Author, Ursula K. LeGuin once said, “There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.” In the modern world, technology has progressed far beyond the wheel, and aspects of storytelling have also evolved by making use of advanced technology. For writer, director, producer, and all-round filmmaker extraordinaire, Christopher Coppola, technology and storytelling complement each other like PB & J. A member of the famously talented Coppola family, Christopher has been using cutting edge technology to impart meaningful stories on film for years. I was thrilled to be able to chat with Coppola to discuss his current ventures.

Bravely dipping a pen in the ink of his own soul, Pickett’s novels chart a winding path from divorced, struggling writer in the throes of an existential crises, to celebrated author.

Los Angeles was chockablock with art openings all over town Saturday night and I had my mind set on attending at least two of them before the night was through. Thankfully I made it across town to both, dodging traffic on the 10 with the help of my human navigator and date, Tim as well as my electronic navigator Garmin, or “Lady Gar Gar” as Tim likes to call it.

My first time on a plane,
I look out the plexiglass
pane of the window, see
the grid of fields beneath.
The only sense I can make
of the latticed land: that here
are the United States, shaded
and flat as they are on a map.
Rosy brown, green, taupe
patches far below do resemble
cartoony illustrations of
countries, cities inserted
cleanly into regions
like toothpicks into bread.

Chapter 1
THE PHOTOGRAPH

WHETHER BEAUTIFUL OR TERRIBLE, THE PAST IS ALWAYS A RUIN.

When I look back on my childhood, my earliest memories seemlike artifacts from a lost civilization: half-understood fragments behind museum glass. I remember the spherical alcohol lamp that glowed like a tiny ghost, ringed with dancing blue flames, which hung over the dining room table of the house where I grew up. I remember the sweet, oily smell of coal smoke, and the creaking of horse-drawn carriages on the dirt road outside. Most of all I remember
the summer twilight over the mountains and how, on certain evenings, just before the sun sank below the horizon, it cast rays so luminous and golden that they felt like a solid, enveloping close into which a small boy could simply disappear. An intensity no light today seems to match.