Alongside Ken Burns’s glorious recent multi-part documentary Country Music, the publication of Sean Brock’s new cookbook, simply titled South, marks a mini-moment, even a kind of re-evaluation, for the region of the country known as the South.
Southern culture has always hidden in plain sight in the larger American mainstream, and the rest of the country has never been able to escape its gravitational pull. But red state/blue state divisions tend to oversimplify regional differences. And the South is particularly prone to cartoonish portrayals.
Brock is nobody’s idea of a cartoon. A superstar of the American kitchen—he’s won the prestigious James Beard Foundation Award, and has starred in The Mind of a Chef on PBS and Neflix’s Chef’s Table—Brock is also an amateur anthropologist and evangelist for Southern cuisine. He comes to UCSC on Nov. 11 in an event co-sponsored by the university’s Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems and Bookshop Santa Cruz. He will be interviewed on stage by Oakland chef Tonya Holland.
Brock’s new book is his second, a follow-up to 2014 New York Times bestseller Heritage. One of the overarching themes of South is Brock’s insistence that the South is not one monolithic thing, especially when it comes to cuisine. The book, in fact, features side-by-side maps of the South and continental Europe, emphasizing their comparable sizes, but making a point about similar diversities in culture.
Brock grew up in a small town called Pound in southwestern Virginia, which is Appalachian mountain country, much closer to Kentucky and West Virginia coal country than Washington, D.C. But he made his name as an executive chef in Charleston, South Carolina, the South’s most elegant and historically resonant coastal city.
“In my opinion, they could be different countries,” he says of the difference between his native home and Charleston. He arrived in Charleston as a teen, a food prodigy eager to show what he can do in the South’s cuisine capital. But he found the culture shock severe.
“That was the first moment when I was just knocked back—‘Holy Cow, I don’t know what any of this food is. And nobody here knows what any of my food is.’”
If many of the recipes are exotic outside the South, Brock says his food can seem that way within the South as well. Case in point is the pawpaw, which is, says Brock, “a bizarre hillbilly tropical fruit.” It resembles an avocado, but with yellow flesh that tastes somewhere on the continuum between a mango and a banana. The pawpaw was an essential part of Brock’s Appalachian upbringing, but when he arrived in Charleston, no one had ever heard of it.
“That was one of those things that blew people’s minds, that people still talk about,” Brock says of the fruit, which became kind of a sensation in Charleston. “People started buying trees and planting them so they could have pawpaws.”
Another case of an Appalachian delicacy that never traveled outside the hill country was “sour corn,” a fermented dish that Brock says was a “mash-up between Native Americans and the Germans. It’s the sauerkraut of corn. I grew up with it my entire life.”
Brock got into the habit of serving the dish to friends unfamiliar with it, but not warning them of its sourness.
“You hand someone some sour corn and they put it in their mouth. Nine times out of 10, they just spit it out on the plate,” he says with a laugh. “You associate corn with sweetness. And when your brain is expecting sweetness and you get sour, it detects a threat, so you spit it out.”
The new cookbook is a meditation and examination of many staples of the Southern diet—it may, in fact, be the definitive text on cornbread—and takes a neo-primitive view of the purity of ingredients (the man makes his own bologna). Brock is an advocate for looking at food through the interplay between four basic themes: natives, immigrants, geography, and ingredients.
South explores the basics of Southern cooking, many of which have been weighed down by decades of stereotypes. Okra, for instance, is a Southern staple that has had problems translating outside the South, thanks mostly to a high slime factor in its preparation. Brock’s new book contains a recipe that reduces the slime—hint: grilling. “We have to convert all these okra haters into okra believers,” he says. The book also goes deep into greens, grits, fried chicken, catfish, and cured country ham. Because of religious restrictions, Brock never tasted pork growing up. Now, he’s a pig completist. In the book, he admits that fried pig ears are one of the dishes he’s most known for.
Brock is also quick to expand his purview from strictly food to the currents of class, race, immigration, and history that influenced the cuisine. Charleston’s food is unique in the world, he says, because of its status as a cultural crossroads. “The original rice planters were Venetians, and the original slaves, very briefly, were Native Americans,” he says. “Then, English, French and West African influences started coming in, which meant not only different flavors, but different ingredients, plant varietals, animal breeds, and traditions.”
Brock opened a high-end Southern-style restaurant called Husk that grew into a mini-chain of four, first in Charleston, then in Savannah, Nashville, and Greenville, South Carolina. In 2020, Brock plans to open a new restaurant near his home in Nashville. It will be called Audrey, an homage to his Virginia grandmother, the inspiration for his cuisine.
In his own way, Brock is not only a historian, but a futurist. The emphasis on convenience in the industrial food system has had a devastating effect on American food, and Southern food in particular, he says. That age of convenience over flavor and nutrition may be coming to an end.
“Now, we’re getting to a much better place where those ingredients are coming back,” he says. “I see a completely different South in five years, in 10 years. I see something totally different. We are such a young country. We have traditions that haven’t even started yet, that one day will become historical traditions of the South. You draw a timeline from 1650 to 2080, say. We’re just a blip on that timeline. We still have so much to explore, so much to discover, and so much to create.”
Sean Brock, author of ‘South: Essential Recipes and New Explorations,’ will be in conversation with Tonya Holland on Monday, Nov. 11, at 7pm at UCSC’s Cowell Ranch Hay Barn. Tickets $45 each and include one copy of the new cookbook. bookshopsantacruz.com.
In Damien Gibson’s video for his hip-hop infused electro-pop song “18 Piñatas,” he literally stands in a room with 18 piñatas, and then destroys them. When he showed the video to his friends, a lot of them reacted like he was just being weird, but the concept is actually highly personal.
As a kid, he always wanted a piñata for his birthday. Instead, he barely scraped by, watched his mom O.D. when he was 3, and later had to live in group homes after his dad went to prison. In the song, he says you can’t fix the past, but you can give yourself what you lacked.
“Just because you weren’t given opportunities, you get that for yourself,” Gibson says. “Whatever your parents threw you into as far as life goes, it doesn’t matter.”
His relationship with music started in prison. At 19, he crashed a stolen car into a cop car in Sacramento, injuring himself and the officer, earning three years in jail. In 2013, a year after he got out, he started working with producers, and in 2014, he released his debut record and played 50 dates on the Warped Tour doing solo acoustic hip-hop. Since then, he’s self-released several experimental alt-pop records.
Last month, he released Domenika on Monolog Records—his 12th album, but his first on a label. He’s even taken down much of his older music for a fresh start. The new record, like “18 Piñatas,” is well-produced and mixes hip-hop, R&B and EDM elements. It’s experimental, but not nearly as scatterbrain as his old stuff.
“It’s a higher-level production,” Gibson says. “Everything before was basically me working on my laptop with no formal training, just winging it.”
Earlier this year, Missouri rock trio Radkey released the No Strange Cats EP. It’s the group’s most diverse record, with each song sounding like it belongs on its own album—there’s hardcore (“Spiders”), classic rock (“Junes”) and emo-pop (“St. Elwood”).
“Every song is its own big thing, with a lot of sections,” says bassist Isaiah J. Radke III. “That was something new we hadn’t done before. We ended up hitting the studio so we could keep on the road.”
The group has focused on touring the past few years after aggressively pushing their second album, 2016’s Delicious Rock Noise, which was a re-issue of their 2015 debut album Dark Black Makeup. The release of Dark Black Makeup was supposed to follow up two successful EPs and help them jump to the next level, but their label didn’t do much for them.
“They didn’t care,” Radke says. “We had to spend a good amount of time on the re-release just so it wasn’t wasted. It cost a lot to make. We can’t just put it out and not have it do anything.”
Their new label, Another Century Records, did care, and helped the group push it hard. They got songs on the radio, and the album charted on Billboard rock charts for 20 weeks, peaking at No. 23.
You can understand why they wanted to make sure it had a chance to find an audience. They went into the release of their first LP already a buzz band. The group of brothers, who grew up listening to their dad’s vast rock album collection—he now manages them—were inspired by the film School Of Rock. It took awhile, but eventually that seed manifested into the rock trio they are now. At their first show in 2011, they opened for Fishbone. Shortly after, their explosive set at SXSW piqued record-label interest, but they ended up self-releasing their first two EPs on their own Little Man Records.
It was a filmed studio performance of mid-tempo acid rock song “Cat and Mouse” that caught the attention of a larger audience online.
“That really helped us get far, because people could get a visual and a sound and not be confused about what was going on,” Radke says.
The group often gets mistaken for a punk band, because they have some of those elements. But they are very clear that they are a rock band. It’s not just that they don’t want to be pigeonholed; they want to have the freedom to go in as many directions as possible.
“We don’t want to just be one thing. We want to appeal to a lot of different kinds of people,” Radke says. “We just say that we’re a rock band that does pretty much whatever we want. All it really has to do is rock. It could be anything as long as it’s got that element.”
The group is getting ready to release their long-awaited full-length follow-up to Delicious Rock Noise. Everything is recorded; they’re just shopping around for a label. This won’t be the hodgepodge collection of songs that No Strange Cats was. The vision is to create a very cohesive rock album that has a clear flow and makes you want to listen to it front to back.
“We were going for one of those old, really long rock records. We were going for something crazy cohesive,” Radke says. “We wanted to give people the feeling that once you put this record on, you go on this ride. It’s designed for that kind of experience.”
Radkey performs at 9pm on Wednesday, Nov. 13, at the Blue Lagoon, 923 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz. $7. 423-7117.
Nine years after being inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame, it’s safe to say that retired wide receiver and bestselling author Jerry Rice has a different perspective on the game of football than what the average sports writer might offer.
In 2015, Rice released his first historical book, co-written with author Randy O. Williams. That New York Times bestseller, titled 50 Years, 50 Moments, laid out a chronology of the Super Bowl, which was celebrating its 50th birthday. Out of those many championship matches, Rice played in four of them, with his San Francisco 49ers winning three. Rice even took home the big game’s MVP in 1989. So he knows something about the Super Bowl.
Williams and Rice’s new book, America’s Game: The NFL at 100, covers a century’s worth of history of the league, and Rice played one-fifth of those years. But Williams never thought of the book in quite that way, nor did Rice himself.
“I approached it as a fan of the game,” Rice tells me, via email, looking back on the project ahead of a Bookshop Santa Cruz signing on Nov. 7.
Rice, who collaborated with Williams by going over all the material over the phone, loved diving into the research. The legendary wide receiver read up on the evolution of the passing offense, as well as the careers of game-changing greats like Don Hutson, a Green Bay Packers split apparently end known as the “Alabama Antelope.” The process additionally served to strengthen Rice’s passion for NFL rivalries.
Of his 20 seasons, Rice spent 19 of them playing in the Bay Area, most prominently with the Niners, and later in Oakland, where he spent more than three years as a Raider. In his prime during the 1980s and ’90s, the Niners’ dynasty repeatedly clashed with that of the Dallas Cowboys, creating a rivalry for the ages with on-field battles that Rice relished. He says his team played some of their best games against the Cowboys. “I loved the challenge,” Rice says.
Williams says Rice’s viewpoint was invaluable to the books, as both include some first-person narratives woven in.
“But even more so, it’s knowing what the players went through, because he lived it. That’s the greatest thing that Jerry brought to the project was knowing what to ask and what insights to look for,” says Williams, a Fremont native who grew up as a Chargers fan, “right under the nose of the Raiders,” as he puts it. (Williams confesses, by the way, that he has fond teenage memories of ditching high school to go to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.)
For the new book, Williams dug into the backstory of unforgettable moments and big games, like the Ice Bowl game, and also David Tyree’s late-game “helmet catch” from quarterback Eli Manning in the New York Giants’ historic Super Bowl XLII against the New England Patriots.
Another one of Williams’ favorites was the 1968 “Heidi Game” between the New York Jets and the Oakland Raiders, a riveting, high-scoring game that got cut off as the network switched to the television movie Heidi, about a girl living in the Swiss Alps. The abrupt change infuriated New York audiences, Williams says, forever changing how games are broadcast. It also almost led to some NBC executives losing their jobs.
The sport of football is in a different place than 16 years ago, when Rice retired. And with the NFL looking back on 100 years of history, Williams isn’t worried about the future of a league that’s facing increased scrutiny for its injury risk, as well as for the long-term dangers posed by repeated head trauma.
“The NFL’s taken the lead on all concussions,” Williams says. “I’m confident the public’s gonna decide. Just look at the TV ratings and the billions that are still demanded for the rights to it. It’s still a huge part of our pop culture. And I’m sure the NFL will figure it out.”
Jerry Rice will be at Bookshop Santa Cruz for a signing of his new book on Thursday, Nov. 7, at 6pm. Each $32 ticket comes with one hardcover copy of ‘America’s Game’ and admits a group of up to four people. Due to time constraints, there will be no posed photographs or signatures of memorabilia. For more information, visit bookshopsantacruz.com.
Update 11/06/19 12:09pm: A previous version of this story misreported the time of the event.
Some people are going to hate Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit like they haven’t hated anything since Life is Beautiful, and understandably some will argue Nazis are never funny under any circumstances, no matter what ridiculous figures they cut with their rites, their idiot prejudices, and their too-cool Hugo Boss uniforms.
But Mel Brooks, who was shot at by them at the Battle of the Bulge, was always certain Nazis were comedy gold. Even in these nervous times, can’t we accept Brooks’ judgment?
Jojo Rabbit is the diary of a Nazi wimpy kid, trying to fit in with the usual social absurdities—it’s just that the absurdities were heightened in the Reich. In a small village in 1944, young Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) is trying to be a good little Hitler Youth member. But he’s a thorough reject, drawing a portion of the scorn doled out by the Jugend’s scoutmaster, an invalided-out Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell, great.) Jojo tents out at Jugend camp with his equal beta-male pal (Archie Yates), laying awake telling scary stories about Jews: “I hear they smell like brussel sprouts.” Recreations include a campfire of burning books—Jojo shows a little hint of reluctance, before he tosses in a volume and joins in with the fun.
Then comes a test of manhood: kill a bunny rabbit with his bare hands in front of his fellow Jugenders. He fails. Dejected, he gets a visit from his imaginary pal Der Fuhrer (Waititi in contact lenses and shaky mustache), who gives him fatherly advice. The boy has a speculative idea of Hitler, imagining him as a smoker, which he wasn’t, and a meat eater who dines on yummy stuffed roast unicorn heads. Adolph’s bucking-up advice to Jojo is to tell him to be the rabbit—faster than anyone. He races forth to be the vanguard in a race, snatches a potato-masher hand grenade from a bigger boy, and tosses it. It bounces off a tree and blows up in his face.
Now that his face is stitched up with scars, he’s an even bigger reject to all but his mom Rosie (a very relaxed and appealing Scarlett Johansson, with a buttery Marlene Dietrich accent). The convalescing Jojo learns is that there’s another woman on the premise. Mom is secretly Anne-Franking a friend of the family in the attic.
Young Elsa corners the boy with the Hitler Youth knife he wasn’t supposed to lose, but soon they become pals. For laughs, she schools simple Jojo on the Jews: do they hang upside like bats when they sleep? Can they read each others’ minds? As Elsa, Tomasin MacKenzie (Leave No Trace) is consistently unsentimental in the part.
Both Elsa and Rosie’s amused solicitude with this backward, fatherless kid is charming.
Moreover, they set up a border between the realm of the preposterous, macho Nazis and the far more mysterious and interesting world of women. As in John Boorman’s Hope and Glory, all the comfort and intelligence is on one side and all the pain and stupidity is on the other.
To add some yang to this yin, there is a female Nazi, Frauline Rahmi; Rebel Wilson plays this platinum blonde Brunhilda working with Klenzendorf. She birthed more than a dozen babies for the Reich (the bastards used to give out Mutterkreuz medals for that). Wilson suggests with her posture that she can’t sit comfortably after all that parturition.
This uproariously satirical version of a quite serious novel might be modeled on Carol Reed’s The Fallen Idol (1948) in the looming staircases, and the expressionism of the boy’s world collapsing around him. Like Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople, it’s certainly something you could take a smart older child to see.
Aspects are like Kurt Vonnegut, both Slaughterhouse-5 and Mother Night. Jojo Rabbit’s elegantly turned if sometimes episodic comedy is as Blaise Pascal described life: the last act is bloody, no matter how pleasant the play has been. There’s no comfortable way out of the tale—the rocky last 15 minutes will give Jojo Rabbit’s haters ammo. Still, maybe nothing was as funny about the Nazis as their scurrying, ignominious end.
JOJO RABBIT
Directed by Taika Waititi. Starring Roman Griffin Davis and Scarlett Johansson. PG-13. 108 minutes.
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********@**.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.
