Taki's Mag

Santa Monica, CA

In February, fresh from the great victory at Oxford, I went to a dinner party in London. At one point my historian friend asked: “Don’t you miss Europe?” My response was a halting “Ye-e-e-e-s-s-s, but…” It is difficult to explain to a European. For all that annoys or disgusts me here, there is also a deep fascination with the self-licking ice-cream cone that is California.

Ah, California! Perhaps no other of the United States has such a diversity of landscape—mountains, deserts, beaches, forests, and everything else imaginable, save tundra. One could go on forever about our natural resources. Industry? We have it! The entertainment industry is our most famous, but we have plenty of others. All of this has led to the old saw that were we a separate nation, we would be the world’s eighth largest economy—and this despite our near bankruptcy!

A late autumn afternoon in Los Angeles with an impossibly rich blue sky and a mellow golden glow may not be as beautiful as New England’s foliage, but amid the faux architectural styles of interwar construction it lends a dreamy sepia tone to everything as though you were in someone else’s memory. Combine this with some of our otherworldly scenery such as the much-filmed Vasquez Rocks. That dreaminess goes a long way to explain both the movie business turning the Golden State into a stronghold of fantasy and innumerable strange cults creating a shrine to the bizarre. This general tone has also had its effect on the waves of people who have come here—the strangeness attracts many and transforms others. But each wave has also transformed California—often out of all recognition to what was here before.

First to come were the Indians. (Only politicos, academics, and media drones feel comfortable saying “Native Americans”—do NOT try saying that in a reservation bar!) Down here in the Southland, with its incredible aridity (and no one named Mulholland to build aqueducts and steal water from the Owens Valley for them), the locals could only live where there were sufficient oak trees to provide acorns and cover for hunting rabbits. It was primarily broken and defeated peoples that were driven here from pleasanter places. As a result, California’s pre-discovery linguistic map was a crazy quilt; ethnic diversity and conflict was a leitmotif here from the beginning. Affected by the odd scenery and the ever-present threat of hunger, the local Indians established yet another pattern for their successors to follow. The jimson weed cult was their religion, proving that hallucinogens and weird belief systems have been here for centuries.

This dippy paradise was not to last. In 1769, our royal founder, Charles III of Spain, was afraid that the Russians would swoop down from Alaska, annex the then-unsettled Alta California, and menace New Spain. He dispatched (and funded) an expedition to evangelize and claim California, headed by the saintly Franciscan Friar Junípero Serra. By the time Mexico forced California into independence from Spain in 1822, the Spanish had built up a rather impressive infrastructure: 21 missions stretching from San Diego to the Bay Area; four presidios; two civilian pueblos; a network of ranchos, and, running like a vertical spine through most of the land and tying us to our sister colony of Baja California, El Camino Real —the King’s Highway.

Despite the best efforts of leftist activists and Indian revisionists to convince you otherwise, Spanish California was quite a pleasant place for most of its denizens. But again, paradise would not last. As in the rest of Latin America, overthrowing the Spanish crown led to a dreary cycle of civil wars and petty dictators, albeit in a typically Californian comic-opera manner. As a result, when the Americans conquered California during the Mexican War, resistance was halfhearted or nonexistent in many places, though los Californios showed what they could do at the Battle of San Pasqual.

Gold’s discovery in 1848 set off a mass migration from every corner of the globe that in a sense has never stopped. The sleepy village of Yerba Buena was transformed into San Francisco’s Barbary Coast, while gold-free SoCal saw most of its rancheros cheated out of their lands or beggared by a drought that killed off their cattle. A wave of Eastern land barons arrived, transforming the state yet again. The Hearsts, Huntingtons, Pattons, Chandlers, and the like ran their sections of California like fiefdoms—all while transforming select portions of it into paradises such as San Marino and Burlingame. The major cities—especially LA—mushroomed into centers of corruption. But our leading robber barons settled down into respectability and philanthropy. Their descendants became San Francisco’s aristocracy and got their names listed in Los Angeles’s Blue Book. Less lofty immigrants (and more Midwestern elements) would flock to smaller cities, so that Long Beach in time would be called “Iowa by the Sea.”

Alongside these more earthly minded arrivals would come a horde of spiritual seekers. Even New Thought was too conventional for many. The theosophists started the Krotona Colony in Beachwood Canyon in 1912 and left us the Hollywood Bowl as a keepsake. Los Angeles became so renowned in esoteric circles that Aleister Crowley made a pilgrimage here six years later. Although the “Great Beast” scoffed at the place as “full of amateurs,” he managed to establish a branch of his Ordo Templi Orientis in Pasadena; one of Crowley’s alumni, L. Ron Hubbard, would go on to found Scientology.

All of this metaphysical hubbub led H. L. Mencken to say of Los Angeles that “The town has more morons in it than the whole State of Mississippi.” Whether or not that was true, California was bustling by the time Crowley spread his magical seed here. There was lots of cheap land, and the great families were quite happy, as were those who did not annoy them. Once again, paradise of sorts seemed to have arrived. But as has been the pattern in our history, a new set of dreamers was arriving and would reshape California again. In 1906, the first movie was shot in Los Angeles, and a decade later, the majority of American films were made here. This California dream would soon be shared with the world.