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WHAT IS CALIFORNIA?
WHAT IS CALIFORNIA?
Even apart from my intellectual convictions, there was this whole matter of California. As a transplanted Easterner, I felt duty-bound not to take anything in California very seriously. I certainly felt no need to understand California; I simply allowed myself to record the usual impressions: millions of Americans breaking away from reality, looking for a dream; everything to excess; Forest Lawn Cemetery (which I never visited); the charm of San Francisco, an American island in time; the giant trees, the thunderously rugged coastline, etc. When natives told me this was where it was "happening," when they said California was the future, I was quite ready to believe them simply because I had no real hopes for the future anyway. To me, California was a place desperately lacking in the experience of limitation, a dream factory in every sense of the word. No wonder all these cults and sects were flourishing there.
I still do not claim to understand California, but I am certain that it cannot be taken lightly from any point of view. Sooner or later we are going to have to understand California – and not simply from the motive of predicting the future for the rest of the country. We are going to have to stop thinking about it simply as a phenomenon of people leaving reality behind. Something is struggling to be born here amid all the obvious absurdity and grotesquery.
Jacob Needleman, The New Religions
the air here is thick with bad vibes. xoxo, J.M.
the air here is thick with bad vibes. xoxo, J.M.
"Wild, sweaty, important, the land of lonely and exiled and eccentric lovers come to forgather like birds, and the land where everybody somehow looked like broken-down, handsome, decadent movie actors."
Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Project SANDMAN
Project SANDMAN
"Psychic spies from China try to steal your mind's elation
And little girls from Sweden dream of silver screen quotation
And if you want these kind of dreams it's Californication
It's the edge of the world and all of Western civilization
The sun may rise in the East at least it's settled in a final location
It's understood that Hollywood sells Californication
Pay your surgeon very well to break the spell of aging
Celebrity skin, is this your chin, or is that war you're waging?"
“California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.”
Don DeLillo, White Noise
The Bay Area
The Bay Area
Castro Valley
Sophie's Apartment
The Ransom House
San Jose Airport Hilton
The Skyline Bar
"You can't have everything, even in California."
"California is a queer place in a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific. It is absolutely selfish, very empty, but not false, and at least, not full of false effort."
San Francisco
San Francisco
Mount Shasta
Mount Shasta
Palo Alto
Palo Alto
"She drove into San Narciso on a Sunday, in a rented Impala. Nothing was happening. She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There'd seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding. Smog hung all round the horizon, the sun on the bright beige countryside was painful; she and the Chevy seemed parked at the centre of an odd, religious instant."
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
"California is the minutes of the next meeting. 'And California dreamin' is becomin' a re-a-li-tyyy,' sang Michelle and John and Cass and Denny. And if the dreamin' is a nightmare? How do we know it will not persist when we are shaken awake?"
"A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community. The jitters were setting in. I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full."
Joan Didion, The White Album
"There was a sense of apocalyptic expanse, of sidewalks and houses centipeding over mountains and going on forever, combined with a shrugging kind of anchorlessness. Growing up I was always aware of L.A.'s diffuseness, its lack of an attachment to anything other than its own good reflection in the mirror.”
Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band: A Memoir
"There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California."
"Southern California – where the American dream came too true."
"We wanted the hotel to look authentic rather than like a traditionally spooky movie hotel. The hotel's labyrinthine layout and huge rooms, I believed, would alone provide an eerie enough atmosphere."
"I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land."
William Blake, And did those feet in ancient time
"A huge, rambling, old prison full of mad people serving life sentences."
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