I love Los Angeles. My mom spent her high school years in San Diego, and every time I go anywhere in Southern California, I feel immediately at home. But I especially love LA. I love the sun, I love the palm trees, I love the big weird sprawl of the city. I love the jungly foliage and curly canyons in the hills. I love the art and the bookstores and the burritos. I love the boxy cartoon architecture that looks like it belongs in a Chuck E. Cheese. I don’t even mind the smog. Twice in my life I’ve almost moved here, and sometimes I think I still might.
Being in Southern California amps up the West Coast energy in me that’s normally tempered by Pacific Northwest practicality. When your mom is from California and your dad is from Connecticut, Seattle is a pretty good compromise.
But in LA, I drive with more confidence. I wear a backwards baseball cap like a 1990s Olsen twin. I get blonder and freckly-er. I start believing in ghosts and the power of desert magic. I go to Erewhon for the jokes. It’s just a normal health food store, truly nothing special, but I will say this for Erewhon: It loves storing food and drinks in glass jars even more than I did during the early-2000s new sincerity years. And I will say this for LA: I like being in a city where being beautiful is some people’s job, because it reminds me that it isn’t mine.
In LA at the end of February, struck with the vacation urge to go running, I drove to Mulholland Drive from the midcentury Airbnb in the valley where I was staying with my long-distance BFF Allie, and up the winding road David Lynch made famous (it’s also just where he lives) to Runyon Canyon in a boxy, jerky-but-dependable rental Jeep (we called her Marge, and she reminded me of a highland cow). Halfway to the top of Mulholland, I came to an abrupt stop behind a slow-rolling tour van, as passengers leaned out to take photos. I was annoyed until I saw what they were so excited about: the Hollywood sign, right across from us.
I get it. I love this stuff, too. But this is also what a lot of people hate about LA. The Hollywood of the popular imagination is very different from the actual neighborhood, and it’s easy to lose sight of what makes Los Angeles such a good and weird place when it’s so steeped in the Movie Magic Cottage Industry of studio tours, star maps, and adjacency to fame.
Which is a weird way of saying that I fully participated in this during my visit: We went to the “Midwestern Town” set used in Gilmore Girls, housed on the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank, where we endured hours of WB-branded nonsense as the price of admission. (In fairness to me, this was also a business expense.)
The WB Studio Tour is heavily targeted toward people who want to take photos in front of locations from Friends and gladly listen to wide-ranging discussions of arcane plot points on network TV shows like The Big Bang Theory (never watched it) and Young Sheldon (I genuinely assumed this was an old sitcom from, like, 30 years ago, but it turns out it’s new?). I don’t care about these shows, but the WB hopes that by seeing the sets, I will.
The Studio Tour did not convert me, but when we passed the storefront that plays the role of Luke’s Diner on Gilmore Girls and pulled up in front of the gazebo that’s usually accompanied by the Stars Hollow sign, I was filled with a glee so pure and childlike it made all the minutes we’d wasted watching the WB’s jumbled propaganda reel featuring a lot of Aquaman feel worth it. And when I spotted the house that plays the role of Kim’s Antiques without prompting from our affable tour guide, I was very proud of myself, as if it meant I would be getting the highest grade possible in WB Studio Tour Studies, Gilmore Girls Discussion Section.
“Why do I know this?” I asked Allie, as we gazed up at the house. Like all of the sets, it’s smaller than it looks on TV. We laughed — we were laughing more often than we weren’t throughout this entire experience — but then they had the same shock of recognition at the next building we were herded toward: “It’s Sookie’s house!”
We also saw the Gilmore Girls’ house, albeit from an awkward angle because it’s under construction, and the lake that sometimes appears in Gilmore Girls, which is part of a generic “Jungle” set that’s apparently used in every movie and TV show ever, including Jurassic Park.
But one of the things I was most excited to see is the huge hill that looms over Burbank; you can often see it in the background on shows filmed at Warner Brothers. It’s quite obviously an LA hill—it looks too desert-y for Connecticut, in a way that’s recognizable to anyone who’s hiked in a canyon in Southern California—but it plays the role of a squat New England mountain on Gilmore Girls. It’s the right height for the job, but the texture and vegetation are all wrong. In reality, it’s called Burbank Peak, and I like it because it’s an intrusion of the real LA into the imaginary landscape of Stars Hollow.
In his 2003 cinematic treatise, Los Angeles Plays Itself, Thom Anderson devotes three hours to this kind of intrusion, exploring the tension between the artifice of LA’s film industry and the very real city around it—a city that often stands in for other places both real and imaginary on film, and rarely gets to be itself. But he also argues that incidental sightings of the real LA do show up in movies and TV: It may be forced to play Chicago or New York or Paris, but the real LA can’t ever be fully repressed or disguised. “If we can appreciate documentaries for their dramatic qualities, perhaps we can appreciate fiction films for their documentary revelations,” he says of this dynamic.
Burbank Peak is a perfect example of this, actively imposing its overt LA-ness onto locations that emphatically aren’t supposed to be LA, but are. Stars Hollow isn’t real, but the shells of its buildings inhabit a city with places that are: the midcentury valley post-and-beam tract home where we stayed, with its crumbling garden wall and perfect turquoise swimming pool; the glossy outdoor malls where you can buy the best ice cream of your life or dubious wellness treatments—the choice is yours; and all those hours in traffic on boulevards and busy roads named after canyons, Marge shepherding us safely from Silver Lake to Beverly Hills to Culver City.
In the final days of our trip, we drove to Palm Springs, which is the opposite of the WB Studio Tour, in that it’s a real place that became a movie location. Palm Springs was a model for the set design of Barbie, and between the mountains and palm trees and midcentury architecture, the aesthetic of the city is nearly identical to the one the movie achieved on soundstages: Greta Gerwig just painted it pink and gave it a plastic, swimming pool-colored ocean. In a shop downtown, a friendly man selling overpriced paintings and sunglasses asked us if it was our first visit to the desert. “It’s our first time in this one,” I chirped. Vacation Megan is excitable and sunny.
We stayed 25 minutes outside of Palm Springs in a renovated jackrabbit homestead in the desert. Jackrabbit homesteads are essentially claim shanties, white shacks on five-acre land allotments in the Morongo Basin near Joshua Tree. Under the Small Tract Act of 1938, homesteaders could buy the land for about $10-20 an acre. Many jackrabbit homesteaders were single women who lived alone, and it’s likely many were queer, although the evidence for this is mostly anecdotal. “A long-time lesbian resident refers affectionately to her neighborhood as the ‘gay ghetto,’ a tightly knit community home to many practicing artists who have restored cabins into artist studios and very distinctive creative retreats,” writes Joshua Tree artist Kim Stringfellow of the desert homes that continue to attract artists and musicians looking for an affordable alternative to Los Angeles.
In the desert at night, the sky full of stars, disrupted only by the lights of Palm Springs and the blinking red dots of the alien-like wind farms at the base of the mountains, it was easy to forget the idea or imaginary story of where we were, and to simply experience the place exactly as it was.
In the Morongo Basin, I felt held by the landscape. I felt safe driving steadfast Marge through high winds and clouds of sand, up rough roads and across busy highways. I didn’t mind checking my sandals for critters. I found myself thinking a lot about my family, as if they were there with me. At first, I attributed this feeling to desert magic, something in the air that leads many a Palm Springs vacationer to cry in a hot tub while contemplating the immense, unknowable inner workings of the universe. But I may have been experiencing a less cosmic and more ordinary tie to the landscape: something more like a memory.
One night, I talked to my mom on the phone from the homestead’s windswept side porch. As I looked out at the windmills slicing their metal wings through the air, I told her how much I loved being here, how I felt at home in the desert, how I never wanted another Northwest winter to pass without visiting, and she told me something surprising: It wasn’t my first visit to this desert at all. “We took you camping there when you were a baby,” she said. “You spent your first Christmas in Joshua Tree.”
What I’ve been up to: I’ve been writing less lately because I’m working on editing projects, one with a private writing client and another as an interim editor at a magazine. That’s also my job sometimes: I swoop in at publications during staff absences or big transitions, ask what needs doing, and get it done, like Tina Brown at Vanity Fair, as my friend Sarah very glamorously put it. Except I work from my kitchen table and am not a close personal friend of Dominick Dunne. For my column at the Emerald, I dug into the language we use to talk about abortion and interviewed the founder of a Seattle-based nonprofit that gives kids in public schools free sports bras. I also reported out a story for Crosscut about emerging corporate coverage for doula support at birth.
Media I’ve been consuming: I just finished Laurie Frankel’s novel One Two Three, about teenage triplets navigating adolescence and ideas of justice and retribution in a town ravaged by corporate malfeasance, with fairy tale elements and three lovable narrators. It is a very gentle book, in the best way possible, and a powerful depiction of what it’s like to grow up with a disability or to be the sibling of a child with a disability.
I also recently enjoyed this interview with Ezra Klein, in which he talks about how making mindful decisions around what media you choose to support can impact the health of the media environment. “[W]hen you pay for anything, when you become a member, a subscriber, then you’re really sending a signal to generate more of that thing and not of the other thing,” he says. Media consumption isn’t a passive act, because “we are generators of the internet, we are generators of the media. What we give our time, attention, and money to is what thrives and what doesn’t get it is what dies.”
As a journalist, I find it very depressing when people talk about the death of my professional world as if it’s a forgone conclusion. Reporters and editors are still making good work, and after the failure of business models that never worked in the first place, your support is often what makes our work possible. Readers have an important role to play in keeping media alive, useful, and independent. You know where this is going: If you want more of Burbank Industries and less nonsense from capricious billionaires, upgrade to a paid subscription. (And if you want to do this without supporting Substack, my Venmo username is mburbank — you can pay that way and I’ll add you to the list manually.)
Also, for some reason I felt the need to track down the Landmark Theatres intro that used to play in the Seattle cinemas of my youth (RIP). They speak our language!
A note about this newsletter: It hits your inbox at least once a month. Burbank Industries is just me, a reproductive health policy reporter at the dawn of the theocracy. This post is public, but most of the content on this account is paywalled, so if you want to follow it, I would strongly recommend a paid subscription.
The reason for this is that I’m going to post things on here that are just personal writing and not my reporting, or delve into the thorny aspects of that reporting, and I like to keep some separation between these things. Additionally, as an independent journalist, I don’t benefit directly from subscriptions to publications I write for (although you should support them!) so this is a great way to support my work directly if it’s meaningful to you. Thank you for reading!
Playing you out: If you’re driving a rental Jeep through Palm Springs to an important appointment with a swimming pool and a boozy slushie and your BFF is sitting in the passenger seat beside you, you have to play this song on the way. LOUD. With the windows DOWN. I don’t make the rules.