smoking ruin.
It usually takes a war or a tragic school shooting or something similar for me to break from my normal format and talk about non-movie events on this blog. But Los Angeles is where I lived for 12 years, and it's also the movie capital of the world, so the tie-in isn't even that strained in this case.
I don't know that what I'm writing on Thursday afternoon (Melbourne time) for a Friday morning posting (I only post once per day and I've already posted today) will already have aged into distant memory within a few days -- not because the fires will have stopped, but because what I'm writing about here will be just so much more apocalyptic by that point. Maybe I need to save "The flaming wreckage of Los Angeles" as a post title for a few days from now.
But as of right now, I'm hearing friends in the usually fire-safe San Fernando Valley, where I lived for the majority of those 12 years, talk about how the fire could in theory reach them. A few minutes ago, a friend even said, possibly without hyperbole (though he is sometimes guilty of hyperbole), that it could burn down to Hollywood Boulevard.
Makes my pursuit of finalizing my 2024 film rankings seem pretty piddly by comparison.
At this writing, only five people have died. Five people is of course too many, but given the devastation to buildings (some of them iconic, like the Will Rogers Estate, where I used to hike), it seems like a small number. Thank goodness everyone knows what's going on and few of them are so stubborn as to stay in their homes with their arms wrapped around their armoires.
But the Los Angeles landscape -- also one of the most likely to be seen in the movies, even when the movies are not set there -- is going to look vastly different after this, with the entire psyche of the region taking a huge hit.
And even the home I used to live in, and sold two years ago, could theoretically be in danger.
Stay safe, everyone. Those words mean more today than they usually do.
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