Afterburn

I’ve written by now a fair amount about loving California. It surprised me, is why. You think you’re above being seduced by things like beauty and comfort, a warm bath of a climate, a change of scene. But there it was, lovely, ready, new to me but with so much history, gilded and seedy and funny and strange. And I fell for it. And there’s nothing quite like the thing you love coming under threat to underline exactly how much.

Walking along the Los Angeles river in Frogtown, about three days before the fires began.

I was two days into a five day stay at the La Réserve in Geneva¹ when the fires started. Such was the brainwashing toxic fugue of jet lag and incipient panic that I don’t even remember the moment when I realized they were bad, or how bad they were. The Swiss are, as a people, not particularly known for being comforting, and plus, they all thought I was from New York. An American friend had a meeting nearby and came to join me for dinner and asked how my partner and dog were, if they were safe. I attempted to unglue my eyes from Watch Duty, which I surveyed from 9 hours and half the world ahead like a helpless god, unable to do anything but omnisciently witness the 100mph winds, the spreading flames, zooming around to see the exact location of everyone I loved, fast asleep, as red lines were expanding and contracting around them. For a person who historically runs anxious, it was the confirmation of years of preemptive worry: what if the worst thing you can imagine happens? What if you’re away doing something ridiculous while it does? What if his phone isn’t on? What if you’re just fated to witness? We live in a green and dry and sometimes dusty canyon, which is wonderful in nearly all occasions and scenarios except this exact one—but the Palisades is a place I think of as lush and damp, and there it was, aflame. I wearily thought about the Eames house, which I had just visited for Neptune Papers (it remains miraculously mostly unharmed, its famed exterior coated in hot pink fire retardant); Will Rogers’ ranch; Ray Kappe masterpieces I’m always regramming on my Instagram stories; all of the art and architecture and lives up in smoke. Even green places burn—sometimes, as my friend Abby Aguirre wrote from experience, they burn the worst. (Eucalyptus! Who knew.) Aerial photos and drone videos of the Palisades and Altadena looked like Gaza, or the Blitz. It was happening faster than I could wrap my mind around it, my mind was just a ringing alarm, it wasn’t wrapping anything. I think we’re okay, I told my friend. We had dim sum at the bar at Tse Fung, the only Michelin starred Chinese restaurant in Switzerland, while I showed him the wind patterns, the miles the flames would have to travel. The incomprehensible size of the fires that were raging on unabated. I had no assurances and no such belief. I was running on cortisol and dumplings. I hope we’re okay.

To be away from the place and people you love when they are in danger is horrible. It is a heart in your mouth knife in the guts kind of feeling. Lots of movies have this scene, I realized: It usually works to make the audience forgive the protagonist for an eventual avenging murder spree. The dawning realization that this is how a majority of the world feels all the time—fundamentally unsafe—didn’t help, nor did the sneaking suspicion that the very idea of security was just a lie that with enough money and luck you believed, and in our hastening climate catastrophe, nowhere is “safe” anyways. I watched videos of people leading horses through flames, being reunited with dogs that waited for them in the ash of their homes. I cried watching the firefighters. I posted endlessly about heroism, wishing I were braver. I could have personally wrung the neck of the idiot whose drone pierced the Super Scooper. I got into a fight in the comments with a climate account who posted an AI video of the Hollywood sign on fire. (They took it down.) I felt like a hysteric, in this spa in Switzerland, close to tears all the time, helpless, surrounded by people just dying to be helpful, but in ways that didn’t come close to what currently counted. I texted and called, I sent voice notes, I told people I loved them. What do I do, do I come home? What should I do? Nobody knew. The winds were still up, the fires still burning, what would I be flying into? My partner was puttering at home, go bags ready, working on home improvements, waiting like everyone to whom the worst hadn’t happened yet.

I stumbled through the rest of my planned time away visiting friends, utterly distracted, deeply unsure, sometimes in black tie. I showed lots of people the Watch Duty app, and tried to make comparisons to what had been lost, what segments of European capitals compared to the Palisades, to Altadena, why these fires were different than the ones they heard about in the news every year. I pointed out the little icon that showed “Home,” right inside the edge of the red flag zone. It seemed that my people were safe, though many were displaced, and now the news was that maybe the air and water was poisonous even in the areas that hadn’t burned. If they lived downwind, would they come back? Would the city I had left just days prior ever be the same? New York friends reached out to me and talked about 9/11, Hurricane Sandy, horrors that we’d lived through before. There was a lot of kind encouragement and invitations to stay abroad until the smoke cleared, literally or proverbially, which is exactly the kind of suggestion I would have happily taken up a few years ago, kicking the ball as far as I could down the road to see where it took me. I didn’t want to do that anymore. I have to go home, I told them. I can’t just watch. I have to be there, I have to throw myself into helping, If I can. I have to do something. Look for the helpers, we all told each other online, in different graphics and fonts. A week after the fires started, I went home.

I think the thing that strikes you after calamity is how things just go on. It’s not unlike when someone you know dies. For you there has been a hard stop, a fracture: there is a clear before and an after. For other people it’s just Wednesday. They have Pilates, an errand, a stupid grievance, a small victory; the business of life marches on even while you’re sitting it out. And even in the city that suffered, life reoriented to normal. From LAX to our canyon was eerily unchanged, the sky a perfect still blue. No one at the airport seemed the wiser, or at least nobody mentioned it. From our house you can’t even see smoke (though it’s the invisible particles we worry about, now, the stuff of houses built before environmental awareness now seeping into our lungs and soil and watershed). FedEx had throughout this crisis sent me a daily email chasing me to sign for a much delayed holiday delivery that probably has alcohol in it. (I think it went back to sender. If it was from you: Sorry.) One gets the feeling that the Amazon delivery people would still toss your overnighted sundries atop the rubble, if you ordered them.

I for one am trying to order from Amazon less. I am showing up, physically, where and when I can, including in the small stores and restaurants I want to bolster and protect from this unhappy reminder of the havoc COVID wreaked on small businesses. (The community distribution efforts have been so expert, and so deeply moving, and, as someone pointed out, would you expect anything less from a city of line producers?) I am donating money, most of all (to the LAFD and GoFundMes and Baby2Baby and Pasadena Humane), because that is what is needed, more than used clothes or canned goods or fretting human bodies, as much as I’d like to throw all three into action. There are usually waitlists to volunteer now, but there will be more opportunities in person a few weeks from now, one nonprofit leader told me, “when people move on.” So many of my friends can’t: so many have lost so much. I’ve been sending people the same kind of message, over and over: life is so fragile. But it doesn’t make me love it any less.

I am also echoing the message that’s been going around online to every executive and event organizer not to cancel their events in Los Angeles—this is a city of people who work, and many at or for those events: makeup artists, stylists, event producers, grips, camera people, caterers. If an awards show feels inappropriate to you, turn it into a red carpeted telethon. (Imagine the iconic cultural moments that could arise!) Just do not take jobs away when they’re most desperately needed by people trying to rebuild their lives. Don’t cancel.

If, however, you want some distraction—from the climate, or current events, or the climate of current events—I get that. I was offline for the inauguration. I suspect I’ll be offline a lot in the next four years. What a year the past few weeks have been.

One new thing I’ve discovered that has made me feel better: what3words is an app that I understand to be predominately used in LA by hikers. The way it works: every 10sq ft of the entire globe has been given a unique combination of three words. Lets say you are alone and get injured on a hike—you can call CA Parks (which uses the app) and give them the three words that designate the 10x10 foot area where you are, rather than, you know “I see a rock and a tree and I think I’m about an hour from the parking lot.” Genius. If you are a frequent traveler (on or off grid) or the type of person who sends your sister the slightly creepy Uber driver’s license plate as insurance, this is one more way to feel better, or at least more findable. Also, sort of fun to see the words assigned to your house.

A few distinctly non-devastating things to watch: Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days (Hulu, Apple) is sublime. I’m sorry it took me so long to get around to it. Don’t make the same mistake. The Outrun (Apple), is about addiction and recovery but it’s also just as much about life in the Orkney islands, where I now am desperate to visit. Saorsie Ronan is as good as everyone says. Sing Sing (Apple): Colman Domingo is wonderful, duh, but so is the movie, which is about Sing Sing’s Rehabilitation Through the Arts theater program, and the incarcerated men who use it to reconnect with their humanity. The cast is mostly made up of RTA program alums. I hope it wins lots of awards. The Substance (Mubi). It’s gross, it’s funny (I laughed out loud repeatedly), it’s really good production design. The only complaint I have is with Margaret Qualley’s very obviously stick-on breasts, but in a body horror that’s fine, as complaints go. Kneecap (Netflix): the true (very funny) story of the eponymous Belfast-based rap group who are fighting to keep their native tongue alive. Sort of a caper, sort of a buddy movie, and a surprisingly good (and distinctly less depressing) compliment to Say Nothing. Black Doves (Netflix): One part The Americans, one part Bourne Ultimatum? I don’t know, welcome back Keira Knightley ['s mouth acting]! I was surprised how satisfying it was to watch she who stole my heart in Bend it Like Beckham disarming would-be assassins. Somebody, Somewhere (Max): the final season of one of the most beautiful shows ever, maybe? We should all have a friend like Joel. Or be a friend like Joel. Colin From Accounts (Paramount): how I missed a genuinely funny Australian rom-com series centered around a wiry terrier that looks like a little old man, I’ll never know. I ate it up. Landman (Paramount): of course it’s batshit crazy, that’s the point. I’d watch Billy Bob Thornton clean his teeth on screen, probably, but here Ali Larter really reigns supreme. A star. A delight. It’s less campy than Yellowstone, even before it got bad, but possibly more ridiculous? (This is an endorsement, by the way.) I once had a car break down in Midland, Texas, as and as far as I can tell, Taylor Sheridan is right on the money. I much prefer this to him casting himself as a heartthrob dating Bella Hadid in Yellowstone’s final act.

I took Norman Rush’s novel Mating, an old favorite, with me to Europe, because sometimes on these trips I feel like nothing so much as a visiting anthropologist, so why not lean all the way in. (The NYT recently described its plot thusly: “An unnamed graduate student in Botswana pursues an American anthropologist, Nelson Denoon, who is trying to form a matriarchal society in a desert village. Punctuating the book are extended dialogues on socialism and a laundry list of obscure words and Latin phrases most readers confess to having to look up. The story is told in the voice of the unnamed student, a 32-year-old woman.”) I am so soothed by Rush’s sentences, his protagonist’s endless cataloging and overthinking (the best written woman ever by a male novelist? Maybe!). Even in dramatically different circumstances than initially planned, it was the perfect tone: insane things happen all the time, everywhere. Sometimes you have to just sit back and take note. It’s a novel for people who love novels. That’s you or it isn’t. (I love you either way.)

A few great LA restaurants: Con’i Seafood, in Inglewood. Go before the LA FireAid concert at the end of the month at KIA Forum, order the enormous perfect grilled fish, which is big enough for a crowd. You will not regret it. Borit Gogae: Korean comfort food with off-the-charts banchan and barley rice-based feasts that’s also the best economic deal you’re likely to find in the city. ($29 a head for the whole shebang, which includes several soups and dessert.) Azizam: Insanely good homestyle Persian food in Silverlake. (Come hungry, get the tumeric braised chicken with the egg on top, to break into the rice, and the kofteh tabrizi, which is essentially a giant, gorgeous meatball.)

And a shoutout to Wayfarer Bread, in San Diego, which we visited pre-fire upon recommendation from our friend Chad (who founded Tartine, and whose epic new Substack, Daybaker, is a deep and necessary education in baking, even for those of us who usually only manage a No-Knead style every now and again). Wayfarer makes the best English muffins I’ve ever had and I do include the famous ones from the very lovely Model Bakery in St Helena, I’m sorry, please don’t hate me. Every other thing was excellent too. Including the passion fruit growing on the vines covering the porch.

That’s all I have for you today. Thanks for being here. It means a lot. I hope you’re safe. I hope it rains soon. I hope everything will be alright. I think that’s all we can do, hope. That and be kind to each other.

Love, ATC

1. More on which soon, but in short: excellent, really great spa, go in the summer when you can take full advantage of the lake.