I thought I’d said everything I had to say about Los Angeles last winter. Should’ve known Hollywood would demand a sequel.
Even at the height of its considerable cultural influence, I never much cared for Sex and the City—for a very simple reason: I didn’t in any way recognize the New York it depicted.
As someone who’d grown up there, Sex seemed like a postfeminist fantasy of the city as a bastion of neoliberal materialism, conjured by someone who’d never actually been to New York or knew so much as the first thing about it. It certainly didn’t reflect the experience of any working-class New Yorkers I knew.
(It would seem the more things change, the more they stay the same: The recent SATC revival series, And Just Like That…, is reported to be full of unintentionally cringe-inducing scenes of the gals apparently interacting with Black women for the first time in their lives. Sounds on-brand.)
But this isn’t a retroactive reappraisal of a 1990s pop-cultural pacesetter—those have been exhaustively conducted elsewhere of late—merely an acknowledgment that the impression the series made on the generation of (largely) female Millennials who adored it is undeniable, legions of whom relocated to New York in early adulthood to have the full Sex and the City experience, and who, in turn, in many ways remade the city in Carrie Bradshaw’s image, for better or worse.
I can’t say as I blame those folks, really. That they were sold a load of shit isn’t their fault. Here in New York, we were just as susceptible to Hollywood’s greener-grass illusions of elsewhere. As a student in the 1990s, the Los Angeles of Beverly Hills, 90210 (1990–2000) and Baywatch (1989–2001), of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) and Clueless (1995), seemed like a fun-in-the-sun teenage paradise in stark contrast with the socially restrictive experience of my all-boys high school in the Bronx, where the only thing that ever passed for excitement were spontaneous gang beatings at the bus stop on Fordham Road.
The sunny schoolyards and neon-lit nighttime streets of L.A. carried the promise of good times, the kind that seemed altogether out of reach for me and my friends. The appeal of what California had to offer was so intoxicating, in fact, my two best pals and I spent an entire summer in the mid-’90s trying to make the streets of the Bronx look like Santa Cruz—a place none of us had ever been—for an amateur sequel to The Lost Boys, the ’80s cult classic about a coven of adolescent vampires who’ve (wisely) opted to spend eternity on the boardwalk. That notion unquestionably took hold of my impressionable imagination—it made me want to be a part of that culture, and tell those kinds of stories.
Accordingly, it’s fair to say it wasn’t merely the movie business that brought me to Los Angeles in my early twenties as an aspiring screenwriter, but arguably the romantic impressions of California itself imprinted upon my psyche by all those movies and TV series on which I came of age. Yet for the two decades I lived there, the city I’d always imagined L.A. to be—a place full of golden possibilities, as low-key as New York was high-strung—wasn’t the one I experienced. Not really. Not until last month, anyway.
Exactly one year after leaving Los Angeles, my wife found herself summoned back for business, so I went along with. Seemed like a good opportunity—certainly a fitting occasion, given that it coincided so precisely with the anniversary of our departure—to enjoy the company of old friends last seen over Christmas of 2019. Owed to the social restrictions of pandemia, we never had a proper “farewell tour,” as it were, and while I’m certain that made leaving easier in some respects, there’s a reason the heart yearns for closure. So, that was how we viewed this trip: not as our final-ever visit to L.A.—I somehow doubt we’ve been there for the last time—but as a chance to bid our home of twenty years the proper goodbye to which we were entitled.
One of the great joys of visiting New York all those years I spent away in L.A. was the special thrill I always got from being a “stranger” in a place about which I possessed intimate familiarity. My senses were heightened because my time there was limited—“living in the moment,” as they say—but I knew the streets like the contours of a lover’s body. For the first time, I got to experience that in reverse, strolling the sunbaked boulevards of the Valley with pure proprietary confidence, but taking in the sights with a tourist’s attention to detail.
I stopped by my old apartment building—this after having definitively proclaimed last January I’d never see the place again—and had drinks with my longtime neighbor, who lives in the unit on the opposite corner from mine, making them “mirrored reflections” of one another. We talked politics and pop culture, this while I sized up his walls and tried like hell to reconcile my generous memory of the space with its considerably abridged scale.
With the afternoon sun finally out of sight, we adjourned to the poolside patio, where one former neighbor after another issued a double take at my presence, then warmly welcomed me home. It reminded me, in a weird way, of the kind of courtyard gatherings I used to watch on Melrose Place back in the day. (Minus the backstabbing and bedhopping, but still.) I wish I’d spent more time—wish I’d made more time for—lounging with those folks when I lived there.
Speaking of Melrose, my wife and I had dinner one night with two very old L.A. pals at chi SPACCA, then dinner later in the week with two other friends at the Smoke House, an old Hollywood institution next door the Warner Bros. lot where Humphrey Bogart used to dine. (That we didn’t get COVID on this trip is a medical miracle.) Sitting at the bar of the Smoke House, I was sure I caught sight of my erstwhile best friend Mike over at a table in the dining room, and thought for a moment I’d been given a chance to patch things up with him like I had with my ex-manager last Christmas. It wasn’t him, though, merely the romantic influence of the restaurant playing a trick on my receptive eyes. I ordered another drink.
And I had plenty more of those—alcoholic beverages, not chimerical visions—at CityWalk with my wife’s colleagues, many of whom I was meeting for the first time. CityWalk is touristy as all hell, but when in Hollywood, eh? The bar’s sound system, I couldn’t help but note, at one point played “Whipping Post” by the Allman Brothers Band, our go-to jam whenever we’d take a weekend drive along Malibu Canyon Road to admire the geographical majesty of coastal California.
On the subject of the state’s natural wonders, I also met with a pair of Climate Reality colleagues for brunch in Encino. The Elysian dreamland of California, if you’re unaware, is fast becoming an extreme-weather nightmare in the Anthropocene, not that anyone in Los Angeles—most of them self-identified liberals and registered Democrats, mind you—seems urgently concerned. Sometimes I think no one’s bought into the sun-and-surf fantasy of L.A. more than native Angelenos, most notably those of suburban privilege. They do not let California’s existential problems—its inconvenient truths, from historic drought to year-round wildfires to tent cities up and down Wilshire—disrupt that fantasy, no matter how bad things get. And, to be certain, they’re getting apocalyptically bad.
“Living here is starting to feel like being on the first-class deck of the Titanic,” commented my friend Diana, chair of the San Fernando Valley Chapter of the Climate Reality Project. I suppose that should’ve validated my decision to leave, but it just made me feel sad, even borderline despondent. What are we doing? Biden was all set to pull the trigger on visionary climate legislation, and the Senate did what it does best: fuck-all.
(And instead of electing more Democrats in November, we’re going to punish the ones we currently have, the elected officials actually supportive of meaningful climate action that would wean us off our crippling dependence on fossil fuels, because we’re pissed off about—irony alert—paying more at the pump. Such is the denialist mindset of too many affluent liberals: that their money and privilege will somehow insulate them from the worst consequences of the climate crisis.)
Still, being in the company of fellow environmental-justice activists—folks who appreciate the value of trying and losing, as many times as necessary—reminds me, because one can never be reminded enough, that “After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends.” I’ll drink to that. And, as it happens, I did…
For Cinco de Mayo—which is to L.A. what St. Paddy’s is to New York—I was invited (or possibly invited myself) to the home of one of my dearest friends; she and I came up in the Hollywood trenches together as aspiring screenwriters—“young, scrappy, and hungry,” as the song goes—and she’s done enviably well for herself. She deserves it. We talked screenwriting craft and career frustrations in a way that only other creative professionals can ever really understand. It reminded me of all those bimonthly Tuesday nights she and I gathered in Hollywood with our old writers group, critiquing and supporting one another through those hopeful years of little money but lotsa drive.
Christ, do I miss those days sometimes. I ache for that special camaraderie. I won’t say I wish I’d appreciated it more when I had it—I appreciated it plenty then—but I do wish I’d known those were the good old days, that they were the best Hollywood would ever have to offer: the chance to be young and creative and surrounded by people who shared your passion and sense of promise. It never got better than that. I say that as someone whose screenwriting ambitions ended in abject failure, though I suspect my friend, her success notwithstanding, would resolutely second the sentiment—that it never got better than those days.
By sharing our writing and our dreams and our insecurities so nakedly, the group of us learned to be real with one another. How many people in your life are really real with you—willing to show you their secret heart? How many people are you willing to be real with, to make yourself vulnerable to? If you can point to as many as two or even three people who’ve seen the real you, who’ve shown you the real them, you are in rarified company. How funny that in a town built on illusion—a terraformed desert wasteland turned global dream factory—some of my most authentic and cherished and lasting friendships were forged. So happy was I to be in her and her husband’s company that night, it was very nearly Seis de Mayo by the time I left their home.
As I roved that week from one friendly face to another—friends, neighbors, and colleagues; I even got a checkup with my longtime doctor, and chatted with the guy behind the coffee counter at the bakery, a neighborhood fixture for as long as I lived there—one simple thought kept asserting itself over and over again:
This is the L.A. I always wanted it to be.
Why? What was different? Los Angeles was the same. My friends were the same. I was basically the same. What the hell was different?
And that’s when it dawned on me: I was living each moment in that particular moment. I was enjoying each experience as it came, no ulterior agenda or eye on the time. I was just there. “Live in the moment,” they tell you—an adage commonplace to the point of cliché. Like you, I’ve heard it a thousand times, though I can’t say I fully understood it before this last trip to Tinseltown.
In case you’re unaware—indulge this brief digression—screenplays are written in the present tense. Here’s what a typical one looks like:
For years I wrote in that mode—the present tense—but I sure as hell didn’t live that way. All that time, I never fully let myself enjoy being in Los Angeles because I was always under self-pressure: Get your foot in the door. CUT TO: Network your way up the ladder. CUT TO: Land a manager. CUT TO: Get an agent. CUT TO: Sell a script.
Even when I was having fun—at industry parties and whatnot—I was always so goddamn goal-driven, so eager to cut to the next scene. Such is probably the reason why I enjoyed our outings at Dodger Stadium with such uncharacteristic abandon, why I only became a baseball fan at midlife: because it was there that I could truly live in the moment—one out at a time, one inning at a time, one game at a time—and enjoy L.A. for L.A.
I’ve blogged extensively, if not exhaustively, about commercial nostalgia—about the hazards of sepia-toned backward-gazing—but what about what we miss when we’re only ever looking ahead? We rush through what’s happening right here, around us. When I was an aspiring writer, I only wanted to be a represented writer. When I was a represented writer, I wanted only to be a working writer. Then when my career irretrievably collapsed—when there was nothing left to look ahead to in Hollywood—I just wanted out. What was the point of being in Los Angeles if I wasn’t in pursuit of the next goal? What was I even doing there?
Oh, shame on me. I was never happier in L.A. than when I was at those baseball games; why couldn’t I have recognized that my soul yearned to slow down, to take in the people and places around me? To live in the moment every so often? Fewer CUT TOs, in screenwriting parlance, and more SLO-MOs.
So, that’s what my better half and I did on our last full day of the trip: We walked the streets of Sherman Oaks, taking in the here and now—all the sights and sounds that surrounded us for twenty years, now out of daily reach forevermore. As we were having lunch on Ventura Boulevard, I assuaged myself with the notion that this visit, rather than a last hurrah, was proof we could always come back—that we could be “strangers in a familiar land” every chance we got to return to L.A.
My wife, whose wisdom is a matter of public record at this point, shook her head. “It’ll get less familiar with each passing year. Right now, save a few small changes, it still looks and feels how it looked and felt when we lived here. But how much has just this stretch of Ventura alone changed since we got here in 2001?”
“Oh, God, it’s barely recognizable,” I agreed.
“Right. What it is right now—the L.A. we remember—that’ll all change, one storefront at a time, one new development at a time. In five years, if that long, we’ll hardly recognize the place.”
As if to test that theory, when we were back in New York, we pulled up the old Nicolas Cage comedy Valley Girl from 1983, which shot all over Sherman Oaks in 1982, precisely twenty years before we were first becoming familiar with the neighborhood. We strained to recognize the locations onscreen. Only by freeze-framing shots and forensically searching for obscure architectural clues in the background—the kinds of details you’re only aware of after you’ve lived someplace for a good, long while—were we able to identify, with gape-mouthed astonishment, the particular coordinates of this-or-that scene. The 1994 Northridge earthquake leveled the shopping mall where so much of the movie was set; time and “progress” took their toll on the rest.
The Sherman Oaks where Randy and Julie came of age is long gone—it exists only on celluloid now—as will fer shurr be the fate of the Sherman Oaks where we spent our young adulthood, which will have to be preserved exclusively in our shared memory of the place. In other words: You can’t go home again.
As emotional—even overwhelming—as our belated farewell tour was, we didn’t have much time to dwell on matters of sentimentality once we were back in the Bronx. We’ve both been exceptionally busy this past month. I’ve been putting the finishing polish on my latest novel; soon, I’ll begin the process of shopping the manuscript, a prospect that fills me with no meager quantum of apprehension, given the thus-far-insurmountable roadblocks to professional rehabilitation I’ve encountered in the years since my screenwriting career ended.
Sometimes, when I’m walking the dog in the morning through our beautiful new neighborhood—one of the most bucolic communities in all of New York City (it isn’t uncommon to cross paths with rabbits and even turtles here, not merely squirrels and pigeons)—I can feel myself getting impatient with the pooch as he stops to quite literally smell the flowers. I’m too busy thinking about how I have to get back to my desk, and how I want X-number of pages edited before end of day, and that I have to make time to work on this very post, too, and when the draft of the current manuscript is done, I need to strategize with my contacts about next steps, then commence outlining the follow-up project I’ve already preselected…
And then I realize the dog, so in tune with the sights and smells and sounds of the world around him, is a much wiser soul than I. While he’s enjoying what’s right in front of him, I’m doing the same shit I did all that time in L.A.: squinting down the road to an idyllic endpoint ever and always just beyond the horizon. “Anticipation,” Carly Simon once sang, “Is makin’ me late / Is keepin’ me waitin’.” No shit.
So, goodbye, Los Angeles. My L.A., I mean—not the one sold to me by Hollywood, through its guileful fantasies that purposefully stoke our ambition for what we’re missing at the expense of our appreciation for what we have. I’m certain moments will come and go when I long to be back there. When they do, I’ll instead make a conscious effort to be right here, ’cause these are the good old days indeed.
This year marks a milestone anniversary for one of the most creatively admirable comic-book movies ever produced. Is it Tim Burton’s Batman Returns (1992)? Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002)? Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises (2012)? Or could it be something else entirely? Be here next month to find out. The answer will surprise you…
Sean,
Great retrospective! And, man, you nailed it about not living in the present. My time as a screenwriter in LA was 100% focused on “making it.” I was there for one reason: to write. I never gave myself the time or mental space to truly enjoy what LA offered. And now that it’s been nearly ten years since I left, I barely recognize it. My beautiful WeHo neighborhood has been completely changed into 7k/month condos. Countless classic locales have been shuttered due to the pandemic (and other issues). I suppose that’s the way of the world, or me just having deep “40-year-old” thoughts! (I passed that milestone last week).
Hey, thanks, Jeff!
I meant what I wrote in the preamble to this post: that I honestly thought I’d said everything I had to say about my L.A. experience in “A Hollywood Ending.” It was my definitive and final statement on the matter, as far as I was concerned. But going back a year later for closure turned out to be so much more than merely a symbolic act; it inspired an epiphany. So, for that reason, I felt I had to write this “sequel.”
I sure hope all the young women who moved to New York in the early aughts in search of a Sex and the City experience at least enjoyed themselves in a way that you and I never did in L.A. I realize now I was under — I put myself under — constant pressure to succeed in L.A. To be sure: I understand why I allowed that mindset to govern every decision I made and action I took, and I forgive myself for my myopia, but it is a bit of a regret I carry around in my heart. I should’ve made more of an effort to enjoy L.A. But… I can only do better moving forward, and this post is sort of a publicly declared promise I’m making to at least try to “live in the moment” a bit more intentionally now.
Now that you’re forty — many happy returns! — you’re going to take stock of the constant changes in the world around you, both seismic and incremental, much more acutely than you might have in your 20s and 30s. This is midlife. And change in itself isn’t inherently good or bad, I should note; it’s merely inevitable. All we can hope and fight for is progressive change, versus the disgraceful regressive change that occurred in this country last week. Stay hopeful for the future, be outraged at those who wish to drag us into the past, and live in the present. That’s the best advice I can offer, as someone with six years’ head start on you! I wouldn’t trade the wisdom I have now for the youth of my 20s.
Wishing you and yours a happy, healthy summer full of new experiences, each one a cherished memory in the making!
Sean
I was taken by your feeling of belonging in NY. We never have that in LA. Everyone ends up here, on our way somewhere else. I owned a dance studio for a while, hired several teachers from Chicago, and they had that feeling of “I’m a Chicagoan”. They didn’t last because they never felt part of LA. Can’t say I did either!
You owned a dance studio, Jacqui?! I never knew that! My wife and sister — and now my niece, too — have such happy memories from their childhood experiences at the local dance studios here in New York.
It is absolutely true that L.A. does not engender a spirit of “hometown pride” the way cities like Boston and New York and Philly and Chicago and Nashville do. I suspect there are a lot of reasons for that — far too many to list. Part of it is unquestionably because L.A. is such a poorly planned, sprawling suburb in search of a metropolitan identity:
Right. So, there’s that, and then there’s the fact that L.A. has never really had a unifying cultural identity outside of the movie industry, which attracted — still attracts — Hollywood hopefuls from far and wide. People come to L.A., but no one (at least it seems) is really from L.A. And the folks who come to L.A. tend to fall into one of two categories: There are those who move here and find paradise; they stay for the remainder of their lives. Then there’s the other type, who realize within a year or two that Southern California ain’t for them — such was my mother’s experience in the early ’70s — and quietly return home for good.
The truth is, you will not find many people like me and my wife — i.e., folks who moved to L.A., stayed for 20 years, and then in midlife moved back to a “harsher” environment like the northeast. People just, for the most part, don’t do that: They either stay for a year… or they stay forever. They don’t decide in their mid-forties, after a two-decade run, that they’re trading in sunny SoCal for the dense streets and bitter winters of New York again!
I imagine part of the reason the Dodgers are so immensely popular in L.A. — aside from the fact that they are a consistently great club — is because they are one of the few institutions outside of showbiz that give the city a cultural personality from which Angelenos can draw a measure of “hometown pride.” But… even the Dodgers came to L.A. from somewhere else!
I suppose, then, L.A. is a sort of urban American Rorschach test. It’s one big backlot, set-dressed to accommodate each person’s own script. It took me 20 years to figure that out. Thanks, Jacqui, for indulging my little meditation on the City of Angels.
Sean
Interesting thoughts about LA. I am eager to leave this town, but for me, I’d like a small town, more rural, lots of nature, great internet. NY as amazing as it is, has too many people, crowded buildings. I love living it through people like you who find the wonderful things about that lifestyle.
I knew you were in California, Jacqui, but I don’t think I realized you were in L.A. proper! Wow! To think we were neighbors all that time!
Many New Yorkers I know relocated during the pandemic to the Hudson Valley for exactly the same reasons you express: to be someplace more rural, with a slower pace of life. I actually know several Californians who are currently considering the Hudson Valley as an option!
Where I live in New York is actually the best of both worlds: I am in NYC, but my neighborhood abuts the Hudson River; this area is the lowermost end of the Hudson Valley. My apartment window overlooks the treetops of an 1,100-acre city park, so I am surrounded by foliage and water and in no way feel the crush of claustrophobia that defines so much of NYC living. It’s not in any way rural here, but there’s room to breathe. That’s why my wife and I chose this neighborhood, aside from my familiarity with it having grown up here. It gives us everything we want at this phase of our life: a clean, safe community with equally easy access to the city and Jersey to the south, and New England and the Hudson Valley to the north. It’s the right place for us. I hope everyone finds the right place for them.
“Living here is starting to feel like being on the first-class deck of the Titanic,” That line caught my attention first, Sean. I think the whole country is starting to wonder about that as the good old US is listing farther to starboard. I do hope “after the final no there comes a yes.” But I worry it’s going to have to get really really really horrible first. Even if the Dems retain control this November, the Supreme Court seems determined to set the country on the road to hell.
But that wasn’t really what your post was about, which was being present, making time to enjoy the good things and places and people around us, because before we know it, they’ve passed us by. That doesn’t only apply to LA, but to life in general. We don’t get do-overs. So enjoy the present, even as we work toward making the future happier, healthier, safer, and more secure for future generations. Hugs.
Yes, my dear friend Diana — another Diana who is also artistic and a great lover of the natural world! — made that comment, and it sent a chill down my spine. Like you, Diana, I am very concerned about how much worse things will have to get in this country before we start to see some sociopolitical progress once again. We came so maddeningly close with Build Back Better! Alas, far from getting anything like a Green New Deal, the conservative project to dismantle the “welfare state” that began under Saint Ronald Reagan more or less achieved apotheosis last week. It’s deeply unfair that a generation of young people who want to address the problems of the 21st century with ideas and strategies relevant to the 21st century find themselves interminably beholden to the self-serving whims of partisans implementing draconian 19th-century “solutions” to long-solved 20th-century problems.
For the first time in my life, I can no longer say with confidence that the country will be better off 20 years down the road. I’m not suggesting things will definitely be worse — at some point in the relatively near future, age will force the gerontocracy off the political stage, making room for younger, more progressive leaders — but I cannot state with certainly that the moral arc of the universe will be bending within the vicinity of justice in my lifetime. With this gerrymandered Supreme Court, we may be in for a generation of backward-thinking pain to come. I don’t know. My only hope is that this Roe disgrace turns out to be a case of be-careful-what-you-wish-for for the GOP — that having galvanized their base to the polls with this issue for the last half-century, they’ll find themselves wondering, What now? Although given how devious they are, I bet they’ll think of something both insidious and effective in short order…
But you’re right: That wasn’t the theme of this post, merely a digression. For reasons I’ve written about elsewhere, Diana, we live in a world that encourages automatic and accelerating behaviors: Buy the latest iPhone! Get the next promotion! See the new Marvel movie! We don’t live in a culture that encourages less stuff, modest ambition, fewer demands on our time and attention. And until we embrace a worldview shift at every level, we’re going to continue to experience both stress and distress. I hope we all make time this summer to slow down, to recalibrate. To consider for ourselves what’s important, not be told by Hollywood and the advertisers and the cable-news pundits what we should own, how we should think, what we should value, how we should feel. We’ve got to find a way to shut out the noise and enjoy the soothing sound of our own thoughts again. The multiverse of our own imaginations is an infinitely more fun and exciting place to be than anything Marvel can conjure.
Hugs — and thanks — to you, my friend.
Sean
I love your reply to Diana (whom I also know) in so many ways. It is frustrating to have been so close to building the future I’d always imagined (and the world needs) and then swing so far the other direction. It seems we’re poised on the weight of a pendulum, and I feel as though I’m holding my psychological breath anticipating the moment it will start to swing back again.
But of course waiting and hoping doesn’t accomplish the changes needed. It’s a million small actions and choices every day that will save our world from destruction. Interestingly, I find myself leaning toward the choices implied in the insight from your recent epiphany – to take things more slowly and live in the moment. And another thing you touched on, to consume and strive less and relish what I have already more. This is already making my immediate world better.
For a while I thought these choices were sticking my head in the sand. I see a definite political push by seemingly all ‘powers that be’ in socio-political circles to keep people distracted (and thereby ineffectual.) Whether we’re distracted by consumerism, entertainment, crusading for a cause, drug culture or hyper-ambition, it achieves the same thing for power blocks manipulating things behind the scenes. It keeps them invisible. It also keeps us looking at things – ever more divided micro-groups of things – instead of looking at each other and our immediate environment, the only place we can actually affect any changes, and the only place we can unite with others to do so effectively.
I’ve slowed down my ambitious future goal achieving and started to focus on each good thing I can do in a day – as it comes. Suddenly the people around me have come alive for me to understand. The discussions we have don’t end with, “Yeah, but there’s not much we can do about it.” A million small actions and choices are beginning to happen in each tiny sphere of ‘Now.’
I’m so glad that you’re seeing the value of ‘Now’ too. I hope it brings as much joy to you as it’s bringing to me, and that the fruit of each of your nows makes it so you never need to look backwards again to find the best of times. Just now, and now again, building that better future by choosing the values of it in each moment and enjoying them immediately, without striving for what’s always just out of reach. It was quite an epiphany for me too.
Wow, Sheri — thank you for this thoughtful comment, which could very well stand as a blog post of its own! I’m delighted you responded to the piece so personally and so emotionally, and it means the world that you shared your reaction with me here. Thank you.
It should go without saying I share your heartbreak over all the sociopolitical setbacks our country endured last month. Right after Biden was elected, I wrote an essay called “The End: Lessons for Storytellers from the Trump Saga” in which I argued that we were finally on the precipice of a new progressive era. In many ways we were — and still are — which is precisely why conservative-cum-patriarchal forces are striking back with unprecedented intensity, undermining democracy itself in the process.
It’s been a very dark month, one that has challenged even my own indefatigable optimism. I was so hopeful for meaningful climate legislation last summer — exactly one year ago today, I published a post called “The Year of Yes” about just how encouragingly within reach Congressional action was — so the West Virginia v. EPA ruling is a special sort of heartbreak for me. As always, I turn to my mentor for renewed hope:
For reasons I explained to Diana above and Erik below, consciously slowing down — consuming less, thinking more, learning to appreciate silence and simply enjoy the sustained company of our own thoughts, being present — is especially challenging as the unwitting indentured servants of a neoliberal economy that encourages and enables automatic and accelerating behaviors. Neoliberalism is designed to keep us consuming so much, ever faster, that we take our eye off the ball: We care more passionately about the worldbuilding intricacies of our fantasy franchises than what’s happening in the halls of power here in reality. We’ve traded civic engagement for corporate entertainment. We’re amusing ourselves to death, as Neil Postman astutely observed — self-medicating with Marvel or Star Wars or whatever our pop-cultural pill of choice.
One of the tools that has been absolutely indispensable to me in pursuit of a more balanced existence — living more with less, as they say — is the practice of minimalism. I wrote about my conversion to minimalism a few years ago in an essay titled “All That You Can’t Leave Behind,” but I’m currently planning to publish an updated post — a far more nuanced dissertation — on that very subject here in August; I hope you’ll join me, Sheri, for a discussion about it in the comments section.
As I recently advised a climate colleague/mentee: Keep the cable news to a minimum, practice activities that center you (whether it’s meditation or writing or what have you), and invest some time/thought into the things you can control — like your home and career and blog and community. Do things that leave you feeling empowered, because it is too fucking easy right now to slip into hopelessness and despair.
Sheri, I wish you and yours a safe and happy holiday weekend, and I do hope you’ll come back here for a visit next month to learn a bit more about how minimalism taught me to only invest my money, time, and attention in the things that matter.
Sean
Your post is evocative of my years living in LA as well as my ruminations about living life. As an octogenarian I can attest that living in the moment becomes more natural with aging. You become grateful simply to have the moment! And yes, we often miss the best of times as they’re happening, looking back with nostalgia to what can never be reclaimed fully. While I wonder what too many of our fellow Americans are using instead of brains, it’s heartening to read the wisdom and profound insight in your ideas. May more of the younger generations engage with analysis and critical thinking! I’m also anticipating the demise of the politico dinosaurs . . . though many are my age contemporaries, their values are nothing like mine. So while the moments endure, I’ll keep looking forward to your posts.
Oh, what lovely feedback on this post, Lennie! Thank you!
I suppose age helps us realize — and appreciate — that time is not a renewable resource, and that any moment wasted is a shame. That’s a difficult concept to appreciate when we’re young, and the entirety of life — that endless ocean of time — is still ahead of us. I’ve written in previous posts about what a fan I am of the vastly underrated seventh Star Trek film, Generations, which came out when I was a college freshman in 1994. I loved what it had to say about time, and second chances, as the two aging Enterprise captains grappled with issues of mortality. I loved it then, but it resonates with me so much more profoundly now, at a point in my life in which I, like Picard, face the existential realization that there are fewer days ahead than there are behind.
Few of the intellectual ideas I’ve expressed on this blog, particularly with respect to matters of environmental justice and moral creativity, originated with me; they’re mostly just a synthesis of theses proffered by much smarter people whom I happen to read on regular basis! But I will say that blogging regularly about these ideas — and about my own life experiences — has deepened my appreciation for critical thinking, for slowing down, for exercising moral imagination, for resisting the kinds of automatic and accelerating behaviors I myself reflexively engaged in for so many years (and, as this post demonstrates, still do outside my conscious awareness sometimes; I’m as inculcated as any American subjected to a lifetime of neoliberal programming). By writing long-form think-pieces, I’ve compelled myself to engage in intellectual interrogations of my own values, beliefs, and assumptions. And to think I resisted my wife’s suggestion to take up blogging for years, because I didn’t want the “distraction” from my screenwriting pursuits! Through this blog, I hold myself accountable; it is both a public declaration and a public diary of (I hope) intellectual and moral growth. I’d like to think Captain Picard would approve.
So grateful for your time and participation this afternoon, Lennie. Please accept my best wishes for a joyous, healthy, and productive summer to come.
Sean
As you must know, this post resonated with me. Much of my writing focuses on what it really means to “live in the present” and how to do that. In fact, it’s been a feature of all of my books thus far. Yet this particular past week, I’ve had an uncanny number of interactions with people around these concepts.
We live at a time when inspirational memes flood us. We have more access to more general wisdom than ever before. But like I said in TRIED & (Still) TRUE, it’s “Scroll, scroll, scroll… Like, Like, Like”—and that’s it. Most people mentally ascent to these ideas about living in the present, stopping to smell the flowers and what have you. But it doesn’t stick, doesn’t change our choices. The newly-coined FOMO actually drives people away from the present moment and into the ever-next one.
That’s sad. And yet I can only control my own choices, no one else’s. The best I can do is to keep myself in the present and to use the choices I do have to share ideas with others who are open to them, through conversation and writing.
One of those uncanny connections from the past week wound up as my latest blog post. In keeping with our collective thoughts here, I trust you won’t mind if I share it, as it served as an encouragement to me and one I trust will encourage others as well.
hope z
I second all of this, Erik, and cannot emphasize enough just how insidiously FOMO has been integrated into the cultural folkways of the Internet Age. Douglas Rushkoff’s book Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, a work that has served as the basis for many of this blog’s core concepts and intellectual preoccupations, essentially argues we no longer have the capacity to exist mindfully in a sustained moment, because the nonstop nonlinear demands on our attention come at us from all angles now, all at once: texts, tweets, e-mails, pings, pop-ups, posts, real-time alerts and status updates — an endlessly refreshing datastream that requires our constant vigilance, this despite any attempt to actually “keep up” with it all is a hopelessly Sisyphean effort.
Anyone who’s been in a restaurant at any point during the last ten years knows Rushkoff’s assertion to be true: It is an altogether common sight now to see entire families, groups of friends, and one-on-one dates sitting at a table together, each member of the party absorbed in their own little digital world, heads down. Because that’s the thing about being present: It can only be done in one place at one time. Being present in multiple places at once is not being present at all. And yet that behavior — that worldview — of being multiple places in the same instant is utterly normalized now. Carly Simon sang “Anticipation is makin’ me late,” but perhaps these days a more apt lyric would be “FOMO is makin’ me late / Is keepin’ me waitin’.”
When such behaviors become institutionalized — when we are conditioned to accept them as automatic and accelerating modes of conduct — we lose sight of the fact that we do have a choice. Such was the point I made in my two-part post “In the Multiverse of Madness”: that FOMO, among other Digital Age strategies, keeps us watching every new offering in a transmedia franchise, but that we can opt out any time we wish. Just because we were fans of Star Wars and Batman at eight years old does not mean we subscribed to them for life. We live in a digital ecosystem now, algorithmically optimized to encourage (and to monetize) automatic and accelerating behaviors. And I think one of the social responsibilities “analog kids” like you and I have, Erik, is to teach Digital Age natives that they can choose to stop scrolling, stop refreshing, stop reacting to every ping of the phone. The phone is programmed to get us to pay attention to it… often at the expense of the things that are happening right in front of us.
Thanks for sharing “hope z” with us, pal. Friends of this blog are always welcome to share/promote any posts or projects here.
SPC
“…an endlessly refreshing datastream that requires our constant vigilance…”
There’s an oxymoron if ever there was one: “refreshing”… and utterly draining.
I wrote this in TRIED & (Still) TRUE, regarding why time seems to speed up as we get older:
“The sense of unrest begins to rear its head when we try to jump through space and time to be two places or times at once. Or three. Or ten.
“Then there are some of us whose days and nights are taken up more and more with looking through old photographs of when we were young, reminiscing about the “good old days”— to the point where the ghosts of our past are stealing more of our attention than the living people and potential experiences that exist in the present. That is, we are trying to relive beginnings and middles at the same time.
“Thing is, we’re just not designed to be multiple places or times simultaneously. And so, in attempting to do the impossible, it stands to reason that we stress our system. We overload it. Steam builds up. Gears grind. It gets wonky. And before you know it—SPROING!—our perception of time is all out of whack.”
Of course, this is just a few paragraphs from an entire chapter on the topic. Worry. Regret. Bitterness. Obsession with reliving the past. They are all attempts to be multiple places in time simultaneously—and those will always be failed attempts. So they serve as no more than enormous drains on the limited lifetime we have in the present.
My best friend puts it this way often: “I only get one July 1, 2022 ever. So I’m not wasting it on that.”
It’s up to each of us to fill in what the “that” is that we intentionally do or do not spend our once-in-a-lifetime moments on.
Jesus, I didn’t even see the irony in my word choice when I typed it! Good eye! Indeed: The endless refreshing is the opposite of refreshing! I don’t know if you’ve read Samantha Hunt’s recent memoir The Unwritten Book: An Investigation, but it’s full of digressions about words: they’re denotations, connotations, and often multiple (and contradictory) meanings. (It’s also very much a story about the ways in which we try to make “contact” with the ghosts of our past through objects and mementos from the past.) I’ve never read anything quite like it. Highly recommended.
The phenomena you describe in TRIED & (Still) TRUE (love that book, by the way) are what Rushkoff identifies in Present Shock as “Digiphrenia” and “Overwinding.” From his website:
It is indeed up to each of us, Erik, to determine the “that” in our own lives, and not waste July 5, 2022 on it. As I mentioned to Sheri above, I’m planning a post for August that will talk at length about how minimalism taught me to only invest my resources — my money, time, and attention — in the things that matter. Practicing minimalism absolutely changed my life, and gave me the tools to live more fully with less everything.
Sean
Sean, As always I am struck by the ease with which your words flow and the deep investment you make in the stories you share. It is always a joy to read your posts!
My family moved to Los Angeles when I was 6 months old. Having been born in Washington DC at Bolling Airforce base hospital – which I suppose, technically, makes me an East Coast girl – I have always felt like a native Angeleno. I have lived in other countries and traveled to many places but have always returned to Los Angeles.
I agree that the spirit of belonging and pride of origin you mention that is so apparent in other American cities is not always on display here. And, as I write this I certainly acknowledge that this next thought of mine could be entirely the product of the sheltered sliver of reality that I experienced in my growing up years, I grew up feeling that there has always been more breathing room here in L.A. to invent yourself without community guidelines telling you who you have to be.
That being said, I also spend some part of every day grieving for the Los Angeles I knew growing up in the San Fernando Valley surrounded by orange groves. So much has changed and been lost to “progress” and greed. But that only makes it more important to keep fighting to save what beauty is still here. So I am with you 100% about living in the present and remembering to notice the good moments while they are happening.
Tara,
As this latest post demonstrates, my relationship to and understanding of the City of Angels is under continual self-interrogation and reevaluation. Such is why I am so grateful to have your perspective, as a de facto native Angeleno. Thank you for being so candid and so open — for embracing the spirit of this blog.
I think you are absolutely on point: L.A. has always been a city that both allows and encourages — perhaps to a much greater degree than a metropolis with a culturally well-established brand or character like New York or Philadelphia — a person to define their own identity and sense of community. I’d even say that has always been the appeal of L.A., and of California in general: as a place where one can go to start over, to make good, to live the American Dream. If my expectations for Los Angeles were not entirely met, that really says more about my own lack of imagination and engagement.
The fact is, L.A. was very good to me, even when I wasn’t always good to it. I had better come to appreciate Los Angeles in my last few years there, long before I ever knew I’d be moving back to New York, when I got involved with L.A. Animal Services and the San Fernando Valley Chapter of the Climate Reality Project. I certainly started to feel like a more active participant in a community at that point, versus yet another “Hollywood hopeful.” L.A. is what you make of it. Isn’t that true of every new experience and opportunity?
As for the changes to the Valley you have witnessed within your lifetime, Tara, I will never forget how California State Senator Henry Stern described L.A. at one of our monthly chapter meetings last autumn: He called it “a reluctant metropolis.” He noted that the San Fernando Valley was in fact once a real valley, but that when it became part of L.A., when it was subdivided and paved over, there was an unintended consequence of disorientation that ensued — that we “lost our sense of place,” Sen. Stern said. Such is why projects like the proposed restoration and reconceptualization of the Sepulveda Basin are so crucial to support: It might not only help us reestablish our sense of place, but by working together for the common good, it can even help us find a sense of community.
Thank you, Tara, for joining the conversation! Next time I’m in L.A., let’s go get a drink at MacLeod’s!
Sean
Sean, thank you for sharing your story! This speaks to me so much! I too am from NY and spent half a decade in LA very single-mindedly focused on Acting, to then come back to the East coast, where I found a better balance with Acting and life. I feel many of the lessons from LA have helped me, but I look back and do wish I had been more present at times. There are many times I think about my old friends there and the times we spent in the “trenches” together. That time spent in LA gave me a greater appreciation of the East Coast and home. I have visited LA briefly a few times for interviews, but they weren’t long stays, but I will be headed there for a week this fall, and plan to enjoy it and see old friends who I spent my 20s in the “trenches’ with and just be in the moment with them!
Thanks so much for this thoughtful comment, AB! I’m grateful to you for sharing your own feelings/experiences as a New Yorker who’s been “there and back again” re: Los Angeles.
I will forever look on my 20 years in L.A. with mixed feelings. On balance, California was very good to me, but I think my heart was always here on the East Coast. It feels good and right to be back to stay. Glad to hear the same is true for you!
This post serves as the third installment of an inadvertent “trilogy” of sorts, a coda to the saga that began in “A Hollywood Ending: Hopeful Reflections on a Failed Screenwriting Career” and
concludedcontinued in “You Can’t Go Home Again: Hopeful Reflections on Returning to New York after 20 Years Away.” I quite intentionally waited until the time was right to tell those stories — of the collapse of my career and subsequent return to my hometown — because I wanted time to process those experiences, to write about them with a measure of perspective and insight.I did myself a favor: Writing these three essays has yielded cathartic dividends beyond my hopes or expectations. It’s helped me put those bygone seasons of my life in their proper place — behind me — and cleared space in my mind and in my life to better appreciate the people and places that surround me now.
And the recent experiences detailed here in “EXT. LOS ANGELES – ONE YEAR LATER” validated so many of the bittersweet lessons I reflected on in “A Hollywood Ending” and “You Can’t Go Home Again,” and will serve as a reminder to me to make the most of the time I still have ahead. I hope your upcoming trip to L.A. this autumn proves just as enjoyable — and cathartic — as my recent visit did. Just make sure to relax and enjoy the time spent in the company of old friends and colleagues… and the rest will take care of itself.
So glad you joined us here, AB. Please feel most welcome to come back anytime…
SPC