Sunset Strips

Sunset Strips are pictures of strip malls at sunset, made from an elevated perspective.

Long, ozone-rich days have been spent in the future fossil layers they’ll call the Bigboxoscene, my rented sedan piled with coffee cups and Combos, scouting for hillocks, mesas, and off-ramps just east of This Plaza, That Center, hoping to climb up high enough to watch the sun go down on JoAnne Fabrics. When Sunset Strips work, they work well. They’re a cocktail of sincerity and irony, a cordial of bad urban planning and pure celestial revolution. They have an unusual color palette, acidic and shimmery like gasoline, from the lot lights below and the fire in the sky. They take you to a familiar place and pour gas on it, and isn’t it pretty watching it burn? But the sunset isn’t always in the west. Sometimes there’s no sunset at all. The damn star just crosses the horizon with no fanfare, no farewell fire, no pink. Many days I made zero pictures. Lots of nights I went to bed in a damnably mediocre hotel unable to really remember that first camera love. They have never been shown or published.