Scorched Dictionaries
I love you, Los Angeles
[Content notes: LA fires, natural disaster, prison, death]
The day after the fires in Los Angeles started, I sat down to write what’s here as the second part of this newsletter. I felt myself go into analysis mode as a distancing mechanism, unable to fully process what was happening. As the week progressed, I was able to feel the enormity of what LA means to me as a city, and how difficult it was to comprehend how to help in a way that matched that meaning. I’ve described LA as a type of “second hometown” to me; I have years of memories in LA, exes in LA, best friends in LA, clients I’ve been working with for over a decade. Being welcomed by the city of Los Angeles as an artist, tattooer, and friend has been uniquely special. Trying to check in on people felt like navigating a grim, complex matrix— Who is closest to where the fires are showing up on the map? Who has kids? Who has asthma? Burnt-edged pages from dictionaries and novels floated separately into two friends’ backyards.
I am sending so much care to the city as a whole, to all my beloveds, and to anyone I’ve met there over the years. If there is anything in particular I can offer, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
Some links for support:
Free air purifiers – Please, please protect your lungs. Public libraries are also providing free KN95s.
LA Fires Master Mutual Aid Directory
Free Therapy & Healing Resources
LA Arts Community Fire Relief Fund – opens January 20th
To Donate:
Displaced Black Families GoFundMe Directory – doc also links Latine, Filipino, and master list of displaced families along with displaced disabled folks. Altadena has been home to so many Black families’ lineage, heritage, and built generational wealth, and the families at the directory link deserve infinite support in rebuilding the community.
Immigrant Fire Relief Fund by the National Day Laborer Organizing Network
Incarcerated Firefighter Fund by Anti-Recidivism Coalition (specify “firefighter fund” in notes)
Very cool tool created by some LA people to donate directly to incarcerated firefighters’ accounts
1/9/2025
I dreamt of climate crisis last night: of flash flooding, of evacuation. In the dream, I looked over to see one wall of my apartment gone, replaced instead with a wall of water that seemed impossible to escape. When I sublet with friends last year, I dreamt that the ceiling would crack and open up onto the sky, and on the day I moved out during a flash flood warning enough water came through a section of the apartment ceiling to create an enormous, precarious bubble of trapped liquid between the drywall and the latex paint.
What a privilege to only dream of disaster, to be able to wake up and stay inside my home, safe. The same can’t be said for so many people in Los Angeles, where the largest wildfires in LA history still rage. In California, the ecosystem of fires is one structured, first, by the theft of land from Indigenous people and by the curtailing of cultural prescribed burns practiced in land stewardship, and second, by the disproportionate use of incarcerated labor to fight fires. Up to 30% of firefighters in California, and a great number of first responders in a wildfire emergency, are people in prison who train at the more than 30 “fire camps” operated by the state’s Department of Corrections. Firefighters with nonviolent convictions can, thanks to legislation signed into effect by Gavin Newsom in 2020, work to have their records expunged after release in order to work as firefighters on the outside, though they still face numerous challenges. A bill was introduced just days ago to pay them the low end of equivalent wages for non-incarcerated firefighters—though only for the time they are actively fighting fires. I’ve seen posts circulating, in the name of debunking misinformation, stating that the prison fire programs are voluntary, and I think it’s important to question what “voluntary” means when to sign up means the ability to be in the wilderness, when otherwise access to nature can be limited to an hour of outdoor yard time, if that. In interviews with firefighters in prison, many say the conditions inside are so bad that anything that gets them out is preferable, even at great personal risk.
It’s impossible to hear the words “fire” and “evacuation” and not think of Gaza, of the people forced to march from one place to another and back again for over a year, with no relief and no safe place to land. It’s impossible not to think of the people burned alive inside tents in refugee camps. The US military is one of the largest drivers of climate change on earth. We have watched Gaza burn from the imperial core and somehow maintained the delusion that we ourselves would never face those conditions, even as the state demonstrated again and again that it abandons us in crisis. Even as a ceasefire deal was reached, “israel” has continued to bomb Gaza; more than 100 people have been killed since it was announced.
It’s also impossible not to think of people who are confined by the state, always the last to be evacuated in a natural disaster. During Hurricane Beryl earlier this year, men incarcerated in Texas described long nights of water pouring into their cells. After Helene, men in Mountain View Correctional Institution in Spruce Pine, North Carolina were left in cells without lights or running water for five days, forced to defecate in plastic bags. Wildfires pose just as serious a threat; the Public Policy Institute of California estimates that “Although one-third of prisons are at least 10 miles from fire zones, the other two-thirds are near or inside them. Six prisons lie in close proximity to high or very high risk zones.” In 2020, women at the Coffee Creek Correction Facility were evacuated to a neighboring prison as smoke filled the air, putting them at high risk for Covid exposure in the already overcrowded facility where they landed. As temperatures rise due to climate change, prisons have become death traps for the people inside them: Jerome Murdough “baked to death” when temperatures in his cell at Rikers reached 100 degrees. He had been arrested on trespassing charges for sleeping in a stairwell while unhoused.
The Oregon State Correctional Institution near Salem, Ore., on Sept. 8, 2020. The prison was one of the prisons evacuated because of wildfires. Provided / Oregon Department of Corrections
Not to be the person who is like “read a book,” but a book that majorly shaped my emotional capacity for crisis response over the past year was A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit. Written in 2010, it covers a number of historical crises and the ways that mutual aid networks sprung up to meet the immediate needs following it, as well as the ways that police, the military, and nonprofit organizations displaced those networks, often violently putting down people working to distribute aid. The book debunks much of the “looter” mythology and the specter of chaos and lawlessness that haunts our historical imagination of such crises. (Every negative GoodReads review of it: “Solnit hates police!”)
Pay attention: Who is demanding you continue to show up to work even as your city is evacuating? So many LA friends were expected to still accomplish their work remotely as they tried to find clearer air to breathe. Who is manufacturing alternative villains (like “looters”) to distract from the real responsible parties (like ICE, who were reported detaining people along evacuation routes)? What entities are swooping in to undo the hard-built networks of mutual aid that are getting immediate help to people who need it most? Who already knows how to tap in after building networks of aid for other ongoing reasons? Who is ignoring the problem entirely? A memory that haunts me is from the summer that smoke from Canadian wildfires turned New York City’s skies orange and thick, and I saw people outside, maskless, eating pizza at sidewalk tables.
I’ve linked two important pieces of writing below; one from KL Mays on surviving fires in the Bay Area, and one from Brandon Sward on mutual aid following the LA Fires. I highly recommend reading both.
Workshops/Classes/Screenings Coming Up:
Wednesday, February 12th: Fire Divination with KL Mays and Alice Sparkly Kat - a fundraiser for the LA wildfires
Tuesday, February 4th: Closing the Last Penal Colony: Screening and Panel with Edwin Santana and the Rikers Public Memory Project
Also recommended: Insurgencies/Counterinsurgencies: a Conversation on Aesthetics, Archives, and Autonomy with Shellyne Rodriguez and Orisanmi Burton (YouTube recording)
Some reading:
Keep it Political: On Los Angeles Fire Mutual Aid by Brandon Sward
fire szn : what happens when you survive? by KL Mays
“You're Not Defeated as Long as You're Resisting”: Palestinian Hunger Strikes between the Singular and the Collective: An Interview with Lena Meari
The Tickling of the Bulls: A Rodeo at Madison Square Garden by Jasper Nathaniel
Ralph’s Beach Parties: In Which The Past Is Also Present interview by J Wortham
General Media:
I just checked the Shotgun Seamstress anthology out of my local Brooklyn Public Library branch and impulsively also got Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces.
I’m also slowly savoring The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise by Olivia Laing (the UK cover is more beautiful IMO). Laing quoting artist Ian Hamilton-Finlay: “some gardens look like retreats but they are actually an attack.”
Bad Bunny’s newest album DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS has a chokehold on me, like it does on everyone I know. NUEVAYoL makes me long for the summertime and offers a sonic respite from the heaviness of winter we are all slogging through here in the city.
Already getting tickets to see Paint Me A Road Out of Here at Film Forum. The documentary tells the story of Faith Ringgold’s work “For The Women’s House” from Rikers Island to the Brooklyn Museum.
Also dying to see the wide release of Los Frikis, based on a true story of punks in early 1990s Cuba.