Word: californiaisms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Back on the highway, I am distracted not by traffic, but by birds. In bathing suits these are not just any girls. California Girls. There is a difference. Maybe it's the orange juice. Or the incessant sunshine. Or the surfing and the skiing. But there is something transporting about a California Girl; the legs are longer, the eyes clearer, the skin more exuberant. Maybe an out-of-towner can become a California Girl if she comes here early?say at about age three. After that, it's too late. She can be beautiful. And healthy. And sexy...
...widely believed that this El Dorado is the mirror of America as it will become, or at least the hothouse for its most rousing fads, fashions, trends and ideas. California clothes, architecture, arts, business ventures, topless/bottomless, parks, table wines, liberated leisure styles, cults, think tanks and Disneylands seem to be spreading everywhere. California's people have created their own atmosphere, like astronauts. Yet it could be that the state is not really so different from the rest of the U.S. as it seems: that it is, in fact, a microcosm of modern American life, with all its problems...
...California everything seems intensified to the point of excess. If excellence and beauty are nowhere more excellent and beautiful than in California, it is also true that nowhere else is the bad so ugly and the ugly so bad. It is full of dramatic contrasts, but what is the essence behind them? It is changing at a dizzying rate, but where are the changes taking it? What is it that people do to California-or California to them? One way to find out is to be born there. Another is to play a latter-day Candide-an innocent...
...start by driving up the shore from Santa Monica to Malibu just because I like the drive. That area, along the shore, is my idea of California. It has the free impermanence of the place. The beach houses stand wall to wall on the sand, weather-beaten dwellings right next to opulent villas. The cliff on the other side is raw, crumbling dirt, and it periodically dumps its houses right down on the road. I get the feeling that the whole state may subside into the ocean some...
This is a salon for the whole body?and the whole day. The exercise room, carpeted in gold and orange, has 25 California ladies lying in it, most of them gray and hefty, in variegated pastel tights, slowly moving their limbs through the air in time with an instructress...