YouTube Gold: L.A. Woman

An older look at Los Angeles

It’s really difficult to wrap your head around what’s happened in Los Angeles this week. Fire on this scale seems impossible. You could imagine it in a vast forest but in a modern city?

Inconceivable.

Well, until this week, anyway.

All you can do is to hope it ends soon, and that’s from a distance. We have no idea what the people there are going through emotionally. It’s just overwhelming to see the devastation.

Los Angeles deals with a lot in the popular imagination. You can look at old movies and how they portray it. You can see movies like Chinatown or L.A. Confidential and get a sense of the city from a remove. It’s a mythical place in many ways, somewhat like New York or Paris.

We looked on YouTube and saw this video of the Doors doing L.A. Woman and it has lots of video of the band and the city and the surrounding areas.

The Los Angeles of 2025 is as gone as the Los Angeles of 1971 was. We hope whatever comes next can recapture some of the magic.

Godspeed, L.A.