RIDE OR DIE

I ride or die for you L.A.

Los Angeles I ride or die for you.

I ride or die for your sunsets and smog, your freeways, your broken dreams and all your promise. I ride or die for every fucking block of Sunset Boulevard from the Mobil gas station in the Palisades that decades of LA teenagers drank behind all the way East of Figueroa Street where it transitions into Cesar Chavez Avenue.

Four generations and counting of my family have been born in Los Angeles. We just celebrated the birth of our latest addition, my great nephew, on Christmas Day, 2024.

My grandfather Sam Goldwyn came to LA in 1913 to produce the first feature film in Hollywood. Who would have thought that a penniless Polish teenage immigrant turned glove salesman would end up as a founder of an industry that manufactured dreams? In Los Angeles, anything is possible. It is a city of constant reinvention.

But Los Angeles is so much more than the movie business, celebrities and the shit I talk here about influencers and Erewhon.

Growing up, people outside of Cali made fun of my hometown’s rampant pollution but it made for the most beautiful displays of sky as the sun set. They said I came from a place with no history but didn’t know the city existed long before it was captured on film.

• 1781 Los Angeles was founded as El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula or The Town of Our Lady of Angels of the Porciuncula River.

• 1850s Los Angeles earns the nickname “Los Diablos” due to the high amount of murders (44 murders in 13 months with no convictions).

• February 1881 Snow falls on the streets of Los Angeles.

• December 31^st, 1882 Electric Street lamps are introduced to Los Angeles. Gas companies started an opposition campaign claiming that electric light attracted bugs, contributed to blindness and had a bad effect on ladies complexions. The lamps are not operated on moonlit nights due to complaints.

• 1884 The City of Los Angeles pays 50K to Colonel Griffith J. Griffiths for his rights to Los Angeles River water.

• 1887 Ranch owner and prohibitionist Harvey Wilcox founds “Hollywood.”

• 1887 The real estate craze begins in earnest in Los Angeles.

• 1888-1890 Heavy rains lead to catastrophic flooding.

• 1892 Edward Doheny discovers oil in Los Angeles at the corner of Colton and Patton Streets.

• 1893 The Bradbury building opens at 3^rd Street & Broadway with iron materials from France and the first elevators in Los Angeles.

• 1894 The Pullman strike shuts down railroads across the country while labor riots break out in Los Angeles.

• 1895 The current Wilshire Boulevard is named just west of Downtown.

• 1898 Los Angeles’ first Chinese language newspaper Wah Mei Sun Po goes to print.

• 1898 Los Angeles forms its own symphony (the fifth in the nation).

• 1898 William Mulholland is named the first Superintendent of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

• 1903 William Randolph Hearst establishes the Los Angeles Examiner.

• 1908 Located just over a mile apart, Philippe’s and Cole’s Pacific Electric Buffet each claim to have invented the French Dip sandwich to rave customer reviews.

• 1913 Sam Goldwyn, along with his producing partner and brother in law Jesse Lasky make the first feature film in Hollywood, The Squaw Man. The picture marks the directing debut of their third partner, Cecile B DeMille.

If you grew up in LA, or even in California, you learned earthquake drills in elementary school and were repeatedly told to take short showers and conserve water because we were always in a drought. My mom used to put empty Evian bottles inside the back lid of our toilets to reduce the amount of water filling the tank. My younger brother and I got our allowance from recycling soda cans and newspapers.

Self portrait and the sky during the September 2020 California wildfires, during which over 4,304,379 acres burned.

I thought all LA kids grew up with the looming climate crisis back of mind but I guess not everyone got the memo. In 2021, after (yet another) drought emergency was declared in California and LA residents were allowed to only water gardens twice a week for eight minutes, Kim Kardashian’s water use exceeded about 230,000 gallons and Kourtney Kardashian's went over by about 101,000 gallons. Kourt was in preschool with one of my family members and I know she’s on the wellness bandwagon but this shit is not the RIDE or DIE for LA that I came up in.

Ride or Die means it is time for thinking of US not ME ME ME.

When I say RIDE OR DIE I mean on every level as a motto to live by. As in it’s high fucking time if you haven’t already to prune chop chop inessential superfluous energy sucking time wasting people and things that leave you high and dry. Knowing who your rides or dies are is essential to survive and thrive. If you thought we lived in wild times before, shit is getting REAL in 2025.

Elon is about to be installed in a guest suite at the White House, Meta is done with fact checking, social media is a cesspool full of fake news disinformation and AI generated images designed to sow chaos disruption and divide. Knowing WHO your Ride or dies are and WHAT you ride or die for is more imperative than ever. We all need our value aligned teammates to resist succumbing to fear, anxiety or defeat.

Where ever you live on this planet—get outside the confines of your phone and talk to your neighbors. Talk to your community. Find out who your people are, find out who’s organizing, who’s mobilizing, who’s making sure everybody is taken care of in an emergency. These are our RIDE OR DIE leaders, not people like Rick Caruso who pay private firefighters to protect their luxury real estate (his shopping mall, Palisades Village is known locally as “Privileged Village") while everything around it is reduced to rubble and then engage in finger pointing to advance his political career at a time when unity and support is needed.

Ride or die is a reminder to check in with your ancestors and spiritual guides on another realm as you navigate the twists and turns that life hands us.

Just two days before the fires broke out, I flew out of LAX back to Hawaii to the small town I live in, where memories of Maui’s Lahaina fire in 2023 are very present.

A Hawaiian friend shared with me that growing up on an island in the middle of the Pacific with constant climate crisis (floods, hurricanes, tsunamis) shaped a different mentality about the cycle of life. She said they were always simultaneously celebrating a birth, wedding, and a funeral, coming together in community to grieve, to laugh, to appreciate that life is always going in and out of balance.

I thought of the last two weeks in my own family— a birth on Christmas Day, a family wedding on New Years Eve, and now, a mass funeral for our city.

Last week, on the second day of the fires raging out of control, on my father’s 10 year death anniversary , I cried watching my hometown burn from a screen, helpless for the many members of my family in various stages of evacuation, for the mounting numbers of close ones who lost everything, for the thousands of strangers who were experiencing the same. I prayed to my grandad and told him about the city he loved where all his dreams were realized and asked for help. I pulled over in the rain (for which I was grateful after 2 months of dry conditions here) and saw this appear in front of me.

And for a moment I felt there has to be some kind of divine plan of going in and out of balance even if I have no fucking clue what it is or what will happen next or if the air will kill us or the selfish billionaires will. I do know that right now in many places around the world experiencing total devastation they are celebrating funerals, birth and weddings in the midst of rubble so I will cling to that and ride or die for my beloved Los Angeles and us all until it’s my time to go.

xx

For more on the history of LA before the movies:

Sporting Guide: Los Angeles, 1897
by Liz Goldwyn

A brilliantly imaginative, illustrated recreation of an 1890s Los Angeles pocket guide, or "Sporting Guide," to the brothels of the day.

Los Angeles, 1897, When Vice Ruled The City

Long before the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, Los Angeles was a city where dreamers from all over the world came to make their fortunes—where a madam named Pearl Morton entertained the most powerful politicians and entrepreneurs inside her namesake brothel. In a series of haunting, interlinked stories set in the period, author and filmmaker Liz Goldwyn re-creates a “sporting guide”—a secret diary and guidebook of the best brothels and prostitutes in the city. In this world a hushed conversation inside a velvet-lined boudoir could destroy a man, and the rustle of bushes might reveal a sordid assignation. Based on original research in the libraries and archives of Los Angeles, these fictional stories are often inspired by real historical characters—like the laudanum-addicted Cora Phillips, whose tombstone Goldwyn rediscovered, or Bartolo Ballerino, Italian immigrant slumlord of the forgotten red-light district, or thirteen-year-old Frances dreaming of life beyond the Children’s Orphan Asylum. Interspersed in these stories—and featuring over a hundred historical photos and illustrations—Goldwyn reveals the history of the period, from the rage for corsets to crushed pearl powder cosmetics and the awful cures for syphilis. Sporting Guide evokes a lost world of those on the margins of Los Angeles, of the hustlers who made it into one of the great cities of the world, and Goldwyn gives a poignant voice to the people and stories forgotten by time.