For me, sub-culture shock occurred at the time Martha Stewart’s magazine, ‘Living’, appeared on the newsstands. I bought a copy, then subscribed and continued to subscribe for several years. It wasn’t that I particularly liked the magazine’s contents. I was clueless as to why the subjects of any of her articles was important on any level. Rather, I saw it as a window into a lifestyle and the ‘East Coast culture’, in the part of the country I’d never seen, was unlikely to ever live in, or even visit for a quick drive-through of leaf-peeping in the fall. It might as well have been another planet… a really weird planet. In many ways the magazine’s East Coast writing slant defined a culture by what I read there, where I simultaneously rejected and yet envied the easy taste and elegance displayed on those glossy pages. I still have a secret hankering for growing dahlias in raised beds in every possible color, then having them cut and arranged in lovely vases placed throughout my large Cape Cod home. All labor performed by my paid staff, of course.
Being confused by what I perceived as East Coast values and taste, I had to ask myself what then defined West Coast culture. Who were we and why? As someone who once spent a great deal of her time riding around in an old car and photographing ‘The West’ with an old large format camera (it was a lot less Ansel Adam-ish than it sounds), I would find some of what I think defines us, even the us that lives in a city as crowded as L.A., in the book, ‘Cadillac Desert’ by Mark Reisner. In fact, as I read your reply, I thought of a few paragraphs in his intro where he describes what he saw as he flew over the Wasatch mountains at night:
‘Emptiness. There was nothing down there on the earth–no towns, no light, no signs of civilization at all. Barren mountains rose duskily from the desert floor; isolated mesas and buttes broke the wind-haunted distance. You couldn’t see much in the moonlight, but obviously there were no forests, no pastures, no lakes, no rivers; there was no fruited plain. I counted the minutes between clusters of lights. Six, eight, nine, eleven–going nine miles a minute, that was a lot of uninhabited distance in a crowded century, a lot of emptiness amid a civilization whose success was achieved in the pretension that natural obstacles do not exist.’
As a lifetime Westerner, I enjoy almost any movie or television show that includes the Great Outdoors. The series, ‘Top of the Lake’, directed by Jane Campian and filmed in New Zealand was a visual treat. A Wes Anderson film, OTOH, is visual chaos. It has all the aesthetic appeal of my great-grandmother’s parlour, a small room filled with heavy upholstered furniture, knick-knacks, family photos of relatives long dead or those that never visit, and cloying with the perfume of potpourri. Maybe Wes’ granny was from the East Coast. The feeling I get as a viewer of his films is claustrophobic. I want to reach in like a cartoon illustrator with an eraser and clean up the lines, rub out the excess clutter, so it will stop distracting me from the characters and the story they’re trying to tell. Perhaps the fans of his films find that more of a comfort. I suspect that most of those fans live east of the 100th meridian… and then north, and their neighbors grow dahlias.
