Jackson’s Useless Beauty

Roger Friedman writes on Fox news’ “The area where Michael Jackson lives, the Santa Ynez Valley, is jaw-droppingly beautiful. The real surprise about Santa Maria is that if you go 20 miles in any direction, the surrounding landscape offers unlimited
enjoyments. From the moonscape of the Guadalupe dunes to the honky-tonk charm of Pismo Beach, cows grazing on pastoral hills, stony granite-lined mountains, the
dusty roads of Casmalia and the gorgeous pink-and-orange sunsets over flat fields of broccoli farms, the whole area has been a pleasure to live in.

You can’t help thinking, though: Somehow Jackson missed all this. Living behind his gates, lost in a world of make-believe, he never got to appreciate, as Elvis Costello might call it, all this useless beauty.