Bits and Pieces

Photo courtesy of Brittany Hosea-Small / AFP

Enough already for 2020.

This morning, I looked out the kitchen window facing east to see the sun hanging on the horizon, a smoky orange orb floating in the haze of particulate ash diffusing the new dawn light.  It is fire season, but we are being told by climate scientists and state government that this is the new reality.  Climate change is upon us, and as a penance, we will struggle to breathe through the fires year-round as our dried-out trees, brush, and homes continue to burn.

Paradise, California, is in jeopardy again.  Two years on from the last inferno, fire officials are telling residents to be prepared for emergency evacuation.  In California, 250,000 acres have been burned; 64,000 have been evacuated; three people are dead.  Fire rages from the Mexican border to Oregon.  The sky in many places is blood red.  Smoking foundations and chimneys are what’s left of structures throughout the region.  Parks and recreation areas are closed.  Many of the campsites have been abandoned, with picnics still laid out on tables like our own version of Chernobyl.

In addition to climate change, stupidity and lightning helped ignite the flames.  Also, bark beetles have infested and killed thousands of trees.  With so much dry, dead fuel, the inferno is inevitable.  Human idiocy includes a “gender reveal” party where people ignited fireworks in the midst of a picnic area tinderbox, and the conflagration spread quickly over several acres.  That’s something to remember; did they get it on film?  The child will certainly enjoy knowing that at his party, his parents burned thousands of acres of wilderness to celebrate his gender.

Every news broadcast has the weather person show us the view of the smoke from space.  There it is, that tan-white smear covering California like rancid mayonnaise.  The fires impact air travel and flight paths.  CHP closes the major arteries up and down the state.  Meanwhile, people stay in their homes waiting for the signal to evacuate, and when it comes, highways are clogged with people fleeing the inferno.  Wildlife and domestic livestock stampede through the burning woods, embers falling and cascading around them.

Should we rebuild in those burn areas?  Are we tempting fate?  Paradise is burning, and so soon after the last scorching.  The earth has not healed yet, and now, the fires come again.  Is there a way to make forests less susceptible to fire?  Often, burning the dead debris on the ground in a forest allows new seeds to take root.  It can be a good thing, but not when it comes to homes and human habitation.

In the perfect storm of 2020, the pandemic rages on.  Scientists now believe the coronavirus arrived in California as early as December 22, 2019, when hospitals began seeing an uptick in respiratory infections.  The virus also profoundly affects the human brain in some survivors, causing headaches, confusion, and delirium.  As we learn from Bob Woodward’s book, Trump knew the virus was deadly and could be spread by air since January.  He knew, and he lied.  Is this surprising?  Years ago, Trump said that he could shoot someone on New York’s Fifth Avenue and get away with it.  He has killed almost 200,000 Americans, and as of this moment, does seem to have gotten away with it:  every night, new revelations, new damning evidence, new felonies and misdemeanors.  The Trump presidency goes on, and now, he is closing the gap with Joe Biden.  Four more years and we won’t be recognizable as America anymore.

There is no dearth of strange news.  Two planes landing at Los Angeles International Airport reported to the tower that they had passed a “guy in a jet pack” flying at 3,000 feet and ten miles from the airport.  The FBI is investigating.  Officials express some disbelief in the sightings given that a jet pack capable of propelling a human being that high would be very expensive and could not be owned by a private individual.

Like everything else over the last six months, we can only say how surreal this all is, scratch our heads, and wait for what tomorrow brings.

 

Sidewalking by David L. Ulin

 

To borrow from the Tao Te Ching, the Los Angeles that can be spoken of is not Los Angeles.  The city is an enigma going back to the days when English was the second language of everyone in the pueblo, or as they called it then, la ciudad de Nuestra Senora de los Angeles de Porciuncula.  David L. Ulin grapples with the city’s ghosts and history in his book, Sidewalking:  Coming To Terms With Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2015).

The author is a New York native who relocated to L.A. in the early 1990s.  Since that time, he has dedicated himself to studying his adoptive city not from a car, but on foot.  He is a dedicated walker in the city and a rider of public transportation.  In Los Angeles, Ulin walks to “pay attention, to see the streets, the buildings…to immerse [himself] in a world that might otherwise slip by.”  His efforts to come to terms with Los Angeles include history, culture, and imagination.  To him, walking the city is a “mechanism of narrative, of liberation…a way to find and maintain one’s place.”

One cannot discuss Los Angeles without talking about racism.  Most people in and out of L.A. know of the riots following the taped beating of Rodney King, but Ulin takes the city’s entire history of upheaval.  The Watts riots in 1965, the Zoot Suit riots in 1943, and the “housing covenants and miscegenation laws,” and on back to the Mexican-American War:  the city is steeped in unrest and violence.

There is much to consider when talking about historical Los Angeles and in the southwestern United States as a whole.  Ulin cites the treaty signed between General Pio Pico and John C. Fremont which ended hostilities between Mexico and the United States in 1847 as significant.  But not all history in L.A. is in the long past.  Ulin discusses the growth of mall culture, especially the Grove.  He spends a lot of time analyzing developer Rick Caruso, who built the Grove and several other projects in the city.  He is the master of the mixed-use property that includes both business and residential units.  Caruso has raised this kind of building to an art form, especially with his Glendale Americana at Brand and the Grove.

Caruso, who admires Walt Disney, describes how the Grove replicates his idea of Main Street U.S.A.  Yet, the area is tightly controlled.  There are rules and regulations that create a lack of spontaneity within its confines.  The Main Street is constructed for shopping, people watching, and fine dining.  Recently, the real streets encroached on this simulacrum when rioters, walking alongside those protesting the murder of George Floyd, gained entrance to the Grove and burned a kiosk and vandalized several stores before LAPD put an end to the rampage.  The Main Street at the Grove became part of every real street in America, and could not escape the anger of these times.

Ulin points out that we used to have streetcars in this city.  They were removed when California embraced the car culture, and only now are we talking about putting them back into service.  Caruso is again the catalyst for a system that would connect the neighborhood around the Grove with subway terminals and public transportation corridors.  Ulin makes an important point:  public transportation must be ubiquitous to fulfill its promise.  He attends a public hearing and shocks the audience by saying he wants a subway stop on his block.  He makes the point that only in Los Angeles must one drive to find a place to walk.  “Melrose Avenue, Venice Beach, Griffith Park, even the Third Street Promenade…all are served by lots and parking structures, as is, of course, the Grove.”

Ghosts haunt Ulin’s walks and forays in the city, and these sections are the strongest and most evocatively written.  All around, he sees change.  “This is the most obvious idea in the world,” he writes, “that time takes everything from us, that streets feel possessed by ghosts because they are possessed by ghosts, the ghosts of all the people who have ever traversed them, who have ever occupied those cubic feet of space.”  L.A. is a haunted city.

The term, Sidewalking, comes from the shops on Main Street where merchants could stand outside and welcome in pedestrians to their shops.  From this, Ulin takes his title.  It is all about community, commerce, and culture.  He digs deep into L.A.’s unique character, its quirky places and inhabitants, its history and darkness.  He concludes with poetry:  “What else is a city but a dream in three dimensions, inhabited by succeeding generations who create identity in the muscle memory of its streets?  What else is a city but an imaginatorium, where the surface, the public record, is constantly collapsing into the interior landscape, the streets as markers, territorial or otherwise, the building blocks, the triggers, of identity?  That is how cities develop, that is how they evolve.”  L.A. continues to challenge, to defy, to strive to escape its history while simultaneously embracing that history.  And David L. Ulin keeps walking.

 

Fault Lines and Earthquakes

We were awakened this morning by a 4.2 earthquake centered about ten miles from our apartment.  No damage, just jangled nerves as we leapt out of bed and went to check our home seismograph more commonly known as the light fixture over the dining room table.  Swaying, it was, confirming that we were not dreaming.

“This, too?” I mumbled to myself.

This morning, I watched the funeral of John Lewis, beloved Civil Rights icon and congressman.  Speaker after speaker reminded us that democracy is a work in progress.  We who live in this country should always be striving to “form a more perfect union.”  The wording is clear:  we strive to form a more perfect union, meaning that perfection will never be achieved.  It is the eternal struggle of democracy to fight to be better, more inclusive, more just.  That is the nature of things.

Struggling to form a more perfect union means that like all Californians, we live with upheaval.  We tolerate the earthquakes because we live in this state, and earthquakes are a fact of life.  We live in this country, and therefore, equality, social justice, and equal representation under the law are achieved only at a cost.  We will never erase a hateful heart or one bent on violence and oppression.  We must be willing, as John Lewis was, to take the blows and wounds in the fight to fulfill the promise of the democratic, multi-cultural collage that is America.

The war for justice never ends.

However, the war is beautiful in its heroism.  The friction brings glory and truth and pain and suffering to the forefront.  Nature mirrors this.  The Grand Canyon represents a war between water and stone.  It has lasted for millennia.  What remains in that perpetual conflict is a thing of beauty and a joy forever.  It is the earth showing us that change is not always easy and never complete.  It simply is, always.

What is more explicit in this natural wonder is the power of a malleable substance—water—to wear away stone that seems impervious to all forces acting upon it.  Yet, here is water carving its way down the canyon and creating this beautiful cataclysm of time and substance.  We are the water; the injustice is the stone.  Water will drip and flow around the rock.  Water will diminish in the heat of the desert.  Water is soft and splashy and mutable—liquid, steam, ice.  But water prevails because it is patient and consistent.  Given time and tide, water will bore right through the rock.

So be like water.

We survive earthquakes but they are a part of our geology.  We are never done with them as we will never be a perfect society or a flawless world.  There will always be those who threaten to upend our rights, throw us into prison, bring down the club upon our skulls.  We go on.  We stand witness to the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” and we fight for human rights and the end to racism, environmental destruction, oppression, discrimination, violence, and the rape and pillage of our world.

Today, we said goodbye to a righteous man.  We will not easily replace him as an advocate for “good trouble.”  In the same breath, we have been threatened by a man who would destroy our civilization, our culture, our tired and poor.  He is trying to stop anyone who dares to lift a “lamp beside the golden door” to sanctuary and opportunity, hallmarks of the American Dream.

We will fight on with words and bayonets.  We will strive to create a more perfect world. We will hold fast to the earth as it heaves and bucks.  And we will survive.  We will flourish.

We will miss you, John Lewis.  However, you did your part, and may angels sing you to your rest.  Now, the fight goes on, and it is up to us to carry the torch.