Most days, Melinda Harrower begins baking at Melinda’s Gluten Free Bakery at 4 a.m.
She’s gotten used to the schedule, and has grown to like it. She returns home for the day around the time her teenage kids get back from school. “I might need a nap, but I’m good to go,” she says. Harrower, who has celiac disease, has seen a range of gluten sensitivities over the years—stretching from the rare and extreme cases of people who get anaphylaxis when there’s flour in the air to others who simply feel bloated after eating too much bread.
She wants even the most sensitive customers to be safe in her 41st Avenue shop. I talked to Harrower at her bakery, which is around the corner from the Capitola branch of the Department of Motor Vehicles, as jazz music played quietly in the background.
I see ‘GF’ a lot as an abbreviation for ‘gluten-free.’ Do you remember, like, 15 years ago, when ‘GF’ was an abbreviation for ‘girlfriend?’
MELINDA HARROWER: [Laughs] When I first started my website, I got the weirdest people knocking on my door, messaging me. I was like, “No, no, no! I’m not trying to be your girlfriend.” It was so uncomfortable. No, Melinda’s not your girlfriend. Melinda’s is gluten-free.
Do people ever come in here after waiting in line at the nearby DMV for six hours, and how famished do they look when they arrive?
I had to sit in the line once, and I had my staff bring doughnuts over. We get a lot of people who just got their license. It’s really cute. But yeah, they’re pretty famished. And angry! So we try to make their life a little easier.
‘Croissant’ is one of those words that, whenever I say it, I either feel like a simple-minded American or a worldly snob. How do you say it?
“Craw-saunt.” I say it like an American. It’s funny because we use Amazon Alexa as our timer, and she says “crwuh-sahn.” We started calling them “crescent rolls” just to get her to stop saying “crwuh-sahn.” It’s funny, we actually got a negative Yelp review, because we kept “yelling at this poor girl in the back—‘Alexa, stop!’” [Music stops playing suddenly during our interview.] Oh, she heard me. Oopsies …
Live music highlights for the week of Dec. 12, 2018
WEDNESDAY 12/12
FOLK
JEREMY CLYDE
If you were to describe the filmography of Wes Anderson in a single song, a good pick would be the impossible twee of “A Summer Song” by British Invasion duo Chad & Jeremy. Everything about it radiates with the corduroy warmth of ’60s AM pop, from the quiet vocals and dampened drums to the mellow strings and soft trumpets. Chad & Jeremy broke up in 1968. Now, 50 years after the release of “A Summer Song,” Clyde returns to music with his first solo album, The Bottom Drawer Sessions No. 1. The vocals are as hushed as ever. MIKE HUGUENOR
One of Casey Neill’s talents as an indie-rocker is the way he takes the better elements of offbeat rock icons of yore (think R.E.M. without the college radio pretension, the Flaming Lips without their carefully curated obnoxiousness) and repurposes them in a simple, genuine manner. Having Portland indie all-stars the Norway Rats as a backup band doesn’t hurt. There’s an ease to Neill’s songwriting, even if he accurately describes the genre of his latest album Subterrene as “dystopian romance.” AMY BEE
If you’re curious about trap and mumble rap, I suggest you start with up-and-coming Atlanta rapper Yung Bans. He takes everything about the whole Soundcloud rap subgenre—bouncy beats, sing-songy flow, strong pop hooks—and creates music that’s a little bit avant-garde, surprisingly emotional and unbelievably catchy. AARON CARNES
The multi-talented Norwegian singer Bernhoft has a new band, the Fashion Bruises, and a new album, Humanoid, to show them off on. Together, band and auteur leave behind computer-based sounds for the more organic landscapes of guitars, drums and bass. Bernhoft’s already impressive R&B flavor and catchy pop hooks thrive in this live-band atmosphere. And his soulful vocals are at their peak—just listen to his funky R&B song “Lookalike,” on which Bernhoft channels the charming, whimsical vocal stylings of Macy Gray. They really could have named that one “Soundalike.” AB
For the past few decades, Mac Powell has been huge with Christian audiences and hardcore lovers of country music (which have a huge overlap). His band Third Day was more in the category of “Southern rock,” meaning country was a prominent element, but not the only one. Now as a solo artist, he’s getting even more country. And we’re talking roots country, not this modern country-pop stuff. He’s bringing his music to the Rio via a Christmas party, where you’ll get to hear new original tunes as well as sing along to classic Yuletide songs. AC
INFO: 8 p.m. Rio Theatre, 1205 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. $35. 423-8209.
SUNDAY 12/16
METAL
NIGHT OF THE BLUE SWAN IV
Formed in 2013 by Dance Gavin Dance guitarist Will Swan, Blue Swan Records specializes in post-rock, math rock and hardcore. This Christmas, they’re taking their bands on the road for three select shows, and Santa Cruz is lucky enough to be on their “nice” list. So start practicing those windmill kicks and karate chops as Icarus the Owl, Fall of Troy, Hail the Sun, Royal Coda, Wolf & Bear, Adventurer, and Ghost Spirit rain screamo and hardcore through a mix of time changes, melodies and intense headbanging. MAT WEIR
This fantastic four-piece blends rock, blues and bluegrass behind band leader Rebecca Roudman’s cello. Along with an arsenal of originals, Dirty Cello is also known for their unlike-the-original cover versions of songs like “Black Dog” by Led Zeppelin and “The Devil Went Down To Georgia” by Charlie Daniels. Just make sure you watch the clock as this toe-tapping quartet goes on at 2 p.m. MW
INFO: 2 p.m. Michael’s on Main, 2591 Main St., Soquel. $20. 479-9777.
MONDAY 12/17
INDIE-POP
BRIDAL PARTY
Bridal Party are not here to kick ass. They’re not here to take names. Plus, they have plenty of bubblegum, so don’t even ask. The Canadian West Coasters might rock the same chorus-pedal cool as Frankie Cosmos and Dogbreth, but on 2017 EP Negative Space, they lean further into pop territory than most of their contemporaries dare. There’s still a good amount of slacker in the rock (plus no small amount of bossa nova), but on songs like “Fruitless” and “Man of One of My Dreams,” they show just how close indie rock can come to Steely Dan. MH
Guitarist Charlie Hunter decamped from the East Bay to the East Coast two decades ago, but the seven-string guitar wizard has never neglected his local homies. He’s performing around the region with Oakland-reared drummer Derek Phillips and Los Angeles vocalist Lucy Woodward. A capriciously talented artist with extensive credits in jazz, pop, rock and soul, Woodward made a memorable appearance on Snarky Puppy’s Grammy Award-winning Family Dinner – Volume 1. She’s also toured with Pink Martini, and released four albums under her own name. Fierce and fun-loving, she sounds utterly at home in this stripped-down setting. ANDREW GILBERT
INFO: 7 and 9 p.m. Kuumbwa Jazz, 320-2 Cedar St., Santa Cruz. $28.35-$44.10. 427-2227.
It’s a quiet early morning on the weekend before Election Day. In a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Merced, one of the most powerful members of the California State Legislature—Senate Majority Leader Bill Monning, who represents Santa Cruz and the Central Coast—is engaging voters on behalf of his friend and longtime political ally, Anna Caballero, a candidate for the sprawling State Senate District 12 seat.
A clear cerulean sky stretches out in all directions as Monning treks along the nondescript series of tract homes seeking out voters in support of Caballero. It’s a surprisingly hot day for early November, and temperatures will climb into the high 80s later in the afternoon. Dressed in blue jeans, a short-sleeved blue polo shirt and a well-worn University of California baseball cap (Monning is a proud Cal alum), the sandy-haired senator walks from house to house.
What he discovers is a fascinating cross-section of California—one family from El Salvador, a young single mother and waitress raised in nearby Ceres, three generations of a Vietnamese family in the midst of celebrating an ornate ceremony welcoming a newborn baby into their home.
Precincts like this one represent the deep trenches of California politics. The party or candidate with the best field operation generally has an edge in any given election. But it’s hard to get a sense of the political landscape in this neighborhood. There’s not a single campaign yard sign anywhere in sight, and the residents who answer the doors seem, for the most part, disengaged from the process.
In certain respects, the 12th State Senate district represents Ground Zero in California legislative politics. A cadre of state senators—including Nancy Skinner (Berkeley), Steve Glazer (Orinda), Henry Stern (Los Angeles), Bob Wieckowski (Fremont) and Senate President pro tempore Toni Atkins (San Diego)—joined Monning on a three-day bus tour to rustle up votes for targeted Democratic Party candidates. Their goal: to secure so-called “supermajorities” in both houses of the California Legislature.
The work in the trenches paid off for Monning and his Democratic Senate colleagues. Caballero—a popular former mayor of Salinas—eked out a narrow win in the 12th Senate District, as did Melissa Hurtado in the bordering 14th, giving Dems a supermajority in the Senate, 29 to 11, reflecting the blue tidal wave that quietly but surely swept the country on Election Day last month.
For those of us in Santa Cruz and the Bay Area, it’s easy to forget how close those bright red pockets of Trumpism are to us. The precinct in which Monning is walking is little more than two hours away.
MONEY MATTERS
As the sun climbs over the San Joaquin Valley, Monning beats on into the neighborhood. He’s warm and genuine with everyone he encounters. It seems there might be a better way for someone at his station in life to spend a golden weekend. I can’t help but ask him why he does it.
“I have a defective gene,” he jokes with a wry smile. A few steps later, he clarifies, as if to make sure his humor is not misinterpreted: “You know, I’ve been walking precincts my entire adult life, all the way back to my days with the farm workers’ movement [in the 1970s]. You meet people, connect with people, you take them out of their political isolation. It’s a real and practical way to stem the tide of all the corporate money that’s being pumped into these races. I tell people, ‘Don’t be demoralized. Vote, get engaged.’”
Ever since he was elected to represent the Central Coast in the California legislature—first as a member of the Assembly in 2008, then as a State Senator beginning in 2012—Monning has waged a steady war in Sacramento on behalf of progressive causes: a soda tax or warning labels to support public health, farm worker protections, clean water, sustainable seafood, the End of Life Option Act, an economic assessment for the shutdown of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, financial protections for the victims of domestic violence, eliminating plastic refuse in the oceans.
In each of these battles, Monning has taken on big-money interests that he believes warp California’s democratic institutions. For him, California politics has a David-versus-Goliath dynamic, and he refuses to give ground to insurance companies, the soft drink industry, the gas and oil lobby, agribusiness, the trucking industry, energy giants, or polluters.
“One of the most admirable elements about Bill is his willingness to tackle large issues, even in the face of strong opposition,” says Santa Cruz County Supervisor Zach Friend. “That is missing too much in politics today, and we could use more people like him that are guided by what’s right rather than what’s expedient.”
CAMPAIGN MODE Monning knocks on doors in the Central Valley this fall in support of incoming District 12 State Sen. Anna Caballero.
The legendary California Assembly Speaker Jesse “Big Daddy” Unruh once famously proclaimed that “money is the mother’s milk of California politics.” Ever since its founding in the aftermath of the Gold Rush, California has been dominated by special interest money. The “Big Four” railroad magnates of the Central Pacific Railroad (Stanford, Hopkins, Crocker and Huntington) essentially owned the legislature in Sacramento for the latter half of the 19th century.
“It was true then, and it’s still true today,” Monning declares. “In fact, the lobby money today is on steroids.”
As an example, he points to this year’s battle in San Luis Obispo County to pass Measure G, which would have prohibited fracking and further oil exploration in the county. “Chevron alone spent $4 million-plus to defeat the measure,” Monning notes. The measure went down in defeat, 56 to 44 percent.
Near the end of Monning’s walk, he meets up with his colleague, Toni Atkins of San Diego. There is a clear warmth between them. She and I chat a while about her district, and then she explains why, as president of the State Senate, she has appointed Monning to top leadership roles.
“Bill has a real calming effect on most of us,” she says. “He is very principled and trustworthy. He’s passionate about his beliefs, but he also has a practical approach to this work.”
PROGRESSIVE ROOTS
Born in Culver City in 1951, William “Bill” Wheeler Monning grew up largely in Pasadena, where he was a star athlete at Flintridge Prep, participating in football, basketball, baseball and swimming.
Monning acknowledges that he was sheltered from the poverty and social turbulence during those post-war years of economic growth and tension in Southern California—in particular, the Watts Riots of 1965—but recalls an incident during his childhood that he says shaped his mindset.
It was during the Christmas season that he saw a beat-up station wagon pull into a parking lot. The driver, a Mexican immigrant with what appeared to be his entire family and all of their belongings in tow, rolled down his window and said to Monning’s father, an engineer for the city of Los Angeles, that he didn’t have money for gas. Without drawing attention to himself, Monning’s dad walked over to the station wagon and handed the driver a $20 bill.
“Not everybody has the same good fortune that we do,” Monning recalls his father telling him. Those words left a profound, lifelong impression on his son. “My family had a deep commitment to public service—you give to others—and watching how my father handled that situation had a huge impact on my life.”
After graduating from Flintridge in 1969 (his father had died from a heart attack when Monning was still in high school), Monning headed off to Berkeley, where the free speech movement was on fire and radical activism defined the times.
One of his mentors at Berkeley was Tom Hayden—the famed author of the Port Huron Statement (the 1962 manifesto of Students for a Democratic Society), a Freedom Rider in the Deep South, a member of the Chicago Seven, and later, like Monning, elected to both houses of the California Legislature. During the early ’70s, Hayden lived in Berkeley as a member of the so-called Red Family, a brand of political activism to which Monning found himself attracted.
By the time he graduated from Berkeley, Monning had been fully radicalized. He entered law school at the University of San Francisco and came out committed to working on behalf of migrant workers. His first job as an attorney was for the United Farm Workers union; he later worked for the Migrant Farm Worker Project at California Rural Legal Assistance, the Salvadoran Medical Relief Fund, and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. It was a legal career steeped in progressive causes, working on behalf of the disenfranchised and dispossessed.
While working for the UFW in 1976, Monning met a young graduate from Radcliffe, Dana Kent, who had worked for the union as an organizer in Delano, then as a clinic worker and a paralegal. They married soon thereafter and raised two daughters.
Kent became a bilingual teacher’s aide in San Juan Bautista, then went into the medical profession as a nurse before enrolling at Harvard Medical School, where she graduated at the top of her class in 1991. She currently serves as a practicing physician and medical director for health promotion and education at the Natividad Foundation, where she focuses on diabetes among the underserved in Monterey County.
It’s easy to see why a good deal of Monning’s work in Sacramento has focused on public health. “Dana and I work as a team,” Monning says. “She’s played a critical role in my political career, but more importantly, my sense of activism.”
READY TO RUN
It was in 1993 that Monning decided to jump with both feet into the political arena. With the election of Bill Clinton to the presidency and the ascendance of Monterey congressmember Leon Panetta to Clinton’s cabinet (first as Director of the Office of Management and Budget), Monning decided to seek what had been Panetta’s congressional seat since the mid-1970s.
Monning’s decision to run irked more than a few members of the regional Democratic party establishment who had already lined up behind Carmel-based Assemblymember Sam Farr. Monning bristles at the longstanding narrative (that still exists to this day) that he ran against Farr.
“Remember, this was an open seat,” Monning says. “Sam wasn’t an incumbent. This was a special election. I was running on a progressive agenda—campaign finance reform, single-payer health insurance and opposition to NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement). We disagreed on the first two issues, but Sam said he was against NAFTA, too.”
POLITICS OF PERSISTENCE After unsuccessful bids for office in the 90s, Monning made his way to Sacramento when voters sent him to the State Assembly in 2008.
Monning’s candidacy brought together a large grassroots campaign in Santa Cruz, which included a remarkable group of progressive elders who brought a unique spirit and energy to the primary campaign that included 25 candidates.
When the first dust settled in the April 1993 primary, Farr garnered 25 percent of the vote, while Monning surprised many local pundits by coming in a strong second, with 18 percent. In a runoff, Farr beat his Republican opponent, Bill McCampbell, 52 to 43 percent.
The next year, Monning decided to take on then-incumbent Bruce McPherson for the State Assembly. It was a historic race in California history. The Democratic Party establishment—most notably the late State Sen. Henry Mello of Watsonville—sabotaged Monning’s campaign. Dan Walters, the longtime Sacramento columnist for McClatchy News Service, published an exposé of how Mello, who Walters described as “an autocratic, old-style politician who … fancies himself the political boss of Santa Cruz and Monterey counties,” iced Monning because he had beaten Mello’s longtime aide Cathy O’Boyle in the Democratic primary for the Assembly.
Mello and Monning were polar opposites. Mello had PAC money running through his veins; he had long favored Salinas and Pajaro Valley agribusiness interests over Cesar Chavez and the UFW.
Mello refused to endorse Monning for Assembly, and Democratic kingpin Speaker of the Assembly Willie Brown waited until the last second to offer Monning some campaign crumbs. It was too little, too late. McPherson (who has since left the Republican Party) squeaked by in the race by just 2,500 votes (51 to 49 percent), and went on to a lengthy career in the State Senate, served as Secretary of State, and now serves as a Santa Cruz County supervisor.
Monning had been outspent by $500,000 in the race, in a district that had been considered a Democratic lock. While he was “frustrated” and “disappointed” by the outcome, he had not compromised his principles, refusing special interest money. He had fought the good fight—and had lost a legislative bid for the second time in two years.
‘UNFINISHED BUSINESS’
Cut to a decade-and-a-half later. By 2008, a lot of water had flowed under many a political bridge on the Central Coast. When John Laird, the popular Democratic Assemblyman from Santa Cruz (now secretary of the California Resources Agency), termed out in the 27th District, Monning—then teaching law in Monterey—decided to make another run for it.
“I had been a recovering politician for nearly 15 years,” he muses. “I felt like there was some unfinished business. I didn’t want to have any regrets.”
Monning suited up for another electoral battle. He ran on the same progressive platform that had defined his previous campaigns—health care, campaign finance reform, workers’ rights, environmental protection. This time around, he won the race with a whopping 67 percent of the vote, defeating Republican Robert Murray and Libertarian Mark Hinkle.
“I have great gratitude and respect for all those who have worked in my campaign teams over the years,” Monning says. “It’s all about love and respect for each other, and the shared vision of what we want for each other and our communities.”
Monning ran for and won re-election in 2010, and then for State Senate in 2012 and 2016. In each instance, he won with roughly two-thirds of the vote. Monning hadn’t changed since his losses in the 1990s, when many Democrats refused to back his candidacies. Rather, the State Democratic Party had come around on embracing Monning’s principled, non-transactional brand of politics.
In 2014, Monning’s longtime ally, State Senate president pro tempore Kevin de León (who lost his U.S. Senate bid last month to Dianne Feinstein) selected Monning to serve as Senate Majority Leader, elevating him to one of the most prominent roles in California government.
There is no small amount of irony that Monning has assumed the position—and, indeed, the actual office—that his antagonist Henry Mello had once held. I was a bit surprised to discover that Monning, who is a trained mediator, never patched things up with Mello, who died in 2004.
“I called him once to schedule a meeting,” Monning recalls. “I went over to his office in the hope of making peace, to unify. It was a vicious, insulting exchange.” Monning says he walked out of that meeting and never looked back.
When Monning ran for office the second time around, there was skepticism among local Democrats about how well Monning might fare in the dog-eat-dog atmosphere of Sacramento. Monning’s late friend and mentor Hayden—who served nearly two decades in the Legislature—died in 2016 at the age of 76. I once asked Hayden how he thought Monning would handle the state capital; he was a little skeptical. “I’m not sure he’s going to like it there,” Hayden told me. He thought there might be too much horse-trading, too much money influence for his friend’s high ethical standards.
ABOVE THE MUCK
Shortly after the November election, I told Monning about Hayden’s prognostication. He says he’s not surprised. “Yeah, it’s been a mixed bag,” he says. “But when I look at what you can do when you grit your teeth, the trade-off is being able to accomplish important policy. I’ve been able to maintain my integrity and moral compass and not get sucked into the sludge.”
Monning recalled his first trip to Sacramento, when he was working for the United Farm Workers. “It’s alluring, the fancy architecture and the glitter and gold, and all the power,” Monning remembers, “but I was also turned off by it, and couldn’t wait to get away. I developed a love-hate relationship with it then, and I still have it. I don’t think you’re really grounded unless you have a love-hate relationship with the place. I still feel the tug both ways.”
There was speculation that Monning would run again for Congress when Sam Farr retired in 2016—the same seat he’d run for and lost 22 years earlier—and Monning made news when he announced that he was instead going to stick with his leadership role in Sacramento.
Monning, now 67, will be termed out of office in 2020. With his two daughters now grown (and with three grandchildren), he says he’s looking forward to his final two years in the Senate, where he remains Majority Leader.
“I’m hooked on it,” he says. “I thrive on engaging the art of the possible. Yes, there are disappointments and much that disappoints. But it all makes the victories that much sweeter when you’ve navigated through all the muck.”
Once the legislative session opens in 2019, he says he’s going to work on getting his Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund legislation passed. He has been in negotiations with various agribusiness organizations and environmental justice groups (totaling 90 in all) and says he will refocus his efforts with a handful of legislators who were afraid of voting for a tax bill in advance of the 2018 election.
And he will continue to wage battle against the soft drink industry. After three unsuccessful attempts at levying taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages (twice in the Assembly and once in the Senate), Monning is hoping that the supermajorities garnered in both houses last month will enable him to push through his proposed tax in the next legislative session.
Monning views the End of Life Option Act passed in 2015, which allows an adult diagnosed with a terminal disease to request aid-in-dying drugs from their attending physician, as one of his greatest legislative achievements. The process was especially moving for him. Many people confronting terminal illnesses at the time came to Sacramento to testify and lobby on behalf of the trailblazing legislation.
“They knew that they weren’t going to be able to benefit from it,” Monning says. “And yet they still came, facing their terminal conditions, making sure that those who followed them would have options that they didn’t have. These are life and death issues. Sure, you see people at times only acting in their own self-interest, but you also see the best in people, too—people who are strong, who are there for others. Their courage was very moving. When it’s all said and done, those will be the lasting memories.”
[This is the first story in a series on recycling and waste reduction in Santa Cruz County. Part two runs next week. Read part two here. Read part three here. — Editor]
We’ve all been there. You’re standing in the kitchen with a compostable to-go container from your favorite restaurant. Or maybe with the compostable see-through cup you grabbed at a local juice bar. Flip the cup over, and you might see a rounded triangle of arrows pointing to one another, a logo that would seem to indicate that this cup is somehow environmentally friendly.
Do you toss the cup into the recycling bin? Or walk outside to throw it in the green yard waste container sitting in your driveway?
The answer is that you put the cup in the trash.
This compostable ware—the biodegradable cups, cutlery and to-go boxes available at local restaurants—is made from natural material, often polylactic acid (PLA), derived from plant sources, like cornstarch. Local governments require businesses to use these biodegradable products for to-go items, but because it isn’t a traditional form of plastic, PLA can’t be recycled like one. The green bins, on the other hand, are reserved only for yard trimmings.
Many local businesses participate in regional government-run composting programs for food scraps and other non-yard waste compostable material. For the time being, though, all their waste gets hauled across county lines—to Santa Clara and Monterey counties. And the services aren’t available to residents in their homes.
The whole setup doesn’t sit well with Santa Cruz resident Andrew Tuckman, the vice president of business development for Vision Recycling, a compost producer serving the Monterey and San Francisco Bay areas. Tuckman says that the composting process is best done locally. Ideally, in the end, locally made compost is readily available for community members to purchase for use in their gardens and on their farms.
“In a county such as Santa Cruz, that says ‘We’re green, we’re sustainable,’ what the hell do you have happening, other than all this feedstock being shipped out of the area?” says Tuckman, whose company handled yard waste for the county until the end of last year. “And nothing’s coming back to Santa Cruz. This should be a closed-loop cycle, and it’s not.”
WARE TO
Three local governments—Santa Cruz County, Capitola and the city of Santa Cruz—all require take-out materials to be compostable. The problem is that there’s usually no easy way for customers to dispose of those items in a sustainable way, at least once they leave the business where they purchased their food. Sure, one might try throwing his or her to-go cup into their own compost pile, if they have one, but a cup could take more than a year to break down there, compared to a couple months at an industrial facility.
State regulators, meanwhile, have been steadily rolling out increasingly stringent food compost requirements. The initial rules applied to businesses that create the most organic waste, like grocery stores and hotels. The second phase extended requirements to many large restaurants. The third will rein in many smaller restaurants. Starting at the beginning of this upcoming year, any business producing more than 4 cubic yards of total waste per week will have to have its food scraps, also known as organics recycling, hauled away for composting.
Santa Cruz, Capitola Watsonville, and the County all have food scrap programs, but not every business that takes part has compost bins in the front of the house for customers to throw in compostable products when they’re done with them.
In the next few years, California may require local governments to haul food scrap from local residences for composting. The road map for where Santa Cruzans will send their growing mass of compostable material is unclear.
BREAK IT DOWN
But Santa Cruz County has a good reputation when it comes to waste management, and for good reason.
The county government has received two recent awards, including one last month from the National Recycling Coalition, honoring the county for Outstanding Community/Government Program of the year.
Santa Cruz County was at the forefront of the effort to ban plastic straws, a movement that inspired Starbucks to commit to banning them by 2020. Now, the county Board of Supervisors has set its sights on eliminating single-use plastic shampoo, conditioner and lotion bottles from local hotels, motels and vacation rentals, making Santa Cruz County the first in the nation to tackle the issue.
Compost is a little more complicated, especially given the confusion about what happens to all of the compostable cups, containers and cutlery once they get to local landfills, as they do every day.
There is disagreement about what becomes of all that compostable ware, and whether or not it decomposes. A2012 study found that once at the dump, compostable ware takes more than 100 years to break down, taking up landfill space in the process. (The county’s landfill is forecast to fill by up in 2030, and the city of Santa Cruz’s in 2056.) Amore recent study found that the items break down quickly. In the process, they will release a significant amount of methane, a greenhouse gas that’s 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
When misinformed residents mistakenly toss compostable cups into their recycling bins, they cause additional problems. All those clear, flimsy cups often gum up the sorting process, because the machines think it’s normal plastic, says Emily Hanson, the business development and communications director for GreenWaste, which hauls waste for Capitola, Scotts Valley and the unincorporated area. At its San Jose facility, GreenWaste sorts recycling from those communities, as well as cities from around the Bay Area.
Hanson, a UCSC grad, says at the very least, it’s nice that many Santa Cruz County businesses have food scrap bins on site for customers to toss their compostable items into when they’re done with them.
“The moment, though, that you ask a consumer to get that compostable and go home, you’re back in the situation of being screwed on what container to put it in, because there’s no container you’re supposed to put it in,” she says. “You end up putting them in the garbage, and when it goes in the garbage, it off-gasses methane. It’s the worst-case scenario. So unless there’s a comprehensive food waste program in a jurisdiction, all that stuff is complicated and confusing the consumer.”
Over at the city of Santa Cruz’s landfill, Craig Pearson, superintendent of waste disposal for the city, sees it differently.
In a world where waste often ends up strewn among our natural spaces, and plastic is filling up the ocean, these compostables have merit, he says. “If it’s compostable, it’s gonna go into the river or the creek or ocean, and break down in a year or so,” he says. For that reason, he says compostable cups are better than plastic ones.
The breakdown rate of compostable items in the ocean has never been fully studied, according to a book calledManagement of Marine Plastic Debris, which makes it impossible to draw strong conclusions, although one report found that a biodegradable bag broke down significantly in three months. Various materials break down at different rates, depending mostly on their thickness.
Tim Goncharoff, the county’s resource planner, has heard the concerns about the environmental impact of compostable ware, and calls it “valid criticism,” one that he says he even shares himself. He knows there are still some gaps in the county’s waste management systems, and says that county officials are working to fill them as quickly as possible.
“I regret that we couldn’t make it all happen at once,” he says.
COMPOST SCRIPT
A lump of food scraps is sitting in a far corner of the Monterey Regional Waste Management District (MRWMD) facility, where Santa Cruz County sends both its food scraps and its compost.
Angela Goebel, MRWMD’s public education and outreach specialist, drove me down here from the main office in the district’s SUV. The waste here is mixed in with wood chips for mulch. “It soaks in the moisture, but you also want a certain balance of carbons and nitrogens,” Goebel says, the heels of her boots on the edge of the heap.
MRWMD mostly serves the Monterey peninsula and Watsonville, but it also gets food scraps from around the Santa Cruz area, including UCSC, Cabrillo College and a number of Santa Cruz County businesses.
Zach Falk, the program’s operations technician, says that compost that comes in from the county is usually very clean, especially from UCSC. In Monterey County, leaders have expanded food compost collection beyond local businesses by putting yellow bins at farmers markets where locals can drop off scraps.
From the mulch pile, the composting pile goes into one of four anaerobic digestive modules, where it decomposes for another two or three weeks. Above the digester, a circus-like tent collects methane, which the facility converts into enough electricity to power 30 homes an hour.
When I visit, the garage-like door of one of the modules is open, with plumes of steam wafting out. The waste is ready to get loaded to nearby giant windrows, where the composting process is finished.
The overwhelming amount of what comes through the composting program is truly biodegradable, with a low contamination rate of around 5 percent. The most common contaminants are plastic garbage bags.
When it comes to local restaurants, Goebel, who lives in Aptos, says a business that doesn’t have compost bins in the front of the house often has lower contamination rates than the ones that do have them—something she can understand. It can be tricky for everyday customers to keep track of what goes in which bin, and she says some of her co-workers sometimes get confused at work in the facility offices.
At the regional level, the clock is ticking for local leaders to expand their food-scrap composting programs.
California is getting ready to announce new rules, and they could include a food scrap pick-up requirement for local governments at all single-family homes by 2020.
The city of Santa Cruz has plans to start a new composting program of its own. Equipment for “pre-processing” at the city’s Dimeo Lane facility will handle the the initial phase, before workers transport the waste to an anaerobic digester at Santa Cruz’s Wastewater Treatment Facility, says Janice Bisgaard, a spokesperson for the Public Works Department, in order to accommodate food waste from local businesses.
Outside the city, solutions are a little murkier. They may involve the county’s other local governments partnering together.
Goncharoff says the county hopes to create a composting facility at or around its Buena Vista Landfill. He’s counted seven state and federal agencies that would have to sign off, including the California Coastal Commission and the Federal Aviation Administration. (The operation would be about a mile and a half from the Watsonville Airport and, without needed mitigations, might impact the flight paths of migrating birds.) The new composting program would also be subjectto the California Environmental Quality Act, and during the review, any opponents could use environmental laws to undermine the potential project, regardless of its environmental benefits.
If a local site doesn’t work out, the county might be able to partner with the MRWMD or with GreenWaste—both of which plan to expand operations—if they can reach an agreement, and if one of the agencies has enough capacity. Goncharoff says that it would be more environmentally sustainable to keep the facility in the county. No matter what path local leaders choose, the county would likely have to raise garbage rates to cover the cost.
These issues aren’t unique to Santa Cruz. Hanson says she’s heard that California has a major shortage of composting facilities—assuming the state is serious about its organics recycling goals—with a deficit of more than 100 programs statewide.
As Goebel drives me back to MRWMD’s main parking lot, we talk about recycling’s bigger picture, and I fill her in on Santa Cruz County’s struggles to sort out the best site for composting and the challenges that lie ahead.
Goebel, who’s worked in resource recovery for nine years, isn’t surprised.
“What you’re probably finding,” she says, “is that it’s a very political industry.”
Update: Dec. 12, 2018 –A previous version of this story misreported the details of the city of Santa Cruz’s composting plans.
The Watsonville wetlands sustain more than 250 species of birds and 23 species of native plants and animals that are threatened or endangered. But they are also serving another unlikely group—more than 300 Pajaro Valley Unified fifth graders.
Last year, the local nonprofit Watsonville Wetlands Watch partnered with the Pajaro Valley Unified School District to create the Wetlands Wonder Program for fifth-grade students. The program aims to increase environmental literacy and stewardship through the “5E” learning model—engage, explore, explain, elaborate and evaluate.
“Watsonville is a fairly urban environment, so getting out to this wild place feels like you are in the middle of nowhere—you wouldn’t know it’s an urban area,” says Emily Howard, Wetlands Watch director of education programs. “Some students have never been to the wetlands before, and they just love it. They discover little animals living in the water. We might see a deer, and they learn about how stewardship is an important part of keeping the wetlands healthy.”
The Watsonville Wetlands Watch is one of 33 local nonprofits selected for the Santa Cruz Gives fundraising campaign. Funds will help support their Wetlands Wonders program alongside many other educational and conservation efforts. All of their programs combined serve more than 3,000 youth in Pajaro Valley. So far, the Watsonville Wetlands Watch is the top fundraiser, and they hope to raise double their initial match of $22,100 in the next few weeks.
The funds raised through Santa Cruz Gives will be used to increase the number of students who participate in the Wetland Wonders program, Watsonville Wetlands Watch director Jonathan Pilch says. The nonprofit hopes to expand the program to new schools in the Pajaro Valley, doubling their current 300 student count.
“We see both a tremendous need and a major opportunity to expand our environmental education programs, with the goal of ensuring that every child in the Pajaro Valley experiences hands-on outdoor learning in a way that inspires them to care about the natural world,” Pilch says, via email. “We’ve seen first-hand how these programs also translate into improved outcomes for their academic and career pathways and inspire youth to take active steps to improve Watsonville’s wetlands, parks, streets, and neighborhoods.”
The Watsonville sloughs are some of the largest freshwater wetlands on the coast. They feature a network of rivers and trails running from the ocean inland to Watsonville, which are often overlooked because waterways aren’t always in plain sight. In 1990, developers proposed building 800 homes on the uplands of Struve Slough, which lies just east of Highway 1. Thanks to a group of concerned citizens that urged the city to protect the wetlands habitat, development was stopped. The group eventually formed into today’s Watsonville Wetlands Watch.
Alongside their Wetland Wonders program, the Watsonville Wetlands Watch facilitates restoration and volunteer opportunities, tours and after school programs. The year-long Wetland Wonders program begins in the classroom, where someone from the Wetlands Watch will talk to the 10- and 11-year-old students about what the wetland ecosystems are and how they operate. This is part of the engage aspect of the 5E model.
Next, the students will explore the Watsonville wetlands in the fall dry season, and collect data on water quality, plants and animals to answer the ultimate question: “How healthy are the wetlands?”
“We don’t want it to be just going out one time for a hike,” Howard says. “Our curriculum is integrated with what they are learning in school and aligned with new content and science standards. We created this program to be more supportive of fifth-grade science standards, while incorporating additional pieces to the classroom.”
The class will return in the spring, once the Wetlands are full, to collect more data and observations. The program ends with a final classroom activity, where students compile the data in bar graphs and come up with suggestions for future wetland protection for the “explain, evaluate and elaborate” components of the 5E educational model.
“The idea is that the students make recommendations to the educators about land management around that slough,” Howard says. “For example, if we noticed that the aquatic invertebrate biodiversity was low when we were there, it could be related to Highway 1 putting runoff into the slough. So maybe they’ll recommend that the highway be moved or that a housing development not go in next to the sloughs.”
Because the students are just being introduced to the habitat ecosystem, Howard says the program doesn’t focus on climate change or the doom and gloom aspects of the environment. Instead, they focus on the smaller tasks that the students can do to help their environment. In some cases, those small tasks, like trash removal, can translate to larger impacts.
“By the end of the second field trip, the students feel a sense of place,” Howard says. “They feel connected to the site, and familiar with it, and they want to do what they can to protect it. That’s a really exciting piece to see.”
ARIES (March 21-April 19): In 1930, some British mystery writers formed a club to provide each other with artistic support and conviviality. They swore an oath to write their stories so that solving crimes happened solely through the wits of their fictional detectives, and not through “Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, or Act of God.” I understand that principle, but don’t endorse it for your use in the coming weeks. On the contrary. I hope you’ll be on the alert and receptive to Divine Revelations, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, and Acts of God.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): When you’re prescribed antibiotic pills to fight off infection, you should finish the entire round. If you stop taking the meds partway through because you’re feeling better, you might enable a stronger version of the original infector to get a foothold in your system. This lesson provides an apt metaphor for a process you’re now undergoing. As you seek to purge a certain unhelpful presence in your life, you must follow through to the end. Don’t get lax halfway through. Keep on cleansing yourself and shedding the unwanted influence beyond the time you’re sure you’re free of it.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Danish scientist and poet Piet Hein wrote this melancholy meditation: “Losing one glove is painful, but nothing compared to the pain of losing one, throwing away the other, and finding the first one again.” Let his words serve as a helpful warning to you, Gemini. If you lose one of your gloves, don’t immediately get rid of the second. Rather, be patient and await the eventual reappearance of the first. The same principle applies to other things that might temporarily go missing.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): Cancerian author Elizabeth Gilbert is a soulful observer whose prose entertains and illuminates me. She’s well aware of her own limitations, however. For example, she writes, “Every few years, I think, ‘Maybe now I’m finally smart enough or sophisticated enough to understand Ulysses. So I pick it up and try it again. And by page 10, as always, I’m like, ‘What the hell?’” Gilbert is referring to the renowned 20th-century novel, James Joyce’s masterwork. She just can’t appreciate it. I propose that you make her your inspirational role model in the coming weeks. Now is a favorable time to acknowledge and accept that there are certain good influences and interesting things that you will simply never be able to benefit from. And that’s OK!
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): More than three centuries ago, Dutch immigrants in New York ate a dessert known as the olykoek, or oily cake: sugar-sweetened dough deep-fried in pig fat. It was the forerunner of the modern doughnut. One problem with the otherwise delectable snack was that the center wasn’t always fully cooked. In 1847, a man named Hanson Gregory finally found a solution. Using a pepper shaker, he punched a hole in the middle of the dough, thus launching the shape that has endured until today. I bring this to your attention because I suspect you’re at a comparable turning point. If all goes according to cosmic plan, you will discover a key innovation that makes a pretty good thing even better.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): I can’t believe I’m going to quote pop star Selena Gomez. But according to my analysis of the current astrological omens, her simple, homespun advice could be especially helpful to you in the coming weeks. “Never look back,” she says. “If Cinderella had looked back and picked up the shoe, she would have never found her prince.” Just to be clear, Virgo, I’m not saying you’ll experience an adventure that has a plot akin to the Cinderella fairy tale. But I do expect you will benefit from a “loss” as long as you’re focused on what’s ahead of you rather than what’s behind you.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Among the pieces of jewelry worn by superstar Elvis Presley were a Christian cross and a Star of David. “I don’t want to miss out on heaven due to a technicality,” he testified. In that spirit, and in accordance with astrological omens, I urge you, too, to cover all your bases in the coming weeks. Honor your important influences. Be extra nice to everyone who might have something to offer you in the future. Show your appreciation for those who have helped make you who you are. And be as open-minded and welcoming and multicultural as you can genuinely be. Your motto is “Embrace the rainbow.”
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Are you a gambling addict seeking power over your addiction? If you live in Michigan or Illinois, you can formally blacklist yourself from all casinos. Anytime your resolve wanes and you wander into a casino, you can be arrested and fined for trespassing. I invite you to consider a comparable approach as you work to free yourself from a bad habit or debilitating obsession. Enlist some help in enforcing your desire to refrain. Create an obstruction that will interfere with your ability to act on negative impulses.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): “What is the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable?” Author John Green asked that question. I confess that I’m not entirely comfortable with it. It’s a bit pushy. I find I’m more likely to do remarkable things if I’m not trying too hard to do remarkable things. Nevertheless, I offer it as one of your key themes for 2019. I suspect you will be so naturally inclined to do remarkable things that you won’t feel pressure to do so. Here’s my only advice: up the ante on your desire to be fully yourself; dream up new ways to give your most important gifts; explore all of the possibilities of how you can express your soul’s code with vigor and rigor.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): In the fairy tale Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the heroine rejects both the options that are too puny and too excessive. She wisely decides that just enough is exactly right. I think she’s a good role model for you. After your time of feeling somewhat deprived, it would be understandable if you were tempted to crave too much and ask for too much and grab too much. It would be understandable, yes, but mistaken. For now, just enough is exactly right.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): In 1140, two dynasties were at war in Weinsberg, in what’s now southern Germany. Conrad III, leader of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, laid siege to the castle at Weinsberg, headquarters of the rival Welfs dynasty. Things went badly for the Welfs, and just before Conrad launched a final attack, they surrendered. With a last-minute touch of mercy, Conrad agreed to allow the women of the castle to flee in safety along with whatever possessions they could carry. The women had an ingenious response. They lifted their husbands onto their backs and hauled them away to freedom. Conrad tolerated the trick, saying he would stand by his promise. I foresee a metaphorically comparable opportunity arising for you, Aquarius. It won’t be a life-or-death situation like that of the Welfs, but it will resemble it in that your original thinking can lead you and yours to greater freedom.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): The National Center for Biotechnology Information reported on a 15-year-old boy who had the notion that he could make himself into a superhero. First he arranged to get bitten by many spiders in the hope of acquiring the powers of Spiderman. That didn’t work. Next, he injected mercury into his skin, theorizing it might give him talents comparable to the Marvel Comics mutant character named Mercury. As you strategize to build your power and clout in 2019, Pisces, I trust you won’t resort to questionable methods like those. You won’t need to! Your intuition should steadily guide you, providing precise information on how to proceed. And it all starts now.
Homework: Do a homemade ritual in which you vow to attract more blessings into your life. Report results at FreeWillAstrology.com.
We are in our last days of 2018, with less than a month ’til Christmas and the New Year.
Until then, we have December dedications centered around Light—Advent and the recently ended Hanukkah—and the rider on the white horse. And Mercury now direct, as it just re-entered Sagittarius.
December is dedicated to Advent, the Latin word “adventus” meaning “something’s coming” (winter solstice, Sun turning northward, new light, holy child’s birth, revelation). For four weeks, we light candles representing hope in the dark half of the year. All of December’s religious festivals are festivals of preparation, (re)dedication and the kindling of our light (hope, promise) within the darkness of matter.
We are in the time of Sagittarius, symbolized by the archer on the white horse. Sometimes pictured as the centaur with bow and arrows, it symbolizes the duality of human and divine purpose.
As humans, we carry a multitude of realities, polarities, glamours and illusions, which fall away slowly as we progress upon the Path of Light. Sagittarius is the sign of Silence. In that silence, we are asked to discern and then just be with all that is good and truthful. Sagittarius is seen in symbols form in Revelation 6.2—there is a going forth, a reconnecting with all duality and focusing it into the pure light.
The Revelation 6:2 sees the same mighty Conqueror going forth, who had reconnected all of the duality into a focused spiritual existence: “I looked up and saw a white horse standing there. Its rider carried a bow, and a crown was placed on his head. He rode out to win many battles and gain victory.” This is the foretelling of Sagittarius.
ARIES: You’re out and about, in and of the world—its people, events, food, travel, adventures, mountain peaks, plains and cultures call you to participate. Perhaps you’ll consider writing a book, or travel. Think deeply on your goals. Create more. Ponder this statement: “I see the goal, I reach that goal and then I see another.”
TAURUS: I ask that you also think on the statement at the end of Aries. And then observe the many varied goals, dreams, hopes and wishes that filter through your mind each day. There’s not enough time, day or night, to accomplish all of the inside and outside work, preparation and plans before you. There’s also the issue of money, which may be uncomfortable, yet is most important to consider. You have many resources yet untapped.
GEMINI: What are your holiday plans? Will you prepare with your significant others, or with one in particular? I suggest you plan with the one closest to you. The last new moon’s silver path shines on your relationships, especially one in particular. A new intimacy is being called for. Is it with love, sex, marriage, money, or all of this together? You and another need to travel somewhere. Make plans.
CANCER: Your health at this time is most important. Focusing on this—and not much else—is best, because you have the capacity to heal more quickly now. Appropriate and healthful foods also must be a focus. You’re considering preparing foods to give as gifts? Simultaneously, endless tasks and responsibilities keep appearing. Decline most of them. You need rest, good natural light, a plant and a few good books to read.
LEO: You need a bit more adventure, fun, play and being tended to in a most creative way. You need to accept invitations, go to parties and festivities, be with friends, attend plays, art shows, galleries, dances, and visit other people’s homes. You need both a Christmas tree and a Hanukkah bush with lights and candles everywhere. You need to be loved, cared for, recognized and then loved some more. Who can do this best?
VIRGO: You’re the light bearer to your family this year. You’re the one who must connect them, creating festivities of domestic comfort and care. You must begin to plan a large gathering so those who have no family can feel at home (where you are). You must merge realities that are separated, unify what is opposed, and synthesize all of the parts and pieces. You love being given these tasks.
LIBRA: Being out and about in neighborhoods, dropping in on neighbors, driving around town to view holiday lights, charitable parties with friends, unboxing holiday decorations, finding more to trim the tree (Hanukkah bush), seeing relatives, phoning, sending emails, holiday cards, having dinners—you love and cherish these festivities, looking forward to the beauty of the season all year. We wish we could join you.
SCORPIO: For the next several weeks, it seems a light is shining upon you. You’ll feel lucky, capable, resourceful, wealthy, emotionally supported. Don’t run out and buy everything you fancy, unless it’s for loved ones. Then be lavish. However, most appreciated would be your heart offered to another. Even simply to a friend. We think of you as internal, hidden, watchful. Give a little more for a while.
SAGITTARIUS: All parts of you are active, energetic, hopeful (we hope). You also become a bit more impulsive, quick to anger, impatient, wanting your own way for a time. We see you as being more assertive, daring like a warrior. You become very attractive. However, be careful with communicating, driving, walking, running, using tools, implements. Things red, hot and sharp (all of which, to some, you are) might attack. You’re laughing. That’s good. Caution.
CAPRICORN: You may be in need of rest. Soon you’ll need to be out and about in the public more, so take this time to draw back, do less work. You can still plan agendas and consider creative goals. However, don’t act upon them immediately. Instead, make health, rest and well-being your central focus. Allow these thoughts to direct your actions for at least a month. Blend grass-fed whey in raw or nut milk for protein and strength. Add a bit of chocolate, something green (parsley, kale, etc.), a banana and a date or two.
AQUARIUS: Everything personal and professional has the green light. You have energy and enthusiasm, hopes and wishes along with opportunities and invitations. Amidst the many possibilities, attend only one or two at a time, bringing them to successful conclusions. Then focus on several more. Pay all bills promptly, don’t worry about money. You’re beginning to thrive differently, in so many alternate ways.
PISCES: You become more public with leadership qualities naturally emerging. A forum or group recognizes, invites and accepts your gifts of communication, intelligence and knowledge. You prepare. However, you are aware that at any time in the life of Pisces, things dissolve away. So you are hopeful, patient, accepting, yet you’re also wary, cautious, circumspect, careful and coiled like a snake in preparation, which is good enough for now.
From high atop the dizzying ceiling of the Wrigley Building, aerial performers are contorting, gyrating and flying through the air with the greatest of ease.
Only through practice, dedication and a certain fearlessness could anyone ever think of hanging 50 feet in the air. But on Dec. 16, a local aerial school is partnering with international talent for a special evening of holiday fun called Shine!: An Eclectic Holiday Circus Cabaret.
Allie Cooper, co-founder of the Radical Movement Factory, is behind the ambitious production. “We’re having instructors and colleagues collaborate on a show. People can expect a high level of performance,” she says. Get ready for aerial acts with aerial silks, aerial rope and high-energy dance numbers.
Center stage for the festive event is MC David Poznanter, who will not only be the ringmaster of the evening, but will be performing precision juggling and acrobatics. Poznanter graduated from UCSC in 2001, and spent the better part of the next two decades touring overseas with circuses. He recently moved back to Santa Cruz in July with his French wife to have their baby here. At UCSC, Poznanter was a music major for three years and then created an independent major and earned a bachelor’s degree in music and theater.
For the last two years, Poznanter has been traveling the world with an original masked theater and live music show he created called Boom! The inception of Boom! happened when Poznanter was 22 years old in Santa Cruz. At that time, the young student began exploring manifesting his own theatrical performances while collaborating with like-minded individuals.
Poznanter believes that live performance is central to developing young people into well-rounded adults. “I was having a conversation about the future of technology, and the questions came up: ‘Can a simulated reality ever replace all the gradients of actual reality?’” says Poznanter from his new home in Santa Cruz. “What I realized is that if you don’t know how to ask yourself that question in the first place, it doesn’t matter. If you never hike in the forest you will not compare or question it to a simulated forest. A guiding principle for me is to help the daily experience of young people to include the concrete and the actual as much as possible.”
Poznanter says one thing he loves about the circus is that most of its elements have been done for hundreds of years.
“Boom!, for example, is a two-person, six-character masked show,” he says. “We play ukulele, drums and perform multiple circus numbers, as well as comedic interaction with the audience. We use a speaker system, but we can also unplug and perform as people have performed for centuries.”
Poznanter is philosophical when it comes to the power of the circus in influencing a new generation of performers. “There’s something exciting about investing in things that have always been here,” he says. “In the movement, in the connections between people and in the virtuosity of circus crafts. There’s no shortcut to learning how to juggle five balls or do a backflip. You can’t do it faster than you can teach your body to do it. Something is lost in the desire for everything to happen quickly, and that is the mental and emotional state of learning. As we turn more to screens, we turn away from the things around us. We lose a part of our humanity.”
Events like Shine! that feature extraordinary performances can rebuild those lost connections, says Poznanter. “One thing I love about the circus is the transformation of the everyday world into a playground you can interact with,” he says. “The circus can transport you to a place where you can see the living potential inside something else.”
‘Shine!: An Eclectic Holiday Circus Cabaret’ will be performed at 6 p.m. on Dec. 16 at the Wrigley Building, 2801 Mission St. Extension, Santa Cruz. 531-8407. Tickets are $45 each, two for $80. Admission includes gourmet tapas, complimentary drinks and a dessert tasting. Advance tickets are highly recommended; go to shinecabaret.brownpapertickets.com.
Is it optimistic to believe that in wine, there is truth? Maybe. But certainly, in wine, there is poetry. In his first collection of poems, American Oak, Bonny Doon native Jake Young finds inspiration in wine and the land that produces it.
Thumbing through the pages of Young’s handsome new book, I find the flavors, weather, wildlife, and vintages that inflect our slice of California, explored in spare, pungent lines. Understanding that wine is a living moment of its place of origin, Young’s poems offer glimpses of our sensory memory, inflected by surprise. Memories of flavors and top notes, the feel of the land in our hands and mouths. A newly bottled Chardonnay contains “a hint of graphite, like wetting a pencil on my tongue.”
Abstract yet intimate, his work takes us along with him watching a heron, savoring a coastal sunset, feasting on sunlight and silence. Young currently lives in Missouri, where he’s completing a doctorate in English literature, but his heart belongs to the Santa Cruz Mountains, where he spends summers working at Beauregard Vineyards.
“My work in the wine industry found its way into my poetic writing almost immediately,” Young says. “I became fascinated with the concept of terroir while working at the winery.” That experience sparked the poet’s understanding “of the many ways that food and wine connect us to the land, and thus to nature … place, and culture.” He also happens to be a Certified Specialist of Wine with the Society of Wine Educators.
The sensory mysteries of our coastline, vineyards and fog-drenched canyons run through this new book, from which Young will be reading locally next Thursday, Dec. 20—appropriately enough, at a winery, Stockwell Cellars. An accomplished debut collection by a poet with his taste buds tuned to the natural world.
Also reading from his newest book of poems will be another literary artist named Young. Gary Young. And yes, there is a connection. Gary Young is a much-admired, award-winning poet and printer who teaches creative writing at UCSC. (He is also the father of the aforementioned Jake Young.) He will be reading from his latest collection of poems, That’s What I Thought.
Gary is a shaman of the tenderest, and darkest, in humans. Capable of capturing in compact images the fleeting beauty of our place in the world. Each of his poems reaches deep within the reader, embedding itself within our cellular structure.
In other words, sensuous poetry such as that by the Youngs, père et fils, calls out for a glass of wine—wine loaded with as much terroir as the poems themselves. So you absolutely will head over to Stockwell Cellars next Thursday, Dec. 20, for some fine locally crafted wine and equally fine locally crafted poetry. Given the context, you’ll probably discover that in vino veritas is more than just a line from Kierkegaard.
Poetry Reading by Jake Young and Gary Young. Thursday, Dec. 20, 5-7 p.m., Stockwell Cellars, 1100 Fair Ave., Santa Cruz.
Wine of the Week
Zaca Mesa’s vivid and lyrical 2013 Z Cuvée Rhone-style blend of Grenache, Mourvedre and Cinsault scored 91 Wine Enthusiast points, yet costs only (gasp!) $9.99. Of course you can guess where this outrageous bargain is happening. Shopper’s Corner.
Better hurry, I might just grab it all for myself. Seriously, this is a beautiful blend from the
winery’s Santa Ynez Valley estate vineyard, offering the immediate appeal of dark berries, thyme and firm tannins riding on exactly the right amount of alcohol, 14.2 percent, which I would call medium-light. The tang of plums in the finish. Wonderful with steelhead, pasta, and/or roast
Austin Quattlebaum was intrigued by the banjo, but he didn’t really like bluegrass. Then he caught some jam bands at a Florida rock festival incorporating banjo into their sound. The floodgates opened a few months later, when he caught avant-jazz banjo player Béla Fleck.
“My whole brain cracked open,” Quattlebaum says. “That’s when I decided to try to do the banjo thing.”
It was a smart move. Growing up in Savanna, Georgia, all his friends were strumming guitars. He wanted to join in, but he didn’t see much point in being just another guitarist in the oversaturated landscape of guitar players.
The singer-songwriter, who’s currently based in Portland, Oregon, tours the country with just his vocal chords and a banjo (and occasionally a guitar), picking and strumming somber indie-folk songs that are spacious and emotive, and have an implicit groove to them. When he plays, you can hear the reverberations of the rustic mountains clashing with the breezy ocean.
“It is a new thing for a lot of people,” Quattlebaum says of solo singer-songwriter songs on the banjo.
Before Portland, he went to college in Asheville, North Carolina. There, he got a proper education on his instrument, but it was, of course, in the context of a bluegrass band. The school had an Appalachian folk music department. But he’s OK with it now that he’s more acquainted with the instrument.
“When you’re a banjo player studying bluegrass, it’s kind of like the Suzuki method in classical violin. If you don’t really have that foundation, it’s kind of hard to take it in a new direction,” Quattlebaum says. “I’ve never considered myself a traditionalist. Even growing up in the South and practicing bluegrass in North Carolina, I feel like even if I wanted to be like ‘I’m a traditional bluegrass player,’ the locals still would have been like, ‘Nope.’”
He hit the road after college, rambling the countryside in his Volkswagen, armed with his banjo, eventually landing in the Sierra foothills near South Lake Tahoe. There he recorded his first solo album, 2013’s The Ghost Tangled in the Oaks, which has some prominent country and bluegrass elements in it. The songs are also full of stories and an overall storytelling approach to songwriting. After its release, he started the band the Crow and the Canyon in Portland, and joined the Sam Chase in San Francisco, as well as occasionally contributing to a third band over in the Sierra foothills. But he wasn’t the primary songwriter in all of these projects.
He kept on writing and performing as a solo artist, originally under his full name, but eventually shortening it to just Quattlebaum. His participation in those other bands recently lowered significantly, giving him the chance to finally record a lot of these solo songs he’s been working on for a while.
Quattlebaum released his follow-up album, EP Vol. 1, in October. The bluegrass and country influences are nearly buried underneath the surreal and lonesome, almost vintage folk sounds that dominate the new record.
“It was time for some new music and the older album … it was old. It didn’t really feel like me anymore. I wanted to put out something a little more representative of my solo show,” Quattlebaum says.
The new songs also have less storytelling and are more abstract lyrically. Quattlebaum says that there are usually stories somewhere in the music, but that it tends to come out more abstract, with lines pieced together artfully like poetry.
“I’ll just puke out a bunch of words on the page, and then go back through and kind of rearrange my thoughts. Sometimes in that method of editing, the story gets lost, but there is still some descriptive writing in there,” Quattlebaum says.
He’s developed his show to be a more complete, full, live experience. Which is why he switches his instruments around on stage, and even tries to incorporate some comedy and funny stories in between songs.
He’s finds all kinds of ways to mix it up as just one person.
“I’m not doing just straightforward rollicking bluegrass stuff the whole time. It’s more dynamic than that,” Quattlebaum says. “I like to get spacey and dance-y sometimes, but then I do kick it into high gear and play some bluegrass stuff as well.”
Quattlebaum plays at 9 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 13, at the Crepe Place, 1134 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. 429-6994.
