Below are a few questions about your HQ – your “hipster quotient.”   Feel free to print out and distribute to your friends for a few yucks.  Alter as the circumstances require to keep the material fresh.

1.) Are you a hipster?
_____ Yes.
_____ No.
_____ I don’t know.  Maybe?
_____ If you have to ask, you are so not worth talking to.

2.) Let’s assume for a moment that you are a hipster.  How would you rate your own hipsterliciousness? (pick one)

_____ Hoch Hipstër       _____ Semi-Haute Hipster      _____ Mas o Menos       _____ Un Petit Peu du Hipster 

_____ No, not even a little bit hip      _____ Fuck you and your stupid scale, bitch.  I transcend such facile categorization

3.) Which kaffeehaus do you patronize? (check all that apply)
_____ Charbucks, I mean Starbucks.  I love how safe and clean their stores are!
_____ Java City.  I prefer to patronize a localtm chain, thank you very much.
_____ Peets.  I like my coffee like I like my mens: strong, black, and bitter.  Plus, they’re from Berkeley.  So it’s cool by definition, right?  Right?
_____ I’m still in mourning after the demise of New Helvetia.
_____ Espresso Metro, when I’m cutting class from McCl…. I mean City College.
_____ Old Soul.
_____ Ummmm….does Caffino count?
_____ I don’t need no stinkin’ coffeehouse.  I feed my pet ferret coffee beans and then brew what comes out the other end.

4.) Where do you get your music from? (check all that apply)
_____ XM/Sirius radio channel # ________ (fill in the appropriate channel)
_____ FM radio station # _________ (fill in the appropriate channel)
_____ AM radio (hah!) station # _________ (fill in the appropriate channel)
_____ I make my own music, fuck you very much.
_____ I have a friend from Canada who hooks me up with bootleg CDs.
_____ Yawn.  I prefer the medium of the written word.
_____ A mix of shit I borrow from some (ahem) friends on the internet.

5.) Approximately how many songs do you have on your iPod (guess if you don’t know the exact number) ______
a. Check here if you don’t have an iPod _____
b. Check here if you think iPods are only for the exercise bulemics at 24-hour Fitness _____

6.) What kind of wheels do you use to get around? (check all that apply)
_____ A fixed-gear bike.  And yes I’ve customized it myself.
_____ A mountain bike.
_____ A ten-speed I picked up from some guy who told me it totally fell off the back of a truck.
_____ A vintage 1970s Schwinn I bought off of EBay and have lovingly restored.
_____ A skateboard.
_____ A Razor scooter.
_____ A Segue.  And no I am not a mall-cop.
_____ Gulp.  A car?  Make _________ Model ________________ Year ______

7.) How many days a week do you walk, bike, skate, or otherwise don’t add to your carbon footprint? (circle one)

_____ 7 days/week car-free       _____ 6 days car-free      _____ 5 days car-free      _____ 4 days car-free 

_____ 3 days car-free      _____ 2 days car-free      _____ 1 day car-free      _____ 0 days/week car-free

8.) Think fast!  Name a musician or band you like ________________________________

9.) Think again!  Name a musician or band you hate _______________________________

10.) Read the following statement.  How much do you agree or disagree with it? (circle one)
“With Sacramento hipsters, I just want to pinch their little cheeks they’re so cute.”

_____ Agree Strongly    _____ Agree     

_____ Neither agree nor disagree     

_____ Disagree       _____ Disagree strongly

11.) What about the following?  How much do you agree or disagree with this statement?
“With Bay Area hipsters, I want to projectile vomit they’re trying so hard.”

_____ Agree Strongly    _____ Agree     

_____ Neither agree nor disagree     

_____ Disagree       _____ Disagree strongly

12.) Finally, some basic demographics, if that’s cool by you:
___________ Age?
___________ Sex/Gender?
___________ Race/Ethnicity?
___________ Sexuality?

13.) Totally optional bonus question: How often do you use Craig’sList to (ahem) rent yourself some pirate treasure for the evening?

_____ Whenever I’m in the mood      _____ Every once in awhile      _____ Once.  But I was really drunk 

_____ That’s none of your cotton- pickin’ business      _____ What the hell are you talking about?

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So…given the current mayor’s race, I’ve been doing some thinking about what happened to our alma mater. 

I have an amendment to my former theory.  Which, as you may know, basically boiled down to “scumsucking union-busting corrupt-as-shit superintendent decided to f**k the teachers in their collective a***s without a condom, and sacrificed Sac High to do it.”

I still basically think that was some portion of the dynamic, but there was something always a little…unsatisfactory about that explanation.  The first thing being, why Sac High?  And not, say, Johnson?  Or Burbank?

So, I went and looked up some facts about enrollment, academic performance index (API, which evidently doesn’t always stand for someone of the Commander’s ethnicity), and racial demographics.  And a couple of things struck me:

#1: Enrollments in the district were — and are — collapsing at the high school level.  From the 1999 school year to 2000, Johnson lost 1000 students and McClatchy lost 300.  From 1999 to 2003, Sac High lost 250 — and it was already down 900 from when we attended (as I recall, there were 2400 students officially enrolled during our time there.  In 1999 there were just over 1500).  St. Hope has continued to fall, and is down 350 (over one third) from when it opened.  In sum?  Somebody had to close.

#2: The collapse in enrollments does not appear uniform across ethnic groups.  When we entered our junior year, two-thirds of children between the ages of 15 and 19 in Sacramento — as close a cut of the population as I could find to high schoolers — were white.  In 2000, that proportion had falled below a majority (to 44%).  I assume it has fallen even further since then.  Now, that decline in proportion was partly driven by immigration (the proportion Hispanic and Asian both rose, while the proportion Black remained constant at around 12%).  But it was also quite literally a fall in numbers by about 10%.  This is probably more likely due to the second “baby bust” (i.e., the after-affect of the next generation after ours) that was largely an unintended second-order effect of the legalization of contraception and the massive expansion in higher education — both of which led to people exercising more control over their family sizes, delaying childbirth, having fewer kids, etc.  So, enrollments are collapsing — but they’re really collapsing when it comes to white kids.

#3: Segregation cascades.  One of the less-discussed truisms of sociology is that white people will basically only tolerate living around, and sending their kids to school with, a pretty small number of black people.  It’s an ugly fact, but there it is.  Thus we have lots of neighborhods with less-than-their-fair-share of black people (say, 5-6% — which is probably not too far off from my ‘hood) and a few nighborhoods with way more than their fair share (say, 40-60%, which was what Oak Park historically has been up until probably the last decade).  Once a neighborhood “tips” (fuck you very much Malcolm Gladwell) — and that fulcrum is somewhere around 15%, by the way — it goes from lily-white to lots-o’-Black.   Hiram Johnson, for instance, hit that number sometime around 2000 — within two years the proportion white had fallen from a quarter to a fifth, and has continued to decline since then to 12%.  If you want cites on this, shoot me an e-mail.

Put those three things together — along with my previous theory about the corrupt union-busting superintendent — and I think you have a (somewhat) more convincing story about what happened to Sac High.  And that story goes something like this:

Along about 1999 or 2000, the district looked at the number of students moving through the middle schools and realized that they had a problem on their hands.  That problem, simply put, was that they were going to have to close a high school.  Never mind that the high schools were purpose-built for enrollments to which the population was finally falling (Sac High, for instance, was designed for to be a riot-proof total institution for 1400 students).  Those design standards were farcial to begin with, and only got more so once Prop. 13 stuck a dagger in the heart of school funding.

Given that they had to close a high school, the district looked around and had to make some tough decisions.  Among other things, they had to come to grips with the fact that where there had once been four high schools for white people (two for professionals and assorted state workers [SHS and CKM], one for the wealthy suburbanites [JFK] and one for the working-class [HJHS]) there were now only enough white students to maintain one.  I hadn’t ever thought about it quite this way, but we went to high school at what was likely the very dimmest twilight hour of California’s post-WWII white demographic hegemony.

Given the choice of closing one high school, which would you choose?  It’s not so obvious, is it?  Especially when you know that if the narrative is “we have to close a school” then you’re almost certain to trigger some kind of action by the teachers’ union — after all, a school closing means lost jobs, and nobody likes that.

That is probably why Kevin Johnson’s offer looked so attractive.  If a “school closing” could be re-packaged to at least one constituency (and a symbolically important one at that) as a school opening, the whole narrative would change.  Of course, there was the pesky matter of the white parents and how they would take it.  If KJ had offered to take over HJHS instead of Sac High, I suspect it would not have produced nearly the outcry.* But he didn’t — he wanted Sac.  And his was the only offer on the table.

So the district chose as it did.  What has been the result?  Hiram Johnson has steadily become more Hispanic (from a quarter to over a third).  Luther Burbank — which was never as Black as I had thought in my stupidly racist assumptions — has come increasingly Asian, as has Kennedy (a product, I suspect, of ethnic heterogeneity within the Asian community.  What do second-generation Chinese-Americans have in common, after all, with the Hmong?).  St. Hope has become a day school for the children of middle-class Black state workers who live in Elk Grove and drop their children off conveniently as they’re exiting 99 on their way in to town.  Leaving McClatchy as the school for white people.  The numbers are falling there, too, of course.  But the key number (proportion Black) has never risen above 13%, producing no flight of key middle-class constituencies to who knows where.   And the resources that matter to white people — credentialed teachers, other activist parents you can trust to have properly chaperoned slumber parties, booster club dollars for fancy “enrichment” field trips to places like oh, say, Ashland — can be concentrated in one place rather than being spread between two. 

Faced with those facts, and as much as it pains me to say, I’m now not quite so sure that the district did the worst possible thing.  Maybe there were no good choices.   The next step, I expect, will be some version of making McClatchy an exam school (cf Lowell, in San Francisco).   As ugly as that option is, it would certainly be a more productive use of energy (in my mind) than constantly harping on the district to open a new school when there simply aren’t enough white people to go around.

*It pains me even more to say the following: it looks to me like white middle-class parents had already made their decision about Sac High before the district did.  API scores for white kids — which are, after all, nothing more than a proxy for parental SES — were already volatile in 2000, and had begun to slide substantially in 2002.  The next year the proportion white dropped by 10%.  The compromise that had held Sac High together as two not-quite-overlapping prisons called “the career wing” and “the academic wing” (it churns my stomach a little to think we had two lunches) was surely looking increasingly untenable, and white people were either fleeing, or (more likely) simply not there to show up for the first day of school.

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So I took the partner up on his offer to take me out for an evening of expensive theatre in the City. After much research, I opted for a production by these folks.

It was, in a word, fabulous.

We had a “shock box” (turkish rugs with bolsters and pillows, on which we were encouraged to recline). We had decent beer. We would have had cocktails had not the cast drunk up all the gin. They played 60 year-old nudie flicks for the third “act.” We had a player piano for intermission.

You have not lived until you’ve heard “Dueling Banjos” on a player piano. Next time I go I’m requesting “Material Girl.”

I seriously cannot recommend this place highly enough. It was awesome.

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So I went to a production at STC (Cyrano) the other night. And the comparison with B St. (Escanaba in Da Moonlight) was instructive:

The house:

STC: 2/3 (the center section was full, but the side sections were spotty)

B St.: Full

Advantage: B St.

Costuming, sets, and lighting

STC: Magnificent historical detail. Rapiers, big dresses, liveried regimental uniforms, street urchins. The only mis-step was the use of electric lights, which I imagine was a matter of the fire code.

B St.: Magnificant contemporary detail. Stuffed racks (deer, not boobs); lots of flannel, socks, and boxers; even an apparently working sink. The only mis-step was, as always, that it’s theatre in the round.

Advantage: Tied.

Ancillary entertainment

STC: Live guitar music by Moises Rodriguez, accompanied by a very full-throated young man warbling in French, sometimes accompanied by a chorus of nuns.

B St. Every so often a train would rumble by.

Advantage: STC

The acting

STC: Declamatory. Now, partly this was a matter of the text (more on which below), but there were definitely times when I failed to suspend my disbelief — i.e., I saw the craft of the acting qua costumed people running about in a silly manner on stage, never quite believing themselves the lines that they were quoting. This was most particularly the case for Cyrano, who of course is always aware of his own performance, and so the whole point is that you should “see” him see himself performing. My problem is that who I saw performing was the actor, not Cyrano. This revealed itself most particularly in certain choices — for instance a kind of menschish humor he displayed at least twice. I found myself at these moments thinking more of Milton Berle than of Moliere. He also totally flubbed one of the key scenes (revealing deGuiche’s scarf).

B St. Stanislawski would have been proud. I totally fell behind the veil and never once thought about the intent of the craft. The actors were, from where I said, working-class ethnic whites out to bag some bucks at the family deer camp.

Advantage: B st.

The Text

STC: It’s one of the classic texts of the Western tradition. It’s entered the pantheon of myth to the extent that people use the word “panache” without reference to the text — but in keeping with the Rostand’s definition. The balcony scene — ripped straight from Shakespeare and whipped into 15 minute requiem for the unrequieted lover — is delicious. The moment when the officer begs the heroine for the favor of her scarf, so that the men of his regiment may fight and die under her silk? A stunner. And the ending? Even ham-handed it’s a three-hanky weep-fest. And the all of the inter-textual references to poetry and acting? A pre-pomo confection of which Pirandello might have approved.

B St.: The height of the play involved a 3-minute fart joke. At which I laughed so hard the lady in the seat behind mine was moved to thank me (after the “curtain”). And…. yeah, that’s pretty much it. Fart jokes.

Advantage: STC

Overall score? Gosh, tied, I guess. As a result, the partner and I are headed into the City to see some Grand Guignol this weekend.

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“What is Second Saturday, after all, but that one time when Elk Grove invades Midtown?”

Said, I should note, not with any kind of hostility, but rather with a kind of resigned analysis to the facts of the matter.

As it turns out, when Elk Grove invades Midtown, that shit is out of control.  Between the Hare Krishnas and the 10 year-olds grooving to the house re-mix of “Sexual Healing” I have come to the conclusion that whatever I may have thought “coming home” to Sacramento involved, it was orders of magnitude not as cool as this.

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After talking with the paterfamilias about this conundrum, I came to the conclusion that the answer to last week’s puzzler is this:

Corporations.

See, it works kind of like this.  The glaring thing left unsaid at Sutter’s Fort goes as follows: that the only way Sutter kept his operation “afloat” was by marketing hides to Boston-bound shippers (whence the former skins of those cattle he let free to despoil this Garden would be made into shoes by the very people whose second sons would later despoil Sutter of his principality).  Secondly, that it was through his connections to the Yankee tradesmen that he came into possession of the iron which he then forged into the farm implements bought up by the ancestors of Didion et al.  

This is nowhere said, of course.  We are instead told that he had thousands of cattle (the branding marks are used to number the doorways of the Fort outbuildings) and that he employed a blacksmith (and if you are lucky on the day you visit, you may even see some friendly docent dressed up in frontier drag happily blowing the bellows in the shop).  And, the most important point, that he sold a variety of goods (candles, barrels, etc.) to the industrious emigrants not so foolish as to get caught in the Sierra snows. 

You are told all of this — even summed up nicely in the phrase “he ran California’s first shopping mall” — but are never told what he did with all those thousands of cattle.  Nor where he got the iron, etc. to vend to the Americans streaming down the valley that would later bear their name.  It is a curious omission, particularly given the excruciating detail in which they tell the story of his various peregrinations across the continent, trying to make an, ahem, honest dollar.

I think that this contradiction may help me understand another thing that puzzled me recently.  To wit, the plot of There Will Be Blood.  I read the book before seeing it, and frankly, I was puzzled as to why the directors even bothered making the pretense that the movie is based on Upton Sinclair’s Oil.  But after seeing Sutter’s Fort it occurs to me that the movie would have been a commercial failure had it in fact hewed to the story-line of Sinclair’s bread-and-butter American Socialism.  Because that is not a myth that rings true to us, and to be quite pointed about the matter, we tend reject that storyline out of hand whenever we hear it.  A story about a man undone by the monstrous success?  That’s an American story, one that we love to see again and again.  A man who destroys all that is best in the world — the land, his family, even religion* — that is a California story. 

Perhaps this also helps me to understand better Didion’s antipathy to the children of the aerospace engineers.  And how she got it wrong.  It was not that they (we) did not understand California, that they (we) could not or would not learn the stories that go with settlement on the edge of the continent.  No — we learned them all right.  We turned those stories around and marketed the shit out of that myth, carving it up into town lots and auctioning them off at $8.50 per ticket.  No, her antipathy came from somewhere else.  It was that aerospace represented what she could not understand, because it operated on an alien logic, a logic carefully and precisely omitted from all that mystical rigamorole about the mission fathers, the impecunious Swissman, the industrious pioneers, the grubby gold-panner, even our old friend Joaquin.

*Where, after all, is the chapel at Sutter’s Fort? It is California’s own New Amsterdam, founded by a emigrants so beset on making money that they forgot to build a church.  How pathetically, grotesquely, Calvinist. 

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So if you want to skip ahead (and ignore all the blather about institutionalized myth-making, etc.), for the answer to this week’s question by all means page down to the end of the post. 

Working, as I do, at “a large government bureaucracy,” I had Monday as a holiday.  And being a busy fellow, I spent the day mostly running errands: getting an eye exam, picking up student surveys at the college — more on which at some point — attending a committee meeting for a political group to which I belong, that sort of thing.  In between all of which I decided to revisit at least one of the various locations at which Sacramento tells the story of itself (where, natch, I might find out what we talk about when we’re not talking about politics).  I considered going to the Governor’s Mansion, but then I figured I ought to wait until I have a wee bit more time to devote my full mental energy to the visit.  After all, I’ll need it if I’m to have any hope of producing anything approaching a shadow of the image of the form that la divina Didion crystallizes in Many Mansions.  I then drove over to the Crocker, forgetting right up until I had successfully navigated the moebius strip of one-way streets and double-blocks in that neck of the woods that (duh) museums are always closed on Mondays.

So since I’d been to Old Sac relatively recently (though not to the museum portions), that left one place.  One that, perhaps not surprisingly, I had not been in (gosh has it been this long) something like 20 years. 

Sutter’s Fort.

And I learned two things.  The first had to do with the character of John Sutter.  I learned that he was hospitable to a fault, multilingual, “courtly in bearing,” a really crappy businessman, married his wife the day before she gave birth to his namesake, ran two business into the ground before abandoning said wife and five children, and that he spent several years wandering the territories of what would become the U.S. (New York, St. Louis, Santa Fe, Vancouver, and Honolulu all figured in his apparently endless search to strike it rich) before ending up in Monterey and sweet talking Gov. Alvarado out of 11 leagues of (ahem) barren and uncivilized country for the use of which he promised to settle 11 families and pacify the natives.

As the natal story of our fair city I’m not quite sure what to make of this, really.  That our city was created in an act of (state) government largesse to a fast-talking business entrepeneur.  That our model as a people is of a man too generous, and too trusting in the goodwill of (the federal) government, not to be swindled out of what he would have gladly shared by a bunch of lying, greedy Yankee bastards who plundered the place and in the process of doing so built a metropolis.  That it’s not so awful to abandon your family as long you never take another, and eventually take care of the ones you left behind (note: almost all of the kids — except for the eldest son — ended badly).  That our city was always, from the beginning, the place through which people (e.g., the Donner Party) travel on their way to someplace else.  That the people who actually do the work around this place have always been immigrants (Hawaiians, in the very beginning) and dispossessed locals (the Miwoks).  That the people who restored built this monument were in fact the direct lineal descendants of the lawless claim jumpers who carved up Rancho New Helvetia into town lots.  Any and all of the above would be plausible interpretations of the material presented at Fort sutter.

I find this myth(s) troubling at least in part because I’m having trouble seeing what it excludes and cannot explain.  As all myths must do, right?  Like the way the Great Seal embodies the state in the form of Minerva — sprung fully grown from the head of Zeus, just as California was created whole as a new, free, state with no territorial adolescence — a myth that totally effaces the 79 years of prior settlement by Mexicans and Spaniards, and the millenia of settlement by dozens of native nations.*   That that myth further encases an image of California as the always, already despoiled Eden — a story that leads naturally to both dew-eyed environmentalism and slatheringly racist nativism. 

What is it that the tale of the good-hearted but impecunious Swissman leaves out, I wonder?

Oh, and the second thing?  That Sutter’s Fort was “california’s first shopping mall.” 

Mmmm-hmmmm.  That would be according to the good ol’ California State Park System.

I really don’t know what to make of that.

*This insight I owe to Rex, who first pointed out the contradiction in the symbolism of the Great Seal.

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