I could have started out with an Olympia, or a Smith-Corona. Instead, it was a 1953 Remington Quiet-Riter. For over a year I’d been lugging around a brick of an old MacBook my ex-roommate gave me which only worked while attached precariously to the charger by magnet.

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I walked across Broadway south to Sixth, a walk I’d done many times in the past. On Sixth, I passed the beat-up doors of the old fortune teller, now shuttered. I was on my way to that dank oasis in the middle of the concrete depths, Cole’s, the disputed French dip originator and pre-Prohibition bar that nourished countless L.A. workers, politicians, mobsters, poets, and artists alike.

A film star is not bound by the rules of time and space. Her true currency—imagery—affords her a shot at bliss, a privilege ever stalked by horror.... Persons long dead animate screens agelessly, over and over again, free to besiege our dreams, to instigate lovers’-like spats, crimes of passion.

I intended to write about Jean-Luc Godard. He died on September 19th. The legendary cineaste was the last of the French New Wave (or nouvelle vague) founding fathers to punch the clock... His demise took me back to my early 20s when being cool was all that mattered and being cool meant Jean-Luc Godard...