The City of Angels

LA is like an active war zone. It’s been five days of total shock and awe, and hour-by-hour urgent decisions that don’t yet feel anywhere close to dissipating. Exhaustion on everyone’s faces. Disbelief. Nervousness as to where the wind blows next. Ten thousand structures burned to the ground. More than 100,000 people evacuated. Last night, texting friends in Encino and Tarzana (picture below), which somehow are in danger from the Palisadse fire. Again, if you understand LA geography, you will know how mad that is.

An unholy inferno.

I woke up on Wednesday morning to this first light.

And I stayed all day, chalking up the possibilities, stalking the fire updates app we’re now all reliant on, yet another friend texting every hour that they were also going to evacuate, me holding on wondering if it was really time yet, if the Eaton Fire in Altadena could really make it down past Glendale to my side of Hollywood. Air thick. Apartment smelling of burning. And I decided to stay, to maintain some British stiff upper lip normalcy. After all, the groceries store are open and my gym wasn’t closing.

So I was on La Brea at 6pm on Wednesday night, having just taken a 45-minute break to take a group HIIT class, and I got out to a bombardment of emergency calls from LA local services and panicked texts from already evacuated friends to warn of a new fire at Runyon Canyon; one of my beloved hiking spots, less than a mile from where I was, and I went outside to see plumes of smoke billowing down Sunset Boulevard (the aorta of LA), and a fire atop, and I ran inside to tell the gym to close, to check if everyone had a place to go, and to grab my stuff, and to call an Uber back to my place. Heart racing, negative self-talk about how I should have left earlier (why had I convinced myself – like a sane person who doesn’t cry wolf – that it would never reach the CENTER of Hollywood?), and then immediately remembering a friend down the street in the heart of Sunset who lives by himself, and I called him. “Are you safe?” And he – in his typical way – was on top of a nearby tall parking lot structure with a camera shooting the fire with no ability to leave. We fell out over the war in Gaza a year prior. In such moments it no longer matters. I’ll still fight for someone, even if they cannot or will not always fight for me. Blood is blood. Human is human. I made a plan to get out to the desert, and an hour later we were on the freeway out of there to a safe place for a couple of nights.

Before I set off with him, I had thirty minutes to pack three suitcases alone. I focused on grabbing as much stuff of value as I could. Mainly clothes. I surveyed the home I have made, that I love, all my funky art and my furniture and my book collection, my guitars. I grabbed a family photo from the fridge, a postcard with my best friend’s handwriting, some polaroids of Hollywood parties, my Dad’s copy of Golda Meir’s autobiography, my rare edition of TS Eliot’s Wasteland, my grandfather’s red handkerchief and my grandmother’s brooch. I thought: What will we come back to? Even if fire doesn’t engulf us here, looters might. I took pictures of all the other stuff. The tan leather couch that’s moulded to me. The redwood bench in my bedroom that I got from the Rosebowl flea market. The good pans. My cooking knives. My best decanter. The framed nudes I thrifted at the Fairfax High School weekend market. My Butch Vig-signed Nirvana poster that I received as a gift from Garbage when I interviewed Shirley Manson and Vig at the Echoplex. My DJ decks. My blue velvet reading chair. I love that chair. My physical catalogue of my entire career: every magazine I’ve ever written in. My leather jacket collection. My denim jacket collection. Stuff. It’s just stuff. Goodbye to the boxes of ticket stubs. If I forget half the gigs in there then maybe they weren’t worth remembering in the first place.

After a few days in the safety of Palm Springs, I returned last night. It felt too surreal being away from this city. My city. I was doing a segment for Sky News in a chair in some art deco hotel room in the serenity of the desert as a non-mandatory evacuee of what are now historic LA fires wondering if any of this was real. But it is. The disaster is constantly in my phone. The panic doesn’t stop just because you’re a few hundred miles away. Another text from yet another friend who lost everything, and what do you do? What do you say? How are we going to rebuild? It’s not just homes; it’s schools, it’s mom-and-pop restaurants, it’s clothes stores, it’s libraries, it’s everything. And I feel bad about saying that I am beyond fatigued, but I am. My adrenaline is shot. There has been no break since the pandemic. Multiple wars, and now this, and I caught myself getting confused watching a heartbreaking video of a woman in a devastated street outside her burned-down house last night, recounting stories of all the neighbors who would no longer be neighbors, and memories from the past, and all I could see was this lady Irit, taking me around Kibbutz Nir Oz about 15 months ago, past all the burned-down homes, and the blood-stained homes, and the looted homes… The horrors from October 7 to this bled into one. They’re not the same. But these things all live under my skin.

The death toll currently stands at ten for the LA fires, and this was not an act of terrorism, but an act of God multiplied by severe acts of incompetence from the Mayor Karen Bass and the Governor Gavin Newsom (and while I am beyond enraged with the political side of this, and believe me I have a lot to report, there is a time and place, and for now we Angelenos need to focus on unity, community, fire containment, emergency relief, and a long, long rebuild).

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In October 2014, I was living in London and visiting LA a lot. That month I was covering a music festival in Mexico City and I travelled home to London via LA to celebrate my 28th birthday with my then best friends - a band from Studio City. It was a forever night when these Angeleno born and bred kids took me on a whistle-stop tour of LA classics. We had dinner in Echo Park, then we went to Pins in Studio City, we stopped by In N Out to have a burger “animal style” at midnight and wound up at a dive karaoke bar in Valley Village, before driving up Mulholland, stopping at a lookout, and sitting on the edge of the greatest city on earth. Me and one friend were the last two standing at that point, and she looked at me on the top of Mulholland with a sales pitch to move: “This is what you pay for”, pointing at the twinkling lights down in the valley below, an endless vista surrounding us. It just felt so huge on the side of that mountain. It felt like if you pushed yourself off it you could fly into a sky of everything. Within a month I quit my job and my abusive toxic boss, I abandoned the city that was eating me alive, and moved in with my friends to get happy again, and to gain my own independence. To be my own boss. Fuck it, I moved to Hollywood to make it. And I never looked back. LA saved my life.

It’s been ten years. Since Covid, there have been years in which I fell out love with LA. The city suffered massively and lost its magic somewhat. I also became sick to my stomach by Hollywood and its punishment of women who refused to be owned by its predatory jaws, and it took me time in these last 24 months to rebuild my connection with the city; to fall head over heels for her again. And I have. In fact, only days prior to the fire, I texted my best friend just to say how perfect an LA day it was. It was 11am and I was running at my local park, feeling a perfect breezy heat on my back, an a perfect blue sky, and a perfect wholeness in my soul finally feeling once more that - wow I would not choose any other life in any other place with any other people than all these chancers and grifters and weirdos who I disagree with on almost everything but whose spirits I adore. A perfect LA day is better than any day anywhere. This is the city where dreamers come to realize the biggest fantasies, and hearts are broken in the deepest ways; where love seems bigger and wider and dumber than anywhere else; where stories take every direction that life doesn’t travel down unless you make that life here; where there’s some inexplicable serendipity to all things, and the people worship stars and moons and constellations. Where the freeways transport you from the jagged clutter of Downtown to the never-ending oil canvas painting of the Pacific Coast Highway.

It’s a city where tiny pink and blue houses live under the giant arms of its freeways, and gargantuan palaces sit on the tippy tops of the mountainous Hollywood Hills. It’s a city where planes land from all over the world every day with thousands of fans coming to get some stardust in their eyes in the windy roads of its most infamous canyons. It’s a city where the famous eat a $200 omakase on the West side, and the rest can get the best carne asada from a taco in a parking lot in 90026. It’s the one city in the world where you can take the boulevard of broken dreams from the edges of the gritty eastside through the iconic Sunset Strip all the way out towards the ocean.

In these coming days, my friends, try to do for one person what you wish you could do for all the broken hearts of Los Angeles. With endless love, from the ash-clouded streets of Hollywood x