Friday Was My Birthday

I spent my birthday in San Diego this year. I didn’t expect to be here this weekend, but I came down here in light of the wildfires in LA. It’s hard to process the reality of living through a catastrophic natural disaster.

Was I overreacting by leaving? I live downtown, after all. My building is made of concrete and is at least externally is functionally fireproof. So right now downtown is the safest place to be in LA and that’s probably the only time you can say that. Downtown LA gets a bad rap, but I feel vindicated in my love for it during this disaster – thanks, firesafe building code. Down in San Diego, the air quality is pristine and I can sleep well knowing Milo isn’t breathing in toxic debris and carcinogens. So in that regard, I think I made a good judgment call, and feel lucky I was able to choose to leave rather than being evacuated.

The level of destruction is unimaginable, and the under-preparation of our city officials is deplorable. A moment of crisis reveals the fundamental cracks in the structure of Los Angeles, and I am convinced more than ever that it is a city dying at the hands of its government.

In San Diego, away from the hellscape, life is idyllic. I feel guilty sitting on the boardwalk, writing this blog, knowing what tragedy unfolds back home. I have to wonder – if, God forbid, a fire struck San Diego, would it take the same toll? This doesn’t feel like a city whose leaders would let that happen. San Diego beams with pride and the care its officials have for it is evident in every park and beach and free-use third place. San Diego feels like a place with a sense of purpose with leaders aligned with that vision. After a weekend here, I can understand why people settled here.

It’s tempting to view any city as an unplanned hodgepodge of housing and commerce that somehow magically adds up to a good or bad vibe. This is wrong. Think about the extraordinary amounts of earth and mountain that must be moved just to erect a building. The hours and years spent creating a statue for no sole purpose but to be a symbol of the city’s ideals. The collective coordination and focus it takes to put on a weekly farmer’s market. These things don’t just happen. A city is alive only because of its peoples’ commitment to keeping it so. There is an immense amount of responsibility on those in charge to progress the city towards its collective ideal.

LA is an extraordinarily beautiful place. I wrote recently about Eaton Falls and how wonderful it is to have a natural haven so close to the urban jungle. I fear it may be completely burned down now. I remember gawking at the dichotomy of the Barbie House next to the Goth house on the Pacific Coast Highway. Are they still standing? Runyon Canyon is a panopticon where you can see the valley and Santa Montica and the Hollywood sign from one place. Probably gone.

I don’t know if it’s because it was close to the gold mines. I don’t know if it’s because Union Station used to be the gateway to the west. I don’t know if it’s because it falls on a particularly powerful nexus of ley lines. But Los Angeles is the place. There is an undeniable magic to the soil of Southern California. Anyone who has been to LA can feel it. It’s been a creative Mecca for as long as the layman got the foolish idea in his head that he could go somewhere and become an artist. The city of angels is a historic site of life and culture and ideas on a scale replicated nowhere else.

***And what did they do?***
They let it burn.

I admire the responders doing their best to control a blazing conflagration larger than the island of Manhattan. But it’s been days and it’s what, 8% contained? Blame the Santa Ana winds, maybe. Or, blame cutting $17 million dollars of fire prevention funding.

***I wonder who that money went to?***
Congrats on the McMansion!

It’s the same greed that’s been killing every thing that made Los Angeles LA. How many movies are shot in California anymore? It’s too expensive to film in Hollywood anymore, so now Hollywood is in Atlanta or New York or Vancouver. Angeleno Heights turned into a playground for the Silverlake mustache-beanie-neo-Hipster gentry. Lowriders became Cybertrucks and West Coast hip-hop moved from South Central to some white dude doing “Not Like Us” on karaoke night. To be an artist you have to either get lucky in the dance-app lottery or pay $70,000 a year to go to film school and have 4 roommates and share 1 bathroom. You’re an artist – starve. It’ll be good for your jawline. We all have to be models, now, too. The next Humphrey Bogart would probably need a Turkish hairline if he even wanted to land a commercial.

I don’t know. Hollywood is a dream factory but it’s also a business. I suppose there’s always been this duality woven into the fabric of LA. But at some point, the balance shifted. Something happened, and I’m not sure who to blame, but it’s probably no single person in particular. But I’ll personify them anyways and say they took the ambitions and ideals of the people who made LA what it is, and they twisted it and distorted it and bled it dry and they let it burn. No wonder downtown is the last safe place. It’s the only place that’s solid.

I love downtown LA. I love walking out of my loft in the Fashion District and seeing the merchants selling their textiles. You could go on Amazon and buy Gorilla Glue for $15 or walk around for a few minutes and find it somewhere else for $4 cash. I love the Flower District and its flower shops where you can buy a dozen roses from the price of a single Urban Stem. I love that the Broad is free to visit. I love the architecture. I love that there’s a functional if under maintained public transportation system. I love that Molina Grand Park spans three city blocks and on the second block you can take the elevator underground to the city records backrooms. I love that the bars here are old and would never be caught dead on a TikTok trend. I love that the Hotel Cecil is haunted and at least leaves some sense of the supernatural left for us to imagine about. I love that Dogtown has all these bridges and I also just love that it’s called Dogtown. I love that Johnny Knoxville broke his angle trying to jump the river. I love that the gentrification is at least somewhat limited to Geoffrey Harrison Palmer and his obsession with buying entire city blocks and turning them into tacky, vaguely-Italian-in-a-Vegas-strip-type-of-way apartment compounds with names like Medici and Ferrante. Just kidding, I don’t love that. As a second-generation half-Italian I find it weird. Vaffanculo.

For all intents and purposes, the intents and purposes of our city’s officials have been commercialization at all costs. Profit-driven development at the expense of disaster prevention. LA has become a cash cow so bastardized by the opportunists devouring it that the city has become hollow and we’re seeing the consequences of that in this crisis response. Opportunism breeds. A DJI drone crashed into a fire plane while capturing illegal footage that would’ve ended up on some short form compilation somewhere. Millions of likes and shares for a meager $1.50 payout from Meta at the end of the quarter. This is not a metaphor, it’s a microcosm.

Condemnation aside, I feel a sense of hope. I see my friends selflessly helping others evacuated at the risk of their own safety. Thousands of pounds of clothes and groceries donated. Resources shared. Is this… a sense of community? It takes a cataclysm to pull together 500 square miles into something of a small town. The people care. I care. I wish there was more I could do.

I feel sick and privileged escaping to San Diego for the weekend. I feel selfish that I had the nerve to have a birthday in the wake of this tragedy. I love LA, I really do. It represents so much to me and to other artists and dreamers like me. But I can’t help but feel hypocritical and part of the problem. I came here chasing the dream of Hollywood. I am the gentry I condemn. I try my hardest to engage in LA like an Angeleno and not a tourist. But it feels futile when the government does its best to destroy it.

The optimist in me says the light at the end of this horrific tunnel will be widespread change. A renewed sense of appreciation and community. A return to the ideals. But the pessimist says that dream is long dead. If it wasn’t, how could any of this have happened? All I know is, If Blackrock buys the ashes of the Pacific Palisades and sells it to Geoffrey Harrison Palmer and he builds another Vincenzo or Mario or whatever, I think we’re justified in eating the rich. It’s been long enough. We’re artists and we’re starving.

Stay safe everyone -mbk