:: anne in the attic ::

Create Your Own Countdown

:: Monday, October 24, 2005 ::

When I first learned the name "Sutro Baths," it was because I was researching the shooting sets and locations of my numero uno fave film, "Harold & Maude." I was trying to solidify or categorize the uncategorizable: a certain feeling, an unmistakable mis-en-scene present in what I now think of as a kind of modern ruins or decay. There is so much about that film that evokes my childhood on the coasts of California, but it's not just that. The nostalgia nods to something on a grander scale-- perhaps beneath the surface it is of the fallen, of the Hollywood "Golden Era" left to ruins, abandoned to fall apart like the Sutro Baths. Though the baths are in San Francisco, hundreds of miles North of the film industry, it seems that much of the California coastline has been touched by excess followed by decay common to sudden wealth and its just as sudden loss. Developers were ruthless in the beginning of the 20th century; if a structure tied to a business endeavor didn't turn over the income expected, it was quickly razed (a lot of fires seemed to "happen" back then) like a child's Lego set.

Similar anomalies and evidences of this trend are the castles of California, found most often in Wine Country hills and the coasts. The Rose Court Mansion of San Mateo, set as the Chasen residence in "H & M," embodies the feeling I mean in its heavy Mission-style furniture, dark and woody rooms with high ceilings, wrought-iron light fixtures, and expansive Far-Eastern rugs. The film "The Way We Were" also shows a few interiors like that in Kristofferson's California mansion. Films and photos from the seventies, when all expenses were spared and industry people seemed to use cheaper media that aged much quicker, in turn showed their age and can now be dated visually. Even "Planet of the Apes," which gave me the creeps back then (it was supposed to), has that quintessential final scene where Charleton Heston discovers a mostly-buried statue of liberty at the beach in the sand. Note the architecture and design of the living quarters-- Spanish Colonial meets Frank Lloyd Wright, common elements in California architecture during the boom years, which of course, began with the gold rush. Things went up in a hurry, and were often left standing and empty just as abruptly. Grand plans tossed aside-- loved intensely for a short time, now forlorn as the physical evidence of its being slowly breaks down.

Ruins are like that, but the thing about California that sets it apart is the rapidity of the cycle. All over the world, other fallen civilizations are hundreds and thousands of years in the making; how long did it take the denizens of the new coast to create ghost towns and ruins? --Ruins that exist alongside not-so-distant descendants of the people who built it, caught up in the waves of development in a fickle society that sometimes places its current trends above all else in true Hollywood style. Perhaps this is another element that sticks with me, with an awareness that this is a part of the country unlike any other, where the beautiful and significant occurring within such a culture are often so fast and fleeting, like the many artists and musicians who have passed through there and changed everything forever, but did not stay long.

The most potent embodiment of what I am trying to convey here is best expressed visually, in the photographs of the Sutro Baths. The large pools (and initially an overhead structure) were built right into the cliffs, up against the beach and the sea. Now half-filled with brackish standing water and covered in bright green coastal grasses and moss, the baths are breaking down over time-- the constant tromping of visitors over the walls and surfaces, the ocean's constant pummelling-- they bespeak a once-grand vision. I find it inestimably beautiful, but then I have always loved the green cliffs along Highway 101 in that part of the country, especially Petaluma and Sonoma County. There's something about an early foggy morning on the central California coast that simultaneously feeds my soul and wraps a chilling hand around my heart. And that's as close as I can get to the feeling I'm trying to describe.

:: Anne 2:37 AM [smartass remarks] ::
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