Q+A with John Wilson
Had the opportunity last night to see an advance screening of The History of Concrete featuring a brief Q&A session with John Wilson afterward. I’ve written before about what a joy theatrical experiences are in Los Angeles, and this certainly was no different. Waiting in line outside the theater beforehand, a guy drove by yelling, “Fuck yeah John Wilson!” out his window. A Gen-Z woman on the corner waiting for some tacos yelled toward us, “I’m jealous of every single person waiting in that line.” It was a good vibe.
Some would argue that the weather and the water are what makes living in LA worth the steep cost of living. Some might say that there’s a lot of opportunity. Some would say there’s just a lot going on. None would be wrong. It’s so expansive, both literally and metaphorically, that you can really just take what you want and leave the rest. While it’s probably nice to be a movie star and live in such a place without having to care about gas prices, the city offers up plenty for people who aren’t in the one percent. It’s still a good place to just be.
Alone in Virgil Village
Yet gas prices are a concern for many. There are more than a couple crises facing the city right now being debated in the lingering mayoral election (go Nithya). But the larger, national issues that a mayor has no power over are hitting hard here.
I was driving down Virgil and passed a Sinclair gas station with a line into the street of waiting cars because they were selling gas for $5.79 a gallon—which is the cheapest I’ve seen in the past few weeks. As the threads of the economy are being pulled apart by profiteers everywhere, I kind of wonder how this will play out in such a sprawling, only-kind-of-interconnected metropolis with an outsized police budget.
It does feel like we’re in the last moments of musical chairs, except there are like two chairs and three hundred people trying to grab a seat. There’s no telling what chaos will ensue when the dominoes start to fall at scale, and it’ll probably hit different everywhere. A city like San Francisco, condensed and contained by geography, will respond to public discontent with measures that won’t work in LA’s sprawl. That discontent will be difficult to measure as well, because class solidarity doesn’t really begin to take hold until a large majority of people can’t afford to just be where they’re at.
So I’m trying to enjoy these fun little movie screenings while I can, because it certainly feels like this is all going really bad and is going to get much worse in the not-too-distant future, and I have no clue what living in a city like Los Angeles is going to be like if gas hits ten bucks a gallon and all the restaurants shutter, but I can’t imagine it will be the fun kind of vibe I enjoyed last night.
