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Los Angeles, U.S.A.
Los Angeles – which Christopher Isherwood described as having a mirage-like quality; as dreamy, strange, and with “a theatrical impermanence” – continues to undergo revisions in reputation. Once derided, now it is a favored escape from those disillusioned by Silicon Valley or Manhattan.
As a creative center, it also seems to offer something very particular. And, to discuss, we’ve enlisted two adopted Angelenos.
Alexander May is curator of SIZED gallery, which finds its pied a terre on the ground floor of North Six’s Los Angeles office on North Western Avenue. That short stretch of streetscape, in East Hollywood, is in the midst of great change, with a number of major galleries and creative-led business finding a new home there.
And, Gina Correll Aglietti, a chef and stylist who is also the co-founder of Yola Mezcal, along with Yola Jiminez and the popstar Lykke Li. It is a rare women-owned spirits company, and also one that does a lot of work to support women’s economic independence in Oaxaca, where their mezcal farm is found.
Gina and Alexander spoke at Gina’s modernist home in Silver Lake, designed by RM Schindler in 1934.
A:
Coming back to LA at a different time of my life, after living in Milan and in Paris for like seven years – I still have this feeling of accessibility or opportunity in Los Angeles, that is really interesting to me. It was just at the end of COVID, and there was a sense of dislocation but also a sense of opportunity to kind of develop a sensibility, to join people together.
All the way to now opening SIZED Studio as a new location in a neighborhood that is being completely transformed – it’s completely different even just in the year and half since the first SIZED exhibition that, just coincidentally, took place on that same block.
G:
What you're doing, the fact that you're this sort of pioneer in this little Wild West stretch of LA that has had nothing of this ilk in it ever. It’s maybe a metaphor for what LA is. People coming here and sticking a flag into some pocket and having this future dream. That's like the house we're in, it’s in the same spirit.
A:
100%.
G:
That block of Western Ave is maybe a metaphor for LA – that this city was made up of people coming here with these sorts of visions and seeing in the landscape the opportunity to create.
A:
If you think about it that way, there is actually a longstanding history of this kind of energy in California in general, but also specifically in Los Angeles.
It does feel like, yes, maybe there’s a direct lineage to an underlying creativity that is in the city today, which is something that I think probably a lot of people don't think is inherent in Los Angeles—or even in America.
G:
I always find it so odd when people ask me if I like LA or New York better.
A:
Oh God, that's the worst.
G:
It's just absurd.
But, I do think LA is alluring in that it's a secret city. When you roll into New York, if you have the right look on, if you have the right style and walk, you can find your way into something cool. You can sniff it out in New York, you know what I mean? The city opens up for you immediately. Whereas LA, it takes so long – you have to keep digging, keep discovering.
There’s a good quote from the movie LA Story, let me pull it up.
A:
[Laughs] “Insert LA Story quote.”
G:
Here. Victoria Tennant says, "I've seen a lot of LA and it's also a place of secrets: secret houses, secret lives, secret pleasures. And no one is looking to the outside for verification that what they're doing is all right."
"Milan is a secret city, but there are so many rules in place, socially. Here, there are no rules.
A:
That's the wildest thing. It's like, you can build an inflatable castle next to someone. If that's your dream, go for it. No one's going to stop you because the person next to you is living their East Coast fantasy with a white picket fence.
It's a disjointed amalgamation of everyone's individualized personalities in an odd way, and then it’s drenched in this California light that makes it all okay.
G:
I think equally, the idea of being a man on the hill, sitting in your home, is beautiful – but it's also the thing that is the ugly about Los Angeles, the major wealth gap, and the segregation. It's not easy to intersect here.
You're doing that with SIZED. The crowd, and the talent, and the curation of what you put together for the show is nothing like what people— that's pushing something in the city. It's not enough to say, "Okay, there's an Asian artist." We need to push against social status. We need to push against economic status.
I think that with Yola, we try really hard to do that as well.
We’re probably one of the first female-owned liquor companies, especially in the mezcal world. And we try to reflect that in every aspect of the business. I mean, I was talking to you about that earlier – like, trying to have female investors and have a majority of our cap table reflect what we're doing in Oaxaca in terms of hiring women primarily.
It's also interesting – back to LA – that if we were in any other city, this company probably wouldn't even have existed – because Yola, Lykke and I spent a year just loafing around this house drinking mezcal and talking about what we wanted to do. In any other city, we'd be making a billion plans or have a billion things to do.
I think in LA you can marinate something properly, in a way that you can't in other places.
A:
Well, that’s why I think there's a level of intimacy in LA that you don't really—
G:
Yes. There aren’t five things to go to in one night.
A:
You also can't do five things in one night. It's literally impossible. You just, you can't.
G:
Yes, you can't. You're forced to tuck in, you're forced to actually commit.
A:
I'm digging it here.
G:
Digging it.
A:
Yes, I'm digging it here.
G:
The weather will change your life.
The percent of offices that
are carbon neutral
