Steve Caballero and his art show at The Abbey
Since the early 80’s Steve Caballero has been portraying his love of skateboarding through his contest results and video segments. The industry has rewarded him accordingly, Caballero was the first skater in history to get a signature pro deck in 1980 through Powell Peralta who has been distributing his pro model skateboards at a feverish rate. Steve was also the first skater in history to get a signature pro skate shoe with Van Shoes producing the Half Cab since 1989. He was also named “Skater of the Century” by Thrasher Magazine! Caballero broke into music in 1982-1985 with The Faction and then a series of other bands in order Odd Man Out, Shovelhead and Soda. Known for his skating, music, product endorsements and Christian influence on the people he comes in contact with, sometimes the incredible artistic ability that Caballero possesses is overlooked.

New makeup/skincare store opens in Santa Cruz
Until recently, you had to brave sketchy Highway 17 in order to get your large-scale beauty fix. No longer. All of that changed when CVS—yes, the drugstore on Mission Street—launched a classy, glamorous sidekick—Beauty 360.

On a whim, I swung by CVS one day, and was more than shocked to discover its offshoot—Beauty 360—with its sparkly makeup bottles and skin care creams that beckon beauty aficionados with tempting fragrances, skin care solutions, and lip glosses galore. The store is spacious, well designed and spotless. It offers myriad products from recognizable lines, and the staff is quite generous with letting you sample products. Beauty 360 has become an exclusive beauty destination in Santa Cruz. Good-bye Sephora. It was nice knowing you.

New eco-tourism effort has visitors walking from Santa Cruz to Monterey
“The more you travel, the more you come home and you realize that we live in this amazing place,” says Santa Cruz resident Margaret Leonard. Leonard has hiked all around the world—places like the Annapurna Sanctuary in Nepal, the Inca trail in Peru, and The Pyrenees in Spain, just to name a few. However, she says, “I sometimes came home, and realized, I knew more about some obscure trail in Switzerland than I knew about my own backyard.”

UCSC library to launch an online oral history of organic farming

Dale Coke grew up on an apricot orchard in California’s Santa Clara Valley. In 1976 he bought 10 acres of farmland near Watsonville in Santa Cruz County but continued to work repairing fuel injection systems rather than farming at his new home. In 1981, a struggle with cancer inspired him to rethink his life and become an organic farmer. His neighbor, who had grown strawberries using pesticides and chemical fertilizers, asserted that strawberries could not be grown organically. Coke set out to prove him wrong.

Santa Cruz celebrates 20 years of Farmers’ Market fun
It’s a Wednesday afternoon and the sound of a drum circle in full effect resonating from downtown can only mean one thing: the one and only Downtown Santa Cruz Farmers’ Market is in full swing. Celebrating its 20^th anniversary on April 21 (just in time for Earth Day, naturally), the SCFM has been a staple for an array of vibrant, colorful, fresh produce, captivating scents from various world foods, and community education on every issue from organic gardening to local politics. “After all,” explains Jeff Larkey of Route One Farms, “the market is not just about produce, it’s about the community.”

Consumerism runs amok in savvy satire ‘The Joneses’
You know “the Joneses” that we’re all supposed to be keeping up with? They actually exist in the eponymously named The Joneses, a sly and sharp black comedy from filmmaker Derrick Borte about consumerism and its consequences. Liberated from the prison of metaphor, they stride onto the screen intact, the coolest new family on the block with all the coolest new stuff that all their neighbors instantly covet. In an already affluent neighborhood, they raise the curve for essential possessions and throw down the gauntlet: let the games begin!

Sappy filmmaking bobbles great story in ‘Perfect Game’
A wonderful true story lurks inside the family-friendly baseball movie, The Perfect Game. In 1957, a motley group of street kids from a working-class industrial area of Monterrey, Mexico, not only shaped themselves into a baseball team with the heart and chutzpah to earn official Little League franchise status, they also became the first foreign team to advance all the way to the top in the Little League World Series across the border.

Well, here we go again. Out of the ashes of the recently wrapped Blackest Night comes the next phase in the evolution of the DC universe: Brightest Day. And like that blockbuster 8 issue series, this new one promises even more shocking revelations and landmark events as Geoff Johns continues to take the company places it’s never been before.

Two worlds collide for PremaSoul’s universal appeal
What do you get when you combine Southern soul music, jazz rhythms and Hindu devotional chanting? It could be called universal love. In fact that’s what Sheela Bringi and Clinton Patterson call their band: PremaSoul. “Prema is a sanskrit word that means universal love,” says Bringi, whose parents moved to the United States from India in the ’70s. She explains further, “My first love of music came from devotional singing, or bajans. It’s infused into everything I do musically. I love to take these old melodies and play them in new ways, in new settings, for new audiences.”

PremaSoul combines Bringi on vocals, flute and harp, with Clinton Patterson singing, playing keyboards and trumpet. The band also includes a divine rhythm section of bass, tabla and drumkit. PremaSoul will be performing that unique blend in a concert to benefit Haiti relief efforts at 8 p.m. on Saturday, April 24, at Kuumbwa Jazz. Tickets are $20 in advance and available at Gateways Books. All proceeds will help fund a new orphanage for Haitian children whose parents were killed in the recent earthquake. For more information about humanitarian efforts in Haiti and worldwide by Amma and the MA Center, see embracingtheworld.org.

How did Bringi, an Indian flute player from Colorado, meet Patterson, a jazz keyboardist from Georgia? Both were students at California Institute for the Arts in Southern California. “I was playing music at a Thai restaurant,” Clinton reminisces. “I played music there for two years and one evening Sheela came in and we started talking. Eventually we got together and started playing music.” Their first album was titled Sound Travels and their new EP is A Shrine to All Things.

“I’ve always been interested in pulling music together from different places.” says Clinton. “A vast majority of significant things in American music have come from Black American culture, or people’s perspectives on that culture. I’m bringing my own personal connection to blues, rock ’n’ roll and R&B.”

“PremaSoul is about breaking down boundaries,” adds Bringi, who studied piano and classical Indian vocals as a child. “Early on my mom and dad encouraged me in any kind of artistic pursuit that I wanted. I began piano lessons when I was 4 or 5. Later I took flute lessons and fell in love with Indian flute. In high school I played piano in the jazz band.” She also honed her musical skills at Mills College in Oakland. “It just blew my musical world right open,” she remembers. “I came into contact with so many great musicians, like Fred Frith and Cecil Taylor. It was all based in improvisation. It got me in touch with a musical sense that can only happen when you get together with a group of people and don’t know what you’re going to create, but do it in the moment.”

Playing a concert to benefit children in Haiti seems perfectly in sync with the deeper meaning of PremaSoul. “I was excited when this opportunity came up for us,” reflects Bringi. Patterson agrees; “When things are happening anywhere in the world and people need support, there is no difference between helping someone in Haiti or helping someone that lives next door. That’s also the way that I think about making music. I try to ignore artificial barriers between different musical cultures and traditions.”

Bringi concisely explains her motivation for creativity: “I express my love for the world through music. It’s a way of opening the heart, expressing devotion and calming the mind.” Patterson, her musical partner, adds, “PremaSoul is a way of taking things I really love, putting them together and hopefully making something new, making some progress. It’s music for the future.”

PremaSoul performs at 8 p.m. Saturday, April 24, at Kuumbwa Jazz, 320-2 Cedar St., Santa Cruz. Tickets are $20. For more information, call 427-2227. John Malkin is a local writer, musician and host of The Great Leap Forward each Wednesday at 7 p.m. on Free Radio Santa Cruz, 101.1 FM and freakradio.org. Read about the poverty and political instability contributing to the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti in Paul Farmer’s The Uses of Haiti and Noam Chomsky’s forthcoming Hopes and Prospects (Haymarket).

Plus tips on how to book an in-store at Streetlight Records
Just like cassette tapes are the new vinyl, your local record store is the new iTunes. Gone is the thrill of click, click, clicking away in a dark room to find new music, we’ve seen the light and it is shining through the windows of a real live record store.

Anyone who has ever stepped foot into the musical safe haven that is our own Streetlight Records will immediately recognize that this isn’t Walmart. There are no corporate sponsorships, no major labels controlling the overhead sound system, the staff is not forced to wear uniforms (unless you count the tattoos)—this is a real record store.