With its aromas of passionfruit, lemon verbena and key lime, the 2017 Morgan Sauvignon Blanc is a good buy at around $18. Flavors of lemon and pomelo add lively and refreshing notes.
“The small touch of oak accents the bright acidity by adding elegant texture,” the winemakers at Morgan say. It’s a natural match for shellfish and seafood, and it’s also a very food-versatile wine. The juice was tank fermented to preserve bright fruit flavors—and following fermentation, the wine was transferred to French oak barrels for five months of aging. It’s an easy-to-find wine in a wide array of restaurants, and on the shelves of many supermarkets. With its simple-to-open screw cap, it’s a sure-fire hit for picnics and camping.
Morgan Winery is one of the most-known operations in the area, and they have a lovely tasting room in Carmel. Owners Dan Morgan Lee and Donna Lee host many events, including special tastings called “Vintage Fridays.” Check the website for more info.
Morgan Winery, 204 Crossroads Blvd., Carmel, 626-3700. morganwinery.com.
Albacore Feed
The Monterey Bay Salmon and Trout Project, a nonprofit volunteer organization seeking to restore the native salmon and steelhead trout population in our area, and the Castroville Rotary Club, are having their 42nd annual fundraising albacore dinner—complete with raffle, door prizes and silent auction. The event will happen at 6pm on Saturday, Nov. 9, at the Castroville Recreation Center. Tickets are $20, or $10 for kids 12 and under, and available at the door. For info contact Mary Hermansky at mh********@cs.com.
Uce Juice
Samples of Uce Juice were being offered outside A.J.’s Market in Soquel. It said on the bottle: “Motivation, Determination & Patience—Strength, Unity & Peace,” things we all need. If you like a shot of caffeine any which way but loose, Uce Juice contains a touch of Arabica coffee beans, as well as apple juice concentrate, banana puree, mango juice and other natural flavors. It also contains cane sugar. Made in California by a company of relatives, it sells for $3 at A.J.’s Market, or two for $4.
11th Annual Santa Cruz Sea Glass and Ocean Art Festival
Calling all beachcombers! Over 42 talented artists are bringing their specialty works to Santa Cruz, featuring one-of-a-kind pieces like ceramics, soaps, sea salts, photography, fabric arts and stunning sea glass jewelry from the ocean. On Saturday Krista, Hammond of Santa Cruz Sea Glass will be selling rare pieces of Davenport exotic glass. Plus, on Sunday, there will be a “Collectors Showcase” for vintage sea-glass collectors to display their favorite finds and relive their hunting history.
10am. Saturday, Nov. 2, and Sunday, Nov. 3. Cocoanut Grove at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, 400 Beach St., Santa Cruz. $5.
Art Seen
‘Solitary Garden’
Solitary Garden is a participatory public sculpture and garden project by New Orleans-based artist Jackie Sumell. At the heart of Solitary Garden is a sculpture made following the blueprint of a standard U.S. solitary confinement cell. The cell, designed by Tim Young (an inmate currently incarcerated in San Quentin), sits on a slope overlooking the Monterey Bay. A group of UCSC students have been in communication with Young and are planting a garden around the cell, where over the next 13 months, flowers and vegetables will grow and transform the image of confinement into a space of beauty. Photo: Rachel Nelson.
Opening reception at 5:30pm on Tuesday, Nov.5; artists talk at 6pm on Thursday, Nov. 7. Baskin Art Studios at UCSC, 1156 High St., Santa Cruz. Free.
Saturday 11/2
‘Imagine Healing: Arts of Transformation’
Imagine Healing: Arts of Transformation celebrates the opening of a month-long community art exhibition by Santa Cruz County survivors. There will be live musical performances, bilingual yoga classes, art activities, information about community supportive services, speakers centering on healing and transformation, and Mutari chocolate.
Watsonville Film Festival presents the Second-Annual ‘Coco’ and Fiesta de Día de Muertos celebration at the downtown Watsonville Plaza. The afternoon and evening will feature performances by Esperanza del Valle, Raíces Mestizas, Estrellas de Esperanza, and the White Hawk Aztec Dancers. For the first time, the event also includes a Catrinas and Catrines parade—a traditional Mexican parade of “skeletons.” A screening of Coco in Spanish with English subtitles begins at sunset, so bring lawn chairs, blankets and warm clothes.
4-9pm. Watsonville City Plaza, 358 Main St., Watsonville. Free.
Thursday 10/31
4th Annual Ecstatic Dance Halloween
This bone-shaking, booty-moving event includes body and face painting, and of course, plenty of dancing. There will be a dance-off competition, an oracle and a showing of some of Santa Cruz’s best moving and grooving Halloween costumes. Please note that this is a substance-free event.
7pm-midnight. Motion Pacific, 131 Front St., Santa Cruz. $25-35.
A rising star in the oversaturated world of microbreweries, Santa Cruz’s Sante Adairius placed 10th last year in the RateBeer “100 Best Brewers in the World” contest. But its Water Street taproom has also been serving up an easy-pairing menu of fresh salads, sandwiches, soups, and charcuterie—not to mention pretzels with mustard-and-beer pub cheese.
Chef Chris Pester was a baker at Companion Bakeshop before joining the brewing team at Sante and creating a lean, original kitchen that’s almost entirely local and organic.
What’s unique about being a chef in a brewery?
CHRIS PESTER: You have the opportunity to cook with beer. You get to play with it. Our beers are a lot more oak-aged, sours, not super hop-forward … it can almost bring out some wine notes. I try to incorporate it as much as possible, because it’s there, and I want to have that pairing.
What’s your philosophy for cooking?
Support local agriculture when you can, cook with whole foods, and make things delicious. Have fun with it. Ferment, bring out as many flavors as you can. Play with the seasons, but also try to extend the seasons a little bit.
Getting into the winter season, we’re switching up the soups a little more. I’ve already done a vegan, dry-farmed, roasted tomato bisque served with bread and some olive oil. Now we have a roasted winter squash soup made with a variety called Blue Hubbard—it’s just this enormous, grayish-blue squash, and the flavor is awesome. I like to look for varieties of things that aren’t typically seen.
What are you excited about?
I’ve been excited about this pulled pork potato skin topped with roasted red pepper sauce, shredded cheese, house-made aioli and some cilantro. It’s really delicious, pretty good bar food, beer food, kind of a smaller dish. I’m also pretty excited about opening up a vegan option with mushrooms. I’ve been foraging for a really long time, and now with the opening of Far West Fungi downtown, I’m trying to purchase mushrooms to use in a roasted potato skin with some caramelized onions and some kind of emulsified, creamy sauce. I’m not vegan by any means, but I’m into that.
Sante Adairius Santa Cruz Portal, 1315 Water St., Santa Cruz. 201-4141, rusticales.com.
It is the place with 1,000 names—the Court of Mysteries, the Yogi Temple, the Brick Castle, the Red Castle, the Gate of Prophecy, the Kitchen Property, the St. Elias Orthodox Chapel, the Unorthodox Chapel, the Surreal Estate, West Side’s Weird Site, eyesore, monstrosity, the Hall of WTF. Everyone who lives within two miles of the place likely has their own name for it.
Even the address is ambiguous. For years, it was known as 519 Fair Ave. Now, it’s officially 515 Fair.
It sprawls across four residential lots on Santa Cruz’s Westside and features a main house, an elaborate gate and two towers, all made from brick and mortar inlaid with abalone in a distinctive style that suggests Hindu-flavored folk art—unique certainly in Santa Cruz, maybe in the world.
For decades, it has been a local curiosity: abandoned, dangerous, dirty, and more than a little creepy.
But today, the Court of Mysteries is poised to begin a new era in its long, strange history. After years stuck in a bizarre state of real-estate limbo, the property has been purchased by a larger-than-life, gung-ho San Francisco couple eager to embrace its eccentricities and invite the community to celebrate its weirdness.
The husband-and-wife dynamic duo of Artina Morton and Douglas Harr are not only the new owners of the property, but they fashion themselves as its stewards, as well. At sunset on Halloween, the two will be on hand at the infamous site in a kind of meet-and-greet to chat up neighbors and answer questions about the building and their plans for it. Morton, a visual artist who once lived on the Eastside of Santa Cruz, will be in a Willy Wonka-style top hat. Harr is a veteran of the tech industry, most notably at the software and big-data giant Splunk, as well as an author of a new book on rock music. He’ll be the guy dressed as an enormous fly.
“But next Halloween, look out,” said Harr, when I visited him and his wife at the Temple site one recent sunny afternoon. The plan, he says, is that by Halloween 2020, the Temple will be the wildest, most gotta-see haunted house attraction in town.
The Court of Mysteries’ main house, which dates back to the late 1930s, has never been formally inhabited. Harr and Morton won’t live there, either. They are building their private home right next door on the property’s southernmost (beachside) lot.
They purchased the property in February 2016 for just under $1.6 million and have spent more than $200,000 on renovations to the Court’s buildings, which includes a meticulous re-creation of the signature towers at the front of the property. They’re building a fountain between the ornate gate and the main building, a lap pool on the property’s back end, and they are repurposing the wellhouse—the only structure on the grounds that has not survived—as a gathering place around the property’s well, in which they’ll install lights visible through a metal grate.
The new owners envision the property as a new kind of thing, a quasi-public space that they plan to open several times a year for curious visitors, not only during Halloween, but for the holidays and the annual Open Studios art tour. “We want to map it to the Hindu holidays,” says Morton, who maintains a blog on the renovation of the site (redbrickcastle.com) and also took over a Yelp page about it established years ago.
“This year is all about letting people know what’s going on,” says Morton in reference to Halloween at the site. “People can come by, ask questions, get a peek at what’s going on. We want to get it to the point where it’s a draw for the neighborhood.”
And, for the record, Morton has her own name for the place. As if she’s still test-marketing it, she pronounces, “I call it ‘Ohana Hygge.’” (That’s ohana, as in the Hawaiian term for the emotional bonds between close friends and relatives; and hygge, a Danish term describing a happy or contented life).
OK, make that 1,001 names.
The Man Called Kitchen
The story about the origins of the Court of Mysteries is a ball wrapped in the twine of lore and legend around a small core of known fact. The site is the handiwork of a man named Kenneth Kitchen. According to local historian Carolyn Swift, Kitchen—along with his brother Raymond Kitchen—purchased quite a bit of land on Santa Cruz’s Westside during the Great Depression, when much of that area was open fields and small farms.
One of the Kitchen brothers was a stonemason and the other was a bricklayer, and they kept busy building houses in the area (though, by most accounts, the brothers didn’t exactly enjoy a harmonious relationship; one of the more persistent legends about the Kitchen Brothers has to do with a very public street brawl between the two of them). Some time in the late 1930s (some sources say the ’40s), Kenneth Kitchen began his dream project on a plot of land he owned on Fair Avenue, a byzantine, temple-like building inspired by his interest in Hindu iconography and the Occult. (Legend has it that Kitchen mostly built the temple at night by the light of the moon, and evidently, even he never lived in the main building, preferring to sleep in an adjacent yogi shack.)
One story has it that Kitchen became a student of famed Indian yogi and monk Yogananda Paramahansa, author of the 1946 bestseller Autobiography of a Yogi. As the story goes, Kitchen returned to Santa Cruz and began to build the temple in tribute to the yogi and his teachings.
Whatever its origins, it’s clear that the temple, the gate and the obelisk towers were built from devotion and attention to detail. The arched windows, the inlaid abalone, the symbolic references, and the lotus flower shapes (that look like surfboards to the contemporary eye) all attest to a passion of an artist developing a highly personal expression.
Abalone details at the Court of Mysteries. PHOTO: TARMO HANNULA
“You see that?” said Artina Morton, pointing above the entrance to what appeared to be links in a chain carved from stone. “That’s the ‘Chain of Love’ you find on some Hindu temples over their entry.”
Capitola’s Michael Threet is the stonemason the new owners brought in to restore Kitchen’s work. “It’s just phenomenal the craftsmanship he used in that place,” said Threet. The Court of Mysteries’ walls and ceiling were reinforced with rebar.
“Back in that era,” said Threet, “not very many people were doing that, if any. I’m still doing fireplace rebuilds from the ’89 earthquake. Even then, a lot of them didn’t have rebar in them. For him to have the foresight to build it that way, it’s astounding.”
Much of the abalone used in the exteriors had fallen away, or was otherwise missing through theft or vandalism. For the past three years, Threet has been painstakingly re-creating those abalone features. The materials from the demolished wellhouse, which had been destroyed by literal sledgehammer-wielding vandals years ago, provided Threet with much of the material to rebuild the towers and the temple. “We kept every brick and piece of abalone,” he said. “I also have some friends who are divers, and they’ve donated a lot of abalone shells for the project. So that’s been nice too, to have the local people involved.”
Years of Ruin
It’s not only a seismic miracle that Kitchen’s creation is still standing. The Court of Mysteries has endured in the midst of a breathtaking transformation in the Santa Cruz real-estate market, from sleepy ex-urban farms to million-dollar-plus valuations.
For unknown reasons, Kenneth Kitchen abandoned his dream architectural project and sold the property some time in the 1950s or early 1960s. He then promptly disappeared from the official record. The new owner was a priest in the Eastern Orthodox Church named Elias Karim who wanted to establish a chapel on the site. According to an account in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, Father Karim’s shrine was dedicated in early 1963.
Soon thereafter, however, Karim’s church transferred him to Oklahoma, and, at that point, Kitchen’s Court of Mysteries entered into a state of real-estate limbo that lasted for decades. Karim died, and the property was inherited by his family, none of whom had Santa Cruz roots. Neglectful absentee ownership led to problems.
Perhaps more than any other individual, Santa Cruz architect Mark Primack is responsible for saving the Court of Mysteries from demolition. Primack had led a similar effort to save the fabled Tree Circus in Scotts Valley, which featured bizarre grafts of living trees engineered by arborist Axel Erlandson. Commercial pressures doomed the Tree Circus, but Primack led the effort to move many of Erlandson’s trees to a sanctuary near Gilroy.
For many years, into the 1990s, the Court of Mysteries was a neighborhood nightmare.
“The police would get calls every weekend,” says Primack. “People were having parties there. Homeless people sleeping there. There were even fires being set.”
Meanwhile, Karim’s son Andrew was in Oklahoma City, fielding complaints from 1,300 miles away.
“They didn’t do anything to secure the property,” says Primack. “They made some attempts to sell it. I think they were seeing millions of dollars. But finally, they understood that to sell the property, it was going to have to have value, which in their view means those buildings needed to be gone.”
Primack, who was on the City Zoning Board at the time, worked with the city’s Historic Preservation Commission to have the Court of Mysteries declared a historic structure, thus saving it from demolition. Andrew Karim was not happy at first (“He called me up to give me a lecture on property rights,” remembers Primack), but eventually he acquiesced and agreed to secure the property from trespassing and vandalism.
Primack worked with him and volunteers at the Homeless Garden Project to bring in a caretaker on the lot (who lived in a trailer on the site, with a couple of Rottweilers to get the point across to would-be trespassers). The property was cleaned up. The police calls stopped. But the state of limbo continued into a new, extended period. Primack, working with the Karim family, drew up plans for development of the site that, he felt, respected the Court of Mysteries and its heritage. The job even went out to bid. But those plans never came to pass.
“(Karim) was just too far away,” says Primack. “The family just kept vacillating between ‘We love this property, we should fix it up,’ and, ‘Maybe we should just sell it and ask a lot of money for it.’ They couldn’t get it together to renovate the house, and they just kept lowering their price.”
The breakthrough
Paul Zech calls himself a “hungry guy.” A veteran real-estate agent, Zech considers himself a kind of specialist in developing vacant land. “There’s nothing more difficult to do in real estate,” he said, “than to take a piece of vacant land and try to do something with it.” The Kitchen property was not vacant land, but it had no infrastructure, no septic or sewer, no water, no electricity.
Like many Santa Cruzans, and certainly like many local real-estate agents, Zech was fascinated by the Court of Mysteries. His hunger for a challenge led him to poke around the site and there he saw a sign, tipped over and lying in the weeds: “For Sale, By Owner.”
“I thought, ‘Why would there be a for-sale-by-owner sign with an out-of-town area code?’” says Zech. “So I sat right there in front of the place and called.”
He left a message. A bit later, he got a call back. It was Andrew Karim who, by this time, was living in Atlanta. At that point, it had been more than 50 years since his father purchased the property from Kitchen.
According to Zech, Karim told him something surprising, even unbelievable. “He told me, ‘You’re the first real-estate agent in Santa Cruz County to ever call me.’”
Zech jumped at the chance to represent the property. But he knew it would not be an easy sell. The owner didn’t even have the key to the lock on the door. Zech had to get the lock cut and use a screw gun to get into the property.
“The bigger and tougher the challenge, and the more creative you have to get, that’s the game I like to play,” Zech says. “I told my wife, ‘I don’t know how we’re going to sell this. We’re going to be sitting on this for a long time. I mean, it’s not even a habitable house. It’s a liability that the (Historic Preservation Commission) has their eye on. It’s going to take a unique buyer.”
An interior shot at the Court of Mysteries. PHOTO: TARMO HANNULA
Enter Doug Harr and Artina Morton.
The couple were looking to get out of San Francisco, find something where they could stretch out, maybe a compound where they could invite close friends to live nearby. Because she had once lived there, Morton kept returning to Santa Cruz in her mind. “There’s no place like Santa Cruz,” she says. “It’s a magical island unto itself.”
They found a piece of property on the East Side near Chaminade, but couldn’t make it work. Then, they stumbled upon the Court of Mysteries.
“Doug was immediately drawn to it,” said Morton. “Neither one of us knew anything about it. But it was pretty compelling—this huge lot, weird structures. We needed to know more.”
Complications would follow. At first, the asking price was well above the couple’s comfort level. They sought the advice of locals in the market, who quickly discouraged them for tangling with such a troublesome property. The couple’s original idea was to “finish” the main house; Kitchen had built stairs that went to a second floor that was never constructed. That plan proved to be unworkable.
Still, the property’s magic worked on them.
“Doug couldn’t write the check fast enough,” says Zech. “He didn’t want anyone else to have that property.”
The Paramahansa story deeply connected with Harr, because of his brother who became a monk at a fellowship founded by the famous yogi.
Morton was a tougher sell. One day, she got a call from her husband. “I’m going by that red brick place again,” he said. A bit later, he called again, telling her there was a real-estate agent on site and that they could see the inside of the place. She told him, “OK, but if I walk in that building and there’s weird mojo, we are out of this place.”
“I had a kerosene lamp and a couple of flashlights,” remembers Zech. “All the windows were boarded up. The only thing we could do was open the front door. You couldn’t see anything.”
The interior was coated with dirt and graffiti covered the walls. But there was no garbage, or other sign of human habitation. “I took one step inside,” says Morton, “and it was just so overwhelmingly positive and peaceful.”
“My take on Artina,” says Zech, “was, well, here she was married to this guy who wanted to do the deal. And she’s got to be the one to keep it together. She was cautious. But now, who’s the real lover and champion of that property? It’s her. She’s got great vision. I would just listen to her over different visits to the property when we were in escrow. And, man, she just had it wired.”
The Court of Mysteries was on the market only 89 days after Zech first took it on. That was more than three years ago now. Since then, Harr and Morton have been living in a nearby rental while the renovations of the building and the construction of their own home next door continue. They move into their new home in January. Some locals are grateful to them for bringing life to a long-derelict property. Others are dubious about the construction going on in the Court of Mysteries’ shadow.
“Look,” says Zech, “they did the neighborhood a favor. They did the city a favor. They did the Historical Preservation Commission a favor. We’re all lucky that they came along.”
Harr and Morton said that they are interested in erecting a historical plaque paying tribute to Kenneth Kitchen and his vision on the sidewalk in front of the property. And they want to be part of the ongoing oral history of the site.
“We’re still looking for stories from people about their experiences with this place,” says Morton. “We want to collect those stories from locals and hopefully write a book one day.”
Near the end of my visit, Morton invited me to follow her into the back of the structure, saying “Let me show you something.” We entered into one of the twin “carriage house” spaces in the structure. One will be her art studio. The other his music man-cave.
It was there that she bent down over a couple of hundred small ceramic tiles, engraved with writing and illustrations. She had unearthed these cryptic tiles buried on the grounds that she’s now collecting to put to use in the building’s renovation. Only the ghosts of the Kitchen Brothers could tell her what they are and what they signify. But they’re not talking. Still, the tiles represent a kind of totem handed down through the generations from the creator of the Court of Mysteries to the couple that fate has tabbed as its stewards.
An hour earlier, gregarious and bearish Doug Harr said the same thing, “Let me show you something.” Standing in an empty space, he smiled broadly and said, “Here’s where we put the pinball machine.”
[This is part two of a two-part series on the future of downtown Santa Cruz. — Editor]
Santa Cruz Public Libraries’ downtown branch has some serious problems, as architect Abraham Jayson laid out last week in a city presentation.
The building’s roof is due for replacement. Its fire-safety sprinkler system is incomplete. Much of the structure isn’t seismically safe. Air conditioning is virtually non-existent. The elevators are antiquated. Electrical and plumbing systems are in desperate need of upgrades. Oh, and there’s asbestos everywhere.
“The majority of building systems are obsolete and beyond their usable lifespan,” Jayson told the Downtown Library Council Subcommittee on Thursday, Oct. 2. To top it all off, the library is out of compliance with accessibility rules “too numerous to get into,” he said.
Those findings reaffirmed issues with the current facility that the city’s Downtown Library Advisory Committee (DLAC) had already documented. That group looked at the cost of renovating the current library with funds from a 2016 voter-approved bond measure and determined that it wasn’t worth the money. The committee instead recommended building a mixed-use library from scratch, combined with other uses including a new parking garage—a proposal that quickly turned into a lightning rod in Santa Cruz environmental politics.
After groups like Don’t Bury the Library formed and mobilized against the mixed-use garage, a new council subcommittee formed this year to make sure the city covered its bases.
With guidance from the new subcommittee, Jayson’s firm was tasked with asking a different question: If the city opts to renovate the current library on site, how much benefit could it get? Last Thursday, he revealed his findings.
It wasn’t all bad. With a $27 million budget, Jayson believes Santa Cruz could raze the one-story administrative wings that surround the library, none of which are seismically sound. That would open up the facility and allow for big windows with lots of natural light. The entrance would move from Church Street to Center Street, with an additional entrance from the parking lot next door, which could be reconfigured to allow for better flow.
However, there likely wouldn’t be a teen space or a spot for college and high school kids to study. The genealogical space would get absorbed into another room, like the quiet reading space. Downsizing the office spaces would force the library to rent space elsewhere for administrative purposes. Jayson’s model does not include certain expenses, like the costs of renting a space off-site during two years of renovations, moving the library and its collections or moving everything back after renovations are complete.
There’s little question that—with floor-to-ceiling windows and additional landscaping—Jayson’s renderings portray a project that’s more open and more inviting than the current downtown branch. At this point, there’s a lot of variability in Jayson’s cost model, which his still in draft form; he’ll present a more in-depth estimate in November. But Jayson’s report is already far more detailed than anything the mixed-use library proposal has seen to date. The Santa Cruz City Council had staff halt all work on that proposed project this past spring.
Santa Cruz must finish construction by the time the bonds expire in the summer of 2024. On top of that, construction costs have been rising 8-10% per year. The “good news,” Jayson says, is that will likely go down to 5-6% a year. Taken together, all of this means that Santa Cruz can’t put off its decision much longer, he explains. Santa Cruz has to make a decision on the future of its library.
Here we’ll lay out three basic options the city has for the future of its main library and downtown parking:
1. BUILD A NEW MIXED-USE LIBRARY WITH PARKING AND HOUSING
Last fall, under a previous political majority, the City Council approved for Santa Cruz to proceed with plans a mixed-use library that had several layers of parking and affordable housing above it—all slated for the lot on the corner of Cedar and Cathcart streets.
Per council direction, the six-story project would have had a 24-hour bathroom, and staffers were looking into ways to move or preserve existing magnolia trees that currently tower over that lot, which is home to the farmers market.
And as directed by the council, staff was studying ways to “future-proof” the garage—for instance, so that if parking demand dropped, levels of the garage could be converted into other uses, like housing. Part of the plan was to redevelop old parking lots. If the parking supply was too high, Santa Cruz could start redeveloping even more. The city could also reuse the library site for another use, like affordable housing. The council placed the project on hold this year after a new majority got seated. According to a 2018 estimate, the library and parking portions of the project would come out to a combined $64 million.
Were the city to revive this plan, the City Council would likely move the farmers market site one block away to Front Street, where the market could get a permanent pavilion.
2. RENOVATE LIBRARY, CREATE DOWNTOWN COMMONS
Instead of relocating the market to Front Street, one idea many garage opponents have been pushing for is to create a brand new pavilion plaza at the current farmers market site on Cedar Street. That spot gets less car traffic and more afternoon sun than the Front Street lot.
Members of the group spearheading this idea, Downtown Commons Advocates, also support renovating the library at its current location.
There is, however, a potential contradiction inherent in this vision. It’s clear is that critics of the parking garage have asked tough questions challenging assumptions about the demand for new parking. Transportation is changing, they say. Who knows what the future will bring?
Here’s the issue, though: If there’s as much uncertainty in transportation as critics like to claim, it’s a big leap to go from questioning the need for a new garage to expressing confidence that Santa Cruz can spend parking surplus revenues to start taking spaces away, and ultimately do so without dealing a crippling blow downtown businesses. It’s one thing for environmentalists to suggest that the city’s transportation downtown models might not pencil out. But activists’ own alternatives have yet to face much scrutiny.
Bear in mind that downtown already has hundreds of parking spaces in other lots ready to be redeveloped into better uses, and also that city leaders expect that downtown Santa Cruz could support 600 new units of housing over the next decade, as well as new retail spaces to go with it. Those housing figures are estimates from economic development and planning staffers, based on potential projects that are in various stages of planning. And there’s no reason why the city, which is in the midst of a dire housing crisis, couldn’t raise the bar even higher in order to meet its housing production goals.
Given that the City Council has killed a plan to zone for higher densities on major transit corridors, councilmembers could, for example, plan for more housing downtown, where dense housing projects generally face less opposition.
The debate over common spaces downtown goes back at least 30 years. Shortly after the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake leveled much of downtown, many progressives wanted the City Council to create a new public plaza. One of the quake’s many casualties, after all, was the Cooper House—once home to a bar, restaurant, shops, live music, and community gatherings. In the decades since, that debate never really went away.
Today, many fans of Abbott Square Market, which opened two years ago, see the new food court as a vital community space that fills the void left around the corner, where the Cooper House fell.
But members of the Downtown Commons group still long for a different kind of public space, one divorced from the commercial elements of brick-and-mortar retail.
3. RENOVATE LIBRARY, KICK THE PARKING CAN DOWN THE ROAD
If there’s one skill that various iterations of the Santa Cruz City Council over the last decade have mastered, it’s punting.
It’s understandable, in many ways, that councilmembers would struggle with making difficult decisions on a tight turnaround. From where they sit on the dais, they hear polarized community members—many of them living in different realities from one another—arguing their political views in meetings two or three times per month. Councilmembers can do their best to dig down into the underlying truth behind the town’s most contentious issues on their own time, but the fact remains that these electeds make less than minimum wage when they put in 40 hours of work per week—something they often do.
As always happens in Santa Cruz during times of gridlock, I’ve heard chatter lately about trying to get creative with out-of-the-box compromises and find different sites for a new library. But after so many delays, there is not enough time to go down new rabbit holes. At this juncture, the brand new library project and the parking garage are inextricably linked. The downtown commons and the library renovation, however, are not.
It’s worth noting that the Downtown Library Council Subcommittee, which has been meeting since early summer, has been focusing mostly on the library aspect of the project, less so than on the parking. I have not heard anyone advocate for this idea, but if the council buys arguments about the uncertainty in the future of transportation, it could proceed with renovating the library without taking action on the parking lot and without doling out the parking revenue that it might otherwise spend on the garage. It could, for instance, create a new advisory committee to study the future of parking demand and the possibility of a new garage.
If, however, the city does decide that a new parking structure is needed in the future, Santa Cruz would be hard-pressed to find a first-floor tenant that brings as much public benefit as a full-sized downtown library. Also, the financing could be different without the library funds to share in the expenses.
And in the meantime, construction costs will likely keep going up.
OK, everyone. Former Santa Cruz City Councilcandidate AshleyScontriano has an important message about Chinese food.
Last week, sheposted on her public Facebook page to let everyone know the food at O’mei—which closed two years ago due to protests over the owner’s horrible racism—was actually really good. “Who else misses the BEST Chinese food in the city of Santa Cruz?” she wrote, with a bunch of hashtags including #runoutoftown and #freespeech. Yikes. O’Mei ownerRoger Grigsby’s public bigotry included his support for former KKK leader David Duke’s U.S. Senate campaign in Louisiana—prompting a community boycott. The establishment quickly closed in 2017. The Facebook page, Ashley Scontriano for City Council 2018, was the same one that Scontriano used for her unsuccessful campaign last year. In what appeared to be an edit of the original post, she made sure to let everyone know that she isn’t interested in running for office again.
Phew, that’s a relief, but you might also say that it’s common sense (which coincidentally is the title of Scontriano’s weekly radio show on KSCO, a station that’s itself no stranger to bigotry). Seriously, someone who did want to run for the council again would surely make sure to denounce racism as unequivocally and succinctly as possible. Not only that, but such an individual with ongoing political ambitions would go the extra mile, making sure to also proudly defend the boycott against O’Mei, right on cue.
And it would be so easy!
“Voting with one’s dollars to not frequent an establishment where the owner is donating to a former KKK grand wizard is as American as apple pie,” former Councilmember Richelle Noroyan wrote, commenting on Scontriano’s post. “I would be concerned if this establishment was able to stay open after knowing about his contributions. I am proud of my community who voted with their dollars to not support this restaurant.”
When people talk about “splatter” in horror, they’re usually referring to the subgenre of stabby psycho-killers and their gory antics. But Kathryn Adkins, the director of Cabrillo’s new Halloween production, quickly discovered that she’d have to learn a whole new meaning of it for Carrie: The Musical, if she wanted to pull off the most famous scene in Stephen King’s iconic terror tale.
Everybody knows that when high school misfit Carrie White goes to the prom, she gets a bucket of blood dumped on her in a cruel prank by her high school classmates that sets off her telekinetic rage. That might have been easy to pull off in Brian DePalma’s 1976 film adaptation, but every night on stage? It’s a bit trickier.
“With the blood drop, you have to find the splatter zone. That’s the most important thing. You have to figure out how to catch it so it doesn’t go into the stage itself and make it hazardous for the actors,” says Adkins. “Everything was tried out first with water. Water, of course, isn’t quite the same viscosity, but you get a sense of where it’s going to go and how you can control it—and what you need to do to avoid it hitting and destroying your microphones. That takes practice and attention to detail, like how much liquid to pour. All of those things are part of the rehearsal process.”
If it sounds like she’s overstating the hazards—well, the blood drop shorting out microphones is exactly the kind of problem that plagued the notorious 1988 Broadway run of Carrie: The Musical. (They almost decapitated an actor, too, but that’s another story.)
But the technical disasters during the show’s U.S. opening three decades ago didn’t intimidate Adkins.
“I really wouldn’t have even entertained doing the show if I didn’t have full confidence in the technical designers and masterminds over at Cabrillo College,” she says. “Skip Epperson is brilliant in his designs, and Marcel Tjioe, our technical director, is a wizard at figuring out how to make it all happen. It has been challenging. For me, there’s a joy in the challenge. I don’t know whether they could all say that, but I find always pushing myself a little bit is where the passion comes out. It’s been fun.”
She’s also thankful for the actor getting the blood dropped on her, Marina Hallin.
“I’m so, so lucky that we have a very strong Carrie. She’s not only a fabulous actor who has a tremendous voice, but she’s fearless,” says Adkins. “It’s not every actress who’s willing to have liquid poured on her in front of an audience. She just embraces the challenges all the way through.”
Carrie: The Musical was famously a flop on Broadway; the book about Broadway flops is even called Not Since Carrie. But in the last decade, it has experienced a Renaissance, with a number of revivals featuring a heavily reworked songbook and story. Adkins is not surprised.
“You have to remember that back in the ’80s, the other shows that were being produced at the time were the big extravaganza musicals—Cats, Phantom of the Opera, Les Mis. Huge productions—for Miss Saigon, they were dropping helicopters! So Carrie came along, and it couldn’t really compete on the same level. Plus, the story is pretty dark. So it wasn’t one of what we lovingly call the ‘happy-clappy’ musicals. But musicals have really changed; we’ve had a big resurgence of social issues.”
And Carrie certainly has a strong social issue at its core; it’s about as anti-bullying as you can get, and way ahead of its time in that way. That message was what drew Adkins to the material the most, and she’s added several elements to the production to emphasize it, like text messages to incorporate cyberbullying, and letting the audience see pages in Carrie’s sketchbook as a window into her emotions.
In the #timesup era, Carrie White may have found her cultural moment. Abused by both her deranged mother and her peers, she finally gets to the point of no return, retaliating with a supernatural weapon that has taken on more and more symbolic resonance over the years.
“When Stephen King was writing his novel, telekinesis was being studied as a weapon or a counter-weapon during the Cold War,” says Adkins. “It’s her weapon, and it’s an explosive response, an emotional response that being young she doesn’t have control over yet. I think that’s part of the message, too—that we have to see behaviors and change them, and you can’t ignore them.”
‘Carrie: The Musical’ runs through Nov. 10 at Crocker Theater in Aptos. Performances are Saturday at 7:30pm and Sunday at 2pm. There will also be a Halloween performance at 7:30pm on Thursday, Oct. 31. Tickets $19/$17 students and seniors/$9 with Cabrillo student activities card. Go to cabrillovapa.com for more info and tickets.
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Do you have any skill in fulfilling the wishes and answering the prayers of your allies? Have you developed a capacity to tune into what people want, even when they themselves aren’t sure of what they want? Do you sometimes have a knack for offering just the right gesture at the right time to help people do what they haven’t been able to do under their own power? If you possess any of those aptitudes, now is an excellent time to put them in play. More than usual, you are needed as a catalyst, a transformer, an inspirational influence. Halloween costume suggestion: angel, fairy godmother, genie, benefactor.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Author Amy Tan describes the magic moment when her muse appears and takes command: “I sense a subtle shift, a nudge to move over, and everything cracks open, the writing is freed, the language is full, resources are plentiful, ideas pour forth, and to be frank, some of these ideas surprise me. It seems as though the universe is my friend and is helping me write, its hand over mine.” Even if you’re not a creative artist, Taurus, I suspect you’ll be offered intense visitations from a muse in the coming days. If you make yourself alert for and receptive to these potential blessings, you’ll feel like you’re being guided and fueled by a higher power. Halloween costume suggestion: your muse.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): More than a century ago, author Anton Chekhov wrote, “If many remedies are prescribed for an illness, you may be certain that the illness has no cure.” Decades later, I wrote, “If you’re frantically trying to heal yourself with a random flurry of half-assed remedies, you’ll never cure what ails you. But if you sit still in a safe place and ask your inner genius to identify the one or two things you need to do to heal, you will find the cure.” Halloween costume suggestion: physician, nurse, shaman, healer.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): Cancerian artist Marc Chagall (1887–1985) was a playful visionary and a pioneer of modernism. He appealed to sophisticates despite being described as a dreamy, eccentric outsider who invented his own visual language. In the 1950s, Picasso observed that Chagall was one of the only painters who “understood what color really is.” In 2017, one of Chagall’s paintings sold for $28.5 million. What was the secret to his success? “If I create from the heart, nearly everything works,” he testified. “If from the head, almost nothing.” Your current assignment, Cancerian, is to authorize your heart to rule everything you do. Halloween costume suggestion: a heart.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): The Dead Sea, on the border of Jordan and Israel, is far saltier than the ocean. No fish or frogs live in it. But here and there on the lake’s bottom are springs that exude fresh water. They support large, diverse communities of microbes. It’s hard for divers to get down there and study the life forms, though. The water’s so saline, they tend to float. So they carry 90 pounds of ballast that enables them to sink to the sea floor. I urge you to get inspired by all this, Leo. What would be the metaphorical equivalent for you of descending into the lower depths, so as to research unexplored sources of vitality and excitement? Halloween costume suggestions: diver, spelunker, archaeologist.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): “We have stripped all things of their mystery and luminosity,” lamented psychologist Carl Jung. “Nothing is holy any longer.” In accordance with current astrological omens, Virgo, your assignment is to rebel against that mournful state of affairs. I hope you will devote some of your fine intelligence to restoring mystery and luminosity to the world in which you dwell. I hope you will find and create holiness that’s worthy of your reverence and awe. Halloween costume suggestion: mage, priestess, poet, enchantrix, witch, alchemist, sacramentalist.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): “One language is never enough,” says a Pashto proverb. How could it be, right? Each language has a specific structure and a finite vocabulary that limit its power to describe and understand the world. I think the same is true for religion: one is never enough. Why confine yourself to a single set of theories about spiritual matters when more will enable you to enlarge and deepen your perspective? With this in mind, Libra, I invite you to regard November as “One Is Never Enough Month.” Assume you need more of everything. Halloween costume suggestion: a bilingual Jewish Santa Claus; a pagan Sufi Buddha who intones prayers in three different languages.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): In his novel Zone One, Scorpio author Colson Whitehead writes, “A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.” He means it in the worst sense possible: the emergence of the ugly beast who had been hiding behind social niceties. But I’m going to twist his meme for my own purposes. I propose that when you stop pretending and shed fake politeness, you may indeed resemble an ugly monster—but only temporarily. After the suppressed stuff gets free rein to yammer, it will relax and recede—and you will feel so cleansed and relieved that you’ll naturally be able to express more of your monumental beauty. Halloween costume suggestion: your beautiful, fully exorcised monster.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): “I am glad that I paid so little attention to good advice,” testified poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. “Had I abided by it, I might have been saved from some of my most valuable mistakes.” This is excellent advice for you. I suspect you’re in the midst of either committing or learning from a valuable mistake. It’s best if you don’t interrupt yourself! Halloween costume suggestion: the personification or embodiment of your valuable mistake.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Cleopatra was an ancient Egyptian queen who ruled for 21 years. She was probably a Capricorn. All you need to know about her modern reputation is that Kim Kardashian portrayed her as a sultry seductress in a photo spread in a fashion magazine. But the facts are that Cleopatra was a well-educated, multilingual political leader with strategic cunning. Among her many skills were poetry, philosophy, and mathematics. I propose we make the real Cleopatra your role model. Now is an excellent time to correct people’s misunderstandings about you—and show people who you truly are. Halloween costume suggestion: your actual, authentic self.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Around the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the 11th sign of the zodiac, Aquarius, will be capable of strenuous feats, will have the power to achieve a success that surpasses past successes, will be authorized to attempt a brave act of transcendence that renders a long-standing limitation irrelevant. As for the 11 days and 11 hours before that magic hour, the 11th sign of the zodiac will be smart to engage in fierce meditation and thorough preparation for the magic hour. And as for the 11 days and 11 hours afterward, the 11th sign should expend all possible effort to capitalize on the semi-miraculous breakthrough. Halloween costume suggestion: 11.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Author Robert Musil made a surprising declaration: “A number of flawed individuals can often add up to a brilliant social unit.” I propose we make that one of your mottos for the coming months. I think you have the potential to be a flawed but inspiring individual who’ll serve as a dynamic force in assembling and nurturing a brilliant social unit. So let me ask you: what would be your dream-come-true of a brilliant social unit that is a fertile influence on you and everyone else in the unit? Halloween costume suggestion: ringleader, mastermind, orchestrator, or general.
Homework: “Be homesick for wild knowing,” wrote Clarissa Pinkola Estés. Try that out. Report results to freewillastrology.com.
Last year, Ralph Lawrence “Polo” Reyes played his first show ever under his washed-out, downer-pop moniker Mellow Fellow. That first show was at a dive bar in his native Philippines. Once word got out that Mellow Fellow was playing live shows, he got offered a gig in Hong Kong—his second-ever show—which led to some tours in Asia, and now his first ever U.S. tour, which kicks off on Nov. 6 in Santa Cruz.
“I never had plans of performing my songs,” Reyes says. “I always told my friends that I’m never going to be satisfied with how it sounds live. I get meticulous when I’m in the studio, and I have trust issues, like, will my band be able to sound the way I want it?”
When Reyes started uploading instrumental tracks to his SoundCloud six years ago, he never included his real name or a photo of himself, hoping to keep a healthy distance between his musical expressions and his personal life. That became even more important when he started adding vocals. The chilled-out, dreamy, jangle-pop songs that came pouring out of him were sad, many of them dealing with a failed relationship he had with a girl he dated for four years.
“I started this project as an outlet for sadness, for anger, for exhaustion,” Reyes explains. “The whole purpose was to hide away from my life. I’m a different person when I’m not making my music. I don’t want people to associate me with the music I make when they see me at school or at work. It was a hobby I wanted to keep for myself.”
As his songs got better, the handful of friends he told about it shared his tracks on their Soundcloud pages. A few songs caught a surprising amount of online attention, like “My World,” “Dancing” and “How Was Your Day,” a collaboration with the artist Clairo. Some of his tracks have gone into the millions of views on YouTube, with fans fawning over his ability to produce such solitary bittersweetness in his music.
Magazines reached out to Reyes, and he had to decide if he wanted to keep the project as his private, anonymous emotional outlet, or transform it into a career.
“I had no choice but to reveal, inch by inch, who I really am,” Reyes says. “They would finally see the face behind the music. I wasn’t very comfortable with the idea—not because I have a problem with how I look, but I’m generally an introvert by heart.”
In the last year-and-a-half, he’s taken the project a step further, as a full-on functioning live project. He’s had to grapple with how to translate this infinitely layered, nostalgic bedroom indie project into an actual band. He comes to the U.S. with a drummer, a bassist, three guitarists, and a keyboardist. He had a saxophone player in mind, as well, but didn’t have the budget this time.
“There’s never enough members in the band. Not everything is going to sound like the record, especially if it’s not meant to be played live,” Reyes says. “I told my bandmates, ‘I don’t want to go for a 100% likeness when it comes to the tracks.’ We were literally rearranging the songs to make them sound proper live instead of trying to copy the tracks, riff by riff.”
He’s not completely unfamiliar with performing live. Before Mellow Fellow, he used to play in a surf-punk band whose members would throw stuff around, stage-dive and “probably play naked.”
“I don’t want everyone to fall asleep when I sing my music. I think it’s important to keep that chill vibe, but at the same time to still feed off the crowd’s energy,” Reyes says. “If the crowd’s energy is very high and very energetic, we have some very cool moments on stage.”
Esoteric astrology as news for the week of Oct. 30, 2019
Halloween this year brings us our old friend, shaman, coyote, heyoka (Lakota word for sacred clown, jester): Mercury retrograde, this time in Scorpio. That means it’s a more intense Mercury retrograde. Not light like Gemini, or quick like Aries, or on a journey like Sag, or in the future like Aquarius. Mercury in Scorpio is the deep, dark waters of the unconscious calling us to discipleship; it’s the Scorpio sting, eye of the eagle and the heart of the phoenix reorienting in the fires of transformation.
Mercury in Scorpio (retrograde) is feeling everyone’s thoughts and emotions, and it’s the Soul reminding us to have Right Communication, Goodwill and kindness (or else!). Mercury retrograde is a magical time, while Scorpio is a transformative testing time. In this Scorpio Mercury retrograde time, it’s good to review the Nine Tests given to all of us, to see if we are strong enough to be Disciples and World Servers.
The Nine Tests focus on the three aspects of the personality (physical, emotional and mental). Physical tests: sexuality, physical comfort over service to others, and the right use of money. Emotional tests: fear (inhibiting activities), hate (which destroys relationships), and excessive and obsessive ambition and desire for power (which can destroy entire nations). Mental tests: pride (creates a barrier to the soul), belief in separateness and isolation (create barriers to Right Human Relations), and cruelty (outcome of inappropriate use of power).
ARIES: How to more fully secure finances and resources held in common, and also stabilize relationships? You ponder these questions over the next several months. Some answers: Maintain necessary boundaries and confidentiality, yet be very truthful with those you trust. Pay bills, organize and safeguard important papers, tend to long forgotten needs (and deeds), and allow no alienation to occur. Share and safeguard more.
TAURUS: Important tasks, set aside for months, now need tending and completing. These include cleaning, clearing, home repair, organization, ordering supplies, licensing, day-to-day living needs, commitments, and something concerning marriage. Deep emotions emerge from the tests. They will appear in all relationships. Partnerships need deep, mindful listening. Sit down together. Communicate heart to heart, soul to soul.
GEMINI: The nine tests reveal themselves in daily life events, such as scheduling, tending to self, health, animals, and serving others. Mercury retrograde asks: are you taking care of yourself? Ask others to assist you if needed. It’s important that you tend to daily health tasks, set high standards, floss more carefully, act as if you are beloved, be respectful, and communicate as if the maintenance of the world depended upon it. You can do it all with grace and beauty.
CANCER: You might feel restricted, lost and alone, and far away from others, especially if family is not around. You may be stretched in four directions, experience financial fears with dreams intruding upon reality. “What’s real?” you ask. This question is all about the tests. You remember to step back and observe, to nurture yourself, and to dream more about what you really desire. And to plant some winter seeds.
LEO: You may be concerned about money—lack or loss of it, or not receiving your share in a family legacy or will. You may be concerned with having resources to purchase something quite large like a home. You remember nothing large is purchased in a retrograde. Sometimes you hide away enfolded in shadows. If there is persistent grief, take Ignatia Amara (homeopath). Death could be on your mind. Death is our great adventure, a liberation. We’ve experienced it thousands of times.
VIRGO: A quiet frame of mind may be what you’re experiencing. Mercury retrograde in Scorpio influences your thinking and communication. Careful that you don’t allow a critical nature or separative judgments to take hold. Have the intention to pass the Nine Tests with loving care. Then assist others in their tests. Hold a light up for them in their darkness.
LIBRA: Review all monetary situations—loans, bills, and tithes—in order to carefully assess finances in the next three months. This is a good exercise. You’ll find life is generous. In turn, you are to be generous, too. Give to (tithe) those in need. Do this scientifically; a bit each month. Financial differences occur within relationships. Stand your ground by sharing. Then share more. We are given more and more so we can give again and again.
SCORPIO: The tests for Scorpio center on one’s self-identity. You will observe your many selves through the lens of who you think you are, who you used to be, and who you really are, now and in the future. This is complex, but not confusing. It’s clarifying, especially since the tests are made especially for you. Watch your communication. Mercury will be watching and listening. Always practice Ahimsa (doing no harm). Karma is neutralized.
SAGITTARIUS: How you observe and tend to the Nine Tests will determine what your next opportunities will be. So, ponder upon, tend carefully to, and every moment complete the tests. They will appear even in dreams, at odd times day or night, when you’re about to fall asleep and in between thoughts, ideas and words on a page. People will appear offering you the tests. Information is available through this experience. Remember, eyes wide open, heart petals unfolded.
CAPRICORN: Dear Capricorn, always moving upward and onward. The tests, none of which deter you, will occur in teams, groups, with those around you and in your community. The tests, subtle and behind the scenes, will transform and reorient your values. The Nine Tests will ask what are your hopes, wishes and dreams for the future? For yourself and your family? What are your deepest goals? What do you love? What future do you envision?
AQUARIUS: Your home and work life are in states of change. If you are a writer, photographer or artist, notice the nine tests appearing in your life. Attempt to portray them through the medium of your art. This is new esoteric art. Wherever you are, make it feel like home. Host a party. Use your creativity to write about, describe and film everything about home. This allows you to look homeward, like an angel.
PISCES: The world listens and sees you as a teacher. Make sure all that you say are words concerning the beloved. Everything is the beloved. Write and speak as if you hold the world in your hands and every movement shifts humanity into states of greater Goodwill. What am I saying? That every action we make affects humanity and all the kingdoms.
