Listening to SCOTUS debate whether or not the TikTok ban is a violation of the First Amendment this morning (spoiler: it is…but SCOTUS is…unreliable). Trump gets no jail time but is officially our convicted felon POTUS. “LA’s in flames, it’s getting hot.”
But yeah this is a mailing list for a Band, so here’s a thing about the Band.
All Feels will be spinning some records over at The Quarters tomorrow (Saturday 1/11) night of all our favorite ✨ D R E A M P O P ✨ tracks. What even is that genre? How far can we push it’s boundaries? RIP genres.
Otherwise…
Thinking about LA a lot.
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, The Santa Ana ("Los Angeles Notebook"/Slouching Towards Bethlehem), The Saturday Evening Post, 1965.
KQED mutual aid list for LA fires.
Take care of each other out there.
xo.cjc / af