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Original Essays | June 27, 2009
By Fran Cannon Slayton
"Unfortunately, I've been to my fair share of wakes."
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I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger
by Amy Wilentz
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Synopses & Reviews From one of our most astute contemporary writers, Amy Wilentz, comes an irreverent, inventive portrait of the state of California and its unlikely governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. The prizewinning author, a lifelong easterner and an outsider in the West, takes the reader on a picaresque journey from exclusive Hollywood soirees to a fantasy city in the Mojave desert, from the La Brea Tar Pits to celebrity-besotted Sacramento, from the tents of Skid Row to surf-drunk Malibu, from a snowbird retreat near Mexico to the hippie preserve of tide-beaten Big Sur, along the way offering up sharp observations on politics, fund-raising, the water supply, the Beach Boys, earthquake preparedness, home economics, catastrophism, movie-star politicians, political movie stars, Charlie Manson, and location scouts who want to rent your house in order to make television commercials for bathroom wall cleansers or Swedish banks. Wilentz moved to Los Angeles from a Manhattan wounded by September 11, only to discover a paradise marred by fire, flood, and mudslides. In what seemed like a joke to her, a Democratic governor nicknamed Gumby was about to be ousted by an Austrian muscleman in a bizarre election promoted by a millionaire whose business was car alarms. Intrigued, she set out to find the essence of the quirky, trailblazing state. During her travels, she spots celebrities but can't quite place them, drops in on famous salons with habitués like Warren Beatty and Arianna Huffington, and visits the neglected office of one very special 9,000-year-old woman. Plunging into the traffic of California, Wilentz noodles out meaning in some of the least likely of places; she sees the political in the personal and the personal in the political. By now an expert on tremors real and imagined, she offers readers on both coasts insights into where California stands today, and America as well. Review: "Not long after Sept. 11, 2001, Amy Wilentz, a freelance writer, moved with her husband and children from New York to Los Angeles. Like many if not most New Yorkers, she had been deeply affected by that day's terrorist attacks and their aftermath — 'there were checkpoints at the subway stops, armed guards at entrances to bridges, and something called "police actions' that occasionally stopped all ... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) traffic in both directions' — but the reason for the move was more mundane: 'my husband had been offered a job as an editor at the Los Angeles Times.' She had always held California in disdain, as many New Yorkers do, but she 'thought I could do with a break from the stress,' so she accepted the move with something close to relief. She found, of course, that she was merely moving from Terrorist Central to Fire and Earthquake Central — indeed, to Trouble Central: 'I had arrived in L.A. hoping to avoid catastrophe, only to find that I was living in its capital. My new friends advised me: Cash and water in your car (Tampax too). Full tank, always. Slippers or flip-flops next to each bed (for walking on the inevitable broken glass). Flashlights everywhere, especially in night tables; make sure the batteries are live. Emergency lights. Hand-cranked radio. This all was beginning to sound too familiar. And don't forget: The safest spot is still in a door frame or under a sturdy table; outside is dangerous until the shaking has stopped; door frames without doors are better because doors can swing and knock you out. Bolt all your bookcases to the walls.' Fire and earthquakes were only the beginning. Not long after Wilentz arrived, southern California, where it never rains, was inundated with rains of biblical proportions. Houses that in other weather might have burned to the ground or crumbled to pieces slid down hillsides or were engulfed in muck. The state, once the richest and healthiest in the union, was $27 billion in debt, 'a deeply flawed place with bad public education and poor health care — a gas-guzzling consumathon with hundreds of thousands of miles of asphalt but barely any public transportation.' It was deeply divided over issues of race, ethnicity and language. On top of everything else, its duly elected governor, Gray Davis, a Democrat, had been recalled in part because of his mishandling of a power crisis but also because of the desire of influential Republicans simply to be rid of him, and a muscle-bound movie star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was well ahead in the campaign to replace him. All of which — and much more — is grist for Wilentz's mill in 'I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen,' a mouthful of a title that doubtless won't do much to help the book's sale (imagine asking a sales clerk for it) but that does accurately reflect the author's state of mind: apprehension that at times seems wildly disproportionate to the disturbance or threat at hand. Though she's done extensive stints as a foreign correspondent in dangerous places (Jerusalem, Haiti) and walked through Manhattan with her children after the Sept. 11 attacks, Wilentz has a highly developed sense of her own real or imagined connection to the dangers of the world and indulges that sense at some length in this book. That's the tiresome part. The good part comes when Wilentz stops chafing her exposed nerve ends and just has fun, at the expense of various aspects of California that richly deserve ridicule. At times she lapses into ritualistic California-bashing, to which many of us Easterners are susceptible, but there's plenty about California that simply demands satire — just as there is plenty about Washington, D.C., that demands the same — and it turns out that Wilentz, though a creature of the pious left, has a fully operable and most engaging sense of humor. Indeed, one can't help wonder what sort of L.A. social life she'll have after this book hits the stores, since she's quite merciless about some of the people in whose houses she's been entertained. There is, for example, Arianna Huffington, proprietress of the noted blog and high priestess of chic L.A. liberalism. Huffington 'looks like an exaggerated Jackie Kennedy, and she talks like Zsa Zsa Gabor, but unlike most women in Hollywood circles who are not starlets ... Huffington gets some respect and is listened to — to a degree.' She is 'a well-connected socialite and perennial gadfly and ambitious in the extreme (she was once called the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus),' and: 'What is remarkable is that only a decade ago, when Huffington lived in conservative Santa Barbara with her Texas oilman husband, she was an archconservative and a Republican herself. She's always been a quick study and realized in a half-second that when you arrive in Hollywood as an industry outsider, you can't be conservative and a Republican and expect to have fun or standing or celebrity. Hollywood, in turn, has leaped to accept the revised Huffington.' She gives frequent parties and is a member in eminent standing of a spectacularly self-important group called 'the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities, a group of academics, achievers, artists, curators, and writers who meet twice a month for sit-down, white-tablecloth luncheons at the Faculty Club at the University of Southern California,' where they talk solemnly about ills of the world that they alone are qualified — by dint of their celebrity, their beauty and their sublime virtue — to solve. Huffington also gives and attends parties of the Hollywood A-list: 'No one ever gives a party just to have fun, an occasion to gossip, drink, and wear nice shoes. A party here always has a money aspect and an informational aspect — as if they have to justify a party and prove that their heads contain something other than air.' Yes, nailing those people is like shooting whales in a barrel, but Wilentz hits the bull's-eye dead center. Ditto when she homes in on Schwarzenegger, the only internationally famous California political figure who makes Ronald Reagan seem an intellectual and a statesman. He 'was drawn to politics as another stage on which Schwarzenegger could perform and be watched, loved, worshipped. He's a pure narcissist — contentless, and in this way highly appropriate to his times. An uncontrollable element of egotism is characteristic of all who present themselves for very visible office, of course, but pure love of their own image is not usually the only element that propels them.' Wilentz is fascinated by Schwarzenegger and tries hard (with no luck) to obtain an interview with him, but she correctly observes that his 'candidacy in its most easily understandable form — Terminator for governor — simplified politics and infantilizes the electorate.' Though the electorate probably was infantilized a long time ago, she gets the main point: 'There were certainly political reasons to mistrust Schwarzenegger. His was a masquerade candidacy. Like so many political events in recent years, Schwarzenegger's run was portrayed as the opposite of what it was; the campaign pretended to be for the popular good when it merely furthered the status quo, alleged it would help the little guy when it clearly was intended to make things easier and better for business interests, used the mask of tax givebacks and a "no new taxes' platform as a populist cover-up for its corporate underpinnings.' Wilentz believes 'that California has a dark heart,' and there is much evidence to support her. Schwarzenegger and the people behind him are merely the latest heirs to the state's history of venality and unrepresentative government. 'Since the beginning of its modern development,' Wilentz writes, 'there hasn't been enough water in California, and hence major fortunes in the state have famously (and infamously) been made on water rights, water infrastructure, water bank, and water control.' The railroads owned the state until the governorship of Hiram Johnson (1911-17), and for several decades thereafter the state enjoyed a reputation for progressive government, but that ended with a bang in 1973 with the passage of Proposition 13, which rolled back property taxes and ultimately left the state's public education system 'down there among the bottom ten, along with traditionally poor, underfunded states such as Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Nevada, and New Mexico.' Not a pretty picture, and so long as Schwarzenegger and his masterminds run things, the picture isn't going to change, except possibly for the worse. 'Where's the edge,' Wilentz asks, 'the California Promise?' The answer, apparently, is that it's gone. Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj(at)washpost.com." Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)Review: "This is the way to travel through California — as a passenger on Amy Wilentz's remarkable, funny, and vivid trip through the Land of Schwarzenegger. She has a sharp eye, a cool wit, a lyrical tone, a reporter's gumption, and a grasp of the place's strangeness and allure that makes the book entirely unforgettable." -- Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief Review: "I love the way Amy Wilentz pokes here and pokes there and thinks about this and contemplates that, and pretty soon you are seeing California as you have never seen it before. This is a compellingly readable book, and I want another installment!" -- Jane Smiley, author of Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel Review: "As Amy Wilentz documents in this delightful romp of a memoir, it takes true grit — and a capacity for improvisation — to leave the certainties of the East behind and start life all over again on the coast of dreams." -- Kevin Starr, author of Inventing the Dream and Coast of Dreams Synopsis: From one of the country's most astute contemporary writers comes an irreverent, inventive portrait of the state of California and its unlikely governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Table of Contents Contents Prologue: California City PART ONE: FOCUS PULLER ONE The Dead Point TWO Stardom in Its Purest Form THREE Dog Days PART TWO: SUNSET FOUR Theories of Relativity FIVE Modern Luxury™ PART THREE: CRASHLAND SIX These Things SEVEN Instant Cities EIGHT The Game of Celebrity Acknowledgments Bibliography Index
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780743264396
- Subtitle:
- Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger
- Author:
- Wilentz, Amy
- Publisher:
- Simon & Schuster
- Subject:
- Women
- Subject:
- Politics and government
- Subject:
- Popular Culture
- Subject:
- Regional Subjects - West
- Subject:
- Governors
- Subject:
- Personal Memoirs
- Subject:
- Popular Culture - General
- Copyright:
- 2006
- Publication Date:
- August 2006
- Binding:
- Hardback
- Grade Level:
- General/trade
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 336
- Dimensions:
- 9.25 x 6.125 in
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