Live music highlights for the week of Feb. 27, 2019
WEDNESDAY 2/27
INDIE
TOMMY GUERRERO
Maybe you know him from the skater film The Search for Animal Chin. Or maybe “Organism,” his funky boom-bap track on Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland soundtrack. But if you follow skateboarding, then you know Tommy Guerrero. A member of the original Bones Brigade, Guerrero has been a musician almost as long as he has a skater, casually dropping tropicalia-inflected skater gems like 2003’s Soul Food Taqueria over a two-decade career. This show promises to be a “very special debut performance” of his live band. Coming from Guerrero, that’s that an exciting prospect. MIKE HUGUENOR
OM is the most sacred symbol, chant, mantra, and primordial sound in Hinduism. It represents the highest form of consciousness, the Atman. So it was an appropriate name for Al Cisneros when he formed a new side project with fellow Sleep bandmate and drummer Chris Hakius way back in 2003. Sixteen years later, Uncle Al is still delivering wholy meditative music with the current Om line-up of Emil Amos and Robert Lowe. Birthed in the heavy metal community, Om now instead caravans through the desert of world sounds, blending Middle Eastern and Asian melodies and often forgoing distorted guitars for tamburas and other delights. MAT WEIR
INFO: 8 p.m. Rio Theatre, 1205 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. $22. 423-8209.
THURSDAY 2/28
INDIE
HALEY HEYNDERICKX
Melodic meditations and sad-but-quirky laments unfurl like seedlings in fertile soil on singer-songwriter Haley Heynderickx’s debut album, I Need to Start a Garden. Her tender vocals come from the sultry depths, where deep roots grow and reach out toward the skies in nearly cathartic, operatic beauty. Trombones, piano and ambient sounds add whimsy to otherwise straightforward acoustic guitar parts, allowing Heynderickx to play between somber introspection and anthem-like assertions. It’s a great mix of moods, like a backyard garden full of brilliant wildflowers. AMY BEE
While jazz’s foundational Caribbean roots run primarily from Havana to New Orleans, the entire Caribbean basin has contributed to the music’s ever-evolving rhythmic continuum. Trinidad-born trumpeter Etienne Charles has distinguished himself with a celebratory sound drawing on his homeland’s music, a connection he expanded through research funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship. He’s gathered various musical styles that manifest during Trinidad’s huge Carnival celebrations on his recent project Carnival: The Sound of a People. He’s touring with an all-star band, including Haitian-American alto saxophonist Godwin Louis and pianist Sullivan Fortner. ANDREW GILBERT
INFO: 7 p.m. Kuumbwa Jazz, 320-2 Cedar St., Santa Cruz. $31.50 adv/$36.75 door. 427-2227.
FRIDAY 3/1
INDIE-FOLK
SAM AMIDON
Sam Amidon’s folk-based originals are damn pleasing to the ear. It could be because of his long career of diving deep into the well of American music. As a solid singer, banjo, fiddle, and guitar player, he has the know-how to take what is familiar and improvise the hell out of it, making music that sounds ageless and Avant-Garde. His songs end up not just mesmerizing, like transcendent incantations of the heart and soul, but invigorating. Even the most bored, heard-it-all music nerd would perk up at Amidon’s music, and maybe even listen to a whole album. For fun! AB
INFO: 9 p.m. Michael’s on Main, 2591 Main St., Soquel. $15. 479-9777.
SATURDAY 3/2
REGGAE
WAILING SOULS
Yeah, we know there’s probably at least a couple reggae shows in Santa Cruz this week alone, but this is most certainly a show you won’t want to miss. We’re talking living legends here. The Wailing Souls are one of the few living groups that date back to 1960s Jamaica. They have many classics from the ’60s and ’70s, but also have had a vibrant career since. Their songs on 1992’s Cool Running soundtrack are some of their most commercially successful, like “Shark Attack.” And they slap! AARON CARNES
Partner is all about sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Nothing new right? They are also, as their bio claims, “100% queer.” But how about instead of all these labels, we just describe the duo as one of the most fun rock bands out on the circuit right now? Partner’s music will bend your mind between minimalist punk band, hyper-produced ’90s alt-rock, and the powerhouse edges of deep headbanging metal. The band sings about literally every aspect of their lives, like the kind of silly, but also very serious “Gross Secret.” (“If you only knew some of the things that I do.”) AC
These days, ’80s nostalgia is as dated as the ’80s themselves. True nostalgics reach further back, before the ’60s nostalgia of Mad Men, and even before the Germanic ’30s and ’40s nostalgia of the Trump administration. True nostalgics reach all the way back into a nebulously gilded region of the past known as “old time.” With their gently twanging vocal harmonies, the Gossamer Strings are a duo who proudly proclaim themselves “old-time music,” a Coen Brothers-esque notion if there ever was one. Whatever you call it, they play beautifully together, crafting modern mountain tunes for the nostalgic in all of us. MH
Anyone who’s been crying out that punk is dead clearly hasn’t turned their head toward Scotland in the last few years. Ok, maybe the Murderburgers aren’t “new,” considering they’ve been around about a dozen years. But they can be considered the godfathers of the new Scottish punk movement. Signed to Asian Man Records, this group of Glasgow and Edinburgh rockers will be dropping their latest full-length album, What A Mess, in April. MW
INFO: 9 p.m. Blue Lagoon, 923 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz. $5. 423-7117.
The members of local trio Day Trip really like plants. That’s pretty obvious if you’ve caught a glimpse of the band’s debut EP House Plant, which has surreal plant-themed artwork by P. Barnett on its cover. Oh yeah, and maybe you’ve seen a recent show where they filled the stage with plants, or heard stories about a plant named Paul they tried to save.
“We just really liked—and stuck with—the plant aesthetic,” says drummer Lauren DiQuattro. “A lot of our band art is plant-based.”
The album was named House Plant because of the group’s song of the same name, which bassist and vocalist Jillian “Bean” White wrote as they were grappling with identity and change.
“I wrote the bass part and lyrics in my room, surrounded by tons of my plants. I remember finding solace in thinking about how I’ve watched them grow and transform,” White says. “I was thinking, why can’t I just be, even if I’m constantly growing into new parts of myself. It gave me comfort knowing I had something to relate to in that moment. A house plant.”
The song, like the rest of the band’s record, is a jangly indie-pop tune with strong interplay between the guitar and the bass, drums pushing it forward without overpowering the song. The bass and guitar riffs are at times in sync. Other times, they bounce conflicting ideas off one another.
“I think there’s a lot of emphasis on trying to make the most out of those three instruments that we have together. We don’t have the comfort of having another guitar,” says guitarist Franky Kohn.
Though the band have played together for almost two years, they just released House Plant in December. Now that they have some recorded music, they hope to tour soon.
INFO: 9 p.m. Friday, March 1. Crepe Place, 1134 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. $15. 429-6994.
A day is coming when someone, somewhere will express doubt that Hunter S. Thompson was a real person.
They’ll say that he was just some mythological figure that arose out of the acid-blasted hallucinations of the post-1960s counterculture, or some outrageous McLuhan-esque prank orchestrated by the dregs of the New Left driven to madness by the ascension of Nixon.
And why not? The stories about Thompson sound like legends—blasting his IBM Selectric typewriter with his .454 Magnum, holding court ’til dawn as “night manager” at a notorious San Francisco porn palace, dumping boiling water from a high-rise window onto picketers on the street below, engaging in operatic scorched-Earth tantrum-fights with the editors who paid his salary, destroying hotel rooms, boozing, dosing, smoking, whoring, and still making (some) deadlines with gloriously brilliant and idiosyncratic prose that inspired its own category of non-fiction literature. All without spilling a drop from his ever-present glass of Chivas Regal.
How could a mere mortal live like that? If you weren’t brought up on Rolling Stone magazine and ’70s drug culture, wouldn’t you too think this guy was an invention of some lurid San Francisco hippie novel?
When the God of Gonzo passes into myth, UCSC might be one of the last places to go to get a sense of the real man. Late last year, the Special Collections and Archives at UCSC received an extraordinary gift: a caché of approximately 800 items (in librarian terms, about 35-40 linear feet of material on a shelf) pertaining to the life and career of Thompson, donated by a collector and library professional from North Carolina named Eric Shoaf.
Other than a brother who lived in the area for many years, Shoaf had no direct connection to UCSC or Santa Cruz. As he once did with the work of Beat icon William S. Burroughs—and will soon do with the work of yet another iconic writer, the recently deceased Tom Wolfe—Shoaf is in the habit of amassing literary collections and then finding permanent homes for them. In that respect, he’s something of a matchmaker. And he decided that, like Chivas and Dunhill cigarettes, Santa Cruz and Thompson were an excellent match.
SHOTS FIRED
I’m visiting the reading room at Special Collections on the third floor of UCSC’s McHenry Library. The head of the department, archivist Teresa Mora, is showing me some of the highlights of the new Thompson collection. She points to the cover of a literary journal, attached to which is a photocopied image of famed porn actress Marilyn Chambers gleefully holding up her own picture on a box of Ivory Snow laundry detergent. (One of the more lurid pop-culture ironies of the 1970s was that the same woman who was the wholesome young mom on the Ivory Snow box later became hardcore porn’s first superstar).
The image of Chambers is punctured with what looks like a bullet hole.
“It is a bullet hole,” says Mora. It was created by Hunter S. Thompson. He shot this picture. With a gun.
GONZO BUT NOT FORGOTTEN A new archive at UCSC focuses on the life of Gonzo journalism pioneer Hunter S. Thompson.
Maybe in the Cult of Gonzo, such a thing qualifies as a holy relic—or, more likely, Thompson shot holes in so many things that it’s not really a big deal. (He did, in fact, regularly shoot holes in photos and posters as a kind of demented artistic expression). Either way, as I run my finger across the hole in the image of a naked porn star holding a box of soap, I can sense the fury and nerve of the man in a more visceral way than I can through his words, mediated through typewriters and editors and magazine articles.
OK, now I’m convinced: Thompson was real.
About a year ago, Mora got the kind of phone call that library archivists dream about. It was a cold call from a man she didn’t know. He was interested in donating a collection of material to Special Collections. People in Mora’s position get offers for donations all the time. But this one was different. This was from a fellow library professional; he understood the process, the standards and the timeline. And what he was offering was about as badass as archival library materials get: rare items associated with the iconic king of outlaw journalism.
“He had amassed this collection that was extraordinarily personally valuable to him,” says Mora. “And he was committed to finding the right home for it. He wanted to make sure that wherever it landed was a place where it would be appreciated.”
GRATEFUL DEAD CONNECTION
UCSC is also famously home to the Grateful Dead Archive, a massive storehouse of material donated by the band itself, which has its own tastefully lit sanctuary near the library’s main entrance. The presence of the Dead archive is not coincidental to this story. It is, in fact, the honey that attracted the bee.
Eric Shoaf works as the dean of the academic library at Queens University in Charlotte. He was using his collection of Thompson material to compile a complete HST bibliography, which he published last summer under the title Gonzology. Shoaf knew all about the Grateful Dead archive.
“To have as wide a cultural impact as possible,” he told me by phone from North Carolina, “you certainly want to find a place where it’s going to attract scholars, but also be complementary to collections that already exist. I was homing in on Santa Cruz because they had this Grateful Dead archive, which is an amazing archive. So I was attracted by that to the institution. And once I got acquainted with some of the people there, I knew it would be really good home for it.”
The collection includes mostly printed material—first editions, uncorrected proofs, broadside posters, and even pirated copies of much of Thompson’s best-known works. There’s a high-school literary magazine in which an unknown Thompson is listed as “art editor,” a beer bottle on which is printed an original HST story, and a fine-press edition of a printed eulogy Thompson had written for psychedelic icon Timothy Leary in 1996, tucked inside of which is a perforated, postcard-sized sheet of (we assume fake) blotter acid.
What does the university plan to do with all this Gonzo swag? Exhibits and displays will have to wait until a full cataloguing of the material is done, which could take a few months. But even without a full online accounting, the Thompson collection is now available for public perusal at Special Collections. There is a registration process, says Mora, and nothing is allowed to leave the reading room. But the materials are accessible to anyone, even those not affiliated with UCSC. “If someone does come in,” she says, “we’ll be able to pull out certain things we know will be evocative for (Thompson fans), like the first edition of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”
AUTHOR TO ARCHIVE Librarian Eric Shoaf wrote a bibliography covering Thompson’s life, Gonzology, before donating some 800 items to UCSC’s Special Collections and Archives.
As cultural forces, the Dead and Thompson are yin-and-yang complements of roughly equal influence. Both arose from the seedbed of ’60s West Coast counterculture. The Dead’s signature line—“What a long, strange trip it’s been”—sounds like a Thompson line and works well as an epitaph for his career. The famous opening line of Fear and Loathing—“We were somewhere on the edge of Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold”—could have been drawn from a Dead caravan, if you didn’t know better. There are millions of people who are ardent fans of both.
But the differences are worth pondering as well. Thompson was the reckless cynic, eager to eviscerate the rich and powerful and peel away the veneer of phony objectivity from mainstream journalism. The Dead, by contrast, weren’t too concerned with any of that. They were about creating a Dionysian sense of play and an almost-Buddhist awareness of the here and now.
Individually, the Dead and HST presented the two faces by which the counterculture liked to think of itself: the guerrilla truth-teller and the dancing mystic. Taken together, their respective legacies are two steady poles on which to build a monument to the cultural ferment of the 1960s. And UC Santa Cruz is as good a place as any for such a monument.
“Santa Cruz has its own reputation,” says Mora. “I think the university has a history that is very conducive to this kind of collection. It’s not coming out of the blue. It’s not like the Dead came here and now, all of a sudden we were counterculture. The Dead came here because of what UCSC already symbolized.”
Special Collections has other material that sheds light on the counterculture, from original art by Beat poet Kenneth Patchen to photographs of the Black Panther movement and Haight-Ashbury by Pirkle Jones and Ruth-Marion Baruch. Mora does not shy away from the notion that the Thompson collection could make UCSC the go-to site for the legacy of the ’60s.
“We look deeply into our collection,” she says, “and we realize the overlap is everywhere.”
The university, she’s quick to add, is part of that history: “The campus itself was a grand experiment when it was founded in 1965. It all blends in really well together.” Special Collections is not explicitly an archive of any one cultural period but, says Mora, “Counterculture is definitely the thing we’re on the map for, at this point. We are totally being branded.”
MIDNIGHT CALLING
In the late afternoon of Feb. 20, 2005, Hunter S. Thompson died after shooting himself at his home in Woody Creek, Colorado. He was 67. His final written words were in a note he titled “Football Season is Over,” the last line of which was, “Relax—This won’t hurt.” Santa Cruz writer and editor Susie Bright was a friend of Thompson. In an obituary, she wrote that he did not act from despair or surrender, but instead from “self-deliverance.” “I’m so proud of Hunter for dying the way he wanted to,” she wrote.
Over the course of the next several months, a giant cannon—taller by a few feet than the Statue of Liberty, and paid for by actor Johnny Depp—was built in Thompson’s honor at his home. On the six-month anniversary of his death, the writer’s ashes were shot into the air and exploded in a burst of fireworks.
Thompson’s suicide was especially poignant for Shoaf. “I was scheduled to go out there to Colorado and see him the winter he passed,” he says.
Shoaf had spoken on the phone to Thompson several times, but he never met him in person. A year after Thompson’s death, Shoaf was invited by his widow to visit Woody Creek to see Thompson’s library.
When Shoaf first made contact, Thompson instructed him to call at midnight, and keep calling until someone answered. “He’s on Mountain Time, and I’m on Eastern Time,” says Shoaf. “So his midnight is my 2 a.m., which meant essentially I had to get up in the middle of the night to call this guy.”
The first time the two men spoke, Thompson came on strong with the famous Gonzo persona, evoked so memorably by Depp in the film version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and in the comic pages with Doonesbury’s Uncle Duke. “I think he was doing it to see what my reaction would be,” says Shoaf, “to test me a little bit. But he quickly fell right in and dropped the persona with me entirely. He managed to be quite cogent, really. I wasn’t talking to some drugged-up crazy man at all. He was actually a pretty sharp guy.”
FINAL CHEERS Flying God Brewing is among the companies and people that have created memorials to Thompson in the form of beer labels, books and even a giant cannon.
Thompson talked in “short, staccato bursts” and, because he insisted on using the speaker phone, he wasn’t always understandable. “Typically, he would go on for about an hour and a half, and I’d look up and it’d be 3:30 in the morning, my time. And I was like, ‘Mr. Thompson, I really need to get off the phone.’”
Several years later, Shoaf struck up a correspondence with another figure from the bygone era of literary rock stars, Tom Wolfe. In this case, he did get to meet the man in person. The author of The Bonfire of the Vanities, who died in 2018, invited Shoaf to his home in New York City to take a look at the Wolfe archive.
There is a strong connection between Wolfe and Thompson. Wolfe credits Thompson with supplying him with audiotapes from an infamous party at the ranch of writer Ken Kesey in San Mateo County, an account that formed the basis for Wolfe’s landmark 1968 book The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, which also featured an appearance by the Grateful Dead.
Acid Test chronicles a series of parties during which Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters experiment with LSD. The book not only jump-started Wolfe’s writing career, it established a brand of reportage called New Journalism, made Kesey into a counterculture icon, brought psychedelic drugs to mainstream attention and, in time, became a classic text of the counterculture.
And the first of those “acid tests” took place in … Santa Cruz. Just something to keep in mind for any library professional or collector who might one day have pertinent materials in need of a permanent home.
Now that ambitious goal-setter Gov. Jerry Brown has left office, it’ll be up to new Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration to start implementing Brown’s goal to wean California off fossil fuels and shift to an all-renewables energy matrix by 2045.
In this space, it’s Newsom’s job to declare whether the state should get onboard with a new offshore-wind plan released by the Berkeley-based American Jobs Project (AJP) in February. “We hope that state policy leaders take a look at this,” says Mary Collins, managing director and co-founder of the AJP.
The report endorses two wind farms currently under consideration for development—one near Morro Bay and another off the Humboldt County coast—that could add some 18,000 jobs in California by 2045. The report suggests utilizing cutting-edge offshore windmill technology—huge floating windmills with massive fins tethered to the ocean floor. It also theorizes about future technologies, such as giant wind-catching kites to fully leverage the renewable promise of wind energy.
There’s even a possibility that wind turbines could one day appear within the state’s actual coastal marine sanctuaries, says Paul Michel, superintendent for the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. The sanctuary stretches from San Luis Obispo County to Marin County’s Rocky Point, 7 miles north of the Golden Gate.Oil drilling is prohibited in the sanctuary, barring what would be a shocking reversal from the feds, with required congressional approval. But Michel, who works under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), says that sanctuary officials are working on a permitting process that could potentially allow wind farms into these protected areas.
The AJP proposal, though, avoids suggesting wind farms in protected areas altogether—including in the sanctuaries, says Collins. She adds that the biggest potential hurdles AJP’s ideas face might be from the U.S. Navy, which does offshore training.
WINDY CITY
The AJP proposal notes that offshore wind projects could sync with the growing community choice energy (CCE) movement, where counties and regions are determining their energy future through a mix of renewables. The energy could be procured by CCEs like the newly launched Monterey Bay Community Power (MBCP).
MBCP already sources from carbon-free and renewable energy, and its current power mix is more than 70 percent hydropower, with the remaining 30 percent coming from other renewables like wind and solar. MBCP will be increasing the amount of wind through a long-term contract with a new wind farm being built in New Mexico. The group is interested in expanding wind energy, and is excited about the potential of offshore wind, including the Castle Wind proposal near Morro Bay, says Shelly Whitworth, MBCP’s energy communications specialist.
The AJP report arrives as the state is engaged in multiple legislative efforts and discussions about how to upgrade its electric grid, especially in light of the recent catastrophic wildfires, which put energy utility PG&E at the center of a controversy over safety. CCEs rely on that same grid to deliver renewable energy to its customers.
Newsom has championed an all-of-the-above approach to energy since entering office. As lieutenant governor, he chaired the Lands Commission, andin a 2017 statement said that, “we must continue diversifying our energy supply—that means increasing our output of solar, wind, geothermal, hydro and ocean-based energy.”
The AJP is a nonprofit economic development think tank. Founded by former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, it’s based in Berkeley, with additional offices in the Washington, D.C. area. The organization has been engaged in New Green Deal-type work in 24 states over the past five years, but this is its first foray into California climate-change waters.
The AJP California Offshore Wind Project: A Vision for Industry Growth proposal came about because of the 2045 goal set by Brown, which Newsom recommitted to on his first day in office, and because the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) started the leasing process for offshore wind-farms development last year.
As a result of these intersecting forces, says Collins, “We could see a federal lease as early as 2020 in California waters.”
The AJP pored over the details in its exhaustive offshore-wind project paper and blueprint for California energy independence—interviewing fishermen, hearing input from environmental groups, getting the public-private ball rolling, and engaging in discussions with the Department of Defense. The group made sure that organized labor also had a seat at the table.
The report comes with the promise of thousands of permanent jobs in the renewable and clean-energy industry—and with Google, Shell and Apple, all pledging big-ticket investment interest in the California project.
Historically, onshore- and offshore-wind projects have been fraught with concerns over negative interactions with birds. President Donald Trump decried bird fatalities when he complained about views being impacted by windmills located off the shore of his Scotland golf course. Trump’s administration has also called for a renewed push on offshore gas and oil development in California and elsewhere.
Last June, Congress introduced a trio of bills designed to give a jumpstart to an American offshore-wind industry that’s lagging behind Europe’s, including one that set the BOEM leasing protocols in motion.
BLOWN AWAY
Fishermen, and especially trawlers, have been wary of offshore wind farms because of the potential negative impacts on where they can fish, and their gear getting torn up by windmills. But there’s been sort of a sea change in recent years with offshore-wind farms, as the graver existential issue of global climate catastrophe has trumped concerns about pelicans flying into windmill blades.
The East Coast has led the way in offshore-wind projects in the U.S., but for many years, commercial fishermen along the Atlantic were among the biggest critics, impeding development of a long-proposed wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island and New York. That project came online a couple of years ago, and fishermen there are now charging windmill tourists for a boat ride to go check out the turbines, Collins says.
California fishermen were at the table when the project was conceived, she adds, and have since been part of an intergovernmental task force created at the beginning of the BOEM wind-farm lease process in 2016.
She believes land-bound aesthetics won’t be an issue, given that the turbines will be tethered about 20 miles offshore and out of view—or barely visible—from land.
Collins says that major environmental groups—the Sierra Club, the National Resources Defense Fund—have submitted comments under a lease proposal that indicates that they’re open to offshore-wind farm development. The overall gist of their comments, she says, indicates that “they are not against it but want it to happen in the right way”—meaning the way that doesn’t unduly mess with marine life.
Last fall, UCSC police got a tip about a mobile app offering students easy access to a laundry list of illegal drugs: cocaine, meth, shrooms, MDMA, and “special requests.” It didn’t take long to find the source. Old-fashioned fliers had started popping up around campus to promote the “Banana Plug” app, a play on the university’s famous yellow banana slug mascot, plus the currently favored slang term for a dealer, or “plug.”
The name of a freshman from Sunnyvale, Collin Howard, was reportedly listed right there in the Apple app store, next to the rudimentary banana slug drawing in the logo and the slogan “We Have What You Want.” Though the 18-year-old’s public Facebook page consists mostly of photos of gadgets and robotics equipment from high school, UCSC Campus Police Chief Nader Oweis says he called in federal reinforcements not knowing if the app might be part of a bigger operation.
“When somebody’s here for only three weeks, you don’t know what you’re dealing with,” Oweis told GT. “You don’t want to get caught off guard.”
It was Howard who was caught off guard when he was arrested on Nov. 28, after UCSC police officers, with the backing of Homeland Security investigators, arranged four meetings through the app and the social media platform Snapchat to buy marijuana, cocaine and more than 5 grams of methamphetamine. The arrest and Santa Cruz County hearings in recent months received little attention off campus—that is until last week, when the U.S. Attorney’s office in San Jose announced that Howard had been indicted by a grand jury for drug distribution and possession. He now faces decades in prison and millions in fines.
Howard pleaded not guilty to multiple felonies in an initial arraignment and is out of jail on a $50,000 bond, on the condition that he enrolls in drug, alcohol and mental health counseling. Howard’s former Santa Cruz County public defender told GT that his case has been referred to the federal public defender’s office, which did not respond to requests for comment. The next court date in the case is set for April.
The Banana Plug case is the most recent local example of how law enforcement agencies across the country are struggling with rapidly evolving online channels for sales of not only drugs, but also guns and other contraband. In addition to the Wild West of encrypted “dark web” sites, mainstream social media companies like Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram have faced criticism for being too permissive with users buying and selling illegal products on their platforms.
“These days, if a smartphone app is social and location-based, you can guarantee there’s a dealer near you,” Complex magazine reported in a feature on the digital black market for drugs, which also encompasses smaller messaging apps like Whisper and dating apps such as Grindr and Tinder.
A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Northern California declined to detail whether the agency has prosecuted similar cases related to online drug sales in the area. At UCSC, Oweis says campus police have monitored other cases, like the 2013 arrest of the 29-year-old behind dark web drug emporium the Silk Road.
“We’ve heard of people using apps in the past,” Oweis says. Since the Banana Plug case did not require sophisticated cyber-sleuthing to crack, he says it took about four weeks to go from discovering the app to Howard’s arrest. In the months since the November arrest, as federal prosecutors weighed whether to take the Banana Plug case, Oweis says campus police cooperated with investigators “to the full extent we can.”
The university is no stranger to major drug busts. The last high-profile case involving federal law enforcement was the 2016 arrest of six UCSC students accused of stockpiling around 5,000 ecstacy pills worth $100,000 at three homes in Santa Cruz.
In a written statement, UCSC spokesman Scott Hernandez-Jason says the university was “deeply troubled” to learn of the new Banana Plug indictment, adding that, “We take seriously the safety of our campus community, and work hard to protect our students.”
Hernandez-Jason also emphasizes a Student Health Outreach and Promotion (SHOP) program for students struggling with substance abuse, as well as an Employee Assistance Program for faculty and staff.
Santa Cruz city councilmembers have typically each had one intern at a time at most. But newly elected Councilmember Drew Glover has taken inclusivity to the next level, hiring 10 interns—four working on homelessness, two on harm reduction, one on affordable housing, one on water, one on budget, and another focusing on administrative issues.
With this infusion of youthful energy, if the City Council ends up handing out avocado toast and bean bag chairs,now you’ll know why. Glover hopes that the interns will be able to reduce workloads of city staff by doing research, while allowing him to push his city agenda through as quickly as possible. We’ll see if it actually speeds things up.
Glover, by the way, incited controversy when he put aggressive public pressure on Mayor Martine Watkins, questioning her leadership after she declined to agendize his long list of last-minute items on the topic of homelessness for a Feb. 12 meeting. At that meeting, Watkins acknowledged concerns that Glover and CouncilmemberChris Krohn had been publicly bullying her because she’s a woman. (Stay tuned for more on that from GT.)
Still, Glover’s interns don’t quite have run of the offices yet. When he did give one intern the access code to Santa Cruz City Hall at the start of his term, City Manager Martín Bernal’s office changed the code shortly after.
GOV. COURSE
Any Californian who was expecting to see more of the status quo on housing and transportation got a surprise with the start of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s term.
For one, Newsom unveiled brand new pots of money to expand housing construction in January, and he threatened to withhold transportation dollars from cities that don’t build. After that, he filed suit against Huntington Beach, the state’s (fake) “Surf City,” for blatantly blowing off its housing production goals. The L.A. Times reported that Newsom was declaring “War on NIMBYs,” referring to not-in-my-backyard anti-housing groups.
Similar NIMBY forces are also strong here in the realSurf City—even if they aren’t as vocal or as powerful as the ones in Huntington Beach. The governor’s direction could turn up the pressure on the county’s five local governments, most of which are behind on all of their housing construction targets.
A couple weeks later in February, Newsom announced that he was dramatically downsizing the state’s high-speed rail plan. Projected travel time for the complicated train project kept getting longer, and costs have ballooned. Nonetheless, supporters of local rail growth—expensive and controversial in its own right—had been using the high-speed rail as a selling point for rail in Santa Cruz, à la… The state is investing in rail! We’ll be able to take the train out of Santa Cruz, and arrive in L.A. within a couple of hours!
Yeah, well, apparently not… But the state’s rail reversal has yet to make much of a stir locally. It seems that with a Unified Corridor Study already approved, everyone is damn tired of talking about cars, trains and trails. Or at the very least, the transportation activists on both sides have taken a brief hiatus to catch their collective breath after a couple years of yelling.
Be that as it may, Nuz surveys the railroad landscape ahead and is reminded of the Grateful Dead, because—to paraphrase Bob Weir—we can only imagine that California’s directional change at this unforeseen railroad switch “left the engineer with a worried mind.”
Let’s get ready to rooollllleeeerrr! Derby, that is. March is around the corner, leering its head just in time to be bashed in by our own women warriors, the Santa Cruz Derby Girls (SCDG). But before they can kick off their season opener on March 16, a sacred tradition must be upheld to please the goddesses of skate: the annual SCDG Pub Crawl.
“We have over 100 league members, from officials to skaters, refs and volunteers” says Harbor Hellcat skater Eileen Hill or—as she’s more commonly known on the track—Sharon D. Payn. “So it’s a great time for all of us to get together, go out and promote the new season.”
Beginning at 6 p.m. on Friday, March 1, this year’s crawl starts at Abbott Square and will happily stagger its way down Pacific Avenue. Drink and meal specials will be offered to fuel supporters along the way. For those who really want to try their luck, keep plenty of cash ready for the fan favorite Arm-Wrestle-A-Derby-Girl-For-A-Dollar competition. The night culminates at the Blue Lagoon for a few more hours of drinking and dancing. At least, for those still standing.
“Since it’s the last stop, we’re always excited to see who makes it to the end,” Hill says. “Whoever does always gets mad props. Hopefully I will.”
With 470 leagues in the international Women’s Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA), SCDG are kicking off this season ranked No. 15 in the world (the kids’ team, the Santa Cruz Derby Groms, are the champs at No. 1 in their division). If that’s not enough to rock the black and blue crew, Santa Cruz has the second-highest-ranking league in the state, right behind—*hard sigh*—Los Angeles.
“We’ve been here since before the Warriors, so if you think about it, we are Santa Cruz’s first sports team,” Hill says. “And we’ve been so lucky to have such a great fan base.”
Since the league’s founding in 2009, the Santa Cruz Derby Girls have been a nonprofit and give back to the community throughout their season. Each year they also pick one other local nonprofit program to promote and fundraise for. This year, they have decided on the Santa Cruz SPCA, continuing from last year, with proceeds from each bout going to the animal rescue organization. Adoptable dogs go to the games, too.
“We’ve built a positive culture around what we call our ‘happy little team,’” says Boardwalk Bombshells Captain Regan Eymann. “And of course roller derby is fun, but we’re in it to win.”
She’s quick to note that 2019 is the 11th season for SCDG, and a lot has changed since the league’s early days. When they first started, the games were quick and violent, partly because nobody knew what they were doing.
“Part of the reason games were fast is because people didn’t have control,” Eymann says. “They didn’t know how to stop very well.”
As time went on, athletes honed their skill and strategy. What they didn’t expect was the ticket sales slumps that came after the games began to get longer and more drawn out. But more recently, they think they’ve found the winning formula.
To kick the season up a notch further, every home game bout will be a double-header—twice the derby for one price. A March 16 opening game will feature one of the league’s B teams, the Seabright Sirens, against Sacramento’s Bruin Trouble, followed by something fresh for fans. By combining the A team, Boardwalk Bombshells and B team Harbor Hellcats, SCDG has created a 30-woman, All-Star team to face off head-to-head during the second game of opening day.
“You’re going to get to see the second-best roller derby team in California skate against each other,” Eymann says, clearly ecstatic about the prospect. “It’s going to be hard-hitting, and a lot of fun.”
Santa Cruz Derby Girls will host their season-opening SCDG Pub Crawl beginning at 6 p.m. on March 16 at Abbott Square. santacruzderbygirls.org.
We are preparing this week in Pisces (last sign of the zodiac containing all the eleven previous signs) for the first Mercury retrograde of 2019 with Mardi Gras (festival), Ash Wednesday (ashes on the forehead) and Lent—40 days and nights of purification before Spring begins. It’s a busy week.
Friday, Venus enters Aquarius impressing us with the knowledge, science, art, astrology, and technology needed to create the new Aquarian Era, which includes the Aquarian laws and principles. Saturday, the moon joins Venus in this endeavor.
Tuesday is the beads and bacchanal festival of Mardi Gras. Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, when Lent (time of purification) begins. Pisces is a perfect time for this. After Pisces, we begin a new year in Aries.
On Ash Wednesday in the Catholic Church, there is a special ritual of remembering. The priest places ashes (made from palms given out last Palm Sunday, gathered each year and burned) in the sign of the cross on the forehead of parishioners while saying the words, “From dust thou art (we were made of this), and unto dust thou shalt return.”
Our actions during Lent imitate retrograde Mars and Mercury (29 degrees Pisces). We advance interiorly in quiet reflection, contemplation, study, and wisdom, which purify and enable us to participate more fully in the upcoming solar festivals, setting the template for the rest of our year, and leading to the Festival of the New Group of World Servers at winter solstice.
ARIES: A quiet, peaceful change comes into your life. You become sensitive, compassionate and sympathetic toward everyone, especially those in need. You’re drawn to things mystical, religious, spiritual, meditative, functioning behind the scenes, and the “why” isn’t apparent. You seek forgiveness while offering it. You allow no persecutions of any kingdom. Here your Aries comes forth.
TAURUS: All that you do, consider and ponder upon has to do with groups, friendships, organizations, and the forming of community that restores and reforms society. You know what’s coming. You are concerned with hosting new ideas, creating collective objectives, helping others realize hopes, wishes and dreams that sustain life on earth. There is a mantra that is useful to say: “Let reality govern my every thought, and truth be the master of my life.”
GEMINI: You can use the mantra for Taurus, too, Gem. It’s very useful for the dissolution of illusions and glamours (distortions, miasmas, illusions)—not only the glamours of self, but when encountering the glamours of others. Eliminating glamours helps us focus on accomplishing goals and achieving a successful public life. You have authoritative tasks to perform, and an influential position to fulfill for the saving of humanity. You might begin to prepare now.
CANCER: The light of Pisces sun is providing you with aspirations and high ideals to learn something that develops a new level of consciousness leading to wisdom. Remember to never assume a position of knowing until it is experienced or its validity proven. You will expand your mind through travel, study, a philosophy, or encountering soil and the earth (gardening). Then you are to teach others. Be adventurous and experiential.
LEO: You search for your values. They have changed over the years. You explore the values of others, listening to their talk of sex, intimacy, money, death, regeneration. You discover your ability to diagnose illness in friends, extending this ability to pets. You like to be the detective, and for a while read mysteries that provide courage through conflict. Be not jealous or combative. You will lose. Life in the shadows for a while is best.
VIRGO: You find yourself through relationship interactions—whether intimate, close friends, or who and what you identify with in the moment. You want to cooperate, seeking harmony within all situations so a sense of life in balance emerges. From personal to the political, from social justice to world peace, you travel the range of relationships within the world of humanity’s endeavors. Do you remember the esoteric formula for peace?
LIBRA: You become practical in all ways, tending to daily necessities for self and others. You become the social worker for the world, using your gifts and capacities to create roles for others so they too can be of assistance and be of service. You make improvements wherever you go, tending to details, being scientific and concrete in your healing information. You drop all levels of criticism. You understand forgiveness.
SCORPIO: When observing you for a time, we sense a new level of dignity emanating from you. We also sense a new level of creative self-expression, which in time can lead the world in a new artform that restores the art of living to the world. Sometimes, you focus on happiness, things that entertain and are playful with games, children and/or sports. You speculate on ways resources can be rightly used to create a new world, the new era. You meditate upon this daily.
SAGITTARIUS: Family continues to be your concern—creating, tending to, or writing about one. Your history is like a tree growing within you—its roots go deep, the trunk is your life force, and the leaves how you interact with the world. Realize how important parents were, whether they were good enough or not. All parents are “good enough” in terms of what we must learn (and realizing we choose them). A radical thought. Moodiness may assail you. Take shelter.
CAPRICORN: You’re interested new ways of communicating, expressing yourself and talking with family, friends, neighbors, and siblings. Most important will be things literary and artistic, either in books, attending museums, music fests, or simply reconsidering how to once again bring forth the arts. You love change now and are very adaptable. Realize that others around may not be. Restlessness can upset our organized and artistic apple cart. Draw your greenhouse.
AQUARIUS: During this month, you will be asked to consider what you value. How well you value your abilities, talents, resources, work, friends, and possessions. You will realize you have vast resources, some of which you will want to give away. You will seek ways of making money and will find a state of reserved strength that sustains conservative-yet-liberal values. You will seek comfort and a new love to keep you warm.
PISCES: There’s a sense of well-being, exaltation and a radiant willingness in all that you do. You will initiate new ideas others will accept, reject and react to. This is good. Controversy is good, calling forth the harmony at the core of chaos and conflict. The heavenly lights in Pisces are creating a state of dignity, magnetism and confidence within. Handling all this with care is the sign of a Disciple. Tend with care to diet, sleep, rest, vitality, exercise, and health. Think green (plants, clothes, drinks, shoes, barley grass, etc.).
Madrid looks beautiful in the Spanish-language drama Everybody Knows. Centuries-old, honey-colored stone buildings perch on ancient cobbled streets; private walled courtyards are shaded by leafy trees strung with dozens of lights; interiors are warm and rustic, painted in pale shades of terra cotta and celery. The vast, open fields outside of town are planted with juicy wine grapes. The movie is an immersive timeout in a warm climate that we could all use about now.
Maybe it’s the outsider’s perspective brought to the production by Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi that makes the movie so visually appealing, a sense of wonder as the layers of beauty in the locale keep unfolding. But the layers of plot within Everybody Knows so essential to the mystery—suspense, revelations, complex family histories—don’t always unfold quite as smoothly.
The nuance of family dynamics is sort of a specialty of Farhadi, as seen in his two previous Foreign Language Oscar-winning Iranian films, A Separation and The Salesman. Family secrets and hidden agendas abound in Everybody Knows, and while Fahardi handles them with his usual sensitivity, the movie never quite achieves the emotional epiphany we hope for. Stars Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem (even more expansive and full of gusto than usual) are worth watching in every frame they’re in, and the ensemble cast is excellent. But when all is finally revealed, there’s just not as much there, there as we might wish.
Directing from his own original script, Fahardi crafts a mystery-suspense drama that begins with a lighthearted family reunion in Madrid. Laura (Cruz), returning to her childhood home from Buenos Aires, where she has relocated with her Argentinean husband, arrives with her teenage daughter, Irene (Carla Campra), and young son. Laura’s niece is getting married, and the old family compound—presided over by Laura’s cranky, elderly father and her sister and brother-in-law—is a hive of activity.
Among the friends, relations, neighbors, cleaning crews, and delivery people traipsing in and out of the place, Laura happily reunites with childhood friend Paco (Bardem), a genial winemaker who owns the vineyard a little way down the road, now married to the more reserved Bea (Bárbara Lennie). The wedding is a great success, as is the celebration that goes on all night in the family courtyard, despite a few cases of over-indulgence (Laura has to put Irene to bed upstairs) and a temporary power outage.
But the festivities come to an abrupt end when Laura discovers Irene is missing. Ransom notes via text soon follow, along with a dire warning not to involve the police, and the movie veers into suspense, with characters desperately trying to figure out how the girl was taken, by whom, and how best to get her safely back. When Laura’s husband Alejandro (Ricardo Darín) arrives, the stage is set for dark revelations and suppressed animosities and resentments to surface as the family sifts through its collective history, searching for clues.
Fahardi handles the suspense element pretty well, finding subtle ways to imply that anyone within the family circle or its intimates might plausibly be in on the plot. But the wrap-up is more straightforward and less intriguing than we’ve been led to expect.
And there are complications along the way. After the family decides not to involve the police, a character pops up to provide them with detailed procedural instruction on dealing with the abductor, but we’re given no explanation of who he is. And with so many supporting characters drifting in and out of the household and the storyline, Fahardi doesn’t do enough to differentiate between them. It’s often hard to keep track of who’s who and what their relationships are to each other.
Still, it’s interesting to see how Fahardi’s grasp of intricate human interaction translates to a more open, expressive culture. Everybody Knows teems with life lived in the moment, even if the destination is less compelling than the journey.
EVERYBODY KNOWS (TODOS LO SABEN)
***
With Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem. Written and directed by Asghar Farhadi. A Focus Features release. Rated R. 133 minutes. In Spanish with English subtitles.
ARIES (March 21-April 19): South Koreans work too hard. Many are on the job for 14 hours a day, six days a week. That’s why a new concept in vacations has emerged there. People take sabbaticals by checking into “Prison Inside Me,” a facility designed like a jail. For a while, they do without cell phones and Internet and important appointments. Freed of normal stresses and stripped of obsessive concerns, they turn inward and recharge their spiritual batteries. I’d love to see you treat yourself to a getaway like this—minus the incarceration theme, of course. You’d benefit from a quiet, spacious, low-pressure escape.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): The astrology column you’re reading is published in periodicals in four countries: the U.S., Canada, Italy, and France. In all of these places, women have had a hard time acquiring political power. Neither the U.S. nor Italy has ever had a female head of government. France has had one, Édith Cresson, who served less than a year as Prime Minister. Canada has had one, Kim Campbell, who was in office for 132 days. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the coming months will be a more favorable time than usual to boost feminine authority and enhance women’s ability to shape our shared reality. And you Tauruses of all genders will be in prime position to foster that outcome. Homework: Meditate on specific ways you could contribute, even if just through your personal interactions.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): A 19-year-old guy named Anson Lemmer started a job as a pizza delivery man in Glenwood, Colorado. On his second night, he arrived with a hot pizza at a house where an emergency was in progress. A man was lying on the ground in distress. Having been trained in CPR, Lemmer leaped to his rescue and saved his life. I expect that you, too, will perform a heroic act sometime soon, Gemini—maybe not as monumental as Lemmer’s, but nonetheless impressive. And I bet it will have an enduring impact, sending out reverberations that rebound to your benefit for quite some time.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): Scientist Michael Dillon was shocked when he learned that some bees can buzz around at lofty altitudes where the oxygen is sparse. He and a colleague even found two of them at 29,525 feet—higher than Mt. Everest. How could the bees fly in such thin air? They “didn’t beat their wings faster,” according to a report in National Geographic, but rather “swung their wings through a wider arc.” I propose that we regard these high-flying marvels as your soul animals for the coming weeks. Metaphorically speaking, you will have the power and ingenuity and adaptability to go higher than you’ve been in a long time.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Do you find it a challenge to commit to an entirely plant-based diet? If so, you might appreciate flexitarianism, which is a less-perfectionist approach that focuses on eating vegetables but doesn’t make you feel guilty if you eat a bit of meat now and then. In general, I recommend you experiment with a similar attitude toward pretty much everything in the coming weeks. Be strong-minded, idealistic, willful, and intent on serving your well-being—but without being a maniacal purist.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): If you gorge on sugary treats and soft drinks, you ingest a lot of empty calories. They have a low nutrient density, and provide you with a scant amount of minerals, vitamins, protein, and other necessities. Since I am committed to helping you treat yourself with utmost respect, I always discourage you from that behavior. But I’m especially hopeful you will avoid it during the next three weeks, both in the literal and metaphorical senses. Please refrain from absorbing barren, vacant stuff into the sacred temple of your mind and body—including images, stories, sounds, and ideas, as well as food and drink.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Charles Grey was the second Earl of Grey, as well as Prime Minister of England from 1830 to 1834. His time in office produced pivotal changes, including the abolition of slavery, reform of child labor laws and more democracy in the nation’s electoral process. But most people today know nothing of those triumphs. Rather, he is immortalized for the Earl Grey tea that he made popular. I suspect that in the coming weeks, one of your fine efforts may also get less attention than a more modest success. But don’t worry about it. Instead, be content with congratulating yourself for your excellent work. I think that’s the key to you ultimately getting proper appreciation for your bigger accomplishment.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): At a young age, budding Scorpio poet Sylvia Plath came to a tough realization: “I can never read all the books I want,” she wrote in her journal. “I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life.” Judging by current astrological omens, I can imagine you saying something like that right now. I bet your longing for total immersion in life’s pleasures is especially intense and a bit frustrated. But I’m pleased to predict that in the next four weeks, you’ll be able to live and feel more shades, tones and variations of experience than you have in a long time.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): When Europeans invaded and occupied North America, they displaced many indigenous people from their ancestral lands. There were a few notable exceptions, including five tribes in what’s now Maine and Eastern Canada. They are known as the Wabanaki confederacy: the Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, Micmac, Maliseet, and Abenaki. Although they had to adjust to and compromise with colonialism, they were never defeated by it. I propose we make them your heroic symbols for the coming weeks. May their resilient determination to remain connected to their roots and origins motivate you to draw ever-fresh power from your own roots and origins.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Capricorn javelin thrower Julius Yego won a silver medal at the 2016 Summer Olympics. How did he get so skilled? Not in the typical way. He gained preliminary proficiency while competing for his high school team, but after graduation, he was too poor to keep developing his mastery. So he turned to YouTube, where he studied videos by great javelin throwers to benefit from their training strategies and techniques. Now that you’re in an intense learning phase of your cycle, Capricorn, I suggest that you, too, be ready to draw on sources that may be unexpected or unusual or alternative.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): The first edition of Action Comics, which launched the story of the fictional character Superman, cost 10 cents in 1938. Nowadays, it’s worth $3 million. I’ll make a bold prediction that you, too, will be worth considerably more on Dec. 31, 2019 than you are right now. The increase won’t be as dramatic as that of the Superman comic, but still: I expect a significant boost. And what you do in the next four weeks could have a lot to do with making my prediction come true.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Until the 16th century in much of Europe and the 18th century in Britain, the new year was celebrated in March. That made sense given the fact that the weather was growing noticeably warmer and it was time to plant the crops again. In my astrological opinion, the month of March is still the best time of year for you Pisceans to observe your personal new year. The coming weeks will be an excellent time to start fresh in any area of your life. If you formulate a set of New Year’s resolutions, you’re more likely to remain committed to them than if you had made them on Jan. 1.
Homework: Write a short essay on “How I Created Something Out of Nothing.” Go to realastrology.com and click on “Email Rob.”
