Breton at In & Out

Walking out of an In & Out burger restaurant in Los Angeles recently, we happened upon this scene: a guy in a truck placing his order. The total ridiculousness of the scene prompted us to pause, take the photo, and relish the juxtaposition of the elements. It was a kind of inspirational moment, a Surrealist intersection of forces relocated from the Parisian streets of Breton to the sunny drive-thru culture of contemporary Los Angeles. This combination of ingredients might come to express something deeply idiosyncratic to the LA environment, that of bringing together what usually does not meet, and in doing so allowing certain fantasies to surface - LA might be a site for the potential exaggeration of form, nurturing fantasy and granting space for their manifestation (Hollywood becomes the quintessential example: it is the very sign for such potential and promise). Here at In & Out it might be read in the very site itself, tucked alongside the LA airport with its own park across the street used for viewing incoming aircraft, and further, to the truck itself, as the expression of certain vehicular imagination, and to the final meeting, of the In & Out attendant dressed in a costume that aims to recall some notion of early fast food culture, where burgers and fries meets rock n roll and fast cars of the 1950s. With the sun covering the scene in its glow, we might begin to appreciate LA as a landscape of disproportionate scale, which in itself inaugurates a formal realignment of the senses.