Pod stardom and nature in Los Angeles
Hello friends! It’s me, features director, journalist and now podcast star! OK, I’ve just spoiled the news bit. So…
News
That podcast I talked about guesting on back in November has gone live! I am very used to listening to my own voice when I transcribe my interviews (of which I’ve done no fewer than six this week), but I still haven’t quite ventured to listen back to this yet. Check it out here and let me know how it went!
ALSO: really, I did six interviews this week, my AI transcribing software is exhausted and so am I. BUT it will all be worth it when the mag on-sale date rolls round in March.
AND: I’m so excited about the new issue of ELLE Australia but it’s not on sale till Monday, so I can’t tell you about it. But it’s truly, truly epic and features so many amazing women. I’ll post it on Instagram on Sunday night!
Also news this week: ELLE’s sales are up 57.5%, which was a lovely boost for a Monday. If you buy the mag, thank you!
What I’m reading
I do love some urban nature and so does William L. Fox. I was about to say confidently that I read about him in Robert MacFarlane’s Underland, but I just checked the index and he’s not in it, so who knows where I found him. Anyway, I ordered his book Making Time: Essays on the Nature of Los Angeles, and he is, as I’d hoped, fascinating on urban nature.
I love the idea of a book about nature and time in LA - it must be one of the most ahistorical, future-focused, built-up, artificial places in the world (at least it seemed that way when I was there), and yet there’s millions of years of history oozing up under its inhabitants’ feet. And quite literally oozing up, in the case of the La Brea tar pits.
I had no idea there were oil wells literally on the streets of LA, disguised as office buildings or screened by landscaping. Schools and apartment buildings and even the fancy shopping centre The Grove are all built on top of old oil fields whose wells have been capped - securely, everyone hopes. Of course, if you look at Hollywood’s rich history of disaster movies, screenwriters are well aware of the dangers nature poses to the city. They’ve flooded and burned and shattered LA with earthquakes a million times over for our entertainment. The 1997 movie Volcano was partly filmed along Fox’s street, which prompts some observations on the connections writers have always made between nature and culture. (The book is not only a lovely meditation on time and nature in LA, but is also packed with facts: the longest street in LA, Sepulveda Boulevard, is 76 miles long! The Chinese were drilling wells for natural gas by 211BC!)
In classic essay style, Fox takes a simple subject, such as the antennae that cluster on every mountaintop in the county, and uses it as a launchpad for a discussion of related topics. In this case, he moves into a brief history of astronomy, which then forms part of an exploration of the collision of nature and culture that is the electromagnetic spectrum, which, he notes, is just air that’s carved up and sold for everything from radio to weather radar, remote-controlled military weapons and microwaves. And he visits his great-grandmother’s grave in the fabled Forest Lawn Cemetery, eternal home to many a departed luminary - his great-grandmother lies next to 1930s movie star Jean Harlow. He contemplates the comparisons between graveyards and landfill, both cultivated landscapes, and ponders why we don’t feed back energy from cremations to the national grid. Which somehow sparks a reflection on the accuracy of atomic clocks and the creation of Greenwich Mean Time. And then he narrows down all this amplitude into a focus on how and why we narrativise our lives, and a suggestion that “To keep ourselves anchored to the natural world, we’re going to have to walk around in human-designed places that ignore nature…” The environment we are creating, he says, is a “network of pipes and wires, tunnels and towers. This is a part of the world we also have to understand in order to retain a sense of time and our collective memory.”
And I haven’t even mentioned the final two essays in the book, which cover horses and Mars rovers and movie effects and how we create memories in place and time. So his interests are eclectic, his arguments winding but focused, and his writing clear and engaging, as befits a poet and prolific author. He is squarely my kind of writer, someone who explores place and art and nature in a huge variety of ways, and this book, although the first, won’t be the last of his that I read.
See you next week!