I’m officially done being in Los Angeles. I’m driving home with my dad, taking our time. The only concluding thought I’ve come to, is that everyone’s encounter with LA is different. There’s excess everything; excess good, excess bad. Excess heat, excess use of water. Excess amazing people, excess douchebags, all with excess white noise in between. The epitome of the American dream, LA is whatever you make of it. I’m writing from downtown Santa Cruz right now, outside of Verve Coffee brewers, a recommendation from the dude working at the hotel. After being in the heart of Silver Lake for a month, what stands out about Santa Cruz is the space. The space between people, the space between cars, and the space between people’s words, there’s always more space. It’s slower, and refreshing. I loved my time in LA, but I was ready to be out of it. That city takes a lot of energy. While writing this, a woman walked over to the garbage can next to me and started rooting around.

I’m glad I took this trip, but it’s nothing I could have anticipated. Frankly, I couldn’t have known what to anticipate, I didn’t have much of a picture in my head of what this would be. It wasn’t like the trip to France with my mom or a week at summer camp. I didn’t plan for jack shit; I did shit, I just didn’t plan for shit. That would have been bad, if I’d had any real sort of questions to answer. But honestly, the questions in my prospectus were only there because something had to be there. This didn’t end up a time of data gathering. This was a time of heavy introspection, where I removed the majority of defining external variables of previous everyday life to see what would happen, simple as that. I picked fashion and music because that’s me, and I picked LA because it seemed cool. I don’t know, I just felt constrained and like I needed to go somewhere I could be with my thoughts about the future, uninterrupted.

Honestly, I don’t feel like giving anyone a recap of my past few weeks. As I’ve said, this was a heavily introspective time for me. Though I know in my heart that this trip has changed me and added more to my character, as I’ve learned from travel, nothing will go as far in emphasizing a point as experience itself. So it’s not that I have nothing to say right now, I just don’t know how to make any of this relevant to what we’ve learned in class in a well-articulated manner. It would be boring and irrelevant only to go over the concrete objective details of my time here. I went to stores, cafes; places to people watch and exist in LA. As simple as that sounds, it wasn’t hard to kill way too much time doing that. It takes a ton of energy getting around and often took twice as long as I estimated going from A to B.

The introspective part isn’t anything new. That’s always been me, I spend 95% of time inside my head. That’s why this paper is so introspective, so if you don’t like introspective papers, please get the fcuk out of my cyberspace. When you live like this, it’s easy for external circumstances to get away from you. For example, I rarely seek out new people. I generally end up with people who have picked to be around me. Though I’m comfortable with my introverted nature, as I’ve grown aware of the reasons that I’m with the people I’m with, I’ve started to resent my lack of control in that area of life. I suppose that may have been some of the subconscious reasoning behind this trip.

I picked LA knowing virtually nothing about it, so it’s funny that it worked out the way it did. You see, this town is heavily social, but neighbors are also heavily isolated from one another. In a way, I’m built for the way this town operates, and at the same time I’m the polar opposite of the ideal personality for the “L.A. lifestyle”, whatever that is. That’s appropriate, given what a paradox L.A. manages to be. So yes, I spent lots of my time with just me, in a city that pays no attention to people that don’t matter to it. It was great, people left me alone. What gets weird about such severe isolation is when you go days on end without speaking at all. You start to wonder if when you finally speak again, if you’re going to barf up smoke like an old car that hasn’t been started in a while. I visited all parts of my brain, and started to feel like I was going crazy. What’s interesting is that when you know virtually nobody, you don’t feel subconscious about thinking anything.

All that being said, I feel like now is a good time to reevaluate what brought me here, and what that can tell me about where I’m going next, because that’s all I really care about. I’m connecting the dots of my own path, not of critical academic ideas.

 

I joined this class because it seemed like the universe was speaking to me at the time. I went through the course catalogue, saw this class and felt like it combined two things I was interested in. Architecture + Music, yadda yadda yadda. More than anything, I wanted to go somewhere and do something completely different than anything else I’d done, and I wanted absolute creative freedom. I may not have had that on the syllabus, but I sure had it in the real world situation the class let me set up.

I spent the summer of 2014 studying architecture at UW. It wasn’t anything special; I’m not a genius or anything. It was an introduction class, but we worked our asses off. They were cramming 3 quarters of learning into one summer. Many of the students were already civil engineering majors looking for more creativity. I was there because I’d spent a year after high school at Wenatchee’s community college and I needed to get out of town. I picked architecture because I had fantasies of one day flipping houses, and it seemed more creative than something like construction management. I imagined I would be a creative genius and kill it on every project, blowing everyone else out of the water. I’m competitive like that I suppose. But the opposite happened, all of my projects inspired a similar what the fcuk kind of reaction.

They brought in grad students to peer review each of our projects, in front of the rest of the class. It was similar to our performance workshops; except we were judged on a more transparent good vs. bad basis, and it seemed like all of our judges had a bit of an inferiority complex. It was always humiliating in one way or another. What pissed me off was that these grad students weren’t our “peers”, they were arrogant older students, four years ahead of us with virtually 0 experience in dealing with beginner students in a class room setting. It felt like my older brother was making fun of my legos. I hated that class in some ways, but I value the experience. You don’t gain humility without humiliation.

I felt defeated by visual creativity and focused more on making music after that. I realized no matter what I pursued there would be a starting point and a learning curve and I needed to be doing something my heart was really in.

The exploration of architecture in Musical Cities was nothing like my summer course. I missed the first quarter, which from what I hear was more city than music, but regardless it was different. I had learned very little about history, the real focus was on spatial composition and the design process, which involves little fact memorizing. It’s about intuition, synthesis of ideas, and more than anything else trial and error. This class is about synthesis of ideas in an Evergreen sort of way, but not with regard to applying design concepts. I didn’t gain any knowledge about architecture itself really from my time at UW, other than learning a bit about Le Corbusier. And I actually learned about him from a Kanye West interview I watched that summer, not from any lecture. I got 3 months of practice solving problems with design thinking, that’s what it was, project after project, 0 tests. All practice.

So when I got to this class, I felt like a newb, and I didn’t bring any fact-based knowledge to the table. Any skills I’d developed in architecture were rendered useless, and though I’ve had years of violin lessons and dabble in different instruments, I felt nowhere near these other kids in terms of musical ability. I wanted to be a producer when I came to evergreen. I wanted to learn about music and make beats and get really extra good at it. Part of it was because of my love for music, and part because it was a fantasy I had. Don’t judge me for chasing my dreams mofo. So this trip, I ultimately imagined it would be time to hunker down and focus on picking up real practical knowledge that would facilitate the process of musical composition, while investigating some other interests of mine, fashion.

 

I wrote and wrote and wrote just to have a prospectus so I could make this trip happen. I didn’t know it at the time, but most of that was bullshit. At the heart of it, I was interested in understanding how creativity and capitalism can be successfully combined. Los Angeles is the capital of the intersection of creativity and the entrepreneurial spirit. I feel that I’ve learned something basic yet essential about creativity; it has to be intuitive enough to follow up consistently, and the process needs to supply some instant gratification. People might double take at that, but I think instant gratification gets a bad wrap. It may be bad to seek instant gratification with money, but I think being able to generate instant gratification from within is something we can all gain from. Being able to find joy in the process is gratifying. Not the same type we get from buying something, but instant and gratifying nevertheless.

I got here and it all hit me. For the past two years or so, work that felt redundant had finally put me in a place that was undeniably my own doing. No amount of words can express the weight of finding yourself in a situation like that. While I was proud of myself for finally managing to make something tangible happen, I felt equally stupid, like a kid who throws a fit until his parents buy him a bike, then goes and rides it into the canal like a fcuking idiot.

I’ve spoken with three entrepreneurs. Kosta being the first, Tony Reese and Roy Bank being the second two. Roy was my most recent interview, and he was an interesting character. He was a good guy, as Tony puts it, “Roy is good people.” Tony set me up with the interview, as he’s done editing work for Roy. Roy was a producer on “Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?” He also produces the Christina Milian Show on E!. I was most nervous for this interview. Kosta and Tony are family friends, but with Roy I felt like I was stepping outside my comfort zone. My preparation was mostly stress ridden. How was I supposed to figure out what to ask this guy? I don’t know shit about shit, meaning I don’t know where to start. In the spirit of showbiz, I decided to wing it. It’s an extroverted business, and I wanted to put some pressure on myself to be clutch and find something interesting to talk about without preparation. It proved successful, we had a great conversation and I felt like I learned a lot.

My readings have been all over the map this trip. I didn’t have some hypothesis put together that I could question him about, I wanted to observe the encounter and see what I could take away from having an interaction with a person like this. All I really wondered was, “What type of person does it take to do this?” So it’s safe to say it was more about seeing where the conversation went and learning from that, than it was about having any specific questions answered. Sure, my plan was ultimately founded on ignorance and laziness, but I improvised and it worked so I’m happy with how it went.

 

At the core of my being is an anxiety driven by the paradox of not knowing what my future holds, coupled with a need to be competitive, live to my full potential, and ultimately be successful. I’m aware of this and I love this about myself. So this trip has been me figuring out where my energies will be best focused in the months to come. My discussion with Kostantine was eye opening as I’ve written, because he embodies what I aspire to accomplish in whatever field I end up pursuing. I’ve read about and talked to successful people, and while looking into their personality reveals from a Malcom Gladwell perspective that it’s no surprise they’ve reached such heights, they still aren’t where they imagined they would be as teenagers. It’s more like they just ended up being where they are, and while it’s still a culmination of hard work and luck (opportunity met with preparedness), there are other factors that can still stop someone from reaching success, even with the work. You can have invested your 10,000 hours writing films, but if you don’t understand the art of networking, conversation, and what is fair in a basic business exchange, you likely won’t end up getting your movies where you want them to be. In other words, there’s more to success than the craft alone, there is the context of that craft in present day society. Of course, this all depends on how one defines success, but ultimately I’m speaking about it in terms of getting your work where you want it to be displayed, money aside. But not money aside for me though, I want money, and that’s my own thing…

I’ve realized that no matter how much man plans, god will still laugh and life will still happen. In other words, it’s not only about how we prepare for the next day of practice, but how we adjust when things inevitably go as unexpected at some point or another. My dad, the Zen master refers to this as the pivot. We need to be able to pivot, and to recognize when a pivot is necessary. This has me thinking about practice, and always planning to practice the next day. Whatever our practice is, it needs to be able to serve the role of a pivot as well. For me, that has become sketching. When life inevitably hits us with the unexpected, we need a way to cope. Life happening could mean a family member dying; it cold mean an earthquake happening and you get held up in your house for a week, or it could mean someone canceling plans. The point is to get great at anything we need an extraordinary amount of practice. I like to think I’m disciplined, but I don’t have the focus to force myself just to do something for three hours a day for ten years simply because “I want to master it”. It has to come natural at a certain point. So if the only thing we can count on is the unexpected, why not harness the unexpected? It’s necessary to have that one thing we naturally go back to every time shit hits the fan. For me, drawing fits the bill. It’s a method of disorganization that allows independent self-organization within the chaos of everyday life. Rather than constantly reassuring ourselves that this is the thing, I think we need to be open that what we want to be the thing simply might not fit our personality—that is if we want it to become our profession.

Drawing works for me because I learn more from doing than anything else. For me, it’s the most intuitive form of self-expression and creativity; simply looking at something for long enough can solve any problem. It’s basic enough that I can turn to it when shit hits the fan and it removes me from my own head, but it’s still something I can practice daily even when I don’t necessarily feel emotionally compelled to get something out there. While I didn’t go out and come back with hard fast data, I learned something invaluable about the way I work and what is necessary in deciding what you want to pursue, and the importance of it being true.

Regardless, I still feel juxtaposed between having found something true and important about my being, and not quite sure what this means about what’s next. Of course it’s reassuring, just having an experience like this under my belt. But I’m not sure what I’ll be presenting, or what any of this has to do with anything in class. This is all so personal. I suppose this class is musical cities, right? If nothing else, I can boil it down to the relationship between environments and creative outcomes. LA is the environment, what I do will be the outcome. Only time will tell. Peace!