[Art Seidenbaum was a columnist for
The Times from 1962 to 1978, book editor through 1984 and editor of the
Opinion section until his death on July 24, 1990.
This
article appeared in The Times on Sunday, Sept. 15, 1963, when Art
Seidenbaum was a cultural columnist for the newspaper.]

A couple of skin-peeling
Sundays ago I was adrift on somebody else's small boat off Malibu not
fishing (because nobody brought a spare rod and I wanted to play
spoiled child anyway). The world seemed transparent. You could look
down past the writhing kelp and see bottom. You could look up at a sky
so clear that infinity made sense. And the great corrugated landfall
that holds us all to the East was only a thin, brown line of substance
sandwiched between both blues.

Instead of compounding doing
nothing by thinking nothing, I was trying, however horizontally, to put
the climate in perspective with the place. How important back there on
shore is the water and the weather? And does the combination of gentle
ocean and moderate temperature really tend to limit what this culture
can create and accomplish?

It is an old argument, really. I
could remember a college course about how colder climates have
stimulated men to greater efforts; if the environment is harsh, then
people have something to conquer. In a more tropical situation, man
tends to build himself a torpid society, lush with natural vegetation
and noonday-napping human vegetables.

We've been accused of it,
all right. Los Angeles and lotus-eaters have been linked for a long
time by the people of chillier places. All the unseparated garbage
about our full bodies and empty heads, our mortal chase after beauty
and our monumental concern about death, our indolent bouncing between
boat and barbecue are byproducts of an old and semiundeserved
reputation for surface worship.

The movies, and the artificial
images they projected, started it. And, truth, the motion picture came
to Southern California because the weather was right–more dry, bright,
outdoor shooting days than anywhere else in the country. Even today,
when most film people dress like three-button bankers who lend hard
money to a make-believe industry, an impression persists that we are a
people in short pants.

When the airframe industry settled here,
it was for similar sunny reasons: more days in every fiscal year for
building, testing, flying. Weather was our early claim to fame. The men
to make the movies and to man the wild blue yonder were imported.
Although they enriched the place, nobody took them very seriously.
Balmy was the atmosphere and balmy was the adjective.

The weather reports also made us, in numbers of new residents, a high-pressure area.

Poor
people came because where you don't have to have storm windows or
snowsuits for the children, it is easier to be poor. Would-be artists
and musicians and writers came for almost the same reason; a back yard
could be called a studio. Couples came here to retire because
consistent weather seemed good for what ailed them. Speculators arrived
because there always seemed to be a new fad under the sun: pools to
swim in, drive-ins for meals or for making love, a sports car in every
garage. Until the '50s, you could make a case that the climate
generated more heat than light.

But within a decade, the
prevailing winds from the East shifted. What had been the aircraft
industry was soaring into other areas: space and the computer sciences.
A new definition of Aristotle's good life–including leisure activities
and time to chase culture–was becoming respectable, even applauded.
And Americans, after centuries of looking to Europe for examples,
gradually began to face the Pacific for the first time. The war and the
new technologies were responsible.

The result has been to
accelerate our steep growth while improving the cast of climbers.
Thousands of fine educators were lured here, no longer afraid that
owning a boat would turn a young scholar into a Yahoo. The very same
sun that browned a beach bum promised to make life fuller and freer for
a professor and his family. Suddenly, it became fashionable to argue
that it is the kids that really matter and that Southern California is
the ideal place to raise them. A weather code.

Scientists of all
sorts brought their searches here. The headiest ones who started a
series of think factories chose Southern California. Instead of numbing
the mind, they figured, the weather made the mundane chores less
difficult, releasing the brain for fancier test flights of its own.

Commentators
on American life in the last half of the 20th Century flew in for a new
look at what was going on here. Many years after the fact, they came to
the conclusion that the old sun stigma was no longer attached. They
wrote dozens of articles that nearly unanimously granted us a new set
of adjectives to grow on: optimistic, pioneering, energetic,
ever-changing, diffused, mobile, rootless.

Pretty much forgotten
were the old cults. Almost ignored was the weather that still caused
all the changes. Instead, the smog which so often slices between the
clear sky and the driving, non-napping natives, became the climate of
comment.

Nothing torpid about the tangling twine of freeways.
The push up from the horizontal to highrise. The increasing density of
people with greater breadth of knowledge. Our observers sniffed the air
a couple of times, wiped their eyes and now began to blast us for
behaving like big-city people in bad-weather places. The hustle. The
random scramble. The urban problems crowned by the gray, gloomy mantle
of man's own smog.

In one way, they are right. All you have to
do is get in a small boat off shore to see the way we've fouled up the
natural, beautiful reason why we came here in the first place.

The
secret is that we've been hellbent to imitate other cities. People
moved in from Chicago and New York with all their old habits. Everybody
was afraid to love the weather too loudly. Safer to act like all that
sunshine isn't really here–and now that we've hidden it in the filth
of our own exhausts, much of the time it isn't.

Pity the poor
locals who have been here all along, who never hid their excitements
under the palm fronds but who went about their business of building
when the over-land sky was transparent every day and when the girders
didn't block the view of the ocean.

We have moved through
several phases as a city. The first was laughter, general laughter from
the outside; even then, all the forces for future bigness were at work.
The second was an awkward age, as we began to grow fast and were
watched with a sort of nervous contempt. Then came the war and all the
postwar explosions people talk about: population, education, culture.
Here, the echoes of each explosion were the loudest. Now we are usually
taken seriously, partly because we have some serious problems that
other Americans realize they, too, will have to face.

But
floating out there, half-baked and brainwashed with beauty, it seemed
to me that in our next phase we ought to become the great
preservationists of all time. Hoard the hills from senseless slicing.
Open the sky again by refusing to let us split up so many hydrocarbons.
Let aesthetics rule because it was a run for natural beauty that
started the stampede. Bury the utilities and the bad taste in
everything from homes to public advertisements. The good weather is
still waiting out there to sustain greatness, not just a cheap, dirty
imitation of somewhere else.