More Than Nowhere

The Meaning of Erewhon

Propane on glass chips in a glass and concrete planter. Fire pit at the new Erewhon Pasadena. 7pm, Friday.

The building is late moderne, a perfect bright white cube, platonic suburbia, Pasadena being the original suburb at the end of the 110, the original freeway. At the top of the white cube flies a large American flag. It’s a holdover from the I. Magnin & Company department store building that later became a Borders. It’s very good and beautiful.

The fire pit never lights, but this little ring of oblong black-painted wooden outdoor recliners is always occupied, although we’re 27.3 miles from the beach. People, particularly broken ones, are oddly drawn to the sitting areas of grocery stores. Back in the living nightmare of DTLA, my local Ralph’s had a bar, every seat always taken by bizarre characters, chatting, watching Fight Club with no sound on one of two screens that played cable movies all day, sleeping head down on the bar, taking bites off whole fish they’d foraged from the deli. In Pasadena, Baja Ranch, a low end Mexican grocery, has a little outdoor sitting area with plastic contour booths like you’d see in an old fast food joint. It’s also always full, all old Mexican cowboys snoozing with their Stetsons over their eyes, beautiful mustaches, sweating, impossibly dirty, arms crossed on top of their guts as they rise and fall. 

When I worked briefly as an legal intern in Vietnam, I bunked with a mercurial little mite who grew up in Soviet Uzbekistan. He was a borderer then, a smuggler, and he told me about the utterly corrupt object-economy of the Soviet era. The core currency wasn’t just “vodka,” it was x brand of vodka. This type of cheese, that type of cigarette. The government offered one brand of everything—and that brand was considered toxically awful, the lowest of the low. Possessing literally any other brand proved you were a person of prestige and substance. Novelty was currency.

“We would do anything for a premium vodka or an American cigarette…you could bribe any official instantly, far easier than with money,” he told me.

Slop kills. If you think about it literally, America didn’t finish off the Soviet Union because of our military, but because of our supermarkets. Cornucopias of human creation and deliciousness. It’s the supermarket’s differentiation, slight changes in quality, ingredients, appearance, that humans live for. We imagine a grocery store offering the same brand of everything as dull, drab, dystopian. But a multitude of bright brands emanates a great warmth. People gather by the fire.

The black wood beach…loungers? Speaking of variety, what are these things called? Daybeds? Is this a daybed? What’s a daybed? “Long wooden lounger chair commercial.” Nothing. Aha! The Polywood™ South Beach Folding Adirondack Chair. They’re “Adirondack Chairs!”

Anyway, a depressed woman in full red jumpsuit with a shitty scraggly white dog and scraggly hair sits in an Adirondack Chair at the Erewhon fire pit. In another, an Asian girl with a bob and no shoes falls asleep with a white plastic TJ Maxx bag on her lap. A Middle Eastern bro with a white headphone cord, high socks, white loafers, reading glasses clipped on long sleeve henley, also falling asleep. Keeps waking up. Gets up and limps away. Seems drunk. Asian guy with two iPhones, one of them blasting some game show. 

Bob girl falls deeper asleep, a purple tint in her air. The green ferns creep up the manila wall behind her. Her white flats glow slightly yellow like the wall and her skin. Tattoo on her inner ankle. Birthmark on her elbow. Long middle toe much longer than the big toe, long, unkempt toenails. Flat butt not poking through her cheap looking poor person slacks. She seems hurt pretty bad. Didn’t enter Erewhon. Just wants to bask in its warmth.

New Asian dad in high socks and Birkenstock knockoffs sits down. Golf shirt tucked into white khaki shorts. He takes in his cohort, giving them a calm raised eyebrow. He knows all about grocery sitting areas. And boy is he glad his daughter didn’t turn out like bob girl. His glasses are an opaque orange, his phone case a creamy white. He surveys the scene one more time then squints downward to the screen. 

Jangling white woman bursts onto the scene. Real Birkenstocks. Black yoga pants, perfect fit. Green tank. Blonde highlights darker roots, but very well layered. Feverishly hoovers down kale and chicken. Holds three bananas between legs. Boxed Vita Coco, but not the ordinary blue bottle, the very special “Pressed” variety with “Pressed” written in brown cursive. Apple Watch with black band. Taps on phone. Vigorously digs into her kale, it flops all over the box it came in.

The Asian girl wakes up and digs her toes back into her dirty flats. She makes no eye contact, does no surveying. Her phone case is cheap and flimsy, maybe some rhinestones, a knockoff of a knockoff of a knockoff, purchased for mere cents, manufactured for less than one cent. Her ankle tattoo is non descript, maybe a sunset? 

The Middle Eastern bro is back, pacing, asserting dominance over Asian dad. He claims the last remaining chair, but then jumps up. He’s forgotten something. He bounces back in, through the big sliding doors, into the box of color and light. 

–

The Adirondack chair is from the Adirondacks. A humble furniture designer designed a few for sitting around the fire at his lake house in Lake Champlain in 1903. At first it was for personal use only, but then a carpenter friend looking for extra money asked the designer for work. The designer had him build a few prototypes, and they instantly took off. But then the carpenter betrayed the designer—he made a few tweaks and obtained a patent for the design himself, freezing out the designer and getting rich on the chairs himself. Back then it was called the Westport chair. Thirty years later, a more famous designer, named Irving Wolpin came along, made a few more slight changes to the design, obtained another patent, and changed the name to Adirondack chair, for the mountains near where the chair was originally invented. This became the favored design, and the Westport chair, and the carpenter, fell back into obscurity. And now a ring of these Adirondacks, conceptual spearpoints honed by the pressures of capitalism, now surely manufactured in China, support the weary, silent bodies of first generation immigrants outside the Erewhon, the latest conceptual spearpoint to break through. Welcome to America.

Delicious Tacos tweeted “Erewhon is women’s Valhalla.” Indeed, the most common site in Erewhon is college girls dragging around their hicklib mothers. They gawk at prices together. The mothers’ eyes open wide, their jaws drop—but they aren’t angry. They’re excited. Impressed. Stimulated. Mother and daughter share a smirk. This is it.

Every other grocery store has become that bland, drab, grey experience in comparison. Even Whole Foods, the proto-Erewhon status symbol once known as “whole paycheck,” has plummeted in perception—now it’s known for seed oil stuffed crap and weird globalist frozen beef offerings. An Amazon-subsidiary and the very definition of “middle.”

When global capital in the form of index funds, holding companies, private equity groups, and hedge funds own everything, competition plummets to communist-grey. Everything starts to look and taste the same. People will do anything for not only for real quality, but simply for real variety.

So the market created its own vacuum where an Erewhon should be, and that’s why its here. Still, what Erewhon has done with its brand is astounding. Girls in Michigan post TikToks asking which local stores are most like Erewhon. Erewhon bags and sweatpants are tongue in cheek status symbols. The swirling, colorful $20+ influencer-branded smoothies, one of which contains real beef, are edible artworks; master classes in modern marketing. It’s the greatest brand America has produced in many years. 

Any why? Because the vibe of Erewhon is elite shamelessness. A tuning out of the problems of the world. The prices are appalling, shocking really, and that’s the point. One great example is Harry’s Berries (currently my favorite brand on Earth, for reasons I’ll explain in a later article), strawberries in a clear plastic box that sell for over $20 per. Ready-made-food plates start at $29.99 per pound. Probably the biggest markup? Erewhon sells a small container of white rice for $9. 

The rice says “I’m hot, I live on cigarettes and cocaine, but I just need the slightest bit of sustenance to get me through this afternoon.” It’s the opposite of the pathetic apology that Whole Foods has become. The entire operation is a giant class insult from high to low. The upper classes are abandoning “world saving” as a class signal. Healing the planet has become middle brow. The rich now show off by healing themselves. 

“I disagree with those environmentalists who say we are going to have to make do with less. In fact, we are going to make do with more: more beauty, more community, more fulfillment, more art, more music, and material objects that are fewer in number but superior in utility and aesthetics. The cheap stuff that fills our lives today, however great its quantity, can only cheapen life.” ― Charles Eisenstein, Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition

Charles Eisenstein is a handsome Jewish Yale “expert” pop economist; in other words, he tells the upper classes how to be cool at dinner parties. Most of his work is Marx-light blabbering, but here he’s signaling something new. “Caring about the environment,” is out. Self-sacrifice is out. Being ugly for the sake of the blacks is out. What’s in? Superior aesthetics. No seed oils. Strawberries that actually look red inside like strawberries are supposed to look. Indulging in the sweet taste of a real juicy berry. And becoming one yourself.

The bored and rich always lead revolutions and now they’re leading us towards something actually genuinely beautiful. Steve Jobs didn’t let his kids use tech. The private equity magnate shops at Erewhon. The meaning is the same. Slop is for the masses.

But the masses follow the rich, and thus we begin the long march towards mainstreaming trad wife naturalism in a way that could genuinely save white women, and thus American democracy. In the end, the internationalist blood sucker can indebt us to the tune of a trillion zillion dollars for educations, houses, cars, whatever. They could make that little rice container $500, women will still flock to Erewhon, if only to sit outside of it.

That American flag on Erewhon? It ain’t comin’ down. Not because of Kulak-grade middle-class “patriotism,” which will never ever be “cool” again, at least until there’s another Civil War. It’s not coming down because Erewhon simply doesn’t care. It’s not trying to change the world. It’s trying to be beautiful. Actually beautiful. And it takes enough work to achieve just that.

So what is Erewhon, you ask? Erewhon is why the communists always lose.