Lifestyle

L.A. Affairs: We stopped pretending we were just friends. But was it too late?

Published

2 months ago

November 16, 2025

L.A. Affairs: We stopped pretending we were just friends. But was it too late?

I still think about the night before I left Los Angeles — the way Matt and I finally stopped pretending we were just friends and how his pit bull, Jesus, slept curled at the edge of the bed while we held each other, fully clothed, knowing we were out of time. It wasn’t a grand ending. There were no fireworks, no cinematic declarations. Just the quiet hum of the city outside and two people trying to stretch a single night into forever.

I had met Matt years earlier, back when I first moved to Los Angeles and the city seemed determined to break me. I’d been apartment hunting for months, a process that had devolved into a series of small humiliations. Landlords’ smiles would fade the instant they saw my brown face. The decent apartments — ones with working showers or a refrigerator — were always “just rented.” The ones I could actually get were dark, smelly or unsafe.

I was starting to think I’d made a mistake leaving New York. Then my friend Shannon sent me a Craigslist listing that looked —miraculously — normal. “Hollywood/Little Armenia,” she read. “Centrally located. Two blocks from the 101.” The rent wasn’t outrageous. The photos didn’t make me shudder. I pulled out my Thomas Guide, traced the route to Lexington Avenue and drove there with more hope than I wanted to admit.

The building exceeded my expectations. It was white, mid-century, with quirky castle-like touches that gave it personality. The street was alive with Armenian markets and mom-and-pop bakeries. For the first time since arriving in L.A., I could picture myself living somewhere that felt like a community.

Then Matt appeared.

He was tall, clean-shaven, reddish-haired, with warm brown eyes that made you feel immediately seen. “You’re here about the apartment?” he asked. I braced myself for the usual letdown. Instead, he smiled and said, “Let me show you around.”

He was the building’s superintendent, but that felt too small a word for him. He was also a documentary filmmaker who’d studied at UCLA, was fluent in three languages and had an easy charisma that drew people in. His dog, Jesus, a striking black-and-white pit bull, followed him everywhere, tail wagging like a punctuation mark.

The apartment itself wasn’t perfect, but it was a palace compared to what I’d been through. It was a studio with a big kitchen and actual sunlight. I signed the lease that week. Shannon warned me, only half-joking, “Don’t fall for your building super.” I promised I wouldn’t.

That promise lasted about two weeks.

The first night I moved in, I realized my bedroom window was broken — not just cracked, but open enough to make me feel unsafe. I knocked on Matt’s door, probably sounding sharper than I meant to. I’d been through too many slumlords to expect much. But he listened patiently, nodded and had it fixed the next day. That small act — his professionalism, his steadiness — disarmed me. It was the first time in months that someone in this city had made me feel cared for.

We were both smokers then. The building had a little patio where residents would gather, and before long, Matt and I started running into each other there. Those encounters turned into conversations about film, queerness, art and the strange loneliness of being transplants in a city obsessed with dreams. He told me about Costa Rica, where he grew up, and about how he loved and resented Los Angeles for its contradictions. I told him about New York, about how it shaped me and why I had to leave it.

Our connection deepened slowly, marked by cigarettes and laughter, and those long, suspended silences when neither of us wanted to say goodnight.

By the time the holidays rolled around, I’d stopped pretending that I didn’t look forward to seeing him. As a thank-you for all his help that first year, I bought him two bottles of Grey Goose: lemon- and orange-flavored because I’d noticed he liked citrus. He invited me to help him drink them on New Year’s Eve.

We spent the night talking about everything and nothing: music, travel, ambition. Midnight came. We hugged. And in that long, lingering embrace, I felt the spark we’d been trying to ignore. But we let go, careful not to cross the boundary that had quietly become sacred between us.

For years, we danced around it. We’d share a beer, a smoke, a late-night talk and retreat again to our corners. I respected his professionalism; he respected my space. But under all that restraint was something undeniably alive.

Then came the accident. A driver T-boned my Volvo on my way home from work at E! Networks, and I was left with two herniated cervical discs and a terrifying warning from my doctor: one wrong move, and I could be paralyzed. I decided to move back to New York to recover.

The night before I left, Matt came by to say goodbye. We knew it was our last chance to stop pretending.

“I love you,” he said quietly.

“I love you too,” I told him.

We kissed, finally, with the kind of tenderness born from years of self-restraint. But we didn’t take it further. We just lay there, spooned together, holding on as if stillness could save us.

After I moved back east, we kept in touch for a while, then drifted apart. He eventually married a Frenchman and moved to Europe to make films. I stayed in New York and wrote my stories.

Sometimes I think about that broken window — the one he fixed the day after my first night in the building — and how it set the tone for everything that followed. Love doesn’t always announce itself with drama. Sometimes it’s in the quiet repair of something broken, the small acts of care that build into something profound.

Matt taught me that. He made a city that once felt hostile finally feel like home. And even now, years later, when I think of Los Angeles, I don’t think of the rejection or the struggle. I think of him.

The author is a freelance writer. He lives in New York City and is working on a memoir. He’s also on Instagram: @thebohemiandork.

L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.

Lifestyle

In ‘No Other Choice,’ a loyal worker gets the ax — and starts chopping

Published

3 hours ago

January 10, 2026

Press Room

In ‘No Other Choice,’ a loyal worker gets the ax — and starts chopping

Lee Byung-hun stars in No Other Choice.

NEON

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NEON

In an old Kids in the Hall comedy sketch called “Crazy Love,” two bros throatily proclaim their “love of all women” and declare their incredulity that anyone could possibly take issue with it:

Bro 1: It is in our very makeup; we cannot change who we are!

Bro 2: No! To change would mean … (beat) … to make an effort.

I thought about that particular exchange a lot, watching Park Chan-wook’s latest movie, a niftily nasty piece of work called No Other Choice. The film isn’t about the toxic lecherousness of boy-men, the way that KITH sketch is. But it is very much about men, and that last bit: the annoyed astonishment of learning that you’re expected to change something about yourself that you consider essential, and the extreme lengths you’ll go to avoid doing that hard work.

Many critics have noted No Other Choice‘s satirical, up-the-minute universality, given that it involves a faceless company screwing over a hardworking, loyal employee. As the film opens, Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) has been working at a paper factory for 25 years; he’s got the perfect job, the perfect house, the perfect family — you see where this is going, right? (If you don’t, even after the end of the first scene, when Man-su calls his family over for a group hug while sighing, “I’ve got it all,” then I envy your blithe disinterest in how movies work. Never change, you beautiful blissful Pollyanna, you.)

He gets canned, and can’t seem to find another job in his beloved paper industry, despite going on a series of dehumanizing interviews. His resourceful wife Miri (Son Ye-jin) proves a hell of a lot more adaptable than he does, making practical changes to the family’s expenses to weather Man-su’s situation. But when foreclosure threatens, he resolves to eliminate the other candidates (Lee Sung-min, Cha Seung-won) for the job he wants at another paper factory — and, while he’s at it, maybe even the jerk (Park Hee-soon) to whom he’d be reporting.

So yes, No Other Choice is a scathing spoof of corporate culture. But the director’s true satirical eye is trained on the interpersonal — specifically the intractability of the male ego.

Again and again, the women in the film (both Son Ye-jin as Miri and the hilarious Yeom Hye-ran, who plays the wife of one of Man-su’s potential victims) entreat their husbands to think about doing something, anything else with their lives. But these men have come to equate their years of service with a pot-committed core identity as men and breadwinners; they cling to their old lives and seek only to claw their way back into them. Man-su, for example, unthinkingly channels the energy that he could devote to personal and professional growth into planning and executing a series of ludicrously sloppy murders.

It’s all satisfyingly pulpy stuff, loaded with showy, cinematic homages to old-school suspense cinematography and editing — cross-fades, reverse-angles and jump cuts that are deliberately and unapologetically Hitchcockian. That deliberateness turns out to be reassuring and crowd-pleasing; if you’re tired of tidy visual austerity, of films that look like TV, the lushness on display here will have you leaning back in your seat thinking, “This right here is cinema, goddammit.”

Narratively, the film is loaded with winking jokes and callbacks that reward repeat viewing. Count the number of times that various characters attempt to dodge personal responsibility by sprinkling the movie’s title into their dialogue. Wonder why one character invokes the peculiar image of a madwoman screaming in the woods and then, only a few scenes later, finds herself chasing someone through the woods, screaming. Marvel at Man-su’s family home, a beautifully ugly blend of traditional French-style architecture with lumpy Brutalist touches like exposed concrete balconies jutting out from every wall.

Murder is lost in translation in 'Decision to Leave'

There’s a lot that’s charming about No Other Choice, which might seem an odd thing to note about such a blistering anti-capitalist screed. But the director is careful to remind us at all turns where the responsibility truly lies; say what you will about systemic economic pressure, the blood stays resolutely on Man-su’s hands (and face, and shirt, and pants, and shoes). The film repeatedly offers him the ability to opt out of the system, to abandon his resolve that he must return to the life he once knew, exactly as he knew it.

Man-su could do that, but he won’t, because to change would mean to make an effort — and ultimately men would rather embark upon a bloody murder spree than go to therapy.

Lifestyle

Austin airport to nearly double in size over next decade

Published

4 hours ago

January 10, 2026

Press Room

Austin airport to nearly double in size over next decade

AUSTIN, Texas – Austin-Bergstrom International Airport will nearly double in size over the next decade.

The airport currently has 34 gates. With the expansion projects, it will increase by another 32 gates.

What they’re saying:

Southwest, Delta, United, American, Alaska, FedEx, and UPS have signed 10-year use-and lease agreements, which outline how they operate at the airport, including with the expansion.

“This provides the financial foundation that will support our day-to-day operations and help us fund the expansion program that will reshape how millions of travelers experience AUS for decades to come,” Ghizlane Badawi, CEO of Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, said.

Concourse B, which is in the design phase, will have 26 gates, estimated to open in the 2030s. Southwest Airlines will be the main tenant with 18 gates, United Airlines will have five gates, and three gates will be for common use. There will be a tunnel that connects to Concourse B.

“If you give us the gates, we will bring the planes,” Adam Decaire, senior VP of Network Planning & Network Operations Control at Southwest Airlines said.

“As part of growing the airport, you see that it’s not just us that’s bragging about the success we’re having. It’s the airlines that want to use this airport, and they see advantage in their business model of being part of this airport, and that’s why they’re growing the number of gates they’re using,” Mayor Kirk Watson said.

Dig deeper:

The airport will also redevelop the existing Barbara Jordan Terminal, including the ticket counters, security checkpoints, and baggage claim. Concourse A will be home to Delta Air Lines with 15 gates. American Airlines will have nine gates, and Alaska Airlines will have one gate. There will be eight common-use gates.

“Delta is making a long-term investment in Austin-Bergstrom that will transform travel for years to come,” Holden Shannon, senior VP for Corporate Real Estate at Delta Air Lines said.

The airport will also build Concourse M — six additional gates to increase capacity as early as 2027. There will be a shuttle between that and the Barbara Jordan Terminal. Concourse M will help with capacity during phases of construction.

There will also be a new Arrivals and Departures Hall, with more concessions and amenities. They’re also working to bring rideshare pickup closer to the terminal.

City officials say these projects will bring more jobs.

The expansion is estimated to cost $5 billion — none of which comes from taxpayer dollars. This comes from airport revenue, possible proceeds, and FAA grants.

“We’re seeing airlines really step up to ensure they are sharing in the infrastructure costs at no cost to Austin taxpayers, and so we’re very excited about that as well,” Council Member Vanessa Fuentes (District 2) said.

The Source: Information from interviews conducted by FOX 7 Austin’s Angela Shen

Austin-Bergstrom International AirportAustin

Lifestyle

After years of avoiding the ER, Noah Wyle feels ‘right at home’ in ‘The Pitt’

Published

15 hours ago

January 9, 2026

Press Room

After years of avoiding the ER, Noah Wyle feels ‘right at home’ in ‘The Pitt’

Wyle, who spent 11 seasons on ER, returns to the hospital in The Pitt. Now in Season 2, the HBO series has earned praise for its depiction of the medical field. Originally broadcast April 21, 2025.