Reader, it was not to be. Right when I got into town a headline blared at me from a newspaper box on a street corner. “Alameda Labor Dispute Hinges on Skills of Projectionists,” read the front page of the East Bay Express, the area’s alt-weekly. The projectionists at the Alameda Theatre were on strike. The theater’s owner refused to hire union operators. Shows were starting late and breaking down, prints were scratched and dirty. Audiences were leaving with black clouds over their heads. Incompetents were manning the equipment and the owner didn’t care. He offered no excuses. Digital projection would replace film projection any day now, any second, he said, and “when I convert to digital there is no projectionist. There’s no projectionist anymore. I am trying to make them understand that.”

He was dreaming about a day when the machines would run themselves at the same time as he was talking out his ass. I walked by the theater to make sure the strike was on. It was, in a California way. Some guy was sitting in a folding chair with flyers in his lap. There was no blow-up rat, no pickets that night, nobody chanting slogans. Still, I couldn’t go in. I used to be a movie theater projectionist. I couldn’t cross the line.

Twice each month on Friday nights, the leaflet said, the Harmony Center for the Joyful Spirit hosts movies at the “Home of Gwendolyn and Daniel.” The mission of Oakland’s Harmony Center is to bring “Joy and Inspiration into our lives.” “What better way to do that than to get together with friendly people for an informal meal, enjoy a great film, and then have a lively discussion of the ethical and spiritual lessons of the film?” the leaflet asked. It described Gwendolyn and Daniel’s “24th floor penthouse apartment with a ‘top of the world’ view” where “movies are shown on our 58-inch plasma HDTV with Dolby Digital Surround Sound.” Instructions followed: “If possible, please call or email with your choice of pizza, meat or veggie. Please note that we maintain a shoeless household.” Now I knew I was in California. And I knew what being in California meant: no matter how spiritual the discussion, the pizza would suck.

California is death haunted compared to New York. Everything is still and spooky, the grass along the highways north of Oakland is dry and brown. New York moves in the frame-skip fast-forward of digital video. One thing replaces another, they build an IKEA in no time by paving over cobblestone streets in Brooklyn, and they demolish buildings from the 1850s to do it. In New York, even the ghosts get priced out. In the quiet counties of Marin and Contra Costa, they linger.

I prefer to get my homilies from somebody a little more disabused than Dorothy Gale