Last November, I went with a group of friends to see an art project at the Los Angeles River called What Water Wants. We all wore headphones and listened to Rosten Woo’s project about the LA basin’s watersheds.

Activists and artists and planners and researchers have been working for decades on a new plan to reclaim the river. In the ‘30s, the Army Corps of Engineers strait-jacketed it with concrete channels. But last year, my friends and I saw a heron pecking in the grasses at the foot of a tree. We watched water flow towards the ocean. The area across from us would soon be turned into a park. What Mike Davis once called “the redemption of Los Angeles’s riparian landscapes” seemed so close we could taste it.

I went to New York in October for a seminar in ASAP, the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present. I did write about improv, college, stripping & Marx? See the seminar description below. I took almost no pictures of people, even though it was so sustaining to reconnect with friends I only see at conferences.

I walked the Highline down the waterfront and then across the Brooklyn Bridge. I saw the extraordinarily moving Alvin Ailey exhibit. I let my friend in Brooklyn spoil me, while I fell in love with his cat. We went to a play and a Knicks game and a comedy show, and nothing has ever been more glorious.

And I got to put in some quality time with my uncle, Paul Chihara, and his lovely wife Carol, who teased me about Marxist humor and told me stories about the past.

I wanted to enter SOULHOUSE. But they were closed. So I snapped a picture and ended up, in an insomniac moment at 2am, distracting myself not with an appointment for inner crystals but with a rabbit hole of questions about this house of soul: Why does a music producer and “sound healer” by the beach have an Alzheimer’s nonprofit that he started with Dionne Warwick and an OnlyFans model?

Perhaps this doesn’t happen to you. 

Research about anonymous corporations and money laundering is a minor habit. It can be a useful lens through which I see the business world, or it can be like an inner hammer, where, when some part of me is longing for escape, everything I see in the world looks like a distracting nail. 

 I once read a parenting blog entry that made me so angry, I pretty much stopped reading parenting blogs. It was an interview with a woman who had a high-level position in finance. Yes, she was a banker, so, perhaps I’m biased. But when she was asked for tips about how to get your kids out in the morning, she said something about making organic oatmeal in large batches on Sunday night so that you could spend your precious minutes in the morning “eating together.”

A memorial essay for my father, Charles Chihara.