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.