Holy Land

Eight or nine months before I left New York, I started compiling a list of places in the U.S. that I wanted to visit. These weren't major cities, but out-of-the-way stops that had to be trekked to in something other than an airplane. I had the intention of driving back to California when I eventually moved out of the city, if not an actual idea of how that would work out, so I started keeping track of intriguing places that I would otherwise probably never have the opportunity to visit. And as tends to happen when you mix enough intention with good fortune, it worked out. When I started planning the move, I opened the list and saw that three or four lines down, just below some stops in Texas that it looked like I wasn't going to be able to hit, I had written "garden of the gods, southern illinois".

"Yes," I remember thinking, "I want to go there." This was immediately followed by, "What the hell is the garden of the gods?"

I had to do a Google Image search, and then some further Googling to determine that it was a national park within the Shawnee National Forest (separate from another (equally stunning) national park in Colorado going by the same name. The gods have many gardens, I suppose). I had no recollection of where or how or from whom I originally learned about the place, but when you collect as much miscellany as I have filed away on my computer, you will eventually bury and unearth something that actually has some use. It didn't take many pictures to convince me that yes, I did in fact want to go there, to the garden of the gods.

And so, after Louisville, we drove west from Kentucky, through Indiana, and into the southern tip of Illinois (the area, incidentally, is also known as the Tri-State Area). After passing through many small towns, we saw a horizon of trees sprout along the horizon and then grow steadily until they towered over us. The winding road swung back and away, leading -- almost inevitably it seemed -- to the Garden of the Gods. Summer having just ended and it being the middle of the week, the park was almost entirely deserted. A recent rain lent an added aura of calm. As we set out to hike around the trails, the sun founds its way back out from behind the exhausted rain clouds, and the landscape opened up, swallowing us whole because that's the only way I care to describe it.

Pump your own water.

Our lonely campsite.

Back into the woods.

Obligatory self-portraits.

And then some long-exposure fun at night. Those stars sure don't like to sit still.

The next morning, we packed up camp early, a little whole-r, a little fuller. There's a quiet kind of peace that comes with rising with the sun in a forest tended by gods, and I hope I find it again.

The Start of Something

I often imagined the way I left New York would be captured in one of those iconic moments, where I catch the buildings receding in the rearview and sigh a wistful breath, or watch it diminish and vanish thousands of feet below me as I literally fight free of its weighty pull. Instead, I left the city late at night, a day's worth of sweat and the smell of bleach clinging to my skin, driving east into Queens to avoid the tolls on the westside on my way north to a Marriott in Yonkers. Traffic was sparse coming out of the city, but thick going in; my brother and I squinted at all the headlights across the center divider as my parents crowded in the backseat beneath a minivan's worth of recently-packed luggage and boxes. I did not mark the moment I crossed the city's boundaries. I did not envy the people honking impatiently as they waited their turn to go in.

Later, after a night on a pull-out couch and a lunch with a cadre of my mother's old classmates she hadn't seen in forty-odd years, Roy and I would swing into the city one last time to say a final goodbye to a couple of friends we'd missed the day before. Traffic snarled through seemingly every street we turned down and getting back out became a chore. When the city eventually loomed and shrank and passed, outside the window to my left as Roy drove us south down the turnpike on the Jersey side of the Hudson, I snapped a couple pictures before New York disappeared behind a turn in the highway. None of them came out right; the city always looked too small. There was no time to get a better shot, and when I looked back up, we had rounded the turn. Sometimes, the past just disappears, before you get the chance to frame it in the rearview.

And then I was no longer leaving New York, but heading toward the first stop on the long journey back to my once and future home.

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Despite the fact that I lived in New York for the same three years that really saw my wanderlust spark and swell, I never made it to a lot of the major cities that lie nearby. In a late effort to correct some of those missed opportunities (and to see some friends), Roy and I chose Philly and D.C. as the first two stops on our trip. We spent a good night in Philly, demolishing a couple of cheesesteaks, hanging out at a bar with some locals, and partying with Sung, who I've never seen having as much fun as he is now that he's enrolled in business school.

Sung's view from his apartment:

We kept it moving, though, taking off the next day after lunch. It was fun, Philly. D.C. up next.

Into the belly of the beast.

D.C.'s metro system really likes that brutalist look.

All the national monuments are pretty cool to see in person. The chili dogs from Ben's Chili Bowl were pretty cool to see in person, too. Better to eat. No picture, though. On through Maryland...

...where I took the first of very many pictures of corn on the side of the highway...

...and into West Virginia.

We stayed a very shitty night at a very shitty motel in presumably shitty Charleston (we didn't see much of the empirically shitty capital). Before all of that, though, we saw them Friday Saturday night lights over WVU's stadium.

Kentucky was our next real stop. We had a really pleasant lunch in Frankfort, but zoomed on out of there to make it to the bourbon tour at one of the region's many famed distilleries -- Buffalo Trace Distillery. This is the part of the trip where we slipped real comfortable-like into Kentucky accents. The two seasons of Justified we had watched the previous month probably had a lot to do with that.

Blanton's, one of their specialty batches, is still hand-bottled.

The distillery had its own well-kempt gardens, rich with Kentucky bluegrass.

After, it was on to Louisville, where we popped by Churchill Downs and its Dixieland castle aesthetic.

And then drove into downtown to grab a meal just down the street from the Louisville slugger museum.

In case you hadn't noticed, I've started to toy with the HDR capabilities of my camera. Still getting the hang of it.

I crammed a lot into this post. Illinois next time.

Pause For Breath

I meant to write a couple of posts on leaving New York before I actually left, but between cramming in the last few gasps of city air and packing for the trip home, I wasn't able to get anything done in time. Instead, the few paragraphs I was able to write languished in a perpetually-open Chrome tab, taunting me while I questioned if I could ever find an original and meaningful way to talk about leaving that place, especially when plenty of people have done it so strikingly before (I'm looking particularly at you, Joan Didion).

Writing nostalgia, in general, has become increasingly problematic for me. As much as I've traded in its saccharine currency over the years, it's only been recently that I've started to wonder exactly what value, if any, I've been able to extract from it. While personal blogs are allowed to be self-indulgent -- and are maybe even necessarily so --, the amount of navel-gazing I've done in the way that I've done it has begun to seem directionless and uninspired. I could've been doing better.

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The other form of navel-gazing I've enjoyed trimming my blog(s) with over the years has been the picture/recap post. Seeing as how that old standard hasn't been causing me any existential grief, you can expect a good amount of it in the coming days (or more likely weeks, given my updating habits) as I recount, in the thrilling monotone of text, the resplendent journey that was my cross-country drive from New York to Los Angeles. And maybe when that's all done with, I'll be able to finally figure out what I've been trying so hard to say about New York.

Pictures starting next time.

Retreading Old Ground, or A Prelude

Consider this a Foreword.

As my last year in school ticked past its halfway mark, I began to confront -- actually and practically -- the fact that I didn't really have a plan for What Came Next. There were options certainly -- a desk job at a studio or production company, freelancing on production crews -- but I hadn't proactively pursued any of those options. There were half-steps taken in fits of misdirected enthusiasm, most clearly manifested in an aborted move to a house in Silverlake. But all of these things fell apart or never came to fruition because of a deeper thirst that was beginning to foment inside of my unsophisticated spirit -- a thirst for escape.

Certainly, there were reasons to stay. A final, pesky class to complete my major would leash me to the area through the end of the calendar year. The film industry, though certainly present elsewhere, built its castles in Los Angeles. I had the beginnings of a network, however fetal and unshapen, of colleagues and friends that needed nurturing to continue to grow. Much of my family was there. It was my home, the place where I kept my heart.

Then in my final year and a half of school, I began to develop -- a tad belatedly, I felt at the time -- a taste for greater interaction with a wider world, a taste I had spurned for the indelible but familiar flavors of old friends and favorite places. Maybe it stemmed from being the child of immigrants, or a kid who read too many fantasy and adventure books, but I didn't want to be someone who only ever called one place home (even as I realize now that "one place" is only a relative term). As the end of my 18-year education approached, trimmed in armaments of sentiment and idealism, it seemed appropriate to not only dream big, but to start new. To find a new school to administer my learning, a new home to keep my heart.

So fuck it, pick up and leave. See where the road goes. Why not?

It's hard to pin down the reasons we do a lot of the things in our lives, especially big decisions made when we were different people in different spaces. And it's easy to shape a narrative in hindsight, to paint a picture with a single, tidy brushstroke. To button it up with some pithy platitudes. So maybe the decision to move to New York was not as neat as I've portrayed it to be. Maybe I've left out the part where whimsy and inertia did most of the work. But looking back requires a certain amount of erasure and adjustment. It's baked into the process, forcibly, by selective memories and retroactive auto-corrections. But that is the cost of doing your own storytelling; you cannot hide your vanity.

Now, let's get on with this silly endeavor, shall we?

Rain Or Shine

It's raining today, but last week (and especially the weekend that concluded it), summer trotted out its feathers for an unofficial kick-off to a festive season in the city. In California, I prefer to distill summer into one of those endless days at the beach, when the sun is eager to rise and slow to set; in New York, it's best captured by one of those outdoor events that blooms and breaks in any of the city's many sprawling parks throughout the season.

When the weather starts to warm, a buzz that you don't see as often in the languid sunshine of southern California starts to kick up in the city. Shorts, sundresses, and daytime drinking spread as the pollen count spikes, and an eagerness to get outdoors invigorates even the groggiest of spirits. Hibernating appetites come to life, quelled only when legs have been stretched and sweat has been lost. The city is primed to boogie.

Summer woke this year with the debut of The Great GoogaMooga -- a food and music festival put on by the folks who do Bonnaroo and Outside Lands. Summer festivals weren't all created equal, but I'm always game to give a new one a shot. This one definitely had its share of growing pains, but given the fact that general admission was free for the 40,000 or so folks who could snag a ticket, I really can't see too much room for complaint. The 2,000 some people who shelled out an extra $250 for the VIP package, on the other hand, might have a right to gripe, but that's another story. I was lucky enough to get the VIP hook-up from some friends, so I won't pretend to bear any vitriol. Generally speaking, when you bring together some of the city's most eclectic restaurants in one place and mix it with live music, I'm a happy camper.

One weekend down, 15 more to go. Hello, summer.

Coffee + a kick.

WTF Podcast with Mark Maron, plus guest Niki Russ of Russ & Daughters.

Pat LaFrieda, Jr.

Anthony Bourdain gamely tangles with a rowdy hipster-heavy crowd.

Crowd is ready.

Some more than others.

The Roots!