My palms are beyond sweaty. I have no idea what I should be doing, and my mother is a horrible teacher. She screams, “For the love of God, Hailey, you need to drive like an athlete! Your sister is going to be so much better than this!” The car abruptly starts and stops with my novice toe-taps; I’m only fifteen years old and I desperately want to learn how to drive. So desperately that I even solicit help from my melodramatic mother. It really shouldn’t be this hard, I keep telling myself. It’s a wide open parking lot surrounded by a circular building. There aren’t even any other cars to hit. Suddenly I see flashing lights approaching us, and I am on the brink of tears. I learned how to drive in the Great Western Forum’s parking lot.
There were faces, oh too many faces to forget. Seventy thousand noses ran into seventy thousand upper lips, although I only saw fifty thousand smiles flashing about. Thirty thousand water bottles means 3,000 free waters, 20 of which I am personally responsible for picking up. Who needed to buy a shirt with some iconic rock legend’s face when I have 70,000 strangers playing facial-chess with my memory bank? Faces - the kind which popped out at you when you’re not looking, the face which scares you away from becoming a pill addict, the face which has you asking why meth-heads like Muse. There was no distinct face of Coachella, too many faces I would say, all of whom, at one moment or another, found their place, found their stage, in what seemed to be the Mecca of motion." - From Ryan Cavalier's "Mecca of Motion"
-- Ryan Cavalier
Photo: "Signposts in Indio" by Ryan Cavalier
PUBLISHED IN 1970, Joan Didion's, The White Album, is a scrapbook of the political/pop culture landscape of California of the late 60s and 70s. California, and Los Angeles in particular, was lucky to have such an eye turned on the length of its expanse. Deeply reported and even more deeply felt, Didion is able to convey not just political climate, social disarray and personal upheaval but the very texture of the era's tensions, fears, confusion and sense of possibility. As a journalist and essayist, Didion set not just a tone but presented a different template. She was a model for many aspiring reporters and writers who wanted to dig deeper and peer behind perception. Her stories had more than resonance they left an afterimage."We put 'Lay Lady Lay' on the record player, and 'Suzanne.' We went down to Melrose Avenue to see the Flying Burritos. There was a jasmine vine grown over the verandah of the big house on Franklin Avenue, and in the evenings the smell of jasmine came in through all the open doors and windows. I made bouillabaisse for people who did not eat meat. I imagined that my own life was simple and sweet, and sometimes it was, but there were odd things going around town. There were rumors. There were stories. Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable. This mystical flirtation with the idea of 'sin' -- this sense that it was possible to go 'too far,' and that many people were doing it -- was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969. A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community. The jitters were setting in. I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full. On August 9, 1969, I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law's swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski's house on Cielo Drive. The phone rang many times during the next hour. These early reports were garbled and contradictory. One caller would say hoods, the next would say chains. There were twenty dead, no twelve, ten, eighteen. Black masses were imagined, band bad trips blamed. I remember all of the day's misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised."
-- L.G.
I HAVE been thinking about the rich and varied pieces that you all brought in as examples of admired voices; the voices that continue to play in your heads. "By comparing writing and psychoanalysis, I'm implying that finding your own voice as a writer is in some ways like the tricky business of becoming an adult. For a writer, it's also a basic instinct like a bird marking its territory, though not straightforward or so musical. So how do you do it? First, you do what all young people do: you try on different personalities for size and you fall in love. Young writers, in fact, are a peculiarly promiscuous lot . . . . First the writer's voice dazzles you and you read everything you can lay your hands on. If that doesn't cure you, the sickness goes critical and you become obsessed with the beloved's whole take on life: what he did, where he went, even the kind of people he slept with. You don't want to be like him, you want to be him. In retrospect, infatuation is as embarrassing as promiscuity, but for the writer it is a necessary part of the weary process of growing up."
