Photons rattle up through smoke and scatter through the incoming Marine Layer, drafting in off the coast for a night’s stay inland. For 15 minutes, water beads on my skin and backpack and this life-saving moisture condenses into a small lenticular cloud atop the Hollywood sign.
Please consider viewing on a desktop — that’s where the photos look best. On desktop, you can click a photo to open its full-res version… Right click and ‘open image in new tab’ if you really want to explore the scene.’
This is the first in a series of photo collections without my heavy-handed draping of a narrative atop the frames. Since the long paragraphs are gone, I instead invite you to play the linked songs while moving through the images; they’re meant to convey part of the multifaceted sense of place that I’m so obsessed with capturing.
Platzgeist = the haunting, ghostly quintessence of a place. Impossible to capture or contain. Vaporous. Something you can only catch glimmers of out of the corners of your eyes.
The San Gabriel Mountains crash like waves above the city. Pasadena sits between them and the foreground’s hills. Networks of streets, cell towers, and powerlines slither up and over each rise.
It is the only megalopolis in North America which is mentioned in the same breath as Mexico City or Jakarta — a place whose insoluble excesses raise the specter of some majestic, stately kind of collapse.
The West’s real crisis is one of inertia, of will, and of myth.
At some point, perhaps within my lifetime, the American West will go back to the future rather than forward to the past.
The forces involved are comparable to those met by a boy who builds a castle on the sandy ocean beach, next to the water, at low tide… It is not pessimism, merely an objective evaluation, to predict the destruction of the castle.
- Mark Reisner, “Cadillac Desert”
The product of an ongoing revegetation project, the narrows of the LA River - cutting Griffith Park to the left, and Glendale to the right - have sprouted an uncanny ecology. Mats of reeds and cottonwoods paint only an impersonation of nature, hemmed in by concrete gutters.
Many have made its concrete banks their home. They have to work with what’s left for them.
Catastrophic (completely normal) floods rip at the ribcage of palms that pop out of the river bottom. Flotsam along the banks is sporadically spit out to sea, one winter rain at a time.
Intrepid kayakers ford rapids in the Los Angeles River near Frogtown [a vestigial placename]. It is a calm September. Mostly-dry and steady flow. Does the rental business’s checkbook ebb with the region’s sporadic rain?
The City at the Edge of Forever has draped itself over every mountain in sight. Nick tells me that he’s always held a special place in his heart for the smog-choked sunsets of the valley.
The Empire Builder is returning east, climbing steadily through Cajon Pass, north of San Bernardino, and up into the Mojave Desert. Vital corridors like this, and Banning Pass - pictured above - are key linkages to the Asian trade markets which predominantly ship into Long Beach’s ports.
Ash & soot from the 2003 El Dorado Fire settles out of flow along the Santa Clara River’s banks above Redlands. The river resurrects the long-dead smell of smoke, kicked up in spray from rapids along its course.
Lifeguards are the first line of defense along Venice Beach. Tectonics or Riptides may be to blame while drowning.
Old granite domes, the corpses of once-warm blooded magma chambers, are sheared apart near Mt. San Jacinto. The San Andreas crumples up land in this area of the Inland Empire as huge blocks of rock wedge themselves through a tectonic chokepoint.
Jimmy’s family brings me along on a quiet Monday afternoon to play in Mill Creek. Later that week, this same creekbed would be stripped bare by mudflows and flash flooding, taking out the highway as collateral.
Mt. San Jacinto (left) and San Gorgonio (right) face off, on two separate tectonic plates. In center-left of frame, the San Andreas cuts lineaments into the surface as is slowly carries San Jacinto off towards LA. Coachella really is too expensive these days. Ticket insurance should be covering “unforeseen” Acts of God. And COVID.
Sun sets on Mt. San Gorgonio. My mom’s adoration of U2 reminds me that Irishmen should never be shipped to Southern California. They are caught up in far too much philosophizing. I am guilty, just like Bono.
The Malibu Hills are laid bare by the Palisades Fire in Spring 2025. Black Hawk Helicopters survey the coast. It’s a damn windy day, again.
Below the towering slopes of San Jacinto, wind farms catch each gasp of air coming through Banning Pass. Sand drifts over the road into Palm Springs and keeps tempo with the farm’s array of blinking red warning lights.
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