For a good, but partial assessment of our city, state of well-being and homeland, I went with a friend for a mid-morning walk down the wet sidewalk of Sunset Strip on New Year’s Day 2026.

The Strip has evolved into a digital billboard neighborhood attached to abstract modern structures with sharp angles and dark glasses. No new building looks exactly alike, but they are all indistinguishable.

Everything streaming on Netflix could sum up the variety of entertainment, all of it ominous, violent and filled with great looking people of international ethnicities whose faces are smoothed out to look 32 years old. Unless they are less than 32 and then everyone looks 19.

The old story of the LA photographer, which has been going on since Dennis Hopper and Stephen Shore, is to ironically photograph the ugly juxtapositions between the crude and the elegant, the disposable and the eternal, to show the city exactly as it is to show that things are not exactly as you believe.

Unable to escape that postwar artistic heritage, and consigned to a life of obscurity and non-acknowledgement, I too went anonymously with my lens along the street and photographed everything that was here today and gone tomorrow: Sinners, Glen Powell, Stranger Things; Elon, Zuckerberg and Bezos; Bogonia, Edibles and Cannibis, the Mechanical Bull, and the late great Kobe Bryant. 

The rain made everything quite beautiful and sparkling and reflective.

I went to Starbucks (newly remodeled with smiling baristas who greet you) so I could pee. After washing my hands, I said Happy New Year to a young, bruised, queer girl Amanda who was picking up her beverage. She wore a sweatshirt with the word “Dirt.” She smiled at me, appreciatively.

For one day, only one day, yesterday, it was a new year.

But every year it’s always the same year along the Sunset Strip.