Facts first: California, the state, is so far into the red, so overwhelmed with unfulfillable retirement obligations that only a major earthquake can save us. I mean a major earthquake taking place during a Democrat administration that would be eager to make the money of non-California taxpayers pour into our Golden State. Nor is the disaster affecting only the state bureaucracy. Many of us would secretly gloat if it, and only it, just went bankrupt. I wouldn’t even be surprised if one of our artsy craftsy conservatives (you would be surprised) were making ready a new flag for the occasion. Perhaps, it would show a grizzly bear with its foot in a bear trap.

The truth is that private business does not seem to have really recovered since 2008 either. If it had, I reason, you would notice it here in Santa Cruz, Silicon Valley Beach. Nothing further from the truth. There are still many empty window fronts right downtown. And new businesses don’t seem to last. The turnover is higher than it used to be, as if those that tried shouldn’t have because they have financial feet of clay. Just yesterday, a new restaurant left its door ajar before actual opening, for deliveries and such. It occupies a really good spot where a popular drinking hole stood for twenty years. The owner of the new place, a Palestinian immigrant, told me that I was the sixth person in thirty minutes to walk in spontaneously to wish the new business good luck. We are that eager for good economic news.

Anyway, Sunday and Saturday was the annual Cabrillo street music festival and fair. It was surprisingly good. It’s surprisingly good each year; no one should be surprised, really.

Among the street fair exhibitors, you found, of course, the usual insipid watercolors and second year art students’ plein air art of the California hills all in shocking primary colors. I mean boring paintings, of course. And then, there are the pretty non-discriminate earrings from no one knows where that sell only because of the nature of women’s eyes: You put anything on women’s ears, including little broke pieces of mirror, and their eyes shine and sparkle. Yet, yet, there are good surprises, because this is California, I think. Someone is offering earrings and other jewelry made of sea glass, original, at least. (Sea glass is made up of pieces of broken bottles and such that have been rolled by the ocean until their shape, texture, and color have been radically modified for the better.) Further down the street, an older lady is selling colorful birds nesting boxes made of old food cans. A young couple is doing a brisk business in incredible objects. They are attractive belts, laptop cases, and even frankly elegant purses made entirely with old bicycle inner tubes (recycled, I think). Yes, there is a common theme here. Although I am skeptical of the economic rationality of most recycling, I am in love with the ingenuity involved in turning old into new, seeming nothing into something. California for you, even if the original impulse is rooted in the insane fallacies of the climate change cult!

And then, there was music non-stop on an outdoor stage from 10 am to 8 pm. My old friends of Aza gave their usual brilliant performance. They play Amazigh music with a Santa Cruz twist. The Amazigh are the original inhabitants of North Africa, before the Arab conquest. (Saint Augustine was a romanized Amazigh.) They are the same people we often call “Berber” (but we shouldn’t because it really means “barbarians.”) The Amazigh have their own language that is unrelated to Arabic. Their culture is extraordinarily vivacious, especially in Morocco where they are probably a majority of the population though divided into several subgroups. Anyway, these two young Moroccan Amazigh guys, both trained musicians, emigrated to Santa Cruz, separately twenty years ago. They bumped into each other and began playing together. Then, they recruited local musicians to round off their band, to include more instruments. The locals were steeped in rock and roll and some, in (Western) classical music. Several played instruments never heard in North Africa before, such as saxophones. What comes out is profoundly original music. It’s Amazigh music with a zing and a bang and spitting fire. Last summer, they got first prize at an all-Amazigh music festival in the Atlas mountains of Morocco. You might say this Santa Cruz, California-grown ensemble are the world champions of Amazigh music.

There was also a group performing Carnataka stylized dance from South India. Only two of about twenty dancers appeared to me to be of Indian origin. (I am a kind of expert on Indian appearances, don’t ask.) The dance seemed perfectly accomplished to me. (But what do I know?) I didn’t catch where the group hailed from. Might have been Silicon Valley, someplace in California, for sure. One of the last numbers was West African drumming and singing. There were two energetic West African guys on stage beating traditional African drums very loudly and singing in Wolof (I think) plus a pretty African woman dancer. They were accompanied by a white woman on the drum set, I mean the Western-style drum set. Couldn’t have been less “authentic” and, that’s a key to success, to inventiveness, I believe. It’s one of the reasons nearly bankrupt California remains a beacon to the world. Within minutes, the drummers has thirty people dancing on stage with them, nearly all white. (No Mexicans though, Mexicans are a dignified, reserved lot. Perhaps, their California-born children will join later.)

I ended the lovely day a couple of miles away from the festival, near a restaurant at the harbor, having a smoke. A guy in his early fifties was standing nearby puffing away too. He was in very good shape. He wore a t-shirt of a light blue color matching precisely the blue of his eyes. Athletic gay guy for sure, right? He introduced himself as a former Army drill sergeant, which I believed immediately. Nowadays, he said, he was making his living teaching art at San Francisco State. California dreaming never ending!