Los Angeles

By Ben Fama

Like any subscription member
of the Metropolitan Opera
fashion bloggers believe
they’re at the center of perception.
I want to go where men go.
Is a high school crush
on an alien surf girl
the same as the need
to fatally possess
the other and the self?
My friends were in a band
called Second Life®.
Let’s get high
talk about ’90s nostalgia
Scientology
drink Diet Coke.
The Real is a teenager
drunk in a turn.
A blue dot pulsing down
Santa Monica Blvd.
Hackers are the
unacknowledged legislators of the world.
For something to be timeless
it must be outside mortality
and if humans exist outside of death
they’re no longer subject to the violence
of sexual reproduction
or the fragility of life itself.
In these conditions music
will have no cultural efficacy.
Hope life now won’t need.
A forever sadness, though possible, now obsolete,
What did I do this weekend?
Listened to this song “Tropical Winter” on repeat
while POV jogging through Runyon Canyon.
Totally desperate boys following cute boys
making out under Tumblr skies
reblogged as gossip
sent from my iPhone.
Kenneth Anger fatigued and
decadent in silk
post-fantasy.
Negation is part of the
positive identity of an object.
There is no snow in Hollywood.
Celebrities constitutive of a
scene that draw the populations
restaurant owners want as their clientele.
In a single day three stars photographed
in the same gray hoodie.
I want to create a product
too unstable to be marketed.
Not to say lacking
maybe messy
discursive and sort of pushing
oscillating among
the various dimensions of influence.
I could write here randy details
of my consumer choices
banal and otherwise
it would not amount to much.
Mallarmé on fashion,
Benjamin on fashion.
A monograph retrospective
of Guess’s photo editorials
next to the bed.
So maybe alien visitations
directly influenced human history over the millennia.
What does it take to start a new life?
You take lonely trips to the city
you are interested in moving to.
Saturate the market with your resume.
During interviews order both coffee and juice.
Masterfully handle the acceptance of your ontological incompleteness
by affecting the persona of the applicant they want to hire
a winning assurance that you never intend to realize
obvious to all parties six months into the job
as if persona or voice was something laid stable
over the truth of a tectonic subjectivity
Jean Paul Gaultier staged his Chic Rabbi
collection at Paris Fashion Week FW ’93
Very beautiful, very elegant, the orthodox religious
clothing and the gender bending
fits with his interest in tradition and iconic imagery
as well as the fact that he’s treating somewhat impertinently
something that most people wouldn’t dare play with
in couture design.
When Gaultier talks about himself though he sounds so dumb.