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Life demands its compromises. The woman who wakes in a beach cottage and slips into dawn waves typically forfeits her claim to rich metropolitan confections— Yo-Yo Ma on a Tuesday night, or Percival Everett, fresh from his Pulitzer, holding forth on the nature of narrative in a room of hundreds. One does not expect world-class surf breaks and world-class culture to occupy the same coordinates. Yet Santa Barbara performs this unlikely trick with nonchalance.
The secret, I’ve come to understand, lies in the university. A college town possesses resources that pure beach communities—San Clemente, say, for all its epic waves —cannot muster. Santa Cruz knows this. San Diego knows this. In Santa Barbara, the University of California campus a few miles up the coast does wonders for our cultural lives. From its perch it radiates into town a kind of intellectual weather: brilliant lectures, improbable performances, the whole apparatus of which is as serious in its cultural ambition as New York’s 92nd Street Y. The UCSB Arts & Lectures series delivers something previously unthinkable in a place this small —a metropolitan fix administered in regular, potent doses, here in what might otherwise be just a sleepy surf town with an admirable zoning code.
I'd been marking time until January 20th for months. Miranda July—performance artist, writer, filmmaker, that rarest of creatures who moves fluently between mediums—was scheduled to appear in conversation with Shana Moulton, the media artist and UCSB professor. Even Santa Barbara Magazine, in its December Culture Issue, had seen fit to herald the forthcoming event, the author of All Fours being the sort of draw one promotes well in advance. The editor commissioned me to illustrate an end page for the issue, something that might capture July's spirit and end the year on a playful note. I found the assignment irresistible and surrendered entirely to absurdity. The result appears below.
The event had sold out—Campbell Hall packed to capacity with accomplished women (and a few men) many of whom I recognized from across Santa Barbara’s various scenes. Moulton proved an excellent interviewer, casual enough to put her subject at ease, deferential, yet sufficiently structured as to guide us through the arc of July’s career: from punk performance art at Berkeley’s 924 Gilman Street to her feature film Kajillionaire to her acclaimed novel All Fours. July described having written some parts her latest novel as exploration, and other parts as a kind of expulsion of a former self.
At one particularly arresting moment, July rose from her chair to enact this very transformation. She crouched behind it, embodying her old self trapped in what she called a “foxhole”—one partly of her own construction, partly society’s—that kept her fixated on a question. Her head appeared above the chair back speaking from the foxhole: “I’m hot, right?” Then, as if to demonstrate the liberation she’d experienced, July leapt out front, commanding the full space around her, and looked back at that small, imprisoned head with tender revision: “You don’t have to stay in the foxhole, darling.” I’m paraphrasing here, but the pantomime was a stroke of genius, and it left the audience transfixed in a collective a-ha.
The talk found its complement in the Arts & Lectures podcast "Air Time," where July had spoken with actress and Santa Barbara resident Jordana Brewster. The two conversations illuminated each other—together they revealed July's creative process and her almost Talmudic habit of interrogating everything: middle age, desire, achievement, dating, motherhood. It was a memorable evening, suffused with a particular species of female power. I won't forget it. And I suspect the next item on the Arts & Lectures calendar will prove equally, delightfully urbane.
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