Los Angeles and Sean de Lear

Los Angeles is covered in bruises. She's been pummeled and pounded and burned and trampled and despite popular opinion, let's call it out, she was limping to begin with. She'a fighting and clawing for her life.

They'll keep flocking there, they'll keep moving there, they will continue to because honestly it's possible to ignore the bruises and bask in the other parts of it. All the cliches and trends and shiny baubles. Erewhon and West Hollywood and matcha and the Teslas and the Ubers and the yoga and the bougainnvillea...

The magical takeaways are abundant, there always have been. I was born in Los Angeles and grew up there. Farmers Market and Venice Beach and Hollywood Forever and Gower Gulch and Honey Baked Ham and the Hollywood Sign and the Trail and the Field and the Swing and the waterfall so close up there, right off the 2, the architecture of West Adams, Larchmont and Watts Towers and the Chateau Marmont. The fact that parks and recs are undeniably the best in the world in Southern California. And the produce, or course. It's stunning. The things that grow with the water that's used, the orange trees.. The things they say, they're true.

'It's just easy.'

And it is. And it's not. Take a walk. It's discouraged, but walk. The unhoused population has never been more intense and dramatic. I've clocked it and watched it, it's the biggest elephant in the prettiest room that's ever been. The underpasses of the freeways are encampments, massive encampments of tents and unhoused people seeking refuge, every single underpass. When I was young there was a man with a shopping cart under the one on Vine above Hollywood. We were driving to a piano recital and my father stopped and helped the man, he was having trouble moving his cart up the curb. That's how rare it was, my father had pulled over to help the solitary man. That man now is literally thousands and thousands of men and women.

I went to the Eagle on Thursday pretty much right after the airport and Mariah Carey was there. Mariah Carey was at the Eagle but that's not the point, well maybe in a roundabout way it is. Mariah Carey waved from the DJ booth to the young straight young people who'd come for the party. Straight pretty stupid Los Angeles kids taking pictures of Mariah Carey as she waved, it wasn't clear that she knew where she even was. She was in a leather bar with all these straight kids and shouting, 'Happy Pride!' and all the kids after she disappeared kept saying, 'Wasn't that incredible?' and I was like, 'What part of it, the waving?'

Walking to the Eagle, up from Myra to Santa Monica Boulevard on one of those little side streets there were people, six I counted on one narrow short block, sleeping, lying down in the middle of the sidewalk. Scattered out in the middle of the sidewalk, they'd stopped and just laid down. Even the want for an alcove or a nestle into the side of a building wasn't there. The middle of the sidewalk. People in need just splayed out and young straight people going to one of the oldest gay bars in the city during gay pride just stepped around them. I did too. No one talked about it, they just went into the old leather bar with their straight pretty friends and watched Mariah Carey wave from the DJ booth and took pictures and talked about it like it was an incredible thing. I'd been on a plane all day and went back to my sisters house and went to bed.

We got up too early after not sleeping enough and my sisters and I went to a freeway overpass with signs. NO KINGS was basically our message. Elizabeth had done it with her friends and they brought a speaker that played songs we could dance to as we waved at the commuters below us. Some of them flipped us off from their cars as they drove by. Most honked and waved back, it felt good and futile at the same time. Both things are possible. That’s something I’ve been saying more and more.

The city was charged with the ICE sightings and show ups around downtown. There were protests that you could have ignored if you wanted to. That's what Los Angeles provides, the opportunity to check out. You don't have to know is what the city leads with. At my sisters house my nieces were buzzing around and taking care to help. They had been downtown and had offered triage basically to the protesters who'd been shot at and tear gassed. They got home late, my heroic nieces, tired and emotionally spent but they got up the next morning and did it again. They’re still doing it now, two weeks later. They commandeered the needs of the future and pitched in, I went to rehearsals with my band. I tried to settle into the humanitarian aid of my work. It's a stretch, I’m aware it ia. Is it enough to work and work and work at something for the people without getting paid? I'm being charitable and providing something but it doesn't seem like enough.

We did our soundcheck a couple days later at 4pm at the Regent on Fifth and Main and Jone and I walked after. We aimed on our walk for the epicenter of the protests and the rubber bullets and the tear gas that had happened over the weekend. We were conspicuous and healthy and white in the mix. There were more drugs and hungry people and sick people on those downtown Los Angeles streets than I've seen in a city before. I've been to a lot of cities in my life and I walk when I do. Later on when I spoke of this epidemic, people said, 'but what about San Francisco?' and it's true, the problems up there are also intense but Los Angeles feels like it's barely holding on. More than any city I've seen.

The show we were set to perform was a celebration of a life. Sean de Lear was a friend of over 30 years. We'd met in Los Angeles, he was part of a crew my sister hung out with going to shows early on, when I'd moved to San Francisco. He would wear evening gowns and mini dresses and wigs and big bobble earrings and heels too high and glamorous, it was part of the look. He was a Los Angeles hero in the way Los Angeles delivers, which is crippled and wrong and problematic and astute and with fervor and grace and klunky inconsistencies. He fronted a band called Glue and as a music fan he’d supported Imperial Teen relentlessly, it was why we were asked to take part in the documentary premiere that was being shown at the Regent. Sean de passed two years ago and was being honored in the way that dead people are. A release of his diary came out last year and he was being remembered in a very different way than he was when he was alive. We were there for it as a band. Lynn and Jone and I flew in from three different cities to meet Will and brought our instruments and worked on a set we would play catered to Sean de.

Sound check was done and we were dressing backstage after our walk when the show was cancelled. A curfew had been initiated on downtown because of the protests that had happened on Sunday. There was nothing to be done and nothing we could do. Within minutes we were all outside of the club, kicked out onto the sidewalk on Main Street with the hundreds of people who'd shown up for the screening. April and Nancy and Kelly and my sisters and Peter Alexander and Tequila Mockingbird and Ann Magnuson and Cali and Rene and Tawny and Howie and Tiffany and her crew and Dave Markey and honestly every person I'd known in Los Angeles. That was the takeaway, the reward, the pension fund and payoff of the night, because the show was gone. All the way we traveled and hours we rehearsed and setlist we made and outfits coordinated were scrapped. The celebration, like the protests and the mourning and the grievances were being stripped away from us. It's not how it happened, though.

The performance, yes, it didn't happen and that hurt but the celebration was in the air and it still is. The curfew shut down the logistics of the evening, put a babysitting time frame on a gesture that wasn't time-frameable, but the claps and the laughs and the hugs and the release of emotion around Sean de Lear's life and voice rang brightly on that ugly street. The joy couldn't be taken away.

Fuck ICE, fuck the administration, fuck them all for aiming to rob us of our beauty, our interiors, our voices and our heroes. Thirty four percent of Los Angeles are undocumented people. These are people I grew up with, people who join me and my family and friends in creating that tragic city and what it is and what it becomes. We are all in this together. The color and the character of a city shall not be removed. Sean de Lear was a hero, a voice, a pom pom of brightness and bold and proud and vibrancy. He existed and spawned from that place and his voice I can still hear, his horrible breath I can still smell. Do not let the thumbs oppress you, they are boneless and flabby nothings that flop and don't hold weight. We are who we are. We will never lose sight of our beauty, it is not in our nature.