I came to California at the age of 15, from a city on the east coast, I mainly remember the gray sky and short temple. It was in 1968. To the east, I received dispersed signals from the attitude of the Californian hip – jangly songs on the radio, especially – but now it was in hi -fi and day -glo, everywhere in My high school and my main parts of San Francisco nearby.
I felt delivered by this attitude. He was curious, sometimes gullible, nostalgic for magic eras but just as dazzled by science – fractal, planets, fibonaccvis in the garden. Héliotrope, as interested in the weather as in politics. Optimist in the short term and get me on the long run. Self-decorating at the show point, then gravitating towards open-minded neighborhoods because you could not walk like that anywhere. There was a gaiety and a humor laterally that the mass culture in mass could not imitate, no matter how much she tried. Above all, there was music. Above, even it was a feeling of knowing something that linked you to other people. At the time, it seemed to be an attitude that could see the world through the crisis and float myself through life.
Where does he come from? Lots of places. But years later, I learned a great older and undercomitten source whose influence has struck over the past one hundred years. Learning it on this subject gave me a new window on our California tracks. Also, a novel.
Bookstore-Browing in the 2010s, I came across Gordon Kennedy Children of the Sun: a pictorial anthology From Germany to California 1883–1949. It was full of photos like that of this page, from 1917. In some, people danced in circles, carried out farm tasks in case of bare, or raised the face to a sun that always seemed hot, Without blind. When they made clothes, the clothes were long, draped, colored and accentuated with feathers, glass jewelry, headbands and a lot of hair. To see these images of fifty years before the hippie movement was like discovering the quantity of modern civilization that the Romans had, but with flower chains in place of the aqueducts.
I did a little more reading, in particular books by Martin Burgess Green (Mountain of truth). I learned a movement in Germany from the beginning of the 20th century which combined the philosophy of the earth Naturmenschen (Nature-Men) with expressionist art, anarchism, spiritualism and the cult of the sun. The ad hoc community of the accident houses of the Psychoanalyst of Renegade Otto Gross around Lac de la Lacs de la Suisse Ascona attracted Herman Hesse, Franz Kafka, Isadora Duncan, DH and Frieda Lawrence, and many others. Their involvement went from active adhesion to the use of large as a model for comic characters in their work – and sometimes both.
Some people influenced by these ideas came to California, “The America of America” in the 1910s. In a few years, there were raw food restaurants in Los Angeles, rival spiritualist communities in Ojai and people living in The canyons around Palm Springs, carrying loincloths, lifting rocks to exercise and remaining on the fruits of the trees.
Digging through expressionist art books and poetry at the UC Berkeley library was a late education in life. More and more fascinated by this chapter in the history of California and the birth of cool in America, I started to wonder if there could be a fictitious story here. Then, the characters presented themselves: a family of the working class of Berlin Naturmenschen And follow them in the county of San Bernardino in 1914. I imagined them making a place called Sunland, a tenuous island of artistic and sexual freedom.
Sunland and my characters are fictitious, but some parts of the real story were too good not to use. I learned, for example, that the loss of many utopian communities was bicycle. The children grew up in dirt, knowing no other life, until one day they held bikes, go to the nearest city, that the wonders returned and returned home and have Asked from their parents, “Are you kidding?” The children of my story get a bicycle.
My research was not centered solely on books. I wanted to suffer with my characters, so I walked with a complete San Bernardino pack in Redlands a day of 80 degrees. In the undulating heat, I could see my child from the 60s. The me I saw led Benji, the teenager in my novel The current fantasyWho experiences music and wild costumes during a sunday Sunland concert in 1916 and thinks: “No one knows what a world map in a year, nor a civilization. It might look like that.
He naturally came for certain parts of my book to foreshadow the rhythm, the hippie and the contemporary eras because so many elements of these times were already there in the 1910s – the expressionist art which echoes Burning Man and American songs and modernist poetry that Bob Dylan and others combined to make a new type of music decades later.
The dream of influencing the world by abandoning it must have seemed painfully naive after two world wars. But this vision continues to come back, in slightly different clothes, adapt and refine, slide where it can. Fuiser the modern machine for an improved new family is simply a fantasy too strong for some of us to drop. THE NaturmenschenThe footprints, so weak, are still there. Once you start to search, in California in particular, you keep seeing them. •
Please join us on Thursday, February 20 at 5 p.m. Pacific time when the author Manuel Muñoz sit with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Talia Lakshmi Kolluri to discuss The consequences. Register for the Zoom conversation here.