That California Light

The weather hit different the second you landed. Back home they were bracing for some storm that would knock everything out for a day. Here it was just sun and clear sky.

Mercedes had arranged for a group of us to visit their new research headquarters in Silicon Valley, wedged between Google and Apple’s compounds. Inside was the AMG Vision Gran Turismo, a concept car headed into the next Gran Turismo game. That was the reason we were there, though no one said it explicitly.

I went with Mathias Winks, Don Dahlmann, and Robert Basich—bloggers who were always up for a good story and decent weather. The photographer crew from Hypebeast and NOTCOT were already there, everyone shooting the same car from slightly different angles, looking for an image no one else had captured.

Kazunori Yamauchi showed up—the guy behind Gran Turismo. We talked for a bit. He told me he’d loved concept cars as a kid, the way they promised some future that felt real. Still did. That’s the thing about Yamauchi: he means what he says. He talked about design the way someone talks about a problem they’ve spent thirty years on: proportions, the balance between elegance and aggression, whether every line reads right. In the game, that all has to work. The shape, the movement, the camera framing the car in space. Real, even when it’s imaginary.

The car was a nice piece of design work. You could see both directions in it at once—past and future, elegant and fast, classical and modern. That balance was what interested him. Finding something that lived in multiple registers.

It’s in the game now. On PlayStation 3. You can drive it, crash it, race it. In the physical world it still sits in that building somewhere, proving a point about what’s possible.

The weather is what stayed with me. The hummus too—this pale creamy hummus everywhere in California that I’ve never found in Berlin. That’s what I think about now when it’s cold. The sun was nice. The car was worth seeing. But it’s the hummus I actually miss.