[The following are excerpts from what will be a full volume of essays, poems, and short stories that capture the singular magic and discontents of Los Angeles. This book will ultimately be part of a larger series in which each volume is dedicated to a different city.]

L.A. SUN

If L.A. is best known for its promulgation of the moving image, it is ironically, at its core, a celebration of stasis. The sun that rises each day is an identical sun, the same depth and force and heat of the day before.

Other places experience a variety of suns: shy, exuberant, hidden, melancholy, resentful, diffident, gracious, brutal, weak, absentee. If there is only one sun, its understudies are cast with alarming inconsistency.

In L.A., there are no understudies, and the star rarely gets sick. Even the faces, and bodies, in L.A. carry the same celestial sense of stasis. Youth can be seen blossoming to a perpetual age of 27 then hanging there with determinacy until the age of 74 or so, when it is abruptly announced that they were somehow, internally, aging the whole time.

People in other cities sit in the basements of grocery stores while weather and its malcontents rattle the ceiling tiles. They are reminded, and habitually unsurprised, that the world is inconstant. Guarantees strike them as farcical. The pleasure of entitlement is enjoyed, if at all, with a sense of novelty and suspicion, like a free upgrade when renting a car.

THE MIDDLING CLASS

EXT. PARKING LOT - NIGHT

Beneath the cursive neon of the Black Cat Bar, AMAL (42), all cheekbones, plucks a joint from the mouth of MARJORIE (34), an apparent cardigan model who is huffing like an amateur.

MARJORIE

I’m married.

AMAL

I know. Everyone knows.

(indicates her ring)

So where’s the lucky breadwinner?

MARJORIE

Libya.

AMAL

(coquettishly)

He know you’re a sexual turncoat?

MARJORIE

He’s... one of those seven property developers who got kidnapped.

AMAL

And you’re here finding yourself.

(A serious, cruel shift. Marjorie is wounded and appalled.)

MARJORIE

Excuse me? You don’t know me.

AMAL

Oh, I know you. I know dozens of you. You love this sliver of being less boring. But what you’re really hoping for is that he’ll come home, “changed,” find you in the arms of some woman and think that you’ve changed too. But there’s still nothing more to him than a property developer, and there’s nothing more to you than a Brentwood housewife.

(With slow violence, Amal kisses her collarbone, her neck.)

MARJORIE

You hate me; what are you -

AMAL

Ruining our useless lives, stupid.

(A charged moment. Marjorie curls her fist in Amal’s hair.)

THE TRAIN SPEAKS

This is a blue line train to 7th Street, Metro Center.

He has always believed in poetry. He also believes in irony, but he is not sure this qualifies.

“Don't forget to take your belongings,” he tells himself.

He thinks of the silent movie actors, stilted ghosts, up to their antics for as long as the reels survive. Having traded the cellular for the celluloid, the rude seven-year turnover of skin cells for the longevity of film.

“Now arriving: Willow Street Station. The next stop is: Wardlow Station.”

He earnestly entreats himself not to eat, drink, or smoke on trains or on platforms. To keep his feet off the seats. (Please.)

He is impressed by the ubiquity. Many people are. He is in many places at once. Ignored. Like God.

He listens for anything else. The antique grind of the rails, the labored breathing of the ventilation system, the dull wobble of the sides against the wind of the tunnel. The water torture dinging of texts.

Feet are on seats, everywhere.

“Now arriving: Vernon Station. The next stop is: Washington Station.”

His mother visited, once, bounding forth from the Southwest arrivals terminal with the compact, white-hot, mistaken energy of a thousand suns.

He had suggested hiring a car (he had proudly carved his check into roughly a hundred twenties and hidden these around his studio, like a childhood Easter egg hunt, so it was sort of fiscally viable), but she had insisted upon hearing his voice, so they boarded a bus to the nearest train station. A female voice, perky and sterile like a robot, had greeted them. His mother had twisted her mouth like a coat hanger in distaste, giddily itching for the main event.

He recalls the way she had stood in the underground lobby of Wilshire/Normandie, fixed like a wax figurine, studying the sallow fluorescent glow of the system map. Framed in a latticework of delicate graffiti, she had traced the thick, blood-red aorta of the line to Hollywood, the limp, dangling blue vena cava chugging upward from Long Beach.

“Now arriving: Pico Station. The next stop is: 7th Street, Metro Center.”

He beseeches himself to please be considerate to those around him. To refrain from playing loud music. To please, seriously, absolutely not eat under any circumstances while aboard the train, for the love of God.

He thumbs the fossil-hard edge of a mash of gum on the seat fabric, oddly offended.

He thanks everyone, magnanimously, for going Metro.

“This is the last stop. Please make sure to take your belongings, and exit the train at this time.”

He exits the train, per his instruction. He remembers what it was like to be commanding. Thankful. Certain. How could he forget?

“For your personal safety, do not sit or stand near the edge of the platform.”

He thinks of his mother, folded into a neat, deflated shell, thumbing a Neolithic gum wad on the adjacent seat. “Why carpet?” she had asked.

“I'm not sure,” he had said.

He sticks his head out. No drama. Watches the gap like a surgeon.

“Please stand clear. The doors are closing.”

He knows what they will say. What he will say.

“We apologize for the delay.”

He thinks of the silent film actresses, strapped to the rails, thrashing about with the implausible sangfroid of a 100% survival rate. He thinks of their shining, grateful faces. He wonders where they're buried.

As the doors slide closed, he welcomes everyone, everywhere at once.

And he hears nothing.

THE ACTOR DAY DRINKS

After a surreal audition in which am invited to remove my shoes and to “be funnier,” I step into a place called the Fat Dog, where one can enjoy an immortal stream of remastered Motown music and drink before 10:30am without feeling like an asshole.

A bartender named Joe says that his name is Joe and invites me to call on him if I need anything. I order a chicken fried chicken, a redundant and reactionary menu item no doubt meant to slowly and heavily fly in the face of veganism, vegetarianism, paleo-ism, and all other diets signaling the advancement of civilization. I also order a Fat Mary, which is a Bloody Mary but more proprietary somehow. Joe turns to put in my order, tells me that his name is Joe again, and disappears.

I think about the casting director. I wonder who she’s telling to take off his shoes right now. I wonder whether she even likes Shakespeare, and if her first boyfriend was mean to her. I hope he was.

I drink my Fat Mary, celery slapping me in the cheek, reading. I leave when I've run out of meta-fried chicken. Outside, on Magnolia, a pouring of pure blank sunlight saturates everything. A crowd of impossibly fit, exuberant black men in menorah T-shirts loudly exhort passersby to turn to the path of righteousness. It feels like everywhere you look, there's way too much space.

I descend into the great gaping torso of the train station, wait my turn, and get off at Palms, after ages of fantasizing about the new Metro line. It's fine.

DISENCHANTMENT

Los Angeles is a city of barbarians waiting at windows, breath held for the crunch of glass on metal. The logic of collision. Silence and appetite.

From the roof of the Soho House, she glares down onto the sunny 45-degree angle where Phyllis Street meets Sunset, funneling the world’s finest motorcars toward the strip like a trap. She thinks of the valet, an underground athlete, collecting keys like lottery tickets. The owners vanishing into the Bermuda Triangle of Sunset/Phyllis/Cory Avenue, taking the elevator up up up, checking in constantly, rigorously documenting themselves, eager to not disappear.

She flicks her head quickly to the side, a youthful, bemused attempt to displace her sunglasses in one fluid motion. She is unsuccessful. Someone is, of course, amused by this gesture. Someone always is.

- Thomas.

- Marjorie.

She is of course not Marjorie. Marjorie is unbearable, has a half-life of eight hours. She is gratingly witty, and just a soft palate adjustment away from a 1930s London stage accent.

- Are you meeting someone?

- Right this very minute. Aren’t you?

Marjorie/Elizabeth/Eleanor/Skye surveys the universe through peripheral vision, each person a private little infinity. Each doing the same thing, checking to see who’s famous, theatrically not caring.

Imagination, she understands, is electric. The theory of ships passing in the night, of alternate realities, of just missing one another. Of chemistry. Collision. Of saying yes always meaning saying no to a thousand somethings (or someones) else.

Marjorie/etc. drinks affection like water. She knows that you can be all things to all people, but only one at a time.

And that, in the right hands, Los Angeles will crack open your chest into a million fucking little pieces.

[The following are excerpts from what will be a full volume of essays, poems, and short stories that capture the singular magic and discontents of Los Angeles. This book will be part of a larger series in which each volume is dedicated to a different city.]

L.A. SUN

If L.A. is best known for its promulgation of the moving image, it is ironically, at its core, a celebration of stasis. The sun that rises each day is an identical sun, the same depth and force and heat of the day before.

Other places experience a variety of suns: shy, exuberant, hidden, melancholy, resentful, diffident, gracious, brutal, weak, absentee. If there is only one sun, its understudies are cast with alarming inconsistency.

In L.A., there are no understudies, and the star rarely gets sick. Even the faces, and bodies, in L.A. carry the same celestial sense of stasis. Youth can be seen blossoming to a perpetual age of 27 then hanging there with determinacy until the age of 74 or so, when it is abruptly announced that they were somehow, internally, aging the whole time.

People in other cities sit in the basements of grocery stores while weather and its malcontents rattle the ceiling tiles. They are reminded, and habitually unsurprised, that the world is inconstant. Guarantees strike them as farcical. The pleasure of entitlement is enjoyed, if at all, with a sense of novelty and suspicion, like a free upgrade when renting a car.

THE MIDDLING CLASS

EXT. PARKING LOT - NIGHT

Beneath the cursive neon of the Black Cat Bar, AMAL (42), all cheekbones, plucks a joint from the mouth of MARJORIE (34), an apparent cardigan model who is huffing like an amateur.

MARJORIE

I’m married.

AMAL

I know. Everyone knows.

(indicates her ring)

So where’s the lucky breadwinner?

MARJORIE

Libya.

AMAL

(coquettishly)

He know you’re a sexual turncoat?

MARJORIE

He’s... one of those seven property developers who got kidnapped.

AMAL

And you’re here finding yourself.

(A serious, cruel shift. Marjorie is wounded and appalled.)

MARJORIE

Excuse me? You don’t know me.

AMAL

Oh, I know you. I know dozens of you. You love this sliver of being less boring. But what you’re really hoping for is that he’ll come home, “changed,” find you in the arms of some woman and think that you’ve changed too. But there’s still nothing more to him than a property developer, and there’s nothing more to you than a Brentwood housewife.

(With slow violence, Amal kisses her collarbone, her neck.)

MARJORIE

You hate me; what are you -

AMAL

Ruining our useless lives, stupid.

(A charged moment. Marjorie curls her fist in Amal’s hair.)

DISENCHANTMENT

Los Angeles is a city of barbarians waiting at windows, breath held for the crunch of glass on metal. The logic of collision. Silence and appetite.

From the roof of the Soho House, she glares down onto the sunny 45-degree angle where Phyllis Street meets Sunset, funneling the world’s finest motorcars toward the strip like a trap. She thinks of the valet, an underground athlete, collecting keys like lottery tickets. The owners vanishing into the Bermuda Triangle of Sunset/Phyllis/Cory Avenue, taking the elevator up up up, checking in constantly, rigorously documenting themselves, eager to not disappear.

She flicks her head quickly to the side, a youthful, bemused attempt to displace her sunglasses in one fluid motion. She is unsuccessful. Someone is, of course, amused by this gesture. Someone always is.

- Thomas.

- Marjorie.

She is of course not Marjorie. Marjorie is unbearable, has a half-life of eight hours. She is gratingly witty, and just a soft palate adjustment away from a 1930s London stage accent.

- Are you meeting someone?

- Right this very minute. Aren’t you?

Marjorie/Elizabeth/Eleanor/Skye surveys the universe through peripheral vision, each person a private little infinity. Each doing the same thing, checking to see who’s famous, theatrically not caring.

Imagination, she understands, is electric. The theory of ships passing in the night, of alternate realities, of just missing one another. Of chemistry. Collision. Of saying yes always meaning saying no to a thousand somethings (or someones) else.

Marjorie/etc. drinks affection like water. She knows that you can be all things to all people, but only one at a time.

And that, in the right hands, Los Angeles will crack open your chest into a million fucking little pieces.