Patchouli versus Champagne

Saturday I went up to Ojai with Meghan Daum for the last reading on her book tour. Her novel “The Quality of Life Report” came out in paperback and her publisher has sent her on the rounds one more time to plug the book. (Allow me to plug it here. Meghan is witty, neurotic, creative, and brilliant – in person and on the page, whether writing fiction or non-fiction.) Ojai is one of those exurban towns an hour or so past the last outposts of overdeveloped Los Angeles but well within reach of overdeveloped Santa Barbara. The town is alluring in the way that any weekend-trip town has allure, and it’s an allure that smells of a little too much patchouli and fudge. When we arrived there was some sort of music festival being held in the little park around which most of the stores on the main street were grouped. The band covered old Led Zeppelin, Grateful Dead, Little Feat, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Eric Clapton tunes and most of the people around --bare-chested jugglers, women in overalls, tie-died moppets -- appeared to be readying themselves for the next Human Be-In. I was in loafers, khakis, and a blue silk shirt; Meghan in a simple black dress. We were marked.

This is where the saving remnant of the Haight-Ashbury exodus has gone. When the hangover faded and the new drug of commodified ideals took over the street corner, they counted their dead and retreated out of the neighborhood, then slipped quietly into small towns and cities all over the west, where the land is a little cheaper, nature a little closer, neighbors a little farther, and the police a little poorer. They moved to Marin and Ojai, Sedona and Tucson, Colorado Springs and Eugene. They set up food cooperatives, sat on community radio station boards, and opened bookstores. They even joined the zoning committee. Now on weekends they import tourists and fresh talent to their yoga retreats, encounter groups, poetry workshops, and book readings. And in the parks the ones too young to remember mimic the aesthetic and mistake the smell of patchouli for enlightenment, or perhaps revolution.

Some of the older ones came into the rear of the bookstore where a coffee bar was set up and where Meghan was now going to read since the originally planned outdoor venue was being overwhelmed by the sounds of “All Along the Watchtower.” The audience consisted of a middle-aged, silver haired, New York refugee in a shapeless, salmon-colored dress with teal patches on it, a couple who used to teach literature at Long Beach State and who derided the Iowa Writers Workshop as “too right-brained,” (a Snob will attempt to avoid the use of the name Iowa at all costs, except when it comes to the Writers Workshop, which is perhaps the best in the nation.), a wiry, frenetic man of about 60 with a Russian mail-order girlfriend 35 years his junior, a loud man with a beard, the bookstore proprietor (a Frenchman with a lazy eye) and his wife, and one radiant young lady in a straw hat who turned out to be from Chippewa Falls.

As Meghan began to read from her novel, the blender from the coffee shop began roaring, followed soon after by the cappuccino machine blowing steam like an old train. Despite this she managed to pull in the audience and after the reading there was a meandering and odd discussion with intermittent proclamations on the meaning of life from the Russophile Lothario and the loud-mouthed, bearded man.

The trouble with all group identification, “Hippie” or “Writer” or “Academic” or even “Snob” is the risk of falling into lockstep with platitudes. The Lothario smugly noted about the interruptions, “a loud child entering the bookstore, hey, that’s just life happening.” But is this pseudo Zen noise what passes for wisdom today? The cornerstone of philosophy is not in the recognition that shrill appliances or misbehaving children are “life happening.” The action of ambience upon awareness is not enlightenment and we should not be too quick to read either the divine or the demonic into the trivial. Sometimes an interruption is merely an interruption.

And what better way to interrupt this thread than with a word on Champagne. As a toast to my inaugural entry into the world of Snobdom, I give you the linked essay on how to choose and enjoy Champagne as a Snob. Consider it a bottle of Dom smashed across the bow of my vessel. My she’s yar, don’t you think?