When the abstract ideals of hard buildings meet the actual needs of soft bodies

Key Facts

• I used to leave out a telling addendum, that this tiny sliver represents the largest concentration of industry labor (“industry” being the slightly more focused synecdoche for “motion picture industry”) in the United States.
• In my previous lives — aside from catching a glance of rushed PAs and wardrobe people whenever a film or TV set bloomed in my neighborhood, or on the periphery of my commute to a nonindustry job — I couldn’t tell you where, exactly, this town was located.
• The synecdoche of their struggle stands in for the whole intractable precarity of any kind of writing life (less than a week into the strike I noticed a contingent of picketing poets, bearing signs like “Poets in solidarity with the WGA” and “Do not go gently into that bad contract”).
• What I love, and the WGA building does this too, is how they pay a flash of obeisance to this idea on the surface while undermining it in their geometry.

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