La Beach Quotes

We were miraculous. We were beach creatures. We had treasures in our pockets and each other on our skin.

I know," I say. "It sucks. Let's go get tacos and sit on the beach.

A great man once wrote, "Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and blows up the bonfire." If only I were as eloquent as Mr. de la Rochefoucauld...I miss you, I miss you, I miss you. And I want you. And I need your kiss. And your touch on my skin like a man needs water. Always.

I hope you don't get in trouble," I said, but how could trouble find us? We were miraculous. We were beach creatures. We had treasures in our pockets and each other on our skin.

Devotees who say that À la recherche du temps perdu reminds them of a cathedral should be asked which cathedral they mean. It reminds me of a sandcastle that the tide reached before its obsessed constructor could finish it; but he knew that would happen, or else why build it on a beach?

There are two Venices I know about and one of them is a hotel in Vegas. The other is an L.A. beach where pretty girls walk their dogs while wearing as little as possible and mutant slabs of tanned, posthuman beef sip iced steroid lattes and pump iron until their pecs are the size of Volkswagens.

Mom and I were walking onteh beach and I was explaining to her how I wantd to "GET OVER all my INSECURITIES" and "La La... La..".... and she looked at me and said "Sabrina, does anyone realy feel good about themselves for MORE than 5 minutes?" We both laughed. I was releaved to know she felt that way becuae she seems SO graceful, calm and beautiful, which she is.. but also full of so much more. Auestions, doubts + WONDER. I think that if we can aim for just five minutes a day of complete acceptance of ourselves, we are doing very well!

That was exactly what Tabucchi was suggesting with his title ("La Nostalgie du Possible") --that we can pass right by something very important: love, a job, moving to another city or another country. Or another life. 'Pass by' and at the same time be 'so close' that sometimes, while in that state of melancholy that is akin to hypnosis, we can, in spite of everything, manage to grab little fragments of what might have been. Like catching snatches of a far-off radio frequency. The message is obscure, yet by listening carefully you can still catch snippets of the soundtrack of the life that never was. You hear sentences that were never actually said, you hear footsteps echoing in places you've never been to, you can make out the surf on a beach whose sand you have never touched. You hear the laughter and loving words of a woman though nothing ever happened between you. The idea of an affiar with her had crossed your mind. Perhaps she would have liked that --probably, in fact-- but nothing every happened. For some unknown reason, we never gave in to the exquisite vertigo that you feel when you move those few centimeters towards the face of the other for the first kiss.

Franny stepped on a piece of glass," Alex explains. James makes a little clucking noise of sympathy. Julia says, "What are you guys doing here?" "I decided a day at the beach sounded like fun, so James drove us here to meet up with you guys." Marie turns to Harry. "I don't see [i] you [/i] helping out with this operation." "I'm providing moral support," he says airily. "It's a very challenging job." "You trying to be moral? I'm sure it is," she counters archly.

The time came to put Iris Duarte back on the plane. It was a morning flight which made it difficult. I was used to rising at noon; it was a fine cure for hangovers and would add 5 years to my life. I felt no sadness while driving her to L.A. International. The sex had been fine; there had been laughter. I could hardly remember a more civilized time, neither of us making any demands, yet there had been warmth, it had not been without feeling, dead meat coupled with dead meat. I detested that type of swinging, the Los Angeles, Hollywood, Bel Air, Malibu, Laguna Beach kind of sex. Strangers when you meet, strangers when you part—a gymnasium of bodies namelessly masturbating each other. People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or to love. So they became swingers. The dead fucking the dead. There was no gamble or humor in their game—it was corpse fucking corpse. Morals were restrictive, but they were grounded on human experience down through the centuries. Some morals tended to keep people slaves in factories, in churches and true to the State. Other morals simply made good sense. It was like a garden filled with poisoned fruit and good fruit. You had to know which to pick and eat, which to leave alone.

Cuando encuentres tu razón para vivir, aferrate a ella. Nunca la dejes ir, incluso si eso significa quemar otros puentes en el camino.

Uno tiene muchos sueños, pero el tiempo pasa y te haces viejo, y los sueños se convierten en porcelanas a las que miras y quitas el polvo y nada más.

Just like an ocean can be pounding the beach with waves yet be perfectly calm at its depths, our feelings may look destructive, or inappropriate, or negative, when really they are expressions of something incredibly hopeful coming from deep within us. So, on some days, an angry outburst might really be a wave of creative energy coursing through you. Fight for your rights! Or that tremor of grief could be the stirring of your most tender compassion. What looks like fear might actually be excitement.

So I returned to the northern strip of Miami Beach, the valley just far enough north to muffle the piercing South Beach celebratory voices, and just far enough south to dull the glittering lights of the Sunny Isles high rises, and I went to sleep in the city where exhausted people lived exhausted lives, but never stopped once to even ponder sleep--to even dream sleep an option, in the country that breeds ghosts, where the people can't understand why everything real always passes right through their arms. There was so much life out there for all of us, but so few would ever touch it. God, how I wanted to feel.

L.A. was the John Wayne Gacy of cities, smothering its children with a toxic beach towel of poisoned air, mindless growth, and bad values.

«El mal karma es como una termita —me había dicho Judie una vez—. Deja que entre en tu mente y te comerá vivo.»

We were beach creatures. We had treasures in our pockets and each other on our skin.

There’d been nobody to comfort me and, therefore, no reason to cry.

But how could trouble ever find us? We were miraculous. We were beach creatures. We had treasure in our pockets and each other on our skin.

La vida es corta y estoy cansado de perderla.

My insides warmed, and to my dismay, the unfamiliar prick of tears in my eyes startled me. I hadn’t cried in years. There’d been nobody to comfort me and, therefore, no reason to cry. But

It's June and the city is ripe with meaningless fecal heat. It will be a different kind of hot in LA, the kind that made the Beach Boys all tan and giddy, a heat that doesn't harass you in the shade.

We're at a dinner party in an apartment on Rue Paul Valéry between Avenue Foch and Avenue Victor Hugo and it's all rather subdued since a small percentage of the invited guests were blown up in the Ritz yesterday. For comfort people went shopping, which is understandable even if they bought things a little too enthusiastically. Tonight it's just wildflowers and white lilies, just W's Paris bureau chief, Donna Karan, Aerin Lauder, Ines de la Fressange and Christian Louboutin, who thinks I snubbed him and maybe I did but maybe I'm past the point of caring. Just Annette Bening and Michael Stipe in a tomato-red wig. Just Tammy on heroin, serene and glassy-eyed, her lips swollen from collagen injections, beeswax balm spread over her mouth, gliding through the party, stopping to listen to Kate Winslet, to Jean Reno, to Polly Walker, to Jacques Grange. Just the smell of shit, floating, its fumes spreading everywhere. Just another conversation with a chic sadist obsessed with origami. Just another armless man waving a stump and whispering excitedly, "Natasha's coming!" Just people tan and back from the Ariel Sands Beach Club in Bermuda, some of them looking reskinned. Just me, making connections based on fear, experiencing vertigo, drinking a Woo-Woo.

…Quando osò dirle che forse non riusciva a “cogliere” il punto del rock ‘n roll e quindi non si vedeva perché insistere, Florence dovette ammettere di non capire la necessità delle percussioni. Con brani così elementari, in larga misura semplici quattro tempi, che bisogno c’era di tutto quel battere e martellare? A che scopo, quando già c’era la chitarra ritmica, e spesso anche il pianoforte? Se ai musicisti serviva sentire il tempo, non potevano procurarsi un metronomo? A quel punto perché non inserire un batterista anche nell’Ennismore Quartet? Edward la baciò e le disse che era la persona più fuori moda di tutto l’Occidente. - Eppure mi ami, - fece lei. - No, perciò ti amo.

On one DR trip you drive up to La Vega and put her name out there. You show a picture, too, like a private eye. It is of the two of you, the one time you went to the beach, to Sandy Hook. Both of you are smiling. Both of you blinked.

Cuando él sugirió que ella, en realidad, no “conectaba” con el rock and roll y que no había motivo para que siguiera intentándolo, ella admitió que lo que no aguantaba era la percusión. Cuando las canciones eran tan elementales, casi todas un simple cuatro por cuatro, ¿por qué aquel incesante golpeteo, estrépito y repiqueteo para llevar el compás? ¿A qué venía, cuando ya había una guitarra rítmica y a menudo un piano? Si los músicos necesitaban oír los compases, ¿por qué no utilizaban un metrónomo?

Honolulu represents the worst of all that. Yet every time I fly in, anticipation begins to build just about the time I think I'll go crazy, stuffed into a narrow airliner seat between honeymooners and retired couples looking for Shangri-La. I'd like to tell them to hold on tight to that person beside them, because that's where they'll find paradise. It is not a beach or a palm tree grove or the brim of a smoking black crater. It's a plateau inside their hearts, one that can only be reached in tandem.

According to the L.A. news, the explosion at the Santa Monica beach had been caused when a crazy kidnapper fired a shotgun at a police car. He accidentally hit a gas main that had ruptured during the earthquake. This crazy kidnapper (a.k.a. Ares) was the same man who had abducted me and two other adolescents in New York and brought us across country on a ten-day odyssey of terror. Poor little Percy Jackson wasn’t an international criminal after all. He’d caused a commotion on that Greyhound bus in New Jersey trying to get away from his captor (and afterward, witnesses would even swear they had seen the leather-clad man on the bus—“Why didn’t I remember him before?”). The crazy man had caused the explosion in the St. Louis Arch. After all, no kid could’ve done that. A concerned waitress in Denver had seen the man threatening his abductees outside her diner, gotten a friend to take a photo, and notified the police. Finally, brave Percy Jackson (I was beginning to like this kid) had stolen a gun from his captor in Los Angeles and battled him shotgun-to-rifle on the beach. Police had arrived just in time. But in the spectacular explosion, five police cars had been destroyed and the captor had fled. No fatalities had occurred. Percy Jackson and his two friends were safely in police custody.

It infuriates him, this killing, this death. Infuriating that this is what we’re known for now, drug cartels and slaughter. This my city of Avenida 16 Septembre, the Victoria Theater, cobblestone streets, the bullring, La Central, La Fogata, more bookstores than El Paso, the university, the ballet, garapiñados, pan dulce, the mission, the plaza, the Kentucky Bar, Fred’s—now it’s known for these idiotic thugs. And my country, Mexico—the land of writers and poets—of Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, Elena Garro, Jorge Volpi, Rosario Castellanos, Luis Urrea, Elmer Mendoza, Alfonso Reyes—the land of painters and sculptors—Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Gabriel Orozco, Pablo O’Higgins, Juan Soriano, Francisco Goitia—of dancers like Guillermina Bravo, Gloria and Nellie Campobello, Josefina Lavalle, Ana Mérida, and composers—Carlos Chávez, Silvestre Revueltas, Agustín Lara, Blas Galindo—architects—Luis Barragán, Juan O’Gorman, Tatiana Bilbao, Michel Rojkind, Pedro Vásquez—wonderful filmmakers—Fernando de Fuentes, Alejandro Iñárritu, Luis Buñuel, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro—actors like Dolores del Río, “La Doña” María Félix, Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, Salma Hayek—now the names are “famous” narcos—no more than sociopathic murderers whose sole contribution to the culture has been the narcocorridas sung by no-talent sycophants. Mexico, the land of pyramids and palaces, deserts and jungles, mountains and beaches, markets and gardens, boulevards and cobblestoned streets, broad plazas and hidden courtyards, is now known as a slaughter ground. And for what? So North Americans can get high.

Hacía años que mis labios no habían pronunciado una oración. Hacía años que no me acordaba de Dios, pero en aquel momento fue todo lo que se me ocurrió. Pedirle perdón por haberme olvidado de Él y pedirle un favor especial: que me diera tiempo, solo un poco más de tiempo para llegar junto a mis hijos.

Obama. Kathy was becoming obsessed with the numbness, the way the news cycle was making her incapable of action, a beached somnolent whale. No one could put anything together, that was the problem. She had recently read an article that listed all the reasons why monarch butterflies were dying, before equations were too difficult, you knew intellectually, but you never really saw the consequences, since they tended to impact other poorer people in other poorer places. There is no away to throw things to didn’t quite work as an axiom if you were a species that depended so stubbornly on the evidence of its eyes.

That Sunday, the sun floated bright and hot over the Los Angeles basin, pushing people to the beaches and the parks and into backyard pools to escape the heat. The air buzzed with the nervous palsy it gets when the wind freight-trains in from the deserts, dry as bone, and cooking the hillsides into tar-filled kindling that can snap into flames hot enough to melt an auto body.

CAN I BE PUERTO RICAN? If I was born in Brooklyn? If I’ve never been to Puerto Rico? If I mix my English with my Spanish? If I cop quenepas from the Chino spot? If I don’t know the Boricua national anthem? If I can’t name our national heroes? Can I be Puerto Rican? If the closest I’ve come to the beach is la pompa? If I can’t dance salsa? If all I got is a feeling? Can I be Puerto Rican? If all I got is a feeling?

In short, this summer of 1984 should not have been any different. There is always the large bay of Rivedoux, the small cliffs of La Flotte, the flat beaches of Bois-Plage, the marches of Ars, the rocky point of Saint-Clement. The hollyhocks in alleys, pine needles crunching underfoot in the forest of Trousse-Chemise, the green oaks under which one goes to find shade. The fortifications of Vauban to protect me from imaginary invasions, the open-air abbey that always terrified me at night, and the Whales lighthouse, whose spinning light makes me dizzy. Always the same boys my age; before we went to the carousel, now we go to the bar. Everything is in its place, everything reassures me. Except that I miss Thomas. I miss him terribly. And that changes everything. Have you noticed how the most beautiful landscapes lose their brilliance as soon as our thoughts prevent us from seeing them properly?

—Ojalá tuviéramos un poco más de tiempo... Me encantaría ir en bici por calles desiertas contigo, gastar cien dólares en un salón recreativo y llevarte a Staten Island en el transbordador para que probaras mis helados preferidos. —Me gustaría ir a Jones Beach, correr por la playa y entrar en el agua contigo, hacer tonterías con nuestros amigos bajo la lluvia. Pero también me gustaría disfrutar de noches tranquilas y charlar contigo mientras miramos una película mala.

San Francisco always felt like an island to me, surrounded by the mythical East Bay with its restaurants and parks and North Bay with its wealth and its redwoods. South of the city was where our dead were buried—but not my mother, whose ashes returned to the ocean that killed her, which was also the ocean she loved. South of that were little beach towns, and then Silicon Valley and Stanford. But the people, everyone I knew, everyone I’d ever known, all lived in the city.

One of my favorite album covers is On the Beach. Of course that was the name of a movie and I stole it for my record, but that doesn't matter. The idea for that cover came like a bolt from the blue. Gary and I traveled around getting all the pieces to put it together. We went to a junkyard in Santa Ana to get the tail fin and fender from a 1959 Cadillac, complete with taillights, and watched them cut it off a Cadillac for us, then we went to a patio supply place to get the umbrella and table. We picke up the bad polyester yellow jacket and white pants at a sleazy men's shop, where we watched a shoplifter getting caught red-handed and busted. Gary and I were stoned on some dynamite weed and stood there dumbfounded watching the bust unfold. This girl was screaming and kicking! Finally we grabbed a local LA paper to use as a prop. It had this amazing headline: Sen. Buckley Calls For Nixon to Resign. Next we took the palm tree I had taken around the world on the Tonight's the Night tour. We then placed all of these pieces carefully in the sand at Santa Monica beach. Then we shot it. Bob Seidemann was the photographer, the same one who took the famous Blind Faith cover shot of the naked young girl holding the airplane. We used the crazy pattern from the umbrella insides for the inside of the sleeve that held the vinyl recording. That was the creative process at work. We lived for that, Gary and I, and we still do.

I guess when you spend a life riding waves—knowing that the ocean is heartless and millions of times stronger than you are, but still trusting that you’re skilled enough or brave enough or charmed enough to survive it—you become indebted to the people who don’t make it. Someone always dies. It’s just a matter of who, and when. You remember her with songs, with shrines of shells and flowers and beach glass, with an arm around her daughter and, later, daughters of your own named after her. She

After his initial homecoming week, after he'd been taken to a bunch of sights by his cousins, after he'd gotten somewhat used to the scorching weather and the surprise of waking up to the roosters and being called Huascar by everybody (that was his Dominican name, something else he'd forgotten), after he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves, the whisper that says You do not belong, after he'd gone to about fifty clubs and because he couldn't dance salsa, merengue, or bachata had sat and drunk Presidentes while Lola and his cousins burned holes in the floor, after he'd explained to people a hundred times that he'd been separated from his sister at birth, after he spent a couple of quiet mornings on his own, writing, after he'd given out all his taxi money to beggars and had to call his cousin Pedro Pablo to pick him up, after he'd watched shirtless shoeless seven-year-olds fighting each other for the scraps he'd left on his plate at an outdoor cafe, after his mother took them all to dinner in the Zona Colonial and the waiters kept looking at their party askance (Watch out, Mom, Lola said, they probably think you're Haitian - La unica haitiana aqui eres tu, mi amor, she retorted), after a skeletal vieja grabbed both his hands and begged him for a penny, after his sister had said, You think that's bad, you should see the bateys, after he'd spent a day in Bani (the camp where La Inca had been raised) and he'd taken a dump in a latrine and wiped his ass with a corn cob - now that's entertainment, he wrote in his journal - after he'd gotten somewhat used to the surreal whirligig that was life in La Capital - the guaguas, the cops, the mind-boggling poverty, the Dunkin' Donuts, the beggars, the Haitians selling roasted peanuts at the intersections, the mind-boggling poverty, the asshole tourists hogging up all the beaches, the Xica de Silva novelas where homegirl got naked every five seconds that Lola and his female cousins were cracked on, the afternoon walks on the Conde, the mind-boggling poverty, the snarl of streets and rusting zinc shacks that were the barrios populares, the masses of niggers he waded through every day who ran him over if he stood still, the skinny watchmen standing in front of stores with their brokedown shotguns, the music, the raunchy jokes heard on the streets, the mind-boggling poverty, being piledrived into the corner of a concho by the combined weight of four other customers, the music, the new tunnels driving down into the bauxite earth [...]

A long time back, I used to listen to a song by Dennis Wilson. It was from Pacific Ocean Blue, the album he made after The Beach Boys fell apart. There was a line in it I loved: Loneliness is a very special place. As a teenager, sitting on my bed on autumn evenings, I used to imagine that place as a city, perhaps at dusk, when everyone turns homeward and the neon flickers into life. I recognised myself even then as one of its citizens and I liked how Wilson claimed it; how he made it sound fertile as well as frightening.

Christmas, 1492…. Unfortunately, on Christmas morning 1492 Columbus' ship, the Santa María, ran aground on the northern coast of what is now Haiti. Not having any way to refloat her, the crew off-loaded the provisions and equipment from the ship before she broke up. For protection they then built a flimsy fortification on the beach, calling it “La Navidad.” With the consent of the local Indian Chief, Columbus left behind 39 men with orders to establish a settlement, and appointed Diego de Arana, a cousin of his mistress Beatriz, as the Governor.

How many miles have we done in her?” she asked. “More than a hundred and fifty thousand,” said Arthur. “Have you checked we’ve got enough fuel?” “She’s as ready for us as we are for her.” “Then let’s go.” Arthur opened the boot and placed the suitcases inside. Then, from the workbench, he picked up the hosepipe and, using parcel tape, attached one end to the exhaust pipe and the other to a crack in the side window, padding the rest of the gap with an old beach towel. Finally, he climbed into the van to join June and turned on the ignition. “Where do you fancy going then?” June asked as the engine chugged. “We never made it to Barcelona and I always wanted to climb the steps up La Sagrada Família. It looks so beautiful in photographs.” “Then let’s go there first.” She reached out her hand to entwine her fingers around his. His eyes welled as he offered his wife a grin as broad as any he had given her during their lifetime together. Then he wiped the tears away and closed his eyes. “It’s you and me to the end, girl,” Arthur whispered. “You and me,” she repeated, and he could smell her apple blossom shampoo as she leaned her head onto his shoulder. And together, they set off on their final adventure together.

Te caches-tu de tes enfants et d’Estelle pour me lire, aux toilettes, la nuit très tard, dès qu’ils ont le dos tourné ? Ou bien tiens-tu Monsieur comme on tient un SAS, négligemment, les doigts enduits d’huile solaire ? Suis-je déjà cornée, craquelante du sable que tes bambins m’ont envoyé entre les pages en jouant au beach-ball ? Ai-je enfin réussi, à ma manière, à pénétrer un peu de vos vacances en famille ? Est-ce que tu as peur ? Quelle est la part de haine dans toutes les émotions, contradictoires sans doute, que je t’inspire de manière – disons – posthume ? Est-ce que tu te souviens de tout ? Y compris de ce jour ?

going anyplace outside L.A. Just bothering to go someplace other than Santa Monica was incomprehensible when I could just wake up every morning at dawn, yank on my bathing suit still on the floor from the night before when I’d yanked it off, hurry down to Hollywood and Gower to catch the 91S bus down Hollywood Boulevard and then Santa Monica Boulevard to Beverly Hills and transfer to the 83 going straight out to the beach untilfinally there I’d be, at 8:00 A.M. or so, able to feel the cool sand get warm as the morning sun glazed over the tops of the palm trees up on the palisades while waves of the ocean crashed down day after day so anyone could throw himself into the tides and bodysurf throughout eternity.

No, I’d open a refuge for mothers. A retreat. Concrete 1970s brutalism, an anti-domestic architecture without flounces. Something low with big windows and wide corridors, carpets to deaden sound. There will be five or six rooms off the corridor, each with a wall of glass and sliding doors looking on to a cold, grey beach. Each room has a single bed in the corner, a table and chair. You may bring your laptop but there is no internet access and no telephone. There are books with a body count of zero and no suffering for anyone under the age of eight. A cinema where everything you wanted to see in the last eight years is shown at a time that allows you to have an early night afterwards. And the food, the kind of food you’re pleased to have eaten as well as pleased to eat, is made by a chef, a childless male chef, and brought to your room. You may ask him for biscuits at any moment of the day or night, send your mug back because you dislike the shape of the handle, and change your mind after ordering dinner. And there is a swimming pool, lit from below in a warm, low-ceilinged room without windows, which may be used by one mummy at a time to swim herself into dream. Oh, fuck it, I am composing a business plan for a womb with a view. So what? I’ll call it Hôtel de la Mère and the only real problem is childcare. Absent, children cause guilt and anxiety incompatible with the mission of the Hôtel; present, they prevent thought or sleep, much more swimming and the consumption of biscuits. We need to turn them off for a few days, suspend them like computers. Make them hibernate. You can’t uninvent children any more than you can uninvent the bomb.

After his initial homecoming week, after he'd been taken to a bunch of sights by his cousins, after he'd gotten somewhat used to the scorching weather and the surprise of waking up to the roosters and being called Huascar by everybody (that was his Dominican name, something else he'd forgotten), after he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves, the whisper that says You do not belong, after he'd gone to about fifty clubs and because he couldn't dance salsa, merengue, or bachata had sat and drunk Presidentes while Lola and his cousins burned holes in the floor, after he'd explained to people a hundred times that he'd been separated from his sister at birth, after he spent a couple of quiet mornings on his own, writing, after he'd given out all his taxi money to beggars and had to call his cousin Pedro Pablo to pick him up, after he'd watched shirtless shoeless seven-year-olds fighting each other for the scraps he'd left on his plate at an outdoor cafe, after his mother took them all to dinner in the Zona Colonial and the waiters kept looking at their party askance (Watch out, Mom, Lola said, they probably think you're Haitian - La unica haitiana aqui eres tu, mi amor, she retorted), after a skeletal vieja grabbed both his hands and begged him for a penny, after his sister had said, You think that's bad, you should see the bateys, after he'd spent a day in Bani (the camp where La Inca had been raised) and he'd taken a dump in a latrine and wiped his ass with a corn cob - now that's entertainment, he wrote in his journal - after he'd gotten somewhat used to the surreal whirligig that was life in La Capital - the guaguas, the cops, the mind-boggling poverty, the Dunkin' Donuts, the beggars, the Haitians selling roasted peanuts at the intersections, the mind-boggling poverty, the asshole tourists hogging up all the beaches, the Xica de Silva novelas where homegirl got naked every five seconds that Lola and his female cousins were cracked on, the afternoon walks on the Conde, the mind-boggling poverty, the snarl of streets and rusting zinc shacks that were the barrios populares, the masses of niggers he waded through every day who ran him over if he stood still, the skinny watchmen standing in front of stores with their brokedown shotguns, the music, the raunchy jokes heard on the streets, the mind-boggling poverty, being piledrived into the corner of a concho by the combined weight of four other customers, the music, the new tunnels driving down into the bauxite earth,

When I saw them on the beach, perfectly tanned, or when I watched them twirling in the waves, I grasped the transcendental element in surf music. It was all about freedom from the rules of life, the whole of your being concentrated in the act of shooting the tube. For several years after that trip to L.A. I subscribed to Surfer magazine, and I practiced the Atlantic Ocean version of the sport, though only with my body and on rather tame waves. With my voice muffled by the water I would shout a line from “Surf City.” To me, this was the ultimate fantasy of plenty: “two girls for every boy,” except I sang it as “Two girls for every goy.” Fortunately, Brian has survived the schizoid tendencies that seemed close to the surface when I met him. He’s still performing and writing songs. But it was his emotional battle and the intersection of that struggle with the acid-dosed aesthetic of the sixties that produced his most astonishing music.

Unfortunately, on Christmas morning 1492 the Santa María ran aground on the northern coast of what is now Haiti. Not having any way to refloat her, the crew off-loaded the provisions and equipment from the ship before she broke up. For protection they then built a flimsy fortification on the beach, calling it “La Navidad.” With the consent of the local Indian Chief, Columbus left behind 39 men with orders to establish a settlement, and appointed Diego de Arana, a cousin of his mistress Beatriz, as the Governor. On January 16, 1493, Columbus left Navidad and sailed for Portugal and Spain on the Niña. Everything went well until the two remaining ships, the Niña and the Pinta, became separated from each other. Columbus was convinced that the captain of the faster Pinta would get back to Spain first, thereby garnering all the glory by telling lies about him and his discoveries. On March 4th, a violent storm off the Azores forced him to take refuge in Lisbon. Both ships, amazingly enough, arrived there safely. A week later, Columbus continued on to Palos, Spain, on the Gulf of Cádiz, from whence he had started. Finally, on March 15th, he arrived in Barcelona. It seems that all’s well that ends well, because he was hailed a hero and news of his discovery of new lands spread throughout Europe like wildfire.

So to avoid the twin dangers of nostalgia and despairing bitterness, I'll just say that in Cartagena we'd spend a whole month of happiness, and sometimes even a month and a half, or even longer, going out in Uncle Rafa's motorboat, La Fiorella, to Bocachica to collect seashells and eat fried fish with plantain chips and cassava, and to the Rosary Islands, where I tried lobster, or to the beach at Bocagrande, or walking to the pool at the Caribe Hotel, until we were mildly burned on our shoulders, which after a few days started peeling and turned freckly forever, or playing football with my cousins, in the little park opposite Bocagrande Church, or tennis in the Cartagena Club or ping-pong in their house, or going for bike rides, or swimming under the little nameless waterfalls along the coast, or making the most of the rain and the drowsiness of siesta time to read the complete works of Agatha Christie or the fascinating novels of Ayn Rand (I remember confusing the antics of the architect protagonist of The Fountainhead with those of my uncle Rafael), or Pearl S. Buck's interminable sagas, in cool hammocks strung up in the shade on the terrace of the house, with a view of the sea, drinking Kola Roman, eating Chinese empanadas on Sundays, coconut rice with red snapper on Mondays, Syrian-Lebanese kibbeh on Wednesdays, sirloin steak on Fridays and, my favourite, egg arepas on Saturday mornings, piping hot and brought fresh from a nearby village, Luruaco, where they had the best recipe.

Each generation identifies with a small group of people said to have lived lives exemplifying the vices and virtues of that generation. If one were to choose a trial lawyer whose life reflected the unique characteristics of America’s “Wild West” of a criminal justice system in the latter half of the Twentieth Century, that person likely would be my father. New York City of the 1960s until the turn of the 21st century was the world’s epicenter of organized and white-collar crime. During those four decades, the most feared mafia chiefs, assassins, counterfeiters, Orthodox Jewish money launderers, defrocked politicians of every stripe, and Arab bankers arriving in the dead of night in their private jets, sought the counsel of one man: my father, Jimmy La Rossa. Once a Kennedy-era prosecutor, Brooklyn-born Jimmy La Rossa became one of the greatest criminal trial lawyers of his day. He was the one man who knew where all of the bodies were buried, and everyone knew it. It seemed incomprehensible that Jimmy would one day just disappear from New York. Forever. After stealing my dying father from New York Presbyterian Hospital to a waiting Medevac jet, the La Rossa Boys, as we became known, spent the next five years in a place where few would look for two diehard New Yorkers: a coastal town in the South Bay of Los Angeles, aptly named Manhattan Beach. While I cooked him his favorite Italian dishes and kept him alive using the most advanced medical equipment and drugs, my father and I documented our notorious and cinematic life together as equal parts biography and memoir. This is our story.

Driving alone along the Northway, feeling more haunted than I really had the courage to be, I cried in the car the way one does when leaving someone in a bitter and unbearable way. I don't know why I should have picked that time to grieve, to summon everything before me--my own monsterousness, my two-bit affections, three-bit, four. It could have been sooner, it could have been later, it could have been one of the hot, awkward funerals (my grandmother's, LaRoue's, my father who one morning in Vero Beach clutched his fiery arm and fell dead off his chair mouthing to my mother, "Help. Heart. I love you" --how every death makes the world a lonelier place), it oculd have been some other time when the sun wasn't so bright, and there was no news on the raido, and my arms were not laced in a bird's nest on the steering wheel, my life going well, I believed, pretty well. It could have been any other time. But it was then: I cried for Sils and LaRoue, all that devotion and remorse, stars streaming light a million years after dying; I cried for the boyfriends I was no longer with, the people and places I no longer knew very well, for my parents and grandmother ailing and stuck in Florida, their rough, unchanging forms conjured only in memory; a jewel box kept in the medicine cabinet in the attic of a house on the moon; that's where their unchanging forms were kept. I cried for everyone and for all the scrabbly, funny love one sent out into the world like some hit song that enters space and bounds off to another galaxy, a tune so pretty you think the words are true, you do! There was never any containing a song like that, keeping it. It went off and out, speeding out of earshot or imagining or any reach at all, like a rocket invented in sleep.

I’ve always been very Type-A, so a friend of mine got me into cycling when I was living in L.A. I lived right on the beach in Santa Monica, where there’s this great bike path in the sand that goes for, I think, 25 miles. I’d go onto the bike path, and I would [go] head down and push it—just red-faced huffing, all the way, pushing it as hard as I could. I would go all the way down to one end of the bike path and back, and then head home, and I’d set my little timer when doing this. . . . “I noticed it was always 43 minutes. That’s what it took me to go as fast as I could on that bike path. But I noticed that, over time, I was starting to feel less psyched about going out on the bike path. Because mentally, when I would think of it, it would feel like pain and hard work. . . . So, then I thought, ‘You know, it’s not cool for me to associate negative stuff with going on the bike ride. Why don’t I just chill? For once, I’m gonna go on the same bike ride, and I’m not going to be a complete snail, but I’ll go at half of my normal pace.’ I got on my bike, and it was just pleasant. “I went on the same bike ride, and I noticed that I was standing up, and I was looking around more. I looked into the ocean, and I saw there were these dolphins jumping in the ocean, and I went down to Marina del Rey, to my turnaround point, and I noticed in Marina del Rey, that there was a pelican that was flying above me. I looked up. I was like, ‘Hey, a pelican!’ and he shit in my mouth. “So, the point is: I had such a nice time. It was purely pleasant. There was no red face, there was no huffing. And when I got back to my usual stopping place, I looked at my watch, and it said 45 minutes. I thought, ‘How the hell could that have been 45 minutes, as opposed to my usual 43? There’s no way.’ But it was right: 45 minutes. That was a profound lesson that changed the way I’ve approached my life ever since. . . . “We could do the math, [but] whatever, 93-something-percent of my huffing and puffing, and all that red face and all that stress was only for an extra 2 minutes. It was basically for nothing. . . . [So,] for life, I think of all of this maximization—getting the maximum dollar out of everything, the maximum out of every second, the maximum out of every minute—you don’t need to stress about any of this stuff. Honestly, that’s been my approach ever since. I do things, but I stop before anything gets stressful. . . . “You notice this internal ‘Argh.’ That’s my cue. I treat that like physical pain. What am I doing? I need to stop doing that thing that hurts. What is that? And, it usually means that I’m just pushing too hard, or doing things that I don’t really want to be doing.

Ella ni siquiera sabía por qué lloraba, solo me sostuvo y lloró. La había extrañado muchísimo. Llegué al lugar correcto. Este era mi hogar. Incluso con los recuerdos que me atormentaban, aquí era donde pertenecía. Braden era mi hogar.

Understandings on Tanna came about so often like the slow filtration of rainwater through rock. And nowhere did this happen more than in the realm of language. It was the white man’s desire to trade in sea-slugs – known by the French as bêche-de-mer – that had first necessitated the invention of a lingua franca pidgin, and Bislama, pronounced BISH-la-ma, became its name. The word is a pidgin form of ‘Beach-La-Mer’, itself a corruption of ‘bêche-de-mer’. And so many of Bislama’s terms sounded utterly foreign, until they’d been in my mouth long enough to lose the unfamiliar tang of Tanna. ‘Like’, for instance, was ‘olsem’ – from ‘all a same’. ‘What’ was ‘wanem’ – ‘what name’. And ‘just’ – I liked this best – was rendered in Bislama as ‘nomo’, which for me always evoked the scene of some hard-bitten sea-slug buyer bargaining down to just a shilling, no more. It was a simple language, encrusted with Melanesian habits of pronunciation, designed for commerce and work. Western visitors were tickled by terms like ‘rubba belong fak-fak’ for ‘condom’ and ‘bugarup’ for ‘broken’. Then there was the Olympian ‘bilak-bokis-we-i-gat-bilak-tut-mo-i-gat-waet–tut-sipos-yu-kilim-em-i-sing-aot’, which ensured nobody in the archipelago would ever bother referring to a piano, let alone shipping one in. But I often wondered if the stripped-down concepts of Bislama contributed to the disdainful Western view of the people who used it. Their language sounded charming, but daft, child-like even – just like the Prince Philip cult. No wonder people had trouble taking it seriously.

No tenía responsabilidades o metas en la vida. Él solo quería ser.

La chica despreocupada que decía lo que pensaba y no le importaba lo que el mundo pensara de ella era más frágil de lo que él jamás podría imaginar...

The waves lie on the beach; Your hair on your back of angel. (Les vagues s’allongent sur la plage; - Tes cheveux sur ton dos d’ange. )

Sous les pavés, la plage' (underneath the cobblestones, the beach).

It was L.A. after all; storefronts advertised the availability of Botox at the beach. There were also storefronts that advertised the doctor was in and ready to see to your medical marijuana card. I didn’t see the need. Just walking the boardwalk got you a contact high.

Había escuchado su voz, por primera vez, en la isla donde viajó después de abandonar la empresa; estaba en la playa, sufría pero intentaba desesperadamente creer que aquel dolor tendría un final, cuando vio la puesta de sol más hermosa de su vida. Entonces, la desesperación se abatió sobre él con más fuerza que nunca y descendió al abismo más profundo de su alma, porque aquel atardecer merecía ser visto por su mujer y las niñas. Lloró compulsivamente, y presintió que nunca saldría del fondo de aquel pozo.

2007 Wall Street Journal profile also described how, at one of Schwarzman’s five houses, an “11,000-square-foot home in Palm Beach, Fla., he complained to Jean-Pierre Zeugin, his executive chef and estate manager, that an employee wasn’t wearing the proper black shoes with his uniform…[H]e found the squeak of the rubber soles distracting.” His own mother told the paper that money is “what drives him. Money is the measuring stick.” Schwarzman’s most serious self-inflicted wound, though, was the $3 million sixtieth birthday party he threw for himself in February 2007, at which he paid pop stars Rod Stewart and Patti LaBelle to serenade him. The media sensation stirred by the billionaire bacchanal led directly to congressional calls to close the carried-interest loophole.

En milieu de matinée, je suis allé à la plage. Seul. J'avais besoin de rassembler mes idées. Nous n'étions qu'à Pâques, mais il faisait chaud, et quelques personnes se baignaient. L'eau marronnasse ne me tentait absolument pas. Bon sang, on pourrait quand même changer ça avec un bon logiciel de retouche, ai-je pensé. Merde, ce n'était quand même pas compliqué de virer ce marron chiasseux et de le remplacer par du bleu-turquoise. C'est l'océan, m'a dit le graphiste, le mouvement des marrées brasse le fond, et ça donne cette couleur-là, mais c'est naturel, vous comprenez, ce n'est pas trafiqué, ouais, ça fait naturel ce marron-là, ça fait vrai. J'ai répliqué que le réel on s'en foutait, que ce qui comptait c'était ce qui faisait beau et pas forcément ce qui faisait naturel, que ces deux notions n'étaient pas forcément compatibles, qu'elles l'étaient même rarement, d'ailleurs, que le réel et le naturel étaient rarement ce qui y avait de plus beau.

The suitcase never arrived in New York; no one seemed to know what had happened to it at UCLA, nor could I get an answer from post offices in L.A. or New York. So I lost almost all the photographs I had taken in my three years near the beach;

«Ascolta, non serve che mi scaldi, però sì, ti sei comportato da idiota.» «Hai ragione per quanto riguarda l’idiota, ma per quanto riguarda lo scaldarti… nella tua lingua significa la stessa cosa che nelle mia?» Ne dubitavo. Avrei dovuto preparare la mia entrata in scena con un po’ più d’attenzione.

En fait suivre votre instinct, c'est tout ce qui compte, dans la vie. Faire ce que vous avez envie de faire. Lorsque vous avez trouvé votre voie, il faut vous donner à fond et tout alors devient possible et vous pourrez surfer sur les plus grosses vagues. Et être heureux.

Comment aurais-tu pu apprécier à quel point la vie peut être belle, si elle n'avait jamais été pourrie?

La vie est un sursaut. Il faut s'adapter quoi qu'il arrive, non ?

Los viejos lobos de mar participaban de un mito original, estaban cerca de la raíz de todas las cosas, incluido el lenguaje. Eddie nunca antes se había fijado en cuántas expresiones de las que utilizaba en su día a día procedían de la marinería, desde «hacer aguas» hasta «irse a pique», pasando por «periplo», «echar por la borda», «escorarse», «llegar a buen puerto», «ir viento en popa», «estar boyante», «luchar contra viento y marea», «ser una rémora», etcétera, pero utilizarlas en su contexto natural lo hacía sentirse más cerca de algo fundamental, de una verdad profunda cuyos contornos creía percibir, alegóricamente, incluso estando en tierra firme. Navegar acercaba a Eddie a esa verdad, y los viejos lobos de mar estaban todavía más cerca.

For all its tropical beauty there was something charmless and hard about it, a vulgarity as decidedly American as the picture industry which thrived on the constant waves of transplants eager for work, offering them nothing more substantial than sunshine. It was a city of strangers, but, unlike New York, the dream L.A. sold, like any Shangri-La, was one not of surpassing achievement but unlimited ease, a state attainable by only the very rich and the dead. Half beach, half desert, the place was never meant to be habitable. The heat was unrelenting. On the streets there was a weariness that seemed even more pronounced at night, visible through the yellow windows of burger joints and drugstores about to close, leaving their few customers nowhere to go. Inconceivably, he was one of that rootless tribe now, doomed to wander the boulevards, and again he marveled at his own fall, and at his capacity for appreciating it.

C'est une vie magnifique que d'être un baobab sur une plage.

In 1925, a master plan was instituted to blend the French neo-classical design with the tropical background. The Art Deco movement, both in Havana and in Miami Beach, took hold during the late 1920’s, and is found primarily in the residential section of Miramar. Miramar is where most of the embassies are located, including the massive Russian embassy. The predominant street is Fifth Avenue known as La Quinta Avenida, along which is found the church of Jesus de Miramar, the Teatro Miramar and the Karl Marx Theater. There is also the Old Miramar Yacht Club and the El Ajibe Restaurant, recently visited and televised by Anthony Bourdain on his show, “No Reservations.” Anthony Bourdain originally on the Travel Channel is now being shown on CNN. The modern five-star Meliá Habana hotel, known for its cigar bar, is located opposite the Miramar Trade Centre. Started in 1772, el Paseo del Prado, also known as el Paseo de Marti, became the picturesque main street of Havana. It was the first street in the city to be paved and runs north and south, dividing Centro Habana from Old Havana. Having been designed by Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier, a French landscape architect, it connects the Malecón, the city’s coastal esplanade, with a centrally located park, Parque Central. Although the streets on either side are still in disrepair, the grand pedestrian walkway goes for ten nicely maintained blocks. The promenade has a decorated, inlaid, marble terrazzo pavement with a balustrade of small posts. It is shaded by a tree-lined corridor and has white marble benches for the weary tourist. Arguably, the Malecón is the most photographed street in Havana. It lies as a bulwark just across the horizon from the United States, which is only 90, sometimes treacherous miles away. It is approximately 5 miles long, following the northern coast of the city from east to west. This broad boulevard is ideal for the revelers partaking in parades and is the street used for Fiesta Mardi Gras, known in Cuba as Los Carnavales. It has at times also been used for “spontaneous demonstrations” against the United States. It runs from the entrance to Havana harbor, alongside the Centro Habana neighborhood to the Vedado neighborhood, past the United States Embassy on the Calle Calzada.

In a thousand years nothing will be left of all that’s been written this century. They’ll read loose sentences, traces of lost women, fragments of motionless children, your slow green eyes simply will not exist. It will be like the Greek Anthology, but even further away, like a beach in winter for another wonder, another indifference. Dentro de mil años no quedará nada de cuanto se ha escrito en este siglo. Leerán frases sueltas, huellas e mujeres perdidas, fragmentos de niños inmóviles, tus ojos lentos y verdes> simplemente no existirán. Será como la Antología Griega, aún más distante, como una playa en invierno para otro asombro y otra indiferencia.

The Caribbean is still an exciting destination. I have been to just about every notable island surrounding this sea and have yet to be bored. Some of the islands are administered by other countries like Saint Martín; some are independent countries such as Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The languages differ from island to island and include English, French, Spanish, Dutch Haitian Creole and Papiamento although English is understood on most islands. This time I returned to the Dominican Republic, an island nation that I first visited when Santo Domingo was called Ciudad Trujillo in 1955 and have returned numerous times. I have also been to Haiti the country that shares the Island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic and I have stood at the mountainous border dividing the two countries. Driving around the country offers magnificent views with every turn in the road. On this visit I enjoyed the northern Atlantic coast named the Amber Coast because of the amount of amber found there. The primary site along the northern coast is La Cordillera Septentrional. The amber-bearing stones named clastic rocks are usually washed down the steep inclines along with sandstone and other debris and are even found in deep water at the end of the run. The Amber Coast of the Dominican Republic has mostly low mountains and beautiful beaches. Overlooking the city of Puerto Plata is Mount Isabel de Torres, which is covered by dense jungles but can be ascended by a cableway. Some of these jungle areas were used as sites for the movie Jurassic Park. A new 30 acre tourist port for Carnival Cruise Lines has been constructed in Amber Cove at a cost of $85 Million. It is one of the newest destinations to visit in the Caribbean and well worth the effort.

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Hice lo que cualquier mujer adulta razonable haría cuando se enfrentaba a su rival universitario convertido en vecino de al lado: Me zumbullí detrás de la estantería más cercana.

Los tipos como Gus nunca eran los que frenaban cuando el tren del enredo emocional comenzaba a moverse, y siempre eran los que saltaban y rodaban fuera de las vías una vez que se daban cuenta de que habían alcanzado la velocidad máxima.

¿Notarás siquiera que no puedo mirarte? Probablemente no. Tú misma estás tan nerviosa. Pero si lo recuerdas, ahora sabrás por qué. Me preocupaba que pueda dar la vuelta y llevarnos a los tres de regreso a casa si muestras alguna pizca de vacilación. Quiero tenerte para siempre. ¿Quien soy yo sin ti?

I bristled, but tried not to show it. The last thing I wanted today was an argument with Charlotte. She was still furious with me for telling Mary Ella the truth about her surgery—which I admitted to her before Ann Laing had a chance to tell her—and she was never going to let me forget about the beach trip, either. “I’m going to go over to the Harts’ house this week to see how they’re doing,” I said

The first single was tracked at Media Arts Studio in Hermosa Beach, south of L.A.; the label copy helpfully dates the session—October 9, 1980. The producer is identified as “Screwy Louie.” The A side is a cover of “Under the Boardwalk,” the Drifters’ 1964 R&B ballad. David Hidalgo takes the soaring lead (his first solo vocal on record), effortlessly duplicating the tug of Johnny Moore’s original performance. But the number receives a twist in the band’s hands: in place of the lush string instrumental break on the Bert Berns–produced original, one hears a Tex–Mex button accordion solo. The flip was a rendering of “Volver, Volver,” a bolero penned by Fernando Z. Maldonado that had been an enormous hit for the Mexican ranchera superstar Vicente Fernández in 1976. Returning to his original role as the group’s ballad specialist, Cesar Rosas takes the lead vocal. Here the band offers an old-school East Side spin on the swaying, lushly romantic number, bringing some unidentified friends into the studio to scream and howl in the background, in the manner of the “live” supporting casts on Cannibal and the Headhunters’ “Land of 1000 Dances” or the Premiers’ “Farmer John.

Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses" You're dangerous 'cause you're honest You're dangerous, you don't know what you want Well you left my heart empty as a vacant lot For any spirit to haunt Hey hey sha la la Hey hey You're an accident waiting to happen You're a piece of glass left there on the beach Well you tell me things I know you're not supposed to Then you leave me just out of reach Hey hey sha la la Hey hey sha la la Who's gonna ride your wild horses Who's gonna drown in your blue sea Who's gonna ride your wild horses Who's gonna fall at the foot of thee Well you stole it 'cause I needed the cash And you killed it 'cause I wanted revenge Well you lied to me 'cause I asked you to Baby, can we still be friends Hey hey sha la la Hey hey sha la la Who's gonna ride your wild horses Who's gonna drown in your blue sea Who's gonna ride your wild horses Who's gonna fall at the foot of thee Oh, the deeper I spin Oh, the hunter will sin for your ivory skin Took a drive in the dirty rain To a place where the wind calls your name Under the trees the river laughing at you and me Hallelujah, heaven's white rose The doors you open I just can't close Don't turn around, don't turn around again Don't turn around, your gypsy heart Don't turn around, don't turn around again Don't turn around, and don't look back Come on now love, don't you look back Who's gonna ride your wild horses Who's gonna drown in your blue sea Who's gonna taste your salt water kisses Who's gonna take the place of me Who's gonna ride your wild horses Who could tame the heart of thee U2, Achtung Baby (1991)

Machin, le chien qui n'a pas de nom, ne l'entend pas de cette oreille. Ce qu'il aime à la plage, c’est : Premièrement : courir après les crabes et les crevettes. Deuxièmement : déguster des chichis au sucre tout collants. Troisièmement : faire la crêpe le reste de la journée. Bref, des jeux de chien.

before Venice Beach became Silicon Beach, when LA was merely for stars, not unicorns.

Când lumea din jur îți pare întunecată și înfricoșătoare, iubirea te poate lua pe sus ca să te ducă la dans; râsul poate să mai aline durerea; frumusețea să mai spargă din teamă.

Freedom sounds phenomenal to the preoccupied young. But when one is an adult and has “free days” there is simply not much to do. Even in Los Angeles, where everything was. There was an unspoken spell of solitude cast on the city. Once one has been to the main parts of town, and had their fair share at the beach, Los Angeles turned unbreathably lonely. The biggest risks took place in grocery stores where a quiet shopper chose to switch to multi-grain bread after two years on sourdough. One could use their afternoons to create art— maybe writing a poem or painting a picture—all of which pass time but are isolating activities in and of themselves. The child begs for freedom and the adult wants to be told what to do.

Walk La Solo Ray (Sonnet 1006) Heart immeasurable is measure supreme, All other measures are caveman's dilemma. What measured minds deem as blasphemy, The immeasurable deem the end of myopia. You can inherit money, not mind, You can inherit cash, not character. When heritage makes mind petrified of mind, It is not heritage but a humanitarian disaster. So what, if the measured don't flock behind, Like they frolic on the beaches of frivolity! The sun above burns alone giving light to all, While the hyenas below never run out of company. Defy all old and new that desecrate the heart away. Hearken to no inherited fear, and walk, la solo ray.

they come to LA aspirting to be white. Even the ones who are biologically white aren't white white. Valet parking white. Brag about your Native American, Argentinian, Portuguese ancestry white. Pho white. Paparazzi white. I once got fired from a telemarketing job, now look at m, I'm famous white. Calabazas white. I love L.A. It's the only place where you can go skiing, to the beach and to the desert all in one day white.

Songs that felt like Wyatt: “Iris” by Goo Goo Dolls “A Murder of One” by Counting Crows “Take It Easy on Me” by Little River Band “Hold You in My Arms” by Ray LaMontagne “Wild Horses” by The Rolling Stones “Thinking Out Loud” by Ed Sheeran “Yellow” by Coldplay Songs that took me to the beach: “Watermelon Sugar” by Harry Styles “Sunshine on My Shoulders” by John Denver “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” by The Beach Boys Songs to make Sam cry: “Who Knew” by Pink “Wrecking Ball” by Miley Cyrus “1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back” by Olivia Rodrigo “So Far Away” by Carole King “Romeo and Juliet” by Dire Straits “Stay” by Rihanna “Sam, I Am” by Missy McGee

«DEMOSTRACIÓN INTERPOLATIVA DEL HECHO DE QUE NO EXISTE UN LENGUAJE PRIVADO A veces resulta tentador imaginar que puede existir un lenguaje privado. Muchos de nosotros tenemos tendencia a filosofar, sin ser expertos en la materia, sobre la extraña privacidad de nuestros estados mentales, por ejemplo. Y a partir del hecho que cuando me duele la rodilla yo soy el único que lo siente es tentador sacar la conclusión de que para mí la palabra «dolor» tiene un significado interno subjetivo que solamente puedo entender yo. Esta línea de pensamiento se parece al terror que siente el fumador adolescente de marihuana a que su experiencia interior sea al mismo tiempo privada y no verificable, un síndrome que se conoce técnicamente como Solipsismo Cannábico. Mientras come galletas Chips Ahoy! y sigue con mucha atención un campeonato de golf por la tele, al fumador adolescente de marihuana se le ocurre la posibilidad aterradora de que, p. ej., lo que él percibe como el color verde y lo que el resto de la gente llama «color verde» puedan de hecho no ser la misma experiencia de color en absoluto: el hecho de que tanto él como otra persona digan que son verdes los carriles del campo de golf de Pebble Beach y la luz verde de un semáforo parece garantizar únicamente que existe una consistencia semejante en sus experiencias de los colores de los carriles de los campos de golf y de las luces verdes de los semáforos, no que la cualidad subjetiva real de esas experiencias de color sea la misma. Podría ser que lo que el fumador de marihuana experimenta como verde lo experimenten todos los demás como azul, y que lo que «queremos decir» con la palabra «azul» a lo que «quiere decir» él cuando dice «verde», etcétera, etcétera, hasta que da la línea de pensamiento se vuelve tan controvertida y agotadora que termina repantingado bajo un manto de migas de galleta y paralizado en su sillón. Lo que quiero decir con esto es que la idea de un lenguaje privado, igual que la idea de los colores privados y todas las demás presunciones solipsistas que este mismo reseñista ha sufrido en varias ocasiones, es al mismo tiempo producto de una ilusión y demostrablemente falsa.»

Fifty Best Rock Documentaries Chicago Blues (1972) B. B. King: The Life of Riley (2014) Devil at the Crossroads (2019) BBC: Dancing in the Street: Whole Lotta Shakin’ (1996) BBC: Story of American Folk Music (2014) The Weavers: Wasn’t That a Time! (1982) PBS: The March on Washington (2013) BBC: Beach Boys: Wouldn’t It Be Nice (2005) The Wrecking Crew (2008) What’s Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A. (1964) BBC: Blues Britannia (2009) Rolling Stones: Charlie Is My Darling—Ireland 1965 (2012) Bob Dylan: Dont Look Back (1967) BBC: The Motown Invasion (2011) Rolling Stones: Sympathy for the Devil (1968) BBC: Summer of Love: How Hippies Changed the World (2017) Gimme Shelter (1970) Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World (2017) Cocksucker Blues (1972) John Lennon & the Plastic Ono Band: Sweet Toronto (1971) John and Yoko: Above Us Only Sky (2018) Gimme Some Truth: The Making of John Lennon’s “Imagine” Album (2000) Echo in the Canyon (2018) BBC: Prog Rock Britannia (2009) BBC: Hotel California: LA from the Byrds to the Eagles (2007) The Allman Brothers Band: After the Crash (2016) BBC: Sweet Home Alabama: The Southern Rock Saga (2012) Ain’t in It for My Health: A Film About Levon Helm (2010) BBC: Kings of Glam (2006) Super Duper Alice Cooper (2014) New York Dolls: All Dolled Up (2005) End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones (2004) Fillmore: The Last Days (1972) Gimme Danger: The Stooges (2016) George Clinton: The Mothership Connection (1998) Fleetwood Mac: Rumours (1997) The Who: The Kids Are Alright (1979) The Clash: New Year’s Day ’77 (2015) The Decline of Western Civilization (1981) U2: Rattle and Hum (1988) Neil Young: Year of the Horse (1997) Ginger Baker: Beware of Mr. Baker (2012) AC/DC: Dirty Deeds (2012) Grateful Dead: Long, Strange Trip (2017) No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005) Hip-Hop Evolution (2016) Joan Jett: Bad Reputation (2018) David Crosby: Remember My Name (2019) Zappa (2020) Summer of Soul (2021)

Juan José de la Vega says the memory of 1973, when he saw one hundred thousand turtles lay their eggs on the beach in a single night, is a treasure no one can take from him. He likes to relive it now and again. He stood alone, surrounded by all that … biology, and the moon was full and bright. A gentle breeze was blowing in off the ocean, and the smell of the sea was strong. All around, on all sides, as far as the eye could see on this bright night, there were turtles: turtles coming in out of the ocean, turtles laying their eggs, turtles returning to the mystery of the sea. Juan José had a sensation of a time before man, a sense of the fecundity of the sea and land. There was something deep and full expanding inside of him, something other people feel only inside a church.

¿Ya me olvidaste? ¿Ya me has dejado de amar? Por supuesto que no: ¡el marino que navega nunca puede olvidarse de su amado mar ni mucho menos de su adorado navío, la playa no se olvida de la ola que llega ni el mar de la montaña mientras fluya un río!

Blue I emerge from our yellow linoleum bathroom blue at one end of our single-wide trailer and I have the length of narrow hallway to consider before reaching the living room blue Blue!? And I know my mother is furious You look ridiculous it’s all she says and I do I had torn the pages from a magazine lined my bedroom floor with them and studied those punk rock spiked hair white teeth high fashion popped collar leather studded glossy photos strewn across my small space like a spread of tarot cards telling me a future I would never get to not out here not in the white trailer rusting amber thick of trees stretch of reservation of highway that stood between me and whatever else was out there record stores the mall parking lots where kids were skateboarding and smoking pot probably kids with boom boxes and bottles of beer out there were beaches with bands playing on them and these faces these shining faces with pink green purple and blue hair blue I could get that at least I could mix seventeen packets of blue raspberry Kool-Aid with a little water and I could get that it was alchemy it was potion-making but no one told me about the bleach about my dark hair needing to lift to lighten in order to get that blue no one told me that the mess of Kool-Aid would only run down my scalp my face my neck would stain me blue Blue is what you taste like he says still holding me on the twin bed in the glow of dawn my teenage curiosity has pushed me to ask What does my body taste like to you his fingers travel from neck to navel breath on my thigh and here in our sacred space he answers simply Blue you taste blue and I wonder if what he means is sad you taste sad taqʷšəblu the name is given to me when I am three to understand it my child brain has to break it apart taqʷšəblu talk as in talking as in to tell as in story sha as in the second syllable of my English name as in half of me blue as in the taste of me blue as in sad my grandmother was taqʷšəblu before me and now I am taqʷšəblu too

A mi padre le encantaba tener su espacio, pero también decía siempre que le gustaba que le recordasen que había otras personas viviendo su vida. Personas que no lo conocían y a las que no les importaba.

Era la misma que siempre había sido. Simplemente había dejado de intentar brillar en la oscuridad para él, o para cualquier otra persona.

I’ve come to whisk you away to a land far, far—well, not that far away. I’ve reserved a table for two on the terrace in La Jolla. And then, who knows?” He clasped her hands.

Algunas veces, lo único que tenemos es la determinación.

Algunas veces no tenemos ningún control sobre las cosas que nos abaten. Lo único que podemos hacer es encontrar la forma de enfrentarnos a ellas e intentar levantarnos.

Pero incluso con eso, NOS ENCANTA». Duchaine era un culturista de Los Ángeles que suministraba Dianabol a su gato para ayudarlo a sobrevivir por los callejones de Venice Beach. Más tarde se convertiría en socio de David Jenkins en su red clientelar de sustancias dopantes, y fue encontrado sin vida en el año 2000 a la edad de cuarenta y siete años.

Behold the voracious sea, who appears innocent and blue. Her folds are gentle and she is hemmed with white, like a divine robe. She is a liquid sky and her stars are alive. I meditate on her, from this throne of boulders where I had myself carried from my litter. She is truly amid the lands of Christianity. She receives the sacred water by which the Annunciator washed away sin. Over her beaches every holy face has bowed, and she has rocked their transparent images. Great mysterious anointed one, with neither ebb nor flow, azure candle, set in the terrestrial ring like a liquid jewel, I interrogate you with my eyes. O Mediterranean Sea, return to me my children! Why have you taken them?

After we returned to Italy, I worked as a waitress at this café on La Dogana beach in Maremma. Every day this bald man with one of those cartoon guts came in. Every day he ordered the linguine con vongole. They made it the best there. And every day this man, Carlo, would ask for extra parsley, but he wanted me to sprinkle it on top right there in front of him. Some days he was my only lunch table. He didn’t act untoward with me, unless you can count him wanting the parsley sprinkled tableside, and the way he would watch my hands. I used to apply clear polish every other day because I was conscious of Carlo watching my fingers. Joan, do you understand? There are rapes, and then there are the rapes we allow to happen, the ones we shower and get ready for. But that doesn’t mean the man does nothing.