19 8 / 2008
More than just cheesy hotel art (because everything with me has to be imbued with some kind of pseudo-significance!), this is a repro of some 1936 propaganda of the vintage wherein California land speculators were nurturing an image of California as a fair-weathered Shangri-La of open space, cheap land, health and wealth. And knowing what I do of California in its adolescence (armchair historian that I am), I’m sure it was a lovely, pastoral place full of promise. And, you know, rampant white supremacy, overspeculation and oppression of the underclass. Just like anywhere else I guess.
But anyway, what’s interesting to me is the legacy of this boosterism. It promoted a culture of personal space, ubiquitous single-family detached homeownership, and sun worship that seems to persist in various forms even today. I guess it’s why I’ve always regarded California as eh, just a’ight. None of those things are particularly well-suited to my personality (I consider myself a San Franciscan first, Californian only secondarily and peripherally) and I never really identified with why anyone would want to leave the dense, Industrial Revolution-era East for somewhere without a proper train system, but people certainly seem to. My mother, some of my best friends, probably half the people I know are all transplants arriving here on some kind of fresh-foods/knowledge economy/mild weather pilgrimage. It’s not that the appeal is lost on me, but more interesting that such pilgrimages west are still happening, a century or so after they were first popularized.
