when we were making Bring Your Own Brigade this Joan Didion piece was a reference.
Joan Didion on LA “It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself. Nathaniel West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust, and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end.
Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.”
Decades later, still miss Hill Street Blues. One of my twin sons is a meteorologist with the National Service and was the advisor to firemen (regarding wind direction etc) at the fire close to Big Sur in 2022. Terrible situation then and now. Hope there's no loss of life and that includes the poor critters
when we were making Bring Your Own Brigade this Joan Didion piece was a reference.
Joan Didion on LA “It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself. Nathaniel West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust, and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end.
Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.”
full essay here https://www.murrieta.k12.ca.us/cms/lib5/CA01000508/Centricity/Domain/1538/The%20Santa%20Anas.pdf
Decades later, still miss Hill Street Blues. One of my twin sons is a meteorologist with the National Service and was the advisor to firemen (regarding wind direction etc) at the fire close to Big Sur in 2022. Terrible situation then and now. Hope there's no loss of life and that includes the poor critters