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Cornelius' banjo, lizard in the shower, trees in every direction, drip irrigation, a pond in decline. Cloudy skies.
The thing about nostalgia is that you're remembering a place (thing, person) you used to love but have since lost. What makes being back in rural california weird is feeling nostalgia for something I never loved. I sit in the office of my mother's house looking out over a mile of trees and vineyards capped in the distance by low, soft hills and it makes me miss something.
Having lunch in one of the new restaurants dotting Paso Robles I was surpsied to see a child walk in wearing his blue jeans tucked into honest cowboy boots. More surprising, perhaps, was remembering when I used to walk around Paso Robles in cowboy boots. I was five. The only reason this child seemed so out of place is that Paso Robles is more LA than Steinbeck now. Perhaps that's what feels lost. Driving around town with my brother, ten years younger than I am, I explain that when I was a kid all we had was Kmart, McDonalds, and Carls Junior. It's funny for someone as young as myself to start sentences with "when I was a kid" but what I've realized is that in the eight years since I left this area it has truly been integrated into the commercial network of America. With Kmart and McDonalds as able progenitors, Walmart, Target, Burger King, Jack in the Box, Hollywood Video, JC Penny's, Taco Bell, and Wendy's have moved into town. Starbucks opens next march.
Yet the area out here, where I grew up twelve miles from town, has remained largely unchanged. Except for more vineyards, the character of this area remains basically the same. So once again, I find myself looking out over this country and feeling like something has been lost. If nostalgia is a sort of phantom limb pain then I fear that what I'm feeling is the anticipation of loss, not loss itself. I'm nostalgic for a place that hasn't been lost yet, the same place I hated when I lived here.
While doing a project this previous semester I sat in the corner of the lobby of the architecture building with a camera on a tripod. The camera was off and I was taking notes with a pen and paper as people entered and exited. One woman stopped, stared, and then approached me and asked what I was doing. She asked to be "removed because she doesn't like strangers videotaping her." The now cliched idea that "cameras steal your soul" is something I figured was dead in America; nay, all modernized country. Do people really think that they can maintain any sort of control over their visage? I'd like to see a Harper's Index statistic of the average number of times a person's image is captured on tape each day in America. Every time you use an ATM, enter a store, and, in a lot of cases, walk by a building you are being recorded. I understand the fear that losing control of one's visage is somehow akin to losing control of one's being, but it just seems silly to get worked up about it in a country like this. It's a fact of your existance here: you will be recorded. To protest an individual exercising their right to record the world is to deny the surveillance culture of the contemporary world. To be hyper-concerned with one's visage is to be insecure with one's person. What you should be scared of are not recording capabilities, but altering and re-broadcast capabilities (e.g. CBS' re-billboarding and Fox Sport's overlays).
On an unrelated note, I'm interested in the relationship between shopping and culture. Stewart reprints this pithy comment about shopping and 'high' culture being mixed in the new Gehry designed Issey Miyake store in NYC. The quotation, not the referer, disturbs me. "It's also designed to move merchandise," the original author adds as if the fact that it's designed by a well known architect should mean that it's noncommercial. As if the fact that it's commercial should make us wary of it or worried by it. What is more worrysome: Bilbao or a new Miyake store? At least Miyake is forward about trying to sell you stuff. Bilbao, on the other hand, chose Gehry to design their museum (costing something like three times a 'conventional' building) because they knew they needed something that gauche to attract people to a museum in the middle of Spain. I don't mean to be so harsh on the city of Bilbao, but it's rather obvious that their choice of architect was driven by a (well-placed) desire for sensationalism. It worked, too. That's the best part. The museum has been a huge success and it's definitely due, at least in part, to the building itself. Both the museum and the town have seen an influx of capital. (Bilbao as commercial steroids?) But back to shopping. If you're using sensational architecture to bring people to your establishment, which is more devisive: a store which is upfront about selling you things or a museum which parades under the guise of cultural advancement?
By now you should be aware that everyone is always trying to sell you something and deal with the world as such. It's not an issue of being jaded or defeated, it's an acknowledgement of capital and its influence on our lives. Whether you like it or not, agree with it or not, capital influences your life greatly (unless you live in a remote village in the middle of nowhere and have never communicated with the outside world. In which case you wouldnt be reading this). It would be so refreshing to see people acknowledge this the way Gehry does with his buildings that ignore material limitations or the way Adbusters does by, in a way, fighting capitalism from within. My problems above are with the critique of the Miyake store. The quotation makes me want to revitalize that dreaded valley-speak phrase of the late eighties: "As if."
Which is the long way of saying, "I bit my tounge."
--Posted 12/24/01 09:05PM