Streamer

 "the naïve eye that loves you"

-Amy Newman

Once you watched one of Walsh's videos the others flooded your feed.  A fusillade of fluff. Much later when he was asked on a podcast about his advertising team, his budget, the strategy of it— but by then the passion had left him, he'd gained some weight, lost some skin tone — his wan smile gave one the impression that, while he was too polite to say it, the question was to be pitied for fixating upon mere subtext in something daft like a municipal art project.  He didn't really do plugs.  By then he had lost heart.

The whole endeavor had the aroma of the insubstantial, but during the height of it he was posting forty or sometimes fifty times a day.  "Hey guys it is Walsh!"  The viewing numbers don't really improve, but they didn't go down either, this only seemed to bolster his confidence.    Walsh wandered LA  winking at the camera and insisting coincidence was a lifestyle choice.  "We must, uh, parse the alchemy of the, uh, little insignficancies" he says from an overpass, winking.  The comments threads usually had several that were just emojis winking back.  Walsh documented everything, like it was journalism. As if labling the mystery would keep it from fading away.  "Let's have a drink," he says, the camera following him at arm's length, "and let the spirits flatten you out like the freeway does to the mountains."

He is Slavic. Good-looking, charisma spilling from him like pennies from a torn pocket, and prone to the occassionally intrepid turn of phrase that made you sit up and smile. There he was visiting the Mosque.  Playing tambourine in the park.  Kissing dogs, walking under the Sixth Street Bridge. Walsh tweeted "Serendipity is the only weather worth watching."  This was retweeted by TV weathermen coast-to-coast, most with a snide remark. Walsh did not seem to understand this.

His entourage of friends wasn't in on the joke either.  Notably Seth [Cohen] and Dylan.  Dylan's whole schtick was that fate was flirting with him. Via, billboards, license plates, cafe menus, his Alexa.  Alexa, for her part, did not deny this.  Seth, who had two albums out, should have been the main draw, but was relegated to a side character because of his tiresome loquacity.  He could out-talk anybody.  Walsh spent a considerable amount of time just pointing the camera at him and posting his unprompted monologues at high speed. A notable moment, turning from Seth and then returning at normal speed to Dylan who said, while playing with a self-retracting tape measure and noting dimensions of the leather sofa, "irony will reduce the tension."
A sofa company asked to use the clip in an ad campaign but later discontinued negotiations in press release in which they misspelled Walsh's name.

Enter Marissa who appeared out of nowhere, knew his secrets, and treated reality like a suggestion. Walsh was obviously smitten, his camera lingering on her while Walsh waxed poetic, "look at those hips, soft as clouds," you can hear him saying as she tacks polaroids to a white wall and procedes to draw mustaches on them.  She wasn't in any traditional sense beautiful, and her voice was low and throaty.  She tells Walsh she has no possessions and he asks for no explanation.  She knows things she should not know.  She orders coffee and doesn't drink it.

The frequency of the videos take a hit, but Walsh also adopts a more artistic bent.  More thoughtful editing, transitioned cuts to B-Roll, Marissa will casually drop a sentence that rewires Walsh's brain. You can see him looking injured but grateful. She gestures cryptically. I've watched it over and over.  It honestly makes no sense.  "It's because you fail to see," she whispers closing the door behind her.  Showing up again at the end of the clip in a new outfit, a sky blue pantsuit and a red fedora.  Everyone nods like this happens all the time.  

Another follower-on was Kelly [Atwood] who seemed to sense something was off but, like all of them, like us, can't seem to quite articulate it.  "There is this silence which keeps growing larger."  She tweets before shutting down all her socials cold, which somehow makes it more real.  Dylan laughs nervously whenever destiny is mentioned, which someone counts as foreshadowing now, watching it all back. Walsh always tags him first.

Walsh says he believes he has fallen in love. Perhaps though it is just the idea of Marissa. Maybe it's just the disturbance. The comments raises an eyebrow.
Seth: "this isn't romance, its metaphysics wearing eyeliner." Walsh asks him to explain but Seth refuses. "Explaining it would ruin it," Dylan clocks the situation instantly. 
Walsh muses "maybe to be in love is to swim in doubt.  But this means something."  Seth doesn't disagree "Yes, but not what you think."
"Meaning will not cooperate with us," Dylan ruminates as they stare at their matchas in silence. The aperture widens, as if meaning is to be revealed just outsided of frame.

The city is no longer a setting; it's a conspirator. The sun comes up bright and blue. The city behaves incorrectly. The glow of rust colored glass shards shattered alongside the tracks. Palm trees leaning in ways that suggest knowledge of past mistakes.  A billboard reads Deal With It. Walsh tweets: "'it is only through the senses that we know' -Montaigne"


Marissa refuses to be defined, categorized or followed up with clarifying questions. She is shadowed by an assistant she calls Art, short for Arturo.  He has bright cheeks.  She says she likes doors and leaving through them.  Marissa becomes less present.  She drifts further from the group becoming more symbol than person, like atmosphere. Walsh keeps taking, posting, adding fuel to this dumpster fire.  "Love is strange. Like a joke told by a cop." He takes the group on a road trip to Modesto. Reading the comments aloud he notes "eyeryone keeps asking 'what does it mean?' and, hey! look at the wind in those fields." Marissa, we learn, has filed a restraining order.


In a telling coda, in one of the last videos, Seth's sister Kirsten gently suggests that obsession is unhealthy and not the same as understanding.  They are practicing their mantras and breathing into pillows. Walsh says poetically "Yeah, some people only will value when its convenient for them and in the moment you stop pouring yourself into them you mean nothing to them. I can say I see this clearly now."
"Dude stop forcing connections." says Dylan.
"Closure is a capitalist myth," begins Seth, rocking back and forth.
"Why capitalist?"
"I'm just saying, like, resolution is dishonest..."