Sam Sweet and I are talking. It’s a long conversation, dating back a dozen years. We first encountered each other during the summer of 2014, when he sent me a “booklet,” All Night Menu, in the hope that I might write about it. It was, and remains, right up my alley: the first in a projected five-volume series—the plan was to issue subsequent installments at nine-month intervals—each booklet featuring what I think of as eight dérives, or excavations of the city, all keyed to particular street addresses or locations, some still in use or extant, others long gone.
For those unfamiliar with the dérive, it’s an old conceit of the French Situationist movement. The strategy was first articulated by the theorist Guy Debord in 1956, in response to the unsettling realization that, when faced with the monotonous predictability of mass modernity, we have no choice—if we are to remain conscious—but to shake it up. In this imperative, we see the essence of what came to be called psychogeography. The idea was to reimagine our relationship to urban space by uncoupling ourselves from recognizable geographies. This process could unfold only via wandering, not aimlessly but with a contrary intent. For the Situationists, the object was to partake of the street not as a practical conduit but rather as a destination unto itself. “The city is vast and amorphous,” Sweet suggests in a brief preface to that first All Night Menu. “This book is small and precise. It is not a walking tour, a visitor’s guidebook, or a street atlas. It is a periodic index of lost heroes and miniature histories. Its only objective is to make the invisible equal to the visible.” A map of the soul of the city, in other words.
This article appears in Issue 36 of Alta Journal.
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I kept thinking about this as I waited in front of an unreconstructed warehouse space on Central Avenue, along the southern edge of downtown Los Angeles, for Sweet to come down and bring me to his studio. It was a warm Monday afternoon in late February. I could intuit, if not quite see, a few blocks up, the streamline moderne structure of the Coca-Cola Building, designed by Robert V. Derrah and constructed, in 1939, to resemble an ocean liner. One of its doors, featuring nautical rivets and a porthole, appears on the cover of the fifth and final volume of All Night Menu. That this book came out in December 2024, seven years later than intended, may itself represent another dérive. “I’m very slow, you know?” Sweet told me upstairs in his studio, a rough-hewn space with high ceilings and a wall of windows facing south. “While I like that the temporal changes could become part of the meaning of the series, it was also frightening because I became a different writer, a different person, over the course of the project. My life got busier. I got involved with other projects. I had kids. So finishing All Night Menu was like collaborating with an earlier version of myself.”
As it happens, this is a state of being with which I am familiar. After 35 years in Los Angeles, I find myself retracing my own footsteps as I walk its neighborhoods, which situate me in both the moment and everything that’s come before. So much has disappeared and yet also lingers, like whispers or intonations, which is to say: ghosts. That’s the thing about this city, the challenge of its surfaces, their apparent impenetrability, which appears to pave over all the history that has been occluded, if not quite erased. These traces, the Southern California urbanist Norman M. Klein suggests in his 1997 book, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory, become “what psychologists call an imago, an idealized face left over from childhood—a photograph, the color of mother’s dress on the day she took ill (the photological trace).” To reckon with this perspective requires a porousness on the part of the observer, a willingness not to peel back the layers exactly but rather to recognize the points of juxtaposition where the present is deepened by the vibrations of the past.
Those vibrations resonate for Sweet, not just in his work but also in the world. From his studio, he pointed out an apartment building just a block away where the novelist Chester Himes had lived. We could see it, low and hulking, utterly unremarkable, through the window glass. Along the studio’s inside walls, Sweet had taped images and other bits of detritus: hints or clues or (perhaps) instructions. Think of them as markers of a kind. Less than a mile north, jazz musicians—among them, Kid Ory and Jelly Roll Morton—had brought Louisiana-style Dixieland to Southern California in the late nineteen-teens, after arriving at the Southern Pacific Railroad’s now long ago demolished Central Station, on Central Avenue between Fifth and Sixth Streets. Their story is recounted in that final All Night Menu, where Sweet describes a nascent scene encompassing “a web of saloons, eateries, and beauty parlors constitut[ing] a miniature New Orleans in California.”
That none of this is recollected any longer is the idea that drives All Night Menu. Sweet’s urban narratives range far across a city so vast and texturally indeterminate that it remains impossible to define. Among the locations he charts is Clanton Street, around downtown Los Angeles, whose name was changed to 14th Place to discourage the Mexican American Clanton Street Gang, which was involved in a 1942 shooting that helped set the stage for the Zoot Suit Riots. Another is the setting for a well-known photograph of William Faulkner—which Sweet reproduces in All Night Menu—featuring the author shirtless, eyes concealed behind a pair of sunglasses, smoking a pipe as he reads on a Hollywood balcony, typewriter stationed at his feet. “I thought,” Sweet remembered, “well, where is this? Hollywood’s a big place. There’s West Hollywood or the hills, and to me, there were different meanings, depending on where it was. I thought it was so emblematic of how people regard Los Angeles, that lack of specificity. So I searched through all the Faulkner books and cross-referenced all the addresses where he lived. Then, by a process of elimination, I determined which had balconies, and I visited a couple and eventually was able to pin it down to a building on Highland Avenue.”
Such a method is instructive, mixing, as it does, old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting with a more elusive system of priorities. In hunting down Faulkner’s address, for instance, Sweet reimagined, or reinvented, the city on two levels: the World War II–era Hollywood to which Faulkner came, grudgingly, for money—“I don’t like this damn place any better than I ever did,” he wrote in a 1945 letter. “There is one comfort: at least I cant be any sicker tomorrow for Mississippi than I was yesterday”—and the contemporary city through which Sweet tracked down the origin of the shot. “The past isn’t separated from the present,” Sweet insisted. He kept pausing as he spoke to ensure the precision of his phrasing. “In fact, it’s always present in the landscape, this matrix of meanings and images that’s right there. Experiencing them is a matter of perception. It’s not a matter of material construction. It’s metaphysical, but it’s also completely tangible and present.”
To think about Los Angeles through a metaphysical lens is, for Sweet, to get very close to what it is about the place. Raised in Maine—he maintains a Down-Easter’s taciturnity—he moved to Southern California in 2007, after stints in the Twin Cities and the Deep South. During those early days, he “spent a lot of time driving around aimlessly, inhabiting a certain headspace. It gave me,” he says, “this expansive feeling of communing with things, not directly but indirectly. But also very potent, tangible. The aimless cruise became a ritual sacrament of that process. There’s a certain way you can be mobile in Los Angeles, especially in the off-hours, and drift in this slippery, seamless way.”
The drift, yes. The dérive. I, too, remember this from my first years in Southern California. The directionless drive that becomes a journey of discovery. Watching blocks and buildings unfurl. It was on one such drive that I first encountered the Coca-Cola Building, which emerged from the blur of industrial South Los Angeles like a mirage. Now, Sweet and I decided to embark on another. We went back downstairs to Central Avenue, where his car was parked. He took the wheel, and I sat in the passenger seat, eyes wide again to the city’s dream life, what Sweet calls its “windswept gravity.”
As we set off, Sweet discussed some of his other projects, although, as with the five installments of All Night Menu, it’s hard to say where one begins and another ends. Over the past few years, he’s published three stand-alone books under what is now the All Night Menu imprint, including Tight Heads, a volume of Polaroids by the actress Candy Clark that features informal 1970s candids of, among others, Terry Southern, David Bowie, Anjelica Huston, and Carrie Fisher. All of these undertakings are interwoven, reflecting the ethos of All Night Menu, its capacious fascination with the city, in all its complexity and randomness.
Sweet and I were traveling north on Central, past the Coca-Cola Building and the site where Central Station had once stood. From there, we made a brief stop at the U.S. Postal Service’s Terminal Annex, on North Alameda, pausing in the building’s vestibule, which, Sweet pointed out, still bore the faint scent of tobacco, despite the fact that smoking has been banned in California’s public buildings since 1995. “How many cigarettes,” he wondered as the two of us passed through, “had to have been smoked in here? Going back how many years?”
Another trace, another imago. Another glimpse or glimmer of the past.
From Alameda Street, Sweet steered toward Lincoln Heights, among the earliest “suburbs” of Los Angeles, although it has long since been subsumed by the surrounding city. In that history, that liminality, we confront a reflection of Los Angeles’s larger arc. There is the lithic legacy, the echoes of deep time. As we moved into the hills, Sweet told me about the Lincoln Heights whale: the fossilized skull of a prehistoric baleen whale, discovered in the neighborhood in 1931, now on display at the Natural History Museum. Los Angeles, after all, was once covered by ocean. What this means is that everything is here to go. Like the La Brea Tar Pits—perhaps my favorite Southern California landmark—the whale serves to remind us of our temporality. “As humans,” Sweet said, “our conception of time is so brutally limited and mosquito-like. But then, there are all these signals indicating other scales.”
It’s another useful lens or scrim through which to examine All Night Menu, the way it seeks to flip or complicate our relationship with time.
“I’ve always been interested in this little spot,” Sweet continued, pulling over on a high ridge in the neighborhood. “Somewhere near here is where they excavated the whale.” Almost a century later, the location offered a window on a different sort of evolutionary change. On one side, an overgrown canyon, green and largely undeveloped, except for a few scattered houses and a set of steps. On the other, a sweeping panorama of downtown Los Angeles. “Mega City,” Sweet exclaimed. This is the double vision at the heart of All Night Menu, and of Los Angeles itself. I remembered a story Sweet had told me about artist Ed Ruscha’s encounter on Vermont Avenue in the 1950s or 1960s with an old man who had recalled the avenue being a sheep path many years before. “Apparently,” Sweet concluded, the old man “was coming back to take one last look at the place, and Ruscha was a young man. Now, Ruscha is nearly 90, and he can tell this story.”
This generational layering makes for a delicate rubric, which is one reason Sweet has chosen to steer clear of traditional publishing: to protect the inner life, the integrity, of All Night Menu in both aesthetic and commercial terms. The smallness of the books, their roughness, speaks to the ephemerality they seek to excavate in a way that commercial enterprise would have compromised. Published in small, hand-hewn editions and numbered—the first volume appeared in an initial print run of 100, a number that had expanded to 400 by the fifth—the project has a homemade quality, not unlike a set of scrapbooks, compiled and passed from one person to the next.
By now, Sweet and I had arrived at 1056 North De Garmo Drive in City Terrace, the story of which closes the fourth All Night Menu, published in 2021. This is the home purchased in June 1941 by the Nisei writer Molly Oyama and her husband, left empty after they were sent to the assembly center at Santa Anita Racetrack the following year. To maintain ownership, Oyama needed someone to rent the house. That someone turned out to be none other than Chester Himes, whose 1945 debut novel, the scathing If He Hollers Let Him Go, was produced there. “Little Riki Oyana singing ‘God Bless America’ and going to Santa Anita with his parents next day,” Himes writes, in one of the earliest literary references to the World War II removal of Japanese Americans. “It was taking a man up by the roots and locking him up without a chance.” Himes’s reappearance here hints at the web of inference that spreads through All Night Menu: the mosaic of the city, with each address—each narrative or neighborhood—not only its own tessera but also a strand in the skein of place and time. Nowhere was such a weave more visible to us than at the Maravilla Handball Courts, where, as early as 1928, residents—many of whom made bricks in a local quarry—created a neutral space in a rough community. This was history as hidden narrative. This was Los Angeles reclaimed.
Late in the afternoon, as we drifted west toward Mid-City, Sweet mentioned another source of reclamation, involving Gloria de Herrera, a Los Angeles–born art conservator who worked with Henri Matisse on his late cutouts, preserving them after the artist’s death in 1954.
“There was a little red box tied with a string,” Sweet recalled, describing looking through her papers, which are archived at the Getty Museum. “I opened the box, and it was all these tiny peripheral pieces, color-sorted from the cutouts. It was so striking because the cutouts themselves are already peripheral, art made out of fragments. And these are the fragments of those fragments. And I thought, This is a metaphor for her, the peripheral character who’s almost more interesting or intriguing. When you see those tiny fragments of color, you think, This is that life.”
In a very real way, this, too, is All Night Menu. In a very real way, this is the dérive made scalable, adaptable to many forms. Since completing volume five, Sweet has begun to think about short films and public presentations. Last November, he staged an event called “Lost Heroes & Micro Histories of LA” at the Philosophical Research Society, on Los Feliz Boulevard. Founded in 1934 to further the study of “multicultural wisdom sources,” the society evokes an older, weirder Los Angeles; it might make for an All Night Menu story itself. The evening’s program provided a mission update of a kind. “Since its inception,” Sweet wrote, “All Night Menu has continually expanded.… While it assumes different forms, its intent doesn’t change. Each iteration offers a specific history of Los Angeles. Each addition fits within a whole.”
Each addition, yes, which is to say: each layer. The mesh of past and present yet again. This is the story of the city. This is the conversation in which we take part.•
