Sun City is one of four identical retirement communities designed by Del Webb in the 1960s, located along Interstate 215, in Riverside County, California. It spans four square miles, contains two golf courses, and its primary purpose is to accommodate folks ages 55 and older. This concentrated demographic of the elderly provides for a plethora of eccentrically decorated homes–I set out last week to explore and photograph some of them.

While out snapping, I was approached by a Mr. Sam Bybee, who looked curiously at me photographing his front lawn. “So you like what I’ve done with the place?” he asked me, pulling out his wallet and showing me a badge. “I was a Texas Ranger for 32 years. This lawn is a tribute to a life I once knew. Want a tour?” I followed him into the backyard, passing an overweight beagle, whom he referred to lovingly by the name Peaches. “I’ve owned 117 dogs. I just had to bury one today. I get them from the pound up the street, so they don’t have to put as many of them down. If any of your friends ever want one, I get them their shots and give them away for free. Never could respect anyone who charged money for a dog.” He opened a sliding door and motioned for me to follow. He said jokingly, “I’d like to buy a pretty lady a drink.” I found myself sitting at a kitchen counter, sipping a 7Up, while he told me more of his past. “I came to California to do some training in Fort Roberts. There were dances held once a week up in Newport, and that’s how I met my first wife. We were together until she died in ’84, then I moved here. One of her girlfriends followed me, and we ended up married–been that way since. She just had a stroke a few weeks back, which left her paralyzed from the waist down. She’s fine though, a real trooper. Camping out in the living room right now.” He took me to meet her. I didn’t know what to expect, but when I walked in, a very small, cute lady in (I’m only guessing, now) her early seventies was sitting in a rocking chair, crocheting with the television on. Mrs. Bybee had short red hair and wore enormous bifocals that made her eyes appear to be as wide as tea plates. She looked up at me and smiled politely. Mr. Bybee introduced me and told her about my interest in the front lawn. “See Marjorie, someone appreciates the way I decorate,” he said proudly. ”You like it?” she asked me, in utter disbelief. “My, my. That’s all I have to say about that.”

My chat with the Bybees lasted for about an hour before my mother called me home for dinner. When I got up to leave,  Mr. Bybee slipped me a calling card of sorts, which I found rather humorous and stored safely in my pocket to include in this recounting (shown below, but with some of the information covered–for privacy reasons, of course–by another picture I took that day). From her rocking chair, Mrs. Bybee waved goodbye and said in her small, childlike voice, “It was lovely meeting you. Please come back very soon!”

1. You brought me to: to the burger joint full of drag queens, the beach house with the stray cats and insecure boys, and the deli your mother-in-law worked at. Our original connection was through the antics of a mutual friend long gone in New York. The last time you called me you said, “Would anyone in your house like a knife demonstration?” I asked what you were talking about, and you said you had a new job as a knife seller. You wanted me to ask my parents if they would be interested in seeing your knives. “I’ll see what I can do,” I said, and hung up.

2. You were the tattooed, dirty boy standing outside the soundstage near the hot dog stand. When a father asked you about the event, you said that it was going to be a “fun, clean event” and drugs would not be tolerated. He left and you walked behind a Volvo to do a line. Later that night (although I only heard about this secondhand) you punched your hand through a windshield and went to the hospital. The woman that brought you to the hosptial was your best friend, and you swore that you would be lifelong friends. Two weeks later you two got in a fight and, and you went to live in the Bay Area. Last I heard, you went to jail for a year for pushing a man out a six story window.

3. You sat at the breakfast nook in the spaceship-themed house, waiting. My mom asked you what sorts of things you wrote. “Well, I don’t know quite how to explain it… It’s basically exactly like… hmm… Shakespeare.” My parents kicked each other under the table and asked you about your other art: the paintings hanging in the other room. You compulsively adjusted your bug eyeglasses in thought. “My art seeks to connect all people, through what I believe fundamentally connects all people: mammalian birth,” you told us. “That’s wonderful,” I said naturally, with no trace of irony. You were a sweet, otherkin grandma allowing us to live in your San Francisco loft themed like a spaceship. My parents looked at me wide-eyed. When I was getting ready for bed, you came in to my room and told me that night you saw something special in me. I was scared you’d try pull a Harold and Maude seduction on me. I sighed when you said that I had a true calling in life to spread your idea of mammalian birth. You walked back into your bedroom, forever wide-eyed.

4. You are famous, and people can perceive you with grotesquely perfect proportions. You respond to this by laughing, smiling, and remembering names the first time you hear them. You found the necklace I left under the Virgin Mary statue, did the detective work to call and thank me. You refuse to become numb to all that you have. I am scared someone will try to use you and it won’t be your fault. You don’t want to say no, to anyone, but sometimes you feel this intense bout of refusal coming up your spine; you shove it back down and put on your mask. The fear that one step the wrong way, one trick, one lazy night, and all the gold will disappear keeps you awake. Your respect grows with your hard work.

Photographs from my Instagram

Lately, I’ve been feeling nostalgic for a time I never knew. A time when everything was simple, in black and white, when good and evil were clearly defined. If such a time never existed, at least the world thought it did. Much as I love enlightened thought, it often feels like life would be easier if we could just blame all of our problems on communism. Yes, I’m feeling nostalgic for the 1950s and ’60s, when nothing was as perfect as it seemed, but at least everyone knew nothing was as perfect as it seemed. When you rebelled, you knew what you were rebelling against because there was a clear injustice.

And it’s not that I think there are no real injustices today – there are, and many of them carried out by our own government. It just feels like the people speaking up about injustice most loudly aren’t those who need the most help. Of course, as an artist, thoughts like these always connect back to art for me. Although it obviously wasn’t so clear to the people living through it, it feels like back then there was a clear association between art, free speech, youth, love, liberalism, openness, and intelligent thought. Because most of middle-class society was so closed-off and devoted to a false image of perfection, it was easier, at least, for us middle-class artistic youth, to know where to begin – be open, be free, be you.

In our culture, it seems we have almost the opposite problem. Rebelling against a culture of reality TV and talk radio, which enforces stereotypes in a much more hidden way, is a challenge. Take, for example, the Occupy Wall Street movement. The easiest comparison to the ’60s, as long as I’m making them, would be the civil rights movement, or perhaps the women’s rights movement or any push for greater equality during that time. I like to think that I wouldn’t have been one of those bitchy sweater-set girls from Hairspray who insisted that integration was unnatural or that a woman’s place was in the home. But to us, looking back on it, the conflict seems so clear – Good vs. Evil. Occupy Wall Street has no such clarity, and when I heard recently that Occupy L.A. had staged a protest during a local art event, I honestly didn’t know what to think. The ’60s, fight-for-equality part of me hears that Occupy was protesting the arrest of some people who did no more than draw in chalk on a sidewalk, and wants to go out there and join the fight. After all, as artists, isn’t it our job to defend free speech in its many artistic forms? Another part of me hears that the Occupiers instigated the conflict by throwing glass bottles at the police, and wonders if the majority protesters were fighting for anything, or simply stirring up trouble.

I suppose it just makes me wonder whether, back in the good, or at least old, days of legally-enforced racism, sexism, and homophobia, people thought the same sorts of things. “I’d be okay with these civil rights people if they had a goal instead of stirring up trouble for no reason,” I can imagine a Hairspray sweater-set girl saying. “They just haven’t done their research – they don’t even know how to go about integration or what it would do to this country. Besides, these protests are isolated and will never achieve anything.” Meanwhile, modern-day me replaces “civil rights” with “Occupy” and “integration” with “eliminating the fed,” and thinks the same thing. They’re not on the same level – one is a political tool that clearly enforced racism, while the other is an economic tool that, good or bad, can’t really be sad to “clearly” do anything – but the sentiment remains. “I would probably be okay with the violence if I thought it would achieve something worthwhile, but I don’t think it will.”

Of course, in the modern case, I don’t think it’s that most people disagree with Occupy Wall Street – they literally just don’t know what Occupiers are trying to do or even if the movement has any unified purpose beyond expressing general discontent. At least, I know that’s my problem. As much as I love the idea of a grassroots organization making a change, it worries me that people, using the name of Occupy as a slogan, could set out to an event to demand artists’ rights, and end up making it impossible for any of the artists at that event to sell their work. That sort of disconnect between intention and result doesn’t inspire confidence, and almost seems counter-productive. Wouldn’t it have been more helpful to spend that effort getting a good lawyer to defend the people arrested for their chalk drawings? Yet simultaneously, I worry when I hear people automatically dismiss the movement, since it would take more then poor planning for me to believe we should suppress anyone’s freedom of speech.  As much as I may disagree with Occupy’s execution, I am an artist, after all, and I will defend anyone’s right to draw in chalk on a sidewalk without being arrested for it.

Lidia Yuknavitch is one of the first on my list of “lady heroes,” a list which also includes writers and representatives of kickass womanhood Beryl Markham, Virginia Woolf, Roxane Gay, Isak Dinesen, Cheryl Strayed, Marina Tsvetaeva, Emily Dickinson, and Georgia O’Keeffe. A list that reminds me of my body, my words, my place, and their importance. Of “girl myths,” as Yuknavitch calls them in one interview, and how we must make new ones including our bodies and our power.

We knew, from her memoir The Chronology of Water and from essays like “Blood Red Desk” and “About a Boob, or the Hermeneutics of a Woman’s Body,” that Yuknavitch believes in the body, in story, sex, power, enjoyment: that the body can teach us more about writing, feeling, and art than much else. In an interview with The Rumpus about Dora, she says, “You could say I think the body is the first novel. I take my cues about form and content from her.”

From this, through this, Dora becomes a rolling curvy bodily whole that refuses to feel shame for what is human, for integral girlselves and teenselves and selfselves. The writing is styled into boles, into trunks of kennings and words informed primarily by a precision of fleshed feeling—vodkaskin, throatsong, girlstory, bomblets. It is as full as the character Marlene’s laugh—Marlene, who is Dora’s surrogate-sort mother, part of the family she creates herself: “Marlene is making bacon. She laughs and laughs . . . She says, ‘It is my dark continent. It lives in my belly! . . . It is a statement made by history. I had to eat it, and now it is in my belly.’ . . . With her back to me, she says, ‘Someday, you will learn to laugh with your whole life.’”

To promote the release date of Dora, Yuknavitch led an online campaign on August 1, in which women and men everywhere posted pictures of themselves, their torsos, headless, with signs and skins reading “My body is not your battleground,” often signed “Love, Dora and the daughters of Eve.” Dora is a reclaiming of the body, of every body, and of the stories it and its accompanying personhoods holds. And it is about youth and jealousy, about fullness through living that. In part, Yuknavitch’s dedication to the book reads: “This book is for every teen who ever got treated like something was wrong with them, when really they were opening the portal for all of us. I made this for you.”

I could talk about plot here, or characters. I could mention that, and probably ought to. (I should at least mention that Dora is a modern retelling—as well as a tearing-apart—of Freud’s famous case study of the same name.) But, in tandem with Dora’s statement—“Art is a verb”—reading Dora is a verb. My review can’t change you like it can, can’t tell you exactly how much of the space above your heart up to your throat into your ears will recognize yourself in this, and cry on trains or in hotel rooms like I did knowing that you are both different and exactly the same as you were at seventeen, or as you are now at seventeen, between months or years. I want you to see the tribe Dora makes herself, the space she carves out with her elbows and the sharp corners of her youngfeeling self. I want to ask you yourself “which city [your] body is. Or ocean.” I want to hold your hand while you read this and draw strings from the nodes of its story to your own, draw how it saves you.

—

Dora: A Headcase, published by Hawthorne Books, is available through Powell’s and elsewhere. Lidia Yuknavitch can be found here.

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If you’ve ever been in an English class and actually done the reading, it should come as no surprise to you that most works of classic literature can be summarized in a few lines of dialogue. And if you haven’t…then you probably need these to prepare for that test on the book you were supposed to read this summer.

The Great Gatsby

Nick: So there’s this guy named Gatsby…I’m not obsessed or anything I just think he’s a cool guy.

Gatsby: I throw parties to hide my inner pain.

That one scene in the elevator: You guys this does not represent thinly-veiled homoeroticism. Elevators have shafts, okay? It’s not a metaphor.

Literary Hipsters: BEST BOOK EVER

Literary Hipsters, later: Yeah I used to like that book before it was popular.

Literary Hipsters, even later: Okay but actually this is the best book ever I don’t even care how many people love it

All images are stills from movies based on said novels, not ours.

Just when I thought the so-called “war on drugs” could not become any more incomprehensible, the Dutch are suddenly deciding to clamp down on their famously laid-back cannabis laws. Yes, the capital of the Netherlands, the one city in the world that seemingly has its head screwed on right in terms of the legalisation of weed, is now under threat.

After a handful of drug-related crimes occurred in the south of the country, the Dutch government began to question whether their relaxed attitude toward the sale of marijuana, in designated “coffee shops” around the country, was a good idea or not. They have now stated that, as of January 1st 2013, the buying of cannabis from Dutch coffee shops will be limited to Dutch residents only, who’ll need a “weed pass” in order to legally purchase anything.

The enforcement of this law inevitably does not allow the high majority of tourists who’ll visit Amsterdam to, amongst sight-seeing, just chill out and have a smoke. Surely such an upheaval of the tourism industry will severely affect things financially. Having visited Amsterdam just a couple of weeks ago, I can tell that over half of the visitors to these coffee shops aren’t Dutch. After visiting some of the most established coffee shops (such as 420, Grey Area, Hill Street Blues and Barney’s) it’s clear that these places aren’t the seedy hovels that many may perceive them to be. Since the 90s, coffee shops have only been allowed to serve non-alcoholic drinks, meaning the atmosphere is relaxed and chilled out, as opposed to a rowdy bar. Staff are cool and friendly, greeting you with a menu listing a range of cannabis choices – from Purple Haze to White Widow, to “Space Cakes” (yep – you got it – hash brownies). As someone who occasionally smokes but not often, I was pleasantly surprised when my boyfriend – a regular smoker – handed me a spliff in cafe 420 of some of best stuff I’d ever had. Smooth on your throat and similarly on your head, the weed in Amsterdam is a far cry from the overpriced “skunk” that we buy in London.

Ironically, statistics show that fewer people in the Netherlands smoke cannabis than both the UK and the USA. It’s clear that the attitude toward it, which is so grounded in Amsterdam’s culture, is far from posing a threat. There are around 250 coffee shops in Amsterdam, and it seems at least half serve marijuana. Surely the owners of these businesses won’t go without a fight, right? American musician Jonathan Foster, age 40, the founder of Grey Area which opened in 1995, told the Washington Post that, “The coffee shops became extensions of your living room, a place where you find a 65-year-old Brazilian lawyer talking to a 20-year-old American backpacker, both relaxed and open because they’re smoking weed.” After serving a range of celebrities such as Snoop Dogg and Willie Nelson in his shop, the cannabis culture of the city is decidedly an amazing way to bring people together. “Nationalities mix, people bond. The idea that could go away is too much to imagine.”

Michael Veling, 56, owner of the 420 Cafe, insists that he is ready to disobey this “ridiculous law” which he is sure will only result in a re-emergence of the black market – not only of cannabis, but of the “weed passes” themselves. Even Amsterdam officials have spoken out against the law, so it seems that they will probably look the other way and continue to let these harmless business run peacefully, as they have done for the past 20 years. It’s hard to imagine the law coming into action anywhere near as soon as 2013. Apparently it took ten years before the official ban on simultaneous alcohol and marijuana sale came into effect. For such a radical change to come into action, as soon and as smoothly as the Dutch government is intending, is next to impossible. Nevertheless, tourists are now flocking to Amsterdam en masse to get what could be their last taste of what weed should really taste like…

There’s this drawer in my room that got stuck shut about a year ago, just after my family moved from the only other house I had ever lived in. Trying to pack things more easily, I had stuffed everything that would fit inside it, anything I wanted to keep but didn’t use on a daily basis. Eventually, I closed it one day only to find that it wouldn’t reopen – something inside had gotten wedged, and couldn’t be budged. For days I worked at it, at first not knowing what was keeping the drawer closed – was it the stack of cassette tapes my parents recorded for me when I was little and they went out of town, because I couldn’t bear to go a night without hearing their voices read me to sleep? Was it all of the notes from birthdays and holidays my mom’s parents had sent me over the years, from even before I could read or understand the concept of a letter? Or maybe one of my old journals, filled with cliched ramblings and angsty breakdowns, all the best and worst of a pre-teen’s life?

Regardless, I couldn’t get any of that stuff out, and as weeks and then months passed, I gave up. Sometimes, when I was looking for something and remembered it was in that drawer, I would make another few dozen efforts; I must have tried every material in our house to shove whatever was in there out of the way. When I found my hands couldn’t fit far enough in to reach the offending object, I tried books, pencils, CDs, scissors, an umbrella, my dad’s collection of screwdrivers, shoes, a wire hanger, a plastic hanger, a wooden hanger, and even once, in a poorly planned attempt, one of those snap-on bracelets from the ’90s, which gave me a nasty bruise trying to shove it into the small space, but didn’t work any better than anything else had.

At last, one day last week, on a summer day with nothing much to do, I decided to take a hike with one of my old journals and read through some of the entries, and try to fill it up before buying any new notebooks. Knowing I would fail, I begged my dad for help, and after all of his efforts also met with disappointment, he flipped over the entire ridiculously heavy wooden drawer, and started to shake it. Suddenly, it opened, disgorging its contents all over my bedroom floor, where they joined the stuff that I had thrown off my dresser so that my dad could turn it upside down. And what had been keeping it shut? Nothing special, just a binder of my old sheet music and monologues that I hadn’t really wanted to keep but couldn’t justify throwing away, as they could be future audition material. Really, the only thing in there that might have a concrete purpose in my life, but the only thing I had never searched for or tried to open that drawer for, the one thing I found, when it came down to it, I didn’t really need.

Going through everything that I had lost by locking it away in there, finding old pictures to tape to my walls and CDs I hadn’t listened to in years, I realized that part of the crushing nostalgia I felt every time I wanted to open that drawer, or every time I thought about moving to a completely new city for college, was because I felt like I couldn’t take any of that stuff with me in the rest of my life, even simply to a new house in almost the exact same neighborhood as the old one. But I now saw, as I began to confuse the letters on my floor – which had been inside the drawer, unread for ages, and which had just been sent to me, piled in a stack on top of it? – that that really wasn’t true. All of this stuff is still a part of me, and while I obviously can’t take all of it to my tiny dorm room in the fall, I am the only one who can choose what to bring.

In our lives, we have to make conscious choices what to keep – which friends are dearest, which books best, which letters longest, which clothes most irreplaceable, which hobbies most fulfilling, and on and on. It takes an effort to keep things. If I leave my room as it is, a complete jumble of keepsakes with no rhyme or reason, then my  letters will end up chewed by my dog, and eventually no one will have a way to play my cassette tapes and they’ll be useless. And if I lock all of it away in some drawer – or maybe a cabinet this time – chances are I’ll forget what’s in there, and it will all meet the same sad fate. But if I box away some of it and keep the most important bits of it with me, if I convert those tapes to digital, and stick those old Polaroids up on my walls…then I get to choose what I see every day, what stays a part of me, and what stays with me in a smaller way, boxed up in my parents’ house to be rediscovered at a later date. There is so much that’s uncertain about the future, but what I can control is what I bring with me from the past, be it from ten years ago or two. Although sorting through it all is going to be a lengthy process, I can hardly call it a chore – I’m excited to dig through my past again, to bring bits of it with me; and I’m excited for what necessitates that journey, the journey in the other direction that takes me forward, into the future.

Some time ago, I came to the decision that all of life’s greatest epiphanies occur either in the shower or on some form of public transportation. Whether or not this conclusion is accurate, it applies very much to me and my own epiphanies, big and small.

The most recent of these occurred on my way home from work, in the back-left corner of the bus (the seat I have silently claimed after countless commutes). If these aha moments had a soundtrack, it would most certainly be Goldmund’s album Corduroy Road, followed by the score of American Beauty, or Cinematic Orchestra’s To Build a Home. This evening it was a combination of Goldmund, the 5 o’clock spitting rain, and an aimless day at work that led me to breathe deeply and, on my shopping list for lemons and cotton-balls, scribble the following: “Tonight I am shell-shocked by the never-ending bigness and the simultaneous minuteness of the world.”

I got off the bus, slipped quietly into my empty apartment so as to not wake the sleeping plants, removed my shoes, and curled into bed, forehead pressed lovingly against the wall. In that second I felt no more important or consequential than a fruit fly. At the same time, the steady and unbroken universe of tumultuous emotions and desires within me felt like the single most powerful thing a body could experience.

I could not comprehend how a stranger walking past my blue-doored building at that split second would not stop in their tracks, drop their groceries, and clutch their chest at the overwhelming emotion emanating from Apartment #662. Neither could I comprehend that within each person, there very likely was a similar endless infinity of worries, wants, minute concerns and vast capacities for love and hate.

This realization comes and goes, perpetually stunted by the small, irritating requirements of everyday life and brought back again by equally insignificant details, like an extended second of eye contact with a stranger, or overhearing a heartbreaking conversation, or noticing that the sunglassed lady across the bus has tears creeping down her cheeks like gentle, beautiful blooms of ivy. And it is in these moments that I’m compelled to record the occurrence, be it on a receipt, a shopping list, or my palm, if only to be later reminded that not everything is petty and life is not all spiteful.

My other inclination is to stand up, hands shaking and heart bursting, and take your face in my hands and remind you – you’re an intricate universe of coiled ferns and bleeding hearts and silver lining. This millisecond will be broken by every other spectrum of being alive – remembering you’re late to dinner, spraining your ankle, waking up to your alarm. But while it lasts, gaze at it with eyes open, trembling, and awash with wonder.

Everyone loves Ikea. The cheap, cheerful products and maze-like layout make the store a bit of an adult’s playground. I hadn’t been to IKEA since I was a kid, until I had the idea to shoot a colour story there, and realised there was a store just a 20 minute bus ride from my house!

This is also an editorial from a magazine I’ve been working on for a university project, alongside three other students. We’ve just got it printed but only have four copies in total (because it was so expensive to print). However, I’m thinking of uploading the whole thing to issuu.com sometime soon – so keep a look out! You can get a sneak preview of our inspiration and some behind-the-scenes shots on our tumblr. There should also be a playlist/mix uploaded there soon as well, to go alongside the magazine.

Massive thanks to Alice Neale for helping with art direction and styling.

You can see the rest of the shoot on my website.