"Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse...the wind shows us how close to the edge we are."
-- Joan Didion, "Los Angeles Notebook" in Slouching Toward Bethlehem, 1968.

Palm trees are the best when the wind gets them, but it's hard to capture in a photograph.  Think whirling dervishes with venetian blinds.  And that's just the sound.

People started going toward the windows in the early afternoon to watch.  The wind is an event, a show.  It's provocative. You watch and wait for disaster to strike, or at least for something unexpected to happen.  By rush hour it got really exciting and the temperature dropped.  Fallen palm fronds are treacherous; they'll rip your muffler off if you get one caught underneath.  They can puncture a tire.

I had this whole idea about anarchists to write.  Daniel Guerin (1904 - 1988).  Maria Zazzi (1904 - 1993).  Not a very thoroughly worked-out idea, though.  Then the wind started up. 

This is a cold wind blowing.  When the hot Santa Ana winds blow, "every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen."  - Raymond Chandler, "Red Wind."

There may be a connection.