1.
The Ed Ruscha exhibit currently on view at the MoMA opens with a quote of his: “I don’t have any Seine River like Monet. I’ve just got US 66 between Oklahoma and Los Angeles.” The exhibit is full of expansive paintings of gas stations; delightfully straight-forward photographs of every building on Sunset Boulevard; landscape paintings that are all horizon and nothing else. Many of Ruscha's ideas came to him while he was driving, and you can see his love for the road and the West in all his work. He looked at what was boring and ugly — highway dividers, parking lots — and somehow found the sublime within them.
2.
The fastest way to get from the Bay Area to LA by car is to drive down the 5. I would usually take the 101 south to Gilroy then cut east and get on the 5 around Los Banos. From there it's a straight shot south through the Central Valley with nothing to see or do except stop at the In-N-Out in Kettleman City. After a few hours, you suddenly reach the Grapevine, a winding road through Tejon Pass that's as good a demarcation between NorCal and SoCal as any. But otherwise, the Grapevine is forgettable, just another empty place along an empty drive.
About a year ago Weyes Blood released a song called "Grapevine". Out of that ordinary stretch of road, a road I've driven countless times and never thought anything about, she had spun a story of heartbreak and longing:
Don't know when I'm gonna see you, boy
Oh, I've been waiting for the time
When I see the light
Shining across the freeway late at night
Start to drift over the line
And it hits me for the first time
Now we're just two cars passing by
On the Grapevine
I listened to it on loop in my Brooklyn apartment, smiling and crying at the same time.1
3.
My friend Julian and I have lived surprisingly parallel lives. We grew up in neighboring Bay Area suburbs, met in college, found our ways to New York City, and now both of us are moving back to the Bay Area this fall. The weather's nicer, the food is better. People aren't so stressed out. Yada yada. But when we really indulge in our nostalgia, we both realize one thing we stupidly, nonsensically miss is: parking lots.
"Weird liminal spaces," Julian calls them. How much of our lives have been spent in parking lots? Learning to ride bikes in them, being a high school senior and strutting back to your car after class, late night talks parked next to a Taco Bell, pushing the Safeway shopping cart all the way across the lot back to the car for your mom. Sure, parking lots are ugly. Waste of space. Fucking hot in the summer. I know. I never said my love for them made any sense. But when I saw Ed Ruscha's aerial photographs of these weird liminal spaces, I didn't question why they belonged in a famous art museum. If a parking lot off Van Nuys Boulevard isn't art, honey, what is?
4.
My favorite Instagram account is a photographer who takes mundane photos of California under the handle @ordinarysacramento. The photos are somewhere between landscapes and still lifes, and all a bit desaturated, almost sun-bleached. Cypress trees in a neat row. A flat tire. The back entrance of an outlet mall. It's no Seine River, but it is California.
5.
I love the majesty of the West, but I didn't literally grow up in the middle of Yosemite in an idyllic West Coast Snow White scenario. I'm a boring white girl from the suburbs. After school there was nothing to do except get sugar cookies from Safeway and sit on the curb with my friends, or maybe we'd wander around cul-de-sacs full of ranch-style houses that all lacked "character". The world-renowned national parks were far away; all we had were sunny outdoor malls and palm trees swaying in the breeze as the seasons blurred into each other.
Sure, there was mini-golf, some good Indian restaurants. We didn't have any cutting edge independent movie theaters, but we made do with Blockbuster. Sometimes, if I was lucky, my mom would call my school and lie that I was sick and she'd take me to the mall. Or my dad would take me to Fry's Electronics while he shopped around for some new gadget and I would go look at the circuit boards that looked like tiny cities. I imagined them to be little metropolises full of life and culture and modern art museums and people who actually read fashion magazines. Imagine being somewhere glamorous! Somewhere interesting! I wanted big city grit. I wanted to own a winter coat and scoff at tourists. I was bored of this dull, ordinary place. What was so special about it anyway?
What can I say, I was young and stupid then.
6.
And here, just one more slice of the sublime. For the road.
Though my favorite line in the song is “California’s my body/And your fire runs over me.” Gets me every time.