Hi,
Today’s Webworm features a new short film from documentary maker Giorgio Angelini (Feels Good Man, The Antisocial Network, Owned: A Tale of Two Americas).
It’s about Luigi Mangione — but it’s also, really, about everything in America right now.
Bear with me.
Shortly after I sent out my last missive from the fires on Wednesday, one broke out a little too close to home in a place called Runyon Canyon. This was the shot a friend took from West Hollywood.
Thanks for all your comments on that piece. I read them all. Sorry I haven’t had time to reply. Occupied brain.
Me and some friends packed our bags, and drove about 90 minutes south to Huntington Beach. We went in on a hotel room, and spent two nights close to the water, far away from the fires. It was a privileged position to be in.
We noted none of us had brought any treasured possessions — my attitude was, “If it all goes up, what’s the point in taking some small item?” Then again — maybe I did. I brought two polaroid photos, a laptop, and some harddrives. I guess those were my treasured possessions. Art, books, records — they all remained behind.
Hotels are expensive, so after the fire near my neighborhood was contained on Friday, we drove back. This is how things currently look on the Watch Duty app (I am the huffing emoji, just inside the current “safe zone”).
Things feel normal, but also they don’t. A thin film of ashy dust greeted me inside my apartment, dutifully spread over everything. All my windows were shut, but it got in.
There’s the knowledge that some of the fires are still growing. Things are unpredictable. The one out to my west — the Palisades Fire — has grown 1000 acres today. 11 people are now dead. 153,000 residents are under evacuation orders, and there’s a warning in place for 166,000 more.
My instagram stories are friends crying.
While stories of lost celebrity homes take up the headlines, entire black neighborhoods are being burnt to the ground, and prisoners are drafted into the fire fighting efforts.
Real estate agents make posts about “Immediate LA Housing” —
— which you soon discover starts at $16,000 a month and goes up to $200,000.
And so we all wait here, on alert.
I asked Giorgio Angelini to write some words about the short he made. He wrote them after visiting his friend’s house to survey the damage.
He sums it all up far better than I ever could.
I finished making this video essay a couple of days before the fires took over wide swaths of Los Angeles, where I live. And while it might not seem directly connected—the assassination of a healthcare CEO and wildfires ravaging LA — after walking through the wreckage of the Altadena fire to survey the damage of my friend’s home, I couldn’t help but feel all of it was endemic. American carnage.
We have lived through forty-plus years of a culture built on abject greed. We’ve constructed a national ego that has rewarded this individual greed, all at the expense of the collective. We’ve built a perverted moral armature that not only excuses this greed, but convinces us that it is somehow innate or unavoidable. Or that it is good, even.
It is not. It is a choice. And it is a choice we can no longer make. Like so many in our city, I’ve been overwhelmed with emotions. Not only witnessing the unimaginable destruction, but also a feckless regime of entrenched private interests masquerading as public service.
I’ve also seen the best of humanity. Dedicated first responders working tirelessly to prevent further tragedy under unimaginable conditions. I’ve seen communities come together to offer support. And then I’ve seen opportunists, offering emergency housing at ludicrous prices.
It’s going to take a long time to rebuild from here. But also, in this effort there is an opportunity, a choice we must make about what we actually want to build for the future.
More totems to individualism?
More American carnage?
Or do we build community? Real community. Built on a radically reimagined moral grounding, where we recognize our responsibilities to one another. And take up that responsibility with enthusiasm, pride, and generosity.
I hope there’s a way we can do that, I really do.
We’ve written about mutual aid here on Webworm before, and it’s on my mind more than ever.
The “Mutual Aid LA Network” has compiled a bunch of resources here. It’s being updated daily. I’m off to get a bunch of sanitary items and water from Costco to drop off.
Here is a directory of GoFundMe’s for displaced black families.
And here is a constantly moving list of ways you can volunteer.
Talk soon, and I hope everyone reading this is staying safe — wherever you are on the planet, whatever it is that you’re facing.
David.
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