To have died and gone to heaven
How it feels to love Los Angeles.
For the past 14 days, I watched the sun set its usual pink blanket over Los Angeles. You wouldn’t know it looking up, but below the clouds lies an insurmountable amount of loss. Since the fires started in the Palisades and Altadena on January 7th it’s been very different here, not its usual flamboyant Tinsel Town, and understandably so. I have stared at this document for weeks now, typing and deleting, trying again and again to find words, but somehow there aren’t any. In the mornings I wake up and wonder if there will be new ones invented soon to describe this kind of collective grief. Maybe it is too soon to write about. I’ve read some things that have helped, especially this piece by Shiva Rose, and all of
’s posts in January. I like this one. of The Angel put together a thorough list of resources on where to volunteer around LA, donation links, and which restaurants have kindly opened their kitchens to feed first responders and individuals who have been displaced by the fires. ’s Affection Archives “No. 71- For Los Angeles” is a thoughtful guide to resources for LA’s creative community that have suffered loss due to the fires. I’ve also gone back to this piece wrote last fall.
Last week Carter showed me “Pontormo’s Rainbow”, an essay from Dave Hickey’s Air Guitar. He’ll often show me literature about Los Angeles because he knows I love it so much, and even more so after falling in love with him— a Venice-born Angeleno.
Hickey accounts his move to Los Angeles–
We had just escaped air-conditioned custody in this lily-white, cookie-cutter suburb of North Dallas and moved to Santa Monica, to a house right under the Palisades, between the Pacific Coast Highway and the beach. The house was the quintessence of coolness. There was a big deck on the second floor where we could sit and gaze off across the Pacific toward China. There was a white brick wall around the house, low in front and high in back, covered with bougainvillea. There were hydrangea bushes and hardy hibiscus in the front yard, honeysuckles along the side wall where a small yard ran, a mimosa tree in the front and a wisteria in the back–and, because of the wall and the breeze off the ocean, we could crank the windows open and let the house fill up with colored light, cool air, and the smell of flowers.
Died and gone to heaven. That's the only way to describe it.
The only way to describe how it feels to love Los Angeles— to have died and gone to heaven.
I have searched for heaven my whole life. Sometimes I believe it’s my life’s mission to find it. I always wondered what it might be like. I picture it often in the mornings on my sun-faded yellow couch peeking out at the fluorescent pink bougainvillea, or on the Pacific Coast Highway in June, and more tenderly in February. There’s heaven on the 101 right at 6 pm even in traffic, on the way to Burbank; in Will Rogers park; at the top of Mandeville Canyon road; in the Venice canal, the 10, the 405, the 1; Highland Avenue below Beverly; low tide in the Colony; the loquat trees; the orange groves; gloom in the early morning that burns off between 11 am and 1 pm; 80 degrees in January; the mustard greens, especially at the Fryman Canyon trail; the top of Laurel Canyon driving east on Mulholland Drive; hoping; remembering; soil, fertile and dry; valleys; the half moon; the bridge between Hyperion and Glendale; mountaintops; mourning doves.
I didn’t grow up in Los Angeles, but I have close friends who have, some that come from a long line of Angelenos, who have graciously shown me their pocket of the earth and its particular and peculiar ways of being. I moved to Los Angeles incredibly lost, hoping to find something. It turns out what I was looking for was this place, something that I could relate to, and fall in love with, not like I had with New York. Los Angeles is something of a utopia. It’s stereotypically written off as a baseless wasteland for bimbos and heartless freaks. I’d tell you that any place can be that, but the community support I’ve witnessed this past month is unlike anything I’ve seen. It’s made me want to live here forever, an admission that’s shocked me. I’d always planned to go back to New York at some point, to raise a family and to grow old. Now I’m not so sure. It’s heaven to come to a place you know nothing about, that you even resented once, and change your mind about it. I never thought I would live in Los Angeles, I never wanted to. I even claimed to hate it once. It is an incredibly easy task to love New York City. I’d argue an easier one, and far more rewarding, is choosing to love California.
The jasmine at the end of our street is still in bloom, and the coyote puppies up the street graciously remind us that it is yipping season, and that time does not stop.
Beautifully described.
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