Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are. Joan Didion in Slouching Towards Bethlehem

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husband’s necks. Anything can happen. Raymond Chandler in Trouble is My Business

…very scary, very stressful, very strange week here in L.A., where we work, where we live, where our kids go to school. Jimmy Kimmel

I looked at IRS data and learned that in 2021 (the most recent year for which there was data) LA County paid more in income taxes than all but four states. Philip Bump‬ on Blue Sky

Poor LA, it is a place of so many disasters, and now three devastating fires at once. It is heartbreaking.

And I think it is part of what makes LA so captivating. Michele and I love Los Angeles; it is so alive and so vibrant. It’s a sprawling wonderfulness that can’t be contained; LA covers the flat desert valley floor and climbs into the mountains that surround it. It is a place with a feeling of impermanence that insists its occupiers take both intellectual and artistic risks because, “What the hell, why not try it? We might not be here tomorrow.”

Living in LA is living on the edge; it is earthquake country, where the San Andres Fault bends east. LA is not even on the North American Plate; it is on the Pacific Plate that, here, is banging into the North American Plate as it grinds by. And – and this is a big and – LA is Santa Ana country.

People I know or meet who have moved here from the East or Midwest complain that there are no actual seasons in California, especially Coastal Southern California. They claim that the climate is blandly warm, blandly almost perfect. That is partially true; the climate doesn’t have the extremes of most of the world, but mixed in with that hospitable weather are weather catastrophes.

When it rains, it is often a torrential subtropical rain that lasts days. Washing out the hills and sending houses sliding toward the valley floor. Then there are the Santa Anas, strong dry winds that dry out the land, making it susceptible to fire that it whips up into firestorms. When I lived in the LA area during the late 50s and early 60s, it seemed like the hills were on fire every year; sometimes, huge fires like Malibu in 1956 and Bel Air in 1961. The fires make the place feel violent and unpredictable.

It is a place that probably should be inhabited by, I don’t know, maybe 50,000 humans, max, living in the canyons and along the river. But Los Angeles has a population of over eighteen million people. Eighteen million people that have dug in to stay. It is one of the most culturally dense places on earth, with 98 symphony orchestras, 200 professional theater companies, and about 780 museums, including the California African American Museum, the US Navy Seabee Museum, the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology – which has the largest collection of bird nests in the world – and LACMA (the Los Angeles County Museum of Art). It has the Finnish Folk Art Museum and the First Original McDonald’s Museum. And, of course, there are the vanity museums founded by local billionaires: The Broad, the Armand Hammer Museum, and the J. Paul Getty Museum (two J.Paul Getty museums). 

We love LA because it is so big and so glamorous. When the chairman of Jaguar Cars was asked why they were bringing Jaguar back to the United States when the crash and pollution standards were so strict, and it would be so costly to meet them with a European car. He answered, “Because there are more people in L A County who can afford our cars than people in all of Europe.” What he didn’t say is that LA is full of the kind of people who buy Jaguars.

Michele and I love Los Angeles because of our love for plants. Los Angeles is a city of plants, with lush private gardens and even lusher public botanical gardens. Almost anything grows in Los Angeles; it is a plant paradise. However, this is a paradise that is almost all man-made, just like the millions of flammable buildings that cover the flat valley and steep hills.