Personal Essays
Personal stories from L.A. writers on fashion, culture and beyond.
Inside you are your main audience. The joy lies in the freedom. Be extra. Go bold.
Los Angeles, like its residents, is impermanent, always shape-shifting, always on the verge of becoming something else.
The laundromat is your rare “third place” — a spot to go to that’s not your house, nor your office, but a secret third thing.
In this town, actors often stay at hotels for transient periods of time. But what is it actually like?
Everyone suddenly, it seems, wants to lucid dream. I say: First dream, but dream actively. Here are some practices I take to ensure an engagement in my Dream Life.
When you quite literally accept the cards that life has already dealt you, the story of what may lay ahead practically tells itself.
Los Angeles is terrible at housing people. It’s better at warehousing cars. The concrete nautiluses where we temporarily abandon our Kias and Porsches and mopeds produce, reproduce and shelter dualities.
The beauty of surfing is inextricable with the fear of it. It’s as if the baptismal in the ocean were somehow both the original sin and its curative.
I am not the modern, modest Muslim lady my mother wanted, nor the good wife my grandfather must have envisioned in a daughter-in-law or granddaughter. The old bling glares and guards me.
This story is part of our issue on Remembrance, a time-traveling journey through the L.A. experience — past, present and future.
