Looks like this will be a really interesting follow over this year as he rebuilds after the L.A. fires. Studio burned to the ground and literally everything is gone.

 

Make it mobile, like in an RV...

 

I lived in L.A. for 12 years and watched fire eat people's homes, mudslides slip down steep gradings in torrential winter rains and destroy property as well as earthquakes shake buildings into pancakes. The place just isn't stable and can be a dangerous zone to live when in the wrong place at wrong time. It's semi-arid climate means that the chaparral and air is bone dry in the summer, so much so that a particular 100° day I was painting the outside wall of a small structure and the paint was dry from the roller in like 20 seconds which blew my mind. The highways are huge six lane parking lots during rush hour and I have a few times had full body poison oak rashes which lasted weeks and which drove me mad after hiking off trail. I was in charge of catching the rattlesnakes when they showed up on the property where I lived and once had to face off a young mountain lion when it wanted to kill the peacocks and make them a meal in their cage.

I loved it!

 

Last edited: Feb 10, 2025

in 2017 i spontaneously moved out to central coast from the mitten... i found some work on craigslist one day which was to remove brush and plants from this house's yard that was on little mountainside because of the fire regulations...i was covered in poison oak for like my first 4 weeks out there it sucked so bad
Then i remember when there was a wildfire in Nipomo which was prolly half hour to an hour south of me , it would literally rain ash and super hazy..yeah cali aint the place i thought itd be i only stayed 4 months lol ... also way expensive and overcrowded. sunshine is cool tho

 

That's why I'd rather live in Island than California.

 

Bob Clearmountain, L.A. studio icon, lost his home in the Palisades fire

“I look at it as a challenge, the next chapter,” he said. “I can’t really look back. I can’t spend too much time being bummed out about it. I’ve got to say, ‘OK, what can I do?’ I’m going to change the style of what I do. I’m gonna do what I do, but do it differently, and hopefully it’ll be good, maybe better than what I was doing. That’s all I can think right now.”

He worries about other studios and home recording sites that don’t have his resources to rebuild elsewhere. The lives and homes lost are innumerable and devastating, but the cultural loss and inability of musicians to work is part of the tragedy as well.

Source: www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2025-01-10/bob-clearmountain-l-a-studio-icon-lost-his-home-in-the-fire-this-was-the-end-of-our-world

 

I know personally 10+ people who lost everything. More than half of those being musicians / producers.

 

Earthquakes, floods, typhoons, tsunamis, fires, thefts and misuse of firearms happen every day in the world.

Nobody is really safe, some are insured, sometimes the state uses tax money to rebuild. Most of the time people lose their entire house, apartment or room and lose everything they own, and sometimes people lose their lives as a result.

It is associated with a lot of suffering and pain, and solidarity, including donations of money, bank loans and a future perspective help those affected to overcome these blows of fate or to alleviate their suffering.

 

THE FLOOD - BX UNDER WATER...

July 15, 2021 marks the end of an era for Brainworx and their iconic studio & office building in Germany (see pics below). As documented by the international media, Germany got hit with the hardest rainfalls and flooding ever, that left hundreds of people dead and whole cities washed away by the rain and the resulting floods. Our hearts go out to the victims and their families and friends, of course.

While none of the Brainworx team was hurt or physically harmed, the company building will be unusable for months to come, as it is located in one of the areas that got hit the hardest. In fact, BX may have to move and find a new home asap to rebuild their offices and studios.

Read more & Pictures: www.plugin-alliance.com/en/blog/blogpost/items/bx-under-water.html

 

I've been through loads of disasters over the years. In this era its much easier to rebuild if we're all virtual, but it still takes time and I think there's a lot of trauma that comes from it, paranoid about the next disaster around the corner.

You get these motivational tutorials that tell us we're procrastinating when we can't get going, but I'm starting to think its more about trauma and a process that we need to go through before things become normal again.

I wonder how many people go through trauma and don't realize what it is, so they just label it 'procrastination' instead?

 

i was born and raised in SoCAl there are 3 seasons in Cali 9 or 10 months a year its the brown season 1 or 2 months a year its green season and all the filler time is Fire Season and yes we have earthquakes but honestly it isn't that much and the little ones are kinda fun. which ill take any day over having every year Tornados/blizzards/Hurricanes and flooding. my former german girlfriend i brought with me for Holiday to SoCal her first time in the staes and like 2 days there we had a roller and she FREAKED out i just LMAO'd and of course she was mad at me we could have died she cried yes yes life threating 5.0 haha its a nice trade off vs anthing else to have warm and sunny for 10 months out of the year

 

Trauma means that the shock was so great that the human mind cannot process it or cannot process it immediately. Many people remain traumatized, some people face the situation or seek therapeutic help and few people are strong enough to simply carry on.

Here in Germany, many were traumatized after the war in 1945 and it was simply repressed, it was so cruel that people usually did not talk about it and if they brought it up, the other person simply ended the conversation.

Some, on the other hand, faced the terrible story and worked through what they had experienced. You cannot subject yourself to all the violence and destruction every day, it is not good for your well-being and sometimes you become depressed yourself.

As long as there is a way out and hope that the situation will improve, you can get through a lot. Thank you for the term procrastination, which means postponing or not solving problems. I think people are hedonists and want to avoid suffering. Hedonists prefer to do things that they enjoy.

In addition, a few are more likely to motivate themselves to solve unpleasant things through willpower. The key word is problems have to be solved. Some people carry these things with them until they die. The psychiatrist says a problem should be solved in 3 days.

I think in smaller communities, earlier tribes, it was much easier to solve problems because everyone belonged to the community and you couldn't escape responsibility. It was also part of survival.

With the advent of modern politics, it also became disempowering and other people dictated what to do. Organizing large masses of people is about religion or politics and laws as well as the military and police.

In theory, people should take responsibility for themselves, but unfortunately it only works if you learned that as a child. If you solved problems yourself as a child, you will be able to do it as an adult.

 

A few questions for the Southern Californian, here in Germany we read about forest fires every year and every year we ask ourselves what they're doing wrong and why they can't get it under control.

California is close to an ocean, why can't they build a seawater desalination plant and use it to provide enough firefighting water and irrigate dry areas. Why can't they create large firebreaks? Why can't they collect and dispose of the old dead wood and the fire accelerants? Is it true that your fire departments are underfunded?

 

It was intentional like Maui. "SMART" cities incoming...

 

We would need real evidence for that. But it appears to be an economic development program, jobs are being retained and new ones created, the economy is taking off. After Germany was bombed, the first 20 years were an era of economic growth.

Only when people had everything - back then a vacuum cleaner lasted 40 years and today vacuum cleaners die one day after the warranty expired - did unemployment begin.

So from a purely economic point of view, you need a war every 20 years or, as in California, a few fires and tornadoes - you could also say that natural disasters are economic development at the expense of those affected.

 

Yea, I had just moved to Topanga when I heard what sounded like an unfathomably huge monster bellowing in pain and moments later every dog and coyote began howling along in a bizarre harmony. It took just a few seconds for the pressure wave to make it south, snaking through the canyon from an aftershock from Northridge which was both maybe the coolest and most frightening thing in the natural world I had ever experienced. When the wave reached the house that I was in the whole structure heaved just once from right to left as I felt it and watched it lurch. My friend also laughed at my freaked out demeanor.

 

I feel your pain brother - I couldn't take it anymore so I flew south to clear my mind. Started looking around for spaces here in Baja but dreading the battles with creditors and insurance etc that await me back home. Feels like the fires burned down my entire central nervous system as well.

 

• seawater desalination plants are a good but impractical idea, and also the technology is atrociously expensive. I'm no expert on this sort of engineering, but land costs already would be so high that taxes would depress the economy - or so I've read. Also, we've no idea where the fires would start. California is a long state (800 miles or 1.220 km), and about 13% larger than Germany. Lastly, it's very mountainous terrain, and a majority of people live and work inland (behind the mountains - California agriculture feeds most of America), so good luck getting the water where you think there might be a fire - and praying it's near a desalination plant. Note: Australia, Greece, and France are also close to oceans and the sea - they too have suffered devastating fires the last few years. Also: Brazil, and Siberia - yearly. This is not a CA issue only, FYI.
  
  
• Why can't they create large firebreaks? Have you been to California? Seen the mountainous and desert terrain for yourself? It's nothing like Germany. California also barely 100 years old, houses built in wood, telephone poles and power lines running wild along streets and highways - it's not technologically advanced like Germany or Japan. When I lived in Asia and I flew back home, I had the feeling of stepping back from the 21st to the 20th century. It's paradoxical for the land of high tech to be archaic like that but high tech is private investments, and infrastructure is public. To give you an idea, we still don't have a high speed train here, from L.A. to SF - a French company was supposed to build it, but there were so many delays that they left the project and built that exact same train in Morocco, from Tangiers to Casablanca I think. Morocco was faster and more efficient and has better rail infrastructure than California now - can you believe it. California's economy is smaller than Germany's ($2.8T vs $3.8T) but California's economy ranks 5th internationally, behind the US, China, Germany, and Japan.
  
  
• Why can't they collect and dispose of the old dead wood and the fire accelerants? There is something called the rule of law here, and as you might've learned from Hollywood films and TV, we are drowning in laws and lawyers. It's all about property: yes there are laws that say you should collect and dispose, but it's up to each town to enforce it. That's not law enforcement, it's FD enforcement, and firefighters are busy saving lives (myself and my wife included - for which we're eternally grateful), even when there are no fires - on every day of the year. So yes, collecting: some people do and did. Many didn't do it. Now, some houses didn't burn because the owners collected, some houses burn in spite of the owners collecting, and some whose owners did not collect, did not burn at all. No one really knows why or how - there are dozens of cases like these. I could tell you about a recording studio that didn't burn, while the house the composer/owner lived in (just a couple dozen meters away) burned to the ground. It is what it is and too long to go into detail here.
  
  
• Is it true that your fire departments are underfunded? I'm thinking that's true in L.A., but by. how much (3% or 13% or 30%) is the question. The fact of the matter is we cannot underfund the Santa Ana Winds. And those were blowing at 160 km/h. That's Hurricane level winds - Grade 2 to be exact. These Palisades and Alta Dena firefighters were facing a dry fiery Hurricane, as opposed to to the wet hurricanes of the Caribbean and typhoons of Asia. That meant there was nothing humans could do in that environment to contain the fire. Couldn't fly aircraft either - even if we'd had 10 x the amount of water. Also, the amount of water available to firefighters through the hydrants are made to contain fires of 1-3 residences, maybe a building. Remember 9-11? Those towers on fire? Did anyone mention how the NYFD was underfunded then? No. They were lauded as heroes, for dying when the towers collapsed. Our LAFD are heroes too, as are those from out of state, and even Mexico (120, plus 20+ helicopters they flew across the border to help their northern neighbors). Canada sent us their Airplanes - all of them I think. So is the LAFD underfunded? I'd say yes. Would it have made a difference considering the hurricane winds? Most of us here think not.

 

I read your article and learned a lot.

I will definitely not build my house there. In other words, my insurance company says we don't insure it because it is a high-risk area.

Well, no money, but the biggest, most expensive military on earth...!

 

Interesting. I think the Bureaucrats haven't helped things from an outside perspective but generally its a good point that the high winds made it impossible to tackle the fires. I've had my building go up in flames, tumble dryer. I struggled to get near the fire because of the smoke but I put the fire out and then it went up again because of 70mph winds, nothing like those L.A. fires. Sounds valid from my experience.

I don't think the ground troops can be faulted because of lack of funds etc but sometimes you need to make tough decisions and it sounds like some really dumb ones were made higher up in emptying out the water reserves, however true all of that is. One story is that they redirected the water to save some fish, which sounds insane to me. Sounds like they were low on resources, fire trucks etc, rather than underfunded, which no doubt added to things.