Wednesday, March 19, 2008

March 19, 2008

The Santa Anas haven't been around here for a week or so but whenever a strong wind rolls in we like to call them Santa Anas, especially us newbies. The concept of a mythical wind is too fabulous to store away in our brains for proper usage. The past couple days have had the kind of night winds that sound like the million militia guards in "Commando" in your backyard. Except they aren't trying to break in, they are just torturing you via windchime.

"It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself. Nathaniel West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust, and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end. 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 the 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 from the Los Angeles Notebook/ The Santa Ana

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