- The Lonely City — Olivia Laing, 2016
Laing moves to New York and writes about the artists who used the city to be unreachable. The book is really about the strange loneliness of arriving somewhere new and realizing that the version of yourself you brought no longer has anywhere to stand.
- Lost in Translation — Sofia Coppola, 2003
Two Americans float through a Tokyo hotel, neither quite at home where they came from nor where they are. The film catches the displaced state that follows a real geographical move: jet-lagged, half-present, suddenly aware that home was a set of small daily gestures, not a place.
- Graceland — Paul Simon, 1986
An album made by someone who left the country he was in to look for himself somewhere else. It hums with the specific energy of departure: relief, guilt, curiosity, and the suspicion that the new place will eventually become the old one.