#fuji 100c

minto daze. 

Floridan Winter

Fuji 100c film

homes. 

home: a nice place to visit. 

A week ago tonight the owners of our house on Gramercy Pl in the hills above Western Ave, near Griffith Park, mine of 12 years, Roxanne’s for nearly 10,  whipped on through like the wild Santa Anas and blew us on out. 

I anticipated a rather frantic and frankly dreadful last few hours in this place in which I spent a quarter of my life and which I so thorroughtly documented here in this blog portentously titled. This tumblr was in no small part inspired by the ethereal beauty and queasy uneasiness conjured by this place— and really any place I’ve hung my hat for very long (Home, a nice place to visit…but I wouldn’t want to live there.). But after such a protracted escrow period (6 months while we were out of the country) plus another two months in which we were tenants in our own home looking for a new one, we couldn’t have imagined there would have been such a misunderstanding. 

This is the second house I’ve owned and therefore only the second I’ve sold in my life, so when our broker said the new owners would like a walk through on the 14th–the eve of their contracted move in date–and we obliged (assuming we’d be legs up and soaking in epsoms at some new digs by this point) we of course obliged. When she followed with, “and will you be giving them the keys that night?” I thought–and said–”sure,” though it seemed somewhat irrelevant given we put a keypad lock on the door some years ago. I took her literally.  I wasn’t hip to the vernacular, Moreover, what were they gonna do in an empty house which I was told they were going to remodel much of anyway before they moved in? My plan was to spend a quiet few hours at the house and watch the sun descend for a last time on that too fluid Hollywood skyline, shooting it—soaking it, and picking up any remaining items before I’d quite literally kiss her goodbye. 

We spent our last night in Gramercy the Thursday before the Saturday walkthrough. The Santa Ana winds seemed unpredictably tumultuous that  groggy night as I mediated for the last time in my treehouse bedroom which had mollified as many furious thoughts as it had seen sleepless night. I always look for signs–or do they look for me–and as I tipped and swayed, attempting to mediate but needing  to sleep, in something like harmony with my beloved trees being bent this way and that by winds out of some hyperbolic Angeleno noir, I decided the branches and leaves were bidding me farewell–if not imploring us to move the fuck on already. Not unlike the hideous concrete eclipse of the Capitol Records Building that greeted us upon our return home form Albuquerque last summer, this was a sign, I rationalized.  

I met my wife in this house, not too long after I moved into this uniquely graphic but somewhat clumsily laid out mid-century bachelor sanctuary in which I licked the wounds of a love gone bad and one of the worst real estate decisions in California history. I sold my Silverlake house in 2004 for what I paid for it to a good friend, to move to NY with the wrong girl, only to find myself living in the  very same pal’s office, within spitting distance of my old house, and out of suitcase, within the same year. Then I found Gramercy some 6 months later….just as the market peaked and wouldn’t again for a decade but that didn’t matter, I had a home. I met my wife in the foyer a few months after that, though she insists it was by the bar next to the kitchen. In either case, thank you Greg, thank you Melissa, hi Merritt, and where the hell are you Julian? 

This house reinvigorated my passion for photography and this intangible thing, this digital warehouse, should be a testament to that if nothing else. 

I made 2 records in the garage. 

We made two kids, one made it, and he’s a triumph. 

We knew it was time to move on a couple years ago, just as it was was for the prior owner to pass me the torch as he grew from bachelor to father, to bursting at the seams, but knew also it would be wrenching and it began already to feel a lot like a death, however inevitable, since we arrived home from Canada two months ago.  We tried to extend our “leaseback” from the new owners as we had simply not enough time to find another home, but they declined and we settled on a rental not so many minutes away, but only managed to squeeze in there 72 hours before the deadline. So we’d return to pass the torch to the new residents  after our first full night surrounded by skyscrapers of boxes in a pretty special but not ours space where we’d be parking it for a year. It was during the walkthrough that they mentioned they’d be popping some champagne in the empty reverberant house at sundown. I knew it’d be wrenching but I couldn’t have imagined I’d be frantically documenting the last hour or so in my for so long home, dragging my 4x5 behind me, posing my done with it already wife and son by the bedroom window, between making hurried clumsy final trips down that damn vertical driveway, cramming into the trunk modems and routers, books the movers didn’t spot, and other detritus from this 12 year stand. Nor could I have imagined I’d be squeezing in something like a blessing or a warp speed meditation in my treehouse bedroom, before the sun dropped and the eager new owners arrive to begin their journey somewhat inauspiciously,  behind closed front door (to keep their boxer in) as sweat fell off me into my camera bag as I stuffed it with my 4x5, broke a dark slide, and scurried off the magic deck with the magic view that took magic pictures–just before finally poking my head in the door,  one of the guys bothering to wave from the stairs, the other shouting from the kitchen as I about faced and to no one it seemed, called:  “Have fun guys,” and shut their front door behind me. 

I’d leave behind a pill case, embossed with initials,  which they’d leave in the mailbox for me. But we left behind much more and here’s hoping it doesn’t haunt the happy new tenants too much.