In LA at The Last Booksore

Last week, I flew to LA for four days of, well, everything.

I was there for a conference, but I brought Emmett along.

We stayed in DTLA, but trekked everywhere from Malibu to Venice to Silverlake.

I sat in serious panels about serious topics and then emerged into the dazzling day to do deeply unserious things: workout classes where mini-trampolines are branded as “rebounders,” pilgrimages to cult-like grocery stores for $19 smoothies, a visit to the Goop store. I bought, with only the smallest saving-grace amount of irony, an “immunity boosting” shot that was served to me in a syringe. 

I also – somewhere between a ride up Angel’s Flight and a 30-minute queue for one minute in Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror room – spent some time wandering around The Last Bookstore, a distinctively un-LA bookstore in the heart of the city.

If I had to conjure a Los Angeles bookstore, it would have a macrobiotic cooking section, warm light pouring in through floor-to-ceiling windows, wide expanses of white oak floors, and book signings by wellness gurus and celebrity memoirists.

The Last Bookstore has none of these things, and it’s better for it. And, after days of rotting my brain with adaptogenic blah blah blah and activated wah wah wah, I’m better for it too. Here, I discovered the specific delight of a store that bucks the conventions of its setting. With its Empire Records-evoking main atrium, its internet-famous book tunnel, and its musty warren of rooms studded with doll heads and sarcophagi, this used book, comic, and record store is in a 100-year-old bank building that feels like the 90s, like my angsty adolescence, and like Portland all at once. It’s an oasis of weird shit in a city that’s several decades past whatever dark and edgy identity it might once have had.

I perused the rare book vault, bought a $3 copy of The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing, and (barely) resisted the siren song of the store’s very good merch. And, happily, I found a third state of mind, somewhere between serious conference-goer and trend-chasing wellness wannabe. I could have stayed all day.