Sunland residents Michael and Susan Schaafsma watch the hills near their home burn at twilight on Tuesday. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)(Click for larger version.)

A towering cloud from the super-heated Station fire in Angeles National Forest billows into a blue sky behind downtown Los Angeles on Monday. (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)(Click for larger version.)

Newhall residents Will Moriarty and his son Max, 2, keep an eye on the Station fire along Aliso Canyon Road in Acton on Sunday. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)(Click for larger version.)

The LA Times is doing a great job covering this disaster. Here is a page of hi-res photos from the fire zone.

A sailboat makes its way through the harbor in Marina del Rey against a backdrop of smoke from the Station fire. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times / August 29, 2009)

Palos Verdes fire: Residents of Cartier Drive in Rancho Palos Verdes watch as a helicopter, right, makes a water run at a brush fire in the Portuguese Bend area. (Bob Chamberlin / Los Angeles Times / August 27, 2009)

Los Angeles Times fire photo gallery.

“What do you need another mall for?” he went on. “In L.A., that’s all they ever have built. They cut up the Brown Derby. They cut up all those restaurants that looked like funny things, like pigs or hot dogs. They tear down every coffee shop they can find. You talk about heritage, man, it was there. They find a bowling alley, chop it down. Interesting old apartment house, chop it down. Then they give back stuff with zero content, buildings with no past, a useless present, and no future at all. Where nobody is going to get together, where no memories will be created or associations made, or good times. They will simply be directing you into the act of taking your credit card out of your wallet, with that glazed look on your face. So, you see, I’m not a fan of that. ”

It’s kipplization toward sameness and blandness, toward unification of experience (pulling the credit card from the wallet). The unique experiences of the past may have been kipple (theme restaurants, for instance), but what’s replaced them is a new and greater kipple disguised as a false sense of order: strip malls that all have a liquor store, a donut shop, a laundrymat and video store, all with the same regulation plastic signage in the same generic font, with the same beige stucco walls and the same parking spaces in front.

What such environments do is devaluate the urban experience, and when meaning has been reduced from each specific encounter, what’s left in its place is kipple. It’s like a zombie movie, in which living, breathing humans, once bitten by a zombie, become zombies too. It’s kipple as mass zombiefication of the planet.