How do you feel about setting your clock to “fall back”? Do you prefer early mornings or longer days?
Maria Chavez, 53, Amateur Botanist
“I like having a longer day. I like when it’s bright and happy, and you can be more productive. It’s easier to stay in bed when it’s dark. But I don’t like changing the time, just let it be natural.!”
Oliver Grubb, 17, Street Musician
“I didn’t know the time was changing. I woke up and it was an hour earlier than I thought. It was nice because I hadn’t gone busking for a while, so it felt like I had more time to do that.”
Zoe K, 21, “Olympic” Hacky Sack Player
“I’d rather have the day last longer, but I don’t pay attention to time. If I have to be somewhere on someone else’s timeline I’ll be there, but personally I just follow the sun doing its thing.”
David Regus, 40, Self-Defense Instructor
“I enjoy longer nights. I live in the mountains of Bonny Doone, so I get to see more stars. But I don’t like the time changing—I’d rather settle on a steady time and just let the day do what it’s going to do.”
Catherine Gallagher, 56, Scientist
“I have mixed feelings. I don’t like the longer nights, but I have early morning meetings so it’s a lot easier to get up in the morning. It would be a lot easier if we kept the same time all year.”
Jim Hamilton, 53, Retired
“When you fall back it feels OK, you get an extra hour of sleep—but when you spring forward, you feel like you’re being robbed. They say that heart attacks increase when we spring forward.”
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Your victories-in-progress are subtle. They may not be totally visible to you yet. Let me describe them so you can feel properly confident about what you are in the process of accomplishing. 1. A sustained surge of hard-earned personal growth is rendering one of your problems mostly irrelevant. 2. You have been redefining what rewards are meaningful to you, and that’s motivating you to infuse your ambitions with more soulfulness. 3. You are losing interest in a manipulative game that doesn’t serve you as well as it should. 4. You are cultivating more appreciation for fascinating and useful problems.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Taurus physicist Richard Feynman was a smart and accomplished person who won a Nobel Prize. He articulated a perspective that will be healthy for you to experiment with in the coming weeks. He said, “I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything, and there are many things I don’t know anything about.” Give Feynman’s approach a try, dear Taurus. Now is an excellent time to explore the perks of questioning everything. I bet you’ll be pleased with how free and easy it makes you feel.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): To earn money, I have worked as a janitor, dishwasher, olive picker, ditch-digger, newspaper deliverer, and 23 other jobs involving hard labor. In addition, I have done eight artistic jobs better suited to my sensitive temperament and creative talents. Am I regretful or resentful about the thousands of hours I toiled at tasks I didn’t enjoy? A little. But mostly I’m thankful for them. They taught me how to interact harmoniously with a wide array of people. They helped forge my robust social conscience. And they motivated me to eventually figure out how to get jobs I really loved. Now I invite you to take an inventory of your own work life, Gemini. It’s an excellent time to evaluate where you’ve been and where you want to go in the future.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): There are so many kinds of sweetness. Zesty spicy sweetness. Tender balmy fragrant sweetness. Sour or bitter sweetness. Musky piquant sweetness. Luscious succulent sweetness. One of my favorite types of sweetness is described by Cancerian poet Stephen Dunn. He wrote, “Often a sweetness comes as if on loan, stays just long enough to make sense of what it means to be alive, then returns to its dark source. As for me, I don’t care where it’s been, or what bitter road it’s traveled to come so far, to taste so good.” My analysis of the astrological omens suggests to me that you are about to commune with at least three of these sweetnesses, Cancerian. Maybe most of them.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Author Dan Savage advocates regular indulgence in sloth. He notes that few of us can “get through 24 hours without a little downtime. Human beings need to stare off into space, look out the window, daydream, and spend time every day being indolent and useless.” I concur, and I hope you will indulge in more downtime than usual during the coming weeks. For the sake of your long-term mental and physical health, you need to relax extra deep and strong now—to recharge your battery with delicious and delightful abandon.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): According to my deep and thorough analysis of your astrological rhythms, your mouth will soon be a wonder of nature. The words emerging from your lips will be extra colorful, precise, and persuasive. Your taste buds will have an enhanced vividness as they commune with the joys of food and drink. And I suspect your tongue and lips will exult in an upgrade of aptitude and pleasure while plying the arts of sex and intimate love. Congratulations, Mouthy Maestro!
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): In addition to being a masterful composer, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) played the piano, violin, harp, bassoon, clarinet, horn, flute, oboe, and trumpet. His experience led him to believe that musicians best express their skills when they play fast. It’s more challenging to be excellent when playing slowly, he thought. But I will invite you to adopt the reverse attitude and approach in the coming weeks, Libra. According to my astrological analysis, you will be most successful if you work gradually and incrementally, with careful diligence and measured craftiness.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): In my horoscopes for Scorpios, I tend to write complex messages. My ideas are especially thick and rich and lush. Why? Because I imagine you as being complex, thick, rich, and lush. Your destiny is labyrinthine and mysterious and intriguing, and I aspire to reflect its intricate, tricky beauty. But this time, in accordance with current astrological omens, I will offer you my simplest, most straightforward oracle ever. I borrowed it from author Mary Anne Hershey: “Live with intention. Walk to the edge. Listen hard. Play with abandon. Choose with no regret. Continue to learn. Appreciate your friends. Do what you love.”
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): In her poem “Requiem,” Anna Akhmatova says, “I must kill off memory . . . and I must learn to live anew.” I think most of us can benefit from periodically engaging in this brave and robust exercise. It’s not a feat to be taken lightly—not to be done more than once or twice a year. But guess what: The coming weeks will be a time when such a ritual might be wise for you. Are you ready to purge old business and prepare the way for a fresh start? Here are your words of power: forgiveness, clearing, cleaning, release, absolution, liberation.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): We need stories almost as much as we need to breathe, eat, sleep, and move. It’s impossible to live without them. The best stories nourish our souls, stimulate our imagination, and make life exciting. That’s not to say that all stories are healthy for us. We sometimes cling to narratives that make us miserable and sap our energy. I think we have a sacred duty to de-emphasize and even jettison those stories—even as we honor and relish the rich stories that empower and inspire us. I bring these thoughts to your attention, Capricorn, because you’re in a phase of your cycle when you will especially thrive by disposing of the bad old stories and celebrating the good ones.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): I could be wrong, but I don’t think so: You are smarter and wiser than you realize about the pressing issues that are now vying for your attention. You know more than you know you know. I suspect this will soon become apparent, as streams of fresh insights rise up from the depths of your psyche and guide your conscious awareness toward clarity. It’s OK to squeal with glee every time a healing intuition shows up. You have earned this welcome phase of lucid certainty.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): In Indigenous cultures throughout history, shamans have claimed they have the power to converse with and even temporarily become hawks, coyotes, snakes, and other creatures. Why do they do that? It’s a long story, but one answer is that they believe animals have intelligences that are different from what humans have. The shamans aspire to learn from those alternate ways of seeing and comprehending the world. Many of us who live in Western culture dismiss this venerable practice, although I’ve known animal lovers who sympathize with it. If you are game for a fun experiment, Pisces, I invite you to try your own version. Choose an animal to learn from. Study and commune with it. Ask it to reveal intuitions that surprise and enrich you.
Homework: What increasingly unnecessary duty could you abandon and thereby fuel your drive to be free? Newsletter.FreeWillAstrology.com
Musical prophets without honor in their home country, Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O. have been making mind-melting psychedelic music for nearly three decades. The quintessential underground band is among the most prolific groups in all of music, and its free-wheeling, improvisational excursions have earned it a devoted cult. Led by guitarist, founder and mainstay Kawabata Makoto, the group comes to Santa Cruz’s Moe’s Alley for one performance on Nov. 9.
The origins of psychedelic rock – that is, rock music influenced directly or indirectly by the culture of consciousness-expanding drugs – extend back to the mid 1960s. Arguably the first-ever group to describe its music using that label was a Texas-based group, the 13th Floor Elevators. Both the Beatles and Grateful Dead were early leaders in the movement, one which eventually spread around the globe.
One of the least likely places for psych rock to have taken hold was Japan. Mid-’60s Japan was experiencing a homegrown cultural flowering of its own, thanks to figures like filmmaker Kurosawa Akira and printmaking artist Saitō Kiyoshi.
Pop music in Japan wasn’t immune to global trends: the so-called GS (“Group Sounds”) scene was a decidedly Japanese take on Western rock and pop styles like surf and garage rock. And by the late part of the decade, influential Japanese personalities who had visited places like London, New York and San Francisco brought back records, tapes and stories of the burgeoning psychedelic movement.
Yet the psych rock scene in Japan would remain quite small, and never really broke through to the wider public. “I don’t know so much about the Japanese underground scene,” says Kawabata, leader of Acid Mothers Temple, today the premier Japanese psychedelic group. “I’m not sure there was any psychedelic rock scene in ‘60s and ‘70s Japan.” He suggests what did exist was likely “just bizarre copies of Western music.”
Kawabata’s own musical journey began in 1978. And in those early days, few seemed to appreciate what he was doing. “Nobody could understand my music, so I couldn’t connect with them,” he says. But he followed his inspiration, making his own psychedelic rock, imbued with an Asian character.
Drawing not only from American and British styles, AMT often incorporates elements of noise (from avant-garde composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen) and drone (from the repetitive and hypnotic motorik of German “krautrock”).
The results are every bit as heady as a Grateful Dead “space” piece, but with a Japanese quality all its own. For his part, Kawabata characterizes AMT’s studio work as musique concrète, using recorded sounds as raw material.
The first official AMT album, Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O. was released in 1997. Asked how the album was received by the Japanese public, Kawabata laughs. “Totally no reaction,” he says. The media there ignored it, too.
But the five-track album (featuring a nearly 20-minute drone freakout titled “Speed Guru”) did get noticed. UK magazine The Wire named the album one of the year’s best. The group – a shifting cast of players with Kawabata as the guiding force – embarked on a busy schedule of concert tours around the globe. A staggeringly prolific outfit, AMT has released more than 100 albums to date.
While early psychedelic music pioneers found inspiration among the drug culture. Kawabata’s group stands apart from that tradition.
“All of my music comes from my cosmos,” he explains. “I catch music from my cosmos, and I play with instruments to people. So I don’t need anything like mind-altering substances.” His goal is to remove ego from the process. Because, he says, “my ego/personality gets in the way of reproducing music.”
And while flashing, colored lights and surreal projected visual images are often part of the psych-rock aesthetic. Kawabata says that his group doesn’t emphasize those things. The group often plays in near-darkness.
“I can’t even see my stage,” he says. “Anyway, the most important thing is the music; if people have their own [mental] images from our music, that’s the perfect visual for me.”
The music of Acid Mothers Temple is sometimes said to bring on a state of trance. Kawabata’s goals, though, are decidedly more down to earth. “Music is just music: nothing more, nothing less,” he asserts. “I want to make people happy. Only this.”
Playwright Preston Choi tackles bureaucracy by employing the fantastical in “You Will Get Used to It.” Anyone who’s worked in an office will relate to the unsettling feeling that something just isn’t quite right; Choi takes this gut feeling into the physical, setting his characters in a room that also features a hole that’s… oozing goo. Add to that a mysterious sound, almost like a person crying, and that uneasy feeling starts to ramp up towards fear. What could be scarier than late-stage capitalism? The play is directed by Rebecca Wear and is on its final run this weekend. It closes on Sunday. JESSICA IRISH
INFO: 7:30pm, UCSC Theater Arts eXperimental Theater, 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz. Free. 459-2974
FRIDAY
ROCK
Altın Gün PHOTO: Nick Helde
ALTIN GUN
Grammy-nominated Turkish psych-rock band Altin Gün has recorded a live studio album like no other: Aşk reimagines ten traditional Turkish songs in the band’s signature ’70s Anatolian folk-rock style. These ancient tales of love and loss become surprisingly danceable under Altin Gün’s trippy roof, so concertgoers would be wise to bring their most dazzling pair of dancing shoes. Their hypnotic live performances are transcendent experiences of deep funk, synthpop, and cosmic reggae all wrapped up in Anatolian sensibilities. This is a band that made a sci-fi music video to illustrate their single “Doktor Civanim” as a tribute to pandemic health workers; anything could happen. ADDIE MAHMASSANI
Holy Hell. Literally. This show might happen ten days after Devil’s Night, but if old Belial does appear in the flesh he will most likely be rocking out to Coven. After all, this late ’60s band from Chicago pretty much single-handedly created occult rock with their first album Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls. That debut also ended with the first-ever recording of a Satanic Black Mass, which in itself is the first time the words “Ave Satanas” were ever used in rock music. Can’t get much more metal than that, right? WRONG. For years the metal community has debated whether or not Coven influenced Black Sabbath in, well, everything. Oh, and Jinx Dawson also has claims on using the devil horns before Dio. MW
The Vet’s Hall is a hub for all things good: local punk shows, weekly Tango classes, and, of course, veterans. This Veterans Day is an all-out extravaganza at the hallowed hall, starting at 11am-4pm with a free health fair supporting former soldiers and their families. For the next chunk of the day, from 4pm-11pm, a fundraiser takes place for the Veterans Village of Santa Cruz County, which helps homeless vets transition to permanent housing. The Dylan Rose band headlines with support from a local lineup of dreams: Rumble Steelskin, Locomotive Breath, Bog Iron and James Durbin. AM
INFO: 11am, Veterans Hall, 846 Front Street, Santa Cruz. $20/adv, $25/door. 454-0478.
JAZZ
Low Down Brass Band
LOWDOWN BRASS BAND
What the Dirty Dozen and Rebirth brass bands are to New Orleans, the LowDown Brass Band is to Chicago. They have a similar mission, to keep brass band music evolving as a modern form rather than turning into a static, museum piece. Mixing hip-hop, jazz, reggae, and soul, the high-energy septet is touring to support their two “pandemic lockdown” albums, The Reel Sessions and LowDown Nights. The Graduating Class and Uncle Dog will open. DAN EMERSON
*taps microphone*: Ahem, ahem: are there any Grateful Dead fans out there? Anyone who loves beer and a good time? If the answer to either of those questions is a yes, it’s probably a good idea to check out Steven Graves. He lives in Nashville, owns paisley button-downs, and sings about being a “Lovin’ Man”— aka, this music is a good, rootsy time. Graves’ voice reaches Jerry Garcia plaintiveness in more than one song, evoking that heart twinge that only true vulnerability can prise from the depths. It’s the perfect sound for a Saturday afternoon, swaying alongside a beloved. JI
The New York-based trio Pickle Mafia describes its music–with tongue firmly planted in cheek–as “arena jazz fusion.” But that description is more indicative of the band’s sense of humor than anything. They’re not really an arena band; the group’s website describes its sound in slightly more detail as a well-played blend of jazz with hip-hop, Latin, and pop, which is certainly compatible with a cozy venue like Kuumbwa. DE
INFO: 7 pm, Kuumbwa Jazz Center, 320-2 Cedar St. $25. 427-2227
MONDAY
LITERARY
JOY BUOLAMWINI
Artificial Intelligence is everywhere today. In the news. On the internet. Even in our cars. But what are the moral implications of this new technology? Will it truly free humanity to evolve faster or will it turn into the human-destroying Skynet theorized in dystopian sci-fi movies? Dr. Joy Buolamwini might not have all the answers, but she knows a thing or two. In fact, as one of the leading computer scientists and digital activists, Buolamwini has been called “The conscience of the AI revolution” by Fortune. This Monday Dr. Buolamwini will be at the Cowell Ranch Hay Barn to discuss her new book, Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What is Human in a World of Machines and How to Avoid the Trappings and Pitfalls of Digital Oppression. MW
INFO: 7pm, Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, Ranch View Rd., Santa Cruz. $10-$33. 423-0900.
WEDNESDAY
INDIE
PRINCESS CHELSEA
Princess Chelsea went viral in 2011 for a song about smoking. The song, “Smoking Duet,” is simultaneously kookie, cute and relatable. She uses twee and pop influences to tell the story of a couple squabbling over smoking. But she’s been involved with a lot more than that song, including several bands like Disciples of Macca, a Paul McCartney covers band. She also has continued to release new music. Her 2022 record Everything Is Going To Be Alright, contains all the storybook-gone-adult elements of her earlier work, and then some. The cinematography and bizarre stylings of the “Time” video makes it worth a view, even if it didn’t go “Smoking Duet” level viral. AARON CARNES
Developers never stop developing airports across the US. Several times the Watsonville Municipal Airport was about to be closed, as in one case when the inexperienced pilot took three people and luggage with full fuel on the trip to Tahoe and instead crashed on take-off, making the airport “unsafe”.
To keep pilots safe, Watsonville should have long ago invested in a control tower, based on traffic density which at times resembles Pacific Avenue on Friday nights. They should make mandatory pilot remedials on communications in this area. I could write a book on near misses and near hits that local cowboys do every weekend there. Well, many blessings to those that still fly there, I do not anymore. And relating to security and making a runway longer, please add metal detectors and TSA luggage checks.
Aston Martin 500
MORE AFFORDABLE HOUSING PLEASE
If we’re truly concerned about increasing housing opportunities for local workers, we must support the Housing for People’s initiative on the next ballot. It restricts building to six stories without a vote of the people and requires 25% of the units to be affordable which puts in place reasonable restrictions on developers to NOT destroy the character of Santa Cruz as a livable town. It does not restrict the amount of housing built.
I am wondering if Dan Brumbaugh’s letter (GT 11/1/23) is the beginning of a disinformation campaign by developers to protect their exorbitant profits. How can requiring 25% of units to be affordable be a Negative, when recent developments utilizing loopholes have produced only around half of the 25% affordable units?
Locking in affordability will surely HELP those who cannot remain here when a house costs more than $1million, shared-house bedrooms are up to $1500 and a studio apartment rents for more than $2000.
Susan Martinez
Santa Cruz
NOT ME 2
I wouldn’t pay a penny to U2 or spend a month’s salary to see any group. I was lucky to see them live in their prime and now I am content to listen to them in my home.
Mindi Garman
ME 2
Wow! I have been wanting to go but the cost is huge. Good to hear that it was worth it. U2 is amazing to see live and that venue sounds like a once-in-a lifetime experience.
We really do live in a bubble here in Santa Cruz and you know what? That’s a great thing. Often we set an example that the rest of the country should follow.
Richard Stockton’s cover story on two great women at the top of local radio stations got me thinking hard about our differences and the way we buck national trends.
Radio is and always has been short on female voices, both on the air and in management.
An organization called Mentoring and Inspiring Women in Radio annually compiles a study of the number of women who work in radio management positions and its findings are distressing.
After tracking 11,215 AM and FM radio stations across the country, the site found that 20.6% or 2,316 stations had women holding the title of general manager in 2022. The number is even less for women in programming positions, the ones that determine what you will be listening to. Women hold only 14% of those positions.
So why? It’s hard to find a reasonable answer. Back in the day the standard mansplaining reply was that men didn’t want to hear women on the radio and women didn’t want to hear women. They just weren’t authoritative enough, supposedly.
“That’s so old,” says Rachel Goodman, one of our cover story subjects. And as bad as that is, she notes that it’s even worse for minorities in broadcast media, where people of color are only 4% of network producers and white men make most decisions.
“Just think of the stories that don’t get covered,” says Goodman, noting childcare, health issues, equality.
So we have reason to feel good about the reverse of the trend in Santa Cruz, where not only are our cover subjects making history, but so did the late Laura Ellen Hopper, who programmed Watsonville’s KPIG, one of the most influential stations in the world, before her death in 2007.
I’m proud to have worked for both of these women in my long, storied (uhh,checkered) career and saw first hand just how much care they brought to their listening audiences.
I’m really happy to introduce you to them and to celebrate the odds they bucked to keep local radio alive.
Brad Kava | Editor
PHOTO CONTEST
SAILING HOME The Chardonnay sails past Walton Lighthouse. Photo by Virginia Sajan
GOOD IDEA
In honor of Indigenous Peoples Month local Amah Mutsun Tribal Band members and UCSC California Mission Project members speak at a free event Nov 18, 10:30 – 2:30pmat the Resource Center for Nonviolence. 612 Ocean Street. Tribal members Alexii Sigona and Carolyn Rodriguez share their perspectives on the cultural landscapes and history of Indigenous people.
UCSC Critical Missions Project Drs. Judith Scott, Renya Ramirez, and Daisy Martin speak about education practices and how listening can heal.
GOOD WORK
Throughout the month of November, for every 10 pounds of Smart Chicken purchased at Staff of Life Natural Foods in Santa Cruz and Watsonville, one pound of nutritious, air-chilled poultry will be donated by Staff of Life and Smart Chicken to the Second Harvest Food Bank. Staff of Life Natural Foods and Smart Chicken donated over 6500 meals.
Smart Chicken is made from 100% all-natural, free-roaming, grain-fed chickens that are raised without animal byproducts, antibiotics, or hormones and certified humane.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.” —John Steinbeck
Located just a couple blocks from Twin Lakes Beach, Deke Ramirez has owned his namesake Deke’s Market and Deli for 18 years. Originally born and raised in the Central Valley, he moved to the Bay Area after college and worked in the tech industry for 10 years.
When the chance to purchase a failing market and convenience store presented itself, Ramirez decided to take his shot. He revamped the business and added a deli side, nicknamed “In Mah’ Belly Deli,” that specializes in artisan hand-crafted sandwiches and salads.
Their signature sando is the Hippie Tri-Tip with tender, flavorful steak complemented by barbeque sauce, Sriracha mayo, provolone cheese and pepperoncini between a French roll. Popular poultry picks abound, like the Chicken Salad sandwich and Chicken Pesto sandwich, and salad options are headlined by the Chicken Garden Salad and the Asian Chicken salad. The Force Feed Breakfast Burrito is packed with French fries (yes, French fries), eggs, cheese, avocado and customizable proteins. Deli hours are 9am-3pm Mon-Fri and 10am-3pm Sat/Sun.
What propelled you to open Deke’s?
DEKE RAMIREZ: I really liked the Santa Cruz community and that is what inspired me to want to open a business here. A local neighborhood market was a perfect opportunity to take advantage of that dream. Owning a small business has come with many challenges, and even though I’ve had an opportunity to pull out several times, stepping away has never been an option for me. It’s an honor to still be serving the local community, and I’ve never regretted leaving my previous career in tech.
What sets your sandwiches apart? DR: For one, our portions are very generous and we always listen to customer feedback in order to continuously improve upon our quality. We pride ourselves on using mostly local vendors, especially for our produce and bread. We have a lot of passion for providing great value to our customers, and making
An apple is more than an apple for Larkin Valley growers Freddy Menge and Ellen Baker of Epicenter Orchard.
It’s a dance with history, an exclamation of flavor and a meeting place between farmer and eater.
“A really good apple is a discovery—’What am I tasting,’ ‘Where am I?’ ‘What time is it?’ ”Menge says with an easy chuckle.
Menge and Baker are enthusiastic members of the Monterey Bay chapter of the California Rare Fruit Growers.They also tend avocados, and sell at the Santa Cruz Westside Farmers’ Market on Saturdays.
For November they’ll bring Allen’s Everlasting apples and Brushy Mountain Limbertwig apples, Calville Blancs and Crabby Ladies, and then Pink Parfaits and fleeting red Rubaiyats later in the month. Dana’s Hovey pears, too, and curated tasting boxes (while supplies last).
Many of those old-school apples, including varieties hundreds of years old, will also appear at underrated Jack O’Neill Restaurant all month.
That’s where an apple—or more accurately, hundreds of apples—transform into a lot more in the hands of Exec Chef Gus Trejo, Chef de Cuisine Greg Karjala, pastry chef Cece Bauer and their team.
The apples will leap to life in miso apple butter on fresh-catch lingcod, on top of grilled quail with brioche, celery root and chili sumac, and roasted in rugosa squash ravioli with pomegranate and a brown butter sauce.
Every month Trejo likes to spotlight an abundant and top-tasting produce crop (last month was Mariquita Farms pumpkin).
“The goal is to educate and practice,” he says. “I get excited about this! I’m hoping I can get to the point where I’m not having to leave my community to ‘gather’ foods.”
Trejo loves the spark the monthly custom brings to his kitchen with taste tests, recipe play and information (“It gets the team going,” he says, ““There are 2,500 varieties of apples!”), the verve of his suppliers (“They’re super passionate about what they’re doing!”) and the perspective it provides, in more ways than one.
“It gives people a different way to look at apples, and Freddy has some unique apples you wouldn’t think are apples,” he says. “I want people to come in and try an apple in a way they haven’t before.”
Davenport Roadhouse likes to remind locals it awaits “just two songs north of Santa Cruz.” That doesn’t stop the saloon-restaurant-inn from simmering other reasons to head up the coast (beyond burgers, fried pickles and giddyup garlic bread)—namely Taco Tuesday, Trivia Wednesday and Thirsty Thursday, which all stack $5 deals (for things like two tacos, margaritas, draft beers, street pizza and well drinks, depending on the day).
Then there’s live music on weekends too; this week the sequence is Slow Coast (Friday), Joe Jester (Saturday) and the Breaux Show (Sunday). davenportroadhouse.com
KEEP IT COMING
Turbo news nibbles: Speaking of apples, Live Earth Farm hosts Apple-palooza Nov. 11 with cider tutorials, applesauce canning, take-home treats and more, liveearthfarm.net; also Nov. 11, Capitola Sip & Stroll flows with wine and beer tastings and 28 participating wineries for $45, capitolavillage.com; Café Gratitude (aka Café GSC) in downtown Santa Cruz has closed for good; at last month’s Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk Chili Cook-Off, two local faves shined: East Side Eatery won people’s choice and Far West Fungi earned the nod for best vegetarian.
This is a tale of two radio stations that were voices for the Santa Cruz community, burned to the ground by ambition and a changing media landscape, and how the charred bones of their community service were reborn to rise over Santa Cruz like two reborn Phoenixes.
While many people deserve credit for bringing back community radio to Santa Cruz, this is the story of two women who were its genesis.
From the ashes of KUSP, broadcaster Rachel Goodman marshaled the Santa Cruz community to rebuild a new station, KSQD. From the thinned ranks of KSCO, Rosemary Chalmers, the morning voice of Santa Cruz for three decades, led the exodus of her peers to a new experiment in internet community radio, SantaCruzVoice.com.
From Ashes to the Flight of the Squid
Rachel Goodman grew up in Berkeley and interned at KPFA, went to UC Santa Cruz where she started broadcasting at KZSC. She worked all over the country as a documentary producer (won a Peabody Award) and eventually hosted Talk of the Bay on KUSP and now KSQD. I asked her, “Why do you love community radio?”
“There’s something magic about it. It’s free. You can just dial it in on this little device in your car. And it feels like these people are your friends, you know, because they care about your local community and they’re making references to it. We’re not just catering to the local community; we’re exporting Santa Cruz culture to the world. People come to visit here and go, ‘I love this place, I’m going to miss it.’ And then they go back to Iowa and they listen on the internet, because they want a little bit of Santa Cruz.”
The Crash of KUSP
When a beloved community institution needs a responsible guiding hand, one person will rise to restate the mission, to lead the way, and sometimes that person is insane. Hired for his fiscal acumen, Terry Green took the reins of KUSP and fired all the community volunteers.
“He fired all the local programmers that people had become attached to over 40 years,” Goodman remembers. Then Green purchased NPR programming until debt drove the station into bankruptcy and KUSP crashed and burned.
In the end it was all sold: the frequency, the content, the music, the broadcast equipment. KUSP, which had served the community as a vibrant community radio station since 1974, went off the air in 2016.
Goodman says, “There was always a tension at KUSP between ‘let’s make a lot of money from NPR and brand ourselves as the NPR station’, versus ‘it started as a community station with no NPR at all.’ We pleaded with the final KUSP board to cut expenses and move into a smaller space and go local. I was told that it could never work, nobody could ever pull that off.”
Rachel Goodman
It was a hard blow for the KUSP community, but there was one voice that kept insisting we build a community radio station from scratch. It sounded preposterous, but her voice wouldn’t go away. I was one of those who publicly applauded her, “Go Rachel, go!” but in the back of my mind I was thinking, “This girl is fucking crazy. You can’t just build a station out of nothing.”
For starters, the broadcast license would cost $250,000. Rachel had nothing, she’s a folk singer for God’s sake. She pitched everyone on the idea and got used to seeing eyes glaze over. Then one man, who had inherited a windfall and wanted to do something good for Santa Cruz, donated $50,000, Rachel says.
“At first I couldn’t believe it, I thought it was a prank call,” but he was real, a former KFAT fan, and suddenly the dream had the odor of legitimacy. Santa Cruzans want their community radio and donations started trickling in– $100, sometimes less. Then two donors who had made millions in tech and who love Santa Cruz asked her, “What do you need?” Rachel went shopping for a broadcast license.
I asked her, “How did you weather all the negativity and push forward with fundraising? What kept you going?”
“Anger and indignation at the despoiling of something good can motivate you, but it only takes you so far. There was also that feeling of, ‘You can’t have a town like Santa Cruz without a community radio station, it’s just wrong.’ And that can take you quite a ways.
“But, it was my husband Steve Colter, behind the scenes saying, ‘I don’t know if this is going to work, but I support you all the way.’ You know, just having someone to bounce ideas off of, or when things aren’t going well, having a shoulder to cry on. You can’t underestimate that level of support. And the rest of the board believing in this. If you’re the only one holding this vision, it’s not going to happen. It’s a community project, I’m just one of the village.”
Once they had the license, pro bono tech help appeared, then a brick and mortar space, and Rachel woke up in the middle of the night, “Oh my God, we need a radio signal!”
“Okay, this is going to happen.”
Rachel remembers the moment she knew The Squid was going to happen. After she tracks down the old KUSP broadcast equipment that had fallen into the hands of a repo man, she and Sandy Stone drive an old SUV to a warehouse in Vallejo, CA, and find stacks of old equipment, covered with cobwebs and dust.
In the middle of the night they bargain hard with a rough character standing in shadows and cut a deal for the worn out broadcast equipment. When engineer Sandy Stone said, ‘I can make this equipment send our signal,’ Rachel knew, “Okay, this is going to happen.”
Rachel says they went on the air in late 2019, “… right before the pandemic, the windstorms, the CZU fires and Jan. 6. With radio, we can report faster than print media, and reporting during those disasters was key to keeping the community informed.
“Look at us now, we’ve reached Monterey, we have programming about Big Sur and things people care about at the Monterey Jazz Festival. We recently purchased an additional frequency located on Fremont Peak; it extends KSQD’s potential from 187,000 to 645,000 listeners.” [10]
You can hear Rachel Goodman on KSQD 90.7 FM, or online at kqsd.org, Sundays from 1pm to 3pm, and Thursdays, 5pm to 6pm.
KSCO’s Laid-off Hosts Fly Anew as SantaCruzVoice.com
For the past 31 years Rosemary Chalmers was the morning voice on Good Morning Monterey Bay, broadcast on KSCO radio five days a week. I asked my wife Julie why she listened to Rosemary every morning.
“I like her voice. You can tell who she is, not by her talking about herself, but by the way she treats her guests and callers. She’s kind, strong, and lets others make their case, but is knowledgeable and clear about the truth.”
Will Rogers said that he never met a man he didn’t like. I’d like to introduce him to Michael Zwerling. KSCO is a commercial station, but all of the broadcasters who provided a robust community component that built the station’s following were fired onDec. 1, 2022. Thirty-two stunned local broadcasters exited.
Rosemary Chalmers
In five days, Rosemary got them talking. “Are we just going to give this all up? We’ve built this entire station, are we just going to let this guy pull the plug on us?” And like another Phoenix rising from the embers, the former KSCO employees banded together with Chalmers to create SantaCruzVoice.com.
These broadcasters have over 300 combined years of broadcasting experience and within six weeks they put the station together. So many work so hard that Rosemary insists she is but a piece, but from the beginning she was at the helm.
Good Morning Monterey Bay Rises Again
From 6 to 9 am, Monday through Friday, Rosemary does her magic. First, there is that British accent, but this is not your father’s BBC. It’s matronly sexy, made rough and warm by that infectious husky laugh, it makes you stop your morning coffee in mid-air; you know you don’t want to miss this next one.
Rosemary booms, “Oh, this one is jolly good. The local restaurant owner of Tortilla Town and other San Luis Obispo restaurants said in a now-deleted TikTok video, ‘Fxxk the locals, they’re not going to be the ones that make us money, right? They’re not who this place is designed for.’ ”
The howl of laughter on the SantaCruzVoice.com morning show could not be jollier, because “the locals” are exactly who Rosemary and her side-kick Bill Wolverton pledge to serve. “Local, local, local,” is their mantra, they laugh with the joy of redemption.
Rosemary and Bill carry on about news, life around Santa Cruz and their personal lives, and their schtick is that they are so intent on making sense of it all. The comedy flows naturally but always towards the edge of discovery.
As they reveal their own stumbling journey through modern life, we can all relate. Bill laments to Rosemary, “My phone is always listening to me, I was talking to my wife in the vicinity of my phone about rat traps and up on my Facebook feed are advertisements for rat traps. This is so disturbing.”
Then we hear the semi-weekly interview with State Senator John Laird and finally a reminiscence about Rosemary judging an apple pie eating contest, “I have not eaten apple pie in 15 years.”
Rosemary and her second banana, Wolverton, are there to have fun, but even through laughter, the focus is on survival information; like a discussion of where poisonous tilapia comes from and where it’s safe to buy it. We get the current location of two mountain lions, facts about the Monterey Jazz Festival, and an account of a dog rescue.
“Once I hear it and talk about it, it’s in my head,” says Chalmers, She has heard it all and has trained herself to remember it all. We have our own version of AI, Rosemary Intelligence.
Chalmers has no intention of retiring. “We’re up at 3:30 in the morning and I’m prepping all the way to 6 o’clock.I’ve been working with Bill Wolverton for 18 months and it was clear from the beginning that he would be a good foil for me. Susan Simon gets our local news together and so many people help us technically.”
Chalmers remembers the station’s birth. “I skydived twice. On the first one I hit like a bag of cement.”
Bill goes, “But you got back on the horse.”
“There were no horses involved, but I was dragged over the rocks by my parachute.”
“So why did you jump again?”
“I wanted to get it right.”
This might be the closest I get to how Santa Cruz Voice happened; Rosemary wanted to get it right.
Rosemary and Bill close with the classic Burns and Allen bit.
Bill: Say Goodbye Rosemary.
Rosemary: Goodbye Rosemary.
I hope you take some time to go to SantaCruzVoice.com and KSQD.org, and click the Schedule page; I’ll bet you find programs that will excite and inform you in ways that show you new possibilities.
These two women grabbed ahold and lifted the weight, the bones, the soul of community spirit and created platforms to let neighbors talk to neighbors. As one of the most beloved American voices to ever put on a red sweater would ask, “Would you be my neighbor?”
Voices at SantaCruzVoice.com
Charming, cantankerous, comedic, and with a cornucopia of Americana knowledge, “Sleepy” John Sandidge is the consummate roots music talk show host.
His radio resume stretches from KPIG in Santa Cruz, to the Grand Ol’ Opry in Nashville, with fans from West Cliff Drive to Europe. Sleepy John’s second banana is computer whiz Luigi Oppido. Luigi knows everything about tech, he is brilliant, likable, and very, very funny.
Sleepy John Sandidge
You can call Luigi and Sleepy John about your tech issues on Tuesdays from 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm. Or you may catch them bantering with with a woman about how to use AI and hear her say, “I don’t need AI, my husband knows everything.”
On SantaCruzVoice.com, Christopher Carr hosts Cannabis Connection. If you want to know anything about weed, how to grow it, use it, license it, how to not abuse it, this guy knows. I shit you not, Chris is a bass player in a reggae band, Ancestree. You can ask him your cannabis questions every Friday from 5pm to 6pm.
Raconteur and radio salesman Michael Olson calls himself a duck out of water. “I’m a Montana farm boy. I went to UC Santa Cruz and studied English and Chinese literature. There’s a certain contrariness there.” He says this ultimately led to his show, China Now! (China, friend or foe?) You can call Michael Olson on his shows China Now!, Thursday 3 to 5pm, and Food Chain, Saturday 9 to 10am on SantaCruzVoice.com.
Don’t Touch That Dial, It’s Got Squid On It
Monday through Friday, KSQD 90.7 FM offers progressive staples like Amy Goodman at 8am, “Your Call” from KALW in San Francisco at 10am, and Tom Hartman at 4pm, but the spirit of the station comes from the local voices, from Rick Kleffel’s digital mixes at 9pm on Sundays, to “Unheard Voices” every Friday at 3pm with Reverend Elisha Christopher, to the afternoon drive “Talk of the Bay,” which features local hosts talking with guests about local social, cultural and political issues at 5pm . Andy’s show highlights local musicians with a mix of classic genres including Brooklyn Doo Wop.
Not only does he sing lead with his own hard working band (often at MJA Winery) but with his deep basso Brooklyn voice Andy says, “I grew up in Coney Island and four guys would sing acapella doo wop underneath my window at night. I’m still in touch with one of them.” You can hear Andy every Tuesday at 11am on KSQD, 90.7 FM.
Special thanks to Contributor Julie Flannery, for editing assistance during manuscript development.
It is perhaps one of the greatest ironies within the Santa Cruz County community that many of the people who labor in the vast agricultural fields of the Pajaro Valley cannot afford the food they harvest.
According to the County of Santa Cruz, one in 10 people—which amounts to more than 26,000 people in the county—are considered “food insecure.”
Rising costs at the grocery store, at the gas pump and when paying rent worsen the problem.
“People are being crippled by the cost of food,” said Susan True, CEO of Community Foundation Santa Cruz County.
To help ease this problem, Second Harvest Food Bank gathers and distributes food and other resources to people who need it.
The organization on Friday kicked off its annual Holiday Food & Fund Drive with a rally at Cabrillo College, with the goal of raising 4.5 million meals.
But even as the crowd cheered the announcement, SHFB director Erica Padilla-Chavez warned that the crisis is getting worse, despite post-pandemic predictions that the numbers would decrease.
The organization is now serving some 65,000 people per month, 20,000 of whom are children.
Worse, inflation has forced SHFB to reduce its goal from 5 million meals.
Still, Padilla-Chavez said that the community will pull through to help meet this year’s “very, very real goal.”
“We’re going to achieve it, because if there’s anything Second Harvest Food Bank community does it make that goal,” she said. “We are going to do this together, and I know our neighbors are going to be better off because of it.”
Cabrillo College President Matt Wetstein said that the problem is also affecting the state’s community college students. A report released in September shows that 20% said they were homeless, with 2/3 reporting food insecurity.
“That means that they are skipping meals, they’re not sure they can get nutritional meals for the week and they are struggling with finding food for themselves and their families,” Wetstein said.
Santa Cruz County Superintendent of Schools Faris Sabbah said that the food bank helps bring the community together to care for their neighbors in need.
“(It) is a collection of people in our community that are coming together that are saying, ‘I am going to care not just for myself and my family, I am not only going to care about the people I know, I am going to care not only about my neighbors, But I am going take a stand to care about anybody who’s feeling hunger,’” Sabbah said. “To me that is so beautiful and powerful.”
•••To make a donation, you can drop food off at any of the Second Harvest food barrels throughout the county, click here or visit bit.ly/3QnyjAu.
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This is a tale of two radio stations that were voices for the Santa Cruz community, burned to the ground by ambition and a changing media landscape, and how the charred bones of their community service were reborn to rise over Santa Cruz like two reborn Phoenixes.
