Lost Angeles

I went to Los Angeles.
It was for "a meeting."

...Like the kind you get flown out for, the kind at a television network, the kind where you get offered water by a receptionist with much better shoes than you.

The meeting came at an opportune time -- during my spring break -- which gave me a few additional days to drive around the city, catch up with talented friends, hike Griffith Park, visit colleges (because hey, that's still the day job, to work with high schoolers, and if I could help them on a network's dime, why not?), and imagine my life, were I to live there.

Note to self: when navigating Los Angeles by car, for the first time, GPS might be useful.  Or at least a smart phone.  Or hey, perhaps a map.  There's a reason this post is entitled "Lost Angeles."

So yes, I did get lost (literally) roughly once every two hours.  Asked directions at gas stations, grocery stores, state park entrances, and (memorably) an Episcopal church, retraced my steps, found my way again.

But I guess the reason I titled my post thus is that I FELT lost there.  Saw people who I love, most of whom SEEMED (and hell, maybe I'm projecting) a little lost.  See, I talked to a lot of friends who told me lots of good things -- about new jobs, great auditions, drinks they'd had with such-and-such a movie star, terrific workshops they'd joined, amazing upcoming opportunities -- but laced in among all the upbeat news were moments of...glazed over eyes...thousand yard stares...helpless discussions of breakups...fixations on looks...stories of violent relationships...envious descriptions of so-and-so's insanely huge house... it felt like a lot of people were searching, seeking, grasping, coming up short, pressing their noses against the glass either in terms of career, beauty, or relationships.  In conversation after conversation, I felt like I was talking to people who were driving without GPS, afraid they'd missed their turn or were about to miss a turn, not sure where to get off the highway, not sure whether they could trust the barista to give decent directions.

A lot of people seemed trapped in their cars, standing still on the freeway.  Metaphorically.

I'm probably over-thinking it.  I tend to over-think things.  And to pay more attention to "vibe" than to anything else...and maybe some of what I was noticing was just because I, myself, was in that unhinged, liminal state that we often enter into when we travel, and when we encounter the unfamiliar.  I was ready to notice it.  Still, it felt like a city full of people...waiting.  Isolated.  Separated by mountains, forced together into canyons.

Would I move there?  If I were offered a terrific opportunity?  Yes, yes I would.  And I'd do so happily.  I think ANYWHERE is a good place to be if it's a place you're busy, you're useful.  But to go there to wait for an opportunity, to go there to knock on doors?  That sounds, to me, like deciding to head to Santa Monica during rush hour.

...of course, you can play with similar analogies for New York, right?  And people have...Federico Garcia Lorca talked about its "rootless beauty,"  E.B. White talked about the three New Yorks, comprised of three kinds of New Yorkers (natives, who accept its turbulence, commuters, who devour it and spit it back each day, and transplants, who are here on "quests").  There's the sense that all but the native New Yorkers are here to "get" something, to "climb," and not just in theater but in EVERY field, every aspect of life.  It's why we're always checking each other out on the subway, why New York talks about itself (endlessly, incessantly, obsessively) in magazines and on film and in books...is there ANY city more written about than New York?  The way it writes itself into the center of the universe, the way we can wrap ourselves in some mantle of "seriousness" or "legitimacy" or "success."  You can scoff at this, say it doesn't apply to you, but it's the cliche of the city for a reason -- there's truth to it.  The same "trapped in the car" truth that defined my time in LA?  Here we're trapped TOGETHER on the subways, in the crowded cement canyons of our streets, like it or not.  Here we live vertically, hungry to get high enough for a decent view of sky.  You wanna get to work?  You gotta walk by Bloomindale's, by boutiques, gotta navigate through the women strolling with strollers full of shopping bags (the kid's with the nanny, mom's got yoga).  You confront everything you ARE and everything you AREN'T, everything you have and everything you'll never have (but that someone else does) every day.  We have limited space here, so when we want to change, to rebuild, we have to erase what was there before to make room for the next thing -- every making is an un-making, every gain is a loss (note the current NYU construction plan controversy).

I know none of this is NEW or earth-shattering or revelatory.  I've thought about all of this a million times since I got here, thought about it before I got here.  But it was thrown into relief by this trip, was thrown into relief as I begin to think about the benefits (and booby-traps) of each place, about the next move.

The question is: what's gonna feed you artistically, what's gonna feed you as a person?  What terrain is most conducive to making art, to make a life?  You can survive anything...but how do you thrive?