Backstage California
How to find the California with her hair down.
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Being from California is a bit like your mom being a famous actress. She has a stage persona, easily parodied in movies and advertising -- and then there is her true, backstage, self whose breast you’ve nestle into all your life. I once sat in rapture at a lecture at the London School of Economics entitled California as a Brand given by the American sociologist Harvey Molotch, who at the time was on the faculty at UC Santa Barbara. I’d never thought of my home state of California through this lens, as a branding hook with ripe associative power. California, I came to realize, is marketed to the world as a state of mind - or rather, as a brand mood. Much of the world might easily forget that California is an actual state of the union — a physical, historic, and geographic ecosystem that exists outside of these caricatures. Professor Molotch ran through a slide show of Malibu Barbie, Gidget, O’Neill surf shops outside Rotterdam, and Silicon Valley asserting to the rest of the world in its clean, technical sans-serif that it’s products were “Designed by Apple in California.” California is latched onto like an adjacency to the most attractive person at the party: brands love a cliché palm tree and curvy coastlines and Topanga juice cleanses. California is a name that exists primarily via the world’s misperception of it. The real California, the California with her hair down, is something rather different.
In her extraordinary 2019 treatise How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell explores exactly the backstage California I seek to define here. The book champions attention paid to the physical world as an act of resistance to the hegemony of our digital lives (a.k.a. “the attention economy” — ironically invented in the Silicon Valley region where Odell grew up and later worked at Stanford.) Odell’s employment of real-time observation as a tool to connect to place is a noble one. It’s one way to return to a human-scaled life (the internet being wildly outside the human scale.) Odell becomes a birdwatcher. She describes a Northern California bioregion I know intimately, going into particular detail in regard to ecosystems: marshlands, tidal patterns, animals and moss that inhabit these subtle topographies. Via mantra-like repetition, Odell’s senses become attuned to the noises of her beloved birds, their environment and the shifts in seasons that only a Californian can tell is a “season.” She is so curious, she employs a set of jeweler’s loops to study leaves and flora up close. Odell communes with California in these subtle gestures of observation. I was deeply moved by her book, both as a work of art and as a protest tool-kit in defiance of an increasingly commercialized internet.
Once, when I’d been living in Chicago for a few years, I returned to my hometown of Santa Cruz with a new baby in my arms and burst into tears at the sight of ice plant. How odd, I later mused, that this commonplace cliffside succulent would elicit such a strong response? But one’s native habitat wraps its tendrils of belonging around your subliminal self without permission. (As an aside, I related to the gorgeous Chappell Roan song “California,” which bleeds in the opposite direction — Midwesterner yearning for home from L.A.: “Come get me out of California/ No leaves are brown/ I miss the seasons in Missouri/ my dying town.”) California is not for everyone, despite its wide market appeal. My own attachment to California’s sensual entirety, I realize, is probably just an ancient synapse firing a message that I’m home.
Despite my wholehearted endorsement of her book, Odell’s interest in birds isn’t the way I’d choose to resist the attention economy. My own practice of awareness in Santa Barbara, where I live, is more about material culture — the painted signs above taquerias or the way skateboarders wear their socks. Although I do love studying the sun sinking slowly under the watery horizon at Miramar Beach. All these details of place represent a tender bouquet of nuance. And one that doesn’t often get exported to the masses. This is attention as a kind of prayer — un servicio de adoracion — directed toward the place where you live. It’s these details, these expressions of home, that engender a belonging as true as your mother’s voice.
Resonates with me entirely!
¡Adoro California!