Lessons in Impermanence
A conversation with Sam Sweet, creator of “All Night Menu" - a series of booklets examining the forgotten histories of Los Angeles.
Our conversation today is with Sam Sweet — a wonderful writer based in Los Angeles, published in The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, and Harper’s. He is also the creator of All Night Menu, a series of five booklets released between 2014 and 2024, each containing eight stories titled after different L.A. addresses. The stories are drawn from all time periods, subcultures, and sections of the city — creating, through pieces, a picture of the whole. We were curious to talk about his approach to "finding the lost histories of Los Angeles”, why he focuses on the micro, and about his relationship to the city.
This interview was conducted over email by Noelle Forougi for franknews. Help keep franknews independent, ad-free, and for everyone, by subscribing below or donating here.
Tell us about yourself and All Night Menu. I am curious how you started the project.
I grew up in a town on the coast of Maine, half college town/half mill town. I never felt at home in New England, even as a kid. It was a gray world, claustrophobic, cold. We would go to the ocean but even the ocean had a grayness. I used to look at Robert Frank photographs and fantasize about those roads in Nebraska that shoot out into the horizon. My favorite thing to do in Maine was to drive through the snow listening to dub music in the dead of winter. I don’t miss winter but I miss listening to King Tubby in winter.
From a young age I was primed to fall in love with a diametrically different landscape. In the culture in which I was raised, Los Angeles was uniquely reviled, treated more like a forbidden planet than an American city. Berlin was less foreign. I think my first glimpse of LA was The Karate Kid--the faded dingbat apartment in Reseda with the drained pool, the puddle of stagnant aqua in the bottom. Did they mean for that to look bleak? As a kid, I thought it looked sublime. Reseda is still one of my favorite parts of the city.
I wanted to read about LA but was generally disappointed by pretty much all the writing on the city, especially the nonfiction books. They were hollow trunks of data with no real feel for the poetry of the place, no sense of the contradictions, the unseen inventions, the small spaces. Most of the city didn’t get written about at all--Reseda, Gardena, El Segundo, Sun Valley, Downey, South Gate, etc. There was just nothing. I craved a portrait of the city that allowed everything to sit together in one portrait. I wanted more poetry in nonfiction. I felt the fetishization of “longform” was a sham. The only way to go really deep is through concision. It’s true you write the book you want to read.
What was the first project you worked on?
When I was new to the city, I was working on a book that would become Hadley Lee Lightcap, which is about three musicians who played in a long forgotten band called Acetone. While procrastinating, I would search out and collect weird images of Los Angeles. This was the early days of digital archives and huge buckets of material were being dumped onto the internet for the first time but they weren’t getting distributed on social media so they stayed sort of hidden. There was a window when the internet was more like a thrift store or a used book store. It was so easy to find unnoticed treasure. I find it’s still like that, actually, but noisier, with more clutter.
I was interested in a photograph of William Faulkner sitting on a balcony in Hollywood with his shirt off. It was a famous photo but the location was never identified. Captions always just stated some variation of “Faulkner in Hollywood.” To me that lack of specificity was emblematic of a fundamental disregard. The implication being: Los Angeles is so homogeneous and devoid of character that detail can’t be applied or isn’t worth applying. I did a blitz of research to identify the location of Faulkner’s building, which was on Highland. I sneaked into the building. A few fragments cohered into a short piece of nonfiction. I was happier with that small piece of writing than the lengthy essays I was writing as a freelancer. I wrote more pieces in that short prose style, sat them together, and that’s how the first volume of All Night Menu got made.
What kind of research did that entail? How did you find the exact building?
When I was first looking into the Faulkner building, there were fewer resources to research a given location. I checked out all the biographies then cross-referenced the names of places he’d stayed with addresses in the newspaper record. Visiting the locations on foot provided the final confirmation. I sneaked into the building. You could observe the curve of the balcony and cross-reference it with the view of the hillside. Much can be extracted from virtual databases but geography tells a story that can only be imparted in physical space. Even when all built traces have vanished, a landscape’s spatial language speaks volumes. It means a lot just to stand somewhere, even when there’s nothing left.
How do you decide on or find the people and places you continue to focus on?
It started out with long lists of people, places, and subjects I wanted to see sit together in one portrait. The Long Beach Pike, Gardena poker clubs, Alvin Ailey, Nudie Cohn, Compton Skateland, Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings, tattooing, Tapatio hot sauce, handball, etc. A collage of broad subjects balanced across time periods, subcultures, and locations. For each subject, I’d poke around until I located a resonant image that obsessed me. The full barrels of hand-mixed tattoo ink hidden behind a false wall in Long Beach. Or Jelly Roll Morton lying alone on his deathbed in a close-sized room at General Hospital in Boyle Heights, having grown a beard that made him look like Christ. You build out the architecture of a story simply to arrive at the bottomless image. The address is more like the finishing touch. It gives each story the voltage of specificity. It zaps.
I like what you said earlier about concision -- I think there is a lot of universality to specificity. What do you think you were able to say in short form that you weren’t able to say in long form?
Los Angeles is a vessel for the unseen and the unspoken, so the writing must mirror that. More truth is revealed in holding back. These days I think more in terms of single lines, and even single words, as the vastest containers.
Especially because LA is such a behemoth of a city, it feels like that is the only way to approach the storytelling of it.
Good history doesn’t come from the top down. It has to come from the bottom up. It’s only possible to appreciate the character of Los Angeles if you accept all of it without resorting to one lens, theme, location, or ideology. You can’t decide what you want the city to be and make it so. You have to get out, look at it closely, and make sense of what it gives you. A collection of small contradictory fragments will weigh more than any buffed-up thesis.
How has this project changed your relationship to the city on a personal level?
LA is a good teacher. Christopher Isherwood, Ed Ruscha, Corita Kent would all agree. It rewards the durational experience, so I think it saves some of its juiciest lessons for those who stick it out for the long haul. The city showed me how to see, then it taught me how to listen, and now it is teaching me how time works. If you give it time, it will tell you about time.
That’s funny, someone else said that same thing to me about time and Los Angeles the other day …
The deepest pleasure of the city is observing the ways it holds time. The geology, the built environment, and the light–each element is a clock reflecting time on a different scale. La Monte Young told me that Los Angeles is a durational experience. He knows something about time.
Do you want your project to change how people see the city, or see themselves in relation to the city’s history?
It’s less about memorializing the past than creating a momentary rupture of heightened awareness. I hope each story is like pulling up a tiny corner of carpet to glimpse the matrix of interconnections underlying everything unnoticed.
Do you think about how often things in Los Angeles turn over? I just moved from New York, and there I felt this constant churn of the buildings and what occupied them there and I wondered about what that does to us…
Loss can be painful but it’s intrinsic and essential. I had to accept it as a gift. Los Angeles is a marvelous place to observe how things change, why they change, the unusual ways that they change or don’t change. Christopher Isherwood wrote that LA was his favorite place on earth because it offered a constant lesson in impermanence.
Do you think change has an impact on our cultural memory?
I’m wary of the term “cultural memory.” Does it imply that memory is something static that can be strategized into existence?
Well, I do feel like we sometimes have short-term memory loss. A lot of cultural and political debates have already happened… and happened, and happened. I do wonder if there is something to understanding yourself as situated in history and what built environment might have to do with that. If everything looks like it was built in the last 20 years, maybe we have less reverence for the past as something we are actively living with.
After doing the All Night Menu books for a number of years, I noticed something contradictory. I often felt the presence of the past in places where physical structures had vanished, or been abandoned or mutilated beyond recognition. I’m thinking, for example, of the abandoned development of Surfridge, built on the sand dunes just west of LAX, or certain areas of Maravilla, in East LA, a community that has been battered by the construction of multiple freeways and unrestrained “redevelopment” projects. The past isn’t a quality that relies on large physical signifiers. That sensation of presence might be more a product of perception. Analogous, maybe, to the way a meteorologist notices otherwise imperceptible qualities in the air.
Conversely, I have always felt that institutional preservation creates a distancing effect. It’s more likely to obscure the thing it purports to remember. I’m thinking of the way the thin facades of Clifton’s Cafeteria or the Holiday Bowl are preserved like death masks. Or Angels Flight, a reconstructed simulation of a funicular built to serve a neighborhood that was demolished 60 years ago.
One of the grand mysteries of Los Angeles is how absence creates presence. I like what Walter Benjamin wrote about the trace. That the trace “is the appearance of a nearness, however far removed the thing that left it behind may be.” Los Angeles will never run short of traces.
