I don’t want to speak out of place, or much too soon, but let’s just say that someday I might move to California. I am still kind of cold to the concept of Californiana, as I call it — to me, California is the blonde beauty that everyone else picks, while I was always eying chiseled, rough Chicago or industrially handsome Manchester.
But I visited it for the first time as an adult in March and I was admittedly taken aback. The thing that impressed me the most was the audacity of the decision to even urbanize the state — I mean, San Francisco should have ostensibly withered away in favor of flatter, larger, container-shipping-ready places further inside the bay. But they built it beautiful enough so that society couldn’t let it fade away, and it became something else entirely, this museum of lipstick architecture mixed with champagne socialism.
Nothing that ever happens in California happens because it’s the most practical place for it to happen. That’s kind of why I (tentatively) love it — because it’s clearly a result of society’s desire to surround itself with ideal weather, ideal ideals, ideal temperatures. It’s an aspirational place, not a compromised or pragramatic place. Long Beach would have been the Los Angeles, and Los Angeles would have been another Pasadena, had they not grown up right around the time that proximity to water and old fashioned industry suddenly no longer made or broke a city. Geography, however, plays no less integral of a role in LA’s 20th century prosperity — while it may be 20 miles inland and isolated by desert on most of its periphery, it had sun, and it had an exotic climate and terrain. If it didn’t have palm trees, I don’t know if it would have had sprawling movie lots either.
So now I find myself enjoying the prospect of being a Californian because the state is in the throes of a major identity crisis, and wouldn’t it be great to be a party to its soul-searching? Speaking of LA specifically, will it go from being an oil town to a movie town to something else, or will it enter a period of slow decline? They have pronounced California dead many times — in 1906, in 1983, after Rodney King, after the aerospace industry went away, after the banks left downtown LA.
I don’t know if California is about to die a slow death, and I don’t even know if I will like it. Chances are, I won’t have the luxury of visiting several times beforehand to figure that out. Knowing me, if I move, I move in a single stroke, and I will arrive to a city virtually sight unseen. I did it when I moved to New York, and (for the first few years at least) succeeded swimmingly.
Another curiosity about the place is that nobody seems to capture it all that well in media. While “Taxi Driver” and “Hannah and Her Sisters” or “Annie Hall” portrayed New York in a certain authentic way, and “Risky Business” and “Adventures in Babysitting” captured Chicago in a certain authentic way, I don’t have any cultural reference that tells me what is authentically Californian, or San Franciscan or Angeleno. “Repo Man”… maybe? “L.A. Story” — I hope not! As pathetic as it sounds, the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “City of Angels” is the closest I feel to feeling something about the city, and it’s a good one. A similar feeling to Seattle, a city of beauty caught in perverse captivity by the majority of its obnoxious citizens.
That being said, it’s something I have to experience for myself. I mean, I already know how to pronounce Sepulveda and Los Feliz, but I don’t know how tall those tall palm trees really feel, or what those 6 lane boulevards like Wilshire look like during rush hour, or if Spanish bungalows start to look as plain as an arrowroot biscuit after a while. But I’d like to have the chance to know those things!
For now, I just dream my own weird California dream thanks to another California dream all its own — Google!
So Malibu is clearly purty…
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And this is what “those famous palms!” of Beverly Hills look like!
And this is where Olivia Newton John rollerskated in Xanadu!
This is the intersection where Rodney King was beaten.
Thank you Google, you’re doing the best you can. But for me to really experience it, I’ve got to go there.
