Hieronymus Bosch, The Harrowing of Hell

Early this morning a neighbor texted a photo of a charred page from a screenplay that landed on his roof over the night. That page likely drifted from the Eaton fire twelve miles northeast of us.

Other than horrible air quality we’re safe but I made the mistake of checking the news on the cesspool known as X, hoping to check on some friends in Altadena. Instead of helpful information, I found right wing misdirection and conspiracy theories, blaming the fires on political enemies, water policies and diversity programs. I feel the need to counter a few of these narratives with a few reminders:

1. A single agricultural oligarch family, The Resnicks, consume more water than the entire city of Los Angeles. As I’ve written about before, the Resnicks launder their reputation by giving big gifts to CalTech, The LA County Museum of Art and political contributions to governor Gavin Newsom and many other politicians.
2. No one, myself included, wants to read about, ponder or confront any news about climate change. It’s overwhelming and dis-empowering. I don’t have an easy hot take here but when you have an apocalyptic fire in December you have to, at least, take climate change seriously.
3. Every time there’s an attempt to do an even modest increase in taxes to pay for infrastructure and public safety improvements, an unholy alliance of real estate interests, Wall Street, the California Apartment Owners Association and more spend millions on disinformation campaigns. What little money is spent ends up wasted on graft and corruption via engineering and construction firms controlled by these very same interests.

I have friends who had to evacuate from Pasadena last night who live in a house very far from any wilderness area on a street I never imagined would ever be threatened by a wildfire. I hope that their home and many others will be spared and, when this is over, that we can all join together to work on making our city more resilient. Most of that effort, I’m afraid, will come down to the dirty and un-fun work of grass roots politics.

When I asked a friend what he was going to do for New Year’s Eve he told me that he was going to go to bed like he always does. Then he informed me that Kelly and I once hosted a small New Years gathering where we all sat around and listened to Art Bell’s predictions show where random, unscreened callers would prognosticate about, mostly, doom and gloom stuff. I have no memory of this gathering but put a bootleg podcast of Art on this evening to drown out the fireworks and keep the animals calm.

I worked all day in the woodshop making frames for a friend’s gallery show so I too will be heading to bed early. No Club Los Globos for us tonight.

Best wishes to all for a happy 2025.