Spent my days with a woman unkind
Smoked my stuff and drank all my wine.
Made up my mind to make a new start
Going To California with an aching in my heart.
Someone told me there's a girl out there
With love in her eyes and flowers in her hair.
Took my chances on a big jet plane
Never let them tell you that they're all the same.
The sea was red and the sky was grey
Wondered how tomorrow could ever follow today.

Standing on a hill in my mountain of dreams,
Telling myself it's not as hard, hard, hard as it seems

The idea of Going to California is a pretty poignant one to me, reminds me specifically of the far past when my mother and her brother both went to live there in the early sixties. For them I think California really did represent a land of milk and honey, especially for people who grew up during the Depression and World War II in Nebraska, and had seen some tough times.

Here also are lyrics written in the 1940s by Woodie Guthrie, now made into a song on "Mermaid Avenue"

I'd like to dream my troubles all away
On a bed of California stars
Jump up from my starbed and make another day
Underneath my California stars

They hang like grapes on vines that shine
And warm the lovers glass like friendly wine
So, I'd give this world
just to dream a dream with you
On our bed of California stars

At the same time that California seemed to have stood for an American idea of a utopian escape from hard times, California also seems to have stood for a place of altered consciousness in these and other songs. It definitely seems to be a place not quite as benign as it first appears, where odd things happen, people change, and a hallucinogenic reality can be invoked with no interrupting reality check from the harsh nature of the Midwest or Northeast. A land of glamour, hippies, cults, rumored to be slowly sinking into the ocean; and for me inhabited by people who are likely to drop off the radar.

Both songs seem to partake of this self-conscious sense of surrealism, and these paintings are somewhat about this feeling.

Maybe the American metaphor of Going to California is an expression of the universal need to enter in an alternative consciousness sometimes to shake loose the grim grip of "reality" when life is difficult, and take the dangerous journey to a mythic place.