually exclusive struggles with ourselves, trying earnestly to craft lifestyles and personas through yoga pants and juice cleanses and weekend brunch and the Barre Method. But there is no “typical” Los Angeles experience. As long as the city retains its stubborn and unconscious heterogeneity, it is utterly beautiful. Make all the “that’s so LA” jokes you want, but realize that they are ultimately baseless. Because what is Los Angeles? Maybe it's puking on the sidewalk outside of the worst bar you’ve ever been to, looking up at the sky in search of stars only to find none, and thinking: “This is fucked.” Or perhaps Los Angeles is fighting to put food on the table for your kids, hoping to keep them out of trouble and in their magnet schools, trying to ignore the rents in your neighborhood rising like tidewaters by the week. Maybe it’s standing slack-jawed in the checkout line at Whole Foods after spotting the guy who played that one guy who got killed on that one show your friends are following. Or it could be sweating by a freeway exit while Benzes and Beemers zip by you on their way to the beach, hoping that some compassionate flower-loving soul will roll down their window to purchase one of the bouquets you've been hawking for hours. It might be meeting a stranger, breaking down their walls, giving them your days and nights, smiling subtly when you find their hand on yours as you listen to your favorite records together, and then you blink and they’re gone. It's all of these and none of them. We'll never know. Which would sound like a cop-out anywhere else, but that's just what happens when so many people are so hopelessly isolated from each other: seldom do we forget about our individual stories enough to write ourselves into someone else's. And if we do, it's only a matter of time until we wake up and remember our selfishness.

Los Angeles is the city of storytellers. I don’t mean that only in the sense that The Industry literally doesn’t exist outside of its limits (except maybe in New York?), but the idea that the city is unusually magnetic to those seeking to craft their narratives through acts of creative inspiration. Say what you want about Los Angeles’ superficial reputation, but it possesses an incredible concentration of artists, writers, designers, dancers, actors, creators, dreamers that remains unsurpassed in any other city (except…) and unlimited potential for bringing all these wild talents together. I wasn’t fully aware of these qualities until I began really exploring Los Angeles outside of my university’s campus; up until then, I’d always thought that I’d leave as soon as they handed me my diploma. Five years later, I love and hate this city with alternating intensities. I hate its self-indulgence and its acceptance of $5 lattes as a Thing. The #losangeles tag on Instagram makes me want to dry heave whenever I search for it by accident. Yet, I am also completely in love with just how schizophrenic life here can be. I love walking into that worst bar I’ve ever been to and playing pool on a table where one leg is significantly shorter than the others and your cue always bumps into the wall as you prepare to shoot, then ordering a comically overpriced gin and tonic on the rooftop of the Ace Hotel the very next night. I love whizzing down the hilly portions of Sunset Boulevard on my bike without drop bars, I love walking on the beach as the salty breeze blows my hair in every direction but down, and knowing that I can do both of these in the same day is totally awesome. The traffic I have to slog through in the process, on the other hand, is certainly not.

I appreciate that most people here don’t tuck their heads up their asses about what it’s like to live in Los Angeles. We constantly laugh about how much it sucks, but secretly we’re all trying to deny how much we love it. Angel City reels you in, right from the moment you step off the plane and freak out because you’ve never seen such nice weather in the middle of December before and you were reading an article about climate change during your flight. And there’s really no going back, once it’s got you hooked on its endless cycle of trying and failing to script your existence into something meaningful. The smog invariably finds its way into your lungs and smears its grim patina across your bronchial walls. It chokes you, strangles your compassion, makes you hard and cynical and irreverent, but it also energizes you at the same time. It makes you seek out your passions and run after your dreams. If you ever move here, I promise they’re out there somewhere in the asphalt expanses, but it’s up to you to dig them out in order to write your story, build your world, seek truth and live completely. And while you're at it, maybe smile and wave to the poor sucker in the blue Honda Civic the next lane over when you’re stalled during rush hour on the 101. 

[slow-fires-blog-blog]

if you're lonely, press play

Music means a shit ton to me, and I don’t mean that lightly. I mean, a shit ton is pretty heavy, just by virtue of being some unspecified kind of ton. So what I guess I’m really getting at is that it’s something that I take very seriously.

When asked what kind of music I’m into, I always have to hesitate for a beat or two before answering. That’s not an easy question! Some people can easily rattle off “Kinda into Coldplay, Radiohead, The Beatles”, “90s hip-hop and folk”, or “Metal. The hardest metal known to man” and that’ll be sufficient. I wish I could do the same while remaining honest. Nobody wants to be that clichéd people-pleaser who replies “I’m into pretty much everything except thug rap and country” with a guileless smile plastered on their face, because it generally implies a complete lack of discretion and therefore personality, but it’s as close to the truth as I can get. (Except that I do enjoy thug rap. Immensely.)

The popular music canon is constantly evolving, so it’s natural for our tastes in music to do the same. Trends come and go. Some stick, some fade, and some develop bizarre cult followings (don’t you remember when Hot Topic sold Insane Clown Posse merchandise? UNIRONICALLY?). Some people allow their music taste to be dictated by what’s on the radio. Some people listen to whatever their friends are playing. Some people return to the same songs that played in the background of their high school years, again and again, chasing memories. And that’s perfectly fine, because these people just aren’t loathsomely pretentious music nerds. This loathsomely pretentious music nerd, however, can’t really pin down her taste in music. It has no trajectory, no direction, no common theme - much like the chaotic condition of contemporary life. (WHOOPAH!) I’ll put Icelandic ambient tunes and Biggie remixes in the same mixtape without a trace of shame. And my gym playlists are even worse.

There’s a reason that music plays in the background of most of our indoor spaces. Cafes, elevators, stores, offices (if they’re cool) choose their soundtracks in order to create a certain mood, to set the ambiance of a space, to take you somewhere else. And that’s what music does for me when I play it for myself, whether it's Balkan folk or chirpy synthpop. It’s inextricably tied to memory and emotion within the gnarled net of my psyche. The opening notes of a familiar song will inevitably fling the doors of some long-buried time in my life wide, wide open.

For example, Snow Patrol’s 2003 hit album Final Straw will forever evoke the trip I took to Taiwan with my parents when I was twelve. It was a way of clinging to my American (well, Western – Snow Patrol is British) identity while being surrounded by Taiwanese culture and language. Whenever I listen to Chocolate, I recall watching the forests outside Taipei fly by through the window of a high-speed bullet train. I remember the cold plastic, the cloudy skies, the mosquito bites on my arms that refused to go away. I remember being completely miserable, and how it showed through the petulance on my still-chubby face. I was a pretty terrible child.

So, like that. I don’t make these connections consciously; it’s just that sometimes this clicks and that slides into place and then this melody or that harmony is tied to a past experience or emotion. Or, more recently, heartbreak. As an adolescent, I spent a lot of time digging for strange music with the belief that my peculiar tastes differentiated me from my peers. That I was willfully weird. In that way, it defined me in my search for the esoteric, reflecting a refusal to accept what was given on the surface level in favor of something that I’d determine for myself. Now I do that with everything, now that I’ve learned the value of self-expression. But still, when someone says I have weird taste in music, I take that as a compliment with a self-satisfied grin. And then proceed to blast some King Crimson.

PS: I swear up and down that I’m not on his marketing team, but you should really listen to Damon Albarn’s new album Everyday Robots, because that’s where I got the title for this post. It came out on April 28th and it’s really good.

[slow-fires-blog-blog]

climber's elbow

What I want, more than anything, is to be challenged.

It might be a result of feeling like I hadn’t applied myself enough as a teenager. Sure, I did well in school and had extracurriculars, but in retrospect I had no idea what living was really about. I didn’t value human connections or intellectual exploration, despite having more opportunities than most to develop myself. Was that a product of my environment? Maybe, but that doesn’t make me feel any better about the chances that I missed. It’d be nice to be able to travel back in time and tell 16-year-old Candace to woman up and go make some mistakes, but I might as well wish for world peace and a pet unicorn too while I’m at it. AIN’T GONNA HAPPEN.

I push myself to become a better human (whatever that means) in many aspects, and that includes seeking out people who push me beyond my intellectual limits. My roommates are great – we’ll spontaneously sit around and have excellent discussions until past our bedtimes, even though the conversation frequently (but not unexpectedly) drifts back to studio. My closest friends are those who I can have in-depth debates with on a variety of topics, even when I haven’t seen them for weeks or even months – we’ll just pick right back up where we started. I like conversing, not just talking. It helps me sort out my thoughts and emotions by getting them out into the world, while remaining receptive to new ideas in return. I hope that tendency is reflected in my writing style, even though these journal posts are pretty one-sided. Although I’d like to think that I’m a bit less flowery in my diction face-to-face.

There’s a certain kind of person whose eyes catch fire when they talk about something they love. There’s another kind of person whose eyes keep burning with the same intensity when the conversation turns to other topics, for whom exposure to alien knowledge and faraway worlds constitutes a form of rapture. I can’t really see my own eyes when I talk, so I can’t claim to be the latter with any sort of legitimacy, but I’d like to think that attitude comes across when I’m listening.  

Finding that kind of person is something that I occasionally hope for, but not something that I expect, especially not at this stage in my life. I’ve only ever gone on one date with someone my age where the conversation required mental gymnastics on my part. As we bounced from topic to topic, I found myself really spinning the gears in my brain to think about what I was saying, to ask the right questions and parse his answers. It was fun, the way that refreshing experiences with interesting people usually are. I hoped we’d never leave, despite the fact that we were out on the patio, the breeze was bitterly cold, and I was wearing short sleeves. It didn’t work out. Probably for the better, since I actually found him slightly intimidating (a first). He spoke fluent French, built computers in his spare time, and was working towards a doctorate degree at UCLA. But there were other reasons.

Sometimes, I wonder if my passion and drive are really just the by-products of a profound and sustained fear of failure. I let that fear hold me back for so long, but now that I understand just how many possibilities life has to offer, it seems I’ve developed an aversion to giving up or saying no. It seems trite to claim that you should choose the path that will produce a better story to tell, but for a 22-year-old almost-college-grad whose dreams haven’t been mortared into oblivion quite yet, it’s as good a mantra as any to follow.  

[slow-fires-blog-blog]

tinder field notes

- A bible quote? Really? God is watching you Tinder, homie, and he is judging you so hard. 

- Three Greek letters. Obviously does not have Greek heritage. College was at least 2-3 years ago. There are children capable of walking who are older than the amount of time that has passed since your college graduation.

- Is that your girlfriend? Or your sister? Probably sister. Your arm is around her shoulders in a way that seems brotherly enough for me to want to believe it.  

- Next picture: oh, THAT is definitely your girlfriend. 

- Your super hot girlfriend. 

- What is wrong with you, dude?

- You. You, with the abs and stunna shades in every photo. You look good, breh, but you also look also like a really good way to get genital herpes. 

- Heeeey, grainy selfie where I can't see your face. Social pariah or serial killer? Both?

- Yeah, just list off stuff you're "kinda into at the moment" word by word. I'm sure if you have enough of that written up, some girl will be fooled into thinking that you have an actual personality.

- Look at all these requirements for your future mate! Looks like the gold diggers of the world will just have to go ahead and sink their nails into the thousands of other jerk-ass hotshot finance-world Patrick Bateman wannabes who spend more time pumping iron than reading books NOT written by Tucker Max or Bret Easton Ellis.

- And don't lie, brotha, I know that when you say "active girls only", you're really trying to say "no fatties." And I was so looking forward to letting you bore me with your hotness. 

- Chill. 420 friendly. Spontaneous. Looking for fun. Unemployed. 

- "Not looking for anything serious." Oh hey again, abs and shades. Ooh, no, wait, different set of abs. At least you're honest. I like that in a man.  

- Flipping through your photos out of morbid curiosity aaand there's a picture of a penis. Ostensibly your penis. With nothing else in there for scale. Yeah, okay. Swipe left. 

- I NO SPEAK EMOJI. THIS AMERICA. ENGLISH PLEASE.

- To answer your question, yes. Girls do occasionally send the first message. They're just not sending any to you.

[slow-fires-blog-blog]

some scattered thoughts on coffee shops

“The character of a third place is determined most of all by its regular clientele and is marked by a playful mood, which contrasts with people’s more serious involvement in other spheres. Though a radically different kind of setting for a home, the third place is remarkably similar to a good home in the psychological comfort and support that it extends…They are the heart of a community’s social vitality, the grassroots of democracy, but sadly, they constitute a diminishing aspect of the American social landscape.” 

- Ray Oldenburg

Los Angeles has no shortage of third places. It may not seem so, given the city’s reputation for dismal stretches of street frontage and lukewarm attitude towards public life, but third places are more present throughout the city than we think. They may be spread out across the city, but each neighborhood has its fixture, from Atwater Village to Venice Beach. They’ve served as habitats for its characters: cue the trope of the aspiring screenwriter or novelist scrawling away in the corner of a tiny coffee shop, a standard of Los Angeles’ dramatis personae since Old Hollywood’s golden years, although you’ll be more likely to find them with their noses buried in netbooks instead of notebooks in 2014.

Coffee shops are by no means Los Angeles’ only species of third place, but they are certainly its most visible. Social media websites allow Angelenos to “claim” a third space, evaluating the atmosphere, food, coffee, and crowd and announcing their presences there to the digital sphere. Blogs periodically publish lists of the best coffee shops in the city for obtaining latte art, working, dating, people-watching, or being people-watched, and the overambitious, underemployed young creatives of the city descend in waves upon those garnished with the most praise.

You can frequent a coffee shop or call it your favorite, but it belongs equally to everyone not in its employ. Third places are both no-man’s land and neutral ground, suitable for introductions and armistices. Contrary to what Foursquare.com would have you believe, you can’t “own” a coffee shop unless your name is on the lease. For this reason, there is no more appropriate space to catch up with acquaintances, schedule first dates, or hold work meetings that desperately try to be about anything but work.

We should treasure our coffee shops. Your local neighborhood third place is more than a check-in on your phone, a shell where you disappear completely into your screen of choice. It's a place where you can work, but feel like you're at home. A third place mediates between work and home, filling in the cracks between to make a neighborhood's identity whole.

Dispassionately saying Cognoscenti and Intelligentsia just for the sake of doing so tires out the vocal chords really quickly, so save some gas along with your breath and bring your laptop to the java shack around the corner. Coffee shops are not merely a name to drop, but an integral part of the urban fabric that also often creates knots and collisions within it. That’s a good thing, in a world where reasonable amounts of conflict and confusion are crucial to growth.

[slow-fires-blog-blog]

an open letter to the hypothetical love of my life

We’ll stumble upon each other in a bar, through a haze of smoke and dim lights. We’ll meet by happenstance, unexpectedly, in a store or at the park. We’ll find each other in a class, at a party, or during a concert, where the din dies down for a scant second the moment we lock eyes. It doesn’t matter where you find me, not quite so much as how.

We’ll converse hesitantly at first, but begin to speak more freely as our worlds converge. You’ll watch my spine relax and my smile grow warmer as we thaw from strangers to partners in conversation. You’ll laugh at my jokes, but won’t hesitate to fire back with some of your own. You’ll show me how you understand the world, its systems, its complexities, its everyday idiosyncrasies – such as the one that brought us together – in a few minutes of conversation. We’ll part first-name friends, with cautious smiles and a quick hug goodbye.

We’ll meet again and again, incidentally or intentionally. We’ll discover, surprise-surprise, that we enjoy each other’s company. We’ll explore new places, experiences, activities together, equally delighted to have found someone whose immaterial appetites can match our own. I’ll notice small things, the way you tilt your head back when you laugh, really laugh; the way you rest your hands on your knees; the way you check your shirt sleeves when you think nobody’s looking in order to make sure they haven’t come unrolled. I’ll find your quirks charming, and you mine. You’ll treasure my intensity because it fuels your own.

With you, I won’t feel the need to hide. I won’t choke down my words or dumb down my ideas, because your knowledge and curiosity will lead you to understand them or at least make an effort to try. We’ll enrich each other’s perspectives by sharing different vantage points, finding curious linkages between our lives that make us each hunger for more. We’ll stay up to talk about everything from old music to new culture, until the glow of the streetlamps outside eventually yields to daybreak. At some point we’ll start kissing and refuse to stop until our lips hurt, our pompous words and playful banter reduced to murmurs and sighs. I’ll listen to the rhythm of your breath as you sleep, my head resting softly on your chest, counting the rise and fall to myself so I can memorize it for the nights when you’re not there. We’ll stitch stories together through our lives, out of not only images and words and songs, but also memories. We’ll walk to the end of the world just to peer over the edge.

There is something inside all of us that yearns so much for acceptance, for someone to love us deeply and tell us that we make their lives a little bit more worth living because we are theirs, since we are so beautiful and intelligent and strong. We want to believe that there is someone out there who will one day be capable of accepting and understanding us, above everyone else with their prejudices and concerns. Who will embrace not the images we publicly project to establish our identities, not the images that we hope to one day attain as we gaze sadly at the mirror, but our truest and most vulnerable selves in all their flawed ugliness and sublime poetry.

I don’t know you yet. I hope I'll know you someday, at a strange little point in my life where I’m not exactly lost but still hoping to be found. But right now, I still think about you all the time; more than I should, wondering where you are, wondering when we’ll cross paths, or if we already have. I compare you to all the people with whom I’ve shared my body and soul, unwillingly but inevitably, as time races forward like so many calendar pages flapping in the wind. When I slumber, my dreaming mind will search for you, groping blindly for your face through the sea of all those I’ve seen, hoping to unlock the cheat codes to your coordinates, wondering who you are and where you’ve been. And when I finally see you standing in front of me, I’ll reach out to touch your shoulder, but wake up to reality just as you turn your face to meet mine. The day, as always, will set itself into motion with the first sigh of the morning. I’ll leave my bed, and with it that fragment of you, in order to resume its rituals and routines.

Because more likely than not, that’s all you’ll ever be to me: a hope, a fragment, a dream. 

[slow-fires-blog-blog]

eternity

I have a tattoo. There is a specific reason why I chose its design, and I’ve received many a compliment on it, but in the end it really doesn’t matter what it looks like.

As a human being, a member of homo sapiens sapiens, my body is wired to shed skin cells imperceptibly, but constantly. Anything I do to my skin is bound to change as a result. Warm grey and turquoise blue ink will fade with time, yet stay buried deep enough in my flesh to remind me of their presence every time I glance down and to the side, or catch a glimpse of my reflection while passing a mirror. Perhaps the surface of my arm will begin to sag as my left tricep loses its suppleness. It is likely that its light dusting of moles will bloom into a mass of liver spots and inscrutable blotches. My skin will grow pallid and veiny, advancing in age and retreating from youth. But that won’t matter. Hell, it doesn’t matter now. What matters is that one sunny day in August, in a small upstairs shop in Camden Town, London, United Kingdom, a mother, painter, and artist named Magda marked a memory onto my upper left arm with a machine that hummed like an oversized insect in her swift but gentle hands.

Camden Town is home to a well-known flea market centered over and around the Lock, where vendors hawk their trash and treasure from an array of colorful stalls. The market is crowded, frantic, and occasionally straight up boisterous. Its variety and sheer size make it an ideal venue for souvenir shopping, and I spent much of the day leading up to the appointment perusing small gifts and tokens for friends. For myself, I bought a bracelet of polished Scandinavian amber beads, which I would end up losing months after returning to Los Angeles, mourning briefly before forgetting about it entirely, then unexpectedly uncovering it weeks later still during an impulsive spring cleaning spree. I’m wearing it as I type.

As a child, I was reluctant to take home snowglobes and keychains from far-flung travels (read: Disneyland) because they didn’t really seem to serve a purpose. I hated throwing things away to the point of tears, and dealt with this by consciously attempting to accumulate as little junk as possible. So, I’ve always made a point of travelling light. The bracelet I purchased in an alleyway market while passing through Madrid fit as well in a pocket as on my wrist; when I left Lisbon, nothing remained of the Pasteis de Belém I shared with my Couchsurfing hosts but whispers of sweet custard and caramelized sugar on my tongue. Memories are unreliable, and trinkets are so easily discarded. Even if the linework blurs and the colors fade over time, a tattoo retains its meaning far longer than most people hold on to their belongings. Their appearance is of no consequence, but the scars that we choose are the ones we cherish.

[slow-fires-blog-blog]

preservation

One night, last year, in that fragile time between the end of winter and the commencement of spring, I stood in my apartment complex with a lukewarm drink in my hand, talking to a man who had just snorted a line of cocaine in front of me some thirty minutes prior, and who had moved into the bedroom below mine in our split-level apartment some days before that. He spent an inordinate amount of time smoking cigarettes and listening to podcasts. He was also, on some occasions, a musician. He was explaining to me, on that night, that he preferred living the fast life at the age of 22 because it stimulated the creative centers in his brain. The difference between our two professions, in his noticeably bloodshot eyes, was that architects want to preserve their minds in order to find success in their later years, while artists like himself often produce their best work in their youth as their messiest and rawest selves.

Professors have frequently told me that architects normally don’t hit their stride until middle age, perhaps to reassure themselves as much as their students. After all, the stereotypical architect with coke-bottle glasses, graying hair, and a bent back from decades hunched over a drafting table is far from a mythical figure. Ryue Nishizawa, the youngest Pritzker Prize winner in history at age 44, is an outlier. Bjarke Ingels, at 39, is considered the architectural field’s preeminent boy genius (the “genius” component is debatable in some critical circles, but “boy” is not). Recognition comes late in life for the architect, if at all. And perhaps that’s the way it should be, if one contemplates the sheer amount of literary, historical, theoretical, practical, psychological, and ecological theory that an architect’s mind needs to accrue in order to produce anything of note.

Architecture is as much a race against time as it is a study of space. 69-year-old Rem Koolhaas swims in icy waters every morning, and so did Le Corbusier before him. Even if it means that every sunrise finds us splashing through frigid ocean waters, we preserve our bodies to keep our wits sharp. We want to leave our marks on civilization by creating space. The very thought of our steel and concrete offspring impacting countless lives gives us a high that no drug can surpass. With that rosy prospect on the horizon, who would want to live fast and die young?

Architects in their 20s are still embryonic, if anything; we’re too terrified of wasting our potential to stop learning and start making bad decisions. Why? Because we’re not artists. You won’t find the architect drugged out in the desert in an creaky Volkswagen van on the third day of a week-long bender, because that won’t help him or her design a library staircase that is both efficient and elegant before the big client meeting next Monday. The artists, writers, and musicians are the ones who are suicidal; the architects are perpetually afraid that death will come before they've completed their nebulous missions. But in the end, who will have the better story to tell? The title of “architect” comes with societal reverence and a certain package of bragging rights, but does it come at the price of a strange, wondrous, and adventurous life; the kind of life worth writing or reminiscing about?

Later that night, I climbed onto the roof of our building along with two strangers from the party. One of them donned six-inch platform heels. I took a picture of them with one of their phones upon request, then attempted to photograph the view of the Downtown skyline with my own. My photo came out dark and blurry, the cityscape faint as a cluster of distant stars. I deleted it, jammed my phone back into my back pocket, and contemplated the sight as my comrades bantered away in the background behind a wall of cigarette smoke. I never saw either of them again after that night. Isn’t it peculiar that we’ve become accustomed to taking pictures of everything: our meals, our views, our friends? It’s as if our own memories are no longer enough.

Isn’t it strange that we seek to leave our mark by creating great works of architecture? As if the legacies of our lives simply lived have become so insufficient.

[slow-fires-blog-blog]

Things I’m doing at any given time that are decidedly not productive, at times when I’m supposed to be doing something productive:

Social media stalking friends of friends of second cousins

Baking things with fruit in them

Watching drag queen videos

Trying to remember which TV shows I need to catch up on to be considered culturally literate among my primary friend group

Reading about drag queen videos

Cackling at the self-entitlement that permeates Yelp reviews for Los Angeles’ Most Hyped Brunch Places With Over Five Hundred Reviews, Like For Real

Going through my phone gallery to make sure I didn’t forget to post anything Insta-worthy

Rapping to instrumental background music (in my head, obviously)

Mapping out bike routes (new bike lane on Virgil? wheeeee!)

Thinking of ideas for journal entries and then scrapping them because they are dumb

 Looking up bands whose discographies I should “Playlist” on Spotify and not actually listen to for another six months

Wallowing in self-hate because I'm being unproductive.

[slow-fires-blog-blog]

strings

It’s often said that of the members of the string family, the violoncello’s tone most resembles that of a human voice. Fittingly so, its long neck and elegant curves mimic a woman’s form in sensual repose. Its bourbon-colored wood feels smooth beneath the fingers, shaped into subtle swells to produce acoustic subtleties. You must hold it close, like a lover, in order to play. Player and instrument sit neck to neck, with the bow caressing the four strings as the cello trembles between your thighs. Most instruments are held away from the body, but not this one. Every practice session is an invitation to intimacy.

I’d always wanted to play a stringed instrument but never found the drive to do so until my twenties.Even under a teacher’s guiding hand, the learning curve proved formidable; it took months of basic bowing exercises and incredibly patient roommates to produce anything beyond a pitiful squeak. Yet, the struggle has only imbued the fruit thus borne with more sweetness. With time, one learns to speak through the cello and not merely scratch at it; to express both joy and plaintiveness in the same piece in order to create something that resembles music more than noise. On the rare occasion that I play in tune, I get lost in the sublime qualities of even simple scales and arpeggios.

Musical instruments are among man's most wondrous inventions, so seeing them broken or abandoned has always struck a particularly mournful chord within me. Sure, everything beautiful is destined to collapse and fade, but the idea of something so lovingly crafted (even by Chinese instead of Italian artisans) potentially reduced to kindling fills me with a black and boiling guilt. Yet more often than not, my lovely cello sits beside my bed gathering dust. Over time, other life concerns and hobbies took precedence. I came to view practice time as a liability, even a nuisance. I couldn’t face it – every session was a commitment, an emotionally draining experience. I would get lost in the music, and the prospect of even momentary rapture terrified me against the constant buzz of the outside world. If the wood could speak unbidden, it would cry out to be touched.

So on a sunny weekend afternoon like this one, maybe I’ll lose myself to my cello for a moment or two. But after a while, I’ll set the bow down and merely brush my hand against the wood. I’ve always envied those driven and talented enough to devote their lives to music, the Mas and Rostropoviches of the artistic cosmos, for their ability to live and breathe something so radically humanistic and utterly transcendent while making it appear effortless. (Of course, I know it’s actually not.) But for me, the instrument can only ever be a momentary escape, an insight into a world of beauty from which I must always return, a brief warm moment in time that I cherish because it is so fleeting.

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[sharp intake of breath]

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ROBERT GLASPER EXPERIMENT - BLACK RADIO (Blue Note, 2012)

Celebrated jazz pianist Robert Glasper and his magic band combine forces with some of contemporary soul and hip hop's foremost innovators to produce 65 minutes of intriguing yet palatable tunes. Glasper's rambling piano and the strategic employment of jazz standbys (that syncopation!) alongside modern-day production keep the album well out of the snoozy end of the easy-listening spectrum. Not exactly avant-garde or underground - come on, it won a Grammy for Best R&B Album last year - but still a record with plenty of layers to drink deeply and savor with every listen.

Good for: Lounging. Attempting to be productive. Lounging after giving up on attempting to be productive.

Recommended tracks: Afro Blue, Always Shine, Letter to Hermione, Smells Like Teen Spirit

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More Joywave/Alan Wilkis.

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preemptive resolutions for 2014

- watch more French movies

- ride bicycle further/faster/3x a week

- nail forward and backward walkovers without breaking anything

- make tagine (!)

- learn Portuguese

- visit Brazil, Japan, New Zealand, and a whole bunch of other places I haven't been before

- get through Bach's Cello Suite No. 3 without fucking up

- smile more

- find more reasons to smile

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oh oh my goodness