In an effort to save Monarch butterflies, Assemblymember Mark Stone (D-Scotts Valley) has introduced Assembly Bill 2421—a $3 million piece of legislation to provide technical assistance and funding toward preserving and restoring the habitats of Monarch butterflies and other pollinators and across the state.
AB 2421 has so far received bipartisan support, having passed the state Assembly 64-7. It needs to go through the Senate before making its way to Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk, which is expected to happen next month. Brown has already earmarked $3 million for the bill in the upcoming budget, and it could have a significant impact on Santa Cruz.
Soon public agencies, nonprofits, farmers, ranchers, and other private land trusts should be able to receive funding, technical assistance, and guidance about how to preserve and restore overwintering grounds and pollinator breeding habitats from the Monarch and Pollinator Rescue Program (MPRP), which the bill establishes as part of the Wildlife Conservation Board (WCB).
Many scientists agree that things will get worse for the Monarchs before they get better, although the feds have shown little interest in listing the butterfly as endangered. Experts say there is more than a 70 percent chance that Monarchs will go totally extinct within the next two decades, according to Stone’s bill.
The populations of Monarchs and other pollinators are dwindling at a rapid rate. “Monarchs are at risk of a total collapse,” says Stone. “There were once millions of them on the Central Coast. Now there are a few hundred thousand.”
Migrating Monarchs bring in tourist dollars to Santa Cruz County. “It’s something that makes the Central Coast unique,” he says.
Under the bill, state parks like Natural Bridges would be able to apply for grant money from the MPRP, as needed. Stone says a significant portion of AB 2421 funding will go toward maintaining overwintering habitat for Monarch butterflies.
Although Monarchs areiconic and grab big headlines, Stone says other species of pollinators would benefit from AB 2421, too. Bees, for instance, are in trouble around the world, under siege from parasites and insecticides.
“We want to protect all pollinators,” says Stone. “They’re good for our agriculture, good for our entire ecosystem, and important to sustain human communities. Without pollinators, crops suffer because they cannot reproduce and grow.”
The MPRP will be in charge of doling out money, and providing other forms of assistance and support. Stone hopes that private money will enter the fund, too, to supplement the effort.
In a theater company named after the most famous dead white male in Western literature, perfect gender equality may never be attainable. But that’s not stopping Santa Cruz Shakespeare from getting as close as possible.
Of all of artistic director Mike Ryan’s seemingly superhuman contributions to his company—reviving it from the ashes of the defunct Shakespeare Santa Cruz, developing a new funding model, establishing a picturesque new home—his policy of gender equity in his acting troupe may be the most radical.
Mandating an equal balance between men and women in his casts is about more than giving female actors opportunities that wouldn’t exist otherwise. It also means re-imagining male roles for women, which requires doing something Ryan’s predecessors considered taboo: changing Shakespeare’s text, even if it’s only pronouns.
Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s fifth season, which starts this week, can best be described as an exploration of the eternal dance between “he” and “she.” It features the world’s most famous doomed romance Romeo and Juliet, the often-overlooked rom-com Love’s Labour’s Lost, and the season’s non-Shakespearean offering, David Ives’s explosive two-person (yep, one man and one woman) drama Venus in Fur.
Each play confronts the dynamics of male and female desire; where those two implacable forces mesh, and where they clash. Romeo and Juliet is Shakespeare’s best-known work, and maybe the world’s most famous story of untamable love breaking through tribal hatred. Love’s Labour’s Lost is a comedy about four guys renouncing love in favor of study until they meet four gals who put their vow to the test. And Venus is an intimate battle between a man and a woman that pits male expectations against female vulnerability.
Ryan says the theme of the 2018 season is the “undeniability of desire,” and he relates it to the drama that played out five years ago when UCSC extinguished the debt-ridden Shakespeare Santa Cruz, prompting the creation of the newly independent Santa Cruz Shakespeare. The season’s theme, says Ryan, “also celebrates the fact that this community refused to be denied its desire for its Shakespeare festival.”
HEREFORE ART THOU Left to right: Isabel Pask (Juliet) and Taha Mandviwala (Romeo) in rehearsal with director Laura Gordon. PHOTO: KEANA PARKER
This summer’s festival goes into September to allow for a new education program, in which back-in-session schools can bring students to the festival’s grounds at the Grove at DeLaveaga Park for reduced-price (and, in some cases, free) tickets. “Our ultimate goal with this program is to ensure that every student who graduates high school in Santa Cruz County has the opportunity to see a live performance of Shakespeare,” says Ryan.
What those students (and everyone else) will see is an equal number of men and women on stage. That necessarily means that several roles that Shakespeare envisioned as men are going to be “re-gendered” as women. In Romeo and Juliet, those include Juliet’s hot-headed cousin Tybalt, and Romeo’s would-be peacekeeper cousin Benvolio. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the French lord Boyet and the schoolmaster Holofernes will both be women.
Michael Warren is SCS’s textual consultant and head of dramaturgy, a role he’s filled since 1982—the original company’s first season. He was part of the company’s brain trust when the idea of changing Shakespeare’s text was unthinkable. Now, he’s helping the festival’s directors tweak the text to conform to the new policy.
“In the last 10 years,” says Warren, “we’ve moved into a much more flexible approach. There are a lot more signs of adaptations going on now. The scholar in me, the historian in me, wants to see something that is a representation of the Shakespearean original. At the same time, I accept that theater artists are interested in doing something that renders the work in immediate engagement with social conditions in the 21st century. In that regard, I see exactly what the theater is trying to do. It’s seeing it as a mode of revitalization and fresh thinking not only about the particular play, but about theater’s role in the community and in political life.”
The “new” characters open up unforeseen possibilities in otherwise well-known Shakespearean plays. “I’ve made a joke about this, but it’s true,” says Romeo and Juliet director Laura Gordon about the female conversion of Tybalt and Benvolio. “When we were trying to figure out what world we would set this in, the main motivating questions were: What weapons would they fight with? And what will Tybalt as a woman wear to the party?”
‘All are punished’
With the possible exception of Hamlet, there is no more familiar play in the Shakespearean canon than Romeo and Juliet. The tragedy of the two star-crossed young lovers in Verona has been told in countless versions and from countless perspectives. But, says Gordon, the play is a classic because it is so masterful.
“The more you get into it, you see it’s just a brilliant play,” she says. “It’s so incredibly well-written. The poetry is unbelievably beautiful. The psychology of the characters and the compressed time frame of the story—it all happens in three or four days—is so well done.”
“It’s a dazzling piece of work,” says Warren. “It’s very tightly plotted. The verse is extraordinarily inventive. Shakespeare was moving around various kinds of human speech within it. It’s immensely dynamic.”
Gordon’s gender-balanced 16-member cast (which includes Mike Ryan as Friar Laurence) will be costumed by SCS’s redoubtable veteran B. Modern. The setting of the new production tries to thread the needle between the past and the present. The look and costuming style will be, says Gordon, “inspired by the Italian Renaissance,” which doesn’t mean it will be a period piece. Gordon says that she was influenced by Renaissance-style fashions by designers Alexander McQueen and Alberta Ferretti, looks that evoke the Renaissance while still maintaining contemporary aesthetics.
“We’re trying to allow the story to speak to both its own time and to reach us in ours,” she says.
Ryan points to the play’s setting of Verona, paralyzed by a blood feud between the Capulets and the Montagues, as an uncomfortable allusion to current political divisions.
“We’ve never lived in a more polarizing time, at least not in my lifetime. And that seems very much a parallel with Shakespeare’s Verona, which is a town completely polarized. There are also deep parallels between the play and the contemporary slaughter of children by children we see in these school shootings. In this play, all the young people die, killing each other or themselves.”
“I wasn’t interested in having a very contemporary setting,” says Gordon, who also directed SCS’s Much Ado About Nothing in 2015, “where all the Montagues are Republicans and all the Capulets are Democrats, or vice versa, and try to make it super specific. Because I lose the Shakespeare in that.”
At the same time, she says, the Renaissance vibe also allows her to avoid one chilling reflection of modern times: “I really wanted us to fight with rapier and dagger, so we wouldn’t have to deal with guns.”
‘Love is a Devil’
In any contemporary ranking of Shakespeare’s comedies, Love’s Labour’s Lost would likely rank well behind a number of other touchstones like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night. But that, says Michael Warren, is an injustice.
“It’s an incredibly funny play,” he says. “The plot is not very elaborate, but there is a lot of wit in it.”
Love’s Labour’s Lost is one of Shakespeare’s earliest comedies, written some time in the mid 1590s when Shakespeare was around 30. It is centered on a king and three lords who have all devoted themselves to three years of study and contemplation without the company of women. Those vows face a trial when the king’s camp is visited by the beautiful Princess of France and her three ladies. The men are hopelessly smitten, but don’t want to let on to one another that they have broken their oath.
‘FUR’ SURE Director Raelle Myrick-Hodges (right) works with leads Brian Ibsen and María Gabriela Rosado González on ‘Venus in Fur.’ PHOTO: KEANA PARKER
“Shakespeare did this amazing thing with this play,” says the production’s director Paul Mullins, in his fourth season at SCS. “He made it about language. It’s an explosion of language and poetry and the ways we communicate, especially when it comes to love and desire. There’s a great deal of rhyming in it, a great deal of sonneting in it. Some of it might be difficult for our modern ear to take. But it’s a wonderful and exuberant story about love and how, when you try to deny it, it will out.”
Mullins says that the play will be set in 1915, “without a lot of modern things, like telephones. We liked the way that looked.”
‘I Shall Deny Myself Nothing’
The third play of the season, Venus in Fur by David Ives, dates back only to 2010. But it alludes to source material that is much older, Venus in Furs (note the plural), a 19th century novel by Austrian Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (whose surname gave us the word “masochism.”)
Ives’s play is a two-person back-and-forth set during the end of a long day of unsuccessful auditioning for a demanding theater director. Just as he is finishing up his day, a woman bursts in, soaking wet, apologizing for being late, and begging for a chance to audition. The woman is obviously all wrong for what the director has in mind, but slowly her position of powerlessness becomes an asset in her struggle to change his mind.
“This play has nothing to do with theater,” says director Raelle Myrick-Hodges, a SCS first-timer. “It has to do with what it’s like to be afraid of failing, and it has to do with what it means to be perceived solely as an object.”
Myrick-Hodges says that Venus will particularly resonate with women who have to navigate a world of unrealistic expectations from privileged men in positions of influence.
“The play is about male fantasy and female reality,” she says. “The perception of how this cisgender straight male looks at the female is based on something that isn’t real. She’s a real woman. He thinks the ideal woman is a 24-year-old saint/sinner fantasy girl. And she’s just an actress trying to get a job.”
Mike Ryan saw the play at ACT and realized that unlike a lot of other two-person plays, it had the power to fill the outdoor space at the Grove. “It starts out with the most unbalanced power dynamic you can imagine. I mean, it doesn’t get any more lopsided than that. With the #MeToo stuff going on, this play is particularly timely.”
As artistic director, Ryan knows that his selection of plays is what sells a season. But he’s also eager to point to other new considerations: a more comprehensive shade structure for those hot summer days at DeLaveaga, and a new license to sell beer and wine.
Mostly though, Ryan wants live theater fans to settle in for a season where the drama is mostly on stage, and not in the struggle for the company to survive. “In the early days, there were a lot of questions about us: Can they make it work? Is it going to last? Will they have a new home? Thank goodness for the amazing donors who stuck with us. But I’m hopeful now that some of the people who took a wait-and-see approach will go ‘OK, those guys have figured it out. Let’s do this.’”
BOX:
Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s 2018 Season
Romeo and Juliet, Love’s Labour’s Lost and Venus in Fur by David Ives
July 10 through Sept. 2. Wednesday and Thursday at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. Sunday at 7 p.m. Weekend matinees, Saturdays at 2 p.m. and Sundays at 1 p.m.
The Grove at DeLaveaga Park, 501 Upper Park Road, Santa Cruz. $20 to $56.www.santacruzshakespeare.org. Box office: 460-6399.
If all of modern society were a board game, Maria Cadenas thinks it would be a game of Monopoly. But play time, she says, is over.
“Somebody has all the cash, and the accumulation of wealth is totally decided and others are completely left out, and we’re losing the middle,” says Cadenas, the executive director for Santa Cruz Community Ventures. “Those wealth gaps are the results of policies—how the system has been working. So we need to change the system, change the game.”
To fix all this, Cadenas wants to create a local impact investment fund and help finance a more even playing field.
Impact investing has been among the business world’s hottest buzz phrases in recent years. Over time, it’s gone from a vague concept to a way for investors and everyday people to make a difference. Essentially, it’s the practice of putting cash into assets that an investor can feel good about—anything from the environment to journalism in developing countries. These investors typically accept smaller returns than they would on Wall Street or somewhere else.
Although Santa Cruz Community Ventures has not yet finalized its approach, Cadenas’ pitch is to launch a fund that wouldhelp local businesses switch to worker-owned models. With the Silver Tsunami now underway, baby boomers will be retiring. For many, that means selling their businesses.
To help frame the region’s biggest needs, Community Ventures, which is funded by donations, recently collaborated on two economic analyses—one that the group is now getting ready to share, and another with UCSC’s Blum Center that it’s just now finalizing.
Cadenas wants anyone to be able to invest in the fund, for as little as $25. Implementing and scaling this strategy would take time, but she sees that impact investing—combined with what she hopes will be a boom in employee-owned businesses—as the best way to give the county’s economy an even-keeled boost.
“If we don’t address the perpetual generational poverty from one side of the county to the other, we’re gonna be hurting, because most of the county is gonna be poor,” she says. “What does that mean for social structures? What does that mean for transportation? What does that mean for county government funds that are already limited? What does that mean for housing plans? If you don’t address income and wealth gaps, we’re not going to be able to solve the problems jeopardizing our future. If people can’t understand love, I hope they understand numbers.”
DOLLAR BACK
At a recent Monterey Bay Economic Partnership summit, financial adviser Morgan Simon dove into the thinking behind the concept of impact investing, as well as its significance. In the early days, many of the investors were foundations targeting inequality.
“The idea of impact investing,” Simon said at May’s Regional Economic Summit, “was that you could really bridge that gap, that you could have a social and environmental return alongside your foundation return.”
Simon, the author of the new book Real Impact, got her first exposure to some big-picture financial issues at a young age, when she visited Sierra Leone as a USAID worker. While there, she bought a can of tuna at a roadside stand from a woman who had no interest in eating fish out of a can. Simon calculated that the $1 that she had paid the vendor was enough for the woman to buy a few full meals for her family; not only that, but the can brought far more economic value to the shippers along the supply chain, from Japan to Africa, than it did to the woman it was supposed to help.
The interaction illustrated an important lesson—that making a difference involves more than having philanthropic organizations write big checks. Donors have to be invested in how their checks are getting cashed.
Simon—whose sister Nina is executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History—said there are a number of ways for people to get involved with their money. They could bank locally to keep their money in the community. She highlighted the work of her brother-in-law Sibley Simon, who’s created an impactinvestment fund to spur workforce housing development. She also lauded Cadenas for helping kick-start a local movement of worker-owned businesses.
“Watch your assets,” Simon said. “The point is, it’s your money. When we put our money in the bank or we hand it to the financial adviser, we treat it like it’s not ours anymore. And other people are making decisions about what our money is doing in society, but we’re still responsible for those decisions.”
SELLING POINT
Cadenas knows how big some of her ideas sound. She realizes that will take more than a couple worker-owned businesses to create a more balanced economy, but she says we have to think about building a new ecosystem when it comes to impact investing.
“We have to plan for 50 years in the future,” she says. “The idea that you’re looking for a return on investment in one year and you’re gonna capitalize on it, that’s the idea of the current model. You’re going to go in and extract all the value from the community or a resource, benefit from it and go. That’s the model. What we’re saying is, ‘No, that doesn’t work.’ We’re not looking to extract the value. We’re looking to build the value in the community where people are going to live. That means we’re not looking to build billionaires.”
Most people, Cadenas says, simply want to be able to afford going to the occasional movie or have the time to visit their regional park.
Cadenas says the first phase of Community Ventures’ plan involves supporting the switch to more worker-owned businesses. Local groupCo-Op SC formed earlier this year to help business owners explore these issues. Cadenas says Community Ventures plans to offer technical assistance, providing access to accountants, lawyers and consultants. The next step would involve crowdfunding, which is just taking off in California as a way for businesses to seek funding from their communities. The final piece, Cadenas says, will be the impact investment fund, to fill in the gaps.
She says that in order to address income gaps, the Community Ventures prioritizes women and Latino families. Those are also the groups that the nonprofit will target as potential employee owners of local businesses.
Cadenas envisions this new model being able to scale from Santa Cruz County and the Monterey Bay to the Central Coast—and eventually even beyond that.
“We have the political will and the history—and, I think, the guts—to try it,” she says. “If there’s any place where we can pilot this and build it up, it’s Santa Cruz. We’re the right size. We’re the right people, and it’s the right time to do it. There’s no reason to hold up. We’ve just got to be willing to take it and build on it.”
Santa Cruz residents will get an up-close look at the region’s evolving array of renewable energy offerings at the first-annual Community Power Festival this weekend.
The free event, to be held Saturday, July 14, from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. at San Lorenzo Park, is organized by nascent nonprofit energy provider Monterey Bay Community Power. The government-backed agency—tasked with transitioning 16 cities in Santa Cruz, Monterey and San Benito counties to 100 percent carbon-free energy—planned the festival to offer attractions like live music along with education from purveyors of solar panels, electric bikes and other green alternatives.
“We wanted to have a celebration in Santa Cruz, where everything started,” says Shelly Whitworth, media and communications coordinator for Monterey Bay Community Power.
The effort to create a local clean power authority started five years ago, when former state legislator and current Santa Cruz County Supervisor Bruce McPherson expanded a vision for a countywide program to a broader regional effort.
In the process, Santa Cruz joined a fast-evolving national conversation about community choice energy (CCE) programs, which allow local or regional agencies pursuing more aggressive emissions-reduction goals to take over electricity generation from existing utility providers. A 2002 state measure, AB 117, laid the groundwork for CCEs after California suffered a wave of brownouts and complications with energy deregulation, allowing local agencies to accelerate renewable energy investment by buying in bulk.
Earlier this year, the Monterey Bay region’s roughly 37,500 commercial electricity customers started automatic enrollment in community power. Sign-up for the roughly 235,000 residential accounts in the three-county area started this month. With service up and running, Monterey Bay Community Power joins nine CCEs already offering emissions-free electricity across the country, including nearby Marin and San Mateo counties.
Among the factors differentiating the Monterey Bay CCE is the geographic and demographic diversity of the service area, says Benjamin Eichert, director of the Greenpower program at interfaith advocacy group the Romero Institute.
“Some of the other programs have expanded to later encompass low-income communities, but for the most part they launched in affluent communities,” Eichert says. “You can see the breadth of the program when it includes Carmel, Santa Cruz, but also Hollister, Gonzales.”
Though many environmental groups and policymakers in Santa Cruz have long been outspoken advocates of environmental conservation and climate action, community choice energy isn’t without its critics. Environmental justice groups sometimes contend that business models don’t go far enough to improve access for low-income ratepayers, and climate advocates often disagree about the shades of green that color different carbon-free power sources. Hydropower, for instance, notoriously attracts water conservation concerns.
Locally, PG&E will still oversee transmission, distribution, customer service and billing for all electricity. By the end of this year, however, all commercial and residential users in Monterey Bay Community Power’s service region will begin receiving power from the agency’s portfolio of hydroelectric, solar and wind energy, with the exception of those who decide to opt out of the program and stick with PG&E. The utility’s power mix also includes fossil fuels, natural gas and nuclear power, among other sources.
Of the commercial customers who started the rollover to Monterey Bay Community Power earlier this year, 3 percent have opted out of the new service. Just 1 percent of residential customers have opted out since enrollment started July 1, says Monterey Bay Community Power Director of Communications J.R. Killigrew. Thanks in large part to high anticipated enrollment, the agency is projected to generate $136 million in revenue this year, and $262 million during the first full year of operation in 2019.
Killigrew, a veteran of Marin’s CCE program, says those who opt out are often skeptical of government-controlled power or “just like the status quo.” Costs, Killigrew adds, were designed to be an incentive, rather than a barrier.
“We’re the first community choice program that has an annual rebate program for residential customers, a biannual model for commercial users and a quarterly rebate for large industrial users,” Killigrew says.
To counter concerns about volatile renewable energy prices, Monterey Bay Community Power promises that a 3 percent rebate from PG&E’s rates will be tacked onto customer bills once, twice or four times per year based on power consumption. The program also allows customers to forgo their rebate to help fund local sustainability projects.
Among the biggest questions is how the agency will reinvest funds collected from customers. Since Monterey Bay Community Power is authorized to procure power throughout the Western U.S., customers can pay a higher rate for energy generated in California. Funding local clean power projects is a priority for groups like Eichert’s Greenpower—and the agency did recently release a “Go Local” request for offers to support 20 megawatts of new solar installations in the region—but large-scale projects in cheaper states often come with lower wholesale rates.
“They will be getting renewable energy from a variety of places,” Eichert says. “We want as much as possible of it to be local.”
At least 2 percent of annual revenue will also be dedicated to programs to encourage broader adoption of green technologies—and “not just for your brand-new Tesla,” Whitworth says. Among the programs the agency has considered are making it easier to buy used electric cars or preventing customers behind on their electricity bill from having their power shut off.
Events like this weekend’s festival, Killigrew says, are designed to bring new technologies to life.
“It’s probably one of the fastest-growing revolutions people have seen in a long time,” he says.
The Community Power Festival will be 10 a.m.-4 p.m. on Saturday, July 14 at San Lorenzo Park, celebrating the launch of Monterey Bay Community Power, which has been enrolling customers from Santa Cruz, San Benito and Monterey counties. There will be interactive booths, local vendors, community organizations, food and live music.
Live music highlights for the week of July 11, 2018.
WEDNESDAY 7/11
AMERICANA
WILD & BLUE
Back in 1991, local singer-songwriter Steve Bennett wrote a song about his then 18-month old daughter April (“I never knew about love/till I held you in my arms.”) It’s a heartwarming song he still plays sometimes and gets emotional about. But nowadays he has a musical project with April called Wild & Blue. It’s a powerful father-daughter project. He picks the acoustic guitar, she sings. You can really see Steve’s great songwriting still in action. There’s some twang there, but just a touch. April’s melancholy vocal hooks bring the songs to life. AARON CARNES
If you missed their performance at last week’s High Sierra Music Festival, then make sure not to miss this enchanted evening of jazzy tunes at Moe’s Alley. Both Nathan Moore and Magic in the Other will be playing their repertoire of unique jazzy and jam hits. Nathan Moore delivers singer-songwriter tunes that are one part folk, one part ragtime and all traveling troubadour. No Magic in the Other features members of Phil Lesh & friends, ALO and Mercury Falls for a funk infused jazz fest that’s as cool as the snazzy suits they perform in. MAT WEIR
2018 has been a stressful year. Guess what, it’s halfway over so it’s time to celebrate with an evening of dancing. I know what you’re thinking—should I go dance to soul music or ska? The correct answer is both. Lucky for you, local northern soul all-stars the Inciters are pairing up with longtime San Jose ska band Monkey to bring you an evening you’ll be unable to sit still for. Northern soul is a high energy (extra-dancey) style of soul music. Monkey, as you likely know, plays straight up ska without all the slam-dancing-pitting action that some of the other punky-ska bands play. AC
INFO: 8:30 p.m. Michael’s on Main, 2591 Main St., Soquel. $10. 479-9777.
FRIDAY 7/13
PUNK
WEIRDOS
This Los Angeles group originally formed in 1975, complete with short haircuts, strange clothes and fast music played at extreme levels. While they tried to stray from the “punk” labeling for as long as they could—opting for the preferred nomenclature “art rock”—music fans couldn’t help but see the comparisons. Just listen to their early recordings, and you’ll understand why. MW
Nzuri Soul is a multi-faceted Bay Area gem that can heat things up with an Aretha cover, get the dance floor shaking with funky horns and deep grooves, and slow things down with a smoothed-out love jam. Comprising Lamar Green on keyboards, Eddie Wroten on bass, Chris Brochard on guitar, Mike McCoy on percussion, the captivating Kimberli Stafford on lead vocals, and the Carter Sisters on background vocals, Nzuri Soul blends soul, gospel and R&B in all the right ways. CAT JOHNSON
On a mission to “preserve and continue a traditional culture in a modern age,” Celtic group Runa weaves the music of Ireland and Scotland with jazz, folk and more. The result is something timeless and forward-thinking. Members of the band have roots in the U.S., Canada and Ireland and are now based in Philadelphia, Nashville and Chicago. Collectively, they’ve established themselves as one of the most engaging and innovative contemporary Celtic groups around. CJ
The most award-winning bluegrass band of all time, the Del McCoury Band has been holding it down since the late-’60s. Performing traditional bluegrass, McCoury and company also take an open-minded approach to bluegrass and have grown a fan base that includes Americana enthusiasts, jam band festival attendees and traditionalists alike. For 50-plus years, McCoury has been at the front of the bluegrass wave and has paved the way for countless artists to follow his lead. As resonator guitar standout Jerry Douglas put it, “You can finally make a living playing bluegrass, and a large part of it is because of Del McCoury.” CJ
INFO: 7:30 p.m. Rio Theatre, 1205 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. $40/gen, $55/gold. 423-8209.
TUESDAY 7/17
AMERICANA
DAROL ANGER & THE FURIES
Over the last 30 years, Darol Anger has changed the way we view the fiddle by mixing his favorite influences from around the world. If his name doesn’t ring a bell at first, you’ve probably heard him playing in the David Grisman Quintet, Psychograss, or the Turtle Island String Quartet, to name a few of his projects. His latest band, the Furies, is an all-star cast of stringed wonders, hand-picked by the man himself. If you’re a fan of the old-timey jams with a modern twist, don’t miss this one-night experience. MW
INFO: 7:30 p.m. Michael’s on Main, 2591 S Main St., Soquel. $17/adv, $20/door. 479-9777.
Free Will astrology for the week of July 11, 2018.
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Your key theme right now is growth. Let’s dig in and analyze its nuances. 1. Not all growth is good for you. It may stretch you too far too fast — beyond your capacity to integrate and use it. 2. Some growth that is good for you doesn’t feel good to you. It might force you to transcend comforts that are making you stagnant, and that can be painful. 3. Some growth that’s good for you may meet resistance from people close to you; they might prefer you to remain just as you are, and may even experience your growth as a problem. 4. Some growth that isn’t particularly good for you may feel pretty good. For instance, you could enjoy working to improve a capacity or skill that is irrelevant to your long-term goals. 5. Some growth is good for you in some ways, and not so good in other ways. You have to decide if the trade-off is worth it. 6. Some growth is utterly healthy for you, feels pleasurable, and inspires other people.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): You can’t sing with someone else’s mouth, Taurus. You can’t sit down and settle into a commanding new power spot with someone else’s butt. Capiche? I also want to tell you that it’s best if you don’t try to dream with someone else’s heart, nor should you imagine you can fine-tune your relationship with yourself by pushing someone else to change. But here’s an odd fact: You can enhance your possibility for success by harnessing or borrowing or basking in other people’s luck. Especially in the coming weeks.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): You wouldn’t attempt to cure a case of hiccups by repeatedly smacking your head against a wall, right? You wouldn’t use an anti-tank rocket launcher to eliminate the mosquito buzzing around your room, and you wouldn’t set your friend’s hair on fire as a punishment for arriving late to your rendezvous at the café. So don’t overreact to minor tweaks of fate, my dear Gemini. Don’t over-medicate tiny disturbances. Instead, regard the glitches as learning opportunities. Use them to cultivate more patience, expand your tolerance, and strengthen your character.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): I pay tribute to your dizzying courage, you wise fool. I stage-whisper “Congratulations!” as you slip away from your hypnotic routine and wander out to the edge of mysterious joy. With a crazy grin of encouragement and my fist pressed against my chest, I salute your efforts to transcend your past. I praise and exalt you for demonstrating that freedom is never permanent but must be reclaimed and reinvented on a regular basis. I cheer you on as you avoid every temptation to repeat yourself, demean yourself, and chain yourself.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): I’m feeling a bit helpless as I watch you messing with that bad but good stuff that is so wrong but right for you. I am rendered equally inert as I observe you playing with the strong but weak stuff that’s interesting but probably irrelevant. I fidget and sigh as I monitor the classy but trashy influence that’s angling for your attention; and the supposedly fast-moving process that’s creeping along so slowly; and the seemingly obvious truth that would offer you a much better lesson if only you would see it for the chewy riddle that it is. What should I do about my predicament? Is there any way I can give you a boost? Maybe the best assistance I can offer is to describe to you what I see.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Psychologist Paul Ekman has compiled an extensive atlas of how emotions are revealed in our faces. “Smiles are probably the most underrated facial expressions,” he has written, “much more complicated than most people realize. There are dozens of smiles, each differing in appearance and in the message expressed.” I bring this to your attention, Virgo, because your assignment in the coming weeks — should you choose to accept it — is to explore and experiment with your entire repertoire of smiles. I’m confident that life will conspire to help you carry out this task. More than at any time since your birthday in 2015, this is the season for unleashing your smiles.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Lucky vibes are coalescing in your vicinity. Scouts and recruiters are hovering. Helpers, fairy godmothers, and future playmates are growing restless waiting for you to ask them for favors. Therefore, I hereby authorize you to be imperious, regal, and overflowing with self-respect. I encourage you to seize exactly what you want, not what you’re “supposed” to want. Or else be considerate, appropriate, modest, and full of harmonious caution. CUT! CUT! Delete that “be considerate” sentence. The Libra part of me tricked me into saying it. And this is one time when people of the Libra persuasion are allowed to be free from the compulsion to balance and moderate. You have a mandate to be the show, not watch the show.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Emily Dickinson wrote 1,775 poems — an average of one every week for 34 years. I’d love to see you launch an enduring, deep-rooted project that will require similar amounts of stamina, persistence, and dedication. Are you ready to expand your vision of what’s possible for you to accomplish? The current astrological omens suggest that the next two months will be an excellent time to commit yourself to a Great Work that you will give your best to for the rest of your long life!
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): What’s the biggest lie in my life? There are several candidates. Here’s one: I pretend I’m nonchalant about one of my greatest failures; I act as if I’m not distressed by the fact that the music I’ve created has never received the listenership it should it have. How about you, Sagittarius? What’s the biggest lie in your life? What’s most false or dishonest or evasive about you? Whatever it is, the immediate future will be a favorable time to transform your relationship with it. You now have extraordinary power to tell yourself liberating truths. Three weeks from now, you could be a more authentic version of yourself than you’ve ever been.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Now and then you go through phases when you don’t know what you need until you stumble upon it. At times like those, you’re wise not to harbor fixed ideas about what you need or where to hunt for what you need. Metaphorically speaking, a holy grail might show up in a thrift store. An eccentric stranger may provide you with an accidental epiphany at a bus stop or a convenience store. Who knows? A crucial clue may even jump out at you from a spam email or a reality TV show. I suspect that the next two weeks might be one of those odd grace periods for you.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): “Reverse psychology” is when you convince people to do what you wish they would do by shrewdly suggesting that they do the opposite of what you wish they would do. “Reverse censorship” is when you write or speak the very words or ideas that you have been forbidden to express. “Reverse cynicism” is acting like it’s chic to express glee, positivity, and enthusiasm. “Reverse egotism” is bragging about what you don’t have and can’t do. The coming weeks will be an excellent time to carry out all these reversals, as well as any other constructive or amusing reversals you can dream up.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Poet Emily Dickinson once revealed to a friend that there was only one Commandment she ever obeyed: “Consider the Lilies.” Japanese novelist Natsume Sōseki told his English-speaking students that the proper Japanese translation for “I love you” is Tsuki ga tottemo aoi naa, which literally means “The moon is so blue tonight.” In accordance with current astrological omens, Pisces, I’m advising you to be inspired by Dickinson and Sōseki. More than any other time in 2018, your duty in the coming weeks is to be lyrical, sensual, aesthetic, imaginative, and festively non-literal.
Homework: Send your secrets for how to increase your capacity for love to: Tr**********@***il.com.
Jeanne Sakata’s father never talked about his internment by his own country. He didn’t want her to hold resentment toward her country, and hoped his family could move forward and not look back.
Her father was in high school when President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized Executive Order 9066 to relocate more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry (including U.S. citizens) to internment camps following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Sakata’s grandfather had moved to the Pajaro Valley in 1918, working as a farmer and raising his family. But when the mandate came, the whole Sakata family was relocated from Watsonville to a remote internment camp in Arizona.
“My father would always give me short answers, and then he would change the subject when I would ask about it,” Sakata remembers. “After they got out of those camps, many of the nisei—second-generation Japanese Americans—felt that the best way to deal with the trauma was to not talk about it. There was a sense of shame and humiliation that as American citizens, they had been treated like this.”
Because of the secrecy in her family, Sakata says, it wasn’t until she opened a textbook in high school that she understood what incarcerated Japanese Americans had gone through during World War II.
When Sakata saw the documentary A Personal Matter: Gordon Hirabayashi vs. the United States by John de Graaf, she was stunned that she’d never heard of Hirabayashi’s 50-year fight for equality and consciousness. Hirabayashi, a Washington University student during World War II, challenged the constitutionality of the forced relocation of Japanese Americans all the way to the Supreme Court. He lost his case, and it wasn’t until more than 40 years later that President Ronald Reagan offered a formal apology to Japanese Americans who were interned in the camps.
Sakata wanted to bring more attention to Hirabayashi’s story, so as a longtime playwright—in addition to her work as an actress in theater and television—she decided to do what she does best. Her one-man show Dawn’s Light: The Journey of Gordon Hirabayashi debuted in 2007 at East West Players in Los Angeles. Later retitled Hold These Truths, the play tells the story of Hirabayashi’s long fight for his rights as an American citizen. Over the course of the 90-minute show, actor Joel de la Fuente plays 37 characters, including Hirabayashi.
“When I eventually met Gordon and interviewed him, it was such a redemptive, enlightening experience,” Sakata says. “There were secrets that were long buried there for me, since my father never said much about it. Gordon was a storyteller, full of stories and details about it all.”
Hirabayashi died in 2012, at the age of 93, just before President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He never did see Sakata’s show, but she says she knows he would have enjoyed it.
“He had a gift of optimism,” Sakata says. “He said ‘what I was trying to do is say yes to the America that I wanted to be part of. I wanted to be positive.’ He wanted to hold the country to a standard outlined in the Constitution. It wasn’t a protest, it was hope.”
The play has experienced a timely resurgence, having been produced nine times in the last two years. Though the political climate has changed dramatically since the show began, Sakata says she believes Hold These Truths continues to resonate with many people across various backgrounds who have experienced fear and mistrust of the government based on their heritage.
“Gordon took the Constitution as his Constitution, which gave him the strength to take the stand he did,” Sakata says. “That’s what it’s going to take today: an active citizenry that says ‘this is our Constitution, and we are going to fight for the rights that matter to us.’”
Whether it’s the Muslim ban or migrant children’s camps, many of the largest national issues today contain echoes of Hirabayashi’s story. Sakata says she has a lot of hope that the next generation will break the seemingly never-ending loop of racial biases.
“There are so many of us that are feeling threatened,” Sakata says of minority communities. “I am hoping that there will be a sense of empathy so that if one of us is threatened, all of us are threatened. That we will stick up for each other, and fight on behalf of everyone.”
‘Hold These Truths’ will be presented July 11-Aug. 5 at the Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto. theatreworks.org. $35-$60.
Thursday, a complex day, includes an evening new moon solar eclipse (21 degrees Cancer). Solar (sun) eclipses tell us something essential in our lives has come to an end, its work complete. Our Earth this month is bathed in the Light of Cancer. It is the “light within form” awaiting the Light of the Soul. The “dark light of matter awaiting the Light from the Soul.” Humanity and all Earth’s kingdoms live within the “dark light of matter.” Our physical bodies are made of this … “intelligent substance, awaiting the Light of the Soul.”
The Cherubim are the angels of Cancer. They surround mothers at birth and small children everywhere. At new and full moon times, light from Rays 3 and 5 (two stars from the Big Dipper), the Cherubim and Cancer all stream into the New Group of World Servers who radiate this light to humanity, the Earth and her kingdoms. Two keynotes are sounded. “Let isolation rule, yet the crowd exists.” This is the personality building keynote. Eventually without the light of the Soul we can feel imprisoned, unable to connect with anyone or anything. It is at this time when the personality reaches out in despair, asking for help. And this awakens the Soul and the Soul appears, with specific directional, loving light that unifies, illumines and guides the personality. The Soul tells the personality “I will build a lighted house (within you), and dwell therein.” Then the isolation turns to unity.
We become the Light of the world (like the Christ). We are then able to provide unlimited nourishment to all forms and creatures of life. Our tasks in Cancer.
ARIES: Uranus is your awakener. A great shift in perception begins as you seek more freedom of expression. However, first you’ll feel you cannot speak your mind. Because a new awakening is occurring internally, in your consciousness. You’ll wonder if you must leave all that you love behind. It’s a risk to help create a new world. You, however, have the tools and courage. Rest a while so you can hear the call when it comes.
TAURUS: You’ll find that events in your surroundings and environments are rushing you forward into the future. You’ll also realize certain elements of your life are no longer available. All things from the past either fall away or become useful in creating the future. Calling upon great spiritual resources, you single handedly construct the new curriculum needed for humanity’s survival and education. You’ve been pondering this for years. It’s now time.
GEMINI: There may be need at some time for a change in environments, work, friends, groups and your entire social circle. You may require a new life, new ideas and studies that apply the astrological and esoteric to your daily life. Change will be needed for life to make sense. This will be a new path to be taken, new rules and guidelines. Anything and anyone limiting your steps forward cannot accompany you. Pack lightly.
CANCER: Following orders seems difficult and you will resist anyone with authority. This is good sometimes and not so good other times. You’ll learn to discern and discriminate whom to trust. Attempt to observe yourself more directly. Notice how creative you are. People look to you for information continually emerging from your experiments. In the world, you are seen as a bit unusual to radical. Interesting!
LEO: Will you be traveling soon? If so, know that interesting and unusual events may occur. You’ll encounter new ways of thinking, creating expansive, open-minded, utopian thoughts on community. Traditions fall away and gradually, over time, you become unconventional, adapting ways of being that comfort you. Education, travel, study, religion, mountaineering, philosophy, politics, justice. Which attract you?
VIRGO: Shared resources, taxes, loans, insurance, and/or values (also shared with another close to you) may tilt sideways and be shaken up in your life. This creates the need to rebalance, choosing your own values and finding your own money to pursue what’s most important. You’ll ponder deeply before venturing forth into uncharted territory and unusual relationships. Have fun, though.
LIBRA: Everyone and everything may feel unpredictable. You may change your view of relationships and feel you cannot rely on others for things you hope and expect. There could be a sense of limitation, creating a challenge to break free. You or your partner may become rebellious, act in surprising ways. Sometimes you’re on your own. In some ways, yes you are. It redefines you. Reach out. Love more.
SCORPIO: Everything in daily life and work may feel like they’re being taken apart and shaken up. You feel the need to loosen yourself from previous ways of thinking, beliefs, and relating. You also need to tend to health. The years ahead will be influenced by what you think and do now. Disruptions can be looked upon as reasons to create a new rhythm. Bring forth your deep inventive nature. It will save you.
SAGITTARIUS: Don’t be surprised should you experience sudden changes in ideas leading to creativity. Don’t be surprised if you’re attracted to a totally different type of person, place or way of life. Don’t be surprised if you work really hard at loosening any obstructions and inhibitions and they fly away like a flock of blackbirds. You want to become different, become eccentric, playful, more childlike, more romantic. Over time, you do.
CAPRICORN: Observe your home life. Are changes and subtle fluctuations taking place? Perhaps within you? Realize that routines may shift, decision-making will become deeper and more internal, and you won’t want anything unusual or hasty to be rearranged because that would create distractions. You will try new things, create new traditions. But you must also take the time for long restful sleep. It nourishes you so you can nourish others (more).
AQUARIUS: You may find yourself easily wearied and things traditional and/or habitual not useful. You seek new realities, new studies, unusual fields of endeavors and concepts. You’re highly creative when speaking and writing. Usual routines begin to break away so a new self-expression can take hold. Visualize all needed changes. This creates outer changes. A new environment, neighborhood expands you. Maintain your freedoms.
PISCES: Convert extra money to silver and/or gold. Invest in land, food and essential things needed that sustain the many. Your values are changing and will continue to change. Income may fluctuate, outlay must be practical. All possessions no longer useful quietly disappear. Do not lament this reality. New, better, greater ones appear. Social life, groups and contacts change, too. It’s for the good, the better and the best. Stay poised, patient and cultivate hope, courage, patience and joy. The Disciple’s virtues.
Kate Wakefield recalls playing a show in Baltimore recently, and getting a really strange response after her indie-punk band Lung got off the stage.
“The man said, ‘I expected you to sound like Zooey Deschanel,’ Wakefield remembers, explaining: “They were expecting it to be really poppy and indie.”
It’s understandable that he would see the duo—made up of Wakefield, who plays the cello and sings, and Daisy Caplan, who plays the drums—and not think “punk rock.”
But they do, in fact, rock hard. Wakefield’s electric cello is distorted, and she’s able to play some deep bassy riffs on it.
“You have a lot to work with. You have two lower registers of the cello. You have really screechy stuff that you can do on the top two strings. It’s almost like a weird primal scream,” Wakefield says.
Before starting Lung with Caplan two years ago, Wakefield had already been writing music on her cello. When she plays solo, she loops it, and the resulting music is grand and ethereal, almost fantastical.
But then one day, Wakefield noticed that she was starting to write harder, darker material that wasn’t quite fitting into the style of her solo material. She started to jam with Caplan’s old band Foxy Shazam, but that band just happened to break up right around the same time, so instead of feeling defeated, she started Lung with Caplan.
After just playing one show together, Wakefield and Caplan went to record a four-song demo. Everything clicked so well, they ended up recording a record’s worth of stuff. They released it in March 2017 as Bottom of the Barrel. The record, which has minimal extra flourishes, gives you a sense of the intensity the group can create with just two people.
There’s a clear interplay between the cello and drums, and Daisy rarely does anything flashy, instead opting for high dynamic shifts in the songs. He’ll even lightly tap on the side of the drums if the songs needs it. He attributes his approach to having played other instruments.
“I have a lifetime of yelling at drummers for doing things not the way I want them to do it,” Caplan says. “It gives me a better scope, now that I’m playing drums, of how I want to be playing drums.”
Wakefield says when she’s writing a song she can almost immediately tell if it’s for her solo project or for Lung. More often than not, most of Lung’s songs are written with Caplan, so they can bounce ideas off each other.
“Daisy will play a beat, and it’ll be strange and interesting. We were working on something yesterday where I wouldn’t have come up with the melodic line or the part,” Wakefield says. “I think the biggest difference between this one and the solo one is that I can really express feelings of anger and just really intense crazed feelings. Like you’re up in the middle of the night and you’re looking at humanity and you’re disgusted, and you look around you and what has been happening with the world that we’re living in and what’s happening with this country. Things like that are easier to express in this project probably just because it’s the nature of the setup. Also Daisy’s drumming.”
The band has toured pretty relentlessly, and has turned heads wherever they have landed, as folks anticipate something that sounds a bit more, er, classical. But as they prepare for the next album, they say it will be even heavier.
They also say that some of the clear lines that separated Wakefield’s solo songs and Lung might not be so clear in the future.
“There are definitely some gray areas. But I think that we were both overly conscious of gray areas at one point, and now it’s just more fun,” Caplan says. “I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t like her solo stuff. It’s fun to blend it and explore the gray areas and also have them be separate entities. It’s musical freedom.”
Lung plays at 9 p.m. Wednesday, July 18 at the Crepe Place, 1134 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. $8, 429-6994.
Infrastructure design at Alderwood—an upcoming outpost of “oysters, cocktails, and steaks”—is already well underway at 155 Walnut St. (former location of Erik’s Deli) in downtown Santa Cruz. At the helm as partner and chef is Jeffrey Wall who brings a resumé with him that includes Atlanta’s Kimball House and Denver’s Hearth & Dram. Three seating areas, including a bar and chef’s counter will showcase Wall’s fresh food stylings built upon a French culinary background spun forward into a fresh California setting.
“I am a beef enthusiast,” Wall told me last week. “And California, as with nearly every ingredient, is home to excellent beef.” The cuisinartist has some sophisticated plans. “Alderwood will feature five to six types of beef, from ultra-lean grass-fed to the richest wagyu breed.” Wall, who was trained in French cooking techniques, plans to add “fresh fish and tons of local vegetables” to the menu focus on aged beef.
The restaurant-in-progress will fill several other niches in local cuisine. For example, Wall plans to offer a dozen or more kinds of West Coast oysters at his in-house oyster bar. “The most obvious gap for me is the fact that we will be open later than most other restaurants,” he reveals. And that means that foodies can enjoy a meal after the movie or theater. And Alderwood will be able to “offer great food and dining to the industry professionals of Santa Cruz.” Good news for those who don’t get off work until closing time at most other restaurants.
“The primary goal for me is to write a truly expressive menu,” Wall says. “The true colors of the menu will always be expressed with the produce.” A savvy professional barely into his ’30s, Wall knows that however provocative one’s food philosophy may be, “philosophy alone will not yield a great restaurant. The average diner will not eat our food just because it was grown a certain way. It has to taste amazing, too.”
To that end, he is interested in organic produce because the results are invariably “more dynamic, delicious and explosive.” Same with locally grown items. “A peach grown and picked closer tastes better. It is less likely to be refrigerated. More likely to be ripe.” Wall chose Santa Cruz when the recent opportunity arose, but he’d been impressed with the Bay Area market scene since visiting seven years ago. “I quickly learned that Santa Cruz was home to some of the best farmers in the country—possibly the world.” Jeffrey Wall is also pretty convinced that Santa Cruz is a community that shares his love for “tasty and healthy food.” All the more reason to look forward to the October opening of Alderwood. I’ll be watching the development of this new restaurant, so stay tuned.
Storrs Readies Corralitos Debut
At long last the dust has settled and winemakers Pam and Steve Storrs can actually say the words “grand opening” about their LEED-certified estate winery and tasting room, ready to open next month at their Corralitos winery. “Early August,” promises Steve Storrs, who plans to have tasting hours at the gorgeous new winery building on Saturdays “and possibly Sundays too during the summer.” The familiar Sash Mill Storrs tasting room will stay open, but the winemakers hope that between the exciting new facility and the award-winning reputation of Storrs wines, even more winetasting action will aim toward South County.
“Corralitos is such a super spot,” he (needlessly) reminded me. Storrs, Windy Oaks, Alfaro—three outstanding reasons to visit the south side of the Santa Cruz Mountains winegrowing region.
