Christmas in Santa Barbara

Every week I have a different theory about why British people and Americans are different. The theory normally lasts about three to five days (during which time I bask in the smug glow of someone who has just solved an anthropological puzzle) before which some peskily irrefutable piece of evidence looms to the contrary and I am forced back into thinking that Americas are just... odd.

This week's theory: In their day-to-day lives, domestic arrangements and theories of government Americans are more private than English people.

Evidence to the contrary: Santa Barbara beach on Christmas Day.

California, perhaps more than anywhere else in America, is an epiphany of privacy and individualism. It is the site of tax revolts and home ownership. Southern Californians drive in privatised air conditioned bubbles along white ribbons of elevated freeways which have replaced desiccated public transport systems. The west coast exports to the rest of America the exaggerated crime statistics, no-go neighborhoods, car-jackings and race riots that are rendered in nightmarish cinematic splendor in the collective Californian imagination. Yet the Santa Barbara breakwater on Christmas Day, what should be the most privatized, home centered day of the year, is nothing less than a carnival. The beach path is so congested with people on bikes, skateboards, Rollerblades, segweys and, for some reason, wiry golf carts, that cycling becomes almost impossible. On the roadside families are walking dogs which vary in size from rat-like small to Christmas-pantomime big. Meanwhile Santa Barbara's battalions of homeless, who are normally seen shuffling purposefully in ones and twos up and down State Street sit in clusters on the sand drinking beer from plastic cups. In the distance are ball-games, picnics and windsurfers. Even the sea itself is a riot of activity, thick with pods of dolphins see-sawing across the bay and bemused pelicans watching the crowds from the waves. Compare this to England where everyone is inside. On Christmas Day you could nap in the middle of an A road and not be disturbed until the first boxing day sales opened. If it wasn't for family shaped silhouettes backlit by Christmas lights in the windows of every home, the streetscapes would look little different in the first few hours of a neutron bomb attack.

Maybe its just the weather.

From Northern Canada to Southern California

Last week I went from this:

Edmonton, Alberta. The coldest city in North America with temperatures of -35c for the week that I was there.

To this:

Santa Barbara. A small coastal town just north of Los Angeles. Also known as the 'American Riviera' it is perpetually between 16 and 20 degrees. With comic sans street signs and a 'British Pub' promising 'No Wankers', the town comes with a pervasive uncertainty about whether what you are looking at is a street, or, in fact, a well disguised shopping mall. It is where I will be with family for Christmas.

The problem with Albuquerque

When I set out on this trip I wanted to see at least one American city that was truly a mess. Ugly as sin, impossible to traverse on foot and a helpless victim of the awesome reductionist gale of American capitalism. I wanted to see the same blind, brutally modernist and psychopathically car-centred theory of urban planning that spawned Milton Keynes. This is exactly what I found in Albuquerque

San Mateo Avenue is the central shopping street in Northern Albuquerque. With four lanes of traffic going in either direction, it is bigger than the M1. Without exception, and almost with defiance, every shop is a franchise. Witness a Wall-Mart bigger than a military base that is so far from the road that it looms in the shimmering distance like a blue cliff-face, barely visible. Even the tattoo parlour is clearly a chain affair, with, optimistically I thought, eighteen parking spaces. On the train, later that same day, as we rolled into Gallup, New Mexico, a family with two small children behind me comforted themselves in this unfamiliar place by reciting the names of all of the chain shops and restaurants on the main drag which ran parallel to the train tracks: "Wall Mart, Arby's, Long John Silver's, Taco Bell..." Jeremy's warning that it all looks the fucking same flashed through my mind. Maybe its only Boston that's different. Back on San Mateo, at 11am on a Saturday morning, I am the only person walking down the street who is not either homeless, or involved a drug deal, or both. The idea of walking anywhere seems profoundly insane to those who live here, relinquishing the sidewalks to those whose fingers have slipped off of the last rung of society. It is apparently the case that the police here have the power to arrest anyone who is walking down the sidewalk with less than $20 in their pockets. When I arrived at the bus stop there was not a single person sober enough to tell me what time the bus would come. There were eight people.

I was couchsurfing with a perfectly pleasant, but slightly dull group of kids from Texas. They billed themselves as artists and I imagined I would be spending time with one of the intelligent, if pretentious households of people my age which cluster in cities all across the western world. Instead they were introspective, confused, lost and knew very little about the city they had lived in for almost a year. It was as if, somewhere along the well-understood route to becoming art-loving, coffee-drinking early-20-something hipsters, these kids had got horribly lost, and ended up stagnating in their own weird little cul-de-sac. This might be an Albequerque thing. The next morning I went to an alternative vegan cafe in search of good coffee. Despite the twee blue signage and the fake plastic carrots growing out of the walls, it was essentially a western diner, run by a former cattle rancher from Wyoming who was dressed as if en route to a cowboy themed fancy dress party. The coffee, to borrow a wonderful phrase from David Foster Wallace, tasted like hot water with a brown crayon in it. I asked if they had milk, they didn't.

Albuquerque is a post-modern quagmire. The city is aesthetically arranged so that people like myself will arrive, after travelling thousands of miles, and say "Oh, it looks exactly how I expected Albuquerque to look like." The city has a confusing and dizzyingly self-refferntial relationship with its comparatively rich 300-year colonial history. Looking at one of the countless mud-red Adobe houses along Central Street or in the theme-park-esque "Historic Old Quarter", it is has become impossible to make-out whether it is:

a) an original 300-year-old colonial Spanish structure or b) a recent construction, and that this, simply, is what architecture looks like in New Mexico or c) it is a recent construction, and that this what people think architecture should look like in New Mexico or d) it was built recently out of plastic to generate tourist revenue from the steam of Route 66 travellers. Among the Mexican restaurants and well tended cacti it is impossible to tell whether the city is Western, or just Western-themed. The city, and not just the Old Town but the entire city, is fused with with a nostalgia for an imagined West. It is insane to think that half a million people grow up, have children and die in what is essentially a post-modern theme park, no different to the Western quarter of the 'American Adventure' theme park in the midlands of England. The overall effect is that of a slightly shabby Mexican-themed restaurant.

This may sound depressing. But it feels gratifyingly different to the sugary red-brick coma of Cambridge, MA.

Full Force Galesburg

The journey from Boston to Albequerque, New Mexico is approximately 54 hours by train, including a swift, two hour layover in Chicago. After 2,000 miles, nine states, eighteen mini-oranges, four hot dogs, two burst shower gel bottles and one lost camera I have arrived.

The first day proceeded largely without incident. The train was small, mostly empty and smelt of stale snow. At a two hour stop in Albany I began chatting to two men from my train who, due to their striking appearance, I had been half-watching for the past five hours. The pair were a father and son (the son about my age). The father was supporting a large, brittle beard and round elegant silver-framed glasses. The son was chubby and effeminate, with wavy hair that flicked absurdly out from each side of his head. Both men were wearing black top-hats, black jackets, black trousers and plain, white shirts. The son kept looking at a large silver time piece on a chain which he kept in his top pocket. Together, in the art deco squalor of Albany station, they were an unreal sight. When engaged in a conversation they spoke in an almost unintelligible accent, where vowels were interchangeable. "Ohio" became "Ohiuh." "Canada", for some reason, became "Canadia". It turned out they owned a saw mill a hundred miles south of Cleveland, Ohio, and had been in New Hampshire looking at heavy machinery. I asked them if their accent was an Ohio accent and they were affronted, the father saying, "I thuank we 'ave uh puhtty normal Amriurn accunt miself." I secretly thought otherwise. It gradually dawned on me, as they began, somewhat unexpectedly, to admonish me for owning a mobile phone, that they were Amish. Boston felt very far away indeed.

It was extremely cold overnight. So cold that banks of snow built up in the compartments between the carriages. I put on a coat and two jumpers, curled into a ball and felt my bones turn to glass as I slept. I woke up in nothern Indiana. Absurdly huge factories with complex machinery clogged with snow sprung up on each side of the train. Everything was parched by wind and ice. Chicago is the coldest place I have been in my life, to date. In the two hours I spent changing trains it was impossible to leave the station for more than five minutes. Any longer and my face and ears became numb. Not just tingly, English January morning numb, but numb to the point where it felt like someone else's face and ears were attached to my head. The cars were dusty brown and cracked by the wind whipping off Lake Michigan, which thundered down the canyons of skyscrapers on all sides of the station. It felt like a metropolis built on some distant planet on the more obscure fringes of the solar system, far from the sun's warmth and subject to exotic climactic traumas.

Outside of Chicago, the midwest is a blanket of reasonably populated towns. In its obscurity, its balance of farming and industry and its flat small town-y-ness the midwest resembles the midlands of England. Or at least, it should do. While the midlands are polite, tepid and moderate, the midwest is an orgy of raw extremity. It is the breeding ground of fanatical religious sects, UFO evangelists and disaffected teeangers armed to the gills with semi-automatic weapons. While towns in the midlands are called Oakham and Rushden, towns in the midwest are called Liberty, Broken Arrow and, most evocatively of all, Galesburg. There are two towns named Independence, each within two hundred miles of one another.

My next train, complete with proper central heating and an observation deck, thundered south. It passed, incidentally, through four different cities and places that are the subject of different songs by The Mountain Goats.* I saw the Rocky Mountains and a heard of buffalo. This morning the train wound its way through an 8,000ft mountain pass and then sank down into the desert before reaching Albequerque. My destination for one night.

Before going to bed, let me recount the various things that different Americans have said to me on finding out that I am British.

- "England! Wow, is that up near Denmark? In that part of the world?"
- "Have you met the Queen?"
- "I was in London ten years ago. I bought a bra and underwear with the Union Jack on it. And a hat too."
- (most mystifying of all) "Have you ever seen a London fog horn?"

*From north to south:
Galesburg Illinois, subject of 'Weekend in Western Illinois' (and the album 'Full Force Galesburg')
The railway bridge between Iowa and Illinois that crosses the Mississippi, subject of 'Twin Highway Human Flares'
Kansas, subject of 'Going to Kansas'
San Bernadino California, subject of 'San Bernadino' (okay, I'm not there yet but I pass through it tomorrow).

"It all looks the fucking same"

I have an architect friend here from Florida who claims that all American towns are identical. With the same hatched gird pattern, the same Targets, Goodwills and Wallmarts, the same clapboard suburbs and the same credit crunched inner cities, there is apparently no point in leaving Boston at all if I want to see what the rest of America looks like. In Texas there the shopping malls are built to identical grid plans, with the same clusters of shops in exactly the same places. You can be buying shoes anywhere in Texas and not know if you are in El Paso or San Antonio. All that changes, apparently, is the topography. Marfa, Texas is just Topeka, Kansas in a desert. Baltimore is just Portland on the Atlantic and Omaha, Nebraska is just Birmingham Alabama in a cornfield.

On Wednesday morning I am getting on a train to Albuquerque. Having hardly left the Boston ring road, I am about to spend six weeks finding out what the rest of America looks like.

“Trust me, the first thing you are going to do when you get back from your trip, is knock on my door, and tell me that it all looks the fucking same.” For my friend, the words, “it all looks the fucking same”, should be branded onto the American flag instead of the stars.

If he is right then I will have wasted a lot of time and money.

The coldpocalypse has finally arrived.

I arrived in Boston expecting, by early November at least, to be up to my balls in snow. I imagined myself hopping lightly out of my fourth floor window onto a snowdrift and walking nonchalantly to class. However, first October, and then November passed in a pleasantly warm haze. Long after all the trees had been stripped of leaves I would often find myself walking out wearing nothing but a tee-shirt. Last week, while people in Cambridge were eating their lunch on the grass, it was snowing heavily in Austin, Texas.

Because British people have annexed the climate as our own national obsession, it is easy to overlook just how preoccupied Americans can be with the weather. On the Weather Channel’s website you can check what the weather will be doing over the next ten hours in quarter-hourly installments. At 10.45pm it might be raining. At 11 it might be raining heavily. And so on. Waiting for winter to finally arrive, I soon found myself checking their website every day, hoping that this phony war was about to end. I could feel myself easing dangerously into obsession.

When the first snow finally fell yesterday the weather channel predicted it to within five minutes. I walked into Lamont library (a library with approximately six hundred armchairs and about twelve books) half an hour after the first flakes started to fall. When I left, a few hours later the snow had done its thing. Everything was white, eerie and perfectly silent.

In Britain, when it snows heavily, all bets are off. No one turns up to anything, from school to funerals. It is the only climactic event short of a volcanic eruption that will make two British strangers walking down a street stop and talk to one another. It has the capacity to transform the same unthinkingly trudged streets into an eerie nostalgia-trip. Good old snow.

Before long, of course, the spell was broken as processions of students cantered out into the whiteness. Pale-blue camera flashes, like electric shocks, rippled in chains around the buildings. If the presidents of five different nations had been simultaneously assassinated in Harvard Yard the atmosphere would have been much the same. Soon, a decapitated army of hastily built snowmen were standing sentry around the campus. By midnight there was not much left to see.