How many times have all of us thought of something we really wanted to do, perhaps some piece of art we have always wanted to create, and thought, “Well, not now, but I’ll get around to it eventually?”
Wallace Baine’s cover story this week considers what happens when fate calls our bluff, and we’re faced with the possibility that there might not be an “eventually.” Do we slink back and say, “Never mind, I guess I didn’t really want to do it, anyway?”
Santa Cruz artist Jory Post didn’t. After he was faced with a devastating diagnosis that suggested he might not have much time left, he instead threw himself into a creative overdrive, holding nothing back. His story is a moving and inspiring look at how we’re all capable of making this the day we stop saying “eventually.”
Two other things to mention this week: first, with 20 days left to go in Santa Cruz Gives, we are about $40,000 away from our goal. That means we have to raise $2,000 a day for our local groups to make it happen. I know we can! Read Alisha Green’s story this week on a big change in the works for SCG participant the Homeless Garden Project, and go to santacruzgives.org to donate to our groups.
And lastly, we’re officially opening the voting for our Best of Santa Cruz 2020 awards. Go to goodtimes.sc and vote early to give your favorite local people, places and things a head start!
Thank you for publishing Jordy Hyman’s article “Unreal Meats” (GT, 10/30). I appreciate you providing information about the toll animal agriculture takes on our environment. Given the incredible success of these products, including Beyond Meat’s IPO being the largest in history, it is important for our community to be informed about alternatives to the rainforest destruction, mass extinctions, and greenhouse gases associated with raising beef. I hope your readers will take note of the statistics Hyman included, such as an 89% reduction in greenhouse gases compared to beef.
Somehow, the main point I made when Hyman interviewed me was lost. We are in the midst of the greatest threat to life on Earth that humanity has ever faced. The IPCC has said we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions drastically by 2030, or risk entering complete climate chaos, a point beyond which no human intervention will stabilize the climate. Many scientists think this prediction is overly optimistic.
We must make wide-ranging changes in human activities or we are not going to make it. Once we hit runaway global warming, it is possible that the cascading feedback loops will render the earth too hot for all life.
Meat alternatives exists within this context. We need to reduce greenhouse gases in as many ways as possible, and that includes radically reducing emissions from animal agriculture, one of the main sources of emissions. According to Drawdown, “if cattle were their own nation, they would be the world’s third largest emitter of greenhouse gases.” Each time someone eats a burger made from “unreal meats” instead of meat, they are decreasing their greenhouse gas contribution. Of course, Hyman’s suggestion to “eat your vegetables” works as well!
Beth Love | Founder, Eat for the Earth
Call It Sewage
The Board of Directors and personnel of the Soquel Creek Water District are engaged in a project to combat the intrusion of salt water into the Purisima Aquifer, currently our almost exclusive source of drinking water. There are a number of questionable aspects related to this project, in which they have already invested a substantial amount of money.
I am referring to the Clean Water Soquel project, which will produce treated water to inject into the aquifer to halt the intrusion of ocean water. The source of this water is highly questionable, as it is to come from the treatment of sewage—a word they seldom use when discussing the project in which they will be producing water that is anything but clean.
It has long been known that it is impossible for sewage treatment to remove all the contaminants people flush down their toilets, particularly prescribed and other drugs. A recent study at the University of Southern California found that sewage treatment plants produce an antibiotic DNA fluid that could negate the effectiveness of certain drugs, unquestionably a dangerous situation. Surely we have learned a lesson from the problem in Flint, Michigan.
It is difficult for me to understand the motivation of these folks. To begin with, we do not own the aquifer. And we are not the only ones who depend on it for their water supply. How can they think they have the right to contaminate it?
When the district notified us of their intent to raise rates, they referred several times to the need to develop a supplemental water supply. They mentioned Pure Water Soquel project, but nowhere the word “sewage.” They required 50%+1 of us to object, in writing, to stop the project (which is unnecessary, as there is plenty of water available without it).
I believe that requirement to be upside-down. To be fair, they should be required to get 50%+1 of everyone using the aquifer to approve of their shenanigans, making it more like Government of the People, By the People, and For the People.
Thomas Stumbaugh
Aptos
PHOTO CONTEST WINNER
Submit to ph****@*******es.sc. Include information (location, etc.) and your name. Photos may be cropped. Preferably, photos should be 4 inches by 4 inches and minimum 250dpi.
GOOD IDEA
The Seymour Marine Discovery Center will host its annual Art and Craft Festival on Sunday, Dec. 15. Local artists and craftspeople will be offering ocean-inspired and other nature-conscious creations that make great gifts, and the proceeds support marine education. There will also be live music, apple cider and children’s activities. You can’t get to the ocean every day, so grab a piece made by a local artist from the annual art and craft festival at the Seymour Center. Noon-5:30pm. Seymour Marine Discovery Center, 100 McAllister Way, Santa Cruz. 459-3800, seymourcenter.ucsc.edu. $7 adults/$5 seniors, students, children/free for children under 2.
GOOD WORK
The 4th Annual Christmas Dinner at the MAH will take place on Wednesday, Dec. 25, from noon-3 pm. This event will bring a hot meal, warm clothing and gifts to the less fortunate. Volunteers can sign up by emailing ch***************@***il.com. Warm clothing and gifts may be dropped off at the UN Store at 903 Pacific Ave, Santa Cruz. Monetary donations may be made online, and checks can be sent to Veterans For Peace, P.O. Box 865, Santa Cruz, CA 95061. For more information, visit santacruzmah.org/events.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.”
A Santa Cruz favorite, geologist, scientist, ocean lover, award winner, Sentinel columnist, house renovator, people person, Earth mascot, professor, and all-around everything-er, Gary Griggs knows what’s going on in our ocean backyard. Griggs’ new book Our Ocean Backyard: Collected Essays, Volume 2 is a compilation of 106 previously published articles from his popular column for the Santa Cruz Sentinel. Written for anyone with an interest in the oceans, the essays draw upon our rich history of ocean exploration and discovery, shedding light on our past history and what we can expect in the years and decades to come.
INFO: 6pm. Wednesday, Dec. 18. Seymour Marine Discovery Center, 100 McAllister Way, Santa Cruz. 459-3800, seymourcenter.ucsc.edu. Free.
Art Seen
‘The Nutcracker’
There’s no better way to get into the holiday spirit than to overload on the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.” Santa Cruz City Ballet Artistic Director, choreographer and Juilliard Alumnae Shannon Chipman began the Nutcracker tradition in Santa Cruz as the first Snow Queen at Cabrillo’s theater in 1988, and it’s still going strong today. The Nut is celebrating its 10th year at Cabrillo this season with a full-length performance by the Santa Cruz City Ballet at International Academy of Dance. There will be local talent and principal dancers from the Oregon Ballet Theater, as well as guest dancers from the Bay Area and Krazy George (Sunday only), inventor of the Wave as Mother Ginger.
INFO: 1 and 4:30pm. Saturday, Dec. 14, and Sunday, Dec. 15. Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium. cabrillovapa.com. $28-40.
Saturday 12/14
‘Wowie-Zowie with Jeff Raz’
As part of this year’s ArtSmart Family Concert Series, Tandy Beal & Company is hosting Joy! favorite Jeff Raz. During this magical hour, experience the hilarity, wonder and dazzlement of physical theater and musical juggling with one of the preeminent circus performers of the West Coast. Raz has made a juggling act out of life: he toured as a soloist in Cirque du Soleil and spent nine years with the legendary Pickle Family Circus. An expert at clowning around, Raz will bring volunteers to perform feats of balance, to make people gasp in awe and delight, and to uplift our hearts and spirits!
INFO: 11am. Saturday, Dec. 14. Veterans Memorial Building, 846 Front St., Santa Cruz. tandybeal.com. $15 adults/$10 children.
Saturday 12/14
‘Ayurvedic Cooking During the Holidays’
Fall and winter are full of family gatherings, holidays and food galore. While this is a time to celebrate, it can also lead to digestive issues for many people. In this workshop, experts will go over how to combine Ayurvedic cooking with favorite holiday foods. The class will go over ways to digest and assimilate holiday foods better, how to eat in a balanced way, and ways to feel satiated longer. Lunch is included in the ticket price.
INFO: 10am. New Leaf Community Markets, 1101 Fair Ave., Santa Cruz. newleaf.com. $47.
Friday 12/14
Harmony for the Homeless
When it comes to homelessness in our community, many people want to help but don’t know exactly how to. Join the 418 Project in an opportunity to take action in a way that builds solidarity and raises a voice around the challenges that impact the Santa Cruz community. Local artists are initiating a conversation around homelessness to inspire people through song and poetry, to search for creative solutions rather than turning cheeks or feeling overwhelmed and powerless. Proceeds will go to support Downtown Streets Team, a nonprofit providing homeless and low-income folks with the resources they need to rebuild their lives. Please also bring non-perishable food donations if you can, which will be donated to Second Harvest Food Bank.
INFO: 7pm. The 418 Project. 418 Front St., Santa Cruz. 466-9770, the418project.org. $25.
Sunday 12/15
Diversity Center Community Holiday Party
When the going gets tough, the tough get together. Celebrate the beginning of the winter holidays with the Diversity Center’s annual holiday party. Bring nutritious canned or boxed food donations for the annual Santa Cruz Aids Project holiday drive. Raffle tickets will be offered for chances to win all kinds of local wellness, adventure and dining prizes. Celebrate the end of one year with friends in the local community.
INFO: 4pm. 126 Pacheco Ave., Santa Cruz. 425-5422, diversitycenter.org. $10-100.
The phone call came, ominously, at 7am. It was the morning after a CT scan and Jory Post, swallowing a growing dread, sensed bad news.
He sensed right.
“I’m sorry to hit you with this nuclear bomb,” said the doctor on the other end. Post had a large malignant tumor on his pancreas, wrapped around an artery. Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest forms of cancer—difficult to detect early, often resistant to treatment and infamous for its low survival rate.
Post and his wife Karen cried a lot that morning. “But it didn’t completely wipe me out,” he says months later, reflecting on the moment at his Santa Cruz home. “I know it’s the worst cancer in the world. I know I have a 7.5% chance of survival. But I’m a poker player. I’ve won a lot of poker tournaments at worse odds than that. Mostly, though, I’m a pragmatist. I know what’s coming and how to plan for it. So, I got to work.”
This is not a story of a man facing a life-threatening diagnosis. Tragically, such a thing is so common these days that it’s hardly newsworthy. Neither is it a story of a man beating cancer. He has kept it at arm’s length, and he has stubbornly pushed through it, but he hasn’t beaten anything.
This is a story of a respected community artist, writer and teacher living through a year that has been paradoxically both the worst year of his life, and the best. Pancreatic cancer has informed every waking moment of Jory Post’s 2019, from bouts of pain and exhaustion to chemo treatments to the psycho-spiritual labor of confronting death. Yet, at the same time, he has never been more in command of his artistic powers, attaining improbable professional goals while finding a wellspring of creativity in a newly discovered art form.
Amidst an epic struggle to survive, he’s somehow living his best life.
In February, about three months after his diagnosis, Post, 69, joined a writing group for poetry under the direction of Danusha Laméris, Santa Cruz County’s reigning Poet Laureate. (He already belonged to two other writing groups for fiction and playwriting).
After a frustrating start wrestling with traditional poetry, he happened upon prose poetry. What sounds like an oxymoron is actually poetry without the line breaks on the page, written in undifferentiated paragraphs. Santa Cruz has a rich history in this literary niche, thanks mostly to two men who devoted their writing careers to the prose poem—the late poet, teacher and critic Morton Marcus, and UCSC printer and poet Gary Young, whom Post refers to as “my poetry guru.”
Since adopting the prose-poetry form, Post has been on fire artistically. He has written close to 300 prose poems this year, many of which were published in his first book of poetry poignantly titled The Extra Year, released in September by Anaphora Literary Press. His work has also been published in The Sun, one of the country’s most prominent literary journals, as well as 82 Review and Red Wheelbarrow. And just last week came the cherry on top of an amazing year: He was informed that a short story he had published in Rumble Fish Quarterly was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, which honors the best work from small presses across the country.
He was also the subject of a celebratory book launch party that was one of highlights of the Santa Cruz literary community’s year, and held court at both a writers salon at Gabriella Café and a Lit Chat hosted by the Santa Cruz literary journal Catamaran. This month, he even traveled to Chicago, where he was invited to read his work at the 25th anniversary party of the Chicago Quarterly Review, which also published his poems.
The prose poems that have fueled this run of productivity often come to him in the middle of the night. Even in the midst of bouts of nausea and cramps, reactions to chemo, and the anxieties and worries that accompany serious illness, often he’ll be up at 3am, recording ideas or polishing them into poems in his journal.
“Something has upped my game,” he says. “I don’t personally take credit for it. I like to believe something takes over your pen, that you are writing through some other medium. I lucked into something I don’t completely understand.”
The literary output is accompanied by a similar flowering in his other art form of choice. For years, Post and his wife, book artist Karen Wallace, have run JoKa Press, their in-house art workshop that features her handmade journals and his found-art collage boxes, inspired by the work of assemblage artist Joseph Cornell. Post’s creations are often humorous or whimsical settings built into the drawers of old dressers and featuring everything from Scrabble tiles to star charts to 45-rpm records. Their Santa Cruz home has been a hot spot on the annual Open Studios tour for several years. Last October’s tour attracted more than 300 people to the Posts’ home, with sales of items triple what they’ve been in past years.
“I’ve never seen someone who has had this kind of creative arc before,” says Laméris, a veteran workshop leader and teacher. “It’s like seeing someone emerge from a chrysalis.”
“He’s experiencing his life and his art coming together in a really remarkable and inspiring way,” says friend and fellow writer Kathryn Chetkovich. “He’s been constantly shuttling back and forth between these physical objects he’s making and the poems. You get a sense when you’re over there that something is getting made all the time, in a very cool way.”
Novelist and former UCSC lit prof Paul Skenazy was moved by Post’s story enough to write an essay about his friend for the online journal Brevity. “He took his diagnosis as a challenge,” Skenazy wrote, “and answered it with his stern will, adventurous spirit, and imagination. We do make our own miracles sometimes, but not always, or often.”
Friends and colleagues stress that the timing of Post’s cancer diagnosis and his astonishing artistic output are not coincidental—that the former served as a catalyst for the latter. Whether it was his intention or not, the poetry has been a path that allowed Post to escape being defined by his condition.
“He remains,” says Chetkovich, “a person much bigger than this thing that has happened to him.”
Unexpected Angles
Jory Post has lived in Santa Cruz most of his life. He moved to town in 1962 at the age of 12 with his family, living just steps away from the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. His first summer in his new home was a rush of pinball machines and crabbing at the Wharf. He’s a product of Mission Hill Junior High, Soquel High, Cabrillo College—where he first encountered poets and role models Morton Marcus and Joe Stroud—and UCSC.
He spent most of his career in the classroom, first as an aide, then a part-time and finally a full-time teacher at Happy Valley School. He had a particular interest in technology, and was a pioneer in the early 1980s in bringing computers into an education setting. In the 1990s, he received a fellowship—named for Christa McAuliffe, the teacher who died in the 1986 Challenger explosion—to design computer-aided “virtual” field trips.
In 2000, his educational career took an unexpected turn when he was hired by Apple to help design an online environment for teachers and students, though his association with the world’s most famous computer company didn’t last as long as he had hoped. “It became apparent it was not the mecca I thought it was,” he says.
The last couple of decades Post has dedicated to his creative work, as well as to establishing relationships in Santa Cruz’s artistic communities. In 2011, he co-founded phren-Z, an online literary journal devoted to Santa Cruz County writers. He served as a formal and informal editor of the writings of friends and colleagues.
“He’s now bearing the profits of all those years of community service, connections with people who care about him, things he’s done for other people,” says Paul Skenazy.
Santa Cruz novelist Elizabeth McKenzie, another long-time friend, says that, “I really depend on him as a reader and as a literary critic.”
Filmmaker Jon Silver has known Post for years, going back to the days when both were involved in Santa Cruz educational circles. In September, Silver released a short film he had made titled Along for the Ride, inspired by the prose poems of The Extra Year. “It’s kind of amazing,” he says. “It’s been a creative explosion, and there’s something about those prose poems that capture the realness and rawness of (what he’s been going through).”
The poems in The Extra Year forthrightly address the exhausting rituals of having cancer in the contemporary world, from losing hair to grappling with doctors. The book is rife with gallows humor that walks the knife-edge of tragedy, such as contemplating with his wife the music to play at his memorial (“‘Another One Bites the Dust’ is first,” he writes). There’s a heartbreaking story about a long-lost sister who died as an infant. He names names, and expresses himself openly about the meaningful people in his life, as if coyness disappeared with his hair.
“I find his writing to be original and mysterious,” says McKenzie. “It always comes at you from an unexpected angle.”
Laméris has noticed the way Post knits together darkness and levity.
“There’s a real kind of unflappable coolness of tone that comes through,” she says. “And that really contrasts with the (inherently) hot emotional material and offsets it, making it more powerful. The poems really move between pathos and dark humor. They hit all the notes.”
But perhaps above all, the poems are deeply relatable.
“What I experience,” says Chetkovich, “is that it feels like he has opened his own road for other people to walk with him in a way that I find moving and really generous.”
Bluffs and Calls
The bifurcation between Post’s old-line Santa Cruz life and his not-so-old life as a literary lion is nicely symbolized by poker. He hosts two semi-regular poker games. One includes friends that go back to his high-school days; that game has been going on for more than 50 years. The other game is populated mostly by writers and poets.
For Post, poker is more than idle entertainment. The poker games at his house take place on a regulation table. He has been an accomplished player for years. In 2005, he walked away with $45,000 in winnings from a World Series of Poker event at Lake Tahoe.
He’s been entranced with the challenges of “beating the house” in poker since he was 17, when he won $100 at Harvey’s on Tahoe’s south shore. The same man who is now a prose-poet and visual artist said, “I’m really a numbers guy. Literature and writing were not my strong suit on the SAT. But I was 99th-percentile in math.”
His grounding in math (and cards) has given him a fuller understanding of probabilities, which is useful in avoiding both denial and self-pity when it comes to facing a life-threatening illness.
In November, a year after his original diagnosis, Post endured another CT scan. What followed wasn’t exactly bad news. But it wasn’t good news, either. The tumor was essentially unchanged after months of chemotherapy, still clinging to a crucial artery. He was disappointed, but the doctor told him that, with pancreatic cancer, “stability equals success.” He will return for another scan in three months. “So I’m going to be around another three months,” he says. “The doctor told me that maybe we’ll just keep doing this for a year or two, which made me happy.”
Meanwhile, the urge to create continues, only a tad less intensely. To get out of the house, he’s rented an office in downtown Santa Cruz, where he goes for the express purpose to write without distraction. In the last month alone, aside from the continued production of prose poems, he’s written two 10-minute plays and started a new novel, of which he’s logged more than 20,000 words.
He’s also revising a novel that he initially finished before his diagnosis in 2018. It’s about death and dying. “I had several people read the manuscript,” he says, “and many of them came back pointing to one particular character, that ‘She was a little flat.’ Well, then I got my diagnosis, and it struck me that my experience wasn’t anywhere in that book. So I looked at that character, and it was, ‘Congratulations Louise, you now have pancreatic cancer.’”
At the center of Jory Post’s creative life is his daily journal. Inside it, he brings order to his creative restlessness by the use of icons, most notably a yellow light bulb. The light bulb represents a germ of an idea, often one or two words, a fragment from a dream, a beguiling phrase.
He had the journal with him last summer when he watched a two-hour documentary on the late novelist Toni Morrison at the Nickelodeon. “I just sat there with my pen the whole time. I think I got 25 to 30 light bulbs that day.”
He keeps the journal in the zippered pocket of his Patagonia jacket, which he wears everywhere he goes. He carries the journal when he walks to his downtown office, a ray of light in the enveloping darkness of his health.
“The role of the poet,” he says, “is to look at everything and figure out how, say, looking at bunnies in the backyard has a connection to not only what’s going on in my life, but in all our lives as a universal. I want to hit everything head-on. And because I don’t know how much time I have left to do that, I’m always (referencing) the list of these light bulbs. There’s no ennui at all. The only times that I’ve really been slowed down have been related to my nausea or stomach issues. Otherwise, no. I don’t know what ennui is.”
“As an observer and a teacher,” says Laméris, “what I see is that he’s always had this in him. And because he’s under the gun of mortality in a more obvious way than most of us, he’s really stepped into more of himself. It turns out, this is who he was all along.”
As with many Downtown Streets Team staff functions, attendees say the liquor flowed freely during a 2014 holiday party at the nonprofit’s San Jose headquarters.
A young female staffer hired a month prior recalls mingling with colleagues by the receptionist’s desk when Eileen Richardson, the homeless services provider’s CEO, walked up to join her. “Out of nowhere,” the employee recalls, Richardson asked, “So, you’re a lesbian?”
“We were standing at the front desk chatting, tipsy on wine, and talking about how I liked the job so far,” the newcomer, who requested anonymity to protect future job prospects, later wrote about the encounter. The woman says she laughed at the prying question but answered affirmatively. Richardson then inquired about her relationship status and physical preferences before waxing poetic about feminine beauty, the ex-employee says.
“OK, so what’s your type?” she says she asked Richardson, who “suddenly got serious and sultry-eyed, leaned in and said, ‘Well, you are.’”
The night grew “increasingly strange” as guests helped themselves to boxed wine and spiked fruit punch, did keg stands—that is, a handstand on a keg to guzzle as much beer as possible—and took swigs of hard liquor, according to the woman, who says she drank so much that she threw up in the office toilet. All the while, the employee says, an “incredibly drunk” Richardson followed her around and “had her arm around me and kept telling my friends to go ahead and leave.” The staffer says her employer began “brushing my hair back from my face, snuggling her head into my neck” as onlookers shot worried looks at the pair.
Those same concerned coworkers eventually laid her down on the floor in the office of Richardson’s son, Director of Program Operations Chris Richardson, where the employee remembers waking up at one point to see her boss lying beside her “staring lovingly at me.”
One of the colleagues who witnessed the evening’s uncomfortably intimate conclusion checked in often during the next few weeks over Richardson’s “obvious coming on to me,” the employee says.
Others found humor in the escapade.
“Several other staff joked about Eileen having a crush on me, and there was a rumor that she’d kissed me,” the employee says. “If she did that night, I don’t recall.”
A couple months later, the employee says she attended a Super Bowl party at Chris Richardson’s home, at which Eileen invited her to have a beer and view a photo album at her adjacent residence, where she followed her and “kissed me in the doorway of the bathroom.”
‘A Frat House’
As Silicon Valley’s homeless population ballooned amid an unprecedented affordability crisis over the past decade, Downtown Streets Team (DST) emerged as one of the most prominent Bay Area organizations trying to lift people out of poverty. By 2012, it counted Palo Alto’s top cop as a board member and received nearly $400,000, about 40% of its budget, from direct government support. In 2013, the nonprofit expanded into the North Bay, landing contracts with the cities of San Rafael and Novato; four years later, it launched a team in Santa Cruz.
On the Central Coast, the group’s model of employing people experiencing homelessness to clean up Santa Cruz’s downtown had been floated over the years as one possible tool to address a large local chronically homeless population. Chip, the one-name, then-executive-director of the Downtown Association, threw a fundraiser for the nonprofit in the winter of 2017. A few months later, the nonprofit earned the blessing of a Santa Cruz City Council committee studying homelessness. Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Inductee Joan Baez spoke at the ribbon-cutting ceremony that October. Over the next two years, DST expanded, with crews now servicing Harvey West, downtown, the San Lorenzo Riverwalk, Cowell Beach, Main Beach, and even North County beaches. (A Santa Cruz program manager referred us to public relations in San Jose for comment.)
Behind the do-good mission of employing the unhoused, however, a toxic workplace culture festered for years, according to a dozen former staffers.
In letters prepared by attorneys and echoed in reviews on job-rating platform Glassdoor.com, ex-employees accuse both Eileen, 58, and her son Chris, 33, of sexual harassment, making lewd comments, paying women less than men for similar work, and promoting a culture of heavy drinking. Employees have described the workplace as “toxic,” “a frat house,” “full of nepotism and favoritism,” and “a joke.” Multiple people compared working at DST to being in an abusive relationship.
Yet reporting misconduct proved difficult because of close friendships between the Richardsons, their strategically appointed board of directors and other managers, including Chief Operating Officer Elfedra Strydom, who until earlier this year fielded all personnel concerns.
In all, more than a dozen former employees allege harassment, sexual assault and discrimination at DST. Two of those ex-staffers are coming forward publicly with their claims for the first time.
“Things got really, really bad,” says 34-year-old Zia MacWilliams, a former DST program manager who left the nonprofit in 2017 after four progressively stressful years on the job. “I honestly believe in the mission and loved working with my clients, but internally it was just out of control.”
Both MacWilliams and Michelle Fox Wiles, 29, accuse DST of perpetuating a pay gap that privileged their male counterparts.
After she left DST, MacWilliams teamed up with Wiles and nine of their ex-colleagues to pursue legal recourse. The nonprofit Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto (CLSEPA) took the case and offered the DST board a chance to resolve the allegations out of court. (At this point, the Santa Cruz branch was only a few months old.)
It took a year and a month before the DST board agreed to hire a law firm to investigate the allegations.
The probe, which commenced in late 2018 and concluded this past July, “substantiated a culture of drinking and inappropriate joking in the workplace,” according to an Aug. 28 letter from CLSEPA lawyer Jennifer Smith to the 11 claimants. “The board seems to be genuinely concerned about the work environment that was described,” she wrote, though, “they believe that things are better now than they were three to five years ago.”
While the board insists that the investigation found no evidence of a gender-based pay disparity, Smith said in her letter that trustees expressed a desire to “see changes made.” One of the most significant changes, Smith wrote, is that DST ramped up its reporting system by allowing employees to complain to the board directly and created a human resources position for the first time in the organization’s 14-year history. The board also conceded that alcohol “has been an issue,” Smith said, and instituted a “total prohibition.”
Richardson says she never read any of the Glassdoor reviews and is only vaguely aware of the CLSEPA negotiation. But she denies there were ever any problems with DST’s work environment. “Those claims,” she says, “were unfounded.”
A Bold Vision
A successful venture capitalist who gained global notoriety on the cusp of the 21st century as the CEO of the groundbreaking but controversial music-file-sharing platform Napster, Richardson brought her change-the-world ethos to the charitable sector.
Under the DST model, local governments and business associations hire a team of homeless people to clean up streets in exchange for gift cards and case management.
DST’s “win-win-win” system of hiring the homeless, cleaning up trash and benefiting the broader community garnered renewed acclaim for the elder Richardson. Since its inception, DST has blossomed from a cash-strapped experiment in Palo Alto to a burgeoning enterprise spanning a dozen cities in two states with an $8 million annual budget.
Richardson—who makes upward of $200,000 in base pay as president and CEO of DST and an affiliated nonprofit clinic called Peninsula Healthcare Connection—has since racked up accolades. The San Francisco Chronicle named her a recipient of theVisionary Award earlier this year thanks to nominations from, among other dignitaries, San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo and his counterpart in Oakland, Mayor Libby Schaaf. “The honor salutes leaders who strive to make the world a better place,” the Chron wrote about the distinction.
The New York Times gave her a similar honor a year prior. Also in 2018, the League of California Cities and the California State Association of Counties’ Joint Homeless Task Force recognized DST’s model as a “best practice” for supporting homeless people.
In a blog post a few years back, Richardson credited her success for running her charitable enterprise the only way she knows how: “like a high-tech startup rather than a social service—action-oriented versus service-oriented.” To that end, she said, “We improvised, tried new ideas and constantly corrected our course.”
That constant course-correction may guide the nonprofit’s growth-focused public mission, but sources tell Metro that it elided internal mismanagement, which exposed employees to workplace abuses and, at times, put vulnerable clients at risk.
Wine and Dine
When one of DST’s original clients reconnected with his estranged daughter, two case managers wanted to celebrate his success by taking the pair out to dinner at a white-tablecloth restaurant in Mountain View. Since the client had struggled for years with alcohol abuse, the case managers told Richardson they planned to keep it a dry affair.
“By the time I showed up with the client, Richardson already had a bottle of wine at the table and was obviously a few drinks in,” one of the case managers wrote in a play-by-play of the occasion to the DST board a few years later. “We all kind of side-eyed one another. It was super awkward and completely inappropriate.”
The case manager, who asked to withhold her name, added that Richardson got more and more intoxicated during the uncomfortable dinner and repeatedly offered the client alcohol.
The client abstained, according to the two case managers. But Richardson drank enough that she began slurring her speech, they say, and one of the staffers felt the need to drive her home. “On the way out of the restaurant, Eileen asked [the client] if he needed her to buy him a couple of beers at 7/11 to tide him over, and he declined,” the case manager-turned-chauffeur wrote in the same summary. “I had to help Eileen walk to my car. On the way to my car, she accosted two strangers in the middle of their conversation. It was like she was leaving a concert venue or a New Year’s party; she was far too intoxicated to be the CEO of a company that just left a business-related dinner.”
After the case manager got home, she called her co-worker to ask whether she should continue working for a boss who offered booze to a client trying to get sober.
At holiday parties, former employees recall, it was common for managers and staffers alike to bring sleeping bags so they could crash at the office after drinking enough to pass out.
Erstwhile employees say one high-ranking director who was known for heavily imbibing while dressed up as Santa Claus at annual functions made it something of a tradition for attendees to sit in his lap before they could claim a gift from under the Christmas tree. A photo of holiday office party in 2015 shows him in his red-and-white St. Nick finery rubbing an oversized dildo on his face while Eileen Richardson apparently tries not to laugh. Another from that same event depicts the Santa cosplayer pouring a bag of white wine straight into the mouth of Chris Richardson, who kneels on the floor with his right fist thrust victoriously in the air.
Like mother, like son.
“Eileen had a history of getting extremely inappropriate at office functions,” one former staffer wrote in a review of her multi-year tenure at DST. “Some of these moments were kind of funny, even to me, such as the time she twerked upside down at the office Christmas party. However, similarly to Chris, Eileen did not know when to rein it in.”
Then there were the weekly Costco runs for booze, staff meetings where managers would partake and frequent klatches at Wine Affairs and other restaurants and bars near the office. Richardson didn’t respond to Metro’s query about whether the nonprofit footed the bill for any of the alcohol purchases.
One manager complained that not only were these outings inappropriate, but also that staffers often felt uncomfortable sitting them out because they were a place where conversations about promotions often happened.
MacWilliams says she felt the same way about the lushy overnights, which included annual trips to wine country where, “everyone gets belligerently intoxicated.” On one Napa excursion in late August 2016, she recounts how a manager asked Chris about having sex with a former co-worker. “Did you fuck her in the ass?” the manager allegedly asked. “Chris laughed and went on to describe their sexual relationship,” MacWilliams says.
One could technically opt out of the management trips, she adds, “but it is pretty well known that you won’t have a chance at a promotion if you don’t participate.”
MacWilliams says she’s concerned that public agencies continue to grant DST millions of dollars a year in taxpayer money without demanding more from the nonprofit’s leadership.
She hoped the investigation would lead to some sort of leadership change, compensation for the women she felt were underpaid, and an apology.
“Years later, none of this has happened,” she says. “Although I have come to peace with this, I truly believe that DST should not have access to public funds until those responsible for irrevocably hurting so many people have been held responsible.”
Adam Marshall remembers fondly the time he spent as a kid on his grandfather’s ranch in Watsonville.
That’s where he learned how much he enjoyed labor-intensive work. He dreamed of carrying on his grandfather’s commitment to helping others in need without an expectation of anything in return—as Marshall recently explained to a riveted audience at DNA’s Comedy Lab.
Earlier this year, Marshall had been out of jail for two months and was living out of his car when he realized that he could use some help putting his life back together. He discovered the Homeless Garden Project, where he joined a group of fellow trainees building skills and growing their support networks while transitioning out of homelessness.
Marshall was sharing his story at a celebration of the Homeless Garden Project and its impact on the lives of trainees like Marshall.
“The farm has changed my life in so many ways,” Marshall told the audience. “It has given me hope. It has given me a willingness to live and to better myself. If there is a cure for homelessness, it is through community outreach programs like the Homeless Garden Project.”
Now, the Homeless Garden Project is working on more than doubling its size. Once it expands, the nonprofit will be able to help even more people like Marshall who are experiencing homelessness. The group, founded in 1990, has achieved remarkable results with its current 3.5-acre farm near Natural Bridges State Beach. In 2018, 100% of the group’s trainee graduates obtained stable employment and housing. The farm generated 30,000 pounds of organic produce, including about 7,000 pounds that were donated to community members, providing ingredients for some 40 products sold at the group’s shops in downtown Santa Cruz and Capitola.
The Homeless Garden Project is participating in this year’s Santa Cruz Gives campaign. And the project is raising money for a long-planned move to a 9-acre site in Pogonip. The move has been in the works for more than 20 years, with the acreage originally allocated in the city’s 1998 master plan. The group wanted to make sure it was effective and well-run and then think about expanding, says Darrie Ganzhorn, executive director of the Homeless Garden Project.
It will be the first time the nonprofit can make a long-term farm plan and add an orchard. Site plans also include a greenhouse and barn, and will bring electricity, internet and bathrooms instead of portable toilets. The new farm would allow the group to work with up to 50 trainees at a time, too, and for more community visits.
“We want to see the project be a destination for people to come see a model for how a community can both really promote sustainable agriculture and also solutions to homelessness,” Ganzhorn says.
But progress hit an unexpected hurdle this year, when the group found remnants of clay pigeons in the dirt of the Pogonip site. Newspaper articles from the 1930s seem to confirm that the site formerly hosted skeet shooting, and the clay pigeons used for the activity apparently contained lead and other contaminants that are now in the soil.
While the levels are not unsafe for activities like hiking in the park, based on initial soil studies, they could be unsafe for farming, says Tony Elliot, director of Parks and Recreation for the city of Santa Cruz. “It was a surprise to all of us, so we wanted to work expeditiously with them to figure out what’s going on and resolve it as quickly as possible,” Elliot says.
A grant from the state covered most of the cost of additional assessment and evaluation of the soil, the results of which are expected by May. At that point, the city and the HGP team hope to understand the scope of the contamination and what remediation is needed. It’s not clear at this time how much the remediation might cost.
“We want to make sure it can be a sustainable operation and a healthy operation both for the people working there and for the people consuming the food grown there,” Elliot says.
In the meantime, Elliot says, the city is working closely with the Homeless Garden Project to figure out what steps they can take toward completing the move, such as obtaining tree permits and putting in a water line to the property.
The group currently plans to prepare the soil and take other basic steps starting in May, then farm at the Pogonip site starting in the 2021 growing season, Ganzhorn says.
“It’s just such a long-held dream for the project and for our community,” she says. “It’s a complicated project, and it’s worth it. It stands to have so much community impact.”
For Marshall, being a trainee at the farm gave him a drive and determination he didn’t know he had before, he told the audience at the HGP event. His speech was met with a standing ovation from everyone in the theater.
“The Homeless Garden Project is my home … It’s a magical place,” he said. “It saved my life.”
Visit santacruzgives.org to donate to HGP or any of this year’s participating nonprofits.
We’ll soon have more answers about the upgrade options for Santa Cruz’s downtown library—possibly more information than we ever really needed.
As of last year, the plan was to build a brand new library combined with parking and affordable housing. Evidence showed that the alternative, a remodel, would have given library users far less bang for the city’s buck. However, city leaders opted to ask around. That’s why a council committee had consultant Abe Jayson present on how much of a remodel the town could get for $27 million. The plan isn’t perfect, but his renderings showed big windows with lots of natural light. So pretty!
Of course, because Santa Cruz leaders are better at asking for more information than making decisions, they’re having Jayson go back to the drawing board to sketch out plans to build a brand new library from the ground up, also on a $27 million budget. In the meantime, Jayson will give a finalized presentation on a remodeled downtown library at the current downtown library Friday, Dec. 13 at 4pm.
Just as a reminder, it was nine months ago that the City Council closed the book on the library-planning process because of the parking concerns. And it was six weeks ago that Jayson said that construction costs have been going up 8-10% per year and that the “good news” was that those will drop to 5-6% a year. Delays are expensive. So while Capitola will soon have its very own beautiful new library with its cut of the funds, Santa Cruz is tripping over itself in fights over how to spend its stash, which is scheduled to expire in a few years. So much for “Time is money!”
This is why we can’t have nice things.
IT REALLY SINKS
Repairs to a sinkhole on Soquel Avenue in Santa Cruz have closed the right-hand turn lane at the intersection of Soquel and Ocean streets. Work began on Wednesday, Dec. 4, and it may take another week for the city of Santa Cruz Public Works to finish the roadwork.
Sinkholes are essentially hollowed-out depressions in the earth. They develop when water erodes away a form of soluble bedrock, like limestone—a sedimentary rock common in Santa Cruz County’s underbelly. It’s best to deal with sinkholes before they grow out of control, although when they do widen and ultimately collapse, often without warning, they make for quite a story. Last week, a Southern California woman settled her suit with the Los Angeles City Councilfor $4 million dollars for driving into a sinkhole in 2017. She suffered a traumatic brain injury, PTSD, a hand injury, and sight problems after her SUV fell 20 feet and landed on its roof into a flowing river of raw sewage.
Anyway, drive safe!
Update 12/13/2019 9:30am: A previous version of this story misreported the time of Jayson’s upcoming presentation and the content.
Talk about a quintessential Bay Area cultural experience.
With images spanning his entire half-century career projected behind him, rock god Carlos Santana led his band in the final show of its 2019 world tour on stage at the gleaming new Chase Center, home of the Golden State Warriors, last month in San Francisco. Marking the 50th anniversary of his breakout performance at Woodstock, Santana, energetic and magnetic as ever at 72, enraptured the capacity crowd not only with his instantly recognizable guitar playing, but also with stirring words in defense of a kinder, more harmonious world.
At the center of it all, right next to the man himself, was Watsonville native Andy Vargas.
Sharing the stage with Santana and his namesake band is certainly nothing new for Vargas. For two decades, he’s occupied a coveted spot in the rock firmament as lead vocalist in Santana. The most recent world tour was the 20th in which Vargas has participated.
Vargas knew when he first joined the band “that I was going to be a sponge, just learning from Carlos, for the rest of my life. I still learn something every day with him,” he says. “And it’s hard to catch up with him. He’s already done his two hours of meditation and prayer and has e-mailed me a setlist for the day when I’m just waking up.”
On Dec. 14, Vargas comes to the Rio Theatre in Santa Cruz (sans Santana) for a show he calls El Sueño. He’ll lead his own band Souleros in a benefit performance that also includes the South Bay band Tortilla Soup and comedian Frankie Quiñones. Souleros is Vargas’s attempt—even in the band’s very name—to combine the style and spirit of R&B/soul with the Cuban genre of bolero.
The show is a fundraiser for the Andy Vargas Foundation, which provides musical instruments, musical mentors and college scholarships for kids in underserved communities, including his home town of Watsonville.
“The basic idea is to turn on the light bulb,” he says, “to let kids see that their dreams and aspirations, what they want to do with their lives, is limitless.”
Vargas can point to no better example than himself. His own musical upbringing can be traced back to his grandparents’ Watsonville record store, where as a kid he was surrounded by the latest recordings of Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and the Ohio Players. His father Javier Vargas was (and still is) a widely respected mariachi singer and bandleader, known up and down the West Coast for his performances, but in Watsonville largely for his enthusiasm and willingness to teach local kids the joys of music.
Young Andy was playing in bands from his teenage years, and was a musical prodigy at Watsonville High in the mid 1990s—there’s a video on YouTube featuring Vargas at 14 performing at a WHS talent show to an audience of Beatlemania-style screaming girls.
He was still in high school when he first met Terry Melcher, the well-known record producer who was central in shaping the California sound of the 1960s. Melcher brought Vargas to L.A. and got him a record deal—though, thanks to fall out from music-industry consolidations and changes in ownership, the young singer’s debut record was never released.
But Vargas was brought to the attention of Carlos Santana by Melcher and Lou Adler, another record industry legend. At the time, Santana was experiencing a career resurgence with the 1999 release of his album Supernatural, which spawned his first hit single in years, “Smooth,” featuring Matchbox 20 vocalist Rob Thomas.
Despite its commercial success, Supernatural, loaded with guest vocal performances, exposed the band’s lack of a consistent lead voice. Santana put out the word that he was looking for singers.
Vargas was 20 years old when he was brought into Santana’s studio in San Rafael. “I saw him in the backroom through the window,” he remembers. “Yep, that’s the guy right there. Someone you see in books and magazines, someone you listen to your whole life, then you see him in person. Yeah, I was nervous.”
The entire band was on hand. Without a word, Santana struck up the band with monster hit “Smooth.” “I just jumped right in,” says Vargas. “By the way, he still does that. Nothing’s changed. He’ll get up and begin playing a song without even telling you what it is. You have to recognize the intro and jump right in.”
Vargas was quickly hired for a three-week tour, as a test run. A few days in, Santana and longtime conga player Raul Rekow sat Vargas down and told him they wanted him in the band as a permanent member. He made his recording debut on the 2002 album Shaman. He’s been an integral part of Santana ever since.
“It’s been quite a blessing,” he says. “I remember when I first joined, people would come up to me and say, weeks after the show, ‘Oh my God! I need another Santana concert.’ It’s like their soul needs it. And I’ve seen it consistently for years.”
Andy Vargas & Souleros perform a benefit for the Andy Vargas Foundation, with Tortilla Soup and Frankie Quiñones, on Saturday, Dec. 14, at 7:20pm at the Rio Theatre, 1205 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. $35-75. andyvargas.com.
ARIES (March 21-April 19): “Nobody knows really what they’re doing,” says Aries comedian Conan O’Brien. “And there are two ways to go with that information. One is to be afraid, and the other is to be liberated, and I choose to be liberated by it.” I hope you’ll be inspired by O’Brien’s example in the coming weeks, Aries. I suspect that if you shed your worries about the uncertainty you feel, you’ll trigger an influx of genius. Declaring your relaxed independence from the temptation to be a know-it-all will bless you with expansive new perspectives and freedom to move.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Creativity expert Roger von Oech tells us, “Everyone has a ‘risk muscle.’ You keep it in shape by trying new things. If you don’t, it atrophies. Make a point of using it at least once a day.” Here’s what I’ll add to his advice. If your risk muscle is flabby right now, the coming weeks will be an excellent time to whip it into better shape. Start with small, modest risks, and gradually work your way up to bigger and braver ones. And what should you do if your risk muscle is already well-toned? Dream and scheme about embarking on a major, long-term venture that is the robust embodiment of a smart gamble.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Many people engage in laughably feeble attempts to appear witty by being cynical—as if by exuding sardonic irony and sneering pessimism they could prove their mettle as brilliant observers of modern culture. An example is this lame wisecrack from humorist David Sedaris: “If you’re looking for sympathy you’ll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.” I bring this to your attention in the hope of coaxing you to avoid indulging in gratuitous pessimism during the coming weeks. For the sake of your good health, it’s important for you to be as open-minded and generous-spirited as possible. And besides that, pessimism will be unwarranted.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): “You can shop online and find whatever you’re looking for,” writes pundit Paul Krugman, “but bookstores are where you find what you weren’t looking for.” That’s a good principle to apply in every area of your life. It’s always smart to know exactly what you need and want, but sometimes—like now—it’s important that you put yourself in position to encounter what you need and want, but don’t realize that you need and want.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Bachianas Brasileiras is a nine-part piece of music that blends Brazilian folk music with the compositional style of Johann Sebastian Bach. The poet Anne Sexton relied on it, letting it re-play ceaselessly during her long writing sessions. My painter friend Robin sometimes follows a similar method with Leonard Cohen’s album Ten New Songs, allowing it to cycle for hours as she works on her latest masterpiece. In accordance with astrological omens, I invite you to select a new theme song or collection of theme songs to inspire your intense efforts in behalf of your labors of love in the coming weeks. It’s a favorable time to explore the generative power of joyous, lyrical obsession.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): “I’ve spent my life butting my head against other people’s lack of imagination,” mourned Virgo musician Nick Cave, who’s renowned for his original approach to his craft. I’m bringing this to your attention because I suspect you will be endowed with an extra fertile imagination in the coming weeks. And I would hate for you to waste time and energy trying to make full use of it in the presence of influences that would resist and discourage you. Therefore, I’ll cheer you on as you seek out people and situations that enhance your freedom to express your imagination in its expansive glory.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): A scholar counted up how often the Bible delivers the command “Fear not!” and “Don’t be afraid!” and similar advice. The number was 145. I don’t think that approach to regulating behavior works very well. To be constantly thinking about what you’re not supposed to do and say and think about tends to strengthen and reinforce what you’re not supposed to do and say and think about. I prefer author Elizabeth Gilbert’s strategy. She writes, “I don’t try to kill off my fear. I make all that space for it. Heaps of space. I allow my fear to live and breathe and stretch out its legs comfortably. It seems to me the less I fight my fear, the less it fights back.” That’s the method I recommend for you, Libra—especially in the coming weeks.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Isaac Newton (1642–1726) was one of history’s most influential scientists and a key contributor to physics, astronomy, mathematics, and optics. His mastery of the nuances of human relationships was less developed, however. He had one close friendship with a Swiss mathematician, though he broke it off abruptly after four years. And his biographers agree that he never had sex with another person. What I find most curious, however, is the fact that he refused to even meet the brilliant French philosopher Voltaire, who reached out to him and asked to get together. I trust you won’t do anything like that in the coming weeks, Scorpio. In fact, I urge you to be extra receptive to making new acquaintances, accepting invitations and expanding your circle of influence.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): How did humans figure out that a luxurious fabric could be made from the cocoons of insect larvae? Ancient Chinese sage Confucius told the following story. One day in 2460 B.C., 14-year-old Chinese princess Xi Ling Shi was sitting under a mulberry tree sipping tea. A silk worm’s cocoon fell off a branch and landed in her drink. She was curious, not bothered. She unrolled the delicate structure and got the idea of using the threads to weave a fabric. The rest is history. I foresee a silk-worm’s-cocoon-falling-in-your-cup-of-tea type of event in your future, Sagittarius. Be alert for it.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): “It is the soul’s duty to be loyal to its own desires,” wrote Capricorn author Rebecca West. “It must abandon itself to its master passion.” That’s a high standard to live up to! But then you Capricorns have substantial potential to do just that: become the champions of devoting practical commitment to righteous causes. With that in mind, I’ll ask you: How are you doing in your work to embody the ideal that Rebecca West articulated? Is your soul loyal to its deepest desires? Has it abandoned itself to its master passion? Take inventory—and make any corrections, if necessary.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): I would never try to talk you into downplaying or denying your suffering. I would never try to convince you that the pain you have experienced is mild or tolerable or eminently manageable. Who among us has the wisdom to judge the severity or intractability of anyone else’s afflictions? Not I. But in the coming months, I will ask you to consider the possibility that you have the power—perhaps more than you realize—to diminish your primal aches and angst. I will encourage you to dream of healing yourself in ways that you have previously imagined to be impossible.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): “You owe it to us all to get on with what you’re good at,” wrote Piscean poet W. H. Auden. In other words, you have a responsibility to develop your potential and figure out how to offer your best gifts. It’s not just a selfish act for you to fulfill your promise; it’s a generous act of service to your fellow humans. So how are you doing with that assignment, Pisces? According to my analysis, you should be right in the middle of raising your efforts to a higher octave; you should be discovering the key to activating the next phase of your success—which also happens to be the next phase of your ability to bestow blessings on others.
Homework: Resolved: The answer to a pressing question will come within 72 hours after you do a ritual in which you ask for clarity. freewillastrology.com.
A bona fide shredder schooled in both jazz and rock, Stern was just a fresh-faced kid out of college when he was recommended to Blood Sweat & Tears by Pat Metheny. After a few years, he caught the ear of another New Yorker, a trumpeter named Miles Davis who tapped Stern for his band, and even named a song after him: “Fat Time” from The Man With the Horn. From there, Stern played with Jaco Pastorius and the Yellowjackets and received Grammy nods for his solo work. Jazz magazine Down Beat dubbed him one of the 75 Great Jazz Guitarists of All Time.
But in 2015, while crossing a New York street, a freak accident threatened to take him out of music permanently.
“There was some construction that was not supposed to be where it was,” Stern says. “Very camouflaged. It looked like a line in the middle of the road, but in fact it was elevated. I tripped on this thing.”
He broke both of his humerus bones, which connect the shoulder to the elbow. In addition, he had to have his right shoulder replaced entirely. He was left with permanent nerve damage in his right hand—he could no longer hold a guitar pick.
While many would have tossed in the towel, in the months after the accident, Stern fought through, looking for ways to adapt to his new situation.
“I was struggling to find something that would work, because the pick kept sliding around,” he says. “I was playing with a glove for a while, using Velcro, but that didn’t work.”
He thought of his friend Ray LeVier, a New Orleans drummer who had been seriously injured in a fire.
“He’s a great drummer, but he’s got really bad injuries on his hands. I said, ‘How do you do it?’”
The solution came from an unexpected source: that provenance of debutantes and drag queens, wig glue.
“It’s not like gorilla glue, or anything that’s bad for your skin,” Stern says. “Certain things are difficult, but I’m able to play, thank god.”
Stern crawled out of the wreckage and back to the top of his game. In 2017, just a year and a half after the accident, he released Trip, a dizzying fusion album that finds the guitarist continuing to push himself to the limit. Opening with a title track that sounds half-mad as it swirls feverishly into a spiral-staircase chorus, Stern plays with as much searching melodicism and fretboard shredding exactitude as ever.
This week, Stern comes to Santa Cruz on the heels of his second album since the accident, Eleven, a collaborative work with fusion keyboardist (and recent Grammy winner) Jeff Lorber.
“He’s got some stuff, man. I was surprised. He can really stretch out,” Stern says—high praise from a man whose Miles Davis nickname “Fat Time” refers to his ability to “let a solo fly.”
With five songs written by Stern and five by Lorber, Eleven sees two titans of fusion going hard in the paint for each other’s tunes, unearthing some monster grooves and some truly blazing melodic passages. Late-album track “Ha Ha Hotel” is a barn-burner. Written long before his accident, the Stern composition is full of high-flying guitar acrobatics and precise rhythmic stops. Performed now, with glue and tape, it sounds as sharp and full of life as a live recording of the song from 1996, nearly 20 years before his trip.
“I always like to do my recordings live,” Stern says. “It’s part of the beauty of people playing together—like we’re all conversing in a certain subject, which is the song.”
Though he’ll never get feeling back in his right hand, Stern has always had a deeper sense of feel than mere touch.
“I remember playing with Miles towards the end,” he says. “He was sick at one point, and he was still swinging his ass off—still playing his heart out, being creative and finding his way of playing, just doing it no matter what. I’m always saying: ‘Keep going. Keep pushing.’”
Mike Stern performs Thursday, Dec. 12, at 7 and 9pm at Kuumbwa Jazz Center, 320-2 Cedar St., Santa Cruz. $31.50 adv/$36.75 door. 427-2227.
Esoteric astrology as news for the week of Dec. 11, 2019
Sagittarius is a sign often hidden in the preparations for Christmas and Hanukkah. It’s hidden also by its symbols and stories—traveling far away, riding over the plains to monasteries, eyes upon the snowy peaks of Capricorn or gazing at the stars in wonder, in some desert region of hot sands and slow-moving camels. Sagittarius is the far-flung traveler, at home in any country and with all peoples. Sagittarius is a most important sign. It’s the “little gate” into heaven; the sign of silence, associated with vision, aspiration and a one-pointed direction toward goals. Sag is on a horse, forever galloping toward the signs of service (Capricorn is initiation; Aquarius, for humanity; and Pisces, saving the world). Sag’s esoteric symbol is the bow and arrow, reminding us that we must cultivate the right use of thought (arrows) and speech, allowing our arrows to be dipped first in honey before discharging them towards their target.
From the Sagittarius Labors of Hercules, we read these words, the tasks of the archer: “Right use of thought, restraint of speech, and consequent harmlessness result in liberation; for we are held here by what we ourselves have said and done.”
Thursday, early morning, is the Sagittarius solar festival during the last full moon of 2018. “We see the goal, reach the goal and then we see the next goal.” Thursday is also the Feast Day of Our Lady of Guadalupe (patroness of the Americas). Friday is St. Lucy’s Day (lighted candles crowning her head), a Scandinavian festival of light illuminating the darkness. And, Friday and Saturday, in the night sky, the most active meteor shower of the year (Geminids) peaks. We’re called to catch the Light falling to Earth in this preparatory season of Advent.
ARIES: Will you be traveling? Are you thinking of new professional ideas and realities? Do you feel pressured to step up to the next rung of the ladder? Are you curious about a religious or spiritual reality? Every part of yourself is out and about in the world. Is there a sense that discipline and structure (Saturn) are needed to bring order to relationships? Tend to them carefully. They will see you to the end.
TAURUS: You think a lot about resources and how to provide safety and security for everyone. The future you know is a question, so you continue your important work. For many of us, the resources we seek are hidden in closets, drawers, storage units, and garages (yours). Bringing them out into the open is a good next step. Out into the fresh air to assess their value. Much will be discarded.
GEMINI: On your mind are relationships (one in particular), money, and how it’s being used practically. Your relationship is OK, but tend to it a bit more, with love and gratitude. Money and relationships go hand in hand. Especially now and for you. Assess all that you have and share with another. Update financial documents if needed. And consider all commitments. The ones from the heart last longest.
CANCER: You’ll find yourself embarking upon new spiritual goals, meeting those goals and discovering new ones. These goals affect your daily life and how you will live in the future. Share your goals with others, communicating with them the practicality of both spirituality and planning for the future. Use resources to accomplish goals. List them first. Take your time. Then you find all that you have will be useful, practical and transformed.
LEO: Your daily life has been expanding in many ways. Are you galloping toward far away and distant goals? Know you’ll be restrained if imbalances or disharmony occur. Choose travel as an art form. Take a camera, art supplies and a horse along (if you can). Several dog companions, too. There’s something you’ve wished to do for a long time. You return to the place where your heart resides.
VIRGO: Do you have excess energy but feel restrained by a lack of something? Are you spending much time and energy on things unseen? Do they rest in your heart, unspoken, in longing? It would be good if you concentrated on the season’s festivities by making your home cheerful and welcoming, filled with lights and things of nature. Do things differently this year. Joy comes when you are most creative.
LIBRA: Are you considering remaining home this holiday? It is a good idea this year. A deep transformative change penetrates your heart/mind, and many beliefs begin to have no validity. Disconcerting at first, you’re actually being led to truths previously not understandable. As old beliefs dissolve, a greater capacity to (give/receive) love occurs. You will then understand to “be of love a little more careful than of everything” (ee cummings).
SCORPIO: It’s time to ponder upon then articulate goals concerning money and resources, in order to make your future seem safe and practical. Your mind, moving equally between myth and the real world, needs to concentrate on building adequate resources for the times to come. These resources will not be only for yourself, but others will join you in your endeavors. You have the stamina to face great challenges. You are the warrior.
SAGITTARIUS: The entire introduction is about you. Read it slowly many times so its esoteric significances are absorbed and a new identity can emerge, along with new behaviors. As you seek truth and justice along with trying to feel joy, it’s most important to acknowledge you are always seeking new goals ahead. It’s good to list them, rework them, look for them. Watch birds fly out of marshes into the clear light of day. Turning into swans.
CAPRICORN: You stand within inner and outer realities, deeply personal and yet out in the world where humanity resides. There’s much responsibility and work accomplished, morning till night. At day’s end, you exhaustedly fall into bed, hoping sleep will bring physical, emotional and mental balance. Enough sleep does if there are no lights on during the night to interrupt your sleep cycle. Wear a mask if necessary. And drink more water. Saturn and Pluto are your companions.
AQUARIUS: Our outer reality is connected with our inner reality. What occurs in our outer life is based on what we believe, envision and have intentions for, and where we place our focus. You are aware, of course, that humanity is to bring forth the new culture and civilization, under the Aquarian Laws and Principles. What are your visions? What are your needs? Communicate with the devas. They wait for your voice to speak with them.
PISCES: Each day, there’s a new understanding occurring, which leads to new revelations. That actually is an esoteric rule—revelation emerges from understanding. How does understanding come forth? From suffering, grief and feelings of despair. You understand this line of poetry from Dante’s Divine Comedy: “In the middle of the journey of my life, I came to a dark wood and found myself and my way lost.” You are not lost; the way is not dark. Just keep walking.
