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Day 27.
SONNET 27
Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,

The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;

But then begins a journey in my head, 

To work my mind, when body’s work’s expired:

For then my thoughts (from far where I abide) 

Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee, 

And keep my drooping eyelids open wide, 

Looking on darkness which the blind do see: 

Save that my soul’s imaginary sight 

Presents thy shadow to my sightless view,

Which, like a jewel hung in ghastly night, 

Makes black night beauteous and her old face new.

   Lo, thus, by day my limbs, by night my mind,

   For thee, and for myself, no quiet find. 

 

A couple of years ago I pretended to be a blind accordion busker in a park near Embankment. Every so often I would find a group of people walking through the park with carnations in their hand. Or they’d find me. I would stop them. “Stop! Benedetta, is that you? Is that your scent?” Then I’d have to roll with the group, which might involve establishing false claimants were not Benedetta by touching their faces. Eventually one way or another, I’d establish Benedetta wasn’t there. Then through the prism of being tired/sad/lonely as appropriate based on their engagement I’d segue into the sonnet above. At the end I’d fall asleep on a bench dedicated to “Benedetta, who loved life.” Ahh. People would express sadness or not and then move on and when they were out of sight I’d reset for the next group. They were on a sonnet walk, celebrating Shakespeare’s birthday, which has been a consistent institution of Shakespeare’s Globe since it opened. It’s happening again this year directed by Federay Holmes, and will certainly be a bloody marvellous thing to which you should all go if you’re not in it.

 

I’ve worked enough with Shakespeare’s language that people who barely know my work describe me as a Shakespearean. I detest being labelled and hounded into a box so I try to avoid doing that to myself. But hell, yes, I do a lot of Shakespeare. I’ve toured American with his words. I’ve been in prisons with them. I’ve played Oberon on an island outside Amsterdam. I’ve played Claudius in “King’s Landing” – (Fort Louvreniac) in Dubrovnik. Many many more. Over many years, so many parts in so many plays. I am frequently called on to do after dinner Shakespeare or called back to play diverse parts in beautifully worked shows in gorgeous places. Fortunately my association with The Factory through this time has kept me rooted into rigour, work ethic, simplicity and truth. Through that work I’ve seen the true meaning of openness and simplicity. It’s riveting.

 

So it was only a matter of time before someone threw me in the way of another Shakespeare geek. This evening I met Martin who is writing the definitive book on playing Shakespeare. I realise through him that there aren’t many of them extant, and I also know through my outreach work that a lot of people, including actors, think of his words as being difficult. They’re a gift, his words, they’re just made to be spoken aloud and not studied. Thankfully we agree on the basics. He’s not a nightmare academic. This book will likely be a helpful book. I think I might have found another friend out here. So that was my evening. And the sonnet at the top, the first line certainly, expresses my state of mind. I’m on set all day tomorrow so I have to get up early to put my best eyes in, replace my cheeks, screw on my best arms, put in my actoring brain, attach the binoculars legs. Actoringerising takes time.

  

No photos. Here’s the pianist in the bar where I met Martin. I still don’t remember to take photos. And I mostly worked today.

Day 26. By the time J Paul Getty was 26 he’d made a million bucks out of oil in Tulsa, and that was just the beginning. An Anglophile, he had gone to University at Oxford and then worked a hefty inheritance enough that at one time he was called “The richest man in the world”. How a man spends his money when wealthy is a good indication of the sort of man they would be if they weren’t. Some people like to spend on self aggrandisement, golden elevators, bling, vast phallic monuments to their own narcissism. Getty loved the ancient world, specifically the architecture of the Romans. He spent on beauty. On art. Particularly old art – pre nineteenth century for the most part. This makes for a really deep, really historically interesting, really valuable collection. Ancient art doesn’t depreciate. He was no fool. I cannot even contemplate the value of this. I wish I could afford the cheapest piece. And when he died he left it for the people. He once said “There’s no glory in being remembered as old moneybags.” So, seeking legacy, he gave an endowment and his collection to form a free museum in Los Angeles. As the tour guide says, almost with wonder “He gave us … considerably more than we were expecting.” It’s the richest gallery in the world. Funded by the richest trust in the world. And it’s gorgeous.

 
The property sits on a hillside overlooking the whole of Los Angeles. Because the city is mostly flat, any hill is commanding, and this hill is well placed. There’s a computer operated tram that takes you up the side. It’s like being back on the DLR. The site was carefully chosen and laboriously dug over years and the design is wonderful. Italian stone with glass panelling in beautiful lines. Parts of it make me think of Escher. There is a great deal that is unnecessary but beautiful. I love unnecessary beauty. The layout and the view are deliberately reminiscent of a giant Tuscan villa. And it’s flawlessly kept. The museum doesn’t want for anything. They don’t have to compromise and sacrifice maintenance of the grounds for maintenance of the collection. They have enough money to make both beautiful and keep it beautiful. And enough to keep it free for the public. Even the cafes are pretty affordable considering museum cafe prices. This is the other side of the oil industry, of money. This is wealth used well. This is legacy.

I often shiver at the thought of lost masters in bank vaults or in underground private collections. It’s great to see so many  on display here. Turners, Rembrandts, Titians, a Van Gogh – so many of the greats – all housed in this beautiful place. A journey through art history. And thought beautiful old furniture. And through illuminated manuscripts. There’s an exhibition on alchemy, and I wish I had been to it the day before I went to the escape room rather than the day after. There are so many beautiful books of ancient knowledge. How much more civilised to have a Romanesque villa filled with the wonders of the ancient world than to have a load of huge towers full of gold with your name on. The dude had a pet lioness. A bison. Loads of dogs. A bear. I thought only Byron had a bear! Nope. Getty seems like he was a thoroughly brilliant human being. I’d have been mates with him.

 

I find myself dreaming about having a collection like this in a property like this. I’d have a load of rooms as well for artists to come and live in so they could be surrounded by lovely things and have the headspace to make something glorious. There’d be a working theatre and a working art studio and equipment to make films. All I’d need is a bunch of oil fields and a time machine. Actually all I’d need is a time machine. Get me that time machine.

I’ll be back at this place for sure. It’s serene, and there is so much to see. It’s welcoming. And after my strange feelings to do with the oil industry confronted with those pumps the other day, I’m happy to see so many glorious things assembled in such a lovely place because of it. Getty died in England – the old world for him. His legacy is sparkling, beautiful and important, and it feels like he understood the art he owned, rather than just collecting it for the sake of it. If only all rich men in the public eye these days had such desire to preserve and protect the old world, to welcome beauty, to encourage creativity, and to bring and nurture sensitivity.

And there’s a Moore in the garden… Not Getty’s. A donation from the Starks, apparently…

Day 25. Over the years, I’ve been involved in a ridiculously diverse range of projects. I expect most actors can say that. I can say it double. I’m thinking about one aspect of the tapestry of weirdness tonight. 

When I had just left Guildhall I made friends with a man called Tassos. At the time he was coming up with all sorts of harebrained schemes, making theatre in different contexts, asking “How do we give the audience some sort of agency.” For me this was an interesting and important question, given that theatre is a live experience. I love that it can change and breathe. But I was sure that there were ways to engage the audience more deeply than just as watchers. To get people to shape an experience together. I threw myself in with him and a motley crew. A playful secret agency. We all had code names, I gave myself the codename “mother” because my mother had died so recently. I wasn’t to know I’d have that code name for a decade. But code names appealed to me as I also liked the idea of removing actor’s ego from performance. If no one knows who you are you’re less inclined to show off. We made all sorts of things, on the streets of London, in theatres for one night, in arches and bars and community centres. Some of it worked. Some of it didn’t. We learnt, we adjusted, people we knew had similar thoughts, things grew out of the madness. Some of it touched on the work of old greats like Joan Littlewood. Some lost it’s heart. Some sank without trace. Some got very big: Everybody knows Punchdrunk. 

 
After many years of making this stuff, it started to be given names. Experiential theatre. Immersive. Interactive. At first we had felt like pariahs. But suddenly there was an acceptance of this way of working and then an integration of it. And with an integration, inevitably, an assimilation and a loss of teeth. I’ve been to shows in the last few years that call themselves immersive because the space is dressed as a kitchen and you sit in it, that’s it. I’ve been to stuff called interactive where an actor has thrust something into my hand at the start and then it’s never been referred to for the rest of the staged performance. I’ve been to stuff called Site Specific where the same room has been used as two different notional rooms. I have no problem with any of this. But at some point this stuff started to get money attached to it, and become aspirational. I remember an internal shift where suddenly I was doing launches for branded whisky or I was at expensive parties doing treasure hunts. We were still making strange stuff in stranger places but in London we started to see regular players, people who wanted to have a two week email trail before leaving the house for something odd to happen in a public space. Technology made things more interesting but also more fallible. We experimented with it, but we did it broke so we couldn’t provide infallible tech. Sometimes the tech worked. Sometimes not. Sometimes what we did was great, sometimes what we did was woeful. But I will never stop wanting to experiment and to make things that respond to the people who are there. And to risk. Risk, genuine risk, is what makes a live experience live. There is wonderful telly, unbelievable film. Theatre is happening in the room with you RIGHT NOW. My most recent show, A Christmas Carol, always ended with audience members swapping numbers. At the climax of the show, I would run out into the crowded Christmas street at Leicester Place in a Victorian nightie, dancing and cartwheeling as they watched. There was never a night when I didn’t run out there with my heart in my mouth, worried I’d be stabbed. Some nights were scary. But at the heart of my craft is the desire to connect people through it. An audience is a load of strangers sitting next to each other. Get them fighting for a space at a window , then swapping numbers saying “I can’t believe he actually did that,” and long as it serves the story it’s perfect. Everybody who loves A Christmas Carol knows the moment when Scrooge runs into the street in his nightie.

 
I’m thinking about all of this because I just went to a “Room Escape“. They’re big business in LA. There were six of us, and it was a great big puzzle in a room. It opens with a disappointingly loose storyline. An alchemist with no name is doing something bad, we have to stop him. It turns out it’s the philosopher’s stone. Why do we have to stop him? Surely better to nick it? One actor facilitator is in there with you playing a half thought through alchemist’s assistant come grim reaper person, moving in slow motion and giving silent clues occasionally. He is great even if he has no logical context for his behaviour. But this isn’t a show, it’s a pure game. A puzzle game. Loads of puzzles. Loads of geeky people trying to solve the puzzles. The time flew by and we didn’t find the philosopher’s stone. It was pleasant though, to see everyone start talking through a shared problem. I ended up working on my own at the start as a big group were all busy dominating one half of the puzzle and neglecting the other half. One girl came over and joined me and we solved it together and then got halfway through the next one before time ran out. And the big group hadn’t solved anything yet. But me and Josslyn? We were highfiving each other, laughing, joking, completely unreserved. And it’s why room escapes are so popular. If I was on a first date with the right person it would be great. With the wrong person it would be atrocious. But shared problem solving for fun? It feeds the same hunger as yesterday’s pub quiz.

I left it thinking of ways in which the experience could have been improved, and the logic could have been shored up. It took me a while before I even noticed I was doing it. If I take nothing else from this trip and the fact that I can’t lose myself in my multiple day jobs, it’s that I am still a maker. I started making something out here within a week of landing, immediately on changing my context. I suspect I’ll be doing a lot more of that back in town, in lots of different mediums. And I look forward to collaborating with lots of you. I’m glad I made this trip. Learning a lot already about myself.

Day 24. Pub quiz! Oh I like a good pub quiz. An excuse to chat to friends, an excuse to win some booze. A good pub quiz has that twofold effect. If you have a retentive brain for odd knowledge you can drink for free, and maybe make friends. Over time many good things have come from them for me. In Forest Hill about 8 years ago my flatmate Nathan and I began a conversation that would lead to the two of us being immortalised as the voices of Charlie the Caterpillar and Stanley the Snail for a range of children’s toys. That was at a pub quiz. I had a first date at a pub quiz once and the two of us won so much alcohol there we stayed together for years and I’m still friends with her. There is something about the idea of trading esoteric knowledge for free alcohol that satisfies anyone who has been told as a child “You’ll never profit from reading all those myths”.
My friend Emma messages me on whatsapp to throw me in the way of some friends of hers. Kimberley apologises for being British and meeting at a pub quiz. I’m thrilled. It takes place in EB’s Beer and Wine which is an open bar that forms part of a farmer’s market on the corner of third and Fairfax. As I sit down Kimberley says “Welcome to the centre of the British part of LA. You can walk around here.” I got an uber there and I am getting an uber back, but this appeals to me. I love to walk as you may have gleaned if you’ve got this far into my mumblings. I’ll have to explore this area sometime.

 

My first realisation is that I have accidentally come out without any means to pay. I had to take the dogs out for a pee and Rocko spent so long playing the “screw you I ain’t peeing” game that I was in a hurry by the time I got him inside and got in the uber and I didn’t think to check my card was in my wallet. Not that it makes any difference. The people I’m with, despite being strangers, are extremely generous and when they hear that I’m writing about my time here they have many suggestions of things I should do. Our mutual friend Rhik does this sort of thing for a living and when he came out to LA they took him to some places that sound wonderfully ghastly. I make lots of mental notes.

 

Sadly we do not win. The only round we win hands down is THE DRINKS ROUND. Identifying musical instruments. We got them all. Well, when I say “we” it was Andrew with some encouragement from the team. Andrew is a one man quiz team sitting modestly to my right drinking restrained amounts. His name might not be Andrew. But he remembers things better than … some of the other people on the team…

But we ace the drinks round 100%.  Which shows where our priorities are. For the rest of the time we are just not rigorous enough. But I can see this is a good team. Not winning comes as a disappointment to them and I am concerned that on my first ever night with them we only come third. I owe them some beers now. I hope they’ll have me back next Tuesday. Can you name all the instruments?

 

And this was the only thing I did today outside of work and writing this. No time for big thoughts. I have a lot to do, more than I would have liked, too much, and I’m on a timer. I’ll likely explain in a future post if there comes a day when I literally do nothing but research and emails. But at least today I got to the quiz…

Day 23. River Phoenix was 23 when he had a speedball. I remember it well. The first celebrity death I cared about. I was a teenager. At the time I had experienced very little death first hand but in the next ten years I was to lose both my parents. Death was such a dark, untouched subject that losing my father felt almost stigmatic, losing my mother shameful. I missed meetings for her funeral without explaining the circumstance to my agent, and lost care and focus in my work. I felt I should have done something to prevent it. I didn’t really have a frame to make sense of it. My mother chose alcohol as the means to end her pain, whatever that was. I followed into the same means to numb mine. I had a period where I was obliterating myself, and when I emerged from it, some of my friends were still there, but I had lost momentum and had to remember how to function. The last few years have been clawing myself back to something close to where I was when it all went south. Then Jamie my half brother died, and I reacted to that with this excursion to LA. To seek life rather than to obliterate. To move forwards somehow. 

When Cara suggested today that we go to the Museum of Death and then to a graveyard, I said “sure, why not.” We need to talk about death more in the west, that’s for sure. It’s one of the only things that we all have in common no matter our politics, no matter our religion, no matter how wealthy we are, how powerful. It’s the great leveller. We’re all going to die, kids, and short of orchestrating it, we can’t choose how or when. This is something to be grasped with both hands. It’s the driving force for much of human endeavour. But it’s a reality that we’re protected from, certainly in England. People die all over the place all the time in London and the speed at which it is covered up or fenced off has the twofold effect of making it feel both dirty, and rare. It’s not dirty and it’s not rare. It’s normal and it happens all the time. If someone we love dies we haven’t done something wrong. Unless we killed them.

 

That said the museum is a slog. I’m feeling drained and heavy by the time we are halfway. Horrible letters and worse photographs, videos of genocides and army killings and police shootings and accidents. Frequent visual reminders of how quickly it can all stop for people. A reconstruction of a Heaven’s Gate bunk room, a room devoted to the Mansons, another to cannibalism. This feels a museum to brutality as much as to death. By the time I leave I am very happy to be out of there. The energy is dark. We leave and go to the Hollywood Forever cemetery just down the road. A different side of death, dealing with how we want to be remembered.

It’s a beautiful resting place, and one which often speaks of the celebration of many many lives. The plethora of drawers in the many huge mausoleums continues the day’s reminder that death is happening all the time all over the place. Some were very young, some were very old. Children are next to adults, religions are often mixed in with each other, there is a large Jewish section, a Buddhist part, many christians. I see few if any Muslim graves. Some people I have never heard of have vast mausoleums. Other people I have heard of have small modest graves. I think about the messages they are leaving, spoken or unspoken. “I was really rich” is one message that lots of people leave. “Love your life” is another. Love your family. Love your friends… I think about what I might put. I wonder how many of these people set their own message, and how many were surprised in the end by the inevitable and had it done by loved ones.

 

We walk home much of the way down Hollywood Boulevard, past the stars and to the hand and footprints. I spend a bit of time matching feet and hands to people I admire. I find Robin Williams, and my shoes fit perfectly into his imprint. Another one that took himself off early. Suicide. After touching so many lives with his happysadness. What a desperate shame.

 

This day has been long and thoughtful, touching the shortness of life, the pointlessness of vanity and the difference between perception and reality. Tomorrow it’s back to work. Carpe diem.

Day 22 is much more than day 22. Day 22 is SUPERBOWL SUNDAY. It’s the big game, everybody! The Patriots vs The Falcons. People vs Birds. New England vs Atlanta. North vs South. I can’t decide who to support. I have a friend from Georgia, but I’ve never been there and I’ve been to New England. I go to The Pikey on sunset as I know they’ll have a big screen in the back. But there are only six people in there and none of them want to tell me who they’re supporting. They don’t seem to care. They’re all very downbeat. Why are they even watching? This is the Superbowl, dammit! I weigh my team options. Falcons would eat you if you were chained down. But patriots justify hate and violence with tribalism. So I suppose I have to support the Falcons as a bird would never use an idea to justify an atrocity. They’d just eat your eyes, but they don’t know any better. 

I’m good at knowing about sport. I sometimes watch the Barclays FA league finals. I like it when they kick the ball and do the running. Despite this vast expertise, I would have liked to have found someone who knows about this game and could explain the nuance to me so I can properly appreciate it. But I’m on my own. I’ll have to concentrate.

 

Enter Trevor. He sits next to me just as the game starts. My saviour! He suggests I join him in the happy hour special. He’s also supporting the Falcons, and he’s willing to explain the intricacies of the game to me. Win. He says: “You gotta start with a Pabst and a shot of bourbon for eight bucks. It’s happy hour.” I’ve heard of Pabst Blue Ribbon. It’s what people drink in films before they beat their wife. Well, I broke sober last night and it’s still the weekend. Last night I was the oldest guy dancing in some teenybopper club, before going to Soho House in an attempt to pretend I was in London, leaving my bag there because I was in the sort of state you have to be in before you think it’s a good idea to go to Soho House, and staggering home in the early hours causing the dogs to lose their shit. I am not going to make a habit of this because beer now = nothing to eat in a month. But it’s the Super Bowl.

 

And I’m surprised by how good a game I find this. There’s some real skill, some real athleticism, some real detail in these plays. And the Falcons quarterback has the same name as the friend of my business partner whose Harley I was hoping to be able to borrow while I was here. So I like him even if the bike didn’t work out. It’s enjoyable, if you have a vague understanding of what’s happening. There’s some artistry in the play. At half time the Falcons are winning comprehensively. Go Falcons etc. I watch Gaga put on a great spectacle in the interval. There’s a lot of money in this event, a lot of expensive adverts. It’s such a clear Falcons win that shortly into the second half Trevor calls it and leaves. “Enjoy watching the Falcons win bro.”

 

Trevor is replaced by Michelle. She’s a New Yorker. Grizzled. Cigaretteworn. Brilliantly uncaring. She’s in the minority here, rooting for the Patriots – in particular their 40 year old quarterback. “Tom Brady’s got this,” she confides. “He’s like Napoleon. What are you, English? He’s like David Beckham. You watch. He’s got this.” I quietly think she’s backing the wrong horse but she is a one woman Brady appreciation society. And guided by her eye I watch the guy work miracles, as she gleefully cheers louder and louder against the room, which having been so quiet earlier have now all come out in support of the Falcons. She is enjoying educating me about the game and Brady. She shows me cellphone photos of her interviewing him. “I told you, I told you! He’s like, he’s like Napoleon. He’s in control of the whole team. He’s got a fisherman’s mouth. But he’s going to win. This is huge. This is Super Bowl history.”

 

The Patriots do win, against the odds. This ain’t Waterloo. Everyone is shouting “His knee was down.” at the final touchdown. But it doesn’t seem to affect things. Michelle is ecstatic, screw-you ecstatic, in a very New Yorkian way. Her against the room. Streamers and music. Celebrations. 

 

I like this game a little. I think because beforehand I had no sense of the layers of it. It was just big men jumping on each other. I thank Michelle and leave. I doubt I’m going to turn into a fan, but that was a good final and a good way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

21 days in and I have multiple friends descend on this town simultaneously. I’ve got a car so naturally I slip into the mode of Barclay the chauffeur despite pokey insurance coverage. This involves waiting around the airport lots, driving round in circles lots, and not drinking. The not drinking bit should be easy since I’ve been doing that for the whole time I’ve been in LA. But these friends have little truck with such behaviour, as I am to find out. 

First of all we are wholesome. Robyn is a Buddhist and there’s a lot of Buddhism to be found in Los Angeles. We go to both of the centres in Santa Monica. She wants to buy something and the first one doesn’t have it. When we get to the second we go in and chant for a good while. Good to get something spiritual done, knowing what’s going to happen later. I drop off Robyn and head across town to the W Hotel. I’m going to the Lego Batman premier party.

 

Of course it is round a pool. Of course it involves a free bar and nibbles. I’ve taken the precaution of driving myself there so I know I have to drive myself back, which means I won’t rinse the free bar. It’s nice to go and get lost in a great industry party in LA. Nobody jumps in the pool which surprises me. In fact everyone is really lovely. I have a good conversation with Rosario Dawson with no idea who she is. I then have a better conversation with her uncle, who is a dude, lived in Basildon for a while, and loves making theatre. I know a bit about being a cool uncle. Natch. After a while I feel the lack of business cards. I never want to be that guy, but a couple of people ask. And I tend to do my business by meeting people so I think they might be a handy investment. Especially since the longer I spend out here the more I think I would like to try to come out here for three years on an 01 VISA and just change it up. It helps that I’ve spent much of the day with friends as it reminds me that travel is possible and that moving here won’t mean saying goodbye to them forever as if I was going to Mars for Elon Musk. Perhaps if I find a way to subvert the wankiness of the card, built into the design of the card…

 

I need an agent in the UK who also has a branch over here, or at the very least some contacts, so I can make this visa thing real and have stuff to go to once it’s sorted. Top priority. I will try to reverse engineer someone from here, but my friends are in London. If anyone has a mate who is an actor’s agent in London, even the bottom of the pile at a place with transatlantic connections, link me in with them on email or talk to them or something and I’ll send them my stuff. By Pm. It’s time time and past past time for a change.

  

At the party everyone stands around a pool talking to friendly arty strangers. It’s a good way to spend a day. And since Cara had had plenty of wine it’s easy  to persuade her to have her photo taken with me and the poor people in batman related flumpsuits. I know all too well what it’s like inside those bloody things having done Pudsey the Bear once and almost spewed in the helmet while children were hugging me. Even if you’re dying you still have a smile on your face. That’s probably a metaphor for how I’ve lived my life for the last 14 years. But I was boiled, sweating, crying and suffocating. And people were shouting PUDSEY and bundling on me with all their weight and warmth.

I have now just dropped my car at home and I’m getting an uber back to Sunset Boulevard. I’m never going to catch up to Cara but I can allow a couple of drinks since it’s Saturday night, and my other UK friend is also at a party, also on Sunset Boulevard, 2 blocks down. Since I spent the morning attempting to make my energy resonate with the universe in a Buddhist centre, a coincidence like that is not one I’m willing to overlook. So yeah, the universe wants me to to have this drink, okay. And who am I to fight the will of the universe. Glug glug glug.

20 days out here and finally I’m mobile. I have a car. You need a car in this city. I have it for the weekend only. Can’t afford more than that as they skin you alive for insurance if you don’t have a good credit card. But it’s a start.  

I want to see something green, and walk and think. I find a big park. It looks very green on the map but I’m suspicious. Not the most alluring name: Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area. The drive is a little scary as I have paid for super basic insurance which means the only thing covered is the person I hit. And it’s raining. Everyone in town will be in a museum or working. It’s SuperBowl weekend. If I have a crash the other guy is probably drunk so he’ll be liable…

 

Back in the day, there was a lot of oil in this area. I’ve been told that the city was built around the oil industry as much as film, and that the terrible public transport is a byproduct. One guy told me darkly “They bought the trams, the trains, all that. The oil men bought them and shut them down. Force people to drive. Now they’re trying to build trains but it’s too late. You gotta have a car.” Such a strange thing to have shaped an area, the drilling of black gold. Made out of dormant plant and animal matter coagulating over hundreds of million years. Who would have thought that this potent sludge could have shaped not only the geography of the world we live in, but also the geopolitics. A byproduct of great extinctions past, driving a probable great extinction yet to come. What does 150 million years even mean? Like the infinity of space, it’s too big for our monkey brains. We can try. We should try. But we’ll probably only scratch at the edges, so our instinct is to avoid thinking about it.

 

One of the first things I stumble upon in the park is a dinosaur. Slow, vast, deliberate, contemplative, it drops its head to the earth, up again, down again, up again. There’s loads of them. I feel like the kids in Jurassic Park confronted with the diplodocus. “Wow!” This is a relic on my time scale. A modern dinosaur. A working oil derric. A herd of them.

The park is a reclaimed oil field, but parts of it are still active. So you walk alongside a sculpted ornamental river stocked with fish, active with ducks, thriving, and through the trees, in drab mud, dozens of huge rusted metal monsters dip and suck, dip and suck relentlessly pulling the history out of the ground to be burnt in engines. Like the one in the car I’m so pleased to have. Surely this field will run out soon. Maybe it’s already run out and they’re only for show? 

 

The park is named for Kenneth Hahn, the councillor who determined that the land stripped of oil should be repurposed as a park. I walk around an exhibition celebrating him, and sadly listen to a recording of Martin Luther King quoting and dissecting The Bill of Rights.

 

I leave the park. I don’t like it. Even in the prettiest places you can see those things behind the trees and they both fascinate and unnerve me. And there’s no nature here, just poured concrete paths and picnic tables. Nature in a box.

 

I drive a short way to Culver City, and walk up and down a long flight of stairs a few times. The stairs are uneven, and seem to have been haphazardly jammed into the side of a hill, scrubland either side. This helps bring me back to earth.

 It seems to be the thing to do here at Baldwin Hills. People at all stages of fitness are using them as a free gym, even on a crappy rainy day like this. And they’re talking and laughing and out in the cold improving themselves just because. The stairs feel happy, and the derrics feel oppressive. Do things take on the character of their use?

  

I stop at the top as the sun goes down. Nobody else has stopped. I watch the foggy skyline and smile. A scab has been pulled off today.  The past can be burnt as fuel.

Day 19 and after a morning’s work I’m restless. I’ve been sitting editing with the dogs in the garden but it’s cold. So I go to a nearby David Hockney retrospective. Hockney is 79. He is from Yorkshire, near Bradford, and has spent many years painting and working in Los Angeles. He’s a legend. He has recently released a new book, Sumo, a journey through the bulk of his art, retailing at $2500. Taschen, the publisher, has some copies on display not far from where I am. And the man is in the news tomorrow so it seems like the perfect time to celebrate his works.

I spend some time absorbing his life’s work. At one point he said he paints because he knows that the world is deeper and richer than the one we can capture in a photograph. His paintings are often wonderfully celebratory, and sometimes deeply human. He is playful. And he works hard. Properly hard. Twelve hours a day. I feel guilty taking time off to see them on a weekday. But it’s galvanising stuff. Wild bright colours, the colours that things really are before our eyes before our expectations mute them. Bodies with heft and movement. I’m captivated. And he’s a cheeky bugger. He’s accepted a commission to paint the masthead for The Sun tomorrow. He’s done a spectacularly naive job, and released this as a public statement : ” I was delighted to be asked. Once I thought about the idea it didn’t take me long. The sun and The Sun. I love it.” If anybody thinks that that is anything other than a brilliant troll of the naïveté peddled by that paper, they’re barking up the wrong tree. Good on Hockney. Take the money and spend it on good things and good people. I love it.
As I leave the exhibition I get a video sent to me by a friend. It’s advertising a place called “Crumbs and Whiskers” which is a café come cat sanctuary, where you can get a latte and sit in a fluffy room full of cats. It’s only twenty minutes away on google maps, and my friend is sad so the least I can do is go and spend some time there. She can’t. It’s essentially a convivial version of Battersea Dogs Home filled with overexcited single people running around grinning like idiots. I join them. It’s a great idea.

All the cats are from sanctuary and all are up for adoption. They have a tally on one wall of how many cats they’ve found homes for. Considering cat sanctuaries are often free but you donate, this is actually pretty expensive. You have to pay a minimum of 9 bucks to get in, and coffee is also more expensive than anywhere else. Essentially they are using customer cash to help rescue animals live with a much higher degree of comfort than they would in a sanctuary, and simultaneously raising their chances of adoption. It’s the sort of business model that should take off, both over here and in London.
I play with the idea of setting up a Dog cafe in Hackney, before coming back down to earth and realising that I’ve got a lot of catching up to do with Hockney regarding hours put in to my acting career. On the way home I fantasise about having a Hockney picture. And a cat. And a dog. In my big house in Larchmont that I’ve paid for with a working career.