Before I get into this week’s issue, I want to acknowledge Hugh McCormick, who did a fantastic piece for us about the impending closure of the Second Story Peer Run Respite House (“The End of the Story,” GT, 9/12). You may not have noticed one detail briefly mentioned in our follow-up story last week: the private donors who came together to contribute enough money to pay off a state loan on the Aptos property and ensure the mental health facility will remain open specifically credited Hugh’s piece as the reason they did so. What I loved about that article was the way he laid out exactly what the human cost of the Second Story closure would have been, and clearly the donors felt the same way. It’s great news! Congratulations to the hard-working staff who support Second Story.
Also, I want to mention that we’re looking to satisfy your thirst for knowledge about the hows and whys of our county’s natural world. In a new collaboration with the Science Communication Program at UCSC, GT is inviting readers to submit science or environment questions for the program’s grad students to answer as a course assignment. We’ll publish their responses to the best questions. Send yours to me at st***@go*******.sc.
OK, now to the issue at hand. All I have to say about Wallace Baine’s cover story this week is it made a Jaron Lanier believer out of me. After hearing the title of his latest book, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, I was skeptical. After all, a lot of people are telling us all to get off the internet, for a lot of reasons. I wondered if he had anything truly new or insightful to add. But as it turns out, he absolutely does. Give the story a read, and see if you agree.
I was just reading the e-cigarette article in the latest issue, and I had to come write immediately to ask how it’s possible that GT could publish such a biased piece? How could Hugh McCormick not even touch on the great numbers of teens who are addicted to e-cigs, and the egregious fruity-flavor marketing campaigns of the manufacturers? Well, he did touch on “scary stories about … grade schoolers getting hooked,” but in a brushing-off way. If Hugh wants to enlighten the public on their smoking cessation benefits, he needs to tell the whole story about e-cigs. Hugh just gave an endorsement of e-cigs, and now people can feel good about their vaping choices since they read about their safety and benefits in the Wellness section of the local free paper.
EHF
Santa Cruz
Open Streets, Closed Minds
Wouldn’t it be nice if our community was safe for biking, walking, and skateboarding every day instead of a few times a year?
Considering these bicycle safety statistics, it’s disconcerting that Bike Santa Cruz County’s (BSCC) vision states, “Bicycling in Santa Cruz County is a safe, respected, convenient, and enjoyable form of transportation and recreation for people of all ages and abilities.”
Greenway acknowledges that our county is not yet safe for biking. We need to look beyond painting the street, giving helmets to children, and teaching bicycle safety, and focus on physically protecting bicyclists.
The City of Watsonville has adopted a Vision Zero goal to eliminate all traffic fatalities and severe injuries while increasing safe, healthy and equitable mobility for all. The City of Santa Cruz has considered Vision Zero but has yet to approve it.
While BSCC and Greenway both envision a climate-friendly community where more people choose bikes and public transit over cars, Greenway is advocating for more realistic, affordable, and meaningful solutions with the potential to help alleviate gridlock soon.
If we table the unfunded passenger rail idea, we could railbank the corridor, recycle the tracks, and build a greenway designed to separate faster and slower modes with money already allocated in Measure D. This wide, effective trail could become the backbone of a countywide bicycle and pedestrian network. Such a network combined with a modern, effective bus system would be a cost-effective, achievable transportation plan for our county.
Greenway was not at last Sunday’s Open Streets. We were again denied participation in this Bike Santa Cruz County (BSCC) event. The fact that BSCC, a nonprofit operating a program on public streets with grant funding from the Regional Transportation Commission (RTC), should pick and choose who should be allowed freedom of speech shows how RTC funding of local nonprofits is leading to censorship and watering down local bicycle advocacy efforts.
The RTC hopes to approve the Unified Corridor Study (UCS) deciding the fate of the rail corridor and steering county transportation options for decades on Dec 6. RTC Staff will likely recommend Scenario B (Passenger Rail) on Nov 15.
It’s no surprise that local advocacy groups with strong ties to the RTC and FORT are advocating in unison with the RTC. However, if we hope to address our near-constant traffic congestion and the fact that cyclists and pedestrians are dying on our streets, we need to ask the RTC to slow down and take the time to come up with sustainable, realistic solutions we can afford to implement and maintain over time.
Visit sccrtc.org to view the Unified Corridor Study and get information about the Oct. 15 and 16 UCS workshops and the next public meeting on Oct 18. Share your thoughts with the RTC at in**@sc****.com.
Gail McNulty | Executive Director for Santa Cruz County Greenway
PHOTO CONTEST WINNER
Submit to ph****@go*******.sc. Include information (location, etc.) and your name. Photos may be cropped. Preferably, photos should be 4 inches by 4 inches and minimum 250dpi.
GOOD IDEA
Santa Cruz County officials are preparing to host their second Broadband Service Forum, which will give residents a chance to ask about existing and upcoming services. Residents will get a brief overview of county efforts to expand broadband, and will also be able to meet representatives from at least six internet providers—AT&T, Comcast, Cruzio, Etheric Networks, Loma Broadband, Ridge Wireless and Surfnet. The forum will be at Aptos Junior High School on Oct. 18, 6-8 p.m.
GOOD WORK
A recent Smart Solutions to Homelessness workshop drafted new ways to communicate messages surrounding homelessness. Rather than thinking of homelessness as “unsolvable,” for instance, locals might instead focus on the need to fix known problems. Instead of saying “not in my backyard,” residents could say, “I am an ally.” Instead of focusing on scarcity of resources, they might celebrate the tools available, and instead of pinning fault on individuals, they might emphasize shared responsibility throughout the community. For more information, go to smartsolutionstohomelessness.com.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“Looks like the victim was tweeting ‘More like the bland canyon’ and fell in.”
There is no explicit mention of Watsonville in Matt de la Peña’s new children’s picture book Carmela Full of Wishes. To most readers, the reference to “Freedom Boulevard” early on in the story of a young Latina girl’s birthday outing with her older brother may be merely a particularly on-the-nose socio-political metaphor.
But residents of Santa Cruz County know otherwise. Carmela is clearly a Watsonville story.
Celebrated children’s and young adult author de la Peña—who won the prestigious Newbery Medal in 2016 for his book Last Stop on Market Street—is not exactly a Watsonville guy. But he does have a direct connection: about a decade ago, his parents Al and Roni de la Peña moved there from their longtime home near San Diego. Roni has been working as a teacher at Starlight Elementary School ever since.
In fact, it was during a visit with his parents in Watsonville that de la Peña, the author of several award-winning picture books for pre-adolescent readers and novels for teens, got the idea for Carmela. “I was kinda new to picture books at the time,” he says. “And one time, I heard this little boy say to his teacher, ‘Hey Miss, look. The sky is full of wishes.’ He was pointing to the spores of a dandelion floating in the wind. From that day on, I’ve been trying to write this book.”
On Oct. 21, de la Peña and Robinson will again visit Watsonville to mark the book’s publication and celebrate Watsonville’s role in it. The free event, to take place at the Watsonville Veterans Memorial Building, begins at 4 p.m. and features a book signing, visual art and drama centered on the book, and a dinner. The event is sponsored by Bookshop Santa Cruz.
Carmela Full of Wishes is about a young girl following her brother through the streets of Watsonville on his round of errands. With a dandelion in her hand, she is contemplating what her birthday wishes should be. One of them is to see her father once he gets his “papers fixed.” De la Peña, who is of mixed-race heritage, has made it his mission to write stories of families in what he calls “mixed-status” circumstances in which at least one family member is undocumented.
“This book is kinda about immigration,” he says. “But it’s also not about immigration. It’s about a brother and a sister. I like having picture books with layers.”
The book evokes Watsonville’s agricultural orientation—it may have more references to manure than any other picture book on the market—while also serving to depict the experiences of a child engaged in the daily life of the city.
“I definitely wanted the grit of the neighborhood to be there,” says de la Peña, who was born and raised in National City, a predominantly Latino community between San Diego and the Mexican border. “I grew up right next to this massive stretch of greenhouses and we would ride our bikes through them. One of the memories that sticks with me the most is the smell of manure. I knew where I was when I smelled that. That’s what home smelled like.”
Like many writers of color, de la Peña hopes to present Carmela to two audiences: “It’s really important for a Mexican-American girl to see herself as the hero of a story. But it’s equally powerful for other people to read about Carmela to have more empathy and understanding. The opportunity to see the world through someone else’s eyes is a great gift of literature.”
Matt de la Peña and Christian Robinson will talk about their new book on Sunday, Oct. 21, 4 to 7 p.m., at the Watsonville Veterans Memorial Building, 215 E. Beach St., Watsonville, free. www.bookshopsantacruz.com.
Ah, fall, with its dry Indian summer days and golden light, and its basement of secrets. It’s the time of year, some say, when the veil between the living and dead is at its thinnest. Surely, it’s the season when the passage of time is felt most potently. And just when the sense of nostalgia and foreboding starts to darken the days’ edges, pumpkin spice everything emerges from its dormancy. As do viruses and bugs.
In Ayurvedic medicine, the autumn transition is a powerful time for adjustments to keep the body and mind healthy.
“Just like the cold and the hot in the air creates rainfall, the same thing is happening internally,” says Manish Chandra of Santa Cruz Ayurveda. “We have accumulated a lot of heat in the summer. Confronted with this cold front in the fall, the body creates mucus. We are nothing but nature, and our bodies are reflecting nature.”
Ah, mucus. A valuable component of the immune system, this fall secretion defends against viruses, which, like most evil things, are incubated by the cold. The gut is the body’s ultimate epicenter for immune defense, and in Ayurveda, the fall is a time to prepare the body’s digestive fire, or agni, to burn a bit hotter.
“We are preparing the body for the harsh winter,” says Chandra. “From eating salads and lighter cold foods at night, we are starting to cook warm, nourishing foods—root vegetables and grounding foods.” Accumulating some extra weight this time of year is considered an acceptable buffer by Ayurvedic standards, but it’s a cautious green light: no more than can be shed in spring.
Oleation, or massaging the skin with oil, is an Ayurvedic remedy and transdermal buffer against the dry air and wind, and Chandra recommends retiring cooling coconut oil for sesame oil, which is warming, in the fall and winter.
Ayurveda’s panchakarma—a 21-30-day detox that involves sweats, yoga, meditation, multiple-handed massages, enemas, and eating for one’s dosha—is traditionally set for fall and spring. It’s a total reset that Chandra, who will soon be enduring panchakarma in India, says can’t really be done in a few days. Chandra typically works with patients for at least six months in his Gut Healing Protocol program, which is customized to each individual’s doshic balance. But one of panchakarma’s primary intentions—to detox the body’s ama, or toxins built up in fat cells from undigested food—can be achieved through dietary shifts.
Warming foods, explains Chandra, refers to their post-digestive effect. Unlike summer’s watermelon, mint, cilantro and fennel, he says, spices like cumin, fenugreek, clove, mustard seeds, cinnamon, and ginger have a warming effect on agni. Could this explain mainstream America’s ravenous appetite for pumpkin spice everything?
While the long list of ingredients used in Starbucks’ Pumpkin Spice Latte includes, as of two years ago, actual pumpkin puree, it also includes about 49 grams of sugar—and the only real spices are those dashed on top. Chandra is not actually against sugar, but at such high doses, it’s downright harmful. We crave sugar because of stress, which depletes the doshic principle of vata, says Chandra. “And two, because we are not getting enough healthy fat. Fat burns like a log, and sugar burns like kindling,” says Chandra. Healthy fat, like ghee—“the best, if we are doing dairy”—curbs our cravings for more instant gratification.
One crisp morning after I speak with Chandra, I make his recipe for chai tea—a surefire stand-in for the sugar-laden grande to-go. Spilling across my friend Annica Rose’s kitchen counter, I measure half-teaspoons of fennel seed, black pepper, clove, cinnamon, cardamom, and a generous grate of fresh ginger and (improvised) nutmeg. After the pungent mixture simmers for 10 minutes, add black tea, nut milk (or milk of your choice) and a dab or five of raw honey. Strain and serve. Only after I pour the steaming liquid into two mugs does Annica open her cupboard to reveal a secret, along with a burst of contagious laughter, that anybody reading this far deserves: a jar of chai tea spices already mixed and ready to go from Staff of Life’s bulk bins.
For more information on Santa Cruz Ayurveda’s programs, massage offerings and cooking workshops, visit santacruzayurveda.com.
The term “healthy candy” never fooled anyone, until Ashby Confections came along.
Jennifer Ashby began making chocolates and other confections over 10 years ago, and her superfood sour strips are a reason to go back for seconds and thirds in the name of health.
Ashby’s most recent additions to the superfood sour strip family are boysenberry, and wild sea buckthorn, a berry found in cold, harsh climates that tastes like a cross between orange and mango. She uses only five ingredients, with no artificial anything.
Last year, Ashby began sourcing some chocolate from Mutari for its truffles and other chocolate treats. Ashby also uses Bay Area-based Guittard organic chocolate. Ashby spoke to us about the latest developments.
Why sea buckthorn?
JENNIFER ASHBY: I was looking for organic sour cherries, because around here we don’t get sour cherries—we get black cherries and Rainiers and other types. Those don’t give a strong enough cherry flavor, and I was looking for strong flavors. I love experimenting with different fruits and trying new things, so I was so excited when I found this website that sells all kinds of wild and organic berries, and I saw wild seabuckthorn. I’d never tried it. They are an exotic superfruit, extremely high in vitamin C and omegas and loaded with antioxidants. It’s really cool to get this good stuff in your system in a way that’s delicious.
Any other new stuff?
We have the harvest cup made with Mutari dark chocolate shell and housemade marzipan and a piece of dried apricot. On top, there’s a dried cherry and pistachio. All of that is delicious. I always want to grab one for the drive home, they aren’t too sweet with the dried fruit, dark chocolate and marzipan. It’s the best. We also have more vegan stuff now, particularly more vegan truffles. We also have a blonde Kahlua coffee truffle, which is made with Mutari caramelized white chocolate—all organic, local and fresh. Kahlua, coffee, and caramel chocolate. What could be wrong with any of that?
In the last two years, we’ve also really developed brittles from my family recipe. My mom always told me she made the best peanut brittle, I grew up with her telling me that. I’ve tasted a lot of brittles, and have to admit, it’s really good. So I took her recipe and tweaked it. I use local beer or wine instead of water. The alcohol leaves behind the great flavor and robustness.
James Durbin’s new release represents a clear departure from his image as the metal-loving singer who took American Idol by storm seven years ago. The album also strikes a different chord than the time he has spent with the hard rock group Quiet Riot, who made him their lead singer last year.
For Durbin’s mostly acoustic Homeland, which comes out Friday, Oct. 19, the Santa Cruz native laid down most of the instrumentation and all of the singing. Durbin, who recently moved with his family to Nashville, also wrote all of the songs except for the final track, a cover of “House of the Rising Sun.”
The first song is about learning to play guitar as a kid, the second is about your love for California and the third is about an awesome-sounding road trip. Were you feeling nostalgic at all when you wrote this album?
JAMES DURBIN: This is definitely the most nostalgic-feeling music I’ve written—not just lyrically and thematically, but the sounds I was going for, getting a few different violin players from Santa Cruz and Dale Ockerman on the keys. I wanted it to feel like you could put this on in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, or ’90s.
Another theme is travel. Did you work on it while you were on the road?
A lot of these songs were written in the back of a van or the back of a tour bus or airports during six-hour layovers. They were also written during our move from Santa Cruz, my hometown, to Nashville. The song “Resist” was written right there on West Cliff—the last song I wrote in Santa Cruz. There’s a lot on there about going somewhere, where I don’t know if it’s right, but it feels right. It’s all for the adventure.
Does Nashville still feel right?
Some days. It’s a daily, monthly back-and-forth kind of thing. We definitely miss our friends and family—the familiarity. But at the same time, it’s nice to see different things and have different experiences. Santa Cruz will be there when we get back. That’s what we have to remind ourselves. In our absence, nothing’s really gonna change. We go back, and everything feels the same way. Maybe we’ve changed from it. The beach’ll still be there.
Lots of country vibes on the album. Did those bring you to Nashville, or did Nashville bring them out of you?
It’s a coincidence. I was going for more of an Eagles, John Mellencamp, stripped-down sound—the Eagles if it was just one guy. I was listening to a lot of Chris Stapleton, Eric Church, John Mayer’s Born and Raised album, Arctic Monkeys’ “A.M.,” the Good Luck Thrift Store Outfit. I just wanted to record within my means, and I love playing acoustic guitar.
Do you ever wonder what people who used to bully you think when they see you now?
I don’t really care. I never stop to think about what they would think, because I never did it because of them or in spite of them. They were just another obstacle. I try not to hold grudges, because I’ve met people from those days that changed. Most kids are dicks. That’s your free pass. Some people took it a little far, but I’m all for forgiveness—and I wasn’t the best kid, either. If I could meet myself as a kid, I’d have some choice words for myself, as well as those other guys. It made me who I am today. I hope everyone’s found success and that everyone can be happy. Everyone’s worth a beer and a pat on the back.
You’re a wrestling fan. WWE comes to you and asks if you have an idea for a new wrestling star played by you. What do you say?
There’s a wrestler named Darren Corbin, and online people have mistaken old pictures of me from Wrestlemania for him with his hair bleached. We ran into each other at Dallas/Fort Worth Airport, and we were basically wearing the same thing. We took a selfie. It was creepy. My wife was like, ‘He looks like your brother.’ I don’t have a brother. So we would definitely have a tag team, Durbin and Corbin.
Live music highlights for the week of Oct. 17, 2018.
WEDNESDAY 10/17
PSYCH-FOLK
THE DEER
1,500 light years from Earth, the Horsehead Nebula floats like a cowboy’s dream. Both rootsy and ethereal, this interstellar object comes to mind when listening to Austin’s the Deer, who describe themselves variously as “psychotropic folk,” “stargaze surf,” and “cosmic Americana.” Led by singer/keyboardist Grace Rowland Park, the Deer are the audio equivalent of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, taking familiar elements of the American Southern experience and expanding them outward into the far reaches of the universe. MIKE HUGUENOR
INFO: 9:00 p.m. The Crepe Place, 1134 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. $10/adv, $12/door. 429-6994
FOLK/SOUL
CHRIS WEBSTER & NINA GERBER
Chris Webster and Nina Gerber have fearlessly chartered their own paths across the Bay Area’s music scene for decades. Along the way, they kept running into each other. So in 2013, Webster (a soul singer) and Gerber (an accomplished guitarist) decided to collaborate. Apple Blossom Lane, the resulting album, is a timeless blend of folk, soul, traditional, and rock, interweaving each musician’s unique voice into something that couldn’t have existed without the other. Gerber’s effortless guitar playing is a band in itself, providing the necessary accompaniment for Webster’s expansive voice, as on the hauntingly beautiful “Lay Me Down Easy.” MH
INFO: 7:30 p.m. Michael’s On Main, 2591 Main St., Soquel. $20 adv/$23 door. 479-9777
THURSDAY 10/18
PUNK
H2O
New York melodic hardcore band H2O loves to skate. They even wrote a song about it on their latest record Use Your Voice. (“The sweat! The pain! The scars! The scabs!”) Almost-local skate legend Steve Caballero plays guitars on the song and does plenty of skating in the video. It’s no coincidence that their 2015 record would be so heavily doused in old-school punk culture. The band, which formed in 1995, lived and breathed the DIY punk lifestyle when it seemed like punk would take over the world. After breaking up in 2003, then reforming in 2008, they’ve approached music as a means to having as much fun as possible, and their three post-hiatus albums reflect that. AARON CARNES
Who’s the most important reggae figure of all time? If you said Bob Marley, you need to leave at once. The correct answer is Lee Scratch Perry, who, by the way, transformed Bob Marley from a ska-singing romantic into a political roots reggae radical. Perry is famous for both his masterful producing and flawless original material, and really deserves the title as Godfather of roots reggae. He’s also insane, which adds to his brilliance, clearly. He’s on tour celebrating the 45th anniversary of his band the Upsetter’s haunting reggae masterpiece Blackboard Jungle Dub. AC
INFO: 9 p.m. Rio Theatre, 1205 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. $28.50. 423-8209.
JAZZ
CHRISTIAN SANDS TRIO
Christian Sands is having a breakout year. On the heels of his impressive 2017 debut album Reach, the sensational 29-year-old pianist has been tapped for several prominent positions, such as taking over from his late mentor Geri Allen as creative ambassador for the Erroll Garner Jazz Project. On his new album Facing Dragons, he alternates between piano, Fender Rhodes and Hammond B-3 organ, a project that showcases his skills as a composer and arranger. Like on the album, he’s joined on this tour by the exceptional bassist Yasushi Nakamura, drummer Jonathan Barber, who’s performed around the region, and powerhouse trumpeter Jeremy Pelt, who rounds out this dazzling trio. ANDREW GILBERT
INFO: 7 p.m. Kuumbwa Jazz, 320-2 Cedar St., Santa Cruz. $26.25/adv, $31.50/door. 427-2227.
SATURDAY 10/20
FOLK
SIMRIT
Romantic. Haunting. Brooding. All are great ways to describe the music of Greek folk artist Simrit. Her hypnotic voice has earned her famous fans like Steven Tyler and Belinda Carlisle, the later even dubbing Simrit “punk rock.” That might be because Simrit is unashamedly herself, bringing a sharply unique perspective and sound to her music. YouTube offers a plethora of her live performances, but the more you watch, the more you are stunned at the hypnotic sounds that seamlessly drip from her pores. MAT WEIR
INFO: 7:30 p.m. Rio Theatre, 1205 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. $35. 423-8209.
METAL
MAMMATUS
All praise the heavy psych-gods, because Mammatus is returning to the stage! Since 2005, this local group has earned a diehard cult following, playing anywhere they could from legit clubs to dingy house shows. Fast forward 13 years later, and the cult has only grown. The band has only released four albums, their most recent being 2015’s Sparkling Waters. And Mammatus hardly ever plays, making nights like Oct. 20 a special occasion to write home about. Bring your ibuprofen, for some serious headbanging will ensue. They will be joined by Kinski and the Feral Ohms. MW
INFO: 9 p.m. Blue Lagoon, 923 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz, $10. 423-7117.
ROOTS-ROCK
COFFIS BROTHERS
You can easily envision the Coffis Brothers as the house band in some Santa Cruz version of the movie Roadhouse. They keep the party going with uncomplicated, feel-good rock, slide into raging, guitar-heavy tunes when the bar fight turns nasty, then easily slip back into a soft, baleful country song when everyone sobers up, ready to slow-dance with their honey. With a huge dose of Petty influence and a lifetime of frolicking in the California hills, they are the band you want at your next all-night bonfire. And when that one drunk guy yells, “Free Bird!”, I bet the Coffis Brothers are willing to oblige. AMY BEE
Local musician Elie Mabanza sings about his youth in Africa. Most of the lyrics are in French, and sometimes his native Congolese, which only adds to the dramatic, haunting quality of his work. The timbre of his acoustic guitar is rich, vibrant and rhythmic; each note plucked so crystal-clear and true, coming across like Mabanza’s second voice. Together they weave a melody heartbreaking and redemptive, bittersweet and joyous, much like Mabanza’s thoughts on life: “Life is life and people are people everywhere, even in the midst of terrible suffering.” AB
Like Jacob Marley in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, the moldering ghost of psychologist B.F. Skinner haunts the pages of Jaron Lanier’s new self-explanatory manifesto Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.
Today, most people might only vaguely recognize Skinner’s name from Psych 101 classes. But in the 1960s and ’70s, Skinner and his work were front and center in the national conversation. Promoting a theory that came to be known as “behavior modification,” Skinner considered humans easily programmable animals, vulnerable to all kinds of manipulation and coercion—mostly beyond conscious reasoning—through a regiment of rewards and punishments.
During the Nixon era, Skinner’s ideas were wielded by the left in sometimes apocalyptic critiques of television and the advertising industry, and by the right against Soviet-style communism: Were people being hypnotized on a mass scale by malevolent outside forces into behaving against their self-interest?
Skinner would not recognize the language that we regularly use today to describe contemporary mass communications—trolling, gaslighting, fake news, hate-tweeting, hashtags. But the methods and the outcomes of the social-media age, at least according to Lanier, are straight out of Skinner, recast in the terms of modern cognitive brain science. In his well-known provocative and blunt style, Lanier gets right to the point in Ten Arguments’ chapter headings: “Social Media is Making You Into an Asshole,” “Social Media is Making You Unhappy,” “Social Media Hates Your Soul.”
Cruel Circuits
As Lanier points out in his book, Skinner’s theories resulted in a lot of cheesy mind-control themes in movies and pop culture. But it’s only now—a couple of generations later, after the rise of internet culture—that mass manipulation and granular surveillance has become a practical business model. These practices on the part of social-media companies and other internet giants are, he writes, “unethical, dangerous, cruel and inhumane.”
On Monday, Oct. 29, Lanier comes to UC Santa Cruz as part of the Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture Series, co-sponsored by UCSC’s Humanities Institute and Bookshop Santa Cruz, with a message that cannot be better articulated than the title of his book. He’s making the case that the social media world robs people of free will, distorts relationships, creates destructive addictions, destroys political compromise and progress, and alters the functioning of the human mind, particularly young and developing minds. The most efficacious way out of this emerging hellscape is to delete your social media accounts. All of them. Permanently. Right now.
Lanier is not exactly a voice in the wilderness in his critique of the world that Facebook and Twitter have given us. Since the inflection point of the 2016 election, the voices of protest against online surveillance and manipulation have grown louder and more varied. Former Google product manager Tristan Harris is on a mission to convince the world that smartphones have hacked our brains and made us all addicts. Aza Raskin, the designer who invented “infinite scroll”—the technology that allows users to scroll feeds continuously—now admits to feeling remorse over his technology and asserts that apps are designed to be addictive. High-profile Twitter users are bailing—actor Stephen Fry said he quit Twitter because “too many people have peed in the pool.” Tech industry titans have, to various degrees, expressed regret over what the internet has become. Even Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg said the words “I’m sorry” while testifying before Congress.
But among them all, Jaron Lanier, 58, stands out as a kind of tech elder statesman/prophet. A pioneer in the development of virtual-reality technology, Lanier has in the last decade emerged as a voice of skepticism in tech’s heedless march to a new world order with his books You Are Not a Gadget and Who Owns the Future?. As he sees it, Lanier does not have a political axe to grind—he’s just as likely to critique the socialistic good intentions of an organization like Wikipedia as he is to crack on the centralized ultra-capitalism of Facebook.
However blunt and outspoken Lanier happens to be, he works to avoid the hot-take, button-pushing rhetoric that has made online life so miserable. He works at Microsoft. He has relationships with people at Google going back decades. He makes sure you know that he is criticizing systems, not people.
“There’s a lot of really fine people [in Silicon Valley] who have been caught up in a stupid system,” Lanier tells GT. “They really do have good intent, at least a lot of them. The problem is that we’ve painted ourselves into a very complicated, ridiculous corner, where it’s really tricky to figure out how to improve it. Much of the history of the internet was really about idealistic people who wanted to create a society based more on sharing and volunteerism. But it actually backfired totally, and created this hyper-centralized system that you can’t even call capitalism anymore. It’s kind of a return to feudal times.”
Process Addiction
Lanier’s critique is specific—he’s not lamenting the nature of the internet, or the fact that everyone is spending too much time on their devices, or even the structure of social media platforms to connect people, or people’s desire to connect digitally. His criticism is aimed squarely at a business model that profits from sophisticated and powerful manipulation of people’s behavior, to which they have little defense.
By now, most users know they are being harvested as sources of data. “I don’t think people are being naïve,” says Lanier, “and I don’t think people are being cynical. I think people are being addicted. The service designed by these high-tech companies are deliberately designed to be addictive, at least if you believe some of the people from these companies like Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook.”
“Addiction” is a controversial term. Some believe that it can only apply to chemical addiction, like drug addiction or alcoholism. But cognitive science is increasingly coming to the conclusion that “process addictions” like gambling, shopping, sex and internet use, is potentially just as devastating. In fact, process addictions can be seen as chemical addictions when you consider the brain chemistry involved in such behaviors, which includes internal manipulation of dopamine, the brain’s feel-good neurotransmitter, and cortisol, its stress chemical.
“We can look at earlier examples when there was mass addiction tied into commercial interest that was detrimental to society,” says Lanier. “A good example for me is cigarette smoking or drunk driving. These two things used to be really common.”
In those cases, he says, “all these people were addicted and couldn’t see the problem. The key thing is that there were a few people in society who weren’t addicted and they were able to have a different point of view. This is kind of like that. I feel like we need to have some people outside of the addiction system, just to provide some perspective.”
The compulsion to participate in social media can be justified in many different ways—from addiction to “FOMO” (Fear of Missing Out) to the perfectly natural curiosity to share information in a social setting. But the results, says Lanier, have been crippling economically, politically and socially.
“There is still this bizarre idea that if you share your data through these online systems, you’re creating some sort of fair, socialistic economy,” he says. “When we talk about companies like Uber—it’s ride “share”; share, share, share, as if we’re creating socialism. When in fact, if you look at what actually happens, in terms of the real world and concrete results, more and more money and power concentrates with whoever is closest to the biggest computer running the scheme.”
Economics shapes behavior; the “gig economy” has brought the “attention economy,” as online concentration of wealth and power have left many young people in a more precarious position. “Right now, the only thing people can earn online is attention,” says Lanier. “So people are just trying to get attention. And to do that, they become more horrible and obnoxious. If people were able to get paid in a meaningful way, that would be different. There might still be plenty of horrible and obnoxious stuff, but there would be a lot more people trying to do things that are useful and essential.”
Much of the economic inequity inherent in Silicon Valley, according to Lanier, is less a result of robber barons in search of monopolies and more a perverse result of idealism, as if the creators of the internet designed a commune but built a casino. “We made a huge mistake with this open source/open culture thing. We thought when people shared with each other, things would get more fair. In fact, what’s happened is that other people who weren’t sharing were able to just take advantage of everybody else in order to centralize all this power and now it’s hard to do anything about it.”
The Way Out
Ten Arguments goes well beyond economics. Lanier claims that social media destroys exactly that humanist connective tissue that great art works to create: empathy. Social-media bubbles reinforce tribalism and weaken the impulse to commonality, allowing people to become both victimizers and victims. Even Donald Trump, who is to progressives the walking embodiment of everything awful about the modern age, is a victim, in that he’s an addict of Twitter, and that has shaped his behavior. “Elon Musk is another one,” says Lanier. “It’s exactly the same pattern (as Trump). He became addicted to Twitter. Then he debased himself and started destroying everything.”
So could it get worse before it gets better? Lanier is a yes vote on that question. “I think there’s tremendous danger in the United States that there will be some kind of theocratic takeover of companies like Facebook and Google. I could see something like Trump complaining, feeling like everyone in the world is against him because that’s his worldview. Then the government would impose an ethics panel on top of Google and Facebook. We would appoint some respected theologians and it’ll progress just as it has happened in China, some sort of ideological control police on the internet. That might sound paranoid and bizarre, but it sounds like a reasonable and possible future for this country.”
Is there a way out? Lanier says that he is not doctrinaire when it comes to systems. None of them are perfect. Entropy always wins. “Humanity has never devised a method of organizing people that hasn’t devolved in some terrible way.”
The internet is also crippled, Lanier believes, by its low hurdles to entry. He shared that his wife had been ill of cancer in recent years, and the Laniers’ efforts to find out more information resulted in frustration. “There were some kinds of information that we really wanted to get online. But there was this gigantic ocean of fakers and scammers and snake-oil people. I’m sure the real information was out there. We just couldn’t get to it because there was too much crap. If it’s infinitely cheap to share your crap to get attention, there’s going to be a lot more crap.”
There are models of online systems that work without destroying societal and economic norms. “What I think would be the best system is some kind of cross between Etsy and Kickstarter and Netflix. With Netflix, you realize that, ‘OK, it’s going to be peak TV, so I’ll pay for it. And if I pay for it, I want everybody to know that if they make a video that gets watched a lot, they don’t have to negotiate with YouTube and be chosen by some magical king, and that they are guaranteed a payday.’ Period.”
If anything gives Lanier hope, it’s that his skepticism of online culture is no longer such a hard sell. “There was a time, back in the ’80s and ’90s especially, when the opinions I had cost me friends. And it was very difficult. There was just this really intense orthodoxy on how things should be done. At that time, I was the black sheep.”
But not lately, he says.
“There’s been this astonishing turnaround in recent years. If we go back even five years, when I would be at a college campus—or a high school, for that matter—and talk about some of the concerns I have, people were like, ‘No, you don’t get it. This stuff is wonderful. We love sharing everything.’ But now, there’s not even a space to talk about the criticism, because everybody shares it. At least in the community of young people, we don’t need convincing anymore. We’ve moved on to talk about solutions.”
Jaron Lanier, author of ‘Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now,’ will present the Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture ‘How the Internet Failed and How to Recreate It’ on Monday, Oct. 29 at 7 p.m. at the UC Santa Cruz Music Recital Hall. The event is sold out.
A cheat sheet for the Nov. 6 election in Santa Cruz, Scotts Valley, Capitola, Watsonville and the county at large.
Santa Cruz County District 4 Supervisor
Greg Caput
In the June primary, County Supervisor Greg Caput won 32 percent of the vote, and he will once again face Councilmember Jimmy Dutra. Caput hadn’t originally planned to run again, having advocated for a two-term limit for board seats, but he says he was swayed by his supporters. If re-elected, he says he’ll remain committed to the Pajaro River flood protection project, and that he wants to further increase affordable housing and local veterans services. “Even though I am on the short end of votes 4-1 on the board, it’s important someone speaks up and represents other opinions,” Caput says. “Because a minority opinion today might be the majority opinion later in the future.”
Jimmy Dutra
Watsonville City Councilmember Jimmy Dutra ran for this seat in the 2014 June primary, when he lost to Caput and Terry Medina. After graduating from USC’s school of public policy and serving nearly four years on the council, Dutra says he’s more ready than ever. “People have had major road issues, and there has been no attention brought to that,” he says. Dutra is the first openly gay Watsonville councilmember. If elected, he’d like to see more revenue going to Watsonville and other South County areas, saying that though Watsonville is home to Driscoll’s, Granite Construction, West Marine and Martinelli’s, there isn’t a comparable return of tax dollars to South County. “It’s really sad that a lot of that revenue doesn’t come back to us,” Dutra says.
Capitola City Council (Vote for Three)
Jack Digby
After losing to Jimmy Panetta for a congressional seat two years ago, Digby decided to go more local in 2018. “I got a lot more positive vibes from my community than I thought I would in that race, so when this cycle came around for City Council, I decided to run,” he says. A Navy veteran and ironworker, Digby is a no-party-preference candidate, and prefers to identify as a capitalist reformer. He would like to see resources for homelessness diverted to other county priorities, and have Capitola focus on supporting the middle class, struggling families and the elderly. He originally opposed Greenway’s Measure L initiative to prevent rerouting the Monterey Bay Sanctuary Scenic Trail off the railroad tracks. He has since reversed his position after doing more research, and now supports the measure, arguing that a train station wouldn’t be coming to Capitola any time in the near future, anyway.
Sam Storey
Former Capitola Mayor Storey ran for office as a write-in candidate in 2016 and lost by only seven votes. “I have my name on the ballot this time, which is good,” Storey says. “The voters will be able to see my name and hopefully I’ll have a better chance at prevailing.” Storey, who’s also an attorney, would like to see the new Capitola Mall developers focus on dining, entertainment and the performing arts, rather than retail. He pictures a space with a variety of uses and local businesses, as well as a feeling similar to that of Capitola Village. Storey supports Greenway’s Measure L initiative, saying that Capitola needs a safe route for pedestrians and cyclists. A supporter of the Measure H housing bond, he would like to see Capitola be a welcoming place for everyone, regardless of income level.
Yvette Brooks
Brooks managed the 2016 campaign for Martine Watkins, who is currently vice mayor of Santa Cruz—now she’s running her own. Brooks says she brings a perspective not currently represented on the council—that of mothers, new homeowners and young working families. Brooks works at the Santa Cruz County Office of Education. She supports Measure J, the transient occupancy tax measure, which would slightly boost money for children’s early education programs from taxes on hotel rooms and short-term rentals. “If we invest early in children, we will get the largest return in the future,” she says. “I want to make families a priority, and put families first.”
Jacques Bertrand
In running for re-election, Councilmember Bertrand says he wants to make a difference in residents’ lives in tangible ways, like ensuring permanent support for the Capitola Junior Lifeguards Program and establishing a plan to sustain and rebuild the wharf. “Since elected, I’ve elevated community involvement in decisions—both behind the scenes and up front—to make sure people have a voice in the decisions that affect their lives,” Bertrand says. He supports Measure L, arguing that it will give residents more of a voice in future decision making. He also supports funding housing for the homeless, adding that it’s an important component of addressing the crisis.
Scotts Valley City Council (Vote for Two)
Stephany Aguilar
Aguilar, who’s served on the Scotts Valley City Council since 1998, has compiled a long résumé—having served as president of the League of California Cities and the Association of Monterey Bay Area Governments. A 48-year resident, Aguilar says her experience working on regional efforts and statewide policy has shown her how interconnected California’s communities are. Although she generally supports the long-discussed Town Center plan, she has voted differently than her colleagues on the direction, suggesting that the mixed-use housing project needs more retail than has been planned thus far. “We need a good balance of those elements,” she says.
Jim Reed
Mayor Reed knows something about local government, and not just from his 11 years on the Scotts Valley City Council. Reed, a lifelong Republican, is also the chief of staff for San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo, a lifelong Democrat. Reed says he agrees with 90 percent of what Liccardo does, largely because of how Liccardo does it. “Oftentimes, one of the least important things you do on the council is vote on the dais,” he says of local government. “A far more important element is how you engage.” A supporter of the council’s direction on the Town Center project, he wants to see the town grow in a responsible way that’s consistent with Scotts Valley’s character.
Derek Timm
Timm knows full well that he’s in a race with two long-standing incumbents in this year’s City Council race. The timing might make things appear tough. “The problem in Scotts Valley, in general, is we don’t have term limits. There’s probably never a good time, because you’re just waiting for someone to retire out. Sometimes it’s good to bring in fresh energy,” says Timm, who has earned an endorsement from Mayor Reed. Timm, a Scotts Valley planning commissioner, first got civically involved in 2010, when he started Save Our Schools. He led a successful bond measure campaign in 2012, and he’s leading another one this year with Measure K. One of his strengths, he says, is his skill as a communicator—bringing people together to discuss the issues and helping them stay informed.
Santa Cruz City Council (Vote for Three)
Paige Concannon
Once a week, Seabright resident Concannon is a day manager for the St. Francis Catholic Soup Kitchen. Concannon, who worked for 10 years as a chef at Santa Cruz County Juvenile Hall, says the city needs to crack down on property crime and start handling its “criminal homeless” population more aggressively. She says she does feel for transients who are mentally ill or just down on their luck. “But then you have these guys who really make it hard for everybody else,” she says. As for solving the problem, she says, “it’s a lot of little things, but all those little things are adding up to what the problems are.”
Philip Crawford
Attorney Crawford has been politically involved for decades over the hill, where he taught at San Jose City College. Crawford first started getting involved locally last year, when he and his fellow neighbors from the Friends of West Cliff group began questioning the placement of Santa Cruz’s coastal Jump Bike docks. On public safety, Crawford says he would like to see the police do more community-oriented policing, when cops go the extra mile to get to know residents on their beats. He believes the city should get a bigger portion of mental health funding, as well. “We should be getting our lion’s share, and I don’t think we are, from what I hear from the mayor and others,” Crawford says.
Justin Cummings
Foremost on Justin Cummings’ mind is the need for rent stabilization to protect tenants. “We need it now,” says Cummings, one of two City Council candidates to support the Measure M rent-control ordinance. He says that many campaign issues come back to the economy. If people cannot find good jobs, that exacerbates problems in both housing and public safety, explains Cummings, who trains young people to be environmental stewards via a UCSC conservation program. The son of a criminal defense attorney, Cummings used to plant community gardens throughout low-income neighborhoods and at the Cook County jail in Chicago, where he grew up. He opposes the downtown parking garage/library project, arguing that the city should focus on reducing car trips instead.
Cynthia Hawthorne
Psychotherapist Cynthia Hawthorne hopes she’ll soon have the opportunity to help lead on mental health issues that affect the whole county. If California’s Proposition 2 passes, the bond will provide a couple of billion dollars toward building affordable housing with on-site social and medical services. “We will have a pot of money, for the first time in a generation, that we could use to make a big difference,” she says. Hawthorne hopes to stop the revolving door for those suffering from mental health issues, including the folks that residents see on the streets of downtown everyday. The city, she says, also needs to build more housing downtown. A leader of the Santa Cruz’s Women’s March, Hawthorne has been inspired to see women get more involved in politics.
Drew Glover
Activist Drew Glover finished just 500 votes shy of earning a seat on the City Council when he ran two years ago, after a family emergency pulled him away from Santa Cruz in the final stretch of the campaign. This time, he stopped raising money once he reached about $10,000, as he was uncomfortable with the amount of cash that pours into campaigns and the amount of paper that gets thrown out in the form of mailers from candidates. “It’s so wasteful. My entire kitchen table is covered, literally plastered, right now,” says Glover, the only candidate other than Cummings to support Measure M. He’s focused his energy on talking to voters. Glover says there’s waste in the city government, which he feels needs to better prioritize social services.
Dave Lane
Retired UCSC auditor Lane is running on his experience rooting out financial waste at the university. When GT spoke to him in June, Lane said the Santa Cruz Police Department was overfunded, and he opposed high-density affordable housing. “We just don’t have the water and resources. And we don’t have the room on the streets. I think they want to turn Santa Cruz into San Jose South,” he said. Lane has since added to that, saying it would be better to build housing outside the city limits—and, later, that affordable units should earn subsidies or tax breaks, according to the Santa Cruz Sentinel. Lane didn’t return calls seeking comment for this guide. According to city records, he recently donated $80 to his campaign to print out 800 fliers.
Greg Larson
Former Los Gatos City Manager Larson says he’s running for City Council because Santa Cruz is in need of seasoned leadership. “I’ve been a problem solver across 30 cities,” says Larson, who additionally worked for the cities of Santa Cruz, San Jose and Milpitas, and now works as a consultant. Santa Cruz, he says, is facing ongoing crises in housing and neighborhood safety. He wants to consider hiring new police officers and would like to look at offsetting the costs in the budget, which is already strapped due to increasing pension obligations. Larson says he wants to see the city embrace the San Lorenzo River, rather than turning its back and treating the riparian corridor like it’s a back alley.
Donna Meyers
Environmental consultant Meyers wants to bring her experience in collaboration and securing needed funding to the City Council. She serves on the Parks and Recreation Commission—where she’s helped to oversee the Parks Master Plan—as well as the board for the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History, which has grown during her years as board president. Meyers, also the founding director for the Coastal Watershed Council, says the city can bolster the local economy through partnerships to create new jobs. “There’s still a lot of commitment to making Santa Cruz a place for all the people who are here raising their families,” says Meyers. Concerned about housing affordability, she’s a strong supporter of Measure H, the affordable housing bond.
Richelle Noroyan
The only incumbent in the Santa Cruz City Council race, Noroyan has built her campaign largely around the economy and public safety, issues she campaigned on in past years. Since being elected, she has served on the Homelessness Coordinating Committee, which drafted recommendations that the city is implementing. When she knocks on doors, the one question that Noroyan says voters ask the most is what she thinks of Measure M, which she opposes. Noroyan says that she would support other tenant protections, like outlawing exorbitant rent increases, adding that everyone should work together on housing solutions. “Among landlords and property managers, no one is saying everything is fine the way it is,” she says. “No one has said that to me, no matter if they’re tenant or a property manager or a landlord.”
Ashley Scontriano
Scontriano envisions a Santa Cruz that’s more “customer-friendly” to local businesses. “I don’t think it would be a big hurdle for our government to change in that way,” she says. “It’s just a mentality shift.” Scontriano says she’s witnessed red tape as a business owner operating a dog daycare business that got shut down for a zoning code violation, and then in the form of a planning code violation for what she says is a “landscaping project” at her home. Experiences like those, she says, give her a unique insight into what ails city government. On public safety, she wants to find a way to hold low-level convicts accountable for quality-of-life crimes. Scontriano is an ardent opponent of Measure M, having served on the board for Santa Cruz Together, the opposition campaign.
Watsonville City Council District 3
Lowell Hurst
Current Watsonville Mayor Hurst is running unopposed in his fifth local election, but that doesn’t mean there’s a shortage of issues on his mind. Hurst, a former teacher first elected to city council in 1989, says public safety, living-wage jobs and affordable housing have remained priorities throughout his career, but that pushing for a “well-rounded economy” is still a top objective. “We need to dig deep and help solve the housing crisis,” Hurst says, noting that some 300 new units have been approved in recent years. Pressure is still on, he adds, to address affordability for retirees and area farm workers. In addition to downtown improvements, he sees the evolution of Watsonville’s most famous industry as a potential path forward with new jobs in agriculture tech.
Watsonville City Council District 4
Francisco Estrada
Estrada grew up in Watsonville in a family of farm workers, but more and more, he’s noticed fellow locals moving out of town for lower costs of living inland. It’s one factor that motivated the 35-year-old Pajaro Valley Community Health Trust staffer to run for City Council, transforming from a self-proclaimed political cynic into a first-time candidate. “You see election after election that young people don’t vote. Latino people don’t vote,” Estrada says. “I know my city.” An adjunct professor at Hartnell Community College who worked for nine years at the Santa Cruz County Office of Education, Estrada lists addressing rising youth diabetes rates and reviving community programs among his top priorities, along with adding living-wage jobs. “The rail trail and fixing Highway 1, these things are Band-Aids,” he says. “The real problem is people need to find jobs.”
Jenny T. Sarmiento
After a career in social services and violence prevention, Bolivia-to-California transplant Sarmiento is running for the open District 4 seat on a platform of conscientious economic development. Sarmiento, a Watsonville planning commissioner, hopes to encourage an uptick in interest from new businesses while bolstering technical support and resources available to existing small, often Latino-owned businesses. “We have to be cautious that we don’t become so gentrified that we lose the culture of the town,” she says. Addressing homelessness is also top of mind for Sarmiento, who suggests pairing social workers with police to improve outreach, as the city has done to encourage farm workers to report crimes, despite “the ICE situation.”
Watsonville City Council District 5
Casey Kraig Clark
Clark, challenger to District 5 incumbent Rebecca J. Garcia, is running on a platform of “smart growth” focused on advocating for more reliable infrastructure and job opportunities in the city. “Watsonville is experiencing growth at a record pace,” Clark said in a candidate statement filed with the city. “I vow to ensure our growth is both sustainable and balanced.” In addition to pledging community meetings to discuss large construction projects up for approval, Clark says his profession as a residential care director would also help inform work on public health and mental health.
Rebecca J. Garcia
District 5 Incumbent Rebecca J. Garcia, a former 18-year Pajaro Valley public school teacher and administrator, has served on the Watsonville City Council for four years. In her re-election campaign backed by a broad cross-section of business, labor and Democratic Party groups, Garcia says she intends to continue the work she has already started. “I have volunteered in the city and county for over 35 years,” Garcia says. So far, her approach to policy has been balancing day-to-day local issues like traffic and parking with broader challenges, like advocating for climate action, reaffirming Watsonville’s status as a sanctuary city and implementing regional affordable housing and homelessness plans.
Watsonville City Council District 7
Ari Parker
Ari Parker traces her roots in the Pajaro Valley back nine generations, to the indigenous Amah Mutsun tribe. The 30-year public school teacher also counts her time on the tribal council—contending with frequent “hurry up and wait” interactions with the federal government—as a key source of experience in her candidacy for the open District 7 council seat in Watsonville. Parker, who has also negotiated on behalf of her teachers’ union and served on county commissions, cites flood prevention, a new emergency services outpost in her district and streamlining small business red tape as top priorities. Parker, who’s earned an endorsement from outgoing District 7 Councilmember Nancy Bilicich, draws on advice she frequently dispenses to her sixth-grade students. “Get out there and get trying,” she says. “That’s the only way things get done”
Steve Trujillo
Former Pajaro Valley teacher and school board member Trujillo is vying for the open council seat in District 7 with an aspirational slogan: “Watsonville Renaissance.” Among his top priorities are counteracting stunted economic opportunity, homelessness and gentrification. “There’s a song, ‘Let Your Little Light Shine.’ That’s what Watsonville needs to do,” he says. “Watsonville for too long has played the poor, unwanted stepchild of Santa Cruz County.” Trujillo, now a frequent front-row attendee at City Council meetings, says he plans to balance local priorities, like fixing damaged levies, with resistance to the Trump administration. “We’re going to form a big, blue wall here, and I hope to be part of that,” he says.
Lupe Rivas
Ensuring public safety and a high quality of life for local seniors are among District 7 candidate Rivas’ top campaign priorities. With advanced degrees in multilingual education and 30 years under her belt as a teacher in the Pajaro Valley, Rivas still substitutes in local classrooms. In her bid for city council, she cites credentials including four years on the PVUSD school board, eight years on the CALRetired teachers board and two years on the Watsonville Senior Citizens Board. “It’s crucial to have city council members that are informed,” Rivas said in a candidate statement filed with the city.
This August, Alkaline Trio released their ninth album, Is This Thing Cursed?, which was recorded in secret after five years of relative silence from the band.
“No one knew we were making a record,” says bassist and co-vocalist Dan Andriano, who joined guitarist and lead vocalist Matt Skiba in the Trio shortly after it was formed in 1996. They have been joined most recently by former My Chemical Romance drummer Jarrod Alexander, after it was announced in August that longtime drummer Derek Grant would not be touring due to medical reasons. “We were sort of in a weird position, since we hadn’t done anything in a studio in a long time, and Matt’s been touring with Blink-182. But getting in the studio together, once we began, it was awesome,” says Andriano. “We just started working, and it started going really well.”
The album opens with the title track, a song that begins with rumbling organ, contemplative piano, and (for the first time on an album opener) Andriano’s voice. Then, just before the minute mark, the song explodes. Drums, guitars, and vocal harmonies suddenly propel the song forward, as Andriano and Skiba trade verses all the way up to its final, lingering question: is this thing cursed?
It’s one of the band’s best songs in years, and also a deeply personal one for Andriano.
“That song, really it’s about depression,” he says. “It’s about being in that place where you just don’t feel like anything is going right, and you’re not thinking rationally, you’re not trying to get to the root of the problem, which is usually something you’re doing yourself.”
The album’s cover features a blood red phone, its receiver levitating off the hook with the titular question floating between. Coupled with Andriano’s description, the image suggests that depression is always on the other end of the line, waiting for you to answer its call.
Over the course of their career, Trio has had plenty of time to consider real curses. There have been car crashes, canceled shows, drunken nights, arrests, band member departures, eventabloid-style coverage. But Andriano says that during that time, none of it mattered. It wasn’t until later, when he began to seriously struggle with depression (he was formally diagnosed only a few years ago) that he began to wonder about curses.
“When actual stuff was going on with me I wasn’t really that depressed, I was just like, ‘oh man, this is going to be like a $200 ticket to get out of,’ and then on to the next show, on to the next party, on to the next whatever. But that’s what’s scary about depression: you lose sight of all that, and you make these irrational thoughts,” he says.
It was two decades ago now that Andriano was sitting at a Chicago bar commiserating with his friend Skiba. At the time, Alkaline Trio had just lost their bass player to the number-one leading cause of band member departure: college.
“I was in a band called Tuesday that was sort of in the same boat,” Andriano says. “Two of my bandmates had just decided that they were going back to college for real this time. So I was bumming, and Matt was talking about how all he wants to do is go on the road. And then he just kind of looked at me and said: ‘You should be in this band.’ And I said, ‘All right.’ And we kept drinking.”
In 1998, they released the For Your Lungs Only EP, and then their first full-length, the era-defining Goddamnit. With those two releases, Alkaline Trio immediately staked their claim on punk rock, forgoing the poppier sound and faux-British accents of Green Day for songs that were grittier, more emotionally raw. The world they charted was visceral, full of head wounds and shriveled lungs. And for a generation, the way Skiba and Andriano sung about addiction, desire, and damnation was pure catharsis, and a breath of fresh air.
Sirens and devils have always populated Alkaline Trio’s songs—whether in the form of intoxicating crushes, or malevolent spirits—but this time the demons are personal. Is This Thing Cursed? is less creature feature and more Faust. The demons the band conjures this time are the ones we all face, the ones that grow in the darkness of the soul. And as the late, great philosopher Derrida points out, the act of conjuring is also an act of conjuring away.
“I’ve been saying lately that I just want to be in the light.,” Andriano says. “I’ve been in the darkness a very long time. I just want to be in the light.”
Alkaline Trio plays at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 18, at the Catalyst, 1011 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz. $28/adv, $32/door. 423-1338.
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Humraaz is a word in the Urdu language. Its literal meaning is “secret sharer.” It refers to a confidante, a person in whom you have full trust and to whom you can confess your core feelings. Is there such a character in your life? If so, seek him or her out for assistance in probing into the educational mysteries you have waded into. If there is no such helper you can call on, I advise you to do whatever’s necessary to attract him or her into your sphere. A collaborative quest may be the key to activating sleeping reserves of your soul wisdom.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Taurus author Roberto Bolaño suggests that the world contains more beauty than many people realize. The full scope and intensity of this nourishing beauty “is only visible to those who love.” When he speaks of “those who love,” I suspect he means deep-feeling devotees of kindness and compassion, hard-working servants of the greater good, and free-thinking practitioners of the Golden Rule. In any case, Taurus, I believe you’re in a phase when you have the potential to see far more of the world’s beauty. For best results, supercharge your capacity to give and receive love.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Once upon a time you were walking along a sidewalk when a fairy floated by and whispered, “I’m willing to grant you three wishy-washy wishes for free. You don’t have to do any favors for me in return. But I will grant you three wonderfully wise wishes if you perform three tasks for me.” You asked the fairy, “What would those three tasks be?” She replied, “The second task is that you must hoodwink the devil into allowing you to shave his hairy legs. The third task is that you must bamboozle God into allowing you to shave his bushy beard.” You laughed and said, “What’s the first task?” The fairy touched you on the nose with her tiny wand and said, “You must believe that the best way to achieve the impossible is to attempt the absurd.”
CANCER (June 21-July 22): You Crabs tend to be the stockpilers and hoarders of the zodiac. The world’s largest collections of antique door knobs and Chinese restaurant menus and beer cans from the 1960s belong to Cancerian accumulators. But in alignment with possibilities hinted at by current astrological omens, I recommend that you redirect this inclination so it serves you better. How? One way would be to gather supplies of precious stuff that’s really useful to you. Another way would be to assemble a batch of blessings to bestow on people and animals who provide you with support.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Chinese mythology tells us there used to be 10 suns, all born from the mother goddess Xi He. Every 24 hours, she bathed her brood in the lake and placed them in a giant mulberry tree. From there, one sun glided out into the sky to begin the day while the other nine remained behind. It was a good arrangement. The week had 10 days back then, and each sun got its turn to shine. But the siblings eventually grew restless with the staid rhythm. On one fateful morning, with a playful flourish, they all soared into the heavens at once. It was fun for them, but the earth grew so hot that nothing would grow. To the rescue came the archer Hou Yi. With his flawless aim, he used his arrows to shoot down nine of the suns, leaving one to provide just the right amount of light and warmth. The old tales don’t tell us, but I speculate that Hou Yi was a Leo.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): You now have maximum command of a capacity that’s a great strength but also a potential liability: your piercing brainpower. To help ensure that you wield this asset in ways that empower you and don’t sabotage you, here’s advice from four wise Virgos. 1. “Thought can organize the world so well that you are no longer able to see it.” — psychotherapist Anthony de Mello. 2. “Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.” —poet Mary Oliver. 3. “I like to wake up each morning and not know what I think, that I may reinvent myself in some way.” —actor and writer Stephen Fry. 4. “I wanted space to watch things grow.” —singer Florence Welch.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): “There are works which wait, and which one does not understand for a long time,” wrote Libran author Oscar Wilde. “The reason is that they bring answers to questions which have not yet been raised; for the question often arrives a long time after the answer.” That’s the weird news, Libra. You have been waiting and waiting to understand a project that you set in motion many moons ago. It has been frustrating to give so much energy to a goal that has sometimes confused you. But here’s the good news: Soon you will finally formulate the question your project has been the answer to. And so at last you will understand it. You’ll feel vindicated, illuminated, and resolved.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Many seekers who read horoscope columns want common-sense advice about love, career, money, and power. So I hope I don’t disappoint you by predicting that you will soon have a mystical experience or spiritual epiphany. Let me add, however, that this delightful surprise won’t merely be an entertaining diversion with no useful application. In fact, I suspect it will have the potential of inspiring good ideas about love, career, money, or power. If I had to give the next chapter of your life story a title, it might be “A Thousand Dollars’ Worth of Practical Magic.:
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): In 1962, when she was 31 years old, Sagittarian actress Rita Moreno won an Academy Award for her role in the film West Side Story. In 2018, she attended the Oscars again, sporting the same dress she’d worn for the ceremony 56 years before. I think the coming weeks will be a great time for you, too, to reprise a splashy event or two from the past. You’ll generate soul power by reconnecting with your roots. You’ll tonify and harmonize your mental health by establishing a symbolic link with your earlier self.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): The Committee to Reward Unsung Good Deeds hereby acknowledges your meritorious service in the trenches of the daily routine. We praise your tireless efforts to make life less chaotic and more coherent for everyone around you. We’re grateful for the patience and poise you demonstrate as you babysit adults who act like children. And we are gratified by your capacity to keep long-term projects on track in the face of trivial diversions and petty complaints. I know it’s a lot to ask, but could you please intensify your vigilance in the next three weeks? We need your steadiness more than ever.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): You need a special pep talk that’s best provided by Aquarian poet Audre Lorde. Please meditate on these four quotes by her. 1. “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation.” 2. “We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.” 3. “You cannot use someone else’s fire. You can only use your own. To do that, you must first be willing to believe you have it.” 4. “Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.” 5. “The learning process is something you can literally incite, like a riot.”
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Warning: My horoscopes may interfere with your ability to rationalize your delusions; they could extinguish your enthusiasm for clichés; they might cause you to stop repressing urges that you really should express; and they may influence you to cultivate the state of awareness known as “playful wisdom.” Do you really want to risk being exposed to such lavish amounts of inner freedom? If not, you should stop reading now. But if you’re as ripe for emancipating adventures as I think you are, then get started on shedding any attitudes and influences that might dampen your urge to romp and cavort and carouse.
Homework: Forget all you know about gratitude. Act as if it’s a new emotion you’re tuning into for the first time. Then let it rip.
