I moved recently, and the back door of my new place opens up into a fenced-in parking lot. The fence is chain-link on two sides, and metal bars on the side facing the street. There’s an automatic gate for cars to get in and out. The bars are just far enough apart for small animals to be able to squeeze through.

I say this because, for the past two nights, I’ve been woken up by the shrieks of animals in distress. Last night the identifiable cries of a cat echoed through my apartment at three in the morning. I went out to my stoop to see if something was happening, and the cat kept wailing. After a minute, one came in from the street—the stray that hangs out in our neighborhood that my neighbor Donna sometimes cares for and calls Trashy. I heard no other animal sounds, leading me to believe that a person on the street had been attacking her. She saw me and laid on the ground, keeping her distance.

Tonight, or just now rather—I don’t know if five am qualifies as the night or not—a combination of wails and barking woke me up. Two vague shadows that could have been street dogs or coyotes had a raccoon cornered on Donna’s stoop, the raccoon trying to avoid getting caught, barking in a way I’ve never heard a creature sound. Two sounds came from the raccoon: a violent bark in self-defense and an excruciating cry whenever one of the dogs caught hold of it.

I didn’t know what to do and was frozen watching this animal trying to save itself. The raccoon somehow escaped the stoop and scampered across the lot, climbing the chain-link fence. The dogs followed and were able to climb it for a minute or two. The barking and howling continued but the dogs were not able to keep on the fence and eventually abandoned their attack, leaving the raccoon to try and balance on the top, gravely wounded. It tried to walk, it tried to hang on, it swayed as it attempted to head toward the street, its legs were giving out.

After a few minutes, the silhouette of the injured animal fell to the ground of the alley on the other side of the lot and hobbled into the shadows of the building across the way. I have no clue where the dogs went or how they got in and out of my lot. I am sure the raccoon is dead by now.

It’s just one of those things where like, my new place is a pretty amazing spot to live, but when I initially toured it I did not think to ask, How many nights a week am I going to have to listen to a small animal fight for its life? It’s a harrowing experience, to hear and/or see a living creature being attacked. The echoes of wailing fade but that resonant pain and violence lingers in the air. Nothing is comfortable. My cats are scared, huddled up on the bed.

I can handle many things, but stuff like this really gets to me. I know the way the world works—larger animals attack smaller ones, that’s life, et cetera. But confronting it in reality just reminds me of how we humans choose to do this sort of thing to ourselves. Raccoons and cats are kind of just subjugated to nature’s order, but humanity has invented its way out of that. We aren’t subject to violence, we choose it. I don’t have a great memory, but I’ve seen many forms of brutality—accidental deaths, street fights, drive-by shootings, defenseless beatings, murder—and every scene remains crystal clear in my head. I remember exactly where I was, the time of day, the weather. Even just a proximity to violence leaves a mark.

I don’t know, this post has turned into something else. Truth be told, I just am still stirred from hearing and watching that poor raccoon trying not to be torn to pieces on my neighbor’s steps. A little death in the morning tears a hole in the day, and I’ll just be off-balance for the rest of this one.

We’re having a mayoral election in LA this year and like most of the political world right now, it’s incredibly stupid. It’s another of those popular races that take up the news these days—a progressive democratic socialist, Nithya Raman, against an establishment liberal incumbent, Karen Bass. The establishment does not like this (surprise, surprise). Meanwhile, every time there’s news about this thing, I want to slam my head into the wall in disbelief that Raman isn’t running away with it.

Just today, Bass came out in favor of the potential merger between Paramount and Warner Brothers, even though just yesterday it was reported that the merger would cost Los Angeles over 10,000 total jobs between entertainment and the businesses it supports—around $2.8 billion in the local economy, gone. The Writers Guild immediately issued a statement tearing Bass apart.

There was also a kind of insane warehouse fire in Boyle Heights this year that saw no city declarations for evacuation—only Bass, who spent the first two days of the fire out of the city, telling residents the air was not dangerous. (That ‘safe’ air caused hundreds to suffer health affects directly from exposure.)

Of course, this is all after Bass botched her oversight of the wildfires that burned the Palisades and Altadena to the ground in January of 2025. Los Angeles has also seen cuts to city service budgets in order to give the LAPD more cash. (The LAPD already had an annual budget of over three billion dollars.)

While the criticism could continue, the point is this: All over the United States, in governments local and national alike, establishment democrats are being called out for their decades of stalled policy, lack of ambition, and corporate interests being prioritized over serving the public. What makes me crazy is that the general public is somewhere between fearful of and hateful toward the label of socialism, even if policies like upgrading infrastructure or improving conditions for schools are wildly popular.

Red Scare tactics have proven very successful in the United States, where even ‘liberal’ cities like LA have a substantial population that doesn’t want to lean too far to the left. (What that political ideology actually looks like is beyond me—but I’m pretty sure it’s more in alignment with fascism than humanism.) As conditions continue to rapidly decay while wealth consolidates in the hands of a few, I wonder at what point people will come around to the idea of listening to voices from the left—or if by that time there’ll be anything left to actually govern.

I’ve been to a few art openings recently and I’ve noticed this trend of oversized, low-resolution digital works that were basically just slapped together in Photoshop, printed and hung on name-brand gallery walls. They were aesthetically awful, but came with a multi-page artist statement full of buzz words.

There’s a problem in contemporary art where artist statements become the main focus of a work. Intention and the ability to communicate in a language style that represents intellectualized considerations seems to matter more than how a work actually looks. I’m not trying to advocate for style over substance, but this growing pattern where what someone writes about art against what they actually produce feels like it’s buying in to the capitalist ideology of a class-based society.

I was at a group show last week that was selling the booklet of artist statements for $15, which I thought was crazy. I like conceptual art and there’s certainly plenty of great work in the world produced from it, but I also think that using the concept as a basis for actually showing work is prioritizing the wrong side of the coin.

Yes, everyone has different tastes and there should be an opportunity for every idea to be on display, but it feels increasingly like there’s this undercurrent of MFA-types who are getting away with spending more time indulging in navel gazing than working through the trials of process that end up producing aesthetically pleasing work. (If something being aesthetically repulsive is part of the concept, then that’s fine, but if you simply won’t spend the time to try and make something and just paste bullshit together, that seems cheap.)

It just feels like some artists try to convey they went to an MFA program through how they talk about their work, which buys into the idea you need to go through the institution of higher education to become a gallery artist. It’s very reflective of how a caste system works and I think that should have nothing to do with art. Writing about a piece of art is a fine addendum, but the work should be able to speak for itself.

New Views (Hoover Street)

Sometimes I think poetry will be the only art form that resonates from this era, the only thing that lasts. When you have too much of something, it becomes less valuable—and right now, even if we were to exclude all the AI filling the internet with slop, the mere technology jump we’ve had over the last 30 years has created an excess of available art. When art was regional, restricted by geography and analog methods of reproduction, sharing it was an experience in and of itself that became an integral part of culture.

Now with billions of interconnected screens, experiencing something new, and possibly profound, isn’t so much a desire, opportunity, or possibility—but an expectation. (Even worse is that experience is now integrated directly into the mechanics of capitalism.) The part of us, as humans, that can be affected by the inspiration of another person (and therefore building a sense of connection at a deep, spiritual level) is being bulldozed by a grotesque combination of algorithms and advertisements.

Thanks Metro (Wilshire / Vermont)

Thus, I think poetry probably matters most in this moment. The best poets are able to connect the dots of the human experience emotionally and physically with both the observable and ethereal aspects of reality that I don’t think any machine could ever reproduce. The one thing humanity will always have advantage of over any coded invention is a soul, and though all art forms can represent that depth of feeling alive, the best poems can touch the surface of what it means to be human, as opposed to what it feels like.

(Maybe I’ve just been putting off watching that Mary Oliver documentary for too long, a mistake I’ll rectify this week.)

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

—Mary Oliver, “Praying”

What living in LA is actually like most of the time

Today at LACMA I stood next to Jeff Goldblum in front of a giant Matisse for a few minutes. I didn’t want to bother him (plus he had a couple people with him that looked like they were there to protect him from public nuisance), but it is sort of just a thing that happens here and is always funny when it does.