exotic america

It seemed absurd to me when Euge once commented earnestly during our trip to California that "America is so exotic." There seemed nothing more pedestrian to me, nothing more appropriate to measure all else by, than America. This came not from closed-mindedness so much as my perspective as an American. My entire life has been a constant process of plucking myself out of the familiar and 'normal' and diving into environments that would challenge me to understand them and incorporate myself into them and them into me. Swapping schools and neighborhoods around San Fran and cutting ties with each, discovering the concept of race in Jackson Hole, WY, racing 3,000 miles away to the East Coast, discovering a different world and my own heart just across the bay in Berkeley, and then fleeing another 3,000 miles to a tiny country to which few Americans ever think to move and which speaks the 48th most 'common' language in the world (can you even name 47 langauges?), ony to find myself there too... myself whole, a condition on which I had almost given up hope. Perhaps it was leaving North America, perhaps it was moving to Belgium, perhaps it was finding myself, perhaps it was finding Europeans and their perspectives... but something about coming here finally showed me that America is as exotic a study as a traveller could ever hope to discover.

And now I have this little addiction to browsing the used bookstore De Slegte in Antwerpen and picking up dirt-cheap American photography books I could only dream of affording in the US: Richard Misrach's gorgeous and now nostalgic Golden Gate (which is destined eventually for the library of another Berkeley lover), David Plowden's Imprints (a Yalie, no less... my awe of Yale and its graduates just keeps growing), and today a book I had never heard of before, Kate Schermerhorn's America's Idea of a Good Time.

Not surprisingly, her photos in a way show the sort of America we think of when we think of stereotypical images of America... they do not show the America in which I grew up, neighborhoods where shop owners had their brains blown out, communities that only came together to see the implosion of infamous highrise projects, and Ivy League towers beyond whose protective and exclusive bounds your roommate might have bottles broken over his head on his way home. But also an America of art museums and concert halls, splendid ethnic cuisine, Claes Oldenburg sculptures, icy national parks, desert national parks, empty trains, dark library stacks, fiesty biking communities, modernist wreckages, artists' studios in former toy factories, candlelit rituals, and towers and more towers and bells and the wind. None of these parts of America bear any relation to each other, not even in my arbitrary rhetorical division and juxtaposition of them, except that they avoid coming close to the gaudy, ironic, beautiful, bizarre, sad, and hilarious scenes that Schermerhorn protrays with some technique and lots of keen eye. Elements of her captured scenes most distant from my own life pop out at me from each page in their startling familiarity. So even to me, the scenes in her book are also America... and they are an America so exotic and alluring and filled with a way of life I no longer know that I cannot seem to stop finding myself in them.