hunger games post #2: katniss, race and casting

So, not surprisingly, The Hunger Games is gonna be a movie. And since THG has already developed a substantial (and, judging by writing style, I'd guess mostly teenage) online fandom, that means that the fantasy casting mill is already grinding away, despite the film deal being still in its infant stages.

As I've been poking around for interesting Hunger Games-related stuff on the interwebs, I've noticed a disturbing trend. In the majority of fantasy-casting and fan art that I've found, Katniss Everdeen, the protagonist of The Hunger Games, has mysteriously become white.

The whole question of how race operates in the world of The Hunger Games is pretty interesting in itself. The books take place several hundred years into the future, after who knows what has happened to the population of North America. And also people can dye their bodies green and stuff. So there's no reason to assume people in Panem think about race in remotely the same way we do today. Many of the geographic and ethnic labels we currently use to identify race probably have no meaning in this world, since countries and even continents may no longer have the same names.

But given the general overall trend toward increased migration to and from increasingly diverse parts of the world, and a general relaxing of taboos against interracial marriage (unless of course you live in Louisiana), it seems a reasonable assumption that a future North America would contain more people of mixed race and fewer people who could be clearly identified as white.

Katniss and her best-friend-maybe-boyfriend Gale, who both grew up in the Seam, the poorest part of District 12, are described in the book as having "straight black hair, olive skin, [and] gray eyes." (On a side note, I'm pretty sure black hair + olive skin + gray eyes is a fairly statistically improbable phenotype, since gray eyes are produced by the same gene as blue eyes and tend to be more common in light-skinned, light-haired people.)

I've always pictured Katniss looking sort of Native American, maybe like a teenage version of Tonantzin Carmelo:

If you pictured her as looking sort of Latina you're probably not that far off either. The point is that Katniss, Gale, and most of the people of the Seam seem clearly (to me at least) not white.

The world of Panem, as I noted in an earlier post, has many features in common with the world of European colonialism (and slavery--we'll get to that.)* One of these is that there is a pigmentocracy in District 12. The people of the "merchant class," to which Katniss's mother, and Katniss's other potential love interest Peeta, belong, are described as having blond hair and blue eyes, while the poorer coal mining families of the Seam are dark-haired and dark-skinned.

And yet in the vast majority of fan art and fan casting, Katniss is depicted as having brown hair and light skin (and often looking about 30, but that's another issue). And while the casting suggestions have ranged from intriguing (Ellen Page--did you see her in Hard Candy?) to atrocious (Megan Fox. Um...WTF?) they have been 99% white. (Although I have to say the suggestion of Hugh Laurie as Haymitch made me laugh out loud.)

Even more disturbing is what's happening to the characters from District 11. District 11 is a plantation. If you didn't pick up on the not-too-subtle hints toward this in The Hunger Games, it's made explicit when Katniss and Peeta go there in Catching Fire. All the characters we get to know from District 11 are Black. Rue, the little girl with whom Katniss makes a heartbreakingly brief alliance in The Hunger Games, is described as having "dark brown skin and eyes." And yet somehow white Rue has popped up a few times too.

I'm pretty sure the British cover of The Hunger Games, which is otherwise very cool, is to blame for some of the whitewashing.

(By the way, this all reminds me very much of the controversy over the US cover of Liar, by Australian YA author Justine Larbalestier, which you can read about here and here. As a matter of fact, read her whole blog. She is a damn smart lady who has a lot of great things to say about race, gender and representation in YA literature.**)

But I'm also not entirely convinced that all the fans out there have seen the British cover. I kind of think they're doing this whitewashing on their own.

To me, the most disturbing thing is when fans say something like "That's how I always imagined that character looking!", when it's very clearly not how they are described in the book. If it were just Hollywood doing the whitewashing, I wouldn't be surprised. That's par for the course. Hollywood has spent most of its existence whitewashing the moving image, and it goes far beyond the really obvious stuff like blackface. (Alec Guinness is an Arab! Charlton Heston is Mexican! To name just two examples I can think of off the top of my head.) But the idea that fans themselves--who have actually read the book, which may not be the case for a Hollywood exec--are imagining all the characters as white, when they are very clearly not described that way, is something I find kind of frightening.

And yet, in a certain sense, I realize it is Hollywood doing the whitewashing, by constantly and overwhelmingly presenting images of whiteness, assuming white is neutral, and therefore implicitly (or explicitly) short-circuiting the careers of talented non-white actors. Is it really that surprising, in today's media world, that when asked to name half a dozen actors who can play a tough sixteen-year-old girl, almost all the choices are white? Life ain't easy for actors of color, and it's even harder for actors who don't fit into an easily-identifiable racial box. I don't have to go on about the obstacles for non-white actors in Hollywood--which are of course related to the obstacles faced by writers, directors and producers of color as well--and are as ubiquitous as the fact that if you don't specify a character's race in a script, they are universally assumed to be white. (I do, however, recommend this excellent article from Racialicious, which deals with the matter far more eloquently that I have done so far.)

This issue has been of particular concern to me of late since I'm writing a script, Gaza Sunrise, with a biracial protagonist, Moira Shaheed, who's the child of an Irish mother and a Palestinian father. In the script, Moira is described as being able to pass for white. In my mind, that is not the same as being white.

I picture Moira looking quite a lot like Lubna Azabal looks in Paradise Now.

She's fairly light-skinned, and probably has naturally curly hair like most Arabs, but straightens it and maybe highlights it a little to make herself look whiter. If you saw her on the street in Marseilles, where she lives at the beginning of the script, you might assume she was Italian or Spanish.

Okay, so technically Moira is half white. But the life experience that defines her is not that of a white European, but of a Palestinian refugee. And I know I would be goddam pissed if a white actor ever got cast in that role. (I'm hoping to circumvent this with the fact that the script is 90% in Arabic...unless someone decides to make it in English...don't get me started on that.) But do you know how many casting suggestions involving white actors I've gotten? Including Natalie Portman, who was BORN IN ISRAEL.

As for who will play Katniss, I have to say I think the chances of her being whitewashed are pretty high. I will probably be happy if they don't cast someone who looks 30. Which brings me back to Ellen Page, one of the few young actresses out there who I think could actually rock Katniss's non-feminine gender expression. Which is the subject of my next post.

But if Rue turns out to be played by Abigail Breslin, I'm boycotting.

*Actually, if you think of Panem as the product of a society that's collapsed, and is now re-forming itself by going through a process of primitive accumulation, the presence of social structures that resemble slavery and colonialism kind of makes sense.
**She also has footnotes on her blog! I want to learn to do this! Because I'm a giant nerd.

oppression and resistance in the hunger games

Do you remember, my fellow degenerates, how I mentioned The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins's delightfully grim and violent post-apocalyptic dystopia, as the book I had to hide in my closet because I was afraid that once I started reading it I could not put it down?

Well, I caved. I started reading it, and I was right. I couldn't stop. I was totally hooked. And despite the million tons of work I had to do that did not involve reading young-adult fiction, I devoured the combined 800 pages of The Hunger Games and its sequel, Catching Fire, in a matter of days.

I think there is an enormous amount to be said about The Hunger Games, and I've been able to find far less serious and insightful commentary on these books as I would have expected. I plan to make up for that with several blog posts, starting now.

What makes The Hunger Games so awesome? I think it's really not very different than what makes Harry Potter awesome, which is that underneath the fantastical and/or futuristic trappings is a really great resistance story that feels utterly and totally authentic.

The Hunger Games trilogy (the third book is due out next fall) is set several hundred years in the future, when the present-day nations of North America have collapsed, to be replaced with Panem, a brutal dictatorship controlled by the rich and technologically advanced Capitol. (I totally thought Colorado Springs, too!) The Capitol rules over twelve impoverished Districts in what is basically an old-school colonial relationship, complete with single-industry extraction economies, but maintained with all the terrifying technology of modern warfare. (Sound familiar?) Some seventy-five years before the start of our story, the Districts rebelled against this state of affairs. The rebellion was crushed. One District, 13, was wiped completely off the map. As punishment and an ongoing reminder of the Capitol's power, the remaining twelve Districts are forced once a year to send two of their children, one boy and one girl, to compete in a bloody fight to the death broadcast to the whole nation on live TV.

The selection of competitors, or "tributes," is supposed to be random, but in reality, there's a poverty draft--you can put your name in the lottery extra times in exchange for meager food rations for you and your family. If you are between the ages of twelve and eighteen, you can also volunteer to take the place of someone else who is chosen--which is exactly what Katniss Everdeen, the book's 16-year-old protagonist, does when her 12-year-old sister Prim is selected for the Games.

The first book follows Katniss, a hard-bitten and refreshingly ungirly heroine, as she competes in, and survives, the seventy-fourth Hunger Games. The Hunger Games are supposed to be a display of the Capitol's unlimited power, and by refusing to play by their rules, Katniss (mostly unwittingly) provides a spark that sets off what could very well be the beginning of a revolution in Panem. Catching Fire explores the consequences of Katniss's actions as the rebellion she never intended to start spreads and the Capitol's response threatens pretty much everyone and everything she loves.

So many things about this formula could so easily be cliched. It's Battle Royale, The Running Man, a gladiator game, a critique of reality TV, and the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur all thrown into a big pot. And yet somehow, Collins makes it work, and creates something brutal and scary and real and utterly compelling.

I have a writing teacher who is fond of telling us to exercise our inner sadist--meaning, figure out what will really hurt your characters, what their worst fears are, and then make them confront that. Well, let's just say that Suzanne Collins's inner sadist is ready for a marathon. (This is extra hilarious since she looks like a Girl Scout leader.) I'm someone who reads about torture in my spare time--it takes a lot to make me shudder when reading a book. In Catching Fire, Collins managed it three times.* She has a masterful understanding of the dynamics of oppression and resistance, and has created a chilling dystopia on par with the worlds of 1984 and The Handmaid's Tale. She gives her characters true horrors to face, and face them they do, and it's riveting.

Much of The Hunger Games deals with what it's like to grow up in a world that is unrelentingly violent--not just the obvious violence of the Capitol's heavily-armed police force (in a wonderful irony, they're called Peacekeepers), but the more insidious violence of generations of poverty, starvation, hard labor, restriction of movement and severely limited opportunities.

Katniss is a survivor, and Collins really reckons with what that means in a world like Panem. Since her father was killed in a mining accident when she was twelve, Katniss has kept herself, her mother and little sister Prim from literally starving to death by hunting illegally in the woods outside her home in District 12. She has grown up driven by a single-minded mission to keep her family alive, and has ruthlessly suppressed any emotion, dream or desire inside herself that does not aid that mission--to the point that she is hardly even capable of understanding her own feelings when they don't concern the immediate survival of those she loves.

The Hunger Games explores, with remarkable insight, how and why people resist oppression in conditions where the price of doing so is staggeringly high. The power of the Capitol is fearsome; its use of violence and state terror is calculated, deliberate, overwhelming and unforgiving. As I read The Hunger Games, a phrase from the Goldstone report, documenting Israeli war crimes in Gaza, kept running through my head: "deliberately disproportionate." Everything the Capitol does is deliberately disproportionate, and the Hunger Games themselves are the perfect example. They are a massive, public, indefinite form of collective punishment. The message couldn't be clearer: resist once, and we will punish all of you, forever, in the cruelest way we can imagine.

And yet the people of Panem do resist, in a thousand different ways, many of which are symbolic and almost all of which are, by necessity, nonviolent. My friend Madeline has written a splendid post about The Hunger Games as an exploration of what nonviolent resistance means in a violent world, and what she has to say is right on, so I don't feel the need to repeat it here. But suffice to say that in a world where the Capitol claims to have absolute control, even purely symbolic acts of resistance can take on enormous power. A salute, a song, flowers, a painting, a loaf of bread, a dress, the act of holding hands with someone you've been told is supposed to be your enemy--all these seemingly mundane things become potent weapons against the Capitol.

One of the things that Collins really nails is the way in which unbearable conditions drive people to resist despite the risks of doing so. The opening chapters of Catching Fire, in particular, beautifully capture the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" logic of oppression. Even if someone in the Districts "behaves" and slaves away uncomplainingly for her entire life, she'll still be oppressed from the day she is born until the day she dies. If the choice is between doing nothing and being oppressed and resisting and being oppressed, on balance, sometimes resistance just feels better. At least it gives you a chance to feel like you're doing something other than passively accepting your own subjugation.

At the beginning of Catching Fire, Katniss is jumping through hoops set up by super creepy President Snow (who has been "president," we learn, for at least 25 years), trying to control the rebellion she has unintentionally unleashed and avoid violent reprisal against her loved ones. At a key point in the book, she realizes that nothing she can do will ever satisfy the Capitol. She can't win by playing by their rules, because the game is fixed in their favor. The realization is terrifying, but also oddly liberating--it means, Katniss reflects, that "I am free to act as desperately as I wish."

Once Katniss decides she's down with the rebellion (although she still doesn't understand quite what that means), she must face the reality that not just she herself, but everyone around her may be punished for her defiance. She decides that she is capable of facing arrest, torture, and death at the hand of the Capitol--after all, she's already had to face these possibilities in the Games. But the idea of her family, particularly her younger sister Prim, being hurt because of her actions paralyzes her with terror.

I need only to think of Prim and all my resolve disintegrates. It's my job to protect her.... I can't let the Capitol hurt Prim.

And then it hits me. They already have. They have killed her father in those wretched mines. They have sat by as she almost starved to death. They have chosen her as a tribute, then made her watch her sister fight to the death in the Games. She has been hurt far worse that I had at the age of twelve.

Prim...Rue...aren't they the very reason I have to try to fight? Because what has been done to them is so wrong, so beyond justification, so evil that there is no choice? Because no one has the right to treat them as they have been treated?

Yes. This is the thing to remember when fear threatens to swallow me up. What I am about to do, whatever any of us are forced to endure, it is for them.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

I realize I've already written quite a lot, and haven't even scratched the surface of some of the many other interesting elements of these books. There is so much to say about Katniss as a heroine and a narrator, and about the Games themselves as social commentary, that I feel at least one more blog post is in order here. And goddam, I haven't even mentioned what I think about Team Gale vs. Team Peeta. (Short answer: silly marketing gimmick engineered by Scholastic.)

There is so much fantastic stuff in these books about the dynamics of how and why people fight back, how the daily insults and humiliations and degradations of oppression build up inside people until they explode, how acts of violent repression are just as likely to propel people forward into struggle as backward into fear, how people move from the instinctive resistance necessary for survival to the organized resistance of revolutions, and the often bitter and brutal choices they must make along the way. Collins has set herself a very high bar for the third book, and I have to admit I'm just a tiny bit nervous about whether she will be able to live up to the truly radical conclusions of her own story. But I certainly know I'm dying to find out.

*In case you've read the books and were wondering, the three shudder-inducing moments for me were: pretty much everything in District 11, Gale's encounter with the new Head Peacekeeper, and that bit with the jabberjays, which is just about the most horrible thing I can imagine.

the rock-throwing instinct

The quintessential image of Palestinian resistance is a kid facing down an Israeli tank with nothing but a rock in his hand.

This is, of course, a symbolic act. No one thinks a rock is going to damage a tank. But rock-throwing, usually by children, has become a ritualized form of resistance in the Occupied Territories.

In class, I tried to explain why parents might allow, or even encourage, their children to throw rocks at soldiers who can, and often do, respond with lethal force. "Don't they realize they can get shot?" someone asked.

The answer is yes, of course. But the fact is that you can get shot doing almost anything in the Occupied Territories: crossing a checkpoint, going to school or work, participating in a nonviolent protest, riding in an ambulance, even attending a funeral. And if you spent your life dealing with the fact that you could get shot while just minding your own business, well, you might feel like you don't have that much to lose from throwing a few rocks.

When fighting a militarily superior force, part of what you are really fighting is your own fear. It takes guts to stand up against someone who seems much stronger than you. Occupiers everywhere are aware that they rule not just by violence, but by terror. Fear is a very effective means of social control, often more efficient than brute force. You don't have to kill or maim if you can terrify a population into submission.

It seems to me that rock-throwing is not really about the rock, or the tank (or the soldier, APC, Humvee, checkpoint, bulldozer, whatever). It's about learning to control fear.

Note that learning to control fear is not the same as not having fear. The Israeli military machine is fucking scary. Shit, anyone who's been to a big demonstration knows that American riot cops can be pretty scary, even when you're reasonably certain they won't shoot at you with live ammunition. But learning not to be intimidated by superior force is an essential part of resistance.

In the Occupied Territories, it's also a basic life skill. Just going about your daily business involves having to interact with armed, hostile soldiers. In order not to be completely paralyzed, you need to be capable of managing your own fear. This is what children are learning when they go out to throw rocks.

Of course, the fact that fear management is a skill Palestinian kids need to develop at ten or twelve is pretty grim when you stop and think about it. But I think there's more to rock-throwing than that. When kids throw rocks, they're not just learning survival skills; they're learning resistance.

There is something about rock-throwing that seems to encapsulate a very deep-seated human impulse. It's an expression of the reflexive desire not to be ground down, to resist oppression on principle, to fight back even when it seems nothing can be gained. It's a way of being able to stand up to power and say, "No, fuck you, I won't submit. I won't grovel just because you're stronger, and if the only thing that gets me is my dignity, then so be it."

As always, there is a price to be paid for resistance. Rock-throwing is, to this day, an arrestable offense in the Occupied Territories. (And, let's be clear, if you're Palestinian, arrest means torture.) During the First Intifada in the late '80s, it was common practice for Israeli soldiers to break the fingers of children caught throwing rocks. And of course, soldiers frequently respond to rocks with tear gas, rubber bullets, and live ammunition. For a symbolic act of resistance, the price is high.

But the price of doing anything in the Occupied Territories is high. And everyone who ever won anything started out by fighting back "on principle," at a time when actual victory seemed impossible. It's the rock-throwing instinct that compelled four Black college students to sit down at a Woolworth's lunch counter, that drove drag queens to kick the NYPD out of the Stonewall Inn, and that sent hundreds of thousands of young Iranians into the streets earlier this summer.

Is this a good thing to teach your children--to stand up and fight back, to claim your dignity even when people are trying to crush you? Well, I wouldn't tell you how to raise your kids, but I certainly think so.

an image of resistance

I recently discovered this picture on a Facebook friend's profile, and instantly fell in love with it, because it seems to me to encapsulate so many things about the Palestinian struggle, and about asymmetric warfare in general. On one side, you have overwhelming military force; on the other, nothing but solidarity and defiance: a face-off between two kinds of power, staged at that ubiquitous symbol of occupation, the checkpoint.

The photograph is by Ryuichi Hirokawa, a Japanese photojournalist who has been photographing war zones for over four decades, and was one of the first journalists to get into Sabra and Shatila after the massacre whose anniversary was commemorated this week. Hirokawa has been interested in Palestine ever since 1967, when he went to work on a kibbutz in Israel as a young student, only to discover that it had been built on the ruins of a destroyed Palestinian village.

Although the black and white printing gives this photo a timeless quality, it was in fact taken in 2002, at Al Ram checkpoint in the West Bank. Hirokawa writes about the circumstances under which it was taken here, in yet another awesome feature I've discovered on The Guardian's website.

so that is a sonic boom.

Sometimes you don't quite understand things until you experience them for yourself, and thus internalize them. Here is a small example.

I was in the middle of writing a post about 9/11 when what sounded like some kind of explosion rattled all the doors and windows of my apartment building, which is about as soundproof as a cardboard box. It sounded like something HUGE being dropped on the roof, and perhaps simultaneously in the first floor hallway below me. I knew it was too abrupt to be an earthquake. The interwebs quickly informed me it was a sonic boom from the space shuttle Discovery reentering Earth's atmosphere on its way to land at Edwards AFB.

Of course all my SoCal friends were soon Facebooking and Twittering about it. Most people's first thought was "earthquake." But at least one friend, who is from Lebanon, had a different first thought: "Israelis."

I immediately thought of the notes my Gaza blogrades had written about the weeks after the war, when Israeli planes would fly over Gaza, deliberately breaking the sound barrier over populated areas. This happened in Lebanon after the 2006 war as well. I've heard this practice called "simulated bombing" or "phantom air raids." It's not bombing, but it sounds like it. (And, you might add, feels like it, because the blast wave is forceful enough to be felt in your chest cavity, like being close to fireworks or the amp at a rock concert.)

Of course the only imaginable purpose of this practice is to terrorize people. It's intentional triggering of whatever fresh post-traumatic stress these very same planes have recently created. Imagine if you'd very recently spent weeks living in terror of those sounds: the incoming roar of a low-flying plane, the deep boom of explosions that are felt as much as heard. To you those become the sounds of death, of grief, of helpless, mortal fear. Yeah, a sonic boom would have scared the crap out of me in such a situation.

Like so many things the IOF does, which seem to have no possible rationale other than deliberate torture, I have to wonder: Who thinks up this shit?

knowledge shock

So, classes have started, which means I am back to discussing Gaza Sunrise, the feature I wrote last semester, with a large number of people who may know and believe very many different things about Palestine. And it's weird. It was weird last semester, but after having actually been to Palestine, it's now extra weird.

I've been so immersed in this world for so long that I sometimes forget that many Americans (usually through no fault of their own) do not know a single accurate thing about Palestine. They may not even know that Israel was founded by expelling three-quarters of a million people to create a European-Jewish majority state in an Arab-Muslim majority land. I think this is a pretty important piece of information for understanding the current situation. In fact, one might say it is actually the WHOLE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM. And yet it's history that many--perhaps even most--Americans don't know, and that Israel is consciously trying to suppress.

Add to this a whole slew of other misinformation or lack of information about history and current events, consciously or unconsciously held prejudices against Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians, confusion about who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed or just lack of admission that there is an oppressor and oppressed in the situation, incorrect or zero information about the various political actors and forces involved, and...well, you can see where I'm headed with this.

It leads to conversational difficulties. I'll admit I haven't quite got a good strategy worked out for dealing with this problem yet. It's rather like trying to have a conversation about how to best sautee a fish when your conversation partner thinks the fish is an orange.

The result is that I'm experiencing a repeat of the same feeling I had immediately after leaving Gaza. It wasn't culture shock, exactly (although seeing a European tourist with her ass literally hanging out of her short-shorts at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo was culture shock.) I'll call it knowledge shock.

I am trying to do as much patient explaining as humanly possible, since I do not think it's most people's fault that they are uninformed or misinformed, and after all that is a large part of why I went to Gaza--to be able to patiently explain and show and convince with greater authority because I can say "I have seen it." But it's not as easy as you might think.

The problem is that the patient explaining gets all complicated by the fact that I've developed a staggering, really almost frighteningly powerful, degree of emotional identification with the Palestinians and such an intrinsic, reflexive, visceral hatred of Zionism and the Israeli state that it's very hard not to get angry and want to scream "DON'T YOU SEE? DON'T YOU SEE WHAT'S HAPPENING?!" in the process of the patient explaining. Because whenever I start talking, all the atrocities and cruelties and injustices start rushing to the surface, and there are so, so many of them, and I feel them all so intensely, that it gets overwhelming and I become inarticulate.

I realize this is something I'll have to get over, because I don't think I'll stop talking about Palestine any time soon. I must figure out ways to bridge the knowledge chasm, because my knowledge is useless if it stays in my head.

I also realize that all this is bound up with the other reason I went to Gaza, the reason I couldn't quite articulate, which was to be somewhere where I did not feel like this. I struggled for months after returning from Gaza to explain this to people who didn't instinctively get it, to explain why being in Gaza brought with it such an enormous sense of relief, why Gaza felt more like home than possibly any place I've ever been in my life. Then I read Alice Walker's piece for Electronic Intifada, which was titled, perfectly, "The best place one could be on Earth." It opens with these words:

Coming "home" to Gaza

Rolling into Gaza I had a feeling of homecoming. There is a flavor to the ghetto. To the Bantustan. To the "rez." To the "colored section." In some ways it is surprisingly comforting. Because consciousness is comforting. Everyone you see has an awareness of struggle, of resistance, just as you do. The man driving the donkey cart. The woman selling vegetables. The young person arranging rugs on the sidewalk or flowers in a vase....

As I read her article, I started crying, not just because it was beautifully written and moving, but because she was saying everything I had been trying to say and been unable to. Well, I guess that's why she has a Pulitzer Prize and I do not.

I also realize one other thing, which is that this feeling of extreme dissociation, of knowledge shock, must be exactly what Palestinians living in diaspora feel every day of their lives. Which makes me entirely understand why people might want to stick to their own communities, or not be engaged in politics, or go back and live in their homelands, because in certain ways it's just easier. I think I would explode with frustration if I had to live every day like this.

fiyaaa!

If you have checked the news in the past week or so you probably know that a large portion of Los Angeles County is on fire.

The fires are about 20 miles away from where I live, and, as far as I know, not expected to threaten urban Los Angeles. But they did produce this weird cloud with a pure-white broccoli top directly over downtown Los Angeles this afternoon, which I have learned is called a pyrocumulus cloud. Wikipedia tells me that it is produced by the same atmospheric mechanism as a mushroom cloud. Disasters are so fascinating from a safe distance!

On Vimeo, a filmmaker named Eric Spiegelman has created two time-lapse videos of the fires. They are kind of weirdly beautiful if you forget, you know, that that shit can kill you and destroy everything you own and such.

Yet another reason I'm never living in the Los Angeles County exurbs!

Time Lapse Test: The Station Fire from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.

Time Lapse Test: Station Fire from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.