Tag: Reseda Bl.

For a while I’ve had a photographer’s love affair with Reseda Boulevard.

It’s bright, toxic, saturated, crowded. 

There are signs in every language on Earth:

Thai, Farsi, Spanish, Mandarin, Korean, Hebrew, Arabic.

There’s shit food every five feet: Domino’s, donuts, Arby’s, KFC.

You can buy anything a car or human might consume. 

Everything looks unlicensed, illegal or poisonous, like it just slipped past the eyes and hands of the law. 

Smoke shops, ramen, foot massage, dentists, orthodontists, auto body shops, tire repair, Chinese seafood, Pep Boys Auto, liquor, paint, car wash, 7Eleven, pizza, Korean soup, check cashing, smoke shops, eyebrow threading, and eyeglasses. 

Every sign combined is guaranteed to induce vomiting.

Oil changes and scrambled eggs and kim chi, chocolate milk shakes and boiled dumplings and hookah. Bagels and tampons, cigars and french fries.

All of it is stretched out and burns in the sun for miles.

Yet I have a love affair with Reseda Boulevard.

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It rekindled again last week.

I started a class at CSUN that meets Thursday afternoons from 4-6:45pm. 

When I left the school after the first class we were in the second night of our 108 degree heat wave.

I walked up the stairs in the B5 concrete parking garage, N95 still affixed to my face, water bottle hooked to my belt, gasping for air and thirsting for iced drink.

I drove south, down Reseda Boulevard, as the sun was setting, past the stores with burning oranges and vibrant greens and deep reds written in the languages of many different nations.

The air was brown with fire smoke, and it was like a filter over my eyes, intensifying everything, driving and stopping, braking and accelerating in a rush hour jam of cars, trucks, pedestrians, bikes, motorbikes and the soundtrack of Franz Waxman playing “Agony” in “Beloved Infidel.”

I was watching a movie at every stop light. “Paris, Texas” in the smog. Billboards and signs and on and on and on.

It was so vile but I could not take my eyes off it.

The only hope for me, for our city, is to look at it like a film, a story we are starring in, set in an urban hellscape, temporary and eternal.