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a field guide to concrete - steal the plot of austerlitz, but instead of architecture in antwerp and Austerlitz we use Scratch who';s a sailor fascinated by concrete. big ships, starts in la, then bangkok, then tk then la, then to dubai where it ends with the future of concrete as glass -- the see through blocks of concrete.
Around the turns of the century I found myself back in Los Angeles, living at loose ends, filing meaningless articles for magazines and websites, trying to pick up the pieces of what I thought my life was going to be arrange them into the framework of what my life was. One day, on assignment for Wired, I found myself at TK, Frank Lloyd Wright's contribution to Los Angeles, perch atop a hill near Hollywood with clear views to the north of the Hollywood hills dotted with bungalows from a bygone area that sat now like twinkling eyes winking a hollow knowingness back at nothing and to the south the flat plains of downtown, the 10 freeway a snaking white and red glow cross west out toward Santa Monica and beyond it the sea, shrouded now in an orange gauze of fog, sunset and smog.
The smog had been tugging at my lungs ever since the long walkway up the hill, winding through the dry grass and holly bushes improbably planted beneath palms.
The lights around the edge of TK came on before the sun had finished sinking into the western nothingness, lighting the house in a glow of cold white light that must have glowed for miles, had I been elsewhere able to see it from a great distance.
I resolved to chase down a woman I had thought of for years as a back up plan, a link somehow back to that point at which I felt I had last had a firm grip on where I was going and what I was doing, though on further reflect I resolved that that was not strictly true, that the truth was more complex and more simple at the same time. Simple to say: I went with plan b because plan a was off the table and more complex because I did not allow myself to realize this until much later.
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