I had already noticed a strange cloud above my building which had turned the light in my room completely orange, and while it had struck me as unusual, it didn't strike me as being special - L.A. has its strange weather patterns and habits, and each day I'm being phased by them less and less.
So I opened one of the messages, from my friend Alexis, and found this:
Now. This is the point where I would normally go into a whole long speech about land maintenance and fire corridors and quote large passages from Mike Davis's Ecology of Fear for you, but I have laundry in the wash and I need to run some errands and I'm hoping to go see a bargain matinee at the Los Feliz 3, so we can save all that for later.
What I did want to mention is this article in the La Times, a surprisingly good paper with a surprisingly bad website (seriously, this is perhaps the worst web design ever). The article, in brief, looks at the Hollywood Fire (actually on the Burbank side, but who cares about such details in this town) as a user-generated media event, with photos and videos popping up on YouTube, Flickr and even the Times' own "Your Scene" section. And it isn't simply that people captured it on video, it's that they went out of their way to do it, often attempting dangerous things - like driving down the 110 while filming - in the process.
In a way, the Hollywood Fire is one of those moments when so-called "citizen journalism" goes mainstream, as anyone with a camera (which in this town is almost everyone) gets in on the action in one way or another, and people like me, out here in La La Land, can show you a little bit of what our latest environmental calamity looks like. More though, you also get to see a slice of the city itself, and the people, in their varied reactions to what is happening. It becomes a mosaic as scattered as the metroplex, and, in true Angeleno fashion, it begins with driving:
Some people, though, opted for a more raw, documentary style, B Roll footage approach. The following video really captures the intensity of the conflagration, as well as the way that the sun turned orange when viewed through the firey cloud. It's also rather long and boring, so I don't recommend catching the whole thing. For those keeping track at home, I currently live around the corner from where the first shot in this video was taken; I wonder if Electric Lotus could try and work this into an ad campaign, "our curries are hotter than a wildfire in Hollywood"?
This one is sort of an amatuer spin on the MTV aesthetic, whose main drawback is that the last three or four minutes are all darkness:
And then, this being the land of dreams, an artistic, techno rave version of the fire. Think of it as the Hollywood Conflagration Re-Mix:
And it is sort of strange, the fire being reduced to a piece of testosteroned ephemera, a collection of videos based around the theme "this could one day be important", or, more simply, "this is so fucking cool". But then I imagine that's how we've always experienced these sorts of events; one of my favorite photographs is of people on a hill overlooking the great San Francisco earthquake, dressed in Victorian finery, slightly dazed from the destruction of the city, but also smiling broadly and pointing, exultant in the majesty of the rubble and the smoke beneath them.
Which, in all honesty, is pretty fucking cool.
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