Los Angeles – Jan 11, 2025
My city is on fire.
Last November, I went with a group of friends to see an art project at the Los Angeles River called What Water Wants. We all wore headphones and listened to Rosten Woo’s project about the LA basin’s watersheds. Activists and artists and planners and researchers have been working for decades on a new plan to reclaim the river. In the ‘30s, the Army Corps of Engineers strait-jacketed it with concrete channels. But last year, my friends and I saw a heron pecking in the grasses at the foot of a tree. We watched water flow towards the ocean. The area across from us would soon be turned into a park. What Mike Davis once called “the redemption of Los Angeles’s riparian landscapes” seemed so close we could taste it.
Rosten’s project carries on in the spirit of never-been Los Angeles, a city that exists in the deferred dreams and the haze, a palimpsest on the island on the land. What Water Wants follows in the footsteps of the 1930 Olmsted and Bartholomew plan for an “emerald necklace,” a regional system linking the foothills to the beaches with “pleasureway parks.” The Olmsted brothers’ plan would have conserved water, protected the river wildlife, and let the parkways serve as the absorptive wetlands they were meant to be. Working in tandem with a system of hazard zoning, the revolutionary plan would have created a “dramatically enlarged commons,” air and light and green, instead of the endless stretch of private subdivisions and the “selfish, profit-driven presentism” that we got.
I can’t think about the river and the herons and the pars and the schools and the debris basins and all My friend’s homes in the foothills of the San Gabriels now, all of the contradictions of this complicated place, without crying. A lot of friends who are outside the burn zone are getting out of town. But I don’t want to. I want to go to a neighborhood restaurant, if it’s open tonight, I want to walk by the kids' old school and keep crying while I figure out what to do next. This place is home to me in a way that nowhere else has ever been. These are my contradictions, my burning air, my gridlock and infuriating shortsightedness, and right now, I want to stay here and fight all the New Yorkers and conspiracy theorists spinning new villains out of everything I care about. I want to singlehandedly bring back the emerald necklace tomorrow.
Mike Davis showed me how to be incandescently angry at the city that I love, an anger that rises from a passionate drive to recover that lost future—a greener, safer, beautiful shared future. Before the fires, I wrote a chapter about nonfiction Los Angeles for a CUP volume where I talked about Davis and Eve Babitz and Louis Adamic and a bunch of other writers who have wrecked their hearts on the shoals of this place. I was writing about the crumbling creative industries, the way people almost can’t cobble together a life here anymore. Life in L.A. has always been lived in the interstices between projects and gigs and well-defined neighborhoods. Last year, Matt Specktor, author of Always Crashing In The Same Car and were already mourning a city that we felt was slipping away. Now that chapter will be published into this nightmare, about a place that will never be the same.
My family and friends, my various communities, are trying to coordinate resources and raise money for those in our circles who have lost everything and trying to keep each other afloat. Thank you to all those far and wide who have reached out. I’m trying to get back to everyone, but everything is topsy turvy here. I will keep people posted about any progress we make in coordinating resources and good places to donate. It’s good to connect with a wider network when it’s unclear who is going to stand by us, who’s going to lead us towards something more resilient and sustainable. In the last five years, I have turned towards meditation and become a slightly more spiritual person. I’m now comfortable saying, if you pray, in whatever way you pray, please pray for my city. I’ll be here receiving.
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