| 1. Remember reading novels in sixth grade (say, Where the Red Fern Grows) and getting to the part where the author describes forest life or the look of the rickety old shed? And remember skipping those parts? Did you wonder if you'd get caught, if the teacher would quiz you on the skipped passages? Only she never did, she just ooh ed and ahh ed over them. Because you can't quiz on those parts—you can't ask, “Was it a shed of birch or pine?” So lush, so stark, so untestable. 2. Every time my man and I see a plastic bag blown high up against a cityscape, preferably wooshed like Marilyn's dress up from a subway grate, hopefully tossed against a plain brick wall, we always gush with satire: It's so beauuuutiful! We do this because of the film American Beauty, in which such sentiments are expressed without satire, but within a satirical context, so it's hard to tell. 3. All my landscapes are internal. 4. I saw American Beauty on the big screen while I was living in L.A. The movie had been described to me so many times that the frames were at once lush and flat. 5. Or perhaps it is just Los Angeles I'm remembering now—flat and overripe; American beauty but only in a satirical sort of way. 6. In Simulations, Baudrillard writes: Los Angeles is encircled by these “imaginary stations” which feed reality, reality-energy, to a town whose mystery is precisely that it is nothing more than a network of endless, unreal circulation—a town of fabulous proportions, but without space or dimensions. This is one of my favorite descriptions. 7. Baudrillard's point is that L.A. has achieved the status of the hyperreal. This is a comfort for those of us whose stay there slackened our grip on reality a bit. 8. For a long time I could not describe what it was like to be in Los Angeles. 9. When I think “hyperreal,” I think of how I replicate landscapes internally, how I feel them right below my ribcage, how I sling the nets of them over each new field of vision, superimpose them like a stack of film stills. 10. “Hyperreal” also makes me think that perhaps there is something sort of phosphorescent about me: for example, maybe internal landscapes glow in me like alien probes. 11. I am trying to simulate simultaneity. 12. I am also trying hard to be transparent but perhaps I am coming off as opaque or even phosphorescent. 13. Trick question: a) birch, b) pine, c) plastic bag, or d) none of the above? 14. Whenever we see “none of the above,” we are convinced more than we should be that that is the answer. |