Matthew Rutledge

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!

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And this is where Olivia Newton John roller­skated in Xanadu!

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This is the inter­sec­tion where Rodney King was beaten.

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Thank you Google, you’re doing the best you can. But for me to really exper­i­ence it, I’ve got to go there.