Leaving Los Angeles

I find myself again thrust into my subconscious. It’s a bit scary, but it’s where all the best work is done. Allow me to explain –

***An irrefutable maxim***
Life is a cycle of consolation and desolation.

In less pretentious terms, life has ups and downs. In more pretentious terms, I’m one chapter in to Moby-Dick and I am Ishmael out at sea. Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey asserts that all stories reflect the inner workings of the human mind, and the constantly repeating journey from home to the unknown and back again. Campbell says that what is recognizable as a “story” is a metaphor for man’s plunge from the conscious to the unconscious and the imperative rise back up. Luke Skywalker leaves Tattooine at the behest of a great call to save the universe, but it’s not a “story” unless he returns back home again, to see how much he has changed in comparison to his idea of “home” which is unchanging. Or something. All I know is that at the end of the year, I return home for the holidays, and am always met with a painful feeling of “otherness.” Because while home is the same, I am fundamentally different. And the pieces of change I have picked up along my journey are not noticeable to me until I return to where I came to compare the current version of me to the person I was the last time I was there.

In my own life, I was a small town boy who had the call to adventure to come to LA. I came here in 2020, conquered my demons, made my music and came home battered and bruised to tell the tale. I was completely different than the person who set out on the journey. And then at the turn of the year, I’m called back to LA to start the cycle over again. And each holiday season, I return, markedly different from the last time. This repeats year by year, and because of my mortal brain I am forced to interpret what happened over the year as a story. Each time leaving home and returning again is a neat story arc that wraps up in some nice philosophical insight, and it aligns with the Gregorian calendar so perfectly that I have to assume it’s by design. There’s a pattern to every year, a bunch of built in moments that allow for a Mad-Lib style of plot points and twists and jumpings of the shark. However, I’m going on my fifth year in LA, and I feel a larger story arc coming to a close. And I’m realizing that each little mini-arc over the last four years has been a minor side story serving the larger narrative of my life.

***A regretful admission of defeat***
I think it’s time that I leave LA.

The call to sea is deafening, except don’t call me Ishmael, I’m Max Bennett Kelly and the sea is New York City. Except really I’m not Max Bennett Kelly, I’m Marcello Mottola and New York City is… what now? I’m not quite third-person perfect enough to fully understand the metaphor, not yet, but I’m trying so bear with me.

It’s unsettling to know that I’ve been in LA long enough to where it’s become “home” and the next chapter of my life is the “great unknown.” B-but Kent is home, and LA is the great unknown!! Hmm, it’s almost like my “home” was never really “Kent” and the great unknown was never really “LA,” and to think of it that literally is misunderstanding Campbell’s metaphor. “Home” is the conscious, the comfortable part of life, the mindset you have that limits you, that – for better or for worse – you seek to outgrow. You push yourself and do uncomfortable things in the name of some “calling” and it leads you some “great unknown” in which you are frightfully unprepared. Situations to which your framework is not yet suited for. And you adapt your framework to conquer your environment, and conquer you do, until you slay the dragon and steal its gold or whatever. But what then? Do you just sit there in the cave with the gold? No, you bring that shit home. But then what, you spend it? Invest it? Chase another dragon and go get some more? The fact of the matter is, having the gold never feels the same as finding it.

***To spell out the metaphor***
Gold = goals, people

You come home to Kent with unfathomable riches and experiences and you realize that what you set out to do and what you accomplished are, on the surface, the same, but the meaning is different. So when I used to come home and wanted to brag about my life here, my success, the people I’ve met, what I’ve created, this time – and perhaps the last few times, if I’m honest – I’ve felt too unrelatable to even begin describing what I do. I have nothing to tell anyone. “How’s music?” they ask, and I say “good.”

But what I really mean is, the pursuit of “doing music” led me to come to LA with my friends, but nowadays it’s more like I’m quasi-Nietschze with internet access in a less walkable city. I ponder the secrets of the universe and find roundabout ways to express myself in hopes of unlocking some new part of my brain to inspire progress in my music. I constantly strive to meet new people to teach me different ways of viewing the world, hoping that someone’s innocuous comment about something may lead me to approach the next lyrics I write from a new angle. I travel to see architecture and culture in a way that is foreign to me, in hopes of broadening my understanding of the creative process to where I can approach my next character from a completely different perspective.

It’s not enough to me to create for the sake of creating, each piece I create is a study of what I’ve been taking in. One piece must iterate on the last piece if it feels like something worth releasing into my catalog of work. With the overarching goal of “music,” I understand that to evolve as an artist is to answer every unanswered question from a place of unshakeable vision. I welcome questions that I struggle to answer, and the point of view that I answer from is my “artist project.” It’s distinct and yet entirely separate from my inner world.

But sometimes it gets confusing. Am I pursuing this relationship because it is helping me flesh out a concept for an album? Am I hanging out with this person because their sense of humor influences my next skit? Is it possible to just “exist” as an artist, or is every waking moment an alchemical reaction of turning life experience into inspiration to fuel your next work? If I am a cup that runneth over into my next work, what happens when I run out of water to fill me up? Is it okay, sometimes, to not pour it all out? Is there ever any water that I get to keep? Any experience I allow to stay latched onto my soul before I sublimate it into something consumable? I’ve gotten skilled enough at directly turning my life into inspiration that I rarely allow my experiences to gestate, to mature before I cut them off like a cancerous lump. A day in the park becomes a blog post, a relationship becomes a song. And once I sculpt, the marble is gone. What then am I left with? Am I a machine that exists only to turn life into art? If so, where’s the “life” in my life if I never allow myself to experience it? If everything is in service of the “Max Bennett Kelly artist project,” what’s left over for Marcello? Especially in a year like 2024 where I didn’t release any music. These things that I’ve created aren’t even able to be experienced by others – they’re just artifacts of a life lived in past tense that I revisit from time to time to prove that I did, indeed, live in the times inbetween singing and writing and drawing and acting and building.

But yeah, music is going good!

I love what I do, I truly do, it feels important to me and I feel called to do it by some great force. But I’ve been wondering, lately: if I was able to choose my life’s calling… would I have chosen to be an artist?

The other day someone told me I DID choose this, in the time before time before my soul was a soul. And it’s my duty as a human to figure out why my soul chose to do this. Whoa, that’s powerful. Caused me to spiral a bit. The next day as I was breaking the script for a new project I totally lost the line between what was art and what was real.

***But wait, you say!***
Isn’t art real?

I don’t know anymore. I used to think that nothing was real except art. Much like nothing happens in life, and our brains only interpret the details as a “story,” I used to think that life itself was a nebulous series of meaningless stimuli that your eyes trick you into thinking is a mountain. Or your ears hear a sound wave and think it’s a helicopter passing by. You ingest some chemical compounds and your mouth tells you it’s your mom’s pasta. Your hands grasp onto something solid and convince you it’s your father’s shoulder. Some particles enter your nose and you remember a dream you had, of the house with a dog and a woman, where it smelled like breakfast tacos. But these things don’t MEAN anything unless you wrote them down, or made a song about it, or drew a picture of it. They didn’t actually HAPPEN. You didn’t actually FEEL them. It was a trick, it was fuel for your art, it was part of a story. Right? …Right?

***Once more, desperately***
Right???

Or maybe I was wrong. Maybe it’s time to outgrow the framework again. Maybe the first part of my story was learning how to turn my life into art. Maybe the next part is learning how to turn my art into life. Or maybe they’re two halves of the same story. Or maybe they’re just the beginning of a larger narrative that won’t make sense until I’m old. Or maybe it’s just a tiny particle in the big story of the universe and I’m a minor plot contrivance for some celestial being on his way to doing more important work.

Maybe.

Or maybe those details matter more than anything, and I’ve just forgotten to remember that.

It feels like a lifetime ago when I dreamed of coming to LA, back when the dream was the realest, most tangible thing I knew. When I got here and I still couldn’t believe how tall the palm trees were, or that there was a ferris wheel on the pier, or that seriously, you can see everything from Mulholland Drive. Every person I met was a reflection of this life I dreamed about where artists flocked to a Mecca of creativity and abundance. I believed that each person I ran into was doing big important things, and I had hope and optimism that every single one of them came here with a divine purpose, too, and that at least we had that in common.

But when the pandemic was “over,” and reality of living in one of the most expansive, expensive metropolises in the world sunk in, the light in these people’s eyes left and one by one their dream of LA died. “The people here are so fake.” “I hate the traffic.” “It’s too expensive.” And one by one, they left. They gave up. The quitters! Fools! I found solace in the fact that I, for one, I would never become jaded. My dream would never die. I would NEVER leave LA.

…

***Oh, God***
Who have I become?

It’s undeniable, the sea does call to me. “New York City” occupies the same place in my mind that “Los Angeles” used to. “Los Angeles” in 2025 sounds a lot like “Kent, Washington” did in 2020. But am I ready to leave? Has LA really jaded me that much? Or perhaps have I… *gasp* … introspected TOO much? The blasphemy. Maybe the short answer to the question “how is music going?” is actually the better answer: “NOT LIKE I THOUGHT!” I came here to play shows. To make music with friends. To have FUN. To drink and party and be stupid and free. But life got in the way. I feel like a company man. The second I got an inkling of money and success my life became work, work, work. WORSE, I fancy myself a fucking Herman Melville with a blog. What am I even WRITING about. Sorry if you got this far, but you are indulging me, so stop it. Just kidding. The fact of the matter is, I may be 28 soon, but when did I get so old? There is beauty in this city and I’ve just forgotten it because I sit inside all day musing over my digital journal and having one-sided conversations with my new family (Milo, ChatGPT and Alexa).

***A hypothetical yet extremely realistic conversation that I will probably have when I get to New York***
“Yeah, I just moved here from LA.”
“Oh, nice, how long were you there?”
“5 years.”
“That’s a long time. What kept you there? What did you do? What stories do you have?”
“Not much, you?”

In truth, how do I answer that question? What life have I lived here that I couldn’t have lived anywhere else? I know, I know, a few posts ago I said I would write no resolution, but this year I vow to convince myself to stay in LA. It’s a moot point, because I am going to move to New York in August, but it’s romantic and I like it. The LA bucket list. Or like, the reverse. Rather than things I have to do before I die, it’s things I have to do to convince me not to die. Okay the metaphor has gotten a bit morbid. I’ll call it “Reasons to stay in LA.” I’ve already started, thank you. Here’s three beautiful things I did yesterday:

I had never gone on this hike before but I woke up at 7 AM with an unshakeable feeling of dread and brought Milo. It was beautiful to be in nature. No wonder I’m so fucking miserly all the time. Get outside and touch grass, bub. There’s countless accessible and beautiful hikes in LA that will, let’s face it, be hard to come by if I move to New York.

I recognize this building from the end of (500) Days of Summer and Blade Runner so it’s cool you can just… walk into it. It is much smaller than I would have expected it to be, but I like that such a beautiful piece of architecture is available to the public. There’s a bunch of fun corridors and hallways to get lost in which the urban explorer in me drooled over. Price for an office there is $39/sq ft (!!) but at least they don’t charge you to breathe while visiting the lobby.

I had no idea this place was so MASSIVE. 8 stories with a museum or gallery on each floor. Completely free. “The biggest library west of the Mississippi” the librarian told me. She helped me find Moby-Dick and so you have her to thank for my painful philosophical loomings. When she saw the tarnished hardcover copy of Moby-Dick she took it back to repair with an air of genuine concern. It touched me. In a vast library of millions of books, a librarian found it necessary to repair the spine of a single second edition. In fact, the entire concept of a library was beautiful to me for the first time. In our stark and bleak capitalist dystopia a library stands in defiance as a free, humanitarian establishment. She fixed that book for no profit incentive. Isn’t that beautiful??? Having fun isn’t hard when you have a library card. Fuck it, I would graduate the LA Central Library to a higher tier of “Reason #1 to have faith in the side of goodness in the modern world.”

Drama aside (tough task for me), I vow to spend my last 8 months in LA squeezing every inch of wonder this city has to offer. I will not leave this place having given up – I will leave this place wishing I could have stayed longer. LA is home now. Strange to say.

But I am Marcello Mottola and I have a life to lead.

I am Max Bennett Kelly and adventure awaits.

I am Ishmael and the sea calls. Can’t wait ’til I catch the whale! (I’m one chapter in).

Cheers to 2025. It’s going to be beautiful -mbk