Los Angeles Burns

One of the first books I ever read was City of Quartz by Mike Davis. Growing up in LA, reading it felt serendipitous—I didn’t read much and had very little interest in structural criticism. Before that the only books I had finished were Louis L’Amour paperback westerns with my grandpa and Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver—yet it found its way to me somehow in a manner I can neither recall nor remember. I do remember taking an interest in the place I grew up, and from that interest opened a lifelong obsession with theories about what it once was, what it had become and what it could have been.

The book opens with a brief history of the utopian socialist community of Llano del Rio, a sort of half-cocked agricultural paradise founded in 1914 in the Antelope Valley. The book insinuates that when the community packed up and left in 1918 it left behind a specter, a ghost of an alternative future of Los Angeles etched in artifice—a city that can’t see its own structural fragility, entranced instead by the deep fugue of spectacle and libido, and the capital flows that run through it like blood.

This structure runs very deep. The state of California emerged from geological extremity; the landmass was formed by a collision of the North American and Pacific tectonic plates, grinding and regrinding for millions of years along with the flow of lava, water and the depositing of alluvial soil. Historian Kevin Starr noted that this process “created a region almost abstract in its distinct arrangements of mountain, valley, canyon, coastline, plain, and desert.” This abstract landscape yielded paradise in a place of peril. Its natural habitat was a near perfect canvas for organic modernist architecture, forms, signs, billboards; the beauty of this blankness fed a fixation with the image, with simulacrum, with beautiful people and celebrity. The extreme conditions were always there, but a collective intoxication with incessant spectacle and tabloid fables obscured our ability to seriously consider them.

This is what made LA special, to an extent—“it’s so fake, it’s real” was a quote from a friend that stuck in my mind. There was always something in it that felt dark and delirious, smoldering beneath the surface, pulling us down, the underbelly exposed by noir movies and James Ellroy’s detective novels, through the gang wars of the Nineties as featured on the nightly news—as a kid, even, I remember getting checked by a G telling me to “come out my pockets” on more than one occasion. Something was also always a bit fundamentally “off,” exemplified by monied new-age cults like the Source Family and ill-starred mystics like eden ahbez. Even the region’s high concentration of academics and scientists has something cultlike about it: Davis calls the Caltech scientists who ushered in the SoCal military boom the “sorcerers.” Things felt hard-boiled and unearthly, animated by unseen forces—like narratives concocted by schizoaffective loners in studio apartments in the San Fernando Valley. It was a paradise of forgotten dreamers and hidden artifacts beneath the projection of mass cultural export.

The timely moral of Mike Davis’s topographic book is that Los Angeles was in peril because its structural, material and economic problems had become obfuscated by what he called the “junkyard of dreams.” Jean Baudrillard made similar observations after traveling out west: according to him LA had become “a city whose mystery is precisely that of no longer being anything but a network of incessant, unreal circulation—a city of incredible proportions but without space, without dimension.”

For a long time it worked, the city seeming to subsist purely on the kinesis of its spiritual waste and frenetic desires, but even that momentum now appears to have stalled. Images seem to have lost traction, pulling away from the schemas of ordinary, concrete life—stuff that takes patience and balance and runs counter to the requirements of social media, of turning your life into a business. A schema is a procedural rule, not an image. It’s unglamorous and unsexy, which doesn’t sell in the marketplace of extreme embodiment.

Every time I hear about LA now as a place rather than a social scene it seems to be on fire. Literally engulfed in flames, crumbling, in a state of decay. This is a familiar allegory: Los Angeles as the heart of darkness, sunshine dreams masking a Western inferno, American emptiness. But growing up there it wasn’t merely the embodiment of wickedness and evil in the world. Some of the most loyal people I’ve ever met were born and raised there, people who would run through a wall for you. The people from Los Angeles of a non-celebrity background generally lean toward modesty and self-effacement, having been humbled from a young age. The mansion parties were never something you felt you were going to be invited to—you might as well distance yourself from the pretensions and glittery aspirations and find your identity in Black Flag lyrics instead. (In hindsight, given the ritual abuse unearthed in the entertainment industry, it was probably for the best.) But there are also those who came to Los Angeles for basic economic opportunity—one example that comes to mind is the WWII-era Great Migration from the Deep South and the communal cultural enclaves they formed, like the long-shuttered jazz clubs on Central Avenue.

The current catastrophe of multiple wildfires was unprecedented for a state that seemed used to them, completely leveling vast swathes of Altadena and the Palisades. People who were there have said it was more devastating than the Northridge earthquakes. Tens of thousands of buildings reduced to ash, families losing everything, many of them even dropped from their fire insurance. The last time I was back in LA, I had apocalyptic nightmares of the city facing an event like this. It felt ominous when I attempted to visit Frank Lloyd Wright’s glass Wayfarers Chapel, only to learn it had closed the night before, already partly destroyed by an “activated” mudslide (the chapel is now closed indefinitely; it will be years before it’s rebuilt). The signs started to pile up: in the past year I saw seemingly normal young families begging for money next to litter-strewn freeway on-ramps while tending to their toddlers. What was most concerning was that some of my peers didn’t seem to care as long as the weather was good and the parties were lit. None of this should be that surprising, in a state where our politicians routinely blur the distinction between celebrity and public servant—from Ronald Reagan to Arnold Schwarzenegger to our current governor, impossible to distinguish from Patrick Bateman.

The areas the fires burned strongest in, the Pacific Palisades and Altadena, contrast sharply in economic terms, yet in their devastation things have been leveled. Wind speeds reached hurricane-level strengths of one hundred miles an hour, igniting flamethrower swirls of red, yellow and orange both terrifying and otherworldly. The Santa Ana winds originate from the Great Basin, a region east of the Sierra Nevada mountains. These winds are caused by meteorological factors that create high-pressure systems over the inland deserts and lower pressure along the coastline, where both are geographically situated. They make no distinction for class, gender or race, nor the modern hyperreal environments where meaning is constantly layered and manipulated. They only exist through the passing of mountains and canyons and the compression and climate patterns that aid them. This month they were unusually strong and long-lasting, and after months of no rain LA was unusually dry. No one was prepared.

There are all sorts of pet causes to blame, but to me it’s the ego-image, as the America-whisperer Baudrillard pointed out decades ago. Building and caring for infrastructure, living within limits—this entails sacrificing both social capital and private profit. In a place where it’s rewarded to be a 24/7 manager of one’s own appearance, what incentives are there to act in the benefit of the surroundings? Nobody is asking for the complete elimination of natural dangers; fires are a fact of life.

My heart breaks for Los Angeles, for the people who are suffering there, for the intergenerational families who have lost everything. Although people have pulled together and are helping each other, many are grieving with only the image of a place left, an image of a place that was already built on fantasy.