 |
|
     |
|
|
I’m not sure the Osaka audience around me caught the fact that “Hotel California” is an ode—if anything—to California as a gilded cage, not just the terminus but the graveyard of hope, where you can check out anytime you want, but you can never leave. By Pico Iyer THE EAGLES CAME TO JAPAN LAST FALL, and I hurried to go see them—the global sociologist in me alert—in Osaka. Yet what I witnessed might as well have been The Salarymen. The four principals came onstage and sat on chairs, as if movement were too strenuous. A young newcomer stood beside the aging rockers and played all the famous chords and solos, as if to say that the only way these Eagles would fly was vicariously. Glenn Frey began by announcing that this was their “farewell tour,” but that they might well be taking farewell tours till the end of their days. Though the group had really played together for only a few years in the 1970s, and made only a handful of original albums, a reunion tour some years ago had been so successful that they realized they could support themselves in style just by pantomiming the rogues they had been when young. The audience, some 30,000 of them filling a baseball stadium (tickets went in a matter of hours), didn’t care. They listened in hushed reverence to the Detroit and Texas songwriters, Frey and Don Henley, sing equivocal ditties about lying eyes and cocaine breakdown, women who use men in the city of angels and men who were wasted even before they were used. The group didn’t play Henley’s great requiem to California as the final gasp of dreams—“The Last Resort”—and I’m not sure the audience around me caught the fact that “Hotel California” is an ode—if anything—to California as a gilded cage, not just the terminus but the graveyard of hope, where you can check out anytime you want, but you can never leave. It didn’t matter. Here were the easy harmonies, the good-time songs of driving, the very sound of sunny pleasure that had helped make “Hotel California” one of the most globally requested songs in history. I often don’t know what to say when I see California reflected back to me in the dreamy eyes of people around the world. To those of us grappling with the reality of the Golden State, it’s hard to believe, let alone believe in, the mythic place that is exported around the planet. When I travel from North Korea to Easter Island and back again, I feel I am an emissary from real life, whom people everywhere, hearing I live in California, recast as a messenger of dreams. My hometown isn’t quite the Santa Barbara that used to transfix people in Paris and my grandmother’s Bombay, I want to tell them. “You saw what happened in New Orleans recently, and what happened to Rodney King some years ago,” I’m tempted to tell them. Then I ask whether they’ve heard Los Lobos sing about the broken promise land. If you go to California, I long to inform kids in Dalat, a piney French colonial hill station in Vietnam—“Hotel California” drifting across the warm night, reproduced perfectly by a local band—you’ll meet mostly people from Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia, from your neighboring village, perhaps, the same people you’ve been fighting against for centuries. Haing S. Ngor, the Cambodian obstetrician who won an Academy Award for playing photographer Dith Pran in The Killing Fields, survived the holocaust launched by the Khmer Rouge, a treacherous flight across the border into Thailand, and a long stay in a refugee camp to escape to California with his niece, the only members of their family still alive. When they arrived in California, uncle and niece drifted apart, and Ngor, after winning an Oscar in his debut film, was shot to death by drug dealers while standing by his car in the garage of his Los Angeles apartment. That California is a place of dreamers does not make it a place of dreams, I want to say; the dreamers have to get real, as it were, when competing against thousands of other stars, immigrants, or newcomers eager to make a fresh life for themselves. And then I remember my own family, growing up in chilly Oxford, England, sitting rapt before The Beverly Hillbillies and I Love Lucy in the early 1960s, and believing that we could create our own future when we migrated to California. The school I went to, upon arriving in Santa Barbara, was in the mythic-sounding area of Hope Ranch. The think tank my father joined, set up to re-create the world and redeem the promise of the universe, was surrounded by eucalyptus-scented hills in a town described to us as the “Athens of the Americas.” Soon after we arrived, local students burned down a bank, tore down the remnants of society as we knew it, and set about creating a new kind of society free of division, enmity, and old age. California as the home of possibility: It is a commonplace repeated so often that it has the quality now of truism and even truth. The youth revolution we witnessed in the 1960s went the way of all youth and all revolutions (leaving some of us to think that California, to amend Oscar Wilde, was wasted on the Californian). In 21st-century America, the notion of California as the future makes many people uneasy, because they think California has no roots, no ground beneath its feet; people can’t live in the future tense, especially if they have no sense of history. Yet, as David Brooks points out in On Paradise Drive, 120 million Americans—46 percent of the population—moved between 1995 and 2000. Nearly 86 percent of Americans say they believe in heaven, compared to only half that percentage in, say, Germany. And California is America’s America. Is it any surprise that when you pick up a novel such as The Matter of Desire, by Bolivian writer Edmundo Paz Soldan, you find its protagonist going to a cafe in La Paz called “Berkeley,” to talk to a rock group that calls itself “Berkeley,” about his late father’s coded novel named after the place they all dream of, Berkeley? The transformations they envision are not going to happen in Berlin or Tokyo or Rio. To say that California is the spiritual home of the future is to say that it is permanently about to be eclipsed, on the brink, every day, of being made redundant. I spend my life traveling, moving in a typical week from Damascus to London to Kyoto, and I keep expecting global dreams to catch up with reality. Many of our depictions of California on screen, after all, are shot these days in Sydney or Vancouver. The California that a Tibetan is dreaming of as he recited to me the lyrics of “Hotel California” outside the Dalai Lama’s house a few months ago is actually full of people who think that Tibet is the place of dreams. Many of the cultures I visit have even constructed their own Californias at home, in hotels and restaurants called “Malibu” or “Bel Air” or “Monterey,” conveniently screening out the Fresno barrios, the Humboldt funk, and the dilapidated Compton that we locals drive past every day. If you want a laid-back lifestyle, I begin to think, you should go to Perth; if you want beautiful beaches, head to Thailand; if you want cutting-edge youth culture, turn to Japan. But to say all this is to be shortsighted about aspiration. We are as dogmatic in our dreams as in our beliefs. We need to have a place we can retreat to in our imaginations when we’re sitting under house arrest in Burma, or battling traffic in Lagos. This place is called, naturally enough, “California,” and it has a life more resilient than any reality, and is sustained by every rerun of Baywatch or reprise of “California Dreamin’,” every new screening of City of Angels. When Hollywood was young, it realized that this hunger for somewhere else, a place beyond the horizon, was one of the most durable (and therefore lucrative) impulses of the human heart. Frank Capra quickly shot the best-selling novel Lost Horizon, about the Shangri-La we all imagine hidden behind the mountains, some province of the soul or hopeful consciousness. The Tibet that seemed to be the site of Shangri-La is now overrun by Chinese tanks, tourists, and most of all by high-rising shopping malls on the San Fernando Valley model. Yet the Ojai that stood in for Shangri-La when Lost Horizon was shot glows still, just down the street from where I write this. The place where the monks of Lost Horizon once stayed is now a luxurious spa. The magical valley all around is full of screenwriters musing on new visions to nurture and wondering how to inspire those convinced that Utopia is possible. Even the lama that Capra’s characters had to struggle over mountain passes to encounter in the flesh may now be in residence here, brought, as so many have been, by the goldfields and sense of openness that California represents around the world. It’s hard for many of us in California to accept that we’re leading lives that other people dream of. But the evergreen Shangri-La dreamed of and diligently preserved in every corner of the global imagination is the place where we’re hanging up the wash and going to see the lawyer this afternoon. Pico Iyer is one of the world’s most acclaimed travel writers. His essays, reviews, and reports appear regularly in Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, Time, the New York Times, and elsewhere. His books, many of them exploring California’s relation to the world, include Video Night in Katmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Global Soul, and Sun After Dark, his most recent California novel. |
| |||||||
| About
CAA Contact
Us
Update
your Address CAA Career Opportunities Privacy Policy |
©2008 California Alumni
Association. All Rights Reserved For questions about CAA: info@alumni.berkeley.edu Technical inquiries: web@alumni.berkeley.edu
|
Alumni House Berkeley, CA 94720-7520 Toll-Free: (888) CAL-ALUM Phone: (510) 642-7026 Fax: (510) 642-6252
|
