ok, this might not make sense to anyone. or it might. make sense.
anyway: l.a has a lot of generic, cheap, and seemingly uninspired/uninspiring apartment houses. they’re generally pretty ugly (‘pretty ugly’ is a funny expression, like ‘civil war’, or ‘soluble fish’. not that anyone every says/uses the expression ‘soluble fish’. except for maybe man ray or andre breton or frances picabia or antonin artaud. my dead surrealist friends).
but, in a very odd and subjective way, i love these strange and ugly little apartment houses. partially for their aesthetics, as they are generally kind of boxy and rectilinear and compellingly decrepit. but more for their implied narrative (if you ever want to sound really pretentious just say ‘implied narrative’ at a cocktail party. people will literally or figuratively throw garbage at you).
when i walk by one of these generic, ugly, ubiquitous, boxy apartment houses i wonder: ‘what’s going on in there?’ or: ‘what has gone on in there?’ or: ‘what will go on in there?’ because the answers could be: ‘anything’.
in one of these boxy apartment buildings you could find: trannies smoking crystal meth at 3 in the afternoon. aspiring screenwriters writing aspirational screenplays. aphasic old actors mentally reliving the halcyon glory days of their professional youth. beautiful tattooed aspiring rock gods having sex with their beautiful tattooed partners. frank booth drinking pabst blue ribbon. naive and fresh faced actors checking their email to see if they’ve gotten a call back on the next michael bay film. or: anything. painters, writers, musicians, actors, drug dealers, performance artists, blue velvet characters, etc etc etc. anything.
and that’s why i love these run down, odd apartment houses. they are stepping stones for some people and repositories for others. sometimes they’re stepping stones and repositories for the same people, depending upon the vagaries of their trajectories.
but as buildings they’re menacing and beautiful and disconsolate and aspirational all at the same time. and again, that’s why i love them.
oh, i’m also not sure a building can be ‘disconsolate’, but it sounded nice in my head as i was writing it.
-moby