City on Fire

January 11, 2025

Greetings from fiery Los Angeles.

I am one of many thousands of people who had to evacuate their home with little notice and in mere minutes. To say it was shocking surreal, horrendous and many other adjectives I can’t think of at the moment, and probably wouldn’t do it justice at all, does not tell even a fraction of the story.

But I am also one of the lucky ones who survived, and whose home and immediate neighborhood stands pretty much untouched in comparison to what’s left of the Mad Max terrain in the former gorgeous towns of Pacific Palisades, Malibu, Altadena and others.

Thanks to the L.A. Fire Department, the response of local officials and the fact that the winds had died down enough for it to be tackled by air, the massive flames in the hills of Hollywood, aka the Sunset Fire, were contained relatively quickly. Though if you lost your home, or someone close to you, this doesn’t mean very much at all.

Over four decades, I have grown to love Los Angeles as much as my hometown of New York City and that’s really saying something. I can’t really tell you exactly why other than to say L.A. is part of California and that people have been coming to California for years for the freedom to be who they are and live the way they choose. It’s a mirage of sorts but not fully. There is something about the vastness of the state and what has become its melting pot of a population during the many years I’ve been here that has more and more made that mirage a bit more real. I mean, you might not get what you want but you have a ton of space to do it in and a vast number of tribes you can sample if you’re looking for a place where you can truly belong.

Also, if you don’t like it you can always leave. Literally no one will judge you for it. Out here most of us eventually learn that it’s up to an individual to make themselves happy. California won’t do it and especially L.A. won’t make it happen for you. You have to figure out how to make it happen.

This is one of the many reasons these L.A. fires have been so devastating for me. Watching it happen is like watching the beauty of all those dreams and all that stunning space get fried to a crisp in real time right before your eyes. Everything is ephemeral but the breadth and randomness of such mass destruction feels unusually, and most particularly, cruel.

Which does not mean we don’t feel that and more for all kinds of cruel destruction. No one has the market cornered on those type of regrettable feelings. In fact, maybe if there were more recognition of the latter, the world wouldn’t feel like the hateful place it all too often does these days.

Still, watching firefighters from neighboring states and countries flying in to help the people of L.A. has been quite something. Not to mention how quickly the American Red Cross, World Central Kitchen and dozens of other organizations and volunteers have opened outlets, service areas and phone lines to help us begin to cope and, eventually, recover.

But here is what is NOT helpful. Playing the Blame Game.

I get the country is divided and L.A. is an easy and often willing target (Note: Yes, we’re in on the joke. Duh). But you’d think an estimated $50 billion in damages from the largest city in a state that sends more money than any other to the federal government, would be enough to satiate the naysayers at this point.

Because I don’t trust myself to 1. Explain this properly and 2. Not go on a tangential, unhelpful and hysterical tirade in this sensitive moment, I want to instead share a very wise social media post from my friend Michael Colleary. This weekend he very smartly and very succinctly explained what happened in L.A. in an effort to offer some truth and reality to friends, family and acquaintances from out of state who have been hearing and reading all kinds of things. It goes as follows:

Dear FB Friends – I have received many messages and emails particularly from friends and family on the East Coast, asking after our safety. A million thanks for your care and concern. I would like to answer a few questions I have been asked repeatedly, particularly about fire hydrants and firefighting crews and LA’s overall response to the fires.

Let me try to provide a little perspective for those of you back East …

The Palisades fire began as a wilderness brush fire at 10:30AM on January 7th.

Driven by 80 MPH winds – hurricane-fast winds – within 24 hours it had burned 12,000 acres and hundreds of structures.

Any chance of LA fire crews – the best trained and most experienced in the world – containing it, let alone extinguishing it, drop to zero because air tankers and water-hauling helicopters can’t fly in 80mph winds.

So, to recap: 24 hours, 12,000 acres burned.

For my New York friends: Central Park is 850 acres. So, imagine a firestorm that incinerates 14 Central Parks in 24 hours. Or more to the point perhaps, imagine a firestorm that blows through Central Park, incinerating every blade of grass FOURTEEN TIMES in 24 hours.

For my NJ friends: our hometown of Montclair gets off a little better. At 4,000 acres, it would have been reduced to ash only THREE times in 24 hours. Imagine every single resident of Montclair becoming homeless on one night. Imagine the violent energy required for that to happen. Because it did, 3 times over.

And Palisades is only one of the massive fires burning here. The Eaton fire has burned 14,000 acres on the eastern edge of LA.

And it’s still going. As of this minute, the Palisades fire is closing in on 40,000 acres. That’s bigger than San Francisco (thankfully most of it is – for the moment – in remote canyons teeming with scrub foliage; yes, LA is that huge).

As shocking and overwhelming and devastating as this has been for so many thousands and thousands of people – my sister and brother-in-law lost their home; his niece and nephew both lost homes in separate fire areas – it is excruciating to hear these endless lies and blaming and gibberish about how DEI and budget cuts somehow caused or contributed to this absolute apocalyptic disaster.

No city, no county, no state, no country on the planet would or could be prepared and equipped to confront what’s happened here.

Because what has happened here is much closer to a volcanic eruption than a “brush fire.”

Our neighborhood is now within sight of the Palisades fire which overnight spread to Brentwood. Shan is packing her clothes. I have to go inside now and get my mother – already evacuated once with just the clothes on her back – up and ready to go should we be ordered to leave.

Friends, I know there’s not much you can do from far away – aside from donate to the Red Cross, etc.

But I humbly ask that – if you hear someone spreading the all-too prevalent lies being spewed for political score-settling – tell that person – from me – to STFU. Because they have no idea what’s really happening here.

Thanks for listening. I’ll keep you posted, unless we become like the other 10s of thousands who still have no power.

If you’re looking to donate, here are three great, and vetted, places among many:

Red Cross of Greater Los Angeles

World Central Kitchen

Pasadena Humane Society

Andra Day – “Rise Up”

12.29.24

by notesfromachair

A Trauma-Less 2025

For those of us who have deep concern, and on some days panic, over the results of the recent election and the continuation of democracy in the U.S. – and that should be everyone even though it is clearly not – 2024 was a traumatizing year.

Or retraumatizing, if you’re like me and most of my friends.

But not one without hope.

Counterintuitive, though those two thoughts might be.

Trauma has gotten a knee jerk eye roll response in recent years. As if an emotional response to a distressing event that causes you to feel unsafe, frightened or overwhelmed is an unreasonable one, or means a person is weak.

Or, heaven forbid, too woke.

It is neither. All it means is that you’ve had a personal reaction to a personal experience. Not everyone is traumatized in the same way or by the same thing. We might be able to agree on basic rules of extreme awfulness, nee trauma, that might occur but there can never be exact common ground on the effects it has on any one individual in its aftermath.

Similar as the human experience may be, we are ALL different. For me, the key has always been to accept the differences and try to find common ground in our shared humanness.

Easier said than done for me these days.

And most especially during the last two closing months of this year.

Ironically, this is where hope comes in.

And NO, not the Pollyanna/Kumbaya false hope you get from a random catch phrase on a social media post or Notesfromachair blog (Note: Though I suppose that could be a springboard to something…or even anything…positive). But the endurance, survival and likeminded human perseverance, and in turn victories, of those who have travelled this road before.

On Friday night I watched two end of the year Oscar contender films – A Real Pain and The Brutalist. Yes, it was a double feature of Holocaust-themed movie screeners this weekend because that’s the kind of gay, nice Jewish boy at heart type of guy living in 2024 that I am.

One of my dearest friends in the world, whose death several years ago still tears at my soul, grew up with Holocaust survivor parents and at one time shared with me that the thing about the Holocaust is that you can never compete with it. Meaning, to be a descendent of that traumatic tribe meant that it was likely not a thing, an event, or even moment in your life can ever be possibly as bad as what those people experienced.

That’s one of the reasons the subject comes up over and over and over again in art, in politics, in random discussions and, generally, in life. It’s a benchmark for evil, for badness and for the worst.

But the flip side of that is that it’s also an example of the best, the brightest, the strongest, the most clever and, when all else fails, the luckiest. A version of what can happen when rational thought makes one believe everything is stacked against you and there is NO winning.

Even survival could not be winning.

Except, of course, when it is.

A Real Pain poses the question of what parts and kinds of lives the descendants owe to the survivors. No spoilers at all ahead but the basic, deceptively simple story is of two male cousins – played to perfection by Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg, the latter of whom wrote and directed — who go to Poland to visit the home of their recently-deceased survivor grandmother. They grew up together but these days couldn’t be more drastically different. Yet, like so many of us, they are surprisingly, and very humanly, similar. It’s just that they’ve processed their lives, responsibilities and individual DNA leanings quite differently.

The film is funny, uncomfortable, a bit off and unceasingly, perhaps even a bit dis-satisfyingly, true. Which is what gives one hope while watching it. Somehow you get the idea that those existential questions that have periodically crept into your psyche and haunted you, equally do so to others who are similarly just getting by in those moments.

And you don’t need to have any familial relation to the BIG trauma to grab onto the small shards of hope offered to anyone trying to see some small rays of possibilities into 2025. Everyone is always grasping for straws through the big, the small and everywhere in between. We all are. And many of us manage to get through it, albeit in our own ways and with our costs.

I so wish my dear friend were here to see. And discuss.

As for The Brutalist, it is a more sweeping, epic look at a survivor’s life in America, a brilliant and very flawed architect and how he makes his way, and his mark, through the 1940s, 1950s and beyond as an unsavory yet revered, othered yet in-demand, disrespected yet, at times, surface-ly respected, IMMIGRANT.

Stating its “sweepiness” and “epic-ocity” is technically true but in all honesty it is equally false. It is, in fact, quite familiar a story of today in terms of tolerance, fame, trauma, American exceptionalism/non-exceptionalism and, most of all, love. Of many kinds.

But more than anything of oneself and why that particular emotion is so difficult for any one of us given our varied sets of experiences, nee traumas.

Let’s not say anything more than that except to marvel both at Adrien Brody’s key central performance and how a film can simultaneously be so obtuse and yet so ultimately crystal clear all at the same time. With his famed and boldly prominent nose (Note: The ONLY stereotypical Jewish calling card I happened not to get), not to mention his thick European accent and intense intellectual swagger, this character’s “otherness” in that period of time enters the room practically before he does.

What would make him charismatic and riveting today are merely passing social oddities in the United States during the time that he lived. Much in the way particular features today define people as exotic others within their individual ethnicities in 2024. As I joked with one of my trans students privately (Note: Who would not mind me sharing this), it’s the luck of the draw who gets THE golden ticket of otherness every five years.

Too often in America, Black people had it, only to drop to the #2 spot, and then get it tossed back to them. Gay men had it for a while in the 80s. Non-white skinned immigrants had it from 2016-2020, only to drop down a tad and get it back again during election season. Though this year the Trans community seems to have captured the top spot beside them, for however long that lasts. Hopefully not four years.

None of it means anything, except that it means everything.

Which explains why in the world of The Brutalist it’s not so much that Mr. Brody’s famed and fictional architect survived the Holocaust but how he lived to make it through America in such an admirably flawed and particularly prominent way, that intrigued me.

And gave me hope into 2025.

Though who am I except a gay, Jewish man, of a certain age, with a small nose.

Happy New Year everyone.

And remember to laugh.

Violet Orlandi – “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”

notes from a chair

Category Archives: Just Sayin’

City on Fire

A Trauma-Less 2025