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didion & dunne. malibu, 1976.
When we got back to our apartment after evacuating for a few days due to the fires, Evan and I knew we had to help. We’d gone up to our favorite place in California, a sleepy beach town called Carpinteria, and spent a few days glued to the news but also safe in the knowledge that our apartment and our life in LA would probably be largely unchanged. We knew at some point we would have to exorcise our survivor’s guilt, and planned to do so that upon our return Sunday.
During COVID I was, what you might call, “plugged in” to my community. I’d been volunteering for Nithya Raman, and as soon as stay at home orders went into place, I was swept up and out into the community with a group of the most incredible organizers and canvassers and volunteers on the ground doing The Work it takes to help a city in crisis. Although I am no longer involved, I’m proud (and honestly find it hard to believe, in hindsight) to have been a founding team lead of Mutual Aid LA, who to this day is sharing valuable resources for the community especially in the wake of the fires.
But now, things are different. Three years of grad school and ultimately shifting to focus on film and art over organizing has felt more aligned, personally, but when the fires erupted, I was caught off guard by just how different my response and engagement were compared to 2020. We contacted multiple volunteer centers to see if they needed a hand, bought a bunch of needed items, and rounded up our own items to donate, but the volunteer centers were at capacity, the donation hub wasn’t accepting anything at the moment, fire stations were inundated with drop offs and it was messing with critical operations. Suddenly I felt so passive, and I quickly became ashamed: I know first hand that a huge part of helping in a crisis is not waiting for someone to tell you where to go or what to do. You are only further contributing to the chaos of the moment by expecting someone else to show you a neatly paved path. There is no neatly paved path in the wake of something like a fire that has, quite literally, wiped multiple communities off the map.
So we bought water bottles for our neighbors. We swapped stories with them about everyone’s past few days. We watched the cleanup crews finally depart our street after tackling the ginourmous pine tree that had crashed into a telephone pole. We all got on an email chain together to keep each other alerted about this and the next community emergency.
Because is there’s one thing to know about living in California, it’s that the next emergency isn’t an “if” scenario, but a “when.”
The week after the Palisades and Eaton fires broke out, I was at Universal Studios for work. No one in our production meeting said a word about the fires. It was strange, and unsettling to realize I’d become someone who goes back to work, to the status quo in the aftermath of devastation. But I’ve also never really had a job that, despite the weight of the world, required me to do so.
I’ve since gone out and done the drop offs and donations and sorting and supporting, and though the way I’ve shown up looks a bit different than in the past, the truth is that this moment in LA is only just beginning. The thesis of the next era of our city is already written, and everything that comes next will be defined in relation to the charred remnants of what once was. And I am writing myself into the story, not out of guilt or to shame myself into accountability, but because I want to be a part of it. Because despite my exhortations to the contrary, I love this city. A lot.
And though the demeanor of the city is usually rosy and sunny and picture perfect, I am not just a fair weather fan.
a picture of my most prized possession(s), our bookshelf, to use as a rebuilding reference should our apartment ever go up in flames.
Things I Consumed during the Fires
🖥️ 😓 Twitter - Twitter is what I consumed during the fires. Only a sickening twitter addict like me would relish in an opportunity like this to cease from judging myself for refreshing my feed every 4 and a half minutes. Will I ever truly be able to depart this cursed, hellish place? Probably not if I keep seeing posts like these:
📺 💃🏻 Real Housewives of Salt Lake City + Real Housewives of Potomac - I have a lot to say about how RHOSLC wound down this season. Perhaps I’ll write more about it, but the season finale severely depressed me in a way that literally has culminated in me having no desire to watch the Reunion episodes. I found the setup of the finale ridiculous and contrived, resulting in the cruelest, most repugnant, and off-putting behavior from the Housewives I’ve ever seen. The Housewives is truly in it’s decline, and as someone who has watched it since I was 14, it brings me no joy to say this but the franchise is on a fast track to becoming unwatchable. RHOP, though, still has enough levity and ease to keep me onboard. For now.
📺 🤌🏻 The Sopranos - I’m almost on Season 5! As someone who suffers getting through hourlong TV dramas, this progress is HUGE.
📕 🦁 PAX: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age by Tom Holland - Unfortunately I am not as much of a Roman Empire girlie as I may have imagined, and even Tom Holland can’t really get me to care about the endless succession of usurping Emperors during the Pax Romana… I guess I really only care about Rome in terms of how it coincides with the growth and development of Christianity, so this one wasn’t really for me.
📘 👵🏼 A Room of One’s Own - I have no idea how or when a copy of this ended up in my apartment, but I found it on my bookshelf this past weekend and decided to dive in. It’s a classic for a reason. I think Virginia Woolf was really on to something here….. 😉
📖 ⚡ Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - I picked this up at Evan’s childhood home when we were there for the holidays, and even though it was my least favorite of the series growing up (not because it’s bad, but it’s just very dark and Harry is ((understandably)) very angry and angsty the whole time and also fuck Umbridge), I highly recommend diving into any HP book when you’ve been in a reading slump for awhile.
🎥 🫦 Gilda - I’d never seen the famous film that rocketed Rita Hayworth to stardom and let me tell you that HAIR FLIP alone made an otherwise mediocre noir totally worth the watch. Admittedly, I was a bit confused because I’d thought that it was the role of Gilda, and subsequent press photos from the film, that servicemen pinned up by the thousands while overseas during World War II, but the film came out in 1946 so I guess that wasn’t true! According to this LIFE Magazine article, the image that made her so famous was, in fact,
📓🍃 Finally, the essay The Santa Anas by Joan Didion is worth a few minutes of your time today. “There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon…
I did not know then that there was any basis for the effect [the winds] had on all of us, but it turns out to be another of those cases in which science bears out folk wisdom.”
I linked the page to Mutual Aid LA’s online hub above, but here it is again for those looking to get (and stay) plugged in as Los Angeles begins the years-long process to rebuild. https://mutualaidla.org/
Further, there are a few wonderful Substackers who have been directly affected by the fires and have done some incredible work at helping their neighbors and communities get the support they need. Please contribute if you can, and also support them by subscribing to their Substacks - all three are incredible creators!
