L.A. Field Study

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!

 

I think the notion of time passing has been so interesting to ponder. The idea of observing myself and what my day-to-day routine looks like has always seemed interesting to me, but to observe your own behavior for weeks on end isn’t easily accomplished. These posts seem to give me a sense of footing within the amplified sensitivity to chaos my mind’s been going through as a result of traveler’s anxiety these past weeks. So hopefully in writing this post, I will achieve some clarity as to what I’m really thinking.

I tried to spend this week less concerned with seeing what the city has to offer, as a brochure might read. I focused my energy more towards my readings, as well as finding examples in real life of the ideas presented in the book. I still made sure to get outside and go places, as it would be foolish not to take advantage of my time here and do things specific to being in L.A. I did a lot this week, and it definitely got me thinking… But I’ve got to be honest, it’s tough articulating all of it. And though I see similarities and am making connections between different ideas, I’m unsure how to properly and clearly connect them in this text.

Last Wednesday I was in the Design District on Melrose Avenue. I was there for a few different reasons. Though the hipsters in my neighborhood are very interesting to observe both socially and with regard to fashion, I wanted to see if I could go somewhere that would show L.A. fashion. I’ve since reexamined that thought, as Los Angeles is so disconnected that nothing besides clothing suited for the weather could really encompass all of this city. Nevertheless, I wanted to see the design district, as I love clothing and design. I’ve seen three main ways that high-end clothing is being sold here, the 1^st being department stores, 2nd being brand-storefronts and the third being boutiques. Sunset Boulevard is about a ten-minute skate from my house, and it has quite a few small boutiques. The design district had lots of brand storefronts.

Just going into these stores is fun for me. I love going inside and looking through stuff way to expensive for me, just because they can’t tell me to leave. The real reason I found myself in that area though, was because of a video I watched on Complex magazine’s website. Shopping with A$AP Rocky. The video is from a series where someone from the magazine goes shopping with a rapper for shoes, but A$AP Rocky said he didn’t want to go sneaker shopping, and instead he took them to a high-end boutique in Los Angeles called Maxfield. I found the boutique online, and the website said they sold clothing, furniture, and vintage fashion, architecture, art, and music books. I figured even if I can’t afford $1,000 jeans, maybe I could get a book. I parked about a mile and a half away so I could walk down Melrose and just look at all of the shops and people. When I got to the place Google maps took me, all I saw was an almost empty valet parking lot, and a concrete building that looked like a starving travel agency. I looked across the street and saw a building that read Maxfield. It had all glass windows, and weird looking furniture inside, furniture that looked like sculptures. I walked to the door and saw a sign that said, “Ring Door Bell.” I didn’t want to ring and have some furniture salesmen come over, so I just opened the door. It was giant and wooden, kind of heavy but it opened super smooth. A lady came fast pacing around the corner and asked me “Hello?”

“Hey do you guys have books here?” I asked.

“It’s the other building, across the street.”

I asked if she would point it out because I couldn’t find it, but she cut me short, saying “there’sonlyonebuilding. it’soverthere. see!?”, she pointed across the street, her arm resembling someone who probably loves Hitler. I left.

I walked to the other side again, this time I spotted a Rolls Royce in the driveway of the parking lot. I walked over to what I thought was originally a tacky travel display, and realized it was actually art. I walked around the corner, following a tentative polished concrete path. I saw the doors and went inside. I was greeted by the usual friendly suspicious retail “Helllloooooo”. I asked for the books and headed to the back, where the salesman pointed. A saleswoman with an eastern European accent came over shortly and asked if I needed any help. As it turns out, the books were also thousands of dollars. Luckily they had some less-expensive, non-vintage books, one of which I bought.

On my walk back to my car, I got a call from Konstantine Valissarakos. He’s a family friend who works real estate down here. He restores vintage homes and sells them to L.A.’s affluent. I’d been waiting to get an interview with him for about a week. He said he was coming home from work a bit early, so we arranged to meet at his house at 6:15. On the phone, I mentioned that I’d just bought a book on fashion, and he told me he had a biography on Vivenne Westwood, and though he’s a huge fan he wasn’t going to read it and he said I could have it. I was stoked! He called me at 4:38. According to my phone, I was 15 minutes from home and home was 10 minutes from Kostantines house. But I went straight from there to my house, grabbed my notebook, left for his house immediately and didn’t get there until 6:20. On the phone, he said that he lived beneath the Hollywood sign. As I got closer, I came upon an incredibly narrow, steep, windy road. It was so narrow that I would have to back up the whole thing if another car came. Luckily I found his place and parking was easy enough. The roads were narrow, clean, with high walls on either side, broken up by tall shrubs, gates, and fences. I found the address, which led to another tall wooden door (my second finding of a tall wooden door that day). I tried to open the door but it was locked, and I couldn’t figure out how the buzzer worked. Eventually he came and opened the door.

If I met Kostantine when I was young, I still didn’t remember how he looked. His parents were good friends with my grandparents, and my grandma had connected him and I via email. I just knew that I’d heard about what he did, thought it was cool and wanted to be able to talk to him. We went inside and he handed me the Vivienne Westwood book, as well as some food wrapped in Tin Foil, it was his mother’s Greek Easter bread. He gave me a tour of the house. It was 2 and ½ stories. His living room had an amazing view of Los Angeles, and his house was filled with many relics, all of which had a backstory. There was a large shoe parking lot right at the entrance. It was an interesting arrangement, everything from high tech runners to loafers, tons of shoes. I asked if all of them belonged to him, he told me no but he just grabs whatever is fastest in the morning. After the tour I interviewed him for about 45 minutes and recorded the conversation. It’s hard to process everything I learned from Kostantine, but what I saw was a valuable experience.

We sat down, and I started by asking him when he came down to Los Angeles. He told me about a few of his first sales, but the conversation quickly became more conceptual. He was a good conversationalist, he seemed like someone who means everything he says, 100%, and it’s hard to convey the weight of what that was like through words alone. His younger years were spent in Wenatchee, my hometown. From the time he was eight years old, he was working in his parents restaurant, which was noted by my family as being both extremely hospitable and very well decorated. He sold his first house before he graduated from college, and eventually moved down to Los Angeles. He was fearless, and jumped right into his work at a young age. He now works with Sotheby’s and has an impressive list of houses he has completed and is still working on. He was wearing athletic shorts and a t-shirt, and told me that’s what he wore to work everyday. I could tell from our conversation that Konstantine must be great working in such a people profession. But I couldn’t have anticipated what he was like, aside his job. What I learned though is that he is his job. Sothebys is his company, but he’s his own brand. Konstantine described something to me he calls “creative capitalism”. In essence, wanting to make a lot of money but doing so completely honestly. The reason he goes to work in shorts and a t-shirt is because his branding says what you see is what you get. As he puts it, that’s how confident he is in the houses he sells, that he shouldn’t have to wear a suit or drive his clients in a $100,000 car. Konstantine says this branding of values is something he got from growing up and working for a small business in Wenatchee, which he describes, to my accord, as the complete opposite of Los Angeles. What I find so interesting is that while his clientele may be like the people I saw on Melrose Avenue, he isn’t concerned with an incorrect image, only a truthful image, as he puts it. Image still matters, but it needs to speak to something honest. In his case, it speaks to the way he does business.

Over the next week I read the Vivienne Westwood Biography. Prior to this trip, on my reading list was a biography of Malcom Mclaren. What I didn’t know until reading this book is that Vivienne Westwood played a critical role in the Malcom Maclaren Story (emergence of punk, sex pistols, etc.). Vivienne Westwood was heavily responsible for punk, she designed all of the clothing for the sex pistols, and had a high-end boutique called Sex. She’s 74 now, still working “as hard as the interns”. According to the biography, punk is the first popular music movement to have fundamental roots in high fashion designs. Vivienne designed the image of what came to be known as punk. Co-Author Ian Kelley noted the most unique thing about Vivienne being the childlike enthusiasm and energy she has managed to sustain up to age 74, still pulling consecutive all-nighters during Paris fashion week and living off of apples and tea.

I came down here wide eyed (still wide eyed), wondering how I could connect the dots between music I love, clothing I love, and people making all of that happen. Being in L.A. personifies the way MTV might paint the young American’s dream—flashy clothing, flashy cars, and the luxury of isolation. It makes me feel like a dot in such a big city, and ultimately I find myself questioning why I ever wanted to do the things I want to do. Everyone here looks like an artist and everyone wishes for that dream. I think so many people must seek success because of what they see around it, almost all of what that catches their attention being something they don’t have. But many successful people I’ve met and talked to don’t seemed concerned with things surrounding them. There are for sure rich asinine people, but the people we know who did truly great things don’t live forever in the moments witnessed and envied by everyone else. So why would it make sense chasing success for the things I see around success, when the most successful people I’ve met don’t seem concerned with that at all. It reminds me of the saying, “don’t follow the footsteps of the greats, seek what they sought.” If one wishes to achieve success with anything, it doesn’t make sense to chase the things surrounding it. As I experienced with Kostantine, having expensive things doesn’t make you important.

From the time I was an hour out of town on the freeway and traffic started to get hectic, I’ve been experiencing a city that moves at it’s own strange and chaotic speed. My dad’s friend who’s lived in L.A. over two decades and who I had lunch with my first day put it well, “Los Angeles is a great city, just not great for sight-seeing or tourism. Everyone here is just doing their own thing.” This past week has felt more like the trip controlling me than me controlling the trip, adjustment to a city that won’t heed if you’re too slow.

There was definitely a bit of culture shock upon my arrival. I’ve lived in Wenatchee, Washington (small, suburban, pretty friendly), Seattle (mostly college kids where I was) and Olympia (strange but cool). My experience is pretty limited, so it’s no surprise that this is unlike any place I’ve ever experienced. What I’ve seen this week is how confined my life has been up to this point. It’s just plain weird seeing how many people have been consuming the same media as me, ordering things from the same websites, watching the same TV shows and movies, aware of the same celebrities and pop culture, and listening to the same music as me, and how all of them are so different, yet we all like these things, dislike other things, and because of this we can relate to one another. It’s bewildering to me.

I’m glad I decided to bring my car; I don’t know how anybody here gets around day to day without a car. The traffic here gets crazy, especially during rush hour which I’m told is actually five hours (3-8), which I think is scandalous, because that’s a huge chunk of time during which I usually have to drive at some point. During that time most people on the highway drive like they have a wife in labor in the back seat. I’ve learned to get used to being honked at for not speeding enough or unintentionally cutting people off who otherwise may have cut me off, intentionally or not. It really is everyman for himself.

I’m living in a garage converted into a studio apartment. It still has the garage door, so if I want some fresh air I open it. There is a little patio outside too, with a wall giving privacy from the sidewalk. I’m right on the corner of the street, the building shares one wall with a house, one wall with my neighbors parking port, and two walls with the street and sidewalk. Really, those two walls are shared with whatever the city decides to put outside my window, and there is a surprising amount of through traffic here. There are a lot of motorcyclists who prefer riding loudly at 2am more so than any other time. Besides the more aggressive and startling sounds though, there is a white noise of the freeway, about a half-mile away. It reminds me of a river in a strange way, there is just enough texture and change for it to be noticeable, but it never seems to die down other than at night, when it gets slightly more quiet. There’s a constant current of traffic passing through, and it’s noticeable from everywhere in my house. I’ve gotten used to it though, in a way it’s calming.

While a dose this strong of L.A. life has felt like a slap in the face, I’ve noticed a lot of what Botton said would happen in The Art of Travel happening. Most obviously, bringing all of myself with me on this trip. During the stages of anticipation for travel it’s impossible to foresee how the smallest and most unpredictable details will affect your experience, and which details will matter to you. This happened to me quite a bit during breakfast this week, because I had to learn how to make omelets and I always end up messing up the first omelet, and I always have to spend around 20-25 minutes cleaning dishes before hand, because I’m all out of clean dishes for my ingredients and such. Anyway, little things like this add up throughout the day, so I find it’s important to make sure I’m out the door by a certain time every day, and every night I try to have an idea of what I’ll be doing the next day.

This week I went to the Griffith Observatory, the Getty Museum, Santa Monica Pier, Venice Beach, and to a play directed by Tim Robins. I feel like a got a pretty diverse sense of people from each place. The Griffith observatory felt like all kids on a field trip, while the play felt like a bunch of local people. Everything else fell somewhere in between. The play was probably my favorite thing this week. It was A Midnight Summers Dream by an acting group that normally tours to perform it. They were only in L.A. for two days but my cousin works at the theatre and she was able to get me a ticket. The theatre was small and intimate, probably between 100-200 seats. It’s called “The Actors Gang”. All of the music was live which I thought was pretty cool, and it was done by someone named Dave Robins who I suspect is Tim Robins brother, but I haven’t bothered to look it up so please don’t quote me on that.

All in all, it’s been a good week. I love it down here! Over the next three weeks I’ll be conducting interviews with 4-5 people who work in different creative fields. I’ll type up the interviews when they happen and post them for anyone who wants to read them. Other than that, I’m going to continue my readings, keep sketching everyday, exploring the city and seeing what I can learn from this strange and fascinating place. Right now I’m working on City of Quartz by Mike Davis, which is super interesting but much more dense than I expected. It goes over the history of Los Angeles very thoroughly, and while I like reading it I think I’m going to need to extend it as something I read over the course of my whole trip rather than during the first week. My other books have less pages than this, mostly, so I’m hoping this won’t be a recurring theme.

As I get ready for my trip to Los Angeles, I have a ton of thoughts to sort out. I’m a little stressed about ironing out the details, but ultimately I think everything’s going to work out pretty good. Now that the quarter is over, and I’m going to be deciding which direction I want to take my learning this spring, I’m having to really define what I want to get out of this experience. I know that getting into the specifics of how I think this trip will end up is a mistake, there’s no way I can predict right now how this experience is going to influence me once it’s all said and done. The only thing I can really do to effect what I get out of this experience is make sure I plan well and be as present as possible during it. When I think about where I’m at right now and what I want to learn, I know that I want to get better at making music. Ultimately that’s always been my goal and I think it will stay that way.

This quarter I feel like I’ve learned about an aspect of the creative process that I’d been unintentionally ignoring up until now, which is learning the history surrounding my craft. It seems like an intuitive thing, of course you should know the history behind whatever you’re passionate about. But it’s easy to underestimate the importance of it, and I want to use this experience as an opportunity to focus more on what I’m learning and less on what I’m actually producing creatively. This doesn’t mean I won’t come back to producing afterwards, but I think that taking a break from that and allowing my perspective to readjust will do much more for my creative process than trying to make stuff without paying attention to my raw appreciation for music—that appreciation and understanding is what I want to focus on developing during this trip. I guess it’s important to ask myself about how the geography of this situation will be significant…

For one, I think Los Angeles is a fascinating town in terms of how many people are there for the same thing. It’s a transient town, comprised of people from all over the world. While I’m down there, I will be reading a lot and listening to a bunch of records because I want to be building my knowledge of old music before I start sampling it. But how can I take advantage of being in L.A. during that time? Interviews are one way I know I can learn more about what the city is like. It’s such a spread out city, I don’t feel like there’s one area I can hang out at and get all of what I’m looking for. I think the people are what make the city unique, so what I need to focus on is talking to as many people as I can when I’m not reading or listening to music. Los Angeles is a town synonymous with glitz, glamor, fame, movies etc. This is probably what attracts so many people there. But to get something unique out of this experience I don’t think I should go down to L.A. seeking what everybody else is seeking. I read an article talking about fashion that brought up the question of whether or not L.A. is on it’s way to becoming a fashion capital. The article brought up a number of new brands to sprout from L.A., and went over many of the advantages to having a company in a spread out town like L.A., vs. New York or Paris, which are more cramped. It also talked about the eclectic influences one can have creatively from living in a place so disconnected from the fashion world compared to N.Y. or Paris; not everyone is embracing the same trends at once. Something else it brought up was that Los Angeles has star power, and that this has the potential to effect the world of fashion just as much as if not more than what is happening on the runways. Considering the fairly recent merging of high fashion with the world of hip-hop, I think studying the fashion of people down there can tell me a lot about how influential the music is on their lifestyles.

One of the most basic things I learned in this class is that the music of any time is indicative of how some of the people felt about life at that time. Just as music of the past has been influenced by the world around the creator, I think there are other things going on culturally that can speak to the state of music right now. The relationship between hip-hop and high fashion is continuing to grow closer and I think by conducting research about street style, I can learn about the type of influence music may be having on people.

I think that L.A. is a city obsessed with image. For one, it has successfully branded itself, as something, which I can almost certainly say, is much different from an experiential perspective than it is in terms of the mental associations we make with it and fame, fortune, and dreams coming true. In other words, the only thing I can really expect from L.A. is to have my expectations challenged. In reality it’s kind of a dirty unpleasant place (from the few times of been through), but in that place are people who are really good at selling certain images to the rest of the world. I’m very interested in fashion, and more specifically its relationship to music. Over the past decade there’s been somewhat of a revolution in the world of menswear, and it’s relationship to hip-hop. As someone who at some point might be interested in working in the fashion industry, I think the link between the music and this new emergence of style and demographic is something I could really gain from studying. In addition to my studies, while down there I’ll be taking pictures of a lot of people on the streets and trying to interview them about their inspiration for their clothing choices; what music they listen to, and how long they’ve been into fashion, etc. I also want to practice doing fashion sketches of the people I see when down there. I’ll be simultaneously educating myself both on the history of the music I’m interested in (hip-hop), and the history and ideas of high fashion, while interviewing everyone I can about their experiences in Los Angeles, specifically on the business end of their pursuits, and how the idea of image has effected that. I have a potential interview set up with an associate at Siegal & Gale (marketing firm), who I think I will get some insightful wisdom from on his philosophy of image and branding; wisdom that I hope will be able to carry over to different creative fields. Other than that, I also need to talk to the Alumni office to see if they can hook me up with some interviews with Evergreen graduates down in L.A.