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About
Karina Longworth is the film editor of the LA Weekly, as well as the co-founder of Cinematical and the former editor of SpoutBlog. She recently returned to her hometown of Los Angeles after twelve years split between various other cities, most recently Brooklyn. This blog, when she remembers to update it, will be mostly about that.
A couple of months ago, I invited the internet to make and send me mix CDs. I received about 15 of them, from friends, internet “friends”, total strangers who identified themselves, total strangers who didn’t identify themselves (see above). I promised, in various venues, that I would write something about this experiment/the CDs themselves. But at this point, I can’t keep that promise. There are a few things going on right now that are making me extremely reluctant to put non-professional traces of myself, including non-work writing, into the world. So: if you sent me a CD, thank you. I listened to it, and if you want to talk to me about it privately, please get in touch. That is all.
My favorite things about this — other than, you know, yay Greta, and OMFG Arthur — are Nikki Finke’s slap to Mike Fleming’s lede (because she’s a feminist? Really?), and the first comment, all the way up through, “May the film get ruined at the lab!!” For the record, I disagree and am really quite looking forward to seeing how this turns out.
(The carpet at the abandoned Hollywood Video store on the ground floor of the Wiltern complex. They keep that place lit at all hours of the night, for god knows what reason)
People keep asking me, “How’s it going in LA?” I don’t know how to answer that. I know I should say “Great!” so that the conversation can roll smoothly along. But I’m not exactly a master of casual conversation, so in these situations, I find myself wanting to actually answer accurately. Eyes usually glaze over before I find the right words.
The fact is, I’m too deeply embedded in the work (and it’s all work at this point—not just work-work but also driving, socializing, reacquainting myself with the city—it feels like I’m working all the time) to truly know how it’s “going.”
I do think it’s worth noting, particularly for the New Yorkers, that Los Angeles is in an unusually apocalyptic mode these days. The long-feared city-devastating earthquake is long overdue. The city is about to go bankrupt; it could get all New York in the 70s up in here any minute. People seem to be partying like the end is near—every time I go out, whether to new bourgie nightshit Downtown or to dive bar karaoke split between old men and hipsters, I feel overmatched in terms of my capacity for the indulgence.
Last night, I was driving home to Koreatown, and Wilshire was blocked off approaching Western, which is the end point for the Purple Line subway into Downtown. At the detour point, I asked a guard what was up and, in a heavy Korean accent, he said, “Subway go boom.” I rushed home and went online, but couldn’t find a single news report. Almost twelve hours later, there’s still no news to be found as to what was actually going on that necessitated closing off several blocks of my neighborhood. I’m now convinced that the guard was fucking with me, which is something I’m not sure you could get away with in New York. Here, it’s all you can do to joke about total fucking disaster.
To try to will that theory into reality, I’m going to read from my book at Sherwood Magazines tomorrow evening. 7pm, 745 N La Cienega Blvd, north of Melrose. There will be wine for free and books for sale. Please come.
On Monday, March 22, at the age of 29 and three-quarters, I got my drivers license. It, so far, has been quite exciting: My First Rush Hour! My First Parking Lot Disaster! My First Oh Shit BRB Forgot To Feed The Meter! It is, in short, a whole new world, a new fantastic point of view.
Well, with a caveat. I thought that everything would be okay, once I was finally able to control my own movement through Los Angeles. But everything is not okay; I do not have anything to listen to in the car, because KXLU only comes through spottily on my commute, and I don’t have an MP3 hook-up thing, and when I was leaving New York, I threw away all my CDs (with the exception of half a dozen mix CDs given to me over the past decade by boys; there’s a couple that I can’t listen to due to Memories, and I’ve pretty much exhausted the rest this week).
This is where you come in. Please, people of the internet: make me a mix CD. Put whatever you want on it. If you want to increase the chances that I’ll like it, you can look at my Last.FM profile and curate accordingly. I will Twitter and/or post here about every CD that I receive. Send ‘em here:
Karina Longworth | LA WEEKLY | 3861 Sepulveda Blvd. | Culver City, CA 90230
Godspeed, nerds.
That is now this:
Don’t ask how I found this. Just say thank you.
This band, Best Coast, opened for Vivian Girls the other night. I haven’t been able to stop listening to this song since.
