The Good Place/The Place That Cannot Be
On the death of a dream in Los Angeles.
“You know, one day someone is going to approach this area and it will be entirely desert. There will be nothing left standing, stone upon stone…God never meant for man to live here.1”
Los Angeles, as a modern city, has always been poised on the knife’s edge of apocalypse.
I don’t say this to excuse the obvious fecklessness of some of its officials2. Nor do I say it to negate the manifest reality that climate change is turning seasonal brush fires (that have always existed) into biblical conflagrations.
I say it because it’s true.
It’s why Los Angeles feels so impermanent. Why it can feel, at times, more like a waiting room than a city. If you want a real life, they say, you have to move to Seattle, and so I did.
But I was born in Los Angeles. My parents were born there. My grandfather was born there a hundred years ago. When he was a teenager, he told me, the air smelled of orange groves and night-blooming jasmine. He married a woman named Mary Anne, who had bit parts in movies like Since You Went Away, You Only Live Once, These Three, and Little Women. In our house in the hallway, there was a black and white studio portrait of Mary Anne. In the portrait, she’s lying against a zebra pelt, her almond eyes heavy at the corners with fake eyelashes, her cupid’s bow sharply defined, her glossy black hair a shock next to her creamy skin. My little sister looks just like Mary Anne.
I take after my father’s side. His mother, my grandma Marjorie, was born in Iowa and was the only girl in a family of twelve children to graduate high school3. She went on a road trip with a girlfriend out west and when she got to LA, she decided she was never, ever, going to shovel snow again in December, or in any month for that matter. When she married my grandpa, they quickly moved from Omaha to Culver City.
My dad and his friends skateboarding in Brentwood in 1975.
My father was raised in Culver City in a working class family. My mother was born to great privilege in Bel Air, since Grandpa was a brilliant physicist and I guess the nuclear age and Skunkworks and early computing were very good to him. He made some bad investments in the eighties and nineties and lost most of that. By the time I was born he was living in an apartment at Park La Brea.
So even though I was raised in Orange County, Los Angeles is the setting for all of the family’s myths and origin stories. It’s where all the important things happened, where I said my first word and took my first steps. The Hamburger Hamlet is where I had my first ever temper tantrum at age two, because my mother wouldn’t buy me Miss Spider’s Tea Party at the bookstore. My grandfather said, “just buy her the damn book, Alice,” and then he went and bought it for me himself. It became my favorite book, but it always made me cry. On Savona Road, my uncle once set the insane family dog under the house to chase the cat and they ended up destroying all the ducting (the cat miraculously survived).
After she retired, Grandma Marge volunteered at least three times a week at an emergency food bank by the Sony lot, once the MGM lot, in Culver City. It primarily served the homeless and Grandma Marge knew many of them by name. She would have me and my sister work 8-hour shifts with her, unloading boxes of frozen fish into the freezers and bagging people’s groceries. “Hunger is a distribution problem,” she used to tell me. “There is always enough food. We just have to get it to the people that need it.”
This video of Malibu was taken by my grandfather in 1964 and my dad recently digitized it and edited it.
My dad learned to surf at El Porto, and he has since gone on to surf North Shore, Fiji, Samoa, and Byron Bay. He was good enough to surf with world champions, and he did, but he’s so shy about it he just told me this a month ago. He never thought he’d go to college, so he learned brick masonry at Venice High, in between getting in fights with people and smoking weed with the math teacher. My parents were married at the Bel Air Country Club. At the reception, my dad’s friends cleared out both the upstairs and downstairs bars in less than an hour, as in, there was no more liquor left in the building. My first concert was at the Greek Theater in 2007. And my mom’s best friend lived on Amalfi Drive in the Pacific Palisades, so we often went there for play-dates and holidays.
And now that house has probably been burned to the ground. If it hasn’t, then it’s surrounded by houses that did burn to the ground.
For the last five days I haven’t been able to think about anything else except the fires. I can’t stop crying.
Los Angeles, like California in general, is an easy place for other Americans to ridicule. They’re doing it to us now on social media, saying we deserve to burn, saying that we’re Democrats, so we make good kindling. Here in the Pacific Northwest I can practically smell the distrust and disapproval whenever I tell someone I’m from Southern California. (I don’t care, by the way. I think it’s funny and I am too hot to be offended by what guys in…Bass Pro Shops hats…think of me. As is often the case when it comes to projection and othering, I know it’s mostly envy disguised as disgust). Much of the country delights in assigning stereotypes to us and blaming us for all kinds of sins. And yeah, Los Angeles has plenty of problems that now grip swathes of the West Coast and other American cities. Problems that weren’t invented here but for some reason are stiffly resistant to solutions. Serious housing and cost of living and drug problems. Then there’s the risk of running out of water, a non-zero probability even after diverting the course of the Colorado river4.
Spiritually, LA feels unmoored in time in a way I don’t experience in other cities. It doesn’t respect its history—the site of the first ever Hollywood motion picture studio, the birthplace of an industry that has shaped culture worldwide, is now just a Chase bank parking lot. As far as I know, there isn’t even a plaque to commemorate what happened there5. It’s just a Chase bank and an Equinox.
At the same time, the problems of affordability and available housing and homeless encampments threaten LA’s status as a world-class city. And entrenched power structures, just like in San Francisco, seem contented to let these problems fester. Even with Democratic super-majorities, the people who govern this city obstruct progress by dint of their own corruption. They get embroiled in embarrassing scandals. They commit bribery and embezzlement. They actively undermine each other’s initiatives to address problems like housing and homelessness.
I haven’t even touched on what Netflix has done to the TV and film industry, “mini rooms”, or the studios attempting to embrace AI to replace creatives. I haven’t even touched on all the ways that David Zaslav continues to systematically, fecklessly destroy the legacy of Warner Brothers and any other cultural asset entrusted to him6. People hate Zaslav because he symbolizes how the industry is changing for the worse and threatening its own cultural relevance. Los Angeles—at least its leadership—doesn’t care much about its future.
How can it, though, when its future is never, ever assured? When the Big One could strike at any moment and the city will be swallowed by the earth. When a tsunami could rear its head at any time. Or a fire that becomes like the judgment of God, who, in His vengeance, has decided that no one should get to live in a place this beautiful, so it has to be destroyed.
And how can Los Angeles be aware of its own temporal range in the first place when it does not deal in reality, but in dreams?
Movies are dreams, giving us more potent visions of glamour and aspiration than any other art form. Something about the medium of film makes it uniquely glamorous—it has a hypnotic quality, being projected on a silver screen, that photographs can’t match. The sleights of hand of editing, immersive sets, and special effects conspire to create images of luminous grace that aren’t possible on a theater stage.
But Los Angeles itself has long been a glamorous dream—the fact that my grandmother moved across the country to live there after visiting for just one day is proof of that. So too are all the legions of hopefuls, the actors and models and screenwriters and musicians, who have come from all over the country and all over the world to try to “make it” beneath the benevolent golden sun. Most of them never do, but the dream has endured anyway.
LA isn’t just in the business of creating illusions. It is one itself, a powerful symbol of ease, beauty, and aspiration in our collective consciousness. It’s been this way for a hundred years. Like Rachel says on Mad Men, in a kind of folk etymology that I think has been discredited but remains spiritually correct: utopia has two meanings. The good place, and the place that cannot be.
The Huntington Gardens in Pasadena, shot by my granddad.
No place can be that beautiful—seventy degrees in January, always sunny, with a particular kind of golden sunlight that exists nowhere else, palm trees and flowering trees and citrus and roses, the sea and the mountains meeting again and again in an eternal kiss—no place can be that beautiful and continue to exist without facing the rancorous envy of God7.
Likewise, the luxuries and conveniences of contemporary life given to us by fossil fuels and perverse late stage capitalism—the Chevy Suburbans, the air conditioning, the Temu hauls, the $4 plastic clothing, the AIs inanely chirping out essays—these cannot exist only as luxuries and conveniences. They have costs. We will pay them.
Our utopia of convenience and consumption and distraction is a Faustian bargain. We are Dorian Gray. There is no free lunch in the universe8. Just because the bill has arrived in Los Angeles doesn’t mean it’s not also coming for you.
But back to my original point: Los Angeles has always been the dream for me. It’s always where I’ve honestly, really, truly wanted to live9. Coming to the Pacific Northwest fulfilled my desire to experience something really different, and unlike LA I could actually afford it, but I know it’s not where I truly want to be.
And I am bereft and grieving, for the thousands of people who have just lost everything…for the small businesses…for the people who have died..for the animals…
I am also grieving because the dream of Los Angeles is gone forever. We will never see it again.
Sure, some people will rebuild, but something has fundamentally shifted in how we conceive of Los Angeles10. The cost of living crisis, the housing crisis, the hollowing out of the industry, they were also making it untenable. But now entire swathes of the city are burned to ash and molten steel. Apocalypse literally means the lifting of a veil. The unseen is seen. This is what has happened.
Los Angeles is not The Good Place. It is The Place That Cannot Be.
A few days before Christmas, I went on a solo road trip. My first stop was Venice Beach. I stayed at the Venice Beach House, a restored Craftsman bungalow with a walled garden11. I got drunk at Hinano’s just like my dad used to do when he was young and blond and handsome. I swam in the cold sea and laid in the sun. Then I showered and dressed and went walking up the beach path to get dinner at Felix. The sun was setting over Venice Beach behind hazy clouds. The sea was the color of dying lilacs, and so was the sky. At the horizon line, sky and sea melded together into a vast oneness, warm, shimmering, undulating like hot oil in a cast iron pan, like the Northern Lights, like the blood of the saints.
Ahead of me on the path, a young woman was walking her dog and she stopped to say hello to an elderly man, who it seemed was her neighbor. They had that kind of familiarity. They looked out together at the vast violet oneness for a moment, smiling.
“I feel so grateful to be here,” she said to him. “Don’t you?”
Ways To Help
This piece has lots of details for donations and volunteering.
This spreadsheet is keeping track of GoFundMes set up for victims of the Eaton fire.
The Pasadena Humane Society urgently needs monetary donations as they treat a huge influx of wounded pets and wild animals.
California Fire Foundation is supporting first responders and their families.
MALAN has a mutual aid spreadsheet for those in need as well as anyone looking to donate or volunteer.
attributed to Thornton Wilder in Otto Friedrich’s book City of Nets, an indispensable resource for understanding the history of Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, and the 1940s in America.
It’s easy to blame politicians for these fires, and I think they’re culpable, but it’s also bigger than just them. Prescribed burns or fuel reduction plans are deeply unpopular and we the people can sometimes work against our own interests. But yeah, also, the alert system should not be sending out incorrect ecavuation alerts to nine million people twice in a day (!!!!!!!!!!), a local reservoir wasn’t connected to the fire hydrants, and the powers that be should be held to account for their failures here.
Grandma Marge truly had a genius-level intellect and the best memory. When we watched Jeopardy together she knew everything.
You guys I know that agriculture takes WAY more water than the cities do—you’re welcome, America, for being able to eat strawberries in January!—but my point is that LA is in a place where getting fresh water is logistically insane. Orange County is the same way.
The Lasky-DeMille barn was preserved and is now moved over across from the Hollywood Bowl, but still, there’s nothing to commemorate the place where it all started.
If he tries to fuck with Turner Classic Movies again, there will be rage!!!
In case it wasn’t obvious I think it’s the God of the Old Testament we are dealing with here.
how many times can I reframe the same concept before it becomes ANNOYING
Besides London or Copenhagen. Please don’t try to convince me to move to the East Coast. It will never work.
I will always write about Los Angeles and California. I still, after all, have to write about Lana Del Rey’s third, fourth, and fifth studio albums, where these places become characters in their own right and in Lana’s unique cosmology.
I later learned that this is where my parents spent their wedding night. Given that they’re divorced, that’s something of a bad omen, but the hotel itself is very beautiful and I absolutely recommend it.