Wings in Hollywood
M.I.A. played maybe forty minutes in a corner of the Jim Henson Studios while a crowd of very important-looking suits and very switched-on kids in full Adidas stood around trying to look like they attended this kind of thing every week. Some of them probably did. I shook Frank Ocean’s hand at some point—I don’t remember what I said, I remember he seemed completely unbothered by everything happening around him.
The reason we were all there was a white Smart car with black accents and red wings, designed by Jeremy Scott for Mercedes-Benz. Very Jeremy Scott—maximalist where the car was minimal, theatrical where the engineering was precise. He’d taken this deliberately modest urban vehicle and grafted his entire aesthetic onto it, and somehow the proportions worked. The car was absurd and committed. The man himself was the same: a genuine eccentric, not a performed one, talking to everyone with the same enthusiastic obliqueness.
Los Angeles was doing its usual thing—sunny in a way that felt slightly accusatory, with occasional wind that came from nowhere. The Jim Henson Studios sit in Hollywood proper, surrounded by that strange LA texture of apparent glamour and visible decay existing side by side without apology. The party drew an interesting crowd: a woman from ELLE I got talking to about hometowns, a Japanese guy named Kunzuu who’d left Tokyo and wasn’t going back, a Swiss woman named Thi Thu who was dreaming about the East Coast the way everyone not from the East Coast does.
Mark Hunter circled the room with his camera, cataloguing the whole collision. Watching him work is a reminder that the best party photographers aren’t documenting an event—they’re building a mythology in real time, and everyone present is cooperating with the myth.
We had one night. In the morning it was straight to the LA Auto Show, where larger and more serious automotive dreams were on display, most of them attended by women holding flyers and sunglasses with the resigned professionalism of people paid to smile for six hours. Then lunch in Santa Monica, then shopping, then a flight back. I flirted briefly with an American Apparel employee who was wearing something that required confidence I didn’t have. I tried some coconut milk from a Jamaican brand that tasted like exactly what you’d expect. I watched a Christmas angel in full costume trying to collect donations from people who had already decided not to give.
LA does this to you in twenty-four hours—fills you with the specific longing of a place you didn’t get enough of. The city is enormous and self-contained and indifferent to whether you’ve seen it properly. You leave knowing you’ve barely scratched it, and that’s more interesting than any place that gives itself up on the first visit.