The messages keep coming and going: “Are you guys ok?” “We are safe but our home of 32 years is gone.” “Anything I can do?” “We evacuated.” “We just heard our house is still standing but it’s the only one left.” “Love you.” “Here when you’re ready.” Family and friends are holding their pictures and pets, thinking about driving out to my place in the desert but not quite ready to put the flames and smoke in their rearview mirror, because once it’s out of sight it will be just a memory, the place we all called home.
What I’m Listening To – “Los Angeles is Burning” by Bad Religion
Los Angeles is an easy target for criticism and hate. Los Angeles is the birthplace of the world’s dominant storytelling media and archetypes – so it’s also implicitly the capital of insecurity. A target for FOMO. All the beautiful people. The stars. The movies. TV. The music. The beaches. Every team is a champion. Even in hockey.
Not everyone who comes to LA makes it there, and maybe they have it easier. Rejection is hard but seduction is more dangerous. People who are fortunate enough to make their home in Los Angeles for any substantial length of time understand that every few years LA gets its collective heart broken. Fire. Earthquake. Mudslide. Riot. Sometimes, the destruction is on a grand scale even by LA standards. Like this past week’s devastating once-in-a-generation fires.
If you clicked the song link above and watched Bad Religion’s video, you may have noticed the quotes on the news ticker, like “the fierce grin of all men singed and driven back by flame” (00:00:49) – that one is from Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Even though he was a transplant from Waukegan, Illinois, Bradbury knew Los Angeles. He went to Los Angeles High School with my grandmother, lived in downtown LA, Venice, and the Cheviot Hills neighborhood near Culver City. He wrote Fahrenheit 451 on a rented typewriter in the basement of Powell Library at UCLA. Like Raymond Chandler, Nathaniel West, Michael Connelly, and a precious few others, Bradbury had a gift for channeling the true nature of a place grown by immigration, cruel law enforcement, marketing, technology, entertainment, and water theft into his stories and characters. The reality of LA is almost stranger than fiction. Plenty of insightful academics from UCLA professor Mike Davis to California librarian Kevin Starr have chronicled the historical, cultural, and natural forces that shaped Los Angeles.
But it was Joan Didion who understood the current moment and described it best.
What I’m Reading – ”The Santa Anas” by Joan Didion
“There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night.
“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.
“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 show us how close to the edge we are.”
What I’m Listening To – ”LA Woman” by The Doors
The track begins with an engine purring up the highway. Jim Morrison sings:
Well I just got into town about an hour ago
Took a look around, see which way the wind blow
Most of the 10 million or so people in Los Angeles are from somewhere else. Looking for something. When they leave, they take all of themselves with them.
I grew up in Los Angeles. Part of me is still there.
Morrison goes on:
I see your hair is burnin’
Hills are filled with fire
If they say I never loved you
You know they are a liar
I feel the hot tears on my cheek.
I Love Learning From You!
On a very different note (this is what I was thinking about the day before Los Angeles caught fire), one of my favorite things about teaching was that I had the power to close my classroom door and invite learners to imagine better ways of working together.
Phones, tablets, and laptops instead of notebooks and paper handouts? Sure.
No textbooks? No problem.* (*By law we had to make a classroom set accessible, so I put them in a corner bookcase with a sign on top: MUSEUM OF THE WAY THINGS USED TO BE).
The biggest shift was from a one-to-many broadcast to an interconnected network of contributing members. I still provided daily journal topics, agendas, and most of the core content, but as we progressed, my colleagues became more comfortable curating their work and even suggesting ways we might improve our overall strategies.
I’m thinking about this today because I’m still a voracious learner. When it comes to ideas, I’m greedy and selfish and excited to understand everything you have to offer.
So last week I was absolutely delighted when (friend/ mentor/ artist/ walker of dogs/ chronicler of virtual community and smartmobs/ author of the Foreword to my book ACADEMY OF ONE) Howard Rheingold responded to my thoughts about collaboration with an email of one word:
Stigmergy.
Wuh? For all the years I’ve spent studying and practicing alternative models of collaboration, I had never run across the word stigmergy, which I promptly looked up on Wikipedia:
“Stigmergy (/ˈstɪɡmərdʒi/ STIG-mər-jee) is a mechanism of indirect coordination, through the environment, between agents or actions.[1] The principle is that the trace left in the environment by an individual action stimulates the performance of a succeeding action by the same or different agent. Agents that respond to traces in the environment receive positive fitness benefits, reinforcing the likelihood of these behaviors becoming fixed within a population over time.[2]
Stigmergy is a form of self-organization. It produces complex, seemingly intelligent structures, without need for any planning, control, or even direct communication between the agents. As such it supports efficient collaboration between extremely simple agents, who may lack memory or individual awareness of each other.”
Thank you, Howard.
And thanks to all of you who continue to learn, and share, because whatever we build, pack, or leave behind as we evacuate, I am more convinced than ever that our thinking and our care for each other will continue to preserve us and help the next generation thrive.
What tickled you about learning this week? Or, what inspired you about humanity’s response to adversity and made you grateful for something about your situation? Drop me a line, I’m curious.
Curiosity is worth practicing. That’s how we get better at it. When it’s done particularly well, curiosity can be elevated to an art form. Curiosity makes life worth living. I am literally Curious AF. And now you can be too! Click HERE to unlock your free membership subscription.
Here is a taste of what I’m reading, watching, and thinking about.
Tech Problem Solved –
Texting Android friends from iMessage! I usually use my phone for text – not my laptop – because I like the boundary between messaging and doing work. But a friend of mine swears by his laptop during work hours because he thinks it’s faster, and during the fires I tried it out. From Tim: “Sadly, it’s impossible to iMessage my friends and family who are on Android… or so I thought. For years, my workaround has been using the WhatsApp desktop app, but my friend Mike taught me an easier way.
In simplest terms, here’s what you do:
1. On your iPhone, go to Settings > Apps > Messages.
2. Tap Text Message Forwarding. (If you don’t see it, turn iMessage off and back on, then tap Send & Receive and sign in again.)
3. Tap to turn on each device that you want to allow to send and receive messages from this iPhone.
It’s unintuitive. You need to turn on this additional feature that forwards SMS messages from your MacBook to your iPhone and then to the Android recipient. But it works like a charm. Even Google and ChatGPT insisted I would need to use third-party apps, but it’s not true. The above does the trick.
For more details and troubleshooting, click here to read the full instructions. Enjoy!”
Quotes I’m pondering —
Los Angeles is The Great Gatsby of American cities.
– Kevin Starr
The ideas you have about cities that you’ve always known don’t work in LA, and once you toss those aside you’ll be better off.
– Eve Babitz
Los Angeles is a microcosm of the United States. If L.A. falls, the country falls.
– Ice-T
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Best,
Know someone who is also Curious AF? Please share this edition with them!
David Preston
Educator & Author
Latest book: ACADEMY OF ONE
