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Wilshire Patio
Peter Schjeldahl, from the Village Voice June 1981.
Los Angeles — My fate keeps bringing me here, and I never get used to it. It starts when I step off the plane — World Airways usually, down the stairs and onto the tarmac like an aviation pioneer. There is the familiar shock of the soft dead air and fierce milky brightness, the instant and afterward incessant feeling of being a sugar cube dissolving in warm fluid. Even on the rare glycerine-clear winter day, the atmosphere is more real than anything that occupies it, including one’s own body. In the right frame of mind, one’s consequent feeling of shapelessness can be an immense baby pleasure.