We wouldn’t need to scramble in these kinds of situations if the pre-existing conditions were better for all involved, unfortunately, but that’s a different argument for a different time. Instead, I’d like to present something I started to write nearly 10 years ago as a memoir of sorts about the emotions I had around 9/11. Given the subject, the theme’s a little more “yay America!” when it comes to lauding recovery efforts, though the events of the past few weeks definitely show once again that humanity itself is pretty resilient. (This excellent piece on NPR’s “The Story” the other night proves that.)

This piece was also never finished. I apparently started getting into the nuances of patriotism vs. dissent, but didn’t complete the thought. So I’m just sticking to the relatively schmoopy parts here.

***

In the summer of 2001, I had a girl’s weekend with my best friend. We went on a road trip to Lake Tahoe, stayed in my cousin’s cabin for a night and went to see the Counting Crows perform at Caesar’s Palace on the South Shore. Looking back, I can remember a few moments that took away from the reverie of the trip, including the tricky navigation of the curves of Highway 89 along the lake’s western shore on a moonless night.

But what most made an impression was a comment by the opening act, Glen Phillips of Toad The Wet Sprocket. Of course, I can’t remember the context of what he said, only that it was part of the typical musician’s ad-lib before a song. He commented on the fall of the once-infallible Rome, and said something along the lines of “Who knows how long this American empire is going to last?” It sent shivers up my spine. At that point in time, the idea of our society falling seemed as fantastical as those apocalyptic visions illustrated in films such as The Terminator or Independence Day. My mind just wouldn’t go there.

Little did I know that several months later, that comment would come screaming back to me as I saw footage of the World Trade Center collapsing on my little dorm-room-sized TV. I was lucky enough not to see it live. I was in my Shakespeare class at the time, and as I headed back home with a dining hall lunch in my hand, I knew something was wrong. Everyone I passed was talking on cell phone with shock written all over their faces, and a parked transportation van was blaring a radio news report with the keywords of “terrorism” and “hijack” coming across the waves. That definitely perked up my ears.

After returning home, I turned to that touchstone of college communication—AOL Instant Messenger. (In those days, getting in touch with friends across the country or down the hall stemmed from that one piece of software.) My roommate’s away message conveyed the country’s gut reaction in a very succinct way: “Fuck the terrorists.” I fumbled for my Internet home page—not thinking to flip on the TV—and finally understood the enormity of what was happening when I couldn’t even get onto ABC News’ Web site.

Like everyone else, I cried and shook upon seeing these foreign images on my screen. I called my father on the West Coast and begged him not to go to work, thinking like Chicken Little that the sky was falling. It took me a few hours for my muddled brain to come back to Phillips’ statement and realize something. This was a terrorist attack of epic proportions. It took an organized and concentrated effort. It was intelligent enough to target the nation’s air system when and where it was at its weakest—a weekday morning, and at a small outpost airport. Yet with all of the energy this group expended to demonstrate its hatred of America, the country didn’t roll over and cry uncle.

The systems in place weren’t expecting something of this proportion to happen, but they stayed in place. The skies were cleared of all aircraft in a matter of hours. Emergency personnel did what they needed to do and saved numerous lives. Lines outside blood donation centers stretched for blocks. We may not have been expecting an aggravation of that magnitude, and while the intended purpose had been to shake us to our roots and plant the seed for our eventual destruction, we rose to the occasion. I’ve never been prouder of us than when I realized that our physical and emotional structure had remained intact.

Almost immediately after seeing it, I started writing this. What can I say? It left me with a strong opinion of Anna Wintour. While I put it aside afterward—mostly out of a sense of, who am I to critique Vogue?—rereading it now makes a lot more sense than it did then as print continues to suffer.

So while this isn’t a straight-up movie review like my previous post on The Bourne Ultimatum, it still reminds me of something I would have written in college—but instead of turning it in to an editor at the DTH,  I would have submitted it to one of my professors in the comm studies department.

***

Vogue and I never really had a relationship. When I was in high school (and long before I ever knew I’d end up working in the world of magazines), I picked up a few issues when I realized I was getting too old for Seventeen and wanted a different source for pretty clothes. But all it taught me was that there was a class of people I could never dream of joining. They lived in New York, vacationed in places like Sag Harbor and Saint Tropez, and wore clothes by designers I couldn’t even pronounce. The only piece of information I retained from those pages is that there are three Miller sisters, who all married into royalty—the design, philanthropic and literal varieties.

Once I began working for a beauty magazine, I had to pick it up again—along with every other major woman’s book—as part of my job. I’d flip through the new issues each month, looking for mentions of our advertisers (naturally) and new trends in cosmetics. Doing so over and over for several years gave me an impression of each title’s aim and focus…and I wasn’t surprised to see that Vogue hadn’t changed much in the dozen or so years since I’d last picked it up. Some of the images were gorgeous, of course, but many—with bland, neutral backgrounds – seemed repetitious from issue to issue. The stories on Botox and thousand-dollar clothes reeked of privilege, and it was still a gossip sheet writ large for the Upper East Side.

So naturally, I was curious to see The September Issue, a documentary about the fashion bible shot while the staff pieced together its fall fashion edition in 2007. Now that I oversee photo shoots and judge layouts of my own, I wanted to witness how they did all of that inside the vaunted Condé Nast hallways. I had to determine whether Andre Leon Talley is as ridiculous in person as his headshot and columns make him appear. And of course, Meryl Streep needed a reality check—was the real Anna Wintour actually as heartless and cunning in her disapproval?

After an afternoon at the movie theater, I learned that the answer is no—at least to the latter. While opinionated and swift in her decision-making, she was never cruel to her employees. In several scenes in her own office—which did bear a striking resemblance to the set of The Devil Wears Prada—Wintour sorted through photo options from various designers and made snap decisions about which ones would go and which would stay. Some editors would offer a half-hearted defense for a look they particularly liked, but their protests quickly faded under Wintour’s judgmental glare. She’d smile tightly, and kid around with staffers, but she never seemed to be overtly mean. (Of course, she could have been playing up her softer side for the cameras, but who knows?) Despite mentions of her icy persona in the documentary itself, I still didn’t buy it; too often, women in leadership positions who act decisively and without an overly fuzzy personality get a bum rap when men at similar levels behave the same way and no one bats a perfectly curled eyelash.

No, Anna Wintour’s problem is not that she’s unfriendly—it’s that she has no vision. There’s a certain irony in watching The September Issue now, more than two years after its footage was shot…and probably 18 months or so since print journalism’s gradual slide downward began its current sharp spiral. The scene in the documentary where Vogue’s advertising staff crows about the 644 pages of advertising they sold for the September 2007 issue—enough to qualify as the magazine’s largest ever—is a bit sad knowing that the subsequent two fall fashion-focused editions have been mere shadows of that high mark. Wintour was also able to place spread after spread throughout the issue, seemingly without having to carve any of them up to fit ads or drop any due to space issues. (Many of the spreads are of gorgeous images planned and styled by Grace Coddington, Vogue’s creative director and the one staffer who dares to push back at Wintour.)

This lack of vision is relevant because the documentary makes such a point of showing how influential Wintour is in the fashion industry—a point with which I doubt many would disagree. She holds private audiences with designers for previews of their collections, and she hand-picked the wunderkind Thakoon for a Vogue partnership with The Gap, propelling him toward his career in couture. As for the magazine, her main contribution is underscored as turning its focus toward celebrity culture, especially by putting famous females on the cover. (Indeed, the cover girl in September 2007 was the starlet Sienna Miller.)

But that change is one that took place in the 1990s, and something I now see lambasted in various corners as the new millennium brought on a constant rotation of starlets such as Miller, Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johanssen. Over the last two years, as all magazines (especially those pushing high fashion) have taken a nosedive, Vogue has gone retro with covers featuring supermodels such as Linda Evangelista—the very thing that Wintour was lauded for reversing. Did that move bring greater financial success to Vogue in the 1990s and early 2000s? Apparently so, given the company line from Condé Nast as it’s stated in the film. As my movie-going companion pointed out, focusing on celebrities may have helped Vogue make a bigger penetration in Middle American markets that don’t necessarily follow high fashion—but given the magazine’s remaining insistence on following the New York social scene (which still alienates this blue state native), I’m not so sure that helped retain that audience.

Other than that decade-old accomplishment, what does Wintour bring to the pages of Vogue? After years of following the magazine and 90 minutes in a movie theater, I don’t know. Yes, she’s a strong leader who seems to know exactly what she wants, and quickly—but in all of those scenes where she made snap judgments, she gave no reasons behind her decision. Or, more accurately, none other than “This doesn’t seem necessary” or “There’s too much black.” While creative editing on the documentarians’ part may have a hand in this depiction, she seems like nothing more than a dictator whose word stands based on a stale military victory. Late in the film, she decides to nix the results of a photo shoot on color blocking that Coddington oversaw and order a reshoot—with apparently no new direction given. (Wintour felt free to cut multiple pages of many of Coddington’s shoots; after removing a number of spreads from an ethereal ‘20s shoot, Coddington remarked that Wintour had just put the kibosh on about $50,000 worth of work. It’s hard to believe such waste would fly in today’s magazine market.) The previous color block shoot had been shot in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge with bright hues all around; the reworked version appeared to have been completed in a Long Island studio with a neutral background—just like any number of Vogue spreads over the past few years.

It’s not a stretch to say that Coddington may have more artistic vision than Wintour does. The film quotes one Vogue staffer as saying that there’s no one else who can style shoot and produce beautiful photography in the same way that Coddington does—perhaps a testament to the time she spent as a model in London in her youth. It could even be argued that the film makes an argument that Coddington is best qualified to lead Vogue, perhaps while leaving Wintour a place to continue influencing fashion. Coddington cut an imposing figure in the film as she stood looking out over a regal French garden, her mass of kinky red hair flowing in the wind, before overseeing a shoot on the latest haute couture. While standing there, she lamented that her vision of a more romantic world in Vogue had dated her, while the currents of fashion (heralded by Wintour) passed her by.

But after seeing the striking work she produced for the September 2007 issue—both published and unpublished—it’s painful to think of what she may have had to sacrifice in her concepts and vision to suit smaller magazine sizes since then.

And this is where Wintour falls flat. She had one idea—the embrace of celebrity culture—that once brought Vogue great success and didn’t sustain the brand after the bottom fell out. And what’s happened since then? Competitor Elle won the race between beauty and fashion books for the September issue this year, scoring more advertising pages than Vogue. It might be prudent to do a comparison between the ads in the two magazines, to determine which advertisers Elle reeled in that Vogue did not. I highly doubt they brought in more high-end labels and retailers, so maybe the idea should be to aim a little lower, toward the affordable fashion that real people need these days.

But as Coddington illuminated in the film’s last plot point, those folks are hardly seen in Vogue anymore. She and photographer Patrick DeMarchelier enlisted the help of one of the documentary’s cameramen to appear in a shot for the color block shoot, which was then Photoshopped to appear as though a model were in the same frame. Wintour made a comment that her staff would also need to Photoshop out the cameraman’s slight belly paunch, an order that Coddington quickly reversed.

It’s a new world for print media, and The September Issue is a time capsule of how it used to be. So far, though, this new world still includes Wintour and her vague, old-school ideas of what works. But in order for Vogue to survive, it’s going to realize that it needs to change course as well.

When it comes to the hordes who pack up their cars and move to Los Angeles, I like to think that I don’t fit the cliché. A year ago, I decided to make a change and move out of the San Francisco Bay Area—and my parents’ comfortable suburban home. L.A. offered the same good food, the weather, the politics that I couldn’t stand to leave. Best of all, I didn’t have to change my license plates.

Really, it was just an exercise in laziness.

I carried the typical NorCal resident’s cynicism for anything Hollywood, and I came here with no desire to see my name in lights. I don’t have a screenplay to sell. Getting into the hottest club isn’t my ultimate goal in life. Somehow, I thought this would be evident soon enough; that I’d get a steady job and join the throngs of regular people sitting on the freeway on our ways to work. I’d put the same amount of thought into a place to live—after all, I’m the type who drives my car down Rodeo Drive even though it rattles and is missing a side mirror. Something nice and comfortable, no matter the ZIP code, would suit me just fine.

My home base at first was a friend’s couch in Mid-City; from there, the Palms looked like the best option, though my roommate and I didn’t restrict ourselves too much. I spent my weekdays temping and looking for work, and on the weekends, the two of us drove around with a map and a notepad, charting addresses and bedrooms and dollar amounts.

We started with Craig’s List and Westside Rentals—the old stalwarts—but after we found that many of the best-looking places weren’t listed anywhere online, we just started calling numbers on For Rent signs while idling at the curb. Thanks to that strategy, we found a gorgeous, refurbished duplex in Silver Lake going for half the price it could reasonably get. (Seriously, it had central air and a washer/dryer included!)

After two days of gloating over our good luck, we returned with our applications, only to find that our potential landlord had already promised the place to some neighbors, who caught the same sign on his garage door while walking down the street. In the crush of our disappointment, we figured that this was surely the first time that anything in L.A. had ever been accomplished by walking.

Losing that place was when it started to hit me—I actually wanted some of that L.A. glitz and glamour I had been so sure I didn’t need. It didn’t matter to me that Silver Lake was reportedly a hotbed for hipsters. I wanted the gorgeous apartment with the view of downtown. I wanted the leafy, charming neighborhood and a home with character. L.A. is renowned for being a place where almost everyone driving the streets isn’t quite pretty enough, quite charming enough, quite whatever enough.

I still didn’t want the acting career, the film credit, the nod from the bouncer. All I wanted was for L.A. to deem me important enough to get that apartment.

We continued our search deflated and half-hearted, knowing that nothing we could find and afford would live up, but also needing to find a place before we became permanent refugees. From the far outskirts of Santa Monica to Valley Village to Echo Park, we toured apartments in our price range and plunked down the money to apply to several perfectly acceptable places, which were beyond sterile and boring in comparison. Our passion for the search had slipped away along with that fabulous apartment.

But then came a moment we couldn’t even have scripted—that same potential landlord called us back. His next-door neighbor had just gotten notice from his tenants and would have a duplex with the same number of bedrooms (and the same price) available in a month. By this point, we had credit checks and deposits pending for other places, and an even more anxious deadline looming—I had to be off my friend’s couch in two days, because she was moving as well. So, my roommate and I rushed over, breathless, trying to temper our excitement for fear of offending the karma gods once again, but failing miserably.

And this place turned out to be better than the first. Old Spanish architecture, beautiful antique furniture included, an expansive back deck, sizable bedrooms. Having learned our lesson the first time, we submitted our applications that day, before anyone else even knew the place existed—and not knowing exactly how we would bridge a month-long housing gap.

On a deceptively clear morning in late May, I woke up and realized that for the first time in my life, I didn’t know where I was going to sleep that night. We had approval for one of the sterile, boring apartments and could have moved in that day if we wanted, but our names were still in the hopper for the Silver Lake place, even though its availability was a month away. Just the credit and reference checks—and a small shred of hope—remained. While we waited, I called around to executive and long-term apartment complexes, saying my “significant other” and I might need a place to stay for one month, starting that night. Many laughed at my request, but wished me good luck. I finally secured a space for us at the cheapest place I could find—an ExtendedStayAmerica in an industrial section of Gardena. The placement of our accommodations on a map was a bit frightening to this SoCal newbie, but we didn’t have much of a choice.

That afternoon, while I helped my friend load up her moving van, I got the call—my roommate and I had the Silver Lake place. If we wanted it. There was absolutely no question that we did, but in our elation, we realized that our next challenge we would be getting over our fear of L.A. geography. We called and canceled the sterile, boring apartment with glee—but when we opened the door to our one-bed hotel room and saw how much room that one bed actually took up, we started counting down the days for the next month.

That time was spent cooking pasta in a kitchenette the size of a closet, grabbing clothes out of drawers while trying not to surf off an inflatable mattress and chatting up college basketball with the security guard in the lobby. We received a full education on the virtues of the 405 vs. the 110 and battled the supposedly complimentary wifi a nightly basis. Yeah, the parking lot was a bit scary at night, but even over the course of a month, we managed to make ourselves a home there.

Yet when we finally received the keys to our beautiful apartment, the first thing I did was sink to the floor and hug the carpet. My roommate followed, and we just laid there, awestruck. After everything that had happened, in L.A. terms, I had finally made it.

***

Speaking of articles I wrote on spec, this is something I put together for the Sunday magazine of the Los Angeles Times. I actually met the magazine’s editor at an event in which personal essays were the main topic and sent it in to him soon after, and he declined. The first-person piece is a form that I was still trying to get the hang of—and I’m still not sure I have it down—so it wasn’t a surprise. But like the trip to Rome and Cairo that was mentioned last week, this was a situation that had to be immortalized in writing somehow. And both events took place in 2005, which was quite a banner year.

Of course, I have to acknowledge the fact that there are three of us in the above photo and only two roommates mentioned in the course of the story (hence the sic in the subhead). Truth is, the actual situation was a bit more complicated than this story lets on—my friend (on the left) and I (in the middle) did move down to L.A. from the Bay Area, and we were the ones going around on apartment searches. But we ended up with a third roommate—my friend with whom I originally stayed when I first arrived in Southern California—and the situation only arose because the great place we found happened to have three bedrooms.

See how complicated this is? And why it made more sense to streamline the narrative?

Still, all the nuances of the story needed acknowledgment…especially because there’s a good chance my roommates could read this. (xoxo, ladies!)

We also lived in a school district where the tax base made sending us to public school an easy decision. But when it mattered, my parents anted up. I decided late in my high school career that 18 years in Californian suburbia was enough for me. So, I applied to out-of-state public schools, and even though we didn’t qualify for financial aid, my parents managed to pay for every cent of tuition, housing, books—you name it. Thus, my protective bubble followed me to college, where I had everything taken care of for me. If I was hungry, I just went to the dining hall and my student ID would grant me entrance to the buffet lines. Plane tickets would arrive in the mail just when I needed them. And when the foreign experience of East Coast weather threatened my campus with its hurricane watches and empty grocery stores, I just snuggled closer to the cinder blocks that comprised the 10 floors of my freshman dorm.

My California-flavored childhood meant the concept of snow and ice in everyday life was completely new for me. When classes were canceled for three days in the January of my freshman year, I frolicked in the powder like a 5-year-old. My friends took many pictures of me relishing my first experience as a snow angel, and we stole trays from the dining halls for sledding. We also worked as a unit to create a snow turtle—snowmen were apparently passé.

Fast-forward to four years later. As a hardened senior, I had parted ways with those friends and moved off-campus. It was the last full day of class in the fall semester, and as I stood waiting at the bus stop for my ride home, the frigid December sky began spitting down sleet. Forty-five minutes on a trudging bus replaced my normal swift commute, and I awoke at 5:30 the next morning to hear the tree branches outside my window cracking under the weight of the ice encasing them—and to see the time on my clock radio flicker out. The power was not restored for four days.

To say that my love affair with East Coast winters came to a sudden and bitter end is a bit of an understatement.

It wasn’t a question of boredom. Classes for the semester had already ended, so I just didn’t have the electronic procrastination tools I usually used to distract myself from studying. My roommate and I rediscovered the art of conversation and unearthed board games we hadn’t played since childhood. It was, however, a little difficult to manipulate dice with fingers wrapped in the fleece of our best mittens.

Those mittens were one of the only ways to deal with the greatest predicament of my young life. For the first day, enough heat was trapped in our second-floor flat to facilitate actual living, and there were enough perishables available to eat without needing to touch our dead refrigerator. But after that first night, when the temperatures dipped into the teens and the flannel surface of my pillowcase cooled mere seconds after I turned my head, the frigid air of the worst winter storm in North Carolina history began to creep through the windowpanes and under the doors, rendering my home practically inhabitable. The solution wasn’t as easy as hopping in a car and driving somewhere with heat and food—the entire state was in the exact same condition. Tree branches still littered the frosty roadways and blocked most escapes out of town, and Duke Power had millions of customers out of power across two states. We were just going to have to wait for our electrical benediction along with everyone else.

For the first time in my life, I didn’t know where I was going to sleep. The lack of heat made showering an icy proposition, and I couldn’t contact anyone—the blackout had disabled the local cell towers and we didn’t even have enough light to see the keypad on our landline phone. All thoughts of finals and Christmas presents and packing for my trip home flew out of my head in favor of how to layer multiple sweaters or use a lighter on candles without burning myself. I remember the joy when, a few days into the blackout, we found that our favorite pizza place had its power restored. We ordered a pie, went to pick it up and ate it in our dining room where the heat from the pizza created a steam lingering above the table that was the closest thing to warmth we’d felt in days. My mind was discombobulated—all I could think of was where I would find my next meal and where I could sleep that wouldn’t dangerously threaten my health.

Of course, I knew I could get out of the situation if it became absolutely necessary. I had a credit card and a car. I could have driven as long as was necessary to find a hotel with heat and room service, or gone to the airport and bought a plane ticket to the Caribbean. Luckily, that need disappeared relatively quickly. The first people to get their power back were my friends still living on campus. They took us in, providing floors and blankets for sleep and running water for warm showers. I don’t think I’ve ever taken a shower with such joy in my heart before.

Only after I got power back did I realize that I’d missed several review sessions for my upcoming finals. Thank goodness I was one of the fortunate—I’d heard some students living off-campus waited nearly two weeks for power and had to take their finals during that time. If my power hadn’t come back when it did, there’s no doubt in my mind that 16 weeks of lectures and note-taking and preparation couldn’t have done a thing to overcome my basic needs of food and shelter. This period was fleeting, but I’m still in awe at how naïve I was prior to seeing those little LED numbers flick off.

The situation reminded me of something my mother, a public schoolteacher, often talks about: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which categorizes how our brains operate. Physiological needs such as food and sleep are the keys, with safety concerns coming next. For most of us in the middle class (and the  Western world), these aren’t things we need to worry about. Instead, we occupy our lives worrying about how the new freeway extension will complicate our daily commutes or remarking on how we can’t live without our TiVos. For me, my upbringing was never about not having what I needed, and only when my very survival was staring me in the face did I see how spoiled I was.

Even though our society is extremely affluent in comparison to the rest of the world, we still live amongst peers who struggle with these basic needs, yet we judge them by privileged standards. A young person living in the inner city isn’t likely to graduate from high school and launch into college or a career. Politicians and ed-op columnists say he just needs to put forth superhuman effort to achieve those aspects of the American Dream. But when a person’s first priorities are dodging bullets and finding safe housing, schooling is not high on the list.

I only wish I could go back and inform my coddled high school self of how lucky I was. I do remember a fleeting moment back then—I was doing dishes in the kitchen of my parents’ house and I looked out the window to the street, lit haphazardly by the setting sun peeking through the trees. Standing on the sidewalk were a man and his pregnant wife. They had their arms around each other, and they were crying as they took in the split-level house with four bedrooms and three baths. At that moment, I felt an inkling of what it must have been like for my parents as they struggled to make ends meet in anticipation for a family. But that was as deep as my consideration went as I dried off my hands and went off to work on my calculus homework. When we don’t have to worry about the basic needs of life, we don’t consider them.

But if my temporary inability to think beyond food and shelter is a way of life for some people, and our expectation is for them to brush it off to pursue success, I shudder to think of how deluded those expectations can be—and how easily they can change when we’re in that same situation.

***

Last night, I was contemplating what writing I should post this week…and then the power went out in my apartment. Of course, living in Los Angeles, it was nothing more than a rainstorm. But it reminded me of this piece, which I wrote fairly soon after graduating from college. Reading it now brings into perspective the various people and points-of-view I’ve encountered since then, but even so, I think it demonstrates that the situation was a decent learning experience.