to LA

In the air, almost to Los Angeles. I'll only be there a few days, which makes me angry and annoyed. I'd like a nice, full week to see everyone. I think it's especially annoying because the trip feels like its's marking the end of summer. I was a bit in denial about how busy the fall will be. When I get back from LA, I have to go straight to D's sister's wedding rehearsal dinner. Then the rest of the weekend is wedding stuff. Then, the following week, I don't have a single evening without plans, between work and family things.

I'm glad about this in some ways, but I just wish I'd been realistic. I spent the last few weeks hanging out and partying too much and feeling bad and stressed for a number of reasons. Now I feel a little better, but it took spending a whole day knocked-out by a stomach bug and then a sedentary weekend in the Hamptons to get me back on track. I just can't and don't want to drink and mill about in the way that I used to find appealing. It's really hard to not want to do that and not feel guilty about it though, for some reason. Like I'm being high-horse-y from a variety of angles. When really I just don't have time to lose time to hangovers and coke-y depressive moods.

I stopped writing on the plane because I became convinced that the guy next to me was reading over my shoulder. Mortifying to be caught blogging in public!

Now I am at my Dad's house in Altadena. He and my brother were both out when I got here, so I had a snack and now I'm sitting on the couch, writing this. I haven't been here in like 7 months which feels insane, after living in the same city as my parents for three years. It's nice, but freaky because New York feels more like home. My Dad has only lived in this house for about two years, I think. It's not particularly close to my childhood home. So everything's a bit foreign, despite the fact that the furniture is a collection of straggler pieces from the house I grew up in. I think a project for myself in 2020 will be to help him redecorate, if he wants. The house itself is very cute, but decorated with the care of a 26 yr old guy. Which I guess is the last time my dad really had to decorate a space.

Anyway,  Zoe sent me this artforum piece, and it had this Robert Smithson thing that nearly made me cry. "Smithson felt that in both cases [in the case of two ecological artworks that came under fire for waste or pollution], the community had made of the art scapegoats for their own failure to come to grips with what they knew was killing them."

I thought this was so good. The whole piece, "How I Spent My Summer Vacation," by Philip Leider, was really great. This is the kind of art writing I aspire to, I've decided. Dispatch-y, in the mix, careful, nuanced and political but not ideological. Very good stuff.