Oh, sure, you close the humorless tag, but are you really going to stop being humorless?
I liked it too.
I kind of wonder just how California the whole thing really is, though.
I've been feeling pretty autumnal lately, and it's probably more the passages of life, than any particular place. Although places play their role. My mother in law passed away last month; my brother in law lives in the house he and my wife were born in -- their great grandfather was born in the house as well -- but none of my in-laws' grandchildren will live in the village. It's likely that my wife will never again even visit a place her family has lived in since the Thirty Years War (probably longer, but that's as far back as records go).
My dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer two weeks ago, and the ensuing period has been one of eliminating possible options.
There's nothing special or different about any of this: Dylan was right, but none of us is busy being born.
Future's so crowded nobody goes there anymore.
Raise your hand if you're a tech worker in California not "contemplat[ing] stock options, condos going up all over the city, restaurants packed nightly and spectacular organic produce at farmers' markets every day." For my part, I am contemplating the exquisite phrase "is california roll a sushi."
Also yes, this is hell, but I can't even look back at Wisconsin.
I left the Bay Area in 2002 and I always carry a low grade dread when I return, not knowing what fresh atrocity has been visited upon it.
That is a lovely essay. That is exactly the California delusion that I will always remember.
Yes. Very sorry to hear about your father.
I'm also sorry to hear about your dad, Charley, and hope for the best. (I wrote this in some draft of the comment above, but apparently not the final one.)
Anyway, the piece in the OP is indeed very good. To 1, fair enough, but at least he acknowledged it at all, unlike a lot of people who write stuff like this.
Thinking of you and your dad, Charley.
So sorry to hear about your dad, Charley.
My dad, who is in an extended state of reflecting on the past*, moved to California in 1958. He and my mom (who arrived in 1965) had way better employment and home-buying experiences**, but my dad will reliably point out that smog was worse in LA around the time he arrived than it is now. He has one story about being so shocked to see the mountains over beyond Pasadena that he drove across town just to get a closer look.
*He's had his own battles with cancer and is nostalgic for some internal organs' better days. He's mostly healthy now, but barring some medical breakthrough the rest of his life will be shaped around the results of a few tests he now takes regularly.
**As in, they actually got jobs relatively quickly and stayed in them for a long time, and at my age had already moved a couple of times, having bought and sold.
That article sure strikes a nerve with this native, especially...
a decent life that remained more or less available right through my early adulthood -- as in 15 years ago...and freeway traffic so ubiquitous that it can be soul-destroying just getting out of town to see all this stuff.
Cost of living and the traffic really have made it a different (hugely shittier) place. Halford and I have have mentioned this before. Nobody can afford anything and the traffic is fucking dialed up all the time so even if you can buy a house somewhere trips to the beach or whatever are such a fucking ordeal that why bother.
Sorry to hear the news about your father, Charley.
The obvious solution to California's traffic involves alien miners.
So sorry to hear about your Dad.
I liked that article because it pointed out that California "dream" nostalgia, at least for people of roughly my generation and 2-3 back, isn't primarily about some mystical romantic woo urge for the ur-times (yes there's some of that) but arises because (in much of) California you had pretty much the apex of the general mid-20th-century American success story for the middle class -- great, affordable housing everywhere, good jobs, incredible public University system, a relatively (except for bizarre anachronistic preppy parts of San Francisco) classless society, at least socially, great weather and plenty of opportunity for mild hedonism and leisure. The going away of all that is partly California specific but is really the same story of everywhere in the industrialized west, as we've managed to completely fuck up the semi-socialist achievements of the 30s-70s.
It might hurt a bit more in the Bay because the ones supposedly charting the path to the glorious future are also the ones who are doing the fucking-up. Here, I'm mildly optimistic about the future of Los Angeles, at least if we can get some more in-fill building, but unless the world as a wholr changes we're never getting that 40s-70s moment back.
I still don't understand how anybody does driving commute of even thirty minutes each way. At least not for more than a few months or so. I realize that a significant minority of people I work with have that kind of a commute (or would, if they didn't flex-schedule themselves a 6:30 a.m. start time) but still I can't really picture it. I also can't picture getting up early enough to be at my desk at 6:30.
I suppose people in suburban L.A. (or Pittsburgh) can't comprehend standing outside for a bus in below zero weather, but it's really nothing you can't fix with a few dead geese and some gumption.
I for one will be happy to see the California cityscape that accepts the concomitants of its growth and shifts more decisively to a model of less car use, more public transit and other modes. Also needed is a big step up in public or otherwise affordable housing, that goes beyond project-specific political fights for another 20 or 50 units at at time.
I certainly agree generally with 25 (and, on the transit front, so does out local government), and it's the only way forward, but it's all basically window dressing without reducing economic inequality, which is something local government, with some zoning-related minor exceptions, is shitty at doing.
If it helps, I also have trouble figuring how anybody has to pay more than $1,500 a month to get a house.
I'm moderately proud of the fact that I've managed to be essentially commute-free my entire adult life. I hear about acquaintances who moved to the San Jose area back in the early 00's and it sounds nightmarish.
It was only a couple of years ago when I was reading something here and I realized that San Jose was huge. I'd heard of it, but figured it was a place with maybe 100,000 people, tops.
CC@3: Sorry to hear about your dad.
I'm just about to drive to work from San Jose right now. The freeway exit will probably take 10 minutes by itself.
If it's ten miles long, that sounds about right.
I'm sorry to have to sit this conversation out today. I agree about the long car commute. Neither I nor lourdes would even consider it; I mix tele- and train commuting (and telecommuting from the train), and he bikes or does bike-train-bike, depending on mood and weather. But we did buy aVolt for the times when we do drive (in the weekend traffic crush) and are happy with it.
On a scale of 1 to 10, how much is SF City Hall owned by the absentee real estate investors? More or less than in Vancouver? My sense is that these people have essentially unlimited power to remake the city according to their own desires, but I have never been able to sustain con trol over my own rage long enough to read the details.
28: I was mostly similar. When I was first out of college and commuting from my Dad's by bus, I was upset at the 45 minutes it took. Once I bought a car, my commute dropped to sub-15 minutes for most of my career.
After the crash in 2008, I was suddenly quite willing to commute 150 miles and sleep away from home for the week. When times improved, I was happy to give up a ton of salary to remove that commute once again.
Hey Tigre, you following the Buck Rogers case?
This is, uh, topical, because the lawsuit has just been transferred from CA to Pgh, presumably because they couldn't afford housing.
I stopped at the bank but today's commute was basically the time between these comments.
35 -- a little, though not enough to have any strong view on the merits.
The article was brief, but mentioned that the claim is that the copyright expired back in the '50s. Is the idea simply that some paperwork wasn't filed, like with It's a Wonderful Life*, or is it much more arcane?
*right?
35: In the matter of copyright trolls vs. someone who bears some responsibility for the Transformers movies, the verdict can only be DEATH.
33 - Not at all (owned by absentee real estate investors) that I can tell. Local laws are really tenant-friendly and the various neighborhood associations have a lot of power.
I'm not that up on SF politics, but despite decent rent-control and tenant rights, I think landlords (absentee or not) effectively hold a lot of power just in that very little militates against their slowly accumulating more and more market power as demand rises.
Tenants are able to mobilize for various causes, like keeping their existing protections from being eliminated, or restricting and taxing Airbnb to keep half the city from turning into hotel rooms. But state law (Costa-Hawkins) fundamentally limits the scope of rent control, prices and rents still climb and climb, and there is very little enthusiasm for more affordable housing at the governmental levels that actually have the money to build/maintain enough of it (state/federal).
38 -- basically, before the 1976 Copyright Act, and in more complicated ways until 1992, you had to formally renew a copyright after a period of years; if you failed to do so, the work entered the public domain. The way the law is set up now, the basic rule is that if you had to renew before 1964, and failed to do so, your work is in the public domain. ( In fact, the overwhelming majority of works published pre-1964 failed to renew and are now in the public domain, because the works weren't valuable enough to file the renewal, and sometimes because people just screwed up). The Buck Rogers case as I understand it, which isn't well at all, is that one side claims that the original comic book that introduced the character is in the public domain as a non-renewed pre-1964 work, the other side claims that, even if that is true, anything you'd actually want to use about the character comes from later work that was renewed or is still under copyright. And, also, that the "Buck Rogers" name is protected under trademark (that latter argument seems weak to me, but I think it's at issue in the case).
All I want to know is if I can use "Buck-Naked Rogers" as a stage name.
Sorry, that was written fast and wrong. It's not works where you had to renew before 1964, it's works published before 1964 and which weren't renewed.
43 -- hard to say. If the name "Buck Rogers" is validly trademarkable (I'd say it's not, but whatever) then you'd certainly be diluting the mark, but you might have a parody defense. But the parody defense depends on how commercial you are. And I don't know what kind of audience you have as a male stripper. If you're a non-commercial male stripper in primarily amateur settings, like Unfogged meetups, you're probably fine. If you're marketing a line of anatomically-correct male stripper "Moby Hick as Buck-Naked Rogers" dolls, you can be sued. If you're somewhere in-between, who knows. We need to know more about the connection between you getting naked and money.
It probably doesn't help that I have a prop Twiki.
If you're marketing a line of anatomically-correct male stripper "Moby Hick as Buck-Naked Rogers" dolls, you can be sued.
Under a wide variety of statutes, I'd hope.
Scaring the horses is still on the books as a crime in most places.
This predictably kind of made me roll my eyes so hard they fell out. Goodbye, eyes.
Fine. The horses are just a little bit intimidated, but not actually frightened.