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FitnessProsBooks.com - I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen: Coming to California in the Age of Schwarzenegger
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List Price: $14.00
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Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 910
EAN: 9780743264402
ISBN: 0743264401
Label: Simon & Schuster
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 352
Publication Date: 2007-08-14
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Studio: Simon & Schuster
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: about a place that is more of a pattern or a space
Comment: Amy Wilentz moves to Los Angeles and finds it no more alike her hometown of Perth Amboy that she found her earlier stops in Port au Prince and in Jerusalem. She cannot identify with the healthful, absent-minded blondes. She prefers to think of herself as most like the ancient woman found in the La brea Tarpits. The focal point of her alienation stems from the pull of the orbit surrounding Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
I like this book. Its a book made up solely of the imagination of a wandering observer. She drives to California City and contemplates what the original settlers of the state sought. She wants to understand the feeling of nature and the attention to bodies, so she goes to Esalen. She has a minor car accident and the experience forces her to think about race and class and the disparate communities within the city. She meets celebrities, but can't grasp their power within the culture.
I love the idea of asking someone to tell you who they are by telling you what magazine would represent their personality. Of course, this is California, so Wilentz wonders what magazine would be her car. She decides her used minivan is Parade -- out of step with the Prius' driven by celebs, the Escalades by the record promoters, and even a step from the secondhand Corollas favored by recent immigrants.
I suppose this is two books, and so far I've focused more on the place it concerns. Schwarzenegger is the lead figure, no doubt. I learned a lot about him. I suppose it is a virtue to bring a new voice to a one party community, but a lot of the rest seems less of virtue and more about self.
Well, I would encourage people to read this book. It is more reflective than most non-fiction. I think it would leave a lot of room for book clubs or any group that wants to talk about a book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Calfornia Rubs Off on Author
Comment: If I had to describe this book to a friend, I would say that it's one woman's experience of moving to Los Angeles, told as if she were talking to you while cleaning her house. She jumps from topic to topic with no segue, and the only real thread is her perception of the chronology of Arnold Schwarzenegger's ascension to the governorship. The language is self-indulgent and dreamy, with an air of "outsider-ness" that doesn't ring true, considering the author's nice house in Larchmont Village with a newly remodeled poolhouse and her kids' attendance at school among the children of the elite. This is not a real person's experience of Los Angeles. It is the experience of a rich East Coaster with friends in high places. There is only a passing mention of the legions of homeless and almost nothing about illegal immigration. Instead, the author concentrates on Schwarzenegger and the Hollywood notables who supported him. That's not my Los Angeles, however much those people influence it.
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Summary: L.A. Times Book Review
Comment: From the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Aug. 13, 2006
Entitled, "Barbarians at the Beach"
When writers visit Los Angeles, they often find Something Very Wrong here. It's a noir something. A darkness-hiding-in-the-sunlight something. A vapid-facade, tragic-narcissistic, dystopic-unease sort of problem. We Angelenos failed to create paradise, and we must pay the price. Too much wealth and too much poverty lurk behind those bright lawns and giddy hibiscus, so our town's bound to see trouble.
Occasionally, the SVW manifests itself in biblical fashion with an earthquake, a fire or a flood. Sometimes, it surfaces with a perilous flash in the life of a Sharon Tate, an O.J. Simpson, a Phil Spector or a Robert Blake.
Whatever the SVW may be exactly -- fate or hubris or just something in the air -- it has grown into a recognized discipline, like cosmology or anthropology. And along with distinguished researchers like Nathanael West, Raymond Chandler and Joan Didion, it attracts many lesser poets, novelists, filmmakers and commentators. Some, like social critic Mike Davis, have built entire careers on the SVW: proving its existence, discovering its habits and demonstrating its power. Just last year, an SVW flick named "Crash" won the Academy Award for best picture.
With "I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen," journalist Amy Wilentz makes a lively, if modest, contribution to the field. She doesn't much like L.A., and she claims that California "has a dark heart," but that only places her in the mainstream of the SVW tradition. She sets out to update us on the improbabilities of life in the pueblo since her arrival in early 2002, she takes us inside L.A.'s salon culture and she deftly chronicles one of our most successful commercial products: Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Wilentz is a seasoned traveler. She's covered Haiti and the Mideast for the New Yorker and the Nation. Still, she asks us to picture her as a wide-eyed everywoman, another innocent Manhattanite tossed up, however reluctantly, on our shores: "I didn't want to be in a place where -- according to the tropes, clichés, and stereotypes that I'd absorbed as a proper New Yorker -- everyone was blond, tan, cute, strong-jawed, empty-headed, and athletic, and possibly spiritually inclined. I was dark, bespectacled, bookish, and both physically and mentally not tan. I did not belong in L.A."
Still, her husband, Nick Goldberg, lands a job at the L.A. Times, (he is editor of the op-ed page and the Current section) and she hopes to escape the anxiety of New York after 9/11 -- where she had actually bought an inflatable boat in case she had to escape across the Hudson. Not surprisingly, she finds an equal, even expanded sense of "catastrophism" along the Pacific.
Wilentz feels few earthquakes and sees no riots, but she does get close to fires and floods. And she reliably -- if rather traditionally -- conjures up the SVW while viewing prehistoric bones at the La Brea Tar Pits, while shopping the faux streets of the Grove, or while contemplating her eerily pleasant yard in the figurative shadow of the Hollywood Hills. She recalls Charles Manson's relationship with the Beach Boys; she drives out to failed desert paradises like California City; she tours the sterile suburb of Lakewood with its resident poet, D.J. Waldie; she reads a good deal of Didion and perhaps too much Davis.
And apparently like every new everywoman in town, she does lunch with Warren Beatty, hangs in the salon of Arianna Huffington and mingles in the foyer of entrepreneurs Stewart and Lynda Resnick's enormous mansion along Sunset Boulevard. Along with the ever-looming presence of the Arnold, each of these folks become important local symbols: the handsome liberal, the reinvented immigrant, the savvy marketeers.
The Resnicks make a fascinating study. They own vast tracts of agricultural land in the Central Valley -- along with fad-driven businesses like Fiji Water, Pom Wonderful juice and the Franklin Mint. Like other potent Angelenos, says Wilentz, they act as absentee landlords for American taste -- creating low-brow kitsch as easily as designer waters. She explores what she calls their "Little Versailles" on the suspicion that it might be a safe house for the SVW and discovers (brace yourself) that L.A. fosters excess, even among billionaires.
Yes, the author makes occasional forays north: to the Esalen Institute at Big Sur (where she investigates the failures of the '60s) and all the way to Sacramento (where she fails to meet the Arnold). But despite her often-repeated promises, this book is not about California as a whole -- indeed, it mistakenly assumes that L.A. facades represent California facades, that our noir reflects a statewide noir. And while mocking us for our celebrity worship, it must be pointed out that she also dwells on celebrity: the few working people we meet tend to be valet parking attendants in Bel-Air.
Wherever she travels, Wilentz finds something, well, wrong: our too-easy wealth, our too-easy fame, our frank pursuits. The Resnicks understand marketing perhaps too well. Huffington's spiritual advisor, the ever-smiling John-Roger, proves perhaps too "quackish." We are chastened to learn that "[n]o one ever gives a party just to have fun...A party here always has a money aspect and an informational aspect -- as if they have to justify a party and prove that their heads contain something other than air." And we're relieved when she finds comfort among the self-mocking "Morons," a rump group of L.A. thinkers organized by writers Mickey Kaus and Ann Louise Bardach. Much of the fun in this book comes from learning who hangs in which salon: who's formal, who's casual, and who, like Rob Reiner, "pontificates."
Wilentz paints expert and convincing portraits. Her observations prove charming, incisive, even true. And yes, even locals will picture the SVW more clearly through her eyes. Nevertheless, in the same way her anti-Israel slant might have made you uncomfortable with her Mideast coverage or her pro-Aristide stance might have troubled you in Haiti, Wilentz does push local stereotypes a bit far. When we read: "Everyone at Huffington's is arrogant in his or her own private way, in his or her own private sphere, and that's part of the reason they all get along so well" we do get a little worried that Wilentz won't be invited back. OK, not that worried: she probably spelled everyone's names correctly.
Wilentz is at her best when she writes about Schwarzenegger and his outsized role in our collective psyche. During the recall election of 2003, the Terminator offered, she says, a post-9/11 comfort figure, the superhero we all craved. She traces Schwarzenegger's global iconography, his crudity and the puncturing of his hyper-inflated ego in the special election of 2005. "More than anything," she says, "he reminds me of Hercules, who killed snakes in his crib, and who had to be taught and taught again to have a conscience, to have second thoughts about the uses of his own power." As often happens, she overstates her case, but we enjoy the simile.
Is there really Something Very Wrong with L.A., and by extension, this unredeemed but still-golden state? Are we really just successful barbarians? Is our power so unworthy? Are our virtues really so few? Is our genius merely crass? "Gee," the longtime Angeleno wants to ask, "can't we at least take pride in the way we surfed the big curl coming off that last, really gnarly century? You know, how we rode it so high and wild?"
In the end, Wilentz does not provide answers to such questions, and remains content simply to register her notes in the SVW archives.
The book concludes with her drive into the first stages of a large storm. The coming rain may prove catastrophic -- but it may not -- and she leaves the consequences of her journey, like those of L.A. itself, for future researchers to ponder.
For this she may be forgiven. We Angelenos have not yet determined the moral of our own tale, and surely we should appreciate it when our foibles are pointed out so skillfully. Really we should. Unfortunately, as usually happens when the SVW is brought to our attention, we smile with a vague embarrassment, we acknowledge each well-aimed blow and then we return to our gaudy search for paradise.--Marc Porter Zasada
Customer Rating:
Summary: not worth the effort
Comment: Not exactly well written with no definite thread of thought.
Jumbled.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I Feel Them, Too
Comment: It's a treat to snuggle up for 300-plus pages with Amy Wilentz's voice: reportorial and confiding, contentious and confessional, a hint of Didion and a pinch of Ephron, simultaneously neurotic and level-headed, paranoid and wise. What a balancing act - and the writing gains in richness, momentum and authority in chapter after chapter. After I'd finished, I recalled that when my wife and I moved to Los Angeles in '85 (Manhattan refugees like Wilentz), we coined an acronym for anything grotesque, ostentatious or just plain silly that had a distinctly SoCal vibe: "OILA". Which stood for Only In Los Angeles. Nearly every day, we'd turn to each other and say it. Several years ago we realized that, somewhere along the line, we'd stopped saying it. Because we'd stopped noticing; we were natives now. Well, after reading IFEMOTTH, I feel re-sensitized. Reborn, almost. Okay, not reborn - but amused, enlightened, informed ... and terrified to realize the extent to which we East-to-West Coast transplants have become what we beheld. Thank you Ms. Wilentz for that insight, and so many more.
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Editorial Reviews:
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From one of our most astute writers comes an irreverent, hilarious portrait of the state of California, its unlikely governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, celebrities she can't place, famous salons, and the neglected office of one very special 9,000-year-old woman.
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