We started this blog to cultivate images of Santa Barbara not approved by the Board of Tourism. Is there a Santa Barbara Board of Tourism? Too hard to find out for sure. But consider the following: (a) 75 percent of the humanity flowing up and down State Street at any given time are out-of-towners, and (b) the Santa Barbaran images that reach the outside world offer harbors, palm trees, Spanish architecture, and essentially nothing else. To look at those, you wouldn't know there's anything interesting in Santa Barbara.
Yet after living here for the better part of a decade, I've come to realize that there is. You just have to approach the city in the right frame of mind. To achieve this frame of mind, the only one through which the interesting Santa Barbara can be seen, you must wholly disregard the propaganda of quaint beachiness. Abandon the search for the pleasant, the picturesque, the paradisical. If you want to know what the interesting Santa Barbara is, it's this: a curbside wood grain-encased Sony television from 1981 that is both free and gratis.
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