Quick Take
In the wake of the ruinous fires in Southern California, it's appropriate to acknowledge the unique charm of Los Angeles, a world-class city too often dissed and overlooked.
The following is not about fire. It’s not about climate change, or urban planning, or inadequate government response to disaster, or whether it could happen here.
This is about Los Angeles.
What’s happening in Southern California would be a tragedy in any locale, across the country or around the world. But that it happened in L.A. brings about a particular sense of grief that’s been hard to shake, at least from my perspective.
Los Angeles will survive the conflagration of 2025, but no one knows the degree to which the city will be diminished, and that’s cause for mourning. The loss isn’t just in dollars or property, but in something more ineffable. What have we lost about the unique L.A.-ness of the place?
Images of Los Angeles burning carry a unique horror exactly because of its status as our “City of Dreams.” The ironies and paradoxes are too rich to casually look away or tune out. Especially for those who’ve never lived there, L.A., with its palm trees and swimming pools, has often stood in for The Good Life or, more pointedly, the lie of The Good Life. But with its staggering diversity, its natural beauty, its propensity for grandiosity and delusion and its endless tangle of social problems, L.A. is the most convincing microcosm of America on the map. If, as Wallace Stegner said years ago, California was like everywhere else in America, “only more so,” then L.A. is California, only more so.
Unless you’re singing along with Randy Newman at a Dodgers game, it’s quite unfashionable to profess love for L.A. these days. And that’s been the case for quite a long time. In New York, the love for that city comes naturally and profusely. San Francisco has dealt with some bad press in recent years, but still, few are shy about getting sentimental about Never-Call-It-Frisco. Among America’s world-class cities, L.A. is habitually disrespected and overlooked. It’s a tired pop-culture trope to trash L.A. in some way, even to challenge its status as an actual city. There are fewer stars in the sky than bad stand-up comics or cocktail-party blowhards who have whipped out cliches about L.A.’s traffic or vapid narcissists or love of plastic surgery. Hollywood has consistently cast a condescending eye to its own hometown. For millions across the country, including in the rest of California, Los Angeles is the example of what not to become.
My own connection to L.A. is tenuous. I lived there briefly in the 1980s. I have family there now, and visit two or three times a year. As I’ve gotten older, I’m surprised to learn that L.A.’s wooly charisma has continued to beguile me. Like many, especially in Northern California, I once saw it as a grotesque free-for-all of sprawl and chaos and ugly social inequities. But now, it’s a puzzle, a continually fascinating mosaic of seedy glamour and quintessentially American contradictions.
What is it in the work of, say, Charles Bukowski or Tom Waits or Warren Zevon that can be attributed to their roots in L.A.? What exactly is it that I’m looking for when I skulk about the Chateau Marmont, or search out cool “Googie”-style diners, or visit the spot where the long-demolished Ambassador Hotel — the site of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination — once stood? What do I hope to find in the dishy essays of Eve Babitz and the pitiless insights of Joan Didion? What’s the thread that binds together Joni Mitchell’s Sunday morning “Ladies of the Canyon” vibe and Lana Del Rey’s debauched alienation? Why am I willing, even eager, to watch “Chinatown” over and over again?
It’s a mystique, a distinct brand of tarnished glory unique to Los Angeles, detectable everywhere from the white-hot epicenter of West Hollywood to the valley suburbia of Canoga Park. Sure, New York may be more vibrant and alive with possibilities, San Francisco might have more street-corner scenic beauty. But L.A. is the capital of American eccentricity, where weirdness takes deep root and goes underground, turning into an invisible force. It’s from that ground that sprouted the Doors’ “The End” and David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive.” Visit the awe-inspiring and baffling Museum of Jurassic Technology on Venice Boulevard and tell me that any other American city could have produced such a fascinating oddity.
Los Angeles will never and can never reveal itself fully to anyone, because it is such a chimera. Black L.A., for instance, is an entirely different catalogue of experiences than, say, cruising Van Nuys Boulevard in the Valley or hiking the Angeles Crest or hanging out with Bill Maher at the Playboy Mansion. Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day” is every bit the slice of L.A. life that the Beach Boys’ “California Girls” is. X’s scalding punk anthem “Los Angeles” is the kind of legitimate expression of the experience of LA that “Hotel California” pretended to be.
As the primary wellspring of the world’s mass entertainment, L.A. has churned out an endless sludge of idiotic and puerile drivel from “Baywatch” to “Fear Factor” that has infected and shaped cultures all over the globe. It has provided a safe haven for deluded messiahs from Aimee Semple McPherson to L. Ron Hubbard to Charles Manson. But it’s also produced artists with the self-awareness and sense of humor to embrace the salty and the sweet of the L.A. experience, from Steely Dan’s “Babylon Sisters” to the notoriously tongue-in-cheek Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.,” the city’s unofficial anthem, which is soaked in a winking irony that acknowledges there’s something dementing about loving a place so flawed. Compare that to the famously New York-centric Billy Joel and his snide middle-finger tune “Los Angelenos.” The haters are legion.
All this is to say these devastating fires are worthy of our grief, whether or not we have a connection with Los Angeles. I hate to think such a thing, but I suspect there’s a lot of quiet schadenfreude simmering under the surface across the country (including, and maybe even especially, in Northern California), that the disdain for L.A. has created a kind of callousness toward its fate. In this bitterly divided country, maybe there’s even folks rationalizing the destruction of L.A. and the pain of its residents with ugly comments about Sodom and Gomorrah.
You’ll hear none of that filth from me. I love Los Angeles, and I hurt for it. I feel not only for those who’ve tragically lost their lives and their homes, but all Angelenos who again feel their lives and their families are contingent on forces out of their control.
Let’s remember, in about 3½ years, the Summer Olympics returns to L.A., and the city will again be forefront in the global spotlight. How the city of 2028 will differ from the ruin of 2025 we can only guess. But central to the Los Angeles experience is the awareness of its ephemeral nature. Constant change is the L.A. way. Permanence is an illusion. Hang out with anyone over 50 who grew up in “The Southland” and they’ll tell you a hundred stories of things that aren’t there anymore.
Los Angeles will get over this, because it has to. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a time to mourn. In the City of Angels, it’s time for the angels to step forward, to give comfort and to inspire the will to move forward.
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