OBSOLETE CALIFORNIAS

January 2013

History is, like nature, red in tooth and claw. In the course of our daily lives, we walk over and around the bones of many a buried, boarded up, redecorated, and discarded California.

The relics of popular Californias are preserved and enshrined in our museums and history books. But what of the ones that are painful to remember? Or just awkward?

Never one to let capitalist opportunity lie fallow, Shipping & Receiving joined forces with the Storefront Lab and set up shop as merchants of Obsolete Californias. Artifacts for sale included: shovels, a fern bar microclimate, a 90's era dot-com cubicle, a Barbary Coast closet, coffee sold in mugs manufactured for extinct dot-coms, underpants featuring extinct California wildlife, and the night sky over California on the date that gold was first discovered.

During the month of its operation, the storefront also dealt in extinct social customs, including (but not limited to) whittling and cruising.

As a culmination of the project, the store became extinct.

Visit the original event page.

Credits:
Yosh Asato & David Baker: Storefront Lab Creators
Bree Hylkema: Wardrobe consultant
Jennifer Lynch of Potliqour: Miner food
Emperor Joshua Norton: as HIMSELF

OBJECT: The Frontier
HABITAT: The American West, the popular imagination.
ERA: pre-1893
COMPANION SPECIES: Pretty much everything that wasn't a gold miner.
REMARKS: The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. [Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," 1894]
COURTESY OF: Private collection

OBJECT: Tules (Scirpus acutus var. occidentalis). The name is believed to be a Spanish attempt to pronounce the Nahuatl "Tollin."
HABITAT: Most of California's Central Valley before the Kern, Tule, Kaweah, and Kings Rivers were diverted for agriculture.
ERA: between the last ice age and the early 20th Century, with a few stragglers.
USE: weaving baskets, weaving bowls, weaving boats, weaving buildings, weaving clothing, weaving duck decoys, eating (raw or boiled), breathing underwater while hiding from the U.S. Cavalry.
REMARKS: The expression "out in the tules," is still used in some parts of California. It means "beyond far away."
COURTESY OF: Private collection.OBJECT: Tules (Scirpus acutus var. occidentalis). The name is believed to be a Spanish attempt to pronounce the Nahuatl "Tollin."
HABITAT: Most of California's Central Valley before the Kern, Tule, Kaweah, and Kings Rivers were diverted for agriculture.
ERA: between the last ice age and the early 20th Century, with a few stragglers.
USE: weaving baskets, weaving bowls, weaving boats, weaving buildings, weaving clothing, weaving duck decoys, eating (raw or boiled), breathing underwater while hiding from the U.S. Cavalry.
REMARKS: The expression "out in the tules," is still used in some parts of California. It means "beyond far away."
COURTESY OF: Private collection.

OBJECT: Sabretooth Tiger Smilodon gracilis (underpants)
HABITAT: California's wooded grasslands, scrublands, and savannahs. Your butt.
ERA: Pleistocene (2.5 million years ago-10,000 years ago, give or take a few years).
COMPANION SPECIES: Mammoths, Mastodons, Ground Sloths, Bison, Camels, Horses, Peccaries, Antelopes, Tapirs, Elk, Deer, Bears, Lions, Jaguars, Cheetahs, Cougars, Bobcats, Wolves, Coyotes, Skunks, Raccoons, Humans.
REMARKS: Sabretooth Tigers are the third-most-common animal found in the La Brea Tar Pits. Dire wolves are the first. Coyotes, which know a thing or two about not becoming extinct, are third.

OBJECT: California Golden Bear Ursus arctos californicus (underpants)
HABITAT: Pretty much every part of California that wasn't desert. Your butt.
ERA: 13,000 years ago to 1922, give or take a few years.
REMARKS: The last Golden Bear captured alive in California lived in a cage in Golden Gate Park between 1894 and 1911. He was named "Monarch" after the San Francisco Examiner, which called itself "The Monarch of the Dailies," and which had organized his capture as a publicity stunt. Allen Kelly, the reporter who directed Monarch's capture in Ventura County, used to visit Monarch and apologize. Monarch served as the model for the bear in the California state flag and remains in the park today - stuffed, in the basement of the California Academy of Sciences.

OBJECT: Wooly Mammoth (underpants)
HABITAT: The tundra steppe that stretched across northern Asia, many parts of Europe, and the northern part of North America during the last ice age.
ERA: Pleistocene (2.5 million years ago-10,000 years ago, give or take a few years).
COMPANION SPECIES: Humans. For awhile, anyway.