The Jaysmiths Hit California (part two)

Thursday 24th and Friday 25th...

The schedule on Thursday calls for us to head up to Santa Barbara, where Sarah's aunt Jane has friends called Em and Walt, whom we met last time we were in New York and who generously if randomly offered to put us up in their guest house if we were ever in the area. Sarah tentatively sounded them out on this, and here we go for two nights with them. The GPS takes us along the Interstate, but Sarah isn't having it; our camera, a ten-year veteran and then some, has been a battery-addled failure for a good chunk of that time, and she wants a new one. Today. Now, in fact. So we try the Thousand Oaks Mall, and after a detour for Panda Personal Shopping Services to help her out in Torrid, we ransack the place looking for cameras. None. None at all. Guest Services directs us up the road to Best Buy. Nuh. Really? OK. Fortunately honour is satisfied in the Best of Buys, as you might hope from its name, and we come out with a camera, a small and cheap Kodak (Sarah is so Kodak) yet so futuristic that this freaky little thing can spot faces and will then auto-tag them in the future. WTF. It's smaller than my hand. Not that my hand can do that... although I suppose it would have to learn to, if I was blind... but just rewind to that WTF for a moment, and add this camera to the list of fabulous stuff which is now everyday, and not just some gimmick from "Tomorrow's World". So casually ubiquitous... but not, as we saw on a hoarding advertising a new car, "Unbiquitous", which is one of those portmanteau words which sure makes me want to port someone's manteau...

Some of Santa Barbara's hillside habs put even Hollywood to shame. These people are money. It turn outs that some of these places were swept away in the fires a couple of years ago; they're already rebuilt. $20m houses are bought and demolished so replacement $30m houses can be erected. Architects build places for themselves here - then get divorced and have to move out. A former chairman of Sprint lives here. Downtown, there's an estate next to the Santa Barbara zoo which looks to be about the same size and is owned but not occupied by an English centenarian who they're trying to persuade to sell to the town. There are homeless people here too, mind you, but as Em puts it, "if you're homeless, why not do it here, where the weather's nice?" (In a bizarre progressive measure amidst all this money, the homeless people who sleep under a giant tree in town are allowed to use it as a mailing address, bypassing at a stroke the biggest problem for anyone trying to escape homelessness - no deliverable address.)

Fifteen or even ten years ago I would have had big philosophical problems with this neighbourhood, but these days, whatever. Life is now officially too short for me to protest rich people having money, as long as they pay their taxes and act responsibly with it. I was pleased to read Joanne Rowling ranting in the Guardian about how she wouldn't leave England and would pay her taxes like a good citizen because she had benefited from the NHS when she was broke and she believed her good fortune should be taxed just like anyone else's. Hurrah for her. I have no idea about Walt and Em's taxation position; I'm going to assume the best. I will say the roads are better in Santa Barbara than they are in Hollywood, and we didn't see any private roads. But there are some dangerous ones: Walt and Em live way up the side of the hill, on a road which hairpins in numerous places and which offers more than one opportunity to drive into a three-hundred-foot gully. Jhwalee! However, gully drive-ins were avoided. Just about.

We relaxed for the rest of Thursday and then had a long... a v long... guided tour of Santa Barbara with Em on Friday. Did you know Father Junipero Serra instigated a trail of twenty-one missions along the Californian coast nearly 250 years ago to bring some much-needed Catholicism to the savage Native Americans of the province? Well now you do. The place has been demolished by earthquake before now, but religious stuff always gets rebuilt better than ever in the end. There's a museum distributed through the Mission with time-worn relics, including musical instruments (Native Americans can be taught basic instrument-playing and four-part harmony, Deo Gratia) and some rather nice statuary in the church. It all looks a bit Potemkin, mind you; it doesn't reek history, rather it looks like Zorro will strike at any moment, and then someone will holler "Cut!"

It was impossibly sunny, that day, against expectations (my mother's weather-controlling Bear strikes again) and after seeing the Mission we saw the downtown courthouse, which has impeccable views across the whole of the town. Really strange: the town clearly has plenty of beautification ordnances, because the tallest building in town is a matter of four or five storeys, and almost all roofing is the same tiling in terra-cotta, and the buildings themselves seem to be slouched in a haze of greenery, sharks in the jungle, red jostling red in the green. Trees here are fucking tall when they want to be; right in front of the south view there are two brands of tree which cheerfully match the courthouse and appear quite ready to keep pace if they try building anything else. Most cities look strange when you look down on them because you can see all the rooftop heterogeny they try to conceal behind carefully-regulated and matched-up two-storey facades; Santa Barbara looks downright weird in its coherency, like a carefully-edited novel, showing no signs of having been agonized over for anything longer than perhaps a day. You could almost imagine the place was a pop-up book which came into being like "Dark City" but in broad daylight. It's impressive. But the dreamtown is at risk; according to Em, some long-time privately-owned shops are dying off, to be replaced by American Apparel, British and Irish pubs (never good; always means the ex-pats have arrived) and other indicators of the end of civilization, like Betsey. If all else fails the locals can always set another fire.

The Jaysmiths Hit California (part one of N)

Hello! Remember me? Because I remember you. You're that hypothetical reading person I write blog entries for, and you're about to read another one, again, hypothetically. And that was all the intro you get, so c'mon, start reading.

I'm actually less than two years behind on blogging, which is better than I'd thought, and well under the national average, but I'll cover some of that stuff going forward. For now, Sarah suggested that for various reasons - creativity, sanity, permanent record, can't say "fuck" as often using only the medium of photographs - I should write up how we're enjoying our holiday in Southern California. So that's what this is, and since we got here on the 23rd, I have six days to cover.

Wednesday 23rd...

6:20am flight, with a 4am taxi. So naturally we stayed up till about two; Sarah's sleep cycle is unrecognizable these days, and I left it too late to make a definite decision, with the unpromising result that I was very sleepy in the cab and on the plane. But on the plus side, there tends to be a maximum time I can sleep on flights, and this flight was only a little longer than that time, so I barely noticed it. Which is good, as I hate travelling by air, it's not a compatible and congenial environment for pandas to absorb anything, and its only advantage is that it covers the distance quickly. I'm sure the main reason I don't really like going back to England is the thought of the flight, eating basically two solid days from the vacation time. But LA is in the same time zone, so this was more like a long day than exhausting biorhythm terrorism.

So to collect the rental car, with added GPS. Oh my god, GPS. This wasn't in the initial plan, but James' advice from his recent LA trip was "get one", and I can only imagine the adventures we'd have been on without it. "Where's my fucking jetpack?" goes the common refrain, which I'm even going to use in a song soon... well, "where's our fucking destination?" would have been a far more common utterance this week but for this little sweetheart. These are the days of miracle and wonder, and our GPS -although occasionally in need of forgiveness for its brash confusion about car parks and its insistence on "recalculating" when you're going straight down the very road it stipulated five seconds earlier - is a miracle and a wonder all in one. What we need now is GPS for rabbits...

First we trundled down to Venice Beach, seeing as how we had an urgent need for food. Venice Beach, mmmmm. Biiiig beach... lotsa skateboarders, plenty of surfers, cyclists rowdily barracking a clump of peds to get out of their lane, a big blue mural on the side of a high building a couple of blocks inland, and the Sidewalk Cafe, paired with a bookshop and offering tolerable nosh. I've never really been to an American beach town... or at least, not to the beach part; when I was with Abby we went around Jensen Beach a bit, but I only clearly remember the boardwalk at Saturn, which wasn't like this at all. This was like "John From Cincinatti", with hordes of bike and surf shops, and sunny dropouts teaching six-year-olds how to flip their skateboards. All very non-Jaysmith, really, so we finished our food and retreated, but not before Sarah had found a very impressive breakwater which produced enormous serial splashes every thirty seconds or so. So, happy bunny there, although I had to forbid her to climb it and strike a "Titanic" pose moments before being saturated.

Inland, and seeing as how we're here with a car, a GPS (tee!) and time to kill before the hotel will take us, we decide to go see the HOLLYWOOD sign. It turns out that this is up a terribly damaged road on which there are dire apartment blocks as well as the most extravagant six-storey blank-walled glass-topped mountainside-crawlers you can imagine. Jesus. Spend a few bucks on your fucking road, will you. No doubt this is intended to dispel sightseers like us - well it won't work, rich people! And sure enough, there was the sign... visible from the bottom of the hill, it's far enough away that it doesn't really get too much bigger by the time you get to the cafe and the designated viewing point. I'm finally looking at the famous HOLLYWOOD sign. And do you know the weird thing? It's just a sign, kinda in the middle of nowhere, but it's laden with value and meaning for an English kid... and yet... it really is just a sign, in the middle of nowhere... and you know what else? All that glamour and money looks real faded... a currency no-one spends anymore, half those houses probably empty, the real people living in those crappy-looking apartments which could have been anywhere in the world but which happen to have a view up the hill to the Sign Of Movie Dreams. Huh. Still, now, been there done that.

We can probably head to the hotel now, as Sarah is flagging a bit, so off we go through more downtown LA... and as the GPS delivers us, we find that the exact block containing our hotel has been cordoned off. A little phone exploration determines that there was a fatal crash earlier. We park in the Home Depot opposite, then find we can cross from there into the hotel car park, cunningly avoiding and possibly annoying all the cops. But whatever. Here we are in LA, in our hotel, and we have a nap, because boy, do we need one. So our heads hit the pillows, and we're sleeping... on, wait for it, Sunset Boulevard. HA! Like I wouldn't want a hotel with that address. But see previous paragraph for just how impressive Sunset Boulevard actually is in 2011. It has a few touches of Pender or Hastings, and plenty of general decrepitude. People walking past have that "I live in Aldershot" brittle shell to them, as though teasing them about the former glories of their hometown will get you either stabbed or sobbed on... or possibly a third option, simple rejection of whatever some romantic white boy thinks of LA. This part of town isn't film country, despite its label. These are all the people who are actually waiters and bank tellers, not actors pretending.

And, later that night: Panda Express! Which is not some kind of sex thing. In fact there is a chain of fast-ish food joints by that name, serving extremely acceptable trays of rice and meat, two of which are nommed in due course - after we've been up and down on foot for a few blocks to establish there's nothing else we can eat. Panda Express may prove to be a reliable discovery...

To be continued...