Cooking somewhere other than home is difficult. Where’s the salt? A strange place. Where’s the ginger? We have none. Spices? Kaput. Even the previous step of getting groceries was surreal and somewhat disappointing. Abby knows all the farms and what’s in season, but at a whole foods in Gualala California, or Penchapooba or whatever, it’s all liquid.
Liquification on one end and authenticity on the other is, to me, the spectrum of our age.
California, and the people in it, feels like a liquid land and a liquid people. The contrast between a private ranch in Santa Barbara and an In-N-Out Burger in some anonymous suburb of San Francisco is maybe not as stark as I might’ve guessed.
Something about the weather, but perhaps more importantly, movies is happening here. You can’t feel the air, and you can’t feel the world, you can only feel yourself. You are the protagonist, a part of a hollywood package.
That’s sort of the case back home, too. Watch enough movies and it’s the case anywhere. But here, you can recognize places, you can recognize an attitude and assume it yourself as easily as new clothes.
This is not a place for human beings but for extras.
California, and the people in it, feels like a liquid land and a liquid people. The contrast between a private ranch in Santa Barbara and an In-N-Out Burger in some anonymous suburb of San Francisco is maybe not as stark as I might’ve guessed.
Something about the weather, but perhaps more importantly, movies is happening here. You can’t feel the air, and you can’t feel the world, you can only feel yourself. You are the protagonist, a part of a hollywood package.
That’s sort of the case back home, too. Watch enough movies and it’s the case anywhere. But here, you can recognize places, you can recognize an attitude and assume it yourself as easily as new clothes.
This is not a place for human beings but for extras.
