flux rules
____________SEEN FROM THE EAST, CALIFORNIA IS
____________STILL THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE.
BY LAURA MILLER | "Not that it isn't great here," I recently said to my best friend, "but we are going back to the old country some day, aren't we?" God only knows how many times someone has said those words here, in New York City, where I've recently relocated. But we weren't talking about Poland or Ireland. We were talking about California. Joan Didion famously wrote about our home state, "Things had better work out here, because here, beneath this immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent." Not true, as Didion herself must know by now, having also moved with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, to New York. Professional writers of the intellectual variety, like shops that sell candied violets, seem only able to flourish atop vast concentrations of cosmopolitan industry. My literary friends came to New York City because that's where the jobs are, and I came because this is where my friends are. California looks different from here, as I long suspected from the nutty things East Coasters have always said and written about my homeland. Last month, the New Yorker put out a special "California Issue" in which Alex Ross, in the introductory editorial, announced that "to talk about California as a blank slate is no longer intellectually honest." To which I answer, in the argot of my San Diego childhood: "Duh." I spent the first half of my life in Southern California, the second in the northern half of the state; until a few weeks ago, I'd never lived anywhere else. The product of what was once the finest public school system ever created, I've navigated my way through a bewildering variety of subcultures that tested and expanded everything I learned there. Yet for most of my life I've encountered the default Northeastern assumption that California is, in Ross' words, "a void." To be fair, this delusion only seems to plague older New Yorkers, like that notorious anti-Angeleno Woody Allen and his generation; most of the under-40s here know better. Still, I recently visited a friend in the Upper East Side apartment where she grew up and asked her if, as a child, she'd ever longed to live someplace else -- Europe, the countryside, even, say, the sunny paradise of the Beach Boys' California. "No," she replied after a moment or two, "I thought other places were fun to visit, but frankly it never occurred to me that you could live anywhere else." Thus speaks the daughter of a world capital, the Londoner or Parisian confident in the knowledge that she inhabits the center of the cultural universe. What's surprising, though, is that I recognized the sentiment. Until my mid-30s, the idea of living any place but California seemed eccentric and somehow misguided. I assumed, without ever quite fully formulating the thought, that anybody who didn't must be the victim of some unfortunate accident of fate, or possessed by a drive to Get Away From It All. (My friend, by the way, now lives in L.A.) I may belong to the first generation of Californians to hold the Golden State as the center of the world. And so far, I still do. My respect for the concentrated cultural capital of New York, the intellectual institutions and their economic power, is tempered by an old impatience with the city's sluggishness, the way that smart things like e-mail and goofy things like body piercing are always just catching on here by the time they've become either de rigueur or passé in California. Or the conservatism of a society of supposedly sophisticated people where mention of a subject like masturbation reduces the conversation to a burst of giggly double-entendres. Get over it, already, I find myself thinking at least once a day. I do, though, begin to understand all this talk of a "void." Alongside the massive skyscrapers of this city stand invisible behemoths, conservative structures and traditions that provide stability (and something to climb up) even as they reduce New Yorkers' elbow room. So this is what they mean, I think, whenever I blunder up against absurd but stubborn concepts like the notion that a Harvard degree automatically indicates a higher class of person. These are the "shackles of the past" that George B. Leonard, editor of Look magazine (and, later, a founder of Esalen), claimed were "broken" in California in 1962. For a native Californian, coming to New York is a bit like being a creature from the open ocean transplanted into a coral reef. No wonder California seems empty to Easterners; it's not full of all this old stuff. Now, the puzzling cluelessness of the New Yorker's "California Issue" begins to make sense. Every cartoon features at least one pair of sunglasses; ponytails and Italian suits adorn the men; the stories are about movie moguls and Silicon Valley. These shards -- shopworn stereotypes and the trappings of Hollywood -- are all that old media grandees can find to hang onto in California's amorphous, liquid culture. They understand money, power and fame, if they understand nothing else, and besides, the West Coast version of all that is so arriviste, so easy to feel superior to. The most pertinent article in the issue is John Cassidy's piece about California's newly resuscitated economy. It quotes Berkeley professor Annalee Saxenian's observation that the revival comes from industries (high tech and entertainment) characterized by "fluid labor markets and ... highly skilled people who recombine repeatedly." Even the structures that I grew up with -- the state's once-impressive educational and public works systems, and the aerospace industry's promises of lifetime jobs -- have now dissolved in an economy that functions like the primordial soup. Flux rules. N E X T+P A G E: If California is so cutting edge, why is it so conservative? - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ILLUSTRATION BY ERIC WHITE |