Photographed in September 1997, at Larchmont Village, Los Angeles, CA.
Uploaded to Flickr on September 27, 2012. It was in an album titled “I remember everything that made her special”.
My best friend here, a goddess in fur sitting under bougainvillea. What you don’t see is a servant holding a camera, on the cloudy end of the leash that tied two of us together.
We lived in a 1920’s studio apartment, somewhere between Larchmont and Korea Town, walking distance from places like the Wiltern Theater. It costed a little over 500 USD per mo. with utilities included. A friend told me recently, that a place like that now charges at least 3 times more.
I moved to the City of Angeles in late 1980’s. There were a lot of rooms to be alive for someone like me – a young creative with a penchant for adventurous and experimental. I lived by a motto “I didn’t cross the Big Pond to sit in front of a TV set.”
I’m not saying I found a paradise. It was “spacious” tho, before social media, before smartphones, I thank my God to this day that there was no instagram back then to have my follies documented.
Don’t get me wrong; I love technology. If I didn’t I would have not spent my precious hours learning to run my own website. But. Here’s what I think. More advanced the technology is, greater the need to implement, and USE it/them with empathic, compassionate, good-natured, warm-blooded kindness, which may require each individual – the user end of equation – a consistent willingness to self-reflect.
Or else we’d end up building an invisible cage where Creativity may struggle to flower. And without Creativity life may just be….o, never mind.
The photo was taken shortly before moving away. When I first landed there I had known not even a soul; in little less than a decade I carved out a life I so not wanted to leave. It was an experiment, a challenge, a blank canvas upon which I stumbled, struggled to let myself go.
What’s photographed here is the perfect moment I had to seize, at the conclusive time of contemplation on my long stay in the city I chose, my imperfect life unfolding with impeccable precision leading up to that point.
Examining her smile now as a not-so-young creative with much less self-doubt, it makes me wonder if she had known, an angel in her fur coat, that one day I will come to know that I had done the job just fine.
Published on April 07, 2022.
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