A Room with a View

A Surf ritual, a Merchant-Ivory production, and a hard place

Westside Santa Cruz, 1987

Looking out my aluminum-frame upstairs bedroom window, past the soft cliffside of ice-plant, I have a distant view of Mitchell’s Cove — a local surf break. I am in junior high school and wake up most mornings not to an alarm clock but to the sound of seals barking down at the beach. I lunge over to my open window to watch the following winter morning ritual: gorgeous shaggy-haired young men from the high school and UCSC running pat-pat barefoot down the middle of the empty dawn street to the water. They look like slinky black cats in their wetsuits, boards tucked under their arms. Once they’ve passed, and the sun has risen, I slump romantically over to my record player and put the needle on the soundtrack to A Room with a View that my mother has bought me. We have recently seen the movie. I pine, improbably, for a boyfriend who will look like one of those black cats and also listen to Kiri Takanawa sing “O’Mio Babino Caro” and kiss me. With his salty wet head of hair and chapped lips.

The above was filmed at Hendry’s Beach in Santa Barbara, but carries a similar Beachtown Bohemian spirit to the beaches in westside Santa Cruz.

A Micro-Culture

Over thirty years on, I may have molted out of that little person but still haven’t reconciled the strange overlap between California culture and a European-inflected parental influence. I still long to celebrate them in unison. There are moments where this seems possible. When I locate this hybrid sensibility, I cling to it with belonging: at Bad Animal Books in Santa Cruz, at an event at the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur, at The Santa Barbara Bowl, at Zuni Cafe, or inside San Francisco’s now-shuttered shop Bell’occhio, founded by my friend Claudia Schwartz. What I describe rather clumsily here is a micro-culture I suspect others ache for too: it is Old World in the Western World. Often, it’s about a slower pace of life, of swimming laps in bodies of water rather than pools, of picnics outside with cloth napkins, of the ceremony of getting messy while harvesting food, of live music, reading under a leafy tree, of wearing something inappropriate (like corduroy pants or a dress) on a hike, of candles instead of light dimmers, of friends who dive buck naked into the swimming hole like Julian Sands and Mr. Beebe in A Room with A View. It’s America the Sophisticated, but without the Puritanism and frenzy of late capitalist excess. It’s simpler than that. More bookish than that. More lusty and rugged and knowing. There are many Californias, but this is the one I will always aspire to.

Please message me below if you have similar examples of this California-European mood that I will lovingly compile and publish later.

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