June through July 2024
Only a few portraits were salvageable from our trip upstate with Jason (Isolini) and his wife Amanda. Most picture-taking energy went straight to shooting photos of their extremely cute shih-tzu Albert on my iPhone. And only a few were salvageable from Matthew Donovan’s Prospect Park birthday, a flock of Very Online niche internet microcelebrities, naturally. I had the pleasure of seeing Sean and Morgan there. I also had the slight disappointment of conversing with a tankie podcaster hellbent on armed revolution. Every fellow leftist I meet is either not actually a leftist or is completely removed from reality or both. I mourn.
A trip to L.A. brought the joy of hanging out with Colin, Jimenez (Lai), a brilliant Paul Pfeiffer MoCA retrospective, and the joy of eating some of the finest Mexican food one can have. Matt loves L.A. As for myself- it feels like an alien world. In my memories of it, Los Angeles is surreal and dreamlike. Things look familiar but upon closer inspection they’re little simulacra. I walk through a neighborhood. It’s sweet, balmy, with palm trees and pink houses. For a moment my simpleton New York brain thinks this is an oasis. But I investigate further and realize there are a number of crack houses here along with a smattering of gentrifier house flippers. I turn a corner from a tree lined street and suddenly I’m crossing under an overpass lined with tents. A young woman’s arm is pocked with track marks. Her tent is packed with dirty stuffed animals. My heart runs cold.
Yet still, there is so much splendor. With every sunset, bite of lime-laced fresh ceviche, offering of candy colored boulevards and infinite variety of ethnic foods, this time around I finally understood what people mean when they say L.A is enticing. There’s just enough natural beauty underneath the iridescent gloss of its veneer to make you wonder if you could live there. Or at least I do- for a moment- as I’m hypnotized by the smell of a sprawling jasmine bush. Then I snap back to my senses.
The trip I looked forward to the most was a return to Columbus (Indiana). There we would be celebrating Fourth of July, Fifth of July (Matt’s 40th birthday), and the release of his book with accompanying talks in the Eero Saarinen-designed North Christian Church and Edward Larrabee Barnes-designed Christian Theological Seminary. I swelled with emotion for much of the week, so full of pride for the beautiful work Matt poured himself into. We punched in a trip to stay with friends in Northern Michigan, a first for me. I was of course in awe at the version of life living quietly and surrounded by nature that our kind friends Jacob and Kate are living. The weekend was punctuated by learning how to fish, laughing drunk by the massive firepit, and listening to the beautiful ghostly call of loons in the lake outside our bedroom window. But also by conversations sharing our anxieties around ever owning property, of security in old age, of growing up poor and the fear and caution in bringing up children of our own this had imparted in us. The vision of an idyllic albeit solitary life in rural America combined with the absurdities of the news cycle left us with a strange feeling in our gut. Biden disintegrating, a certain Trump victory on the horizon. But beyond this: more and more signs of unsettling fringe political alignments, talk of Project 2025 and a burgeoning ultraright conservative movement. People who we knew to be on the left using rhetoric that sounds more and more like that of fascists. Everything seeming to be getting worse and worse, faster and faster. But what can we do? I suppose we just stand together in the face of it.