In Tudor England, it’s just one damn thing after another. Widowed by a weakling French King, the new Queen of Scotland (Saoirse Ronan) arrives in 1561 on a glum coast.
Flash forward to her fate at the chopping block at Fotheringhay Castle. Guards rip off her outer gown, revealing the red dress of a Catholic martyr. Gasps all around either at the effrontery or at the chic fashion choice. But Mary Queen of Scots is about the lead up to this death, in her clashes with her ruthless frenemy (and cousin) Queen Elizabeth, played by Margot Robbie.
The Scots Queen has a rocky time in her batcave of a castle. She’s thundered against by the Protestants. Their spokesman: the preacher who put the Knox in obnoxious, John Knox. David Tennant plays the angry divine as a walking hairball in a velvet cap; he’s so obscured by whiskers that he’s excused for bugging his eyes trying to get his fans to recognize him. Mary faces wrath among the Scottish lairds, paid with English gold to destabilize the land.
But the Queen of Scots just wants a court of peace where everyone can have access to her multi-pierced ear. She’s religiously tolerant and LGBT friendly: her favorite person is a gay lad-in-waiting, played by Ismael Cruz Cordova, who likes to dress up as one of the ladies. Her castle is a much nicer place than Elizabeth’s palace, where the earls and knights all stand around muttering into their ruffs, wondering when Her Majesty is going to get married and start producing a few heirs.
Director Josie Rourke debuts after a background in theater. She’s a sort of calmer version of Julie Taymor. Here are processionals, actors standing and delivering their lines, and a fascination with draperies and costume. As in most modern Shakespeare, Rourke uses color-blind casting of black and Asian actors, which will hopefully nauseate British National Party members. Exteriors are lots of cattle and a little battle, with theatrical euphemism. There is no arterial spray in the skirmishes staged like football scrimmages; the entirety is far less violent than versions of this story I’d seen decades ago.
Ronan is ravishingly pretty and sympathetic, and she gets a kissing scene on horseback. “You dare touch a sovereign without her permission!” she says, which is sort of immemorial movie stuff. Given Robbie’s devotion to outre makeup and staring—as seen in the ice skating scenes in I, Tonya—it’s too bad she didn’t get to go eyeball to eyeball with John Knox. She has a prosthetic hook to her nose, and after a bout with the pox, she sports thick white makeup and a fluorescent red-orange wig that makes her resemble Stephen King’s It.
Each queen has a credible argument that the other was a usurper, but Mary Queen of Scots suggest that they would have had easier lives if they’d shown true sisterhood to one another. Elizabeth complains that “the throne has made me a man,” as if it’s a bad thing. This, as opposed to that famous moment where the English queen told her court proudly she had “the heart and stomach of a king.”
“I am not my father,” Elizabeth says, stung, when Mary predicts that being in Elizabeth’s care will end with her being executed; one previously thought that Elizabeth was proud of having a feared tyrant of a father, and that his reputation steadied her shaky throne.
Mary Queen of Scots breaks its template of modern enlightenment at the end. Exiled and at her weakest, Mary decides to pull rank on her rival Queen, a display of the kind of bravery that is usually called “gall.” However, the explanation of what happened between imprisonment and execution is missing.
In college, they warn you against the kind of history where things had to happen because they happened the way they happened. Thus we miss the question of what kind of plotting Mary had been up to—real or imaginary.
Mary Queen of Scots is an improvement over the pointless catfighting in The Favourite, but it misses a conclusion more solid than the idea that menfolk cause all the trouble in the world—that they’re weaklings and schemers keeping the sisters from doing it for themselves.
One of Santa Cruz’s biggest tech stories of the year somehow ended up flying a little under the radar. But what happened downtown in 2018 has significant implications, not just for tech companies, but also for the future of the local economy.
The Santa Cruz Fiber project, which was years in the making, is now a reality for some businesses and residents, bringing high-speed internet access to accommodate growing connectivity demands.
Santa Cruz-based Cruzio Internet is lighting up fiber connections in its first “fiberhood” downtown, including parts of River Street, Pacific Avenue, Front Street, and Cedar Street.
Conversations about building the gigabit-speed internet network (that’s 1,000 megabits per second) began years ago between Cruzio and the city of Santa Cruz. When it became clear that the city wasn’t ready to move forward with its end of the partnership, Cruzio proceeded on its own for the first phase. The company began construction in mid-2017, and connected its first customer to the network on Aug. 30 of this year. The speeds are 10 to 100 times faster than the internet connection many Santa Cruzans have in their homes.
For the businesses and residents in Cruzio’s initial offering area, their proximity to the fiber means they are “future-proofed for the next several decades at least,” since the network can be upgraded to handle 10-gigabit and faster speeds as technology evolves, says James Hackett, Cruzio’s director of business operations and development.
“We’re always looking at what’s coming down the line next,” Hackett says.
Cruzio expects to finish connecting the 300 customers who’ve so far signed up for the gigabit-speed offering during the next few months. The fiber network includes around 20,000 linear feet of underground fiber and encompasses some 1,200 properties. It even includes El Rio Mobile Home Park.
The cost for everyday users is $49.50 a month through Cruzio, which protects the data privacy of its customers, something America’s biggest internet providers do not do. (Some of the country’s biggest internet providers have volunteered to not sell customer data to third parties, but said they’ll still use it for their own advertising networks.)
The project is a proof of concept for the company. From a business standpoint, Cruzio estimates that it needs to connect at least one-third of the people in its covered area to sign up in order to move forward with additional rollouts.
And even though the city sat out a broader collaboration for now, Hackett says it was still a helpful partner in this initial phase, using “dig once” policies to tackle other projects in areas where there was excavation to lay fiber underground. The city is already reaping some of the rewards: Seven city properties are now connected to the fiber network.
Fast, reliable internet speeds are increasingly a need-to-have for business owners, too, as more of their daily operations rely on cloud-based software.
Kathy Daly, office manager and co-owner of the Santa Cruz Optometric Center, says she’s excited for the Cruzio gigabit fiber service because there were regular speed and connectivity issues with her two previous providers. That hurt business when staff couldn’t book appointments or process customers’ payments, Daly says.
“You just don’t realize how much you need it until you don’t have it,” she says.
New Year’s Eve means it’s time to bring out the bubbly, the most celebratory wine on the planet!
Bargetto Winery produces a delightful Blanc de Noirs sparkling wine made in the methode champenoise style. Festive and fun, it’s a perfect libation to ring in 2019—and it’s reasonably priced at $28.
As I was sipping on this lovely sparkler in Bargetto’s Soquel tasting room, the server suggested I add some of Chaucer’s raspberry wine for a zingy zap of red fruit, and the duo blended together in pretty pink harmony. Chaucer’s Cellars, an offshoot of Bargetto Winery, has been producing award-winning, dessert-style fruit wines for more than 50 years in varieties of blackberry, pomegranate, apricot and raspberry. A splash of fruit wine in the bubbly adds sassy color and flavor.
The North Coast Blanc de Noirs showcases bright aromas of citrus, strawberries and cherries. Hints of lemon rind and tart apples on the mid-palate add pizzazz to this tasty bubbly. From now until Dec. 31, the winery is offering free shipping on all Bargetto and Chaucer’s wines with your purchase of six or more bottles.
Congratulations are also due to Bargetto, which is celebrating 85 years in business. The winery has a second tasting room on Cannery Row in Monterey.
Bargetto Winery, 3535 North Main St., Soquel. Open daily noon-5 p.m. 800-422-7438, bargetto.com.
Bubbles and Bivalves on New Year’s Eve
Start celebrating 2019 with Equinox sparkling wine and oysters by Bill the Oyster Man. From 5-8 p.m. on Monday, Dec. 31, you can begin ringing in the New Year with bubbly and oysters. What a great pairing! A spoonful of caviar adds to the fun.
Admission is free, and oysters will start at $16 for six. Equinox will donate $10 of every bottle of sparkling wine sold during the party to the North Valley Community Foundation’s Camp Fire Relief Fund—an opportunity to start the New Year with a helping hand.
Equinox Wines, 334 Ingalls St. Unit 3, Santa Cruz. 471-8608, equinoxwine.com
Sundara Clark started Vixen Kitchen Paleo Gelato over five years ago using nothing but cashews, maple syrup, vanilla and salt in her ice cream.
Since one of her daughters has a dairy allergy, she says she wanted to experiment with something that her daughter could enjoy and she could feel good about feeding her kids. Clark, who grew up in Santa Cruz, has since developed five flavors—vanilla, chocolate, coffee, chai, and mint—all organic, gluten free, paleo, and vegan.
I bet you have so much gelato in your freezer at home.
CLARK: I don’t have any pints, but at one point I had 59 1.5 gallon tubs in a giant freezer in my garage. They are great for school events or weddings, and my daughter is doing a great job at eating the mint one—sometimes I let her eat it for breakfast. But we will be working on those tubs well into 2020. I use cashews for the gelato, and unfortunately my husband developed a nut allergy recently, maybe from eating so many cashews in the last few years. So now he can’t eat any of my gelato. He’s really not helping us at all with those tubs.
Any new flavors coming up?
I want to do more ice cream with chunks in it, like caramel swirl or cookie dough, and I really want to do a functional mushroom one like chaga or reishi. Everyone asks me to do matcha, which I’ve experimented with. I’ve done some strange other flavors, like basil-strawberry. I really want to do ice cream bars, and I’m playing around with zero sugar sweeteners right now, like monk fruit, because there are so many people that don’t eat sugars. I’ll go to Staff of Life and experiment with the sugar alternatives. It would be nice to have an option for people. It’s hard. I feel like I have to reinvent it all, but I’ve done it before so we’ll see.
Would you ever want to open a shop?
Yes, I actually looked at Abbott Square, but it didn’t work out financially. I really would love to have a cart, with, like, a cute umbrella that I could wheel around. I’ve been looking around, but am just doing wholesale for now.
Vixen Kitchen Paleo Gelato is available at Staff of Life, the Westside New Leaf and Whole Foods. vixenkitchen.co.
Recently, I decided it was time to use Santa Cruz Gives to give my eight-year-old daughter a lesson in how philanthropy works. So I gave her a copy of the Santa Cruz Gives cover story we ran a few weeks back that listed all of the groups participating and their projects, and suggested she read about all of them and then pick “two or three” that she’d like us to donate to as a family. “Just circle the ones you like the most,” I told her.
When she handed it back to me, she had circled absolutely every single group—all 33. “Uh, sweetie,” I said. “I think it might make more sense to consolidate how much we’re going to give into a few groups. They get more money that way.” Well, that’s when she started explaining why each group she had circled was important. If you can come up with a good counter argument to something like that, you’re a stronger parent than me. So … sorry, groups that got $5-$10 from us. But we really had to spread it around.
I hope you will, too—maybe not quite that spread around, but whatever moves you. This is the last week of the campaign; you have until midnight on Dec. 31 to go to santacruzgives.org and make your donation.
Meanwhile, as you prep for New Year’s Eve, allow us to be your guide. My cover story this week is on Robyn Hitchcock, who plays in Soquel on New Year’s weekend. I’m a longtime fan and in conversation he was as funny, interesting and thoughtful as I’d hoped he would be. Happy 2019!
I’m writing in response to the article about development at 1930 Ocean Street Extension. The article was, on the whole, balanced in its overview of the CEQA issues. But, as a resident of the street, I want to draw attention to what was not addressed in the article: 1) rezoning for high density—environmental review was required because the parcel was zoned for nine residential units, not the 40 the developer sought; 2) access—the only access to the entire street, including for large emergency vehicles, is via Graham Hill Road, and urban high-density development on a single-access parcel within the wild land interface is precisely what fire safety officials advise against (think about the Camp Fire catastrophe); 3) traffic safety—the road fronting the project is narrower than the minimum width required by the city’s fire ordinance, and the proposed changes to the intersection at Graham Hill make it more dangerous by sharpening the curve, reducing the line of sight and shortening the left exit lane onto Graham Hill; and 4) flooding—what wasn’t addressed was the additional impact the project would have on the significant storm runoff in this area that currently causes flooding to Crossing Street.
The EIR is admittedly a long and complex document, and given the pressures to increase housing and close relationships between city planners and developers, it received less than close scrutiny. Most homes and farms on Ocean Street Extension are in the county; the city’s decisions have a direct impact on the safety of both this rural environment and commuters using Graham Hill Road. This project is inconsistent in every way with the city’s General Plan for development—it’s just not the right project for this space.
Carla Freccero | Santa Cruz
Re: New City Council
What I truly feel good about is that we now have real conservatives on the council. You read that right! By conservative I mean in a “conserver” sense; that is conservation, based on environmental principles. Cummings especially brings scientific credentials to the council. We now have a majority on the council who care for a community of all living things, not just humans. I see council decisions that will lead Santa Cruz into a near future with care for San Lorenzo River wildlife habitat, care of all City open spaces to preserve, not “activate,” what’s left of the natural world, care that will minimize destruction of the night sky with overlighting, development actions based on repurposing and rehabilitation of existing city structures, rather than demolition and always building new. I look forward to creative and compassionate ways to house people without destroying the homes of other species. I think it can be done and this New Council seems qualified to do it. Congratulations all.
— Jean Brocklebank
Re: RTC’s Gary Preston
I’m very hopeful that Mr. Preston will not stake our future on antiquated rail technology. As he said, “Have the routes going to where the trips are going to be generated.” A 19th-century abandoned rail line does not go to education, government or employment centers in Santa Cruz County. Put the transportation solution right in the line of sight of the congestion, and that is with Bus Rapid Transit/Bus on Shoulder. Commuters will be able to easily see the busses passing them, and they are easy to adjust based on where people want to go. Rail simply cannot do that, and will be a huge mistake for Santa Cruz.
— Jack Brown
PHOTO CONTEST WINNER
Submit to ph****@*******es.sc. Include information (location, etc.) and your name. Photos may be cropped. Preferably, photos should be 4 inches by 4 inches and minimum 250dpi.
GOOD IDEA
The Seaside-based nonprofit Save the Whales has been hard at work on a postcard-writing campaign to protect Baja California’s critically endangered vaquita porpoises from becoming extinct. It’s estimated that there are now less than 30 vaquitas, which grow to be about four feet long. The postcards will go to newly seated Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to encourage him to continue his country’s initiatives to save the world’s most endangered marine mammal. To learn more, email ma***@***********es.org.
GOOD WORK
UCSC film professor Shelley Stamp curated a DVD box set called Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers. The six-disc collection celebrating the groundbreaking early female directors of American cinema has received a 2018 Special Award from the New York Film Critics Circle. Presented in association with the Library of Congress, Pioneers is the largest commercially released video collection of films by women directors focusing on American films made between 1911 and 1929, a major era in the histories of both film and of feminism in America.
For the past couple of years, Austin Smith and Mark Tegio have gotten together casually to strum their guitars.
They even wrote a handful of songs in the process, mixing their love of outlaw country with woodsy folk music, but never did much with it publicly aside from playing an open mic here and there.
“We were always playing together and writing songs,” says Smith.
The casual nature of it took a sharp left turn late last year, when their friend Stacey heard them play and suggested they record an album, even offering to produce it.
“We were partying and hanging out with her, and she said, ‘Let’s make an album,’” Tegio says. “After that, we decided, ‘Hey, let’s go share this album with people.’”
The duo’s self-titled album came out early this year. They’ve taken this living room project to clubs, and even toured a bit in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Oregon, and South Dakota. The blend of outlaw attitude with breezy folk vibes has created an emotive sound that captures the spirit of the West Coast roots vibe. You can hear its seamless blend on the record.
“It was pretty rough at the beginning,” Tegio says. “It got to the point where we weren’t so terrible anymore. I think it grew organically.”
The duo have their eyes set on making more music and getting out a lot more this year, really seeing what they can do with this music. They have a new single coming called “Talking Suzie Blue Blues,” available on all the streaming platforms on Jan. 20.
“There’s more pressure to get out and play more and tour more and travel more,” Tegio says. “Before it was just playing guitar. Now it’s changed, like, ‘Let’s go play guitar so we can get some free beer.’”
INFO: 6:30 p.m. Friday, Dec. 28. Santa Cruz Mountain Brewery, 402 Ingalls St., Santa Cruz. Free. 425-4900.
Good New Year’s resolution: taking the road less traveled. Why not start off right with this literal “road less traveled” walk? The group will walk along the North Escape Road, a paved road closed to traffic featuring stunning old-growth redwood groves along beautiful Opal Creek. The docent will talk about redwood ecology and park history while exploring the redwood forest. This is a 3-mile, two-hour walk for those with or without dogs. Bring water and comfortable shoes. Meet at park headquarters.
INFO: 9:30 a.m. Sunday, Dec. 30. Big Basin Redwoods State Park. 21600 Big Basin Way, Boulder Creek. 338-8883, parks.ca.gov/bigbasin. Free/parking $10.
Art Seen
Toy Trains Exhibit
Destined to delight the young and young at heart, the MAH’s annual Toy Trains exhibit is a marvel of astonishingly lifelike trains and landscapes to inspire any age group. The event showcases model trains through history, from the 1920s to today, and includes steam engines, electric trains and all of the bells and whistles to boot.
INFO: Wednesday, Dec. 26-Sunday, Jan. 6. Museum of Art and History. 705 Front St., Santa Cruz. Free.
Saturday 12/29
Snakes Alive
Join Big Basin Redwoods State Park Docent Diane Shaw in talking about the fascinating world of snakes. These little slithery noodle friends are a crucial part of our ecosystem—think of them as big worms just worming around. Shaw is bringing her snake for a show and tell, so feel free to bring your own little friend for a slithery play date. No snake? No problem, just grab one off the side of the road on your way up the mountain—they love that.
INFO: Noon-3 p.m. Big Basin Redwoods State Park, 21600 Big Basin Way, Boulder Creek. 338-8883, parks.ca.gov/bigbasin. Free/parking $10.
Tuesday 1/1
First Day Hikes
We hear the best cure for a hangover is a hike. What, you haven’t heard that? Try it, you’ll thank us later. Kick off the new year right by enjoying the best of the Santa Cruz outdoors. On New Year’s Day, state parks and beaches across the county are hosting special, first day docent-led hikes and explorations. From Henry Cowell to Nisene Marks and Seacliff State Beach, there are a bunch of options to choose from. Check online for full list of events, hikes and information.
INFO: Times and locations vary. parks.ca.gov. Free/$10 parking.
The idea of live shows based around musicians playing an album from start to finish started off as a novelty, but over the last several years has built into a full-fledged phenomenon that shows no signs of letting up.
It’s a form that defies conventional wisdom about what fans want out of a performance by their favorite artists. Supposedly, they only want to hear the “hits,” but most musicians will play those at any of their shows. What makes these full-album performances truly special is that they play the other songs from the records that fans have grown to love over repeated listenings, but that rarely—or never—get played live. Audiences crave these shows because they get to see and hear things that they haven’t before, and might not again.
Never was that truer for me than when I saw Robyn Hitchcock perform his first solo album, 1981’s Black Snake Diamond Role, in its entirety at the Fillmore last year. Not only had I never heard him play many of his earliest songs, like “Out of the Picture,” “City of Shame” and “Love,” but he also played them with Yo La Tengo as his backing band. It was an incredible show, but not one that I would have imagined. While they’re both pioneering alt-rock acts that turned college-radio cult fandom into major international success without compromising their idiosyncrasies, Hitchcock’s Britain just seems too far from Yo La Tengo’s Hoboken, New Jersey in every way.
But Hitchcock—who, after not playing in Santa Cruz since two 1998 Catalyst shows with his former backing band the Egyptians, returns solo to play Michael’s on Main on Dec. 29—says his connection to Yo La Tengo actually goes back to before it was formed, when the group’s future vocalist-guitarist Ira Kaplan was a music writer. Kaplan was a big fan of Hitchcock’s first band, the Soft Boys, which came out of Cambridge, England, in the late ’70s and built a cult following both in the U.K. and U.S. with proto-indie-rock songs like “Kingdom of Love” and “Queen of Eyes.”
“I’ve known them for years,” says Hitchcock of Yo La Tengo. “Ira was the first person to write up Black Snake Diamond Role in an American paper. He wrote some nice stuff about it, and the Soft Boys. He was one of the 28 or so people who saw us when we played in New York in 1980.”
Almost four decades later, that early connection finally came around to the show, on a whim.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” Hitchcock admits. “I just thought, ‘Ooh, wow, I wonder if they would back me up on Black Snake Diamond Role.’ Because in a way it’s now sort of an archetypal indie record, and they are an archetypal indie band. They’re very successful, but they’ll always have that sound—they’re never going to be sort of smoothed out or anything. Whatever it is, they define it.”
Now is definitely the time for him to act on such whims, because despite the fact that his big alt-radio hits like “Balloon Man” and “So You Think You’re In Love” were in the late ’80s and early ’90s, it’s quite possibly never been cooler to be Robyn Hitchcock than it is right now.
The Unsettled Celebrity
That was evident this year when Hitchcock was asked to write a song for director Jesse Peretz’s film adaptation of Nick Hornby’s “Juliet, Naked.” The result, “Sunday Never Comes,” was sung by Ethan Hawke as cult musician Tucker Crowe in the film. (A demo sung by Hitchcock is on the soundtrack, along with Hawke’s version, and Hitchcock plans to release a proper version of his own as a single next year.)
At this point, he’s had his music and uniquely stream-of-consciousness stage banter documented by the late director Jonathan Demme, in the 1998 concert film Storefront Hitchcock, and several of his songs have become part of the rock ’n’ roll canon. For example, “I Wanna Destroy You”—originally released on the Soft Boys’ classic 1980 album Underwater Moonlight—has been covered by everyone from the Replacements to the Circle Jerks to Uncle Tupelo to Liz Phair (a live clip of she and Hitchcock performing the song in October went viral).
“You don’t know how long a song is going to last. I think if I sing my songs long enough, I sort of can’t remember life before them,” he says. “Now I can’t really imagine what my life was like before I wrote ‘My Wife and My Dead Wife,’ and ‘Listening to the Higsons,’ and the ’80s radio hits. Just as I’ve sung ‘Visions of Johanna’ so much, I feel like it’s part of my life. I know Bob Dylan wrote it, but I feel like it belongs to me as a song now. So I’ll keep the royalties from ‘I Wanna Destroy You’ or one of those other old ones, but in a way they just feel like folk songs. They feel like they’ve been around forever.”
It’s not just his most popular songs that continue to influence rock songwriters, as I discovered when I went to the “Viva Hitchcock” show at the Fillmore in 2013, held in honor of Hitchcock’s 60th birthday. Organized by Colin Meloy of the Decemberists, it featured a number of major artists covering Hitchcock’s work, and some of the selections were downright obscure. Amanda Palmer of Dresden Dolls fame did a gorgeous version of “Surgery,” a song which was never even on a proper Hitchcock album, but has nonetheless become a fan favorite.
“It was very flattering,” Hitchcock says of that star-studded night. But he’s not altogether comfortable with this current level of affection from peers or fans.
“I think being a Brit, it’s quite hard for me to accept compliments,” he says. “I’m not one of those people going, ‘Thank you very much, it’s been wonderful, it’s great to be here, I love you all, good night.’ When people say, ‘I love you, Robyn’ from the audience, it’s very hard not to say something sarcastic back. ‘You don’t have to,’ or ‘I wish I loved you, too,’ or ‘Thanks for sharing’ or some sort of a put down, you know? Because I’m just too British. I’m too embarrassed by that sort of love. We’re used to being the kind of resigned losers. We’re a dismal bunch, and that may be why so many of us wind up in the states, because we want to warm ourselves on your guileless optimism.”
The Man Who Reinvented Himself
His most recent album, last year’s self-titled Robyn Hitchcock, is one of the best of Hitchcock’s entire career, which explains why someone would make their 21stsolo album their eponymous one. From the catchy literary rocker “Virginia Woolf” to the rootsy shuffle of “I Pray When I’m Drunk” to the closing “Time Coast,” which exemplifies the jangly guitar work that made him such a big influence on R.E.M. and other American rock bands, the album ties together sonic threads from all of his different eras.
“People would often say ‘Well, it’s been fascinating talking to you, Mr. Hitchcock, I see you have quite an extensive body of work. Where would you recommend I start listening?’ And I can’t really say that,” he says. “I don’t know. I’m too close to my work to be able to see how it strikes other people. But I figured if they’re going to like me at all, they’ll like that record. If they don’t like the Robyn Hitchcock record, nothing I’ve done is for them.”
Even though the album was enthusiastically received, Hitchcock isn’t sure whether the format is something he—or anyone—would be wise to continue with in the future. It’s not altogether hard to imagine that he might not, since his non-album songs, which have come out in collections like Invisible Hitchcock, You & Oblivion, and as bonus tracks on his reissued albums, are usually as good as his albums.
“I remember there was a guy once who referred to me as ‘king of the B-sides.’ I think there’s a lot to songs that are kind of ‘near-miss’ songs—songs that don’t quite make it. That the artist themselves, the auteurs, decide are not quite up to it, but the listener goes, ‘Oh, I love this one,’” Hitchcock says. “I kind of think in an artistically perfect world, you wouldn’t be allowed to release a song until five years after you recorded it, or an album until five years after you recorded it. And then you’d know what to do with it.”
But he hasn’t given up on albums altogether, at least not yet.
“If I make another one, maybe it’ll be Robyn Hitchcock II. I don’t know. I’m still recording, and I’m writing songs all the time, but I’m not sure about putting out another LP,” he says. “So in terms of albums, this one is me kind of waving at the world. Whether it’s hello or goodbye, I don’t know.”
Where in the World
Though Hitchcock’s songs are most often talked about in terms of their eccentricity—and when the imagery in one’s best-known songs centers around insects (“Madonna of the Wasps”), animal life (“Acid Bird,” “Bass”) and general Syd-Barrett-esque surrealism (“The Man With the Lightbulb Head,” “If You Were A Priest,” “When I Was Dead, “Adventure Rocket-Ship,” and countless others), that’s certainly understandable. But it’s also misleading. Hitchcock has never really been a madcap laughing; his songs have always had a humanist, emotional core that has shown through more and more overtly as his career progressed. In the evolution from the Soft Boys’ “Where Are The Prawns” to solo songs with his ’80s and ’90s band the Egyptians like “I’m Only You” and “Airscape,” to his 2004 album Spooked with longtime Hitchcock fans Gillian Welch and David Rawlings to the easy warmth of songs like “Belltown Ramble” and “I’m Falling” with late-2000s alt-rock supergroup the Venus 3 to the latest solo album—which opens with the emphatic declaration “I Want to Tell You What I Want”—it has sometimes felt like Hitchcock is coming out of his shell.
“As you get older, you’ve been you all your life, and there’s a point where you can be more confident, just because you’ve got as much right to exist as anybody. And you’re probably not going to do so for much longer,” he says. “The tentative outsider that I think I felt I was 40 years ago—the ‘I’m not really part of this species, mate,’ which I think was kind of my shtick and how I really felt—has sort of gone. Because I obviously am part of this species. Whatever I think or feel, I’m a human and we all share the same fate, we breathe the same air, we use the same drains. It’s incredible to think that technically I could mate with a Republican.”
Listening back over his body of work, what most defies the typical notion that Hitchcock is obsessively abstract is the way almost all of his albums feel so grounded in a particular place. One in particular, 1990’s Eye, has its epicenter in San Francisco, which has led to a special bond with his Northern California fans. His second stripped-down solo acoustic endeavor after 1984’s I Often Dream of Trains, Eye opens with a few verses worth of his trademark startlingly funny lyrics (“Napoleon wore a black hat/Ate lots of chicken/And conquered half Europe”) but rolls into some of the most gorgeous imagery he’s ever put on record in “Raining Twilight Coast,” “Queen Elvis” and “Glass Hotel.” He even gets pretty close to Santa Cruz in “Aquarium” (“In the aquarium/You stroked a greasy ray/Just at the end of day/Way down in Monterey”).
“Eye was recorded in San Francisco, when I had two San Francisco relationships, and it’s largely about the end of one and the beginning of the other. So that’s a very San Francisco record,” he says. “Eye is completely set where it happens, which is quite rare for me. I usually take a while to process my emotions.”
There’s always been a strong fascination with American life that runs through his work, but now that he’s living here full-time—having moved to Nashville, where he lives with his partner, musician Emma Swift—Hitchcock is perhaps surprisingly more focused on his native country.
“The Robyn Hitchcock record, all of those songs were written off the British mainland—except one of them was written in a tube train, so it was under the British mainland in London—but it’s all very much looking at my life in Britain. It’s all about what I was leaving behind, really,” he says. “And I suspect that what I’m writing now in Tennessee is also looking at Britain. In a way, it’s easier to deal with Britain as a kind of lost lover, like the old song ‘How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away?’ For me to look at—to feel—my homeland, I have to be a safe distance from it.”
But for the man who wrote “Where Do You Go When You Die?” it’s all relative.
“The real division is between the living and the dead,” he says. “Whether I’m in Vietnam or Guildford or Paris or New Haven, Connecticut, I’m still here. Once you’ve crossed over into unbeing, that’s when you’ve gone. While you’re still here, it doesn’t really matter—we’re all on Earth. It’s a question of degree. I’m not as in London as I was, but I’m still a lot more than I’m going to be.”
Robyn Hitchcock plays at 9 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 29, at Michael’s on Main, 2591 S. Main, Soquel. $25. michaelsonmain.info.
Neuroscientist Lindsey Chester says the true gift of children’s musical theater is the way that it combines three spheres of learning—visual, auditory and kinesthetic—into one fun atmosphere that’s welcoming to all children.
Chester, who studied child psychology, is the executive and artistic director of All About Theater, which serves as an ambassador for children to the arts. From a neurological perspective, Chester says that musical theater builds up social emotional awareness, decreases rates of depression and even increases neural connections between the right and left hemispheres of the brain.
“If you start young and continue, you set a pathway and a foundation of learning and a flexibility in the mind of how to adapt to anything,” she says.
All About Theater is one of three arts organizations participating in this year’s Santa Cruz Gives holiday fundraising drive, sponsored by GT. One of Chester’s favorite things about her nonprofit is that, unlike with school, everything is constantly changing, including the casts.
“For us, it’s about making sure everybody understands that theater isn’t just about jazz hands and Broadway squares,” Chester says. “It really has so much more depth and wealth to it. A lot of it is about the process and what the kids are learning and going through.”
Every organization taking part in the Santa Cruz Gives drive has a “big idea” that it is raising money for. This year, All About Theater is prioritizing resources on its Arts for All project, which will focus on South County kids and bridging divides between regions in the Monterey Bay.
All About Theater divides groups by age and carefully selects age-appropriate plays for each level. Chester just announced that Disney’s Alice in Wonderland Jr. will be the spring show for the younger group. “The kids started screaming in the dressing room when I told them,” she says.
After 15 years and 150 shows, Chester says that All About Theater has had an impact on thousands of local kids. “Many of them are now older. They’re in their mid-to-late 20s, and they’re coming back as educators,” Chester says.
This year, there are other Santa Cruz Gives groups doing their part to expand the creativity of young people.
In Watsonville, the nonprofit Pajaro Valley Arts (PVA) is a gallery that holds between seven and eight exhibitions a year. PVA President Adrienne Momi says its spring show is usually centered around social justice issues. This year, it’s highlighting the importance of civic engagement, especially through voting.
Your Voice, Your Vote is the arts organization’s spring exhibit and its special Santa Cruz Gives project. Momi, a printmaker and painter, is currently soliciting artists for the show. “It’s not political,” she says. “We’re not taking any kind of sides or promoting one party or the other. What we’re promoting is that we are the government through our voice, our vote.”
The project was inspired by Latino voting rights legal activist Joaquin Avila, who died this past year, and once spearheaded a voting rights challenge on behalf of the city of Watsonville and prevailed in the late 1980s. With that victory, Avila, who argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, defeated decades of disenfranchisement. The ruling paved the way for districted elections and allowed for better representation of a town that had a growing Latino population, but also had a long history of all-white representation.
Momi says all of the exhibits are bilingual and have something to offer for visitors of all ages. Typically, the PVA receives about 100 groups a year to tour its gallery. “Everything is always free. There are no admission charges or costs for the tours,” Momi says. “It’s only through donations that these costs are covered.” PVA is working with Pajaro Valley Unified School District to create an Arts Now community program to build support for developing more arts education.
Meanwhile, kids who don’t picture themselves in a gallery are finding other ways to express themselves—thanks to a separate nonprofit that’s engaging local children in a different kind of art, one that gets people moving.
The dance troupe Senderos has been busy since last year’s Santa Cruz Gives campaign, which helped fund numerous performances throughout 2018. “We are busy. That’s the point—to keep the students, the musicians and dancers busy,” says Fe Silva-Robles, who founded the youth group with her sister Nereida Robles Vasquez 17 years ago.
Senderos, an after-school program with dance and music classes, shares elements of Mexican culture, welcoming in anyone who might be unfamiliar with Latin American traditions.
This past week, Senderos dancers led the procession at a traditional Las Posadas celebration. Senderos also partnered with Friends of State Parks for the Mole and Mariachi Festival, and performed a classical music piece at the Santa Cruz Mission State Park. “It was so beautiful seeing the musicians bringing the traditional music to that special place,” Silva-Robles says.
Senderos performed at the Ebb and Flow River Festival, as well as Soquel High School and Santa Cruz High School fundraisers. Students even performed at the Mexican Consulate in San Jose and the Carnaval San Francisco.
The group was in high demand for Dia De Los Muertos celebrations, performing at three celebrations of the Mexican holiday, sometimes known in the United States as the Day of the Dead.
A growing interest this year in the traditional Mexican holiday may have coincided with Pixar’s release of the animated musical, Coco.
Silva-Robles, who is from Oaxaca, says that the two years the filmmakers spent in Oaxaca learning how to represent the inhabitants in the film paid off, leading to an accurate depiction of the region’s people and culture.
Dipping into Spanish, Silva-Robles says that many people from Mexico were moved by the film. “Coco is a movie that touched a lot of our paisanos because of the connection, because of the culture, because of the different reasons they cannot travel and go back and leave,” she says, referring to the main conflict in the movie.
Similarly, Senderos serves the special role of bringing the culture of Mexican immigrants who long for it and cannot easily travel to fiestas in their home country. Often, Silva-Robles says, audience members are left in tears.
“It is a therapy, an emotional moment,” she says. “At least for one day, for one afternoon, for one evening, the audience can escape to a place they don’t see in their daily lives as immigrants.”
For information on how to donate to any of the 33 organizations participating in Santa Cruz Gives, visit santacruzgives.org by Dec. 31.
[This is the third and final story in a series on recycling and waste reduction in Santa Cruz County. Read part one here. Read part two here. — Editor]
Until the end of November, Ivy Young managed Santa Cruz’s only regional composting program for residents.
Customers of the Santa Cruz Community Compost Co. would scrape food scraps off their plates and cutting boards into a bucket every night. And for $5 a week, Young would show up on a bike to collect whatever leftovers were ready to get turned into worm food.
“I had not built a business model. I was just winging it,” says Young, a single mom who launched the environmentally friendly business in 2014. But it was far from her only priority. She always had at least two other jobs to support herself. “I was just trying to make something happen.”
Trouble struck when Young broke her wrist in a cycling accident on the job. For three months she kept on biking, but once it became clear that she could do her arm permanent damage, she went in for surgery. Doctors put a cast on her wrist, and she sent out an email to her subscribers explaining that Santa Cruz Community Compost would unfortunately be shutting down.
Soon, hundreds of frenetic emails began piling up in Young’s inbox—emails she has been meaning to respond to. She didn’t want customer service to suffer while she recovered, so she “decided to make a clean break of it for now.”
At the company’s peak, Young had only a couple of employees helping out with cycling and food scrap collections. The operation, which stretched from the Westside of Santa Cruz to Capitola, had started growing more quickly, and she was having an increasingly difficult time managing the explosion in interest. Just keeping up with the work of turning her enormous compost pile at the Homeless Garden Project—which she did herself—was proving more and more daunting all the time.
Young is thinking about re-launching the effort as a nonprofit, or possibly even partnering with the city of Santa Cruz on a similar effort in the future. Her customers are having a difficult time putting their food scraps back in the trash, she explains, and they have started brainstorming other solutions. “There’s all that momentum we built,” Young says.
One thing customers really loved was getting back a pound of compost for every four pounds of waste collected. “They liked participating in the full circle of it,” Young says.
By the end, Santa Cruz Community Compost Co. was serving more than 500 households and collecting 17,000 pounds of organic waste per month, she says. Before the sudden closure, the business was just about to hit the 500,000-pound mark.
HERO TO ZERO
Local activists and government officials sometimes throw around the term “zero waste,” a buzzword for the goal of eliminating trash dumped into landfills. A clear path for how or when this can be achieved, though, has yet to materialize. Even though the county adopted a Zero Waste Plan in 2015, it isn’t even clear at this point if we are headed in the right direction.
State regulators track the amount of trash sent to landfills in every local jurisdiction across the state, including Capitola, Scotts Valley and Watsonville, as well as in both the city and the county of Santa Cruz. Between 2013 and 2017, the per capita trash headed for local landfills has trended up slightly in the city of Santa Cruz, the county and in Scotts Valley, according to thewebsite for CalRecycle, which oversees the state’s waste management strategies. Disposal rates in Watsonville and Capitola, however, have stayed more or less the same during that span. The county’s unincorporated areas average the lowest rates for waste disposal.
Despite the backslide, each local government is still meeting its state-mandated goals for waste disposal, which are tied to how many tons each locale was sending to the landfill 15 years ago. Additionally, the county and all four local cities are consistently well below thestate averages for per capita pounds of garbage, which also startedtrending upward again in2013.
Tim Goncharoff, a resource planner for the county, says that it’s typical for the amount of garbage headed to the landfill to increase during an economic recovery. And the increase in online ordering services, like Amazon, has shoppers sending more wasteful packaging to the dump than ever, he adds. Many future waste-reduction breakthroughs, Goncharoff says, will depend on increased stewardship from manufacturers. “The basic idea is that companies that produce products should have some responsibility for what happens to them at end of life,” he says.
Even while garbage at dumps piles up faster, California regulators are scrambling to implement ambitious new rules designed to attain carbon-reduction goals laid out by state law. A CalRecyclereport released last month began laying out a framework to double the collection of organics recycling over the next six years. But the changes will pose new costs to the state’s families, businesses and local governments. More formal rules will come out next year, and CalRecycle is still in the comment phase. The League of California Countieshas already started pushing back with concerns about cost and implementation.
USE TO KNOW
Here in Santa Cruz County, local communities are not exactly in the dark ages of waste management.
The county’s groundbreaking ban on single-use bottles for personal care products at hotels will go into effect in two years. Emily Hanson, GreenWaste’s business development director, tells GT that Santa Cruz County’s recycling always comes in very clean, compared to other communities around the Bay Area. And Craig Pearson, Santa Cruz’s superintendent of waste disposal, says that recyclers who buy the material from his facility always compliment him on how immaculate the product is.
Nonetheless, Pearson isn’t optimistic that zero waste is a realistic goal—at least not immediately.
The idea would be impossible, Pearson explains, in a world where the very companies that make cheap packaging and profit off of the current system are paying off the politicians who would need to step in and introduce new regulations or ban certain items. Even to pass local Santa Cruz ordinances banning controversial materials like polystyrene, he remembers the overwhelming pushback from the manufacturing industry.
But then, Pearson looks up toward the sky. He pauses to think. Actually, he says, he’s “super confident that we can get to zero waste.”
“Tomorrow? No. But I think we will,” he says.
To explain the change of heart, Pearson recalls when he first started working in curbside recycling in the city of Capitola. Lots of locals told him that they had been putting their aluminum cans in the trash their whole lives, and that they would never stop.
In the 29 years since, he’s watched attitudes change dramatically.
“So what’s it gonna be in 29 more years?” Pearson asks. “I’m gonna be recycling, and the kids are gonna be saying, ‘Hey wait a second, we don’t even buy that stuff anymore. This is what we use, and we reuse it over and over and over again.’ So hey, maybe I am optimistic, if I think about it that way.”
