Welcome to Beachtown Bohemia — a sketchbook and collection of writings about the coastal California that I belong to. It’s one part cultural anthropology, one part unhinged love letter, one part a meditation on place. My name is Olivia Joffrey. I’m an illustrator and writer with an eponymous creative agency based in Santa Barbara.
I come from the nonconformist Northern California surf town of Santa Cruz, which boasts a famous Boardwalk (please tell me you’ve seen The Lost Boys) and a fine university teeming with academics. The juxtaposition of those two things — the sensual and the academic — has shaped the way I experience the world (and shapes this newsletter.)
Beachtown Bohemia is a direct response to Jenny Odell’s revolutionary 2019 book How to do Nothing. In it, Odell argues that our attention in contemporary culture is being pulled away from the physical world with increasing velocity and force. She writes about becoming a birdwatcher as an engrossing antidote to the modern digital condition. Refining one’s attention to one’s environment, she argues, is an act of resistance to capitalist ideas of productivity and “a colonization of the self.” Beachtown Bohemia is my expression of this same joyful resistance, but in lieu of birding binoculars, I hold my paintbrush and pen. I may draw tacos, agave plants, tiled architraves, surfer’s limp wetsuits hanging on fences, camper trucks, interiors, street trees — whatever beckons as an emblem of this land and culture. In tandem with my drawings, I’ll tell stories of this specific region’s past and present. If attention is prayer, this is my paintbrush hymnal.
Yours,
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I look forward to this California adventure with you!
Yours, Olivia
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