after a breakup after covid, after a lot of other pointless crap not worth talking about here, I decided this month to Los Angeles like an ailing little houseplant I had to get out and needed a little more water, air and sun. Unfortunately, and totally in keeping with the spirit of this year, it didn’t go as planned at all.
Once inside my staggeringly expensive Airbnb, I found that it looked nothing like what was shown on the internet, and with a dogged and unflinching dedication I dedicated myself to tackling higher and higher levels of Airbnb’s customer service maze, assuming I still owned the place to turn in favor. Spoilers: I couldn’t. Before I finally gave up, I lost more than $1000 and what felt like years of my life.
After hearing me rant throughout my ordeal about how horribly I had been treated by the low-wage workers of an evil conglomerate working on other continents, my friends gently tried to steer me in a different direction, saying: Write about it! Which I’ve found is just another way of saying: You obviously care about the outcome of this matter, which seems to matter more to you than anything else in your life, don’t you have a job where you have this obsession possibly live it out? Why, yes, I HAVE.
The question threw me off my feet: What am I actually doing all the time?
And now I can finally get this important story out into the open: There’s an Airbnb on Lobdell Street in Echo Park that I’m 99 percent sure currently violates the Los Angeles short-term rental law regulates! And besides, the furniture doesn’t look like it does in the pictures!! And the hosts were mean to me when I pointed this out!!! And Airbnb sided with them, although I can PROVE it!!!!
Yes, exactly. Hopefully this text will send them all to jail.
Meanwhile, when I needed a little break from my new job as a hard-hitting investigative journalist covering tech and real estate, I met up for coffee with a friend who asked me, “Well, what do you do with your time in New York?” (He probably wanted to say: if you don’t throw yourself selflessly into the fight against lying landlords and the power of greedy corporations).
Strangely enough, the question blew my mind: what make me all the time? I vaguely remembered sitting on the couch, crying, and writing in my journal for hours on end how many ways I was wronged in the world, but I had a nagging feeling that I’d occasionally done something else. The question nagged me the whole way home: New York… get off the couch… put on your pants… culture… oh fuck.
Kristen Roupenian is a writer. In her SZ column “Trans Atlantic Express” she reports every four weeks on New York’s cultural life.
(Photo: private)
My culture column was due in three days and I had consumed no culture at all. I spent the next few hours scrolling around on my phone and Googling in various combinations: culture events what to do LA friday night. All I could find were club nights that didn’t start until well after my bedtime, but there was also a comedy show by a girl who looked vaguely familiar, and then I remembered that that was because she was the star of a movie that’s coming out soon and that I actually wrote.
I didn’t recognize her at first because I’d been thrown out of film production years ago and – as is my way with rejection – was wildly torn about whether I should get into it, until I was seething with rage about it, and then but to act as if it never happened.
The show was sold out, but I thought: I’m a cultural columnist and writer with considerable social prestige, surely that’s what Instagram is for. I hit “Follow” and typed a charming message, introducing myself as the person Wikipedia still wrongly believes wrote her film and suggested she send me some leftover tickets to her show with it I could write about it for this German newspaper.
What could be more narcissistic and LA?
Unfortunately, whether it’s because LA is a mindless cultural desert where writers are considered the most expendable figures in filmmaking, or because I don’t have that blue tick that shows you’re a celebrity that other celebrities should take notice of, when texting them, or for some other inexplicable reason, the actress didn’t text back.
So here I was, in LA, 24 hours before the deadline, with no ticket to any cultural event and nothing to write about! I had a big problem. It was almost like I had to go to the museum or something. But then! Didn’t I say I got kicked out of this movie? And that I am a passionate fighter for law and justice?? Before I was fired, I had signed a contract that everyone (meaning my agent and my attorney) agrees is lousy and unfair, and I’ve been struggling with a series of lawsuits for the past year to get what I DESERVED ( so a few thousand dollars and at least a chance to be a screenwriter in the credits).
Over the course of this, and after months of begging, arguing, and scolding my friends, who were always trying to end the conversation by saying, wow, that’s really a sick story, you should write about it, I finally got a super secret rough cut of the film in your hands. So, instead of going to a cultural event, I had the brilliant idea of going to see the film that I written by myself had (or something like that) and about it in my own to write a column. What could be more narcissistic and LA than that?
As I said, since it was a rough cut that only people involved in the film are allowed to see and people who are willing to fight months of legal battles with them for the sake of justice, I can’t tell you much about it. But I have to say that [zensiert], and as I sat there and saw how [zensiert], I just had that in my head [zensiert]. You know what’s funny – it’s very exhausting and time consuming to fight all these battles for justice and sometimes when the battle is over and you have time to think about what the point is, other than the goddam principle of a matter for which you’ve put in all your time and energy, and then you think, maybe I should have just gone to the museum.
Translated from the English by Marie Schmidt
For more episodes of the Trans Atlantic Express column, see sz.de/transatlantikexpress