Billy Bragg & Wilco - California Stars

Vines that Shine

1. It’s California. I could write about California for a dozen years and never get close to capturing it accurately. No matter who you are or what you’re about, there’s a place for you in the Golden State. I promise on everything holy, there is a place for you. There are secrets hidden in Joshua Tree, and if you listen closely they’ll reveal themselves between the third and fourth bottles of wine as you gaze at the stars. You may likely not remember. Those secrets like to stay hidden. You can emerge drenched from a sea plunge in Half Moon Bay and kiss Neptune on the beach. You can ride wild horses over the hills until all your days run away. You can find yourself, lose yourself, and accept a new definition of yourself that includes the word happy in California. You can smell flowers bloom in the Mojave Desert and know, without question, that you can overcome the harshest of adversity. My brother once looked out the car window while driving through a canyon in California with me and said, “I feel bad for people born here. They’ll never remember the first time they saw it.” That’s poetry, and when he said it, I recalled the first time I drove over the Golden Gate Bridge, motoring north into Marin County with beatific joy. My brother understood.

If you think you might come to California
I think you should.

-Counting Crows, A Long December

2. At some point in the 1770s, Spanish missionaries under the direction of Father Junípero Serra planted the first California wine vineyard in Mission San Juan Capistrano, about nine minutes from the Pacific Ocean. We have all benefitted because of it. I can’t listen to California Stars without drinking California wine. You shouldn’t either. I drank my first bottle in the spring of 1999 in San Francisco, and I never slept better. I woke up in North Beach, a few blocks from City Lights Books, and my heart sang. I woke up rested for the very last time in my life, my molecules vibrating with elation, because the joy of adventure was tattooed on my heart. This was the home of my heroes.

   I’ve never told anyone this, what I’m about to write. I’ve kept this close to my chest for a quarter century. As it turns out, City Lights doesn’t accept unsolicited poems and prose. They denied me and they had every right to. More to the point, they should have denied me. 19-year-old me was awful. So, I bought a copy of Ginsberg’s Howl and snuck into the alley for a cigarette. As I was halfway through my cigarette, starstruck and taking it all in, amazed to be on Jack Kerouac Alley, between City Lights and the Vesuvio Cafe. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, co-founder of City Lights Books, the man who published Ginsberg, the Buddha of my youth popped outside for a smoke. I looked at him. He looked at me.

   “Giants fan?” he asked.

   “Tigers."

   “You must think about baseball a lot.”

   “Yeah, I do. What was it like watching Willie Mays play?” I asked.

   “Like watching God rub his own dick,” said Lawrence.

   Lawrence was 80 years old at the time.

   California is a queer place in a way, it has turned its back on the world and looks into the void Pacific. It is absolutely selfish, very empty, but not false, and at least, not full of false effort.”

   – D. H. Lawrence

3. I drove up the California coast on a long weekend as a punk kid. I had no place to be and nowhere to go. I was taking everything in including the the two breasts masquerading as a nuclear power plant in San Onofre. (Don’t ask. If you know, you know.) As it happened, everything the Beach Boys mentioned in Surfin U.S.A. was real, and this was WILD to me. Del Mar, Ventura County Line, Santa Cruz, Trestles, Manhattan Beach, and Doheny Way. These were real places??? They are. Very much so. And U2’s Joshua Tree? Yes. And the Redwoods? Indeed. There’s some idea that we’re not supposed to have some regrets. I know we’re supposed to live with some idea perpetuated by social media influencers that we should live with no regrets, but the sharp reality is we ALL have regrets. More to the point, I contend, we SHOULD have some regrets. We all went wrong somewhere. None of us did enough. None of us did our absolute best every time it was asked of us. None of us made the absolute best of our situations. That’s okay. California is there on the eastern edge of the Pacific Ocean to remind us it’s okay. Each of us can reshape ourselves in the image of California, which holds no memory. We can rage, we can storm, we can be at peace, we can whisper delicious thoughts. California sees us as we want to be seen, as we want to see ourselves, as we need to see ourselves.