the dragging liminal space of the monotonous LA sun
In cities like New York and Toronto time is always fleeting, always out of reach. You’re always in a rush. You anxiously savour every sunny day because you know they are fleeting, you know the warmth is fleeting, the sunlight is fleeting, and therefore time is fleeting. And so you become hyper aware of the passing of time and of every moment wasted. Of every sunny summer morning spent in bed. Or the rare warm October days of fading sun spent in an office. The omnipresent guilt of wasted time consuming you. LA is different. Surprisingly, once in the sunshine state I became more nocturnal than I had ever been because I knew the sun would be there again tomorrow, it wasn’t fleeting. I didn’t have to savour something that was always at my disposal. There was a comfort in that. The sun would pierce through the windows as I slept well into the afternoon. Momentarily awakening me out of my thick hungover fog. I reach for an Advil on the nightstand and remove the fake eyelashes I forgot to take off the night before. Alongside my inconsistent sleep schedule this is another bad habit recently picked up after moving. I am quickly hushed back to sleep by the blanketing sun, temporarily sedating me from my persistent anxiety surrounding the passing of time, because it wasn’t taunting me the way the sun does in the north.
“Hush now,” I hear the sun say as it lulls me back to sleep, “I’m not going anywhere.” There was no threat of wasted time or rush to emerge from bed, because the sun would be there again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. And even if I didn’t leave the house until after nightfall the echo of the day's sun would linger in the warm evening air.
I didn’t feel the same need to savour every sunny day the way I do with summer days in New York, London, or Toronto. Clouds are rare and I never saw more than a couple drops of rain. I slept many of those sunny summer days away, and went out at night. There was a two week period where I alarmingly didn’t leave my house once before nightfall. I didn’t even notice at first, until I ran out of groceries and realized I hadn’t stepped outside during the day since my last trip to Trader Joes. Baudrillard writes in America “Dawn in Los Angeles, coming up over the Hollywood hills. You get the distinct feeling that the sun only touched Europe lightly on its way to rising properly here, above this plane geometry where its light is still that brand new light of the edge of the desert. Long-stemmed palm trees, swaying in front of the electronic billboard, the only vertical signs in this two-dimensional world. At 6 a.m. a man is already telephoning from a public phonebox in Beverly Terrace. The neon signs of the night are going out as the daytime ones become visible. The light everywhere reveals and illuminates the absence of architecture. This is what gives the city its beauty, this city that is so intimate and warm, whatever anyone says of it: the factisits in love with its limitless horizontality, as New York maybe with its verticality.”
In LA time is never fleeting. It at least gives the illusion it never does. The fleeting nature of time only becomes evident in the aging starlets and broken promises littered across Hollywood Blvd. But that’s the type of fleeting that sneaks up on you, crashing down on you all at once. Rather than persistent omnipresent whispers of every sunset in Toronto reminding you the dark cold winter is coming, that the plants will return to a season of cold, dead, slumber and so will you. On one night out at a bar I became a local at, my friend introduced me to a friend of theirs. I immediately recognize him as a child star that frequented the TV set of the living room in my childhood home. We introduce ourselves to each other; I pretend like I don’t know who he is, and he pretends like he doesn’t know that I know who he is. We engage in this charade for the evening, getting into a fiery debate about something I’m sure both of us were too drunk to remember the details of, and settling the debate by doing a round of shots together. If he wasn’t who he was, he would have seemed like the most normal guy in the world. But it was odd, the tension between us and everyone around him. Everyone engages in the same charade of we know you, but we’ll pretend like we don't, we’ll pretend like you’re normal and you’ll pretend you believe us. As the ghost of childhood past is staring you in the eye. It was odd to have the reminder of faded childhood looking back at you. His once juvenile face that graced the TV of every kid in North America now peppered with facial hair and other normal signs of ageing. He had gotten older- and so have I…obviously. This is the type of confrontation with time LA offers you. The most beautiful people you know drop off one by one from the city. As quickly as you know them, they are gone. Either they were never really from here, just passing through town, sent to rehab, or completely succumbed by the city. Eaten in the cannibalistic ritual of angels. After weeks clouded by a boschian hedonistic fog, it is only a matter of time before you come to be face to face with death himself. Though as quickly as you come to face him, he pulls you closer and you are dancing with the cloaked figure, he’s off the clock, he's just here to enjoy the party too. Inundated by the illusion that the clocks are not ticking, that you are invincible, and that time won’t eventually catch up with you too. But the party always ends eventually, and the grim reaper doesn’t have loyalty to the girls he fucks.
I saw an interview once where Chloe Sevigny described the sun in LA as “monotonous” which I at first didn’t understand. Though it didn’t take long after landing in California before I realized what she meant. But there is a comfort in the dragging liminal space of the monotonous LA sun. In Toronto I scream at the sun to stay, and in LA the sun screams at me that it’s not going anywhere. The LA sun drags and drags, and I drag my feet along with it. The California sun wraps me in that warm embrace and hushes my anxieties to rest… at least for the time being. “Things fade into the distance faster and faster in the rear-view mirror of memory.” Baudrillard muses on California “Two and a half months disappear in a few moments, even quicker than the jet lag when your mind readjusts to Europe. It's not easy keeping your sense of wonderment alive or the first flashes of surprise, or even recalling what it felt like when things were still unexpected. Things last no longer than the time it takes for them to happen. It used to be the agreeable custom that you went to see the same film more than once. We are losing that habit. I doubt now whether we really see our whole life flashing before us at the moment of our death.”
I’m back in Canada now for a visit. I slept in until noon because I haven’t been getting much sleep lately. As soon as I open my eyes that familiar sense of guilt creeps up on me. Of a day wasted. The sky is already darkened with clouds, threatening me with the fact that in only a couple hours it will be nightfall again. It’s December, it’s cold, and it’s dark. I’m soon in the passenger seat of my moms car as we drive to the liquor store and “I Love Hollywood” by Slayyyter plays in the car. The snowy rural scenery beyond the dashboard is a stark contrast to the song's imagery and the memories it provokes. I linger in the California wine aisle, eventually picking out a red. I have a tendency to linger in the wine aisles of the places I’d rather be in. When I was a teenager under the impression that I would love to live in Paris I would exclusively drink wine from France, and ever since I’ve left LA I find myself reaching for California reds. So, I drink my California wine, in my cold dark childhood bedroom, hoping perhaps that the California sun seeped into the grapes of the wine and will transfer into my bloodstream with every sip, putting my worries of time passed to rest. Letting time linger a little longer.
So true, any cold climaters can relate!!!! ꌛꌹ⚹⚺𐆐𐆓𐆔
Always, ALWAYS so inspired by you !