I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen : Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger

by Amy Wilentz

• ISBN13: 9780743264396
• ISBN10: 0743264398
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-08-15
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Summary

Contents

Prologue: California City

PART ONE: FOCUS PULLER

ONE The Dead Point

TWO S

Table of Contents

Prologue: California City	1	(18)
PART ONE: FOCUS PULLER
ONE The Dead Point	19	(32)
TWO Stardom in Its Purest Form	51	(30)
THREE Dog Days	81	(52)
PART TWO: SUNSET
FOUR Theories of Relativity	133	(18)
FIVE Modern Luxury™	151	(50)
PART THREE: CRASHLAND
SIX These Things	201	(30)
SEVEN Instant Cities	231	(28)
EIGHT The Game of Celebrity	259	(40)
Acknowledgments	299	(2)
Bibliography	301	(6)
Index	307

Excerpts

CHAPTER EIGHT The Game of Celebrity In my neighborhood, a couple of miles down Third Street from the Grove, Michelangelo's nineteen Davids are wearing Santa hats. So is the petite Venus de Milo who stands among them. A few years ago, the Davids also wore festive red jock straps, but that element of holiday haberdashery has been abandoned. It's December 2005. The house in front of which the Davids and Venus stand throughout the year (minus the Santa hats) is considered a local eyesore and an infringement on its neighbors' property values, but I've come to admire its outlandishness, its over-the-top tastelessness, its bad-boy nose-thumbing in my neighborhood of goody-goodies. Still, I'm glad the Davids are not my next-door neighbors. In this season, fake snow blankets their yard; on the roof of the well-kept white-brick house are the white lettersFHP, as tall as a man, with the exhortation "Feed His People" written on them in smaller type. In front of these three letters, an African American Santa -- a plump mannequin -- is balancing on the eaves, a golden saxophone at his lips. The numbers 2006, in glittering, lightbulb-encrusted white, stand on the white lawn, each digit five feet high. In a corner of the garden, visible from busy Third Street, two African American life-sized dummies of Santa and Mrs. Claus sit companionably on a love seat, wearing gilt-rimmed sunglasses. It's one way to welcome the New Year. At night the scene is professionally lit, and every once in a while, as I drive by, I'll see a family of tourists standing in front of the white cast-iron fence, having a picture taken. Like the redwood forests and the Santa Monica shoreline (protected by shorefront property owners like David Geffen, the record and film producer, from untoward intrusion by the public), front lawns have become a political and philosophical battlefield here in California, where the small-scale topography by now reflects all the ills of development: the suburban sprawl, the decimated forests, the dry rivers, the tangle of freeways. What is natural has been all but covered up, except for protected places like the Desert Tortoise Natural Area and those spots where it's just not feasible to build: the steep, unstable, and noninfrastructured canyons where I hike, for example. Even what is natural here is unnatural. A tour of Cook's Meadow on the Merced River in Yosemite Valley is available now for amateur photographers and tourists who want to stand where Ansel Adams once stood and see the exact view that he put in his famous pictures. They can even try to take pictures of what was in his pictures. On the Ansel Adams Gallery Tours (nine to eleven a.m., Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays), you can take the photograph Ansel Adams took; this is a profoundly mediated way of approaching both art and nature. In fact, it's a celebrity-sighting approach to nature, the equivalent of wanting to go meet the David of those Davids, shake his hand, or meet the model for theMona Lisa, tell her a joke. ("Yeah, I met them," you could say after.) As if that were the value of the photograph or the painting. There is enough falseness in nature itself here; you don't need a gallery and an artist to see that. The alien palm tree again comes to mind, long a symbol of California's sybaritic, generous warmth but not indigenous (like so many Californians -- the governor being a prime example). Palms are beloved here, in spite of their alien origins, but the tamarisk, a Eurasian original that arrived in the New World in the 1800s and now grows in rich clumps and thickets in desert and dry areas, is loathed. Environmentalists put on gloves and goggles and saw down the trees, fanning out over riverbeds and into canyons, and then, quickly, they apply herbicide to the wound before the plant can begin to heal itself. (In one report