AFTER SCIENCE

I bought Brian Eno's "Before and After Science" when I was a teenager. A few months before finding "Science," I bought Eno's "Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)" and the Stones' "Exile On Main Street" on a store right above 42nd Street on the east side of 5th Avenue. (It was called either Discomat or Discorama.) "Tiger Mountain" and "Exile" were both included in this 1979 book, one of the few sources I had for the names of older albums I might actually want. This book was the only reason I walked into an enormous barn lined with record racks and haltingly asked for these two albums with titles that sounded really odd when spoken out loud.

The Eno and the Stones delighted and frustrated me. The words and sounds were off, as if they were mixed incorrectly or intentionally obscured or sung in some kind of pidgin English I would never learn. I wanted to know more about what Eno was. (And the Stones, but that came later.)

"Before and After Science" made me immediately happier than "Tiger Mountain," though I couldn't figure out why until a year or two later, when I was playing bass more regularly. Though there is some treated, groaning, humming Eno guitar — obvs on "King's Lead Hat" duh —  "Science" is tied to the rhythm section. Much of the time, it is bassist Percy Jones and Phil Collins, then playing together in Brand X, though Paul Rudolph and a few others also play bass. I felt a second kind of disorientation this time, without the frustration. I loved all of the low end and hanging bell tones; the alternation between rhythm and near-ambient tracks; the decreased emphasis on non-narrative language that felt a little forced and English to me. (Though it wasn't gone. "Backwater" contains a line about "heuristics of the mystics." Not sure why Extra Credit Rock never became a genre name.)

I am listening to it now, more than 30 years later, on the other side of the country. It didn't sound like an album from New York, and it doesn't sound like an album from California. It still seems like a moon that is always there, low on the horizon, never sunk.

THE NUMBER

Nobody fears aging more than someone on the verge of losing his youth card. A 28-year-old will mutter "some old man" quicker than any 18-year-old.

TRIGGERS

I don't know about anybody else. But there was no one moment. There were many, many moments, followed by the last moment. The last moment is when you say "I need to stop." It's just one in a series.

SNOW DAY

It is snowing in Kraków today.

The below was painted in 1961 by Antoni Tàpies, and it is called "Superimposition of Grey Matter." It happened to arrive in my inbox today, thanks to Artsy, and it is the perfect image to accompany the year's first snow. 

LEVELS

I hate loud speaking voices, cigars, heedless public smartphone use (guilty), stanked-up people overdosing on knock-off perfume, gum snappers and blinking lights on gadgets that should be unseen. The public space cannot become a place where we sacrifice the possibility of having our own, uninterrupted thoughts. That sounds like a bad line from some 1912 depressive writing a broadside against automobiles and moving pictures, but fuck it I'm going to leave it right there. 

There is an an English couple eating here at the Mama Cafe in Kazimierz. I can hear either one of them talking at all times, even when the staff uses the ice-crushing smoothie machine. Wait. One of them just started hacking and blowing her nose. I want no harm to befall them but if they get caught in very bad traffic for three hours, that might be just.

NOTE TO SELF

Rock a holding pattern like a houndstooth.  

VISITS

Last night, I went out with my upstairs neighbors, Carrie and Ben, infinitely sweet and patient people. They work as independent designers, sometimes of book covers, mostly of websites.  

We walked up Sunset to Taix, the only place I had been to in Echo Park before moving here. It's high French plastic camp with B+ food and a massive wine cellar that I will never need to know about. Against my better judgment, I get steak frites. I regret it immediately. It's not a season for lumpy meals — a rich and useless observation, since I later ate an "alley dog," a thing wrapped in bacon and slathered in mayonnaise so god kill us both let's just agree to disagree. 

We find our way to The Holloway. The jukebox screen is stuck on a blue matchstick declaration: ERRORS EXIST. Ben and I try to play shuffleboard, which is like bocce but in miniature on a sawdusted plank. I couldn't judge the distance to the sweet spot. I guessed it would take a thousand tries before my wrist would know the proper swing. Ben guessed fifty tries would do it. I found that optimistic.

"Free Water" was painted in cursive on a mirrored wall, which says a lot about an L.A. bar in 2015. 

Today, I saw my friend, Mara, at a more or less vegan café. We talked about our mutual distrust of white gallery cubes and proscenium stages. We were interrupted at one point by a wait staff member singing "Happy Birthday" to a patron in full operatic soprano.

STRATEGIES

Missing my sons — one a college freshman in Maine, the other a sophomore in a Bronx high school — means doing irrational stuff like not taking this basketball out of this box, as if my handling it would make their not handling it more palpable.

DISTANCE

Today, as I walked out of the Times building onto Spring Street, a text zazzed my phone.

"Hi Sasha, we're all moved in and the kids started school yesterday. We'd love to see you. Can we take you out for dinner soon? Maybe after a tour of Brooklyn? K x"

Back in late July, I didn't tell all of my friends that I was moving to Los Angeles. An Instagram post did some public work, a tweet did more, but loved ones outside those cloverleafs weren't necessarily going to know what was going on. I couldn't think of the right way to announce something so big and weird. Almost fifty years spent in New York and then, suddenly, ship it all to LA. Boom, done.

There's no sturdy explanation for why I didn't just send an email to everyone in my address book. The reasoning — which I am reconstructing, unreliably — emerged from my suspicion that a cross-country move was too hard to talk about. The transition from one place to the other felt both idiosyncratic and cosmically inevitable, which is a way of saying it would lead to even more rambling and tangential explanations than usual. "Only announce small or simple things" was my crude mantra. Also, I had been thinking of moving to L.A. for at least five years, and somehow the idea of potentially over-announcing the decision felt like a jinx. I was just going to watch the moving company leave and get on the plane and then talk about it somewhere, at some point. Like here.

Half an hour after I got the text, I was sitting at Gold Room with my friend, Joni. She had brought her daughter out to CalArts and stayed a few extra days. We talked about marriages come and gone and unrealized, and then drove a few blocks to Mohawk Bend. And then the spatial thing happened again. Because I don't yet have a car and am still internalizing the spaces around me, I am constantly discovering that points my mind has placed in two different neighborhoods are just a block apart.

When we said goodbye, I failed to find any LaCroix at the local Whole Foods — which isn't a Whole Foods but I'm never going to learn the name so fuck it, it's Whole Foods — and I felt a slight sense of failure. Then we walked outside. The heat had receded behind a low wind. I said, not for the first time during our night, "I love it here."

THE MERCEDES

A few weeks ago, I was living in temporary housing: the lower half of a moderately clean and modern duplex on Los Feliz Boulevard. On the day before I was scheduled to clear out and move into my first LA rental, two people knocked on my door in the space of an hour. They both wanted to know if I owned a black Mercedes. I do not. Apparently, a black Mercedes was parked outside the house, and someone had smashed in the driver's side window.

I was touched that people cared enough about a person whose fancy car had been vandalized to walk around asking after the owner. For several reasons, this wouldn't happen in New York. If your Mercedes gets busted into, fuck do we care. You have a Mercedes. We assume you'll come back for it. We also know the thief was gone hours before we saw your dumb car. But let's posit a more empathic witness. What does she do? New York exists more or less vertically. Even though it was originally designed as single-family dwelling, a brownstone in Fort Greene is now an apartment building. You can find a main doorway, but then what? Ring all the buzzers, even if there are just two? No way.

In LA, you can knock on the door of a house and be fairly certain that a person will answer the door and not be cross about it. This brought to mind a friend's assertion that LA is a Midwestern city, temperamentally. I might agree.

MOVING IN

On September 1st, my oldest son moved into his dorm at Colby, a freshman. On the same day, I moved into my apartment in Angelino Heights.