from Wilshire District to Hollywood to Santa Monica to
Venice Beach. My friends and I listened not only to Joni
Mitchell and Laura Nyro, but to Aretha Franklin and Nina
Simone. We held life drawing classes, we read The Diaries of Anais Nin and the novels of D.H. Lawrence. We
watched films as recondite as those of Kenneth Anger
and Maya Deren; we saw Bertolucci's The Conformist
and Last Tango in Paris. We hankered after Paris; we
knew almost nothing of New York, but passionately we
set about creating moods and fragments of those cities
in our city which was not one.
(Two darkly beautifying mirrors of Los Angeles from about
1973 do recall themselves to me now. Roman Polanski's thriller, Chinatown, one of the most perfect films ever
made, showed us the corrupt, seductive scenery of L.A.
in the 1930s. Joan Didion's novel, Play It As It Lays, like
Polanski's work, portrayed a lost, beautiful anti-heroine,
this one from the 1970s, driving the freeways to distraction.)
In this milieu of very young autodidacts I had a special
friend who later became my roommate in a charming
1920s guesthouse we rented in Westwood from 1974
Jim Bassler, Detail of Net with Ikat 48" x 32" linen, silk, indigo ikat warp; 2010
HYLAND
