This month, I needed to get some distractions out of my system but now the blog should be back on schedule (albeit, a relaxed, summer schedule.) What are you doing reading blogs in July anyway? Here are some things I missed in the meantime: Simon Critchley’s American Apparel ad, Bradgelina love road trips and Taco Bell, Metacritique, RIP Phyllis Gotlieb, Brian Baker “Interactive Architecture” series on Ballardian, Andrew Zornoza very great summer reading list. His book “Where I Stay” is lovely. “Love, Virtually,” Virgina Heffernan at her best, Anna Kavan’s New Zealand (”Kavan’s writing is really an equal to Katherine Mansfield at her best. It shares a crystalline quality, a hypnotic otherness which may have come from her heroin addiction but translates, on the page, into prose completely unlike anything..”), Paddy Johnson on fan production in the art world, The Dark Side of Scrabble, The Art of Juliet Jacobson, Karen Archey’s favorite links, Zaha Hadid’s Bach performance space Manchester Art Gallery, where “Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism” is opening in a couple months (which I plan on checking out, when I’m in the UK for the Frieze Art Fair), Emily Gould on Millionaire Matchmaker, and this: “The idea behind this performance is simple: I install a bed in a gallery or other performance-friendly public space, and stay in it until somebody gives me $10,000 dollars (or I am struck by lightning, whichever comes first)” (via.)
The Best Fireworks Display is Seen From a Plane Flying into LAX Sometime Between 9 – 10pm
Independence day is my favorite holiday. Partly because it’s not in the winter, so there’s no seasonal affective disorder. Another reason is you don’t need to celebrate it with your family. It is the first guaranteed easy day of summer. Plus it means my birthday is just a few weeks away.
Last year to the day tomorrow, I was flying into Los Angeles. The cheapest flight I could get was on the 4th in the evening. I thought I would be missing the parties, but what I got was so much more.
From my window I looked at the beautiful infinite motherboard of lights that is the city as seen from the air. And just above it, little ripples of hundreds more colored lights. The firework explosions were all so tiny, and yet I could see them go off above every city subdivision. And all of it was happening at once.
There was the Glendale fireworks and the Long Beach celebration over there. You could see another firework show above Malibu and Culver City, and Westwood, and everywhere else. A firework show for every neighborhood, and from my vantage point, I could see them all at once. It was one of the most beautiful and amazing things I’ve seen in my life; made even more special by that fact so few people will have the chance to experience it.
If this were a short story or a better crafted essay I might have played up my disappointement in missing all the Independence Day barbeques, or emphasize that the day has some sentimental significance to me besides what I’ve already written. But it is just a blog post so I’ll state the point here more directly, and even use a tired cliche to finish this post: the best things come when you least expect them.
Enjoy your holiday!
Images by Yoon Lee.
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