An Invitation
At the very end
In about a month I’ll be leaving the studio I’ve rented since I first came to L.A. from Portland when I was 29 (I’m 51 now). It’s a two-bedroom house and initially it was my home; it cost $1k a month which was a massive amount to me at the time. There were two small houses on the property, mine was the one in front and I just completely ignored the people living behind me. My boyfriend at the time helped me make a cheap bed — two twin boxframes covered by a thick slab of foam. But it was always a place of work; almost immediately it became the production office for the movie I was making, Me and You and Everyone We Know. The art department was all in one bedroom and then I edited the movie in that same room. I was abruptly dumped around this time (I did appreciate that he waited until I was done shooting) and was very sad in this house for what felt forever but actually it couldn’t have been more than a month or two because I started dating the movie’s very cute composer. We mostly hung out at his fancy house, but one time he came over and was shocked to see how dirty my home was, the floors, the bathroom. This was embarassing – I’m a very neat person – but I was still thinking of it as a production office. Gina Kwon, my producer still had a desk in the livingroom and the kitchen was still full of gross craft services snacks. I had planned on deep-cleaning and turning it back into a home when the movie was done and I kind of loved the sacrifice of living so awfully in the meantime. But he wasn’t having it, so somewhere there is a photo of my composer scrubbing my floor on his hands and knees with a bucket next to him. So sweet he did that.
My next boyfriend also had a nice house and after a couple years I moved in with him but I kept renting my house as my office. I knew I wanted to eventually have a baby and, like every woman ever, I was worried about how to do it all. Keeping the office seemed like an insurance policy, an undomesticated place where I could think alone no matter what. The rent was sometimes a challenge (I happily signed a contract for that first movie that said something like Thank you, thank you, I agree to give everything to my work and have no physical needs. This would be my mantra for the next 20 years.)
I did have the baby; I walked to the office to work every day and walked home in the evening. I made everything in there. I rehearsed performances with audiences in the diningroom, I held meetings, I read, I painted and recorded and videoed, but mostly I thought alone in there, pacing around the long table in the livingroom and then sitting to write. I never fixed it up; it was an artist studio and I just added and adjusted according to the needs of what I was making.
Some of you know that in my mid-forties I began to spend Wednesday nights in the studio, sleeping on the old foam bed that was still in the back bedroom. I wanted more time to work on my novel and, in retrospect, I wanted to change everything about my life. Every. single. thing.
This house, with it’s uninsulated thin walls, was always too cold in the winter and unbearably hot in the summer and I didn’t think much about this other than to move my desk closer to the wall heater a few months a year. Sometimes at the end of a long writing session I would film myself dancing in front of the heater, which was probably the beginning of real, embodied, change — the wriggling tip of something gigantic.
By the time I had finished that novel, All Fours, I was still technically married but with a girlfriend now and eventually I realized I needed to rent a house to live in. In that moment I couldn’t afford to keep the studio and rent a house so I was considering turning the studio completely into a house and putting all my work stuff in storage, when I saw a moving truck in the driveway. The man renting the house in back was leaving. In twenty years I had never been inside this back house but I asked him if I could take a peek. It was small and disgusting, reeking of cigarettes, but I counted two bedrooms and that was enough. The rent was almost double the (rent controlled) front house but combined they were still an incredible deal.
So for the last two years my child and I have lived in the house behind my studio. It has been a time of total collapse and contraction, chrysalis-style. I focused entirely on the work of melting, which was a very new discipline for me. I’m still in it, tbh, but six months ago I bought a house (my first). Using the money I made from writing about rennovating a motel room, I bought and rennovated this over house over the last 6 months. It’s almost done.
I’m more than ready to live in a house with central air but it is very, very hard to leave the studio. Hard emotionally and hard practically. It’s taken many months to sort through all the things that have accumulated in there. Much of it is a formal archive (I have kept everything from age six onwards) and some of it will go to the new house. But what about all the books and clothes and furniture and materials that I want to let go of? How does one let go? A few months ago I put one box of materials in a park for my subscribers, but it would be too labor-intensive to hide everything all over the city. And also, why? I’m leaving; the privacy of the studio doesn’t matter anymore.
In fact.
In fact it might be nice to share it, to invite you in as way to say goodbye to my longest and most sustaining relationship.
I’m calling it The Estate Sale But I’m Alive Sale.
You can come and pick through all my things (in both houses), opening drawers and asking for prices as I have done at so many estate sales in Los Angeles, always wondering about the life of the woman whose gloves I was trying on, whose feet were just a little smaller than mine. In this case you’ll know it’s me and that I died only to be reborn.
You can make your own video in front of the wall heater if you like.
The The Estate Sale But I’m Alive Sale will happen in December or January1 and to keep it small enough to be possible I’ll post the adress for paid subscribers only, on the morning of the sale. (I’ll give you some advance warning and more information as it gets closer.)
I hope everyone is ok. Today, Sunday, I took the teenager and myself to the osteopath, made them a grilled cheese sandwich, did TM, began reading the new Gertrude Stein biography by Frencesca Wade that everyone is talking about (An Afterlife) and wondered why isn’t this Peter Hujar movie playing anywhere in LA?
Take care, more soon.
xx
mj
Some of you might be thinking: isn’t this way more work during an already-stressful time of moving? Yes. It is definitely already more work (everything I want to get rid of I have to keep for the estate sale!) And if in the end I give it all to The Sidewalk Project on a single day then this will demonstrate incredible growth on my part and I’ll let you know. But for now, I can’t seem to get my head around letting go of the studio without the estate sale, so I have to do the more laborious thing. This has often been the case for me; I think I like the weird adventure of it.
Will fly to LA for this. Please keep us posted on dates!
Your processes are sublime.