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Yesterday Christal and I awoke to an apocalyptic sky, whipping winds, and stories of devastation. Today the sky is a bit clearer, but Los Angeles is still burning on all three sides of the city that connect to any kind of wildlife and that aren’t the side defined by the Pacific Ocean.
Our city is burning. There are three fires now. All 0% contained at the time that I write this. One to the north, one the west, and one to the east.
The fire to the east has burned down an entire neighborhood just blocks away from where I lived for many years before I met Christal. That was an amazing neighborhood. I loved it so much, in part, because it was so unique. Altadena and North Pasadena are the result of horrible racism as Los Angeles developed, but the result was beautiful. Black families weren’t allowed to buy property in Pasadena proper. Not even very affluent Black families. So the neighborhoods north of the city, where they could buy, became, in the kind of irony that this dimension so adores, a paradise. An upper-middle-class paradise that held all the charm of the Midwest, right here, just a short drive from Hollywood. Until yesterday. Now it is gone.
The fire to the north threatens Hollywood, and the part of Hollywood near West Hollywood, where I also lived for years. This area is also an incredible haven for the middle class. Where do all of the people who work really hard on film and television projects——work so hard because they love what they do so much, and their love is exploited by an industry, now in the hands of true, machine-minded, soulless, mechanical monsters, an industry that has always exploited their love for their work by saying, essentially, ‘you’re lucky to love what you do, so live in near poverty’——where do all those people live in their cramped apartments? In Hollywood and West Hollywood and, now that the city is becoming unlivably expensive, North Hollywood, far from the sets, requiring long drives and even more emissions. This critical, pulsing, heartbeat of a neighborhood of now viciously exploited workers is under threat of utter devastation, and nobody knows what will happen today.
To the west, a neighborhood called Pacific Palisades has been wiped off the map. This neighborhood was where Henry Miller lived, and Henry Miller was a cranky fuck. He chose LA, when he could, when he wanted a retirement somewhere other than New York. And, when he did choose this neighborhood, he could have chosen any neighborhood in Los Angeles. But this cranky, hard to please, artistic, hilarious, unbridled, pornographic, literate, American Roald Dahl chose to live in Pacific Palisades. And I think that was, in part, because the Palisades weren’t Malibu, and they weren’t Los Angeles. Sure, a lot of famous people lived there, but so did a lot of people who ran regular businesses and a lot of people who loved the ocean. Pacific Palisades was the closest Los Angeles ever came to being a quaint waterfront town on Lake Michigan.
And now it is gone.
Pacific Palisades is just a baseball’s throw from where Christal and I took the picture I used for the Dancing Queen post. From a big, beautifully maintained park with trails that run deep into the woods and up into the hills with breathtaking views of the Pacific. We would drive through the Palisades on the way back to West LA after our hikes there.
And now it is gone.
We have lost much of Los Angeles to fire, fire that we could have prevented, fire that is a symbol of our changing world. Fire has always been a symbol of devastation and regeneration both. We have lost much of LA already to three fires that, as I write this, are all still zero percent contained. Today has only begun. We don’t know what’s in store. Yesterday, Christal, one of those hardworking film and television workers, actually went to work. Her director is a great human being so he called the day short. But it’s an illustration of how regular people continue to go about their business in the face of utter, unimaginable devastation. And, because of that, we know that regeneration will take place.
Fire will lead to regeneration. Something new.
What will that be?
Have we lost, already, without it being over, much of the remaining middle class charm that connected the ridiculously wealthy in this city to the ridiculously poor? It seems like it, right now, to me, at this moment.
Will it be rebuilt as a middle class conduit that holds the two polar forces of the city that have been forced ever further and further apart in the last ten years?
I doubt it. I think disaster capitalism is going to wipe out much of what remains of Los Angeles’s great middle class neighborhoods. Now you will have to go north into the Valley, or south and east and down the coast, or out to the desert cities, to see the remnants of what made this city, and America, the place where a genius could be a regular person. Where Henry Miller could feel comfortable.
I think that’s what’s going to happen to LA. But it doesn’t have to happen forever, and it doesn’t have to happen permanently, and it doesn’t have to happen to all of America, and it doesn’t have to happen to the whole God damned world.
Fire has always happened. But what comes next is our choice.
That’s what VISION 2025 is all about.
Today, as we anxiously stare out all the windows in the house in a kind of nervous rotation, we are still focused on what’s next. And, of course, how we can help right now.
Fire creates devastation which creates the opportunity to heal and build from the ground up in a new way. I can only offer this perspective from a house that hasn’t burned down yet. I know what’s happening as my healing unfolds in this house. We know what’s happening outside.
I’m sorry, Los Angeles. I am so sorry. I love you. We will heal.