One might assume that Rosecrans Baldwin, author of “Paris, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down” and “The Last Kid Left,” is L.A. born-and-raised, given that he shares his first name with the street that runs from Manhattan Beach to Fullerton.
He’s not. Baldwin, who was born in Chicago and raised primarily in Connecticut, had only visited the city a handful of times before moving here more than six years ago.
“I always choose George as my Starbucks name, because Rosecrans is just asking for people to go all over the place with it,” Baldwin says on a recent video call. In L.A., though, people recognize his given name because of the street or the naval base in San Diego or from “California Love,” the now-classic Tupac Shakur track. “Most frequently, people just ask if I got named after Los Angeles neighborhoods, between the street and then Baldwin Hills.”
Baldwin does have a connection to the street, though, in that he’s related to William Rosecrans, the Union army general who later headed west and died in Redondo Beach. While he says it’s “a trip” to drive around and see your name on street signs, genealogy isn’t what brought him to Los Angeles or what prompted him to write about the city in his just-published book, “Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles.”
Baldwin, who co-founded the online magazine The Morning News, spent much of his adult life moving around the world. He studied in Maine and South Africa, then lived in New York, France and North Carolina. While in North Carolina, Baldwin and his wife, fellow writer Rachel Knowles, had an idea for a television show that garnered some attention.
“Suddenly, there was a deal and things were happening,” he says, “and then we came out here, and then it all fell apart, as I think a lot of things do in Hollywood.”
Still, the experience led to two realizations. One was that the couple enjoyed collaborating with each other. The other is that Baldwin quickly became enamored with the city.
“One of the odd things that occurred to me very early was that I felt at home here,” he says. Baldwin and Knowles spent their Saturdays exploring Los Angeles and the surrounding counties. “I just found myself really enthralled by trying to learn more about Los Angeles,” he says. “The more I did it, the more I liked it.”
Exploring Los Angeles led Baldwin to read more about his new home base, which prompted more questions, as well as conversations with his editor, who is from Southern California. He recalled an article in Forbes Magazine about the concept of the city-state in the 21st century and related it to Los Angeles.
“To me, it made a lot of sense,” he says, add that, from his perspective L.A. “felt much more like a country” than a city.
Baldwin also understood that writing about Los Angeles could pose some issues, noting the “great history of people, especially people from the East Coast,” heading to L.A. and trying to explain it. That wasn’t what Baldwin wanted to do. He was more interested in reading a lot about Los Angeles and talking to plenty of locals to see what kinds of stories might emerge that go beyond the common depictions of the city.
“Everything Now” comes out of this exploration. In the non-fiction book, which includes some work that previously informed articles Baldwin wrote for GQ, where he is a frequent contributor, Baldwin takes part in a self-help program from Mastery in Transformational Training (M.I.T.T.), visits Skid Row, and talks to photographer Robert Spangle about putting down the camera and responding to the Woolsey Fire. All the while, he asks what these things say about Los Angeles.
“I was really intimidated because there have been a lot of people who have written a lot about Los Angeles. Los Angeles doesn’t lack for literature,” he says. Over the course of four years, Baldwin read about 190 L.A. books. He spent about a year developing the idea and formulating questions that would be addressed in his own book.
Baldwin was finishing his drafts when COVID-19 hit last year. “Some days that meant I was grateful to have a project so singular that I could sort of put my blinders on, especially when the lockdown was really at its most intense, and just focus on it,” he says. On other days, he says, the last thing he wanted to do was dive back into the book. Last August, though, he started volunteering with CORE at Dodger Stadium, where the non-profit was running COVID-19 testing and, later, vaccinations. “It has been very meaningful,” he says of the work.
It was also a bit of a role reversal. Baldwin says that, while he spent so much time traveling around greater Los Angeles in researching “Everything Now,” at Dodger Stadium, he was working in a space where people from across the county were gathering. His volunteer work gave Baldwin a chance to continue to interact with Angelenos, even if it was just to explain a test or help schedule an appointment, while he was finishing “Everything Now.”
“It definitely influenced the work on the book,” he says.
