Words and Images by Tom Pazderka

I recently turned forty-two. This fact means two major things. First, it is the beginning of the last phase of seven-year cycles, the seventh of seven. In the esoteric sense, forty-two is the age when one is finally ready to do actual mystical work. This could mean a lot of things, but spirituality is what is most often meant. The cycle signifies a complete return back toward the self. This is represented geometrically by seven identical circles within a larger circle. Second, it means that with the creep of middle age upon me, it feels as though I should finally have been able to take stock of whatever accomplishments that have made me into the person that I am before time finally catches up to me. And time is certainly doing that. That old saying, ‘When you’re young, you have time but no money, and when you’re old, you have money but no time,’ is feeling less and less like a prophecy and more like a cruel joke. 

Now, what is the point of this strange introduction? There is a point, so bear with me as I try and explain. 

I live in Ojai. It is, and probably has been for a long time, one of the most beautiful places in the world. It’s not without its shortcomings, but what place isn’t? Just like half of the population of Ojai, I rent because, realistically, I could never afford a house here. Not in this lifetime, or the next, or the next it seems. Living here feels oddly like an accomplishment in itself. 

Before Ojai, I lived in Ventura, Santa Barbara, and Goleta, and before that, thousands of miles east in North Carolina and, before that, in New York, and even before that and, many more thousands of miles to the east, in the Czech Republic. How I ended up in Ojai at forty-two is a strange and mystical tale alien even to myself that I am only now beginning to understand. 

As a young kid, I watched so-called ‘Spaghetti Westerns,’ lots of them, or maybe just a few, but lots of times. Little did I know how much unconscious influence they’d exert on me throughout my adult life. With thirty-plus years of hindsight, I see them as oddly mystical pieces of nostalgia, and yet something in them, most obviously the not-so-subtle message ‘go west,’ stirs me to this day. The irony, of course, is that the imagination of the American West in the Spaghetti Western is completely contrived. It is European landscape masquerading as the West. Many of these westerns were shot on location in Spain and the former Yugoslavia, where the landscape most resembled states like California, Arizona, Utah, or New Mexico. The films were most often co-productions between Western European countries like Italy, Germany, and Spain, but because of the Italian directors who shot them, the term Spaghetti Western was invented. I had no idea how mesmerized I must have been by the images of the vast landscapes, even if they were European. I did also watch the occasional American Western shot in actual Western locales. The circle closes not merely in the physical sense. These locations are both physical and mystical, and even though they’re separated by thousands of miles, through their conjured nostalgic, if not tragic, visions, they might as well exist as one. 

Ojai is a bit like that vision of the European landscape, appearing as an image of the West. Instead of Westerns, Ojai was host to the filming of parts of The Birth of a Nation. That singular film is one of Ojai’s dark shadows and seldom talked about. The Southern California landscape figures heavily in D. W. Griffith’s racist magnum opus and with an almost equally potent esoteric meaning. While in graduate school, I was struck by the camerawork of the film, its novel effects, and its narrative structure. 

As abominable as the story is, the film was a breakthrough in cinematography. F. W. Murnau did the same for horror with Nosferatu, and Leni Riefenstahl did it for documentaries with her ‘love letter’ to Hitler, The Triumph of the Will. Whether we like it or not, technology doesn’t care what our politics are, and a camera is just as good of a tool in the hands of a fascist as a liberal. I sat through all three and a half hours of Birth and isolated one key scene for one of my rare video projects.

It is the pivotal scene in the film, when Elsie Stoneman, the love interest of the main character Ben Cameron, is pursued through the woods by Gus, a black ‘freedman,’ in reality a white actor in blackface, ostensibly with the intent to rape her, and finally chased to the top of a mountain from where she leaps to her death. Cameron races after them through an emblematic SoCal pine forest, arrives at the same mountaintop, and strikes the first iconic pose of its kind in cinematic history, one reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich’s lone ‘Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog.’ It is this image that would become the quintessential symbol of Western individualism and copied innumerable times in Westerns of all types. It is an image so potent that it has been recycled for the modern superhero age. A lone figure standing in dominion above and over a landscape, gazing outward toward an ever-expanding horizon, symbolically playing out its own version of manifest destiny. But in my video, titled ‘Walking’ after a chapter from Henry Thoreau’s Walden, the scenes with Elsie and Gus are edited out, leaving Ben Cameron wandering alone in the California landscape in an endless repeating cycle of return, from his home to the top of the mountain and back again. 

Ojai’s dark shadows aren’t relegated to film only. The town was also host to early 20th-century rocket scientist, occultist, and black magician Jack Parsons, a follower and self-described ‘son’ of Aleister Crowley and founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, who came to Ojai to see Krishnamurti speak at various retreats. Legend has it that Parsons made contact here with Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World, who has ties to Ojai through Happy Valley School, which he founded along with Krishnamurti in 1946 and visited often until his death in 1963. 

But these happened too far in the past to be of much relevance to today’s positive image of the city. Ojai today is the inscrutable object of appearance. It reveals itself to each person in its own guise. It appears to each person as it wants to appear. There is an almost Lynchian quality to Ojai in its determination of appearance. Its mythos is misaligned at the core in regard to the people that actually live here. It is a kind of incongruousness that exists here that says that if you don’t appreciate the natural beauty of the place and its essential qualities, the light and positive atmosphere, then you don’t deserve to live here. This is hardly said out loud, but it is always implied. 

This sort of thinking isn’t unique to Ojai, however. Asheville, a city in North Carolina where I lived before moving to California, has a similar mythology to defend against its various psychic enemies and intruders. It’s the sort of thinking that actually disregards what is happening on the ground and the reality of what it takes to live in a place that has been thoroughly gentrified, not just through real estate valuations, but gentrified in thoughts and aesthetics and thus made poor in imagination. Westerns played the same role within the collective imaginary. The history of an entire nation was cleansed and replaced with a gentrified alternate reality game in which everyone could take part by proxy. What remained was a beautiful Western Romanticism to which the Spaghetti Westerns were the counterpart, a deconstruction of the myth of the Old West. This is also why they were very unpopular in the US at the time.

I’m not saying that Ojai isn’t a great place to live. Far from it. I was drawn here, almost by magic or by some sort of collective nostalgia, perhaps the effect of watching too many Spaghetti Westerns or listening to Johnny Cash. Either way, something about Ojai feels eerily familiar to this day. But in every place I live, I have a tendency to scrutinize. To doubt is to see. The modern-day image of Ojai is something that is entirely socialized. What we think of Ojai is more often than not based on what others think of Ojai. The massive number of tourists that keep locals away from downtown is a symptom of the age. People go where other people already are, and they follow where others have already been. There is safety in numbers and in the vetted opinions of others. This isn’t new, but our influencer TikTok culture makes it easier to achieve notoriety. The bumper sticker ‘Keep Ojai Lame’ is the final attempt at a reassertion of the reality principle in Ojai. It is the doomed clarion call for resistance to the false reality brought upon by an unwelcome and unsolicited change. Its fate is already a predetermined failure. This is certainly the case with all other bumper stickers of this type. To keep something weird or wild presupposes that the change has already happened and that it is already too late. The bumper sticker is instead a plea to keep the nostalgic vision intact. It is an insistence on the existence of an alternate reality and a collective imagination of a place, sort of like the Wild West of the Spaghetti Western. 

Cover: 
The Seven Year VVitch
Ash, oil and charcoal on burned paper
30x22
2023