California
The trees along the California coastline look sharper than anywhere else, the wind as a paintbrush making every stroke bold and intentional in a ferociously beautiful landscape. To walk along the cliffs is to admire the beauty with a gleeful shudder at the way the waves crash on the rocks below; I wouldn’t want to be down there. I’m in San Francisco for the first time since the pandemic and the last time before my parents move back east. Thirteen years of relationship with a city that I love to hate when I’m out east, but, like its landscape, strikes me anew in its particularities when I return.
There’s ample dystopia here. The tent cities ringed around deserted tech office buildings. Breathtaking public parks in the hills of Oakland without public transportation to get there. The mounting fires every summer, too big now to try to stop, that turn the air noxious and paint the sky rust-orange. And the thousand-acre farms growing almonds and lemons and bright green pasture in the dusty desert of Central Valley. Eight avocados for a dollar, a few miles from a shrinking lake that has grown too salty and toxic for anything to live in it or near it. It feels like America is not working when you’re out here, and at the same time like the inevitable conclusion of everything it stands for.
The Matrix: Resurrections, which was vengefully terrible, seemed to concentrate its vengeance on San Francisco. Every shot in the first part of the movie looks lurid and oversaturated, swerving between satire of the city’s tech culture to the dreamlike horror of people launching themselves as missiles from its tall office towers. Neo’s world is lifeless and shallow, caged by success in a glass tower, misunderstood by sycophantic coworkers who love his work for all the wrong reasons and a boss who grants him zero creative freedom. Nothing about the world feels real, which of course is always part of The Matrix.
As I watched Lana Wachowski feast on the expectations of her fans, I thought about the burden of creating a cultural touchstone that surely came to represent things she didn’t intend. The Matrix’s counterculture hacker persona is so embedded in the now extremely mainstream tech industry, that every programmer seems to think they’re fighting against the machine as they help to build it. Companies like Coinbase and Soylent describe their products as empowering the unbanked and hungry without a hint of irony. Any cyberpunk media of the late 90s could’ve formed the aesthetic foundation of 2000s tech, perhaps, but The Matrix was so iconic. It gave us the “red pill,” the trench coat over an arsenal of guns, Neo’s refusal to submit to authority, his nagging sense that the world was unreal justified by an army of rebels who said he was the key to humanity’s liberation. So many images that turned up in the ugliest movements of the last two decades, among people who latched on to the idea that nothing about the world was real except themselves.
“Stressing as it did an extreme if ungrounded individualism, this was not an ambiance that tended toward a view of life as defined or limited or controlled, or even in any way affected, by the social and economic structures of the larger world. To be a Californian was to see oneself…as affected only by ‘nature,’” writes Joan Didion in Where I Was From. She’s just spent 50 pages delineating the tension between the Californian ideal of self-reliance and the state’s actual reliance on federal funds since its founding, from its epic water projects to the railroad to farming subsidies. She goes on to challenge Californians’ exultance in nature, whose beauty, she says, is contingent on the absence of humans. John Muir could not tolerate most other people, and the naturalist poet Robinson Jeffers called himself an “Inhumanist.” The romantic vistas of California are marred by our actual presence. It’s true that I come here to be alone. I see my family and some friends, but as quickly as we can, Anthony and I borrow a car and drive south to Monterey or north to Mendocino, where we can take hours-long walks without seeing another person. I feel most at peace when I stare over a valley full of trees without a power line or building visible, which is odd since I depend on these things to live. It’s as if something in me wants to disappear.
One of the friends who feels to me like she belongs in San Francisco doesn’t have a car, but the topic of her art is nature, as observed from her 3’x4’ balcony off the kitchen. In particular, a scrub jay that she’s fed peanuts to almost every day for years (at one point the visitor became the offspring of the original) and the other animals that are part of their shared backyard world, the cats and crows. She’s taken thousands of photos of these guys over the years and amassed a corpus of work that is not about Nature in the abstract, removed from humans, but a relationship with a tiny, particular bit of it, which is the way we actually relate to the things and people we love. When we see each other, we go on long walks through the city, walks that are always surprising to me as a New Yorker because of how much they feel like we’re “out in nature.” Because there is that to the city too, a stunning natural beauty that weaves right around where people live, full of birds and plants and hidden secret spots that are near other people but at the distance of an observer.
Every place you visit but don’t live in is a bit of a simulation, though California still feels more so than elsewhere. Sometimes the blur of symbolism clears a little and I remember that it’s just a place, another place where people are living and finding ways to be. If it’s dystopian, well, isn’t everything else? The people I seek out for the most part aren’t profiting off the disintegration but are finding ways to reckon with it. Maybe what’s difficult about being here is that I have to reckon with it too.
The truth is that California is not as independent as it or I would like to believe. As an East Coaster, their fires and droughts are going to affect my food supply. Their housing crisis and inequalities are amplifications of the rest of the rest of the country, and our shared future if we don’t find some ways to rebalance wealth. Flying back to New York on Wednesday doesn’t really mean leaving it all behind. Its problems are mine, but its beauty too.
What I’m cooking
Spicy Uyghur Cumin Potatoes (v)
A riff on Xinjiang-style skewers, with little potatoes. Tasty and spicy and very warming. Subscribe to get the recipe on Friday!