heat for the ears
the heat in socal can be overwhelming in the summer. one september in high school we played a tennis match in 102-degree weather. it’s desert where we live, so there wasn’t so much stickyness so much as warmth everywhere - on the handles of racquets, between my skin and cotton shirt, on the vinyl seats of the school bus that took us to duarte. i slogged through my sets, barely being able to breathe, then afterward went in search of cooler temperatures. the gym was a noise of volleyball, yells, and handclaps, all generating their own kind of unbearable heat, and there was no shade (duarte high school - more trees, please!). i ended up back on the schoolbus with a few other teammates, slouched on hot green vinyl. my head throbbed, maybe from some combination of exhaust from the idling bus, the fiery furnace around me, and the ice cold water i drank. for the rest of the afternoon i sat still, staring out the window at trees and heat waves.
best coast, especially this cover art for one of her 7-inches last year, conjures memories like that.
as varied as LA childhoods can be, i suspect that most kids who grow up there can at least share the experience of sitting in some car on a clogged freeway, like the one downtown in the cover art (LA friends, is that the 110? or the 5?), while the sun beats down, and you’re staring out the window up at a brown-layered sky.
best coast’s music is like the aural descriptor. it’s a hazy slog, and like the heat, so loud in its noise to the point that you don’t complain, you just move through it. the pop vocals could be something i’d actually hear in the car when my parents tune the radio to the oldies station, which seemed to play a beach boys song every hour as if by socal mandate.
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more than any accusation of materialism that could be launched against LA (which i don’t buy completely), what keeps me from settling back in LA is the threat of this malaise — that feeling of not wanting to do anything but sit there and move passively through. clogged heads and clogged freeways.
by joe
by caliscrub
Is it LA, or the surrounding suburbia, that’s so standstill?
joe: thanks for the back-up!
l: aren’t they the same thing? it’s weird though — it’s not quite a matter of standstill or movement, because i think there’s a lot of movement in LA. it’s that congestion, like my head and thoughts are all washed out and hazy. eh. maybe it’s just me.
it’s the 110 going north, right by downtown.