The ingredients that 11th Hour Coffee throws into its avocado toast would put the offerings from any Brooklyn café to shame.
At 11th Hour, employees serve up their special version complete with watermelon radish, garlic-infused olive oil, nutritional yeast balsamic glaze, and a little salt. Brothers Brayden and Joel Estby, co-owners of the newly opened coffee house, plan to celebrate the joint’s official grand opening on Wednesday, Oct. 31.
I’ll mention here that I’d forgotten about this assignment until dangerously close to GT’s deadline, which gave his café’s name a special meaning. Luckily, Brayden was available on short notice.
Love the name 11th Hour. How did you come up with it?
BRAYDEN ESTBY: I was reading a spiritual book, and it was talking about the 11th hour, and I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with my coffee idea. I was just starting to roast. This was about four and a half years ago. For me, the 11th hour was representing the present moment. The 11th hour is the moment you pull out whatever reason, whatever “why” you need to get up in the morning, to get excited about something. That’s the 11th hour.
What are your core values here?
Our values internally are all based around communication. One is personal growth work—so people quit jobs often, especially at coffee shops, but it’s usually that they’re quitting their employer or the environment more than anything. As an employer, we want to create a space for our employees where it’s invigorating and captivating and they feel like they’re growing as a person. Customer service is the most important thing. People have preconceptions before they even sip a cup, so feeling comfortable, invited and welcome is a core value. Our overall mission as a company is to spread awareness and expression, so come as you are. Express who you are, how you want to express it. And raise your awareness as a human. Higher consciousness through higher-quality coffee.
One of the things we want to promote with our coffee is mindfulness of consumption. We don’t serve in 16-ounce cups or 32-ounce cups. Twelve ounces is our largest. We promote being mindful of what you’re consuming and how you’re consuming it.
Is the medium one a “tall?”
No [laughs], none of our drinks actually have a large or a small. Every drink is descriptive of what the size is. So a latte’s a certain size—cappuccino, macchiato, espresso.
Wait, there’s only one size for coffee?
That’s the one thing where there is a small and a large.
Are the bar and tables handmade?
Everything in the entire café is built by me and my brother. Every table, every piece of wood. The bar, the espresso machine. The only thing that isn’t is the heavy equipment, like the grinders and the brewers. It’s very DIY.
11th Hour Coffee. 1001 Center St. #1, Santa Cruz. eleventhhourcoffee.com. Br*****@****************ee.com.
Electronic music artist Alex Crossan, who goes by the stage name Mura Masa, was born and raised on Guernsey, a small island in the English Channel off the coast of Normandy.
A young, well-known producer who grew up performing in punk, hardcore, deathcore and gospel bands, Crossan gravitated to electronic music in his teens and has since won numerous awards and caught the attention of industry giants, including Nile Rodgers.
As one reviewer put it, “this child of the internet generation is now ready to make a serious mark on the big, wide, real world.”
INFO: 9 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 29. Catalyst, 1011 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz. $23/adv, $25/door. 423-1338.
WANT TO GO?
Go to santacruz.com/giveaways before 11 a.m. on Monday, Aug. 20 to find out how you could win a pair of tickets to the show.
If you’re looking for a beautiful spot to go wine tasting, then Clos LaChance fits the bill.
With its lush gardens, abundant vineyards and its lively hummingbird theme—the bird is emblazoned on just about everything—it’s a pleasurable place to visit. Situated on Hummingbird Lane—what else would it be called?—in the San Martin area of Santa Clara County, this family-owned winery has truly earned its reputation as a destination of renown.
Among the wines I tried at a recent tasting was a Malbec 2014 Central Coast ($36)—a lively dark purple wine with hints of leather, spice, mocha, blackberry, and fig. Aromas of black licorice, pepper and cinnamon add to the wine’s appeal. Very dry and teeming with flavors of red and black fruit, the Malbec pairs well with dishes like beef stew and shepherd’s pie.
Clos LaChance produces an abundance of different wines, including a 2017 Rosé called Colibri (“hummingbird” in Spanish) for only $20. Special promotions run regularly, when a case of wine can be had for $60. And be sure to check the winery’s website for their many events, including music line-ups until the end of September.
Clos LaChance Winery, 1 Hummingbird Lane, San Martin (Gilroy area off Watsonville Road), 408-686-1050, clos.com.
Wine Classes at Cabrillo
Want to learn more about wine? Enology expert Sue Slater, department chair and culinary and wine instructor, will be teaching a class at Cabrillo College in the fall called French Wines, which runs from Aug. 28 to Dec. 18. Another class, Wine Faults, will be taught by Deborah Parker Wong. It runs from Aug. 29 to Dec. 19. These classes are upbeat, fun and interesting—and you’ll certainly be much better informed about wine.
To register go to cabrillo.edu or email Slater at su******@******lo.ed for more info.
Wine Map
The Santa Cruz Mountains Winegrowers Association (SCMWA) puts out a wine map periodically, with updated information about winery openings and closings. It contains information on events and the history of Santa Cruz Mountains wines. The map is free and can be picked up at local wineries and elsewhere. Visit scmwa.com for more info.
Despite Mona Lisa, despite The Last Supper, despite Vitruvian Man and The Virgin of the Rocks, it’s possible that the most impressive creative expressions of Leonardo da Vinci have been lost in the mists of time.
In the late 15th century, Leonardo served as a producer of theatrical pageants in the court of the Duke of Milan. From set design to costumes to music, Leonardo did it all, creating phantasmagoric shows that we can barely imagine today. As related in Walter Isaacson’s best-selling 2016 biography Leonardo da Vinci, in one production, a mountain is cleaved in half to expose Hades where a dozen devils are making hellish noises with pots. As Leonardo wrote in his notebooks about the set piece, “Here will be Death, the Furies, ashes, many naked children weeping; living fires made of various colors. Dances follow.”
Because YouTube was 500 years too late to catch the moment, and because paintings generally last for centuries, today we tend to think of Leonardo primarily as a painter. But he could never be contained by such a limiting term. He was the ultimate hyphenate, a mind of astounding curiosity and resourcefulness who paid no heed to arbitrary lines drawn between art and science, aesthetics and engineering, or any other category of human endeavor.
UCSC’s Dean of the Arts Division Susan Solt would be the first to tell you that Leonardo is overused as a symbol for restless genius. But she’s using him nevertheless as a tool to reconfigure arts education. Solt has designed an approach that she calls the “Da Vinci Mindset,” that she hopes will lead to a revolution in how higher education trains creative people. The idea is not to sell students the ridiculous notion that anyone can become like Leonardo, but instead that Leonardo’s creativity was a function of his engagement with the world, that he was a creative entrepreneur.
Historically, the e-word doesn’t go down well with artists. Entrepreneur is too mercenary, transactional and commercial. For some, it derives from the French for “selling out.”
“Of course, I’m going to use the word,” says Solt, who had a long career at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts)—and before that, as a Hollywood film producer. “That’s our word. I’m just taking it back.”
To drive her point home, she refers to the Oxford English Dictionary. Sure enough, there it is, the original meaning of entrepreneur: “The director or manager of a public musical performance.”
“That term might upset people,” says Solt. “But I’m using the word to subvert the word. Business entrepreneurs will say, ‘What’s an artist entrepreneur? What does that even mean?’ Well, that’s what artists do. We are serial entrepreneurs. Artists have always had to create their own opportunities. There’s nothing new in all this at all. It’s just owning what we do and getting credit for it.”
Calling Leonardo an entrepreneur isn’t some slick marketing metaphor. It’s the literal truth.
ART SCHOOL TABOOS
Whether you’ve been to art school or not, you know the cliché: Art school is a place that crushes idealism, rewards flattery and fetishizes commercial success while pretending to sneer at it. Even in the best case scenario, art school can often provide intensive training in technique and form while also leaving its charges ill-equipped to deal with the world after graduation.
Designer Shannon Scrofano got her degree at CalArts, and now teaches there. Her time as a student, she says, was often a kind of monastic deep-dive that ignored the world outside. “As far as I could see, it was, ‘come spend three or four years of your life hunkered down in the most self-absorbed but still productive process in doing what you do.’ But all you had on the other side was your portfolio,” she says. “Concrete professional development was not super present in art schools.”
Then she took a class from Solt in creative entrepreneurship, a pioneering course that violated a lot of art school taboos. It talked about jobs, the market, branding, careers. Solt asked her students to write letters to older artists that they would like to emulate, to look at the professional journeys of artists who have gone before them, to envision what the next decade of their lives might look like. “No one was even remotely asking those kinds of questions,” says Scrofano.
CREATIVE CAPITALFormer film producer Susan Solt is bringing more focus on financial sustainability to her role as UCSC’s Dean of the Arts Division.
Inspired by the approach of a nonprofit called Creative Capital—which provides mentoring, project funding and other services to aspiring artists—Solt went looking to carve out a new path between hidebound art schools and the demands of the free market. And she was not shy about throwing elbows when she had to.
“There has been an antipathy to actually discussing art as a money-making enterprise,” she says. “It’s so frustrating, because there’s been this destructive linking between the notion that if you think about making money as an artist that you’re somehow compromising your integrity, and your artistry. That’s been perpetuated by a desire to stay pure and make sure we don’t train commercial artists or turn our art schools into vocational schools. There’s this built-in terror that it will subvert the vision of the artist.”
Solt’s credo is not to convince her students to create art that will sell in the market; it’s to figure out a way to sell the art that they want to make. It’s not how to appeal to mass, lowest-common-denominator taste, but how to find a sustainable audience for your idiosyncratic work.
“I have never tried to dictate content or aesthetic. You can have the most wild, out-there aesthetic. But you still have to have a constituency,” she says.
SHOW BUSINESS
Before coming to CalArts, Solt had built a fine career as a film producer, beginning with Sophie’s Choice—among her duties was to help Meryl Streep with her Polish dialect. After that she enjoyed a productive period working alongside director Alan Pakula. (Among the films the two made together was the Harrison Ford thriller Presumed Innocent).
In Solt’s view, the film producer is the ultimate creative entrepreneur, the person who takes a specific artistic vision and makes it work in the real world. Artists have to be their own director and their own producer. She figured that art schools were doing well in creating the directors, but were ignoring the producer part.
But in her role as dean at CalArts, she had come to a professional crossroads. Her plans, based on the Creative Capital model, were more ambitious than the institution was willing to support. With costs of higher education spiraling into the stratosphere, she also began to feel a moral pinch. “I could no longer justify to myself that I was the one out there hawking that education with the price tag that it had,” she says.
The job at UCSC came by happenstance. She saw an ad in an academic journal for the position of dean of the Arts Division. Feeling stymied at CalArts, she responded to the ad. She told herself, “If they have what I want, I want to go with them.” With tuition in the UC system about a quarter of what it is at the private CalArts, her qualms about student finances were quieted. In the hiring process, she pushed her convictions about creative entrepreneurship. She got the job. In the summer of 2016, Solt was introduced as the new dean of the Arts Division.
WINNING OVER CRITICS
Before and after coming to UCSC, Solt has been an evangelist for creative entrepreneurship and the embrace of branding and marketing that it entailed. She was recognized as a pioneer in the approach and may have been the first to teach a creative entrepreneurship class. In 2015, The Atlantic published an article by writer William Deresiewicz that Solt took to be an example of backlash to her ideas. “It’s hard to believe,” Deresiewicz wrote of creative entrepreneurship, “that the new arrangement will not favor work that’s safer; more familiar, formulaic, user-friendly, eager to please—more like entertainment, less like art.”
Solt rebuts that argument by pointing again to Leonardo: “[Deresiewicz] was instrumentalizing something that I think is a mindset, and I teach it as the Da Vinci mindset: be imaginative, be engaged in the world and see where your imagination has value. There are art critics who think that Leonardo did a terrible disservice to himself by being interested in science and engineering and doing all those pageants. They say, ‘Well, think of the paintings that were lost to the future because Leonardo’s time was squandered.’ Why instrumentalize a great artist’s choices and decisions by imposing our values on him?”
Deresiewicz is now writing a book about how artists make a living in the modern world. “My position has changed a bit since I wrote that article,” he says. “Among the many other reasons for that is because I had a good conversation with Susan Solt.”
Deresiewicz and Solt are not mutual antagonists when it comes to art. For example, they both seem quite happy to dance on the grave of the outdated notion of the artist as the divinely inspired solitary genius. But in his Atlantic piece, Deresiewicz copped to a suspicion that creative entrepreneurship was “the final triumph of the market and its values.”
He said that he really just wants to draw distinctions between artists trying to find their place in the market and cynical opportunists who might slap an image of the Mona Lisa on a Louis Vuitton handbag and call themselves artists. “We need to acknowledge the presence of money in art, so we can be vigilant about it,” he says. “And so we can tell the difference between work that has integrity but still needs to sell for something so that the artist can continue to make work, and art that is not art at all but just a surrender to the market.”
He admits now that “Solt’s position falls on the good side of this.” He cites her impulse to begin her creative entrepreneurship classes with lots of introspection, to get her students to address fundamental questions like “Who am I as an artist?” and “What do I want to say in the world?”
Last spring, Solt began her initiative at UCSC in earnest with a lecture series that brought in a wide variety of guest artists including Apple creative director Rick Vargas and arts producer Margaret Wolfson, whose lecture was titled Branding Matters. With Wolfson’s help, Solt has branded the new approach at UCSC as Artist21, and has created an internship program to create opportunities in entertainment, tech and other industries.
The lecture series was co-taught by Nada Miljkovic, a Crown College instructor who has begun an entrepreneurial initiative of her own at UCSC. She runs the Summer Entrepreneurial Academy and plans to teach an entrepreneurial class in the fall. “When I heard about what [Solt] was doing, I was excited because it’s totally in alignment to what I was pitching and creating,” says Miljkovic.
In the classroom, Solt draws lessons from Leonardo’s life as articulated in the Isaacson biography. They include curiosity, retaining a childlike sense of wonder, thinking visually, collaborating, indulging fantasy and going down rabbit holes. “Look, I believe in ‘Follow Your Bliss.’ I tell everyone, ‘start with your authentic values, follow your bliss.’ But have a plan. Learn how to write grants. Be curators. Think of other avenues where your values are enhanced. Find that person who shares your tastes. Look at yourself and create a career plan, apply those principles, whether you’re making art, or writing a book, or getting a job in the ballet. There isn’t an artist who has ever been successful who does not understand their market.”
“She has conviction and it’s contagious,” said Shannon Scrofano of Solt in the classroom. “She believes in you. If you work hard, show up and activate your brain, she’ll be one of your greatest champions in the whole world. And that’s really powerful.”
Five years ago, then-Santa Cruz mayor Hilary Bryant knew that there was a healthy tech start-up culture really starting to bloom in Santa Cruz, but she didn’t feel she knew as much about it as she should have.
As a part of the city’s business retention efforts, Bryant remembers visiting the offices of Looker, the data-analytics company that today is one of Santa Cruz’s most prominent homegrown businesses.
“It was probably six or seven people in the small office in the back of the Cruzio building,” she says “I kept thinking, ‘I know you guys are doing something cool, but I have no idea exactly what you’re doing.’”
At the time, the tech industry in Santa Cruz was growing largely outside of notice, so much so that the city’s mayor had to rely on rumor and scuttlebutt to figure out who was doing what.
The timing could not have been better for Sara Isenberg, and her idea to provide centralized coverage of Santa Cruz’s tech sector at a new website she called Santa Cruz Tech Beat. Isenberg showed up at the mayor’s office with exactly the solution to her problem.
“Sara and I had a great conversation,” says Bryant. “I told her that as an elected official, I wanted to be able to tell this story and to understand this story. But I didn’t know how to tap into that community without going to a whole lot of events. And I didn’t even have the understanding to know which events to attend. And when she showed up, I was like, ‘Yes, please, how can I help you do this?’”
Bryant became one of Tech Beat’s earliest subscribers.
This summer, Santa Cruz Tech Beat is celebrating its fifth anniversary of providing a window into the world of Santa Cruz’s busy tech sector. From the beginning, Isenberg has claimed no standing as a journalist. Instead, she comes from tech herself, having graduated from UCSC with a degree in computer science and working in the computer industry since the early 1980s, most notably at Santa Cruz Operations (SCO) throughout the 1990s.
“I’m a tech person who just happened to be here and happened to pick up something I thought would be fun when my son was headed off to college,” says.
Isenberg credits her friend and fellow techie Margaret Rosas—who later introduced her to the mayor—for inspiring Tech Beat in July 2013. “The conception at the time wasn’t a grand thing,” says Isenberg. “It was just a newsletter. The people at the city were too busy with other things to know what was going on in tech, and unless if you were spending all day at NextSpace, you didn’t know what was going on.”
An ecosystem emerges
Santa Cruz Tech Beat first began collecting press releases from the entrepreneurs in town and quickly expanded to include interviews, events and job listings. It was the job postings that really attracted eyeballs to the site, and after a couple of years, Isenberg moved from a tech consultant who publishes a newsletter on the side to a publisher who does consulting on the side.
“The news on the site is a selection of curated news that’s written elsewhere, press releases, guest articles,” she says.
Santa Cruz Tech Beat soon expanded its purview and began covering the tech sector not only throughout Santa Cruz County but in Monterey and San Benito counties as well. Since then, the site has brought into sharper focus the nature of tech around the Monterey Bay, chronicling the rise of several hubs of activity—genomics, stemming from the Genomics Institute at UCSC; adventure sports and gaming; and agricultural tech. With companies such as Plantronics and Fullpower Technologies, Santa Cruz has a stake in wearable tech. Overall, it’s a thriving community that ties together the biggest players in Santa Cruz’s tech economy, from UCSC to Cruzio to ProductOps and Looker to Santa Cruz New Tech Meet Up.
Doug Erickson of New Tech MeetUp says that Isenberg and Tech Beat provide a valuable bridge in the town’s tech ecosystem. He points to studies that list critical components like institutions of higher learning, municipal support, angel investors, mentor businesspeople and incubator businesses. “You have to have all those components for a tech ecosystem to thrive,” he says, “and Tech Beat connects all those components together.”
New Tech MeetUp began 10 years ago, long before Tech Beat. And the absence of a site like Tech Beat made Erickson’s job difficult. “It was very difficult,” he says, “to find out who would be interested, what’s the history, whether anyone has tried to do this before. It was really hard to find out any of that stuff. Now, with Tech Beat, we have a record of everything that’s been going on, and that’s a very valuable thing to have.”
The tech industry’s relationship with the public has always included a degree of hype, but Isenberg makes the point to say that she is not inclined to hyperbole. “I’m just not a hyperbolic person,” she says. “I’m not a salesperson. I’m really just an introverted, geeky kind of person. When I publish, the focus I want to give is not that these companies have sexy products necessarily. It’s more that they make these kinds of products, and they were started by so-and-so. And what I’ve learned is that even though you think that tech people would value Tech Beat, it’s really the people who are around tech but not in it that are more interested. City and county leaders, university people, attorneys, commercial real-estate people, all the people who have an interest in the infrastructure around tech.
Santa Cruz Tech Beat is largely supported by the institutions and companies that it covers, allowing Isenberg to generate some income and spend her time populating the site. “It generates an income,” she says. “Not a Silicon Valley high-tech income. It’s not like having a salary. But I’m my own boss, and I can do what I want.”
Tech Beat also keeps the breathless “Silicon Beach” rhetoric that the local tech industry has had problems living up to in check.
“We are what we are,” says Isenberg of Santa Cruz County’s tech community, downplaying any notion that Santa Cruz might become some Next Big Thing in tech. “It’s up to individuals to start companies. I don’t think all of a sudden something big is going to happen locally. We have an ecosystem here.”
Intellectual and developmental disabilities don’t have to hinder a happy and successful life, says Anya Hobley, co-director of Camphill Community in Santa Cruz. At Camphill, workers don’t get a salary, and care doesn’t come at a financial cost. Instead, the residents work to give back to their community in order to support themselves.
“The way that people feel engaged and have a sense of purpose in the community here is different from the run-of-the-mill care,” Hobley says. “People are able to cultivate independence and sometimes it’s a shock for the families who thought that they would be dependent on them for life.”
Some of these workers and residents spend their time weaving, others on papermaking or organic biodynamic gardening. The focus of Camphill is community life, the arts, and working the land. Nestled in the Soquel hills, the community houses more than 40 friends, as residents are called, of all ages and varying special needs and abilities. Camphill staff, known as co-workers, come from all over the world to support the residents and community. The driving force behind Camphill is the idea that everyone has unique abilities and talents and can be independent regardless of mental limitations.
“Working gives everyone a sense of purpose, they are contributing to a larger whole, regardless of their limitations,” Hobley says, while Daniel, a 43-year-old resident with Fragile X Syndrome, pushes a full wheelbarrow across the garden. “It gives their life meaning.”
As with most art, the beauty is in the details. The residents weave lavender satchels, pillowcases and blankets and make recycled paper with flower petals. They grow their organic biodynamic crops from seeds and harvest their grapes as a community. Because of the diverse backgrounds of the staff, Camphill is a mash-up of cultural influences from cottage pie (a British riff on shepherd’s pie) to stories from Germany.
Hobley has been part of the Camphill movement almost all of her life. Having lived in a Camphill community in Wales and then in Ireland, she says that she feels a responsibility and passion for the meaningful work that she does within the community.
“We have the capacity to accommodate many people regardless of ability,” Hobley says. “If I went to Norway or South Africa, I know I’d have a place to stay there. It’s amazing in that aspect.”
The houses, named House of Ishi, Linden, Siiwiini, Marimi, Aulinta, Sunrose, Chrysalis and Evergreen, are each part of the Camphill Communities assisted living network, a California subcategory of the large international Camphill movement founded by Austrian pediatrician and teacher Dr. Karl König. König was influenced by the teachings of Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy and the Waldorf education.
Camphill residents begin each morning with readings, often from the Bible (though the community itself has no religious affiliation), followed by a community breakfast consisting of homemade bread or granola, freshly picked fruit or veggie and egg scrambles. They enjoy three meals together daily, each one homemade from their fresh garden produce.
“To break bread or have a meal together is a bit of a foreign concept these days,” Hobley says. “Every meal we make, we cook together, we eat together, we talk together.”
While it may sound like a dreamy vacation for anyone, the residents don’t get to do exactly what they want all the time. They’re on a somewhat rigid set schedule as they give back to their little community.
Camphill also hosts festivals to celebrate holidays and the seasons. They include plays and singing, readings, dancing, and music. While it’s different for each community, the Santa Cruz Camphill relies on 80 percent state funding and the rest is donations-based. Families of those at Camphill do not have to pay for care, though many donate in some way, be it by volunteering their time or with financial support.
For the staff co-workers, working in Camphill comes with free room and board, meals, and chances to make new friends and experience new places. Many co-workers will make their way to other Camphill communities around the world, staying in one place for a year or two and then moving on. Through the Camphill Academy, co-workers in Camphill communities across North America can pursue full-time integrated studies that can culminate in a Certificate of Foundation Studies or a diploma in Curative Education or Social Therapy. Participation in the academy also makes them eligible for an extended visa so that they can continue their work within the communities beyond standard visa limits.
Despite the program’s worldwide reach, many in Santa Cruz don’t know about the community, even though it’s celebrating its 20th birthday this year. Hobley says she’s making a conscious effort to establish relationships and connections with the public locally. In particular, their upcoming farm-to-table event on Aug. 25 as well as their fairs and festivals are a way to celebrate nature connect Camphill to Santa Cruz.
“The farm-to-table dinner is really about creating community partnerships and friendships, and extending that to the local community,” Hobley says. “Unlike other farm-to-table events that are maybe a fundraiser or promote a specific farm, this is to showcase how we live and work in the community and how we can be part of the fabric of the local Santa Cruz community and beyond.”
They expect around 120 people, and while much of the food is grown on their land, they’re also getting outside help from local farms like Happy Boy and Live Earth. They are currently preparing for the dinner, and as the chickens run back and forth and residents tend to the crops, there is a certain late summer atmosphere around the garden.
”It’s about honoring each person’s abilities, rather than being a care provider or a friend,” Hobley says. “Sometimes when new co-workers come in, the friends know more about weaving than they do, and they can teach them. It’s a really amazing balance.”
For more information about Camphill Community in Santa Cruz or volunteer or purchase tickets to their events, visit camphillca.org.
The outstanding wines made by Jim Schultze of Windy Oaks are now easier than ever to access in metropolitan Carmel-by-the-Sea.
More opportunities to taste. More opportunities to go nuts for the long line of delightful Pinots. And here’s why: Windy Oaks has moved its Carmel tasting room location to Lincoln Street, between Ocean and 6th avenues in Carmel-by-the-Sea. How easy is that? Simply cruising through the charming village at the southern end of the Monterey Bay you will practically trip over the new tasting room, loaded with the estate Pinot Noirs, accessible Chardonnays, and tangy Syrahs. Plus lots more, including the popular sparkling Albariño. Open every day (except Wednesday), noon to 6 p.m.
Tapas? Maybe.
I was disappointed that, even though the sign in the door has been advertising them for two weeks, there were no tapas available when I went to Malabar for dinner a few nights ago. I’d come on a Tuesday night, when it was quiet in the beautiful dining room, anticipating the new menu items. They sounded great on the “Tapas” portion of the menu. I would love to have sampled the new small plates of roasted baby Indian eggplant, or the Vietnamese-Sri Lankan spring rolls, or the stuffed peppers with potato, tomato and garam masala. But none were available when we arrived, due to a computer glitch the day before which required the staff’s attention. When we asked about the housemade raviolis, we were informed that they also were not available that night. We did enjoy being able to partner our dishes of Singapore Hawk Noodles ($11) and Tempeh La La with Gado Gado ($11.75) with glasses of Orsianna Organic Chardonnay 2016 and excellent Line Shack 2015 Petite Sirah (both $8). It honors the fine food this kitchen can make to have wine and beer now available on the menu. I’ll be back to try out the new tapas.
Top Five Pastries
In no particular order, here are the Santa Cruz-baked pastries you don’t want to miss: The kouign-amann at Verve, made by the bakers at Manresa Bread. Buttery, sinful.The palmier at Companion Bakeshop, usually delicately tinted with intriguing spice and fruit flavors. Exceptional flakiness. The zucchini muffin at The Buttery, brilliant spice balance, a toothsome tweed of flavors and textures. The light yet decadent almond croissant at Iveta, just barely sweet so that it fulfills your needs for a treat, as well as a breakfast carb. Add butter. Live large. The apple pie from Beckmann’s, available in a mini-pie at New Leaf. Very much like the imaginary grandmother in your collective memory would have made. There. Some clues to start foraging for pastries in our vicinity.
Manresa Update
Another fire, the second in four years, has closed Los Gatos landmark Manresa for the next while. From Manresa’s Executive Chef, David Kinch: “There was a fire at Manresa on the evening of July 16. The restaurant was closed at the time of the fire, no one was in the restaurant and no one was harmed. The fire department responded swiftly to put the fire out. The cause of the fire is being investigated.” As a result, the restaurant is currently closed and we will provide updates as available.” Such a shame. Hope Kinch and company get to the bottom of this latest bit of trouble.
While most of us didn’t take music lessons as seriously as our parents and teachers might have liked, John Jorgenson says he actually liked practicing as a kid.
“I understood that if I wanted to play something, I had to practice it,” he says. “I could see that if I did, I would get better. A lot of times, young kids who don’t practice don’t ever feel the satisfaction of getting better, which makes it not so horrible to practice.”
Apparently, the rest of us should have listened, because Jorgenson’s efforts appear to have paid off. He’s now a master multi-instrumentalist who plays mandolin, mandocello, Dobro, pedal steel, piano, upright bass, clarinet, bassoon, and saxophone. Oh yeah, and he’s a world-class guitarist, who travels the world performing with the likes of Elton John, Emmylou Harris, Bob Dylan and Bonnie Raitt.
Of course, Jorgenson had a bit of a head start—his mom was a piano teacher and his dad was a music teacher at the University of Redlands. He started playing piano at age 4, studied classical piano until he was 13, picked up the clarinet at 8 and the guitar at 12.
“The people I was around were much better and more advanced than I was,” he says. “I always strived to be up at that level. I’m still striving to be at a higher level than I am now.”
For Jorgenson, the goal of practicing is not to impress audiences with technical chops. He aims to put thoughts and feelings across musically, and doesn’t want lack of technique to get in the way.
“In order to have enough skill to translate what you hear in your mind instantly to the instrument, you have to be really proficient,” he says. “Anything you play is part of either a scale or arpeggio. If you can play all of those up and down, in your sleep, as fast as you want, when you get to the place where you’re trying to improvise, or play with feeling off the top of your head, you don’t get interrupted by technical problems.”
When artists are interrupted by lack of technique, audiences can feel it. As Jorgenson puts it, they “feel more of your insecurity or hesitation or frustration than the real feeling you want to convey through the musical phrase.”
At any given time, Jorgenson is working on numerous musical projects simultaneously, including his own gypsy jazz band, his electric band, his bluegrass band, side projects, studio work, touring and more.
On Aug. 19, Jorgenson performs at Kuumbwa with his bluegrass band. A longtime fan of the genre, Jorgenson is rooted firmly in traditional styles and techniques, which gives him the freedom to further contemporary bluegrass in interesting ways.
“If I’m going to play it, I want to be able to play it as true as possible to the original style—not so that I have to stay there,” he says, “but, if you don’t have the foundation of anything, how can you stand and move from it?”
Jorgenson’s latest bluegrass album, From the Crow’s Nest, is a collection of songs he hopes will “help people see different things.” He wrote the song “If You Could See” for two of his friends, who he describes as “accomplished and quite famous musicians,” who both took their own lives within a 10 day period—a time he describes as devastating.
“I didn’t even do the song for a while on-stage because I felt like it might be too heavy,” he says, “but we’ve started doing it and it’s actually been a pretty nice moment—a beautiful moment.”
Another tune, “Wandering Boy,” written by Rodney Crowell, is the story of twin brothers from Texas—one straight, one gay—who both have to face their own prejudices and judgements.
The album as a whole is a reflection of Jorgenson’s finely-honed musical ability and his curiosity about people and music, in general.
“I get entranced with a style and I want to learn all about it—I don’t want to just dabble in it,” he says. “I want to learn about the elements that drew me to the music and what the core of that style is.”
The John Jorgenson Bluegrass Band will perform at 7:30 p.m. on Sunday, Aug. 19 at Kuumbwa Jazz, 320-2 Cedar St., Santa Cruz. $27-40. 427-2227.
You don’t need a white critic to tell you that 2018 has been a phenomenal year for black-themed film. BlacKkKlansman, released on the anniversary of the shame of Charlottesville, continues the streak. Spike Lee’s Cannes winner is oddly merry, quite nostalgic, and an ultimately hopeful account of a black police detective’s investigation in Colorado during the late 1970s.
Few who saw Lee’s Malcolm X (1992) would forget the horror of the scene of the Klan riding out against a billboard-big full moon. His treatment of the KKK here is different: It reminds one of a caption R. Crumb affixed to a cartoon of evil cigar-smoking CEOs—“I just love drawing these guys.” It’s a thrill to have a skulking enemy out in the open. There they are, the real thing, no excuses about misspeaking or misunderstanding.
It’s the late 1970s. Rookie cop Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) is a laconic but can-do kid who is told he’s going to be the Jackie Robinson of the Colorado Springs police department. After he pushes for more challenging assignments, he’s ordered undercover at the local college’s Black Student Union. There he meets the student activist Patrice (Laura Harrier of Spider-Man: Homecoming).
Noting a classified ad seeking recruits to the KKK, Stallworth makes a spontaneous prank phone call in what Sorry to Bother You describes as “the white voice.” The gang is enthusiastic to meet Ron, but naturally, he can’t actually appear in person. Ron talks his partner Flip (Adam Driver) into impersonating him at the audition with the secret organization.
Ultimately, the surveillance goes all the way to the top—to the loathsome David Duke (played by Topher Grace). Together, Ron and Flip learn the rites and the secret handshake, and discover you’re not supposed to mention the “K” word around Klansmen eager to mainstream their organization.
Flip is secular Jewish. “For you, this is a crusade,” he tells Ron. “For me, this is a job.” However, through exposure to the KKK’s Jew-hatred, Flip comes to identify his common cause with Ron. Oddly, in the real-life case this is based on, the KKK plotters were considering bombing a pair of gay bars; common cause seems to only go so far here.
Elements of the fictionalization show, as do the standard moments seen in a police drama and the reveling in blaxploitation films. But it’s easy to get wrapped up in this story, thanks to Lee’s force and thoughtfulness. The KKK members are sometimes formidable, sometimes lonely; the only one-dimensional one is a cracker imbecile played by Paul Walter Hauser as the kind of dunce who scratches his forehead with the barrel of his pistol.
Lee shows a strange bit of sympathy for one couple, Felix (Jasper PääkkÖnnen) and his wife Connie (Ashlie Atkinson), who are seen cuddling up in bed. They’re sickening racists, and yet the salt of the earth.
It’s made with mellow color by Chayse Irvin, with just the right amount of violence and scenes of big ’70s cars swaying on their shock absorbers. Lee maintains a good deal of texture to go with the discursiveness, such as Ron and Patrice’s chat about who’s better, Shaft or Superfly.
Over the years, Lee has tended to address his audience as if they were a public meeting. And yet his gambits pay off, as in a lecture by Kwame Ture (born Stokely Carmichael, and played here by Corey Hawkins) on the self-loathing installed in black folk by white society.
Even more impressive is a visit from His Eminence, Harry Belafonte. The 90-year-old performer plays an instructor sitting in the style of rattan peacock chair that Huey Newton once immortalized, recounting the grisly details of a lynching. The point of this lecture is to mention that the vicious mob had been ginned up by a viewing of 1915’s racist sensation Birth of a Nation. One definition of double-consciousness: loving cinema while realizing it sometimes poisons people.
This is a big movie from Lee, warm and smart. It’s not essentially radical, unless the subject of self-defense is radical. For instance, it comes out in favor of supporting your local police, as long as they’re trying to hunt down the Klan. BlacKkKlansman has great spirit. Lee doesn’t wear a hood, but he’s certainly a wizard sometimes.
BlacKkKlansman
Directed by Spike Lee. Starring John David Washington, Adam Driver and Topher Grace. R; 135 mins.
The final mainstage offering from Santa Cruz Shakespeare concludes the season with a bang—and a crash and a boom. Outstanding thunder and lightning effects punctuate the action in Venus in Fur, an often scorchingly funny contemporary drama written by David Ives. It’s a rousing closer to a season that has trained its sights on the politics of desire, gender, and power in many diverse, unruly forms.
Playwright Ives is familiar to SCS audiences as the author of The Liar, adapted from a 17th Century French farce. The SCS production of The Liar was one of the most uproarious in the company’s history. In addition to his own original plays, Ives’ specialty is adapting the work of comic authors of previous centuries, like Moliere and Mark Twain.
But with Venus in Fur, Ives’ source material is an 1870 novella by Austrian literary figure Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (the man who put the “M” in S&M). And instead of simply adapting Masoch’s story for the stage, Ives whips up (sorry), a clever bracketing device about a frazzled theatrical director and a ditzy actress late for an audition reading through a modern play based on the Masoch story—and confronting all the sex/control issues it raises. It’s a seductive chamber piece for two actors and four voices as the actress and director go in and out of character, the lines between reality and fantasy blur, and simmering, centuries-old tensions between the sexes bubble to the surface.
Directed with sharp-witted aplomb by Raelle Myrick-Hodges, the story begins as that ferocious storm is raging outside at the end of a long day of fruitless auditions for Thomas (Brian Ibsen). He’s planning to direct a production of his own new play, based on the Masoch story, but all depends on finding the right actress to play the female lead—an elegant countess-turned-dominatrix. As Thomas complains to his fiancée on his cell, all he’s seen are flighty “idiot actresses” who are unable to play “sexy, classy women.”
Enter Vanda (Maria Gabriela Rosado Gonzalez)—rain-soaked, and three hours late for her audition—who threatens to live up to every one of Thomas’ prejudices. She’s exuberantly profane, strewing F-bombs like rose petals in her wake, pushy, and given to raucous belly-laughs. And when he tries to send her packing, she cries. Too weary to resist, he agrees to read a scene with her.
But something transformative happens when Vanda steps into the role of the countess. Her ditziness disappears, and, along with her “continental” accent, she acquires a mysteriously seductive authority. And Thomas (also reading from the script) appears to respond with the same awe as his protagonist in the play, finally begging for her “delicious cruelty,” which he/they confuse with love.
And this is just the beginning, as the dynamic bounces back and forth between them: mistaking love for power, kinks for passion, and wondering who is auditioning whom (and for what). In the late innings leading up to the corker of a finale, canny Vanda gets Thomas to switch parts, reading each other’s lines, adding extra layers to Ives’ study on the nature of “male” vs. “female.”
The play asks a lot of its two actors, but, they are up to the task. Ibsen (so terrific as Berowne in this season’s Love’s Labour’s Lost) anchors the story as Thomas’ sober irritability morphs into something much more revealing. And Gonzalez is riotously entertaining as Vanda, especially in her quicksilver changes from patrician countess to gauche and giddy modern Millennial.
The onstage rack crammed with B. Modern’s vivid period-inspired pieces (frock coats, fluffy skirts) is a great touch to help the characters act out their fantasies. Lighting Designer Kent Dorsey and Sound Designer Rudy Ortega team up to produce precisely-applied storm effects that light up the grove in eerie splendor. It’s a charged evening of theater in every respect.
Now playing
The Santa Cruz Shakespeare production of ‘Venus In Fur’ plays in repertory through Sept. 2 at The Grove in Delaveaga Park. Call 460-6399 or visit santacruzshakespeare.org.
