The ninth annual Kinetic Poetics Spoken Word Festival will take place at UC Santa Cruz next week, from Sunday, Jan. 29 to Wednesday, Feb. 1. The event, which features students performing slam poetry pieces that highlight themes of identity and other personal subjects, has been gaining a lot of popularity since the festival first started.     

Freud and Jung are dueling docs in uneven ‘Dangerous Method’

It’s Carl Jung vs. Sigmund Freud in A Dangerous Method, the talky new drama of ideas from director David Cronenberg. But despite what you see on the poster and in the preview trailers, the dueling doctors are not involved in a love triangle over a woman. Yes, there is a woman at the center of the story, the historically significant figure, Sabine Spielrein; an early patient of Jung’s, she was later psychoanalyzed by Freud, and eventually went on to become a doctor in her own right, and colleague to both men. Many things come between the two pioneers of modern psychiatry in the course of the film, but sexual rivalry over Sabine is not one of them.

Tips for healthy and guilt-free eating out

It’s late January: how are your New Year’s resolutions faring? If you vowed, like many Americans, to eat healthier and maybe shed a few pounds this year, rest assured that you don’t need to hibernate while your friends go out for a bite. Here are some helpful hints that will let you join the party without compromising your resolutions.

SLUG REPORT > Food activism prompts upcoming UC Santa Cruz conference

Food: it’s a topic so interwoven into our everyday lives that it never seems to stray too far from our thoughts, and our concerns. Whether it’s finding out what’s right to eat or growing it in our own front and backyards, food, and specifically where it comes from and how it gets to us, is a trending topic.

Films This Week
Check out the movies playing around town.
With: Reviews  A DANGEROUS METHOD,
Movie Times click here.
Santa Cruz area movie theaters >

The Shoot
The Girls
The Boys
The Bride
Simmons’ Wedding Tips

The Cocoanut Grove
Seascape Flowers
Hollins House
Crown Café Catering
Alexis Party Rental
Music Now DJ

Hip-hop collective Doomtree meditates on technology with ‘No Kings’

Indie rock fans would be forgiven if they mistook the tale of Twin Cities hip-hop collective Doomtree for that of folk strummer Bon Iver.

After all, just as Justin Vernon did with For Emma, Forever Ago, the seven-member crew laid down all the demos for their forthcoming album, No Kings, while sequestered in a remote Wisconsin cabin—far away from the noise and lights of the city and out of cell phone reception.

“We definitely wanted to isolate ourselves from distractions,” says Margret Wander a.k.a. Dessa, a singer and emcee with the group.

Steven Graves has started to dream in songs. The 48-year-old Capitola resident heard the lyrics to his latest in the gray space between waking and sleep. “I wrote the whole song in about 20 minutes, got up, laid down the guitar parts—I’ve never been able to do that before,” he laughs. A dream is a fitting metaphor for Graves’ career. A former land use consultant, he left the field in 2010 to pursue his passion for music.

SLUG REPORT > Collaboration was key to new open sourced surgical robots

“The story about Raven is actually the story about collaboration.”

These words rang out long after my recent interview with Jacob Rosen, an associate professor of computer engineering in the Jack Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz. Rosen and his research group have been working alongside Blake Hannaford, director of bio-robotics of the University of Washington (UW), to create Raven II, a robotic surgery system that relies upon Rosen’s choice word: collaboration.