Anyone in town interested in traditional Brazilian dance music has certainly checked out SambaDá, the seven-piece local band that does it amazingly well. It was founded by Papiba Godinho two decades ago, just a couple of years after he moved here from Brazil.
But Godinho has another project he started a few years ago called Papiba and Friends with bassist Etienne Franc and drummer Gary Kehoe, which certainly has Brazilian elements, but veers from the traditional.
“There is more space for the experimental elements of the music. We do a lot more blending of R&B, rock, blues and Northern Americana influences. I think this makes Brazilian music more accessible to our American audiences and opens them to exploring more deeply,” Godinho says.
The group started as Godinho’s answer to gig requests that were more intimate and weren’t appropriate for a large dance band to play. What he found was that he and his smaller group could jam out on songs more, build funky grooves and do pretty much whatever they want. Oddly, this side project has helped SambaDá gain an even larger audience in town.
“I think we do this and it’s actually been helping. I feel like our SambaDá shows are actually getting more popular lately, because people come to see us and they see a little bit of the drumming and the Portuguese and they don’t know what it is. I say ‘oh, it’s Brazilian music, we also have a different project called SambaDá,” Godinho says.
Both of his bands gig regularly, though SambaDá still plays more than Papiba and Friends. Papiba and Friends play a monthly Crow’s Nest gig, which has gotten pretty popular, as well as other gigs around Santa Cruz.
“It’s very cool. SambaDá, because of the size, it ends up becoming a big party. Sometimes it’s hard to break down to something more groovy. but I like that I want to keep exploring that,” Godinho says.
INFO: 8:30 p.m. Thursday, June 21. Moe’s Alley, 1535 Commercial Way, Santa Cruz. $12/adv, $15/door. 479-1854.
The City of Santa Cruz Water Department will host an information session about the plans for the Newell Creek Dam—a major tributary to the San Lorenzo River. Representatives from the agency will also be tabling at the event to answer questions. There will be six additional environmental groups there including American Fisheries Society, Monterey Bay Salmon and Trout Project, and Santa Cruz Fly Fishermen.
Join several artists and performers from both Santa Cruz and Monterey counties in an exploration of gender identity through poetry, film, photography, live music and more. Artists of varying gender expressions, orientations, and cultural experiences will be showcasing works that are representative of their own experiences. This is a one-night-only pop-up.
INFO: 7-8:30 p.m. Wednesday, June 20. Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. 705 Front St, Santa Cruz. 429-1964. santacruzmah.org. $10 general admission, $8 student.
With seven bands across two stages, a beer garden and a skate park, the Pleasure Point Street Fair is back for a sixth round. The Santa Cruz Boardroom will once again hold its popular skateboard contest, and the kid’s zone will feature crafts with Santa Cruz Children’s Museum of Discovery and Woodworm Party Store, as well as face and henna painting. Around 100 local vendors will set up shop to showcase their art, crafts, local services, food and beverages from across the county, and there will be live music galore (including Coffee Zombie Collective, pictured). The Pleasure Point Business Association will be donating $2,500 of the proceeds to local nonprofit Live Oak Education Foundation.
INFO: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Portola Drive between 41st and 38th avenues, Santa Cruz. pleasurepointstreetfair.com. Free.
In case you haven’t heard, bees are dying. In the last few years, colonies of bees have been significantly impacted by pesticide use, monoculture and suburban farming. If the trend continues, it will mean a lot less honey and fruit (that includes wine, by the way). Protecting the bees is critical for the future of our global ecosystem, and starting a beehive is easy, if you have the right guidance. Join UC Master Gardener Randy Fox in a beginners beekeeping class. He will talk about the lives of honey bees, discuss the everyday dynamics inside a beehive, and how to set up a beehive.
Santa Cruz’s median home price is encroaching on $1 million; it’s an expensive place to live for anyone. But what do the multi-million dollar homes look like? A joint benefit for the Women’s Council of Realtors Santa Cruz, Habitat for Humanity, Santa Cruz SPCA, and many others, this showcase tours six exquisite homes in Santa Cruz, Aptos, Capitola and Soquel—including a 3770 square-foot contemporary country estate from an award-winning architect Fred Lattanzio.
A cold grey wall of fog blankets Santa Cruz on a Friday morning in mid-June. From a distant perch above the Santa Cruz Yacht Harbor, one can see a meandering line of children in dark green T-shirts winding their way down the eastern rim of the harbor, slowly but ever-so-surely making their way to a destination near the beach.
The students—participating in the Nueva Vista Community Resource program in Beach Flats—are here for the marine stewardship program hosted by the O’Neill Sea Odyssey (OSO), and while they may not know it quite yet, they are marching toward history. Sometime this summer—the date is uncertain, but likely in September—the widely heralded nonprofit will officially count its 100,000th participant in the organization’s 22-year operation.
In the building adjacent to the Crow’s Nest restaurant, a trio of highly trained ocean stewards—OSO Education Coordinator Laura Walker, and instructors Lauren Hanneman and Joey Rodrigues—gather the students together, secure life jackets on them, and prepare them for an afternoon at sea. At first it’s a bit like herding young kittens (or as Rodrigues jokes, “young squirrels”); their energy is kinetic and unfocused. But in a matter of minutes, they are molded into shape and ready for their launch aboard the imposing 65-foot Team O’Neill catamaran.
I have been a passenger on various craft in Monterey Bay for the better part of six decades, and much to my surprise, I still get a rush of pleasure and excitement going out to sea. The views from the catamaran are muted on this foggy day—much like the work of American Tonalist painters in the late 19th century—and the panorama quickly captures a view from Lighthouse Point to Pleasure Point, with the Santa Cruz Mountains providing a dark backdrop in the distance. If any place feels like home to me, this does.
On their two-hour journey into the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, the students will encounter lessons in marine biology, environmental protection, and the basics of navigation. The instructors make each educational platform a hands-on experience. The kids are enthralled.
Shortly after leaving the harbor, and just a few hundred yards off Black Point, we encounter more than a dozen sea otters (quite nearly extinct when I was the age of the children on the boat), and then a host of various sea birds gracefully glide by—murres and egrets and cormorants and pelicans—and it’s different seeing them from the ocean’s surface. The magic and various glories of the maritime universe take on new meaning when you are in the middle of them.
One critical piece of information that OSO teaches its participants is about “non-point-source” pollution—road runoff (oil, gasoline, etc.), animal feces, plastic bags, Styrofoam cups, cigarette butts ad infinitum that wind up in the Monterey Bay Sanctuary through storm drains, rivers and creeks. No matter where the kids are coming from—and many come from Santa Clara County—they realize they can have an impact on protecting the oceans from outside threats.
Let me acknowledge that, much to my surprise, this old salt learned a lot of new things about marine life during the sail. This was my first time on one of the Sea Odyssey excursions in several years, and at each stage of the journey I learned something new—about various types of plankton, about current threats to the marine environment (the amount of plastics in the ocean is staggering) and even the common murre, which, as instructor Hanneman explained to me, dives to depths of nearly 100 fathoms (600 feet)! It was an absolutely inspiring experience.
You could see by the excitement on the faces of the kids, that the two-to-three hour experience would make an indelible mark on their lives. As one young student said to me when we spotted our first sea otter, “This is so cool. I wish that I could take my entire family out here. They won’t believe it!”
Indeed, for many of the students—and for most students who participate in the program—their voyage on Team O’Neill marks their very first time on the ocean. Hanneman, a 13-year veteran of the OSO program, wrote her master’s thesis specifically about the long-term impacts of the program by tracking participants into middle and high school. Fully 75 percent of students in Hanneman’s study manifested long-term retention of materials taught to them in the OSO program. By the time they arrive back on shore, the students become lifelong warriors on behalf of ocean stewardship. There’s hope.
[Drop Cap] The O’Neill Sea Odyssey program was founded in 1996 by the late Jack O’Neill (1923-2017), the innovative surf gear and clothing entrepreneur whose ultimate legacy, I would argue, is less about wetsuits and surf shops than about the program he envisioned in the 1990s for turning his catamaran and yacht harbor offices into a maritime program for young students.
If O’Neill was the founding visionary of the Sea Odyssey experience, then the man at the tiller of the program for the past two decades has been its executive director, Dan Haifley.
Raised in the suburbs of Orange County, in Rossmoor, near Seal Beach, Haifley credits his father, a retired Sea Scout, with encouraging his lifelong love affair with the sea. “He told me stories of his six-month Pacific trip when he was a teenager, and it sort of captured my imagination,” Haifley says. And, as a teenager, Haifley also began paying attention to offshore oil drilling operations just north of him, near Long Beach.
A steady and energetic presence in Santa Cruz since he arrived here in 1977 as a student at UCSC, where he majored in economics, Haifley has long been at the center of the community’s political zeitgeist. He first cut his chops at the activist organization People for a Nuclear Free Future, working with would-be Santa Cruz mayors Jane Weed and the late Scott Kennedy.
In 1986, Haifley was hired to run the Oil Information Program of Save Our Shores (SOS), at a time during the Reagan presidency when the entire coast of California appeared to be up for grabs to the highest bidder. The year before, voters in the City of Santa Cruz had passed an ordinance by 82 percent which basically put a stop to oil drilling locally by requiring a vote of the people for any changes in zoning to accommodate onshore facilities for offshore operations.
At Save Our Shores, Haifley was essentially hired to replicate the initiative up and down California. Even with the threat of lawsuits from oil companies looming over his efforts, he got more than two dozen of them passed.
Most significantly, Haifley was viewed as the go-to guy on the ground for delivering and stewarding ocean protection legislation in California. In the early 1990s, Haifley used his perch at SOS to work closely with then-congressman Leon Panetta and the Center for Marine Conservation (now the Ocean Conservancy) to form an environmental coalition that pushed for the largest possible boundary for the Monterey Bay Marine Sanctuary—the largest in the United States. The legislation was passed by Congress at Panetta’s behest in September of 1992. Haifley, as Panetta once said to me, was the “field lieutenant” of that effort.
Shortly thereafter, at an SOS event celebrating the Sanctuary, O’Neill (who had become strongly supportive of SOS and environmental protections for the oceans) told Haifley that he was “interested in using his 65-foot sailing catamaran to get students on the water to learn about the ocean.” From that initial discussion, O’Neill Sea Odyssey was born.
The rest, as they say, is history. OSO offered its first classes in December of 1996; it incorporated as a nonprofit in 1997, and by May of 1999, Haifley had been hired as executive director, where he’s been at the helm ever since. This past April, he announced his retirement at the end of the year.
In advance of an all-encompassing event this coming weekend celebrating OSO’s 100,000th student, to be held at Cowell Beach, I interviewed Haifley—married to his wife Rebecca, a retired teacher with the Pajaro Valley School District, and the father of two children, Aaron and Julia—about his thoughts on the program he helped create, his retirement and the state of the oceans today.
SHIPPING NEWS This summer will see the O’Neill Sea Odyssey take its 100,000th student out on the water. There will be a celebration of the milestone on Sunday, June 24, from 1-4 p.m. at Cowell Beach. PHOTO: JASPER LYONS
We’ve discussed this before, and correct me if I’m wrong, but I knew Jack [O’Neill] since I was a kid, and I felt like Jack had something of a rebirth around the OSO program. When I talked to him about it, he was always very excited. It seemed to add new meaning to his life.
DAN HAIFLEY: Yes. He had established his company as a leader in the surf industry, and in the 1980s began to think about how the ocean could be protected. He knew instinctively that the sea was comprised of an interwoven matrix of life. The engineer in him figured out how that system operated, and the promoter in him understood that if students learned about that system at a young age, they would become its life-long protectors.
People forget about his fascination with science and engineering.
Right. From 1988 until his death, I had countless conversations with him about the ocean’s systems. For example, he was interested in the North Atlantic current—which is key to moving warm water from the tropics northward, and is a reason that Europe has a moderate climate—and its role in mitigating the effects of climate change. He was interested in what was happening with ocean acidification, which is an outcome of the ocean absorbing excess carbon from the atmosphere.
He was a ‘waterman’ in the purest sense of the word.
Jack O’Neill always tinkered with wetsuit designs and how swells work along the coast, and he applied that same analytical mindset to ocean health. His legacy in promoting ocean awareness and health started with his own curiosity and drive to make things better. He took it to the next step by deploying his boat and the building at the harbor, and some money to get O’Neill Sea Odyssey started.
I didn’t realize that.
Yeah, he and Tim O’Neill gathered a team that included Jack McLaughlin, Theresa Coyle, Jim Holm, Carl Keehn, and members of Save Our Shores to develop a program. I was hired in 1999, and so was Laura Walker. Today she runs the program, working with over 200 teachers a year, scheduling classes, community service projects and providing scholarships.
Jack seemed to love what was going on with the program.
Jack moved his family to Santa Cruz in the late 1950s to building a family-oriented market for surfing. That naturally led to his passion and drive to protect the ocean. The wetsuit business and O’Neill Sea Odyssey were two sides of the same coin for him. He believed that getting people in the water bred familiarity with it, which lead to a desire to protect it.
What’s the biggest impact of your program on the kids?
Most of the students who participate in our program have never been on the ocean. In fact, most people in the world have never been on the ocean. Getting out onto the ocean to explore its intricacies and learn to protect it is not a prerequisite to a life of stewardship, but it surely helps. O’Neill Sea Odyssey instructors use hands-on learning, which is a very effective complement to book-based and lecture-driven learning. People learn visually and kinetically, as well as by listening. I see it as an immersion in science and stewardship using the ocean field trip, classroom curriculum, and community service. Being a free program allows us to serve students regardless of background. You never know where the next Rachel Carson will come from.
What do you see as the biggest challenge facing the oceans today?
Plastic pollution and climate change, which changes the water’s pH, are the two biggest stressors on the ocean today—though there are many others. When I go out and promote O’Neill Sea Odyssey in the community, I am asked about what the biggest threat to the ocean is, and I say that everything we do in our everyday lives such as tossing a cigarette butt on the ground, or getting into our cars, affects everything on Earth, including the ocean.
OCEAN ADVOCATES The late Jack O’Neill (right) with OSO Executive Director Dan Haifley, who has announced his retirement after two decades with the program. PHOTO: JASPER LYONS
What does the 100,000th student mean to you?
We are now at 99,236 students, and at the rate of 25 students per class, we will likely serve our 100,000th student in September, if not before. I know it’s just a number, but it represents our team’s skill, which causes those teachers to keep bringing students to us. The idea of a campaign to count down to 100,000 was the brainchild of Adam Steckley, our Operations Coordinator. It enables us to use social media to tell the stories of our instructors, our students, and their experiences.
Dan, I’ve known you for 40 years and you’ve always walked with a steady purpose. It’s hard to imagine you are really retiring.
I am really retiring. My wife has been retired for a few years now, and when I turned 60, I decided it was time to pass the baton. My job has been to promote the program, raise funds and implement the board’s direction, and a new person will be able to do that with new energy. I will work in the garden, go kayaking, and volunteer. I am still on the Monterey Bay Sanctuary Advisory Council and I just joined the Board of the new Monterey Bay Chapter for the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation.
GT: So ‘retiring’ in the Haifley sense.
[Laughter] OK …
GT: Any final thoughts?
Haifley: I am grateful to everyone who makes O’Neill Sea Odyssey work, every day. They are true ocean heroes.
100,000th Student Schedule of Events
Sunday, June 24, Cowell Beach, 1-4 p.m.
SCHEDULE
1:00-1:30 Check-in at registration table. Samba Stilt Circus dancers greet attendees. Gather in parking lot.
1:30-2:30 City of Santa Cruz street dedication (David Terrazas) and OSO milestone remarks (Dan Haifley).
2:30-4 Entertainment, food trucks, beach activities, and sailing charters.
ACTIVITIES
Parking lot
Performance art by Samba Stilt Circus (1-1:30)
Food trucks (1-4)
City of Santa Cruz dedication/OSO announcement (1:30-2:30)
Live music by The Wavetones (2:30-3, 3:10-3:20, 3:35-4)
Hula dance troupe with Lorraine Kinnamon (3:00-3:10 & 3:20-3:30)
Raffle ticket drawing and closing remarks (3:30-3:35)
Beach
Beach cleanup with Save Our Shores (11:30-1:30)
Surf rentals with Club Ed (1-4)
Sand art by Bill Lewis (1-4)
Face painting with Sophie and Audrey (1-4)
Photo booth – What does the ocean mean to you? (1-4)
Marine debris art with Theresa & Rachel (1-4)
Public sailing with O’Neill Yacht Charters (2-2:45, 3-3:45, 4-4:45)
Under Tent
SOS information table (supplying own tent, table and chairs)
Morgan Winery is one of the better-known wineries in the Monterey Bay area. Their wines can be found in restaurants, bars, stores, and, of course, at their tasting room in Carmel.
Morgan is a well-established winery that was founded by Dan Morgan Lee in the early 1980s. And then in 1997 he and his wife Donna Lee purchased and planted a vineyard in the northern end of the Santa Lucia Highlands—now one of the most famed winegrowing properties in California.
The G17 Morgan Vineyards 2016 Syrah, Santa Lucia Highlands ($24), is a luxurious blend of 88 percent Syrah, 8 percent Grenache and 4 percent Tempranillo, aged for 15 months in French oak (16 percent new oak). G17 refers to one of Monterey County’s highways—best known for winding its way through lush vineyards. This rich ruby-red Syrah is medium-bodied with lovely soft tannins and abundant notes of boysenberry, white pepper, and “a mouthful of black fruits and cured meat.”
Morgan Winery, 204 Crossroads Blvd., Carmel, 626-3700. morganwinery.com.
Love Apple Farms Jam-making Class
Ever thought of trying your hand at jam-making? You will have the chance from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, June 23 by signing up for Love Apple Farms’ hands-on class ($119). This workshop will be held at Love Apple Farms, 2317 Vine Hill Road, Santa Cruz. Visit growbetterveggies.com or email lo************@***il.com for more info.
Days of Wine & Roses on The Summit
Visit Burrell School Vineyards, Loma Prieta Winery and Wrights Station Vineyard for the month of June when the roses are at their peak in each of these scenic Summit-area vineyards. The heritage rose garden at Burrell School is abloom with a panoply of dazzling colors and scents, from the crush pad to the gazebo. For the regular tasting fee, enjoy newly released Rosé wines at Burrell School and at Wrights Station, where you can picnic among the flowering vines. Sip sparkling Pinotage at Loma Prieta whilst enjoying panoramic views of the Monterey Bay. The event is through June 30, with special pricing on Rosé and select white wines for spring-into-summer sipping. Visit summitoseawinetrail.com for more info.
Koji Gotu bought the Pink Godzilla sushi spot on 41st Avenue four years ago, and refashioned it into an all-things-Japanese restaurant with not just sushi, but also noodles, curry and Japanese tapas.
Gotu, who used to own a similar restaurant in Burlingame, says that Santa Cruz, with its cool weather, is a good place for ramen. He also owns Sushi Market Sprouts, a takeout store on 7th Avenue, and says ramen is a good way for surfers to warm up after getting out of the water. What’s the difference between ramen and other types of Asian noodles? KOJI GOTU: Udon is a different type of noodle. Like ramen, it’s also a wheat noodle, but it’s a different type. Soba is a buckwheat noodle, and it has a different floss. How did you come up with the restaurant name? Kaito means ocean lover. The “kai” means ocean or sea, and the “to” means people—so ocean people or seamen. I’ve always liked the raised wooden seating area, where you can sit on the ground but still dangle your feet below. What’s it called? We call it zashiki. Other people call it tatami. Zashiki means sitting on the floor without shoes. Do you like eating that way? I like it, and the people like it, too. And our kids like it. It’s a different experience than regular tables and chairs. Do you have a favorite food establishment here in the Pleasure Point area? We have a lot here. Next door, Penny Ice Creamery has a huge line, and they’re really good. smilekaito.com, 464-2586.
Through the swirling dust of a refugee camp in Eastern Lebanon, two girls wearing school uniforms catch Tony Hoffman’s eye. The child psychologist and UCSC lecturer approaches the high-school-age girls and begins asking about how they first arrived at the camp and what their lives were like before.
Having spent more than a year in the camp, both girls know the safest routes to school. They’ve become friends since fleeing Syria with their families. The older girl, who sports tennis shoes and Western-style bangles, was studying computer science before the Syrian Civil War broke out. The other girl—who’s wearing artfully done makeup, pretty universal in Syria and in the camps—was studying literature. Today, they are students in a school run by a non-governmental organization and funded by Malala Yousafzai, the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize. This area, Bekaa Valley, contains the region’s highest density of vulnerable Syrian refugees, Hoffman says, and it’s six miles from the Syrian border.
The girls are from different parts of Syria, Aleppo and Damascus, but their stories are eerily—and heartbreakingly—similar. They are among the half of all Syrians who’ve been driven from their homes by bombs, siege, starvation, chemical attacks, and domicide, which is the widespread destruction of people’s homes, and are fueling the largest refugee crisis since World War II. Both girls just want to go home, but have no homes to return to.
“We have nowhere to go, and we cannot stay here. We cannot even call the dirt under our feet our own,” they tell Hoffman. An estimated 100 Syrians flee the country every hour, Hoffman says, and entire communities will have nothing but rubble to return to once the war is over.
Hoffman says war should, first and foremost, be seen as an attack on children.
“Children are more vulnerable to injury,” says Hoffman, who’s retiring from UCSC, having taught his final class at the university this past spring. “They are more vulnerable to disease and starvation. In war, children always lose.”
The conflict—which began seven years ago as the Arab Spring was well underway—has Syria in tatters. While watching the situation worsen on his trips to Lebanon, where one out of every four people is a Syrian refugee, Hoffman has felt powerless to stop it.
As a developmental psychologist, Hoffman is fascinated with how children survive extreme circumstances. Over the past five years, he has been leading a double life, splitting his time between professorial duties at UCSC and the American University in Beirut, where he is running AUB’s psychosocial services for refugee children. He teaches a course on war-affected children at each university.
EMERGENCY EXIT
A half a world away, Hoffman’s spacious office on the third floor of the UCSC Social Sciences 2 building feels cramped. Ornately carved wooden masks and dozens of framed pictures of himself with child refugees from brutal conflicts around the world cover every inch of the cream-colored walls.
According to a 2017 poll conducted by CNN/ORC,more than half of Americans favored allowing refugees from Syria to seek asylum in the United States, but only 25 percent were strongly in favor. Hoffman hopes to help shape the way his fellow Americans understand the situation.
“I’m reviving the concept of deep homelessness in my writing and lectures,” he says, “so people can understand the psychology of these refugees.”
Refugees are scattering in four directions—south to Jordan, east to Iraq, west to Lebanon, north into Turkey, and, of course, toward Europe, which is the route that’s gotten the most attention. But Hoffman explains that the refugee flow into Europe has largely stopped by now.
“Host countries don’t have the means to repatriate them and feed them and they want them to go home,” he says. “But these refugees have no home to go to.”
ORDER PATROL
Last year, an executive order signed by Donald Trump effectively closed the United States’ borders to any and all Syrian refugees. European governments and their citizens are fighting against the influx of refugees as well, with physical walls, laws and regulations. In many European countries, violence against migrants is common.
Hoffman says Syrian refugees are often seen as “freeloaders taking away local jobs, outsiders, cowards, and criminals. The negative stereotypes we hear in the United States about migrants are just as prevalent in other parts of the world.”
Westerners have focused on the refugee crisis in Europe, rather than on the 80 percent of refugees remaining in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, Hoffman says. “Our Islamophobia plays a role in not addressing the issue where it’s at its worst,” Hoffman explains.
In September of 2015, the Kurdi family of Syria paid smugglers $5,860 for four spaces on a small inflatable boat in the hopes of reaching “safety” in Europe. The five-meter-long boat carrying the Kurdis and eight others capsized just five minutes after pushing off Bodrum in Turkey. Their boat carried no life jackets and the entire Syrian family drowned, except for the father.
When the salt-caked body of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi—still wearing shoes and a red rocket ship T-shirt—washed ashore from the Mediterranean Sea, it made international headlines. In Syria, it was a cautionary tale.
“There’s a saying in Syria now,” Hoffman tells me. “‘The land isn’t safe and the sea isn’t safe. We have nowhere to go.’”
Over the past few years, much of the attention Syria has gotten has been directed at dictator Bashar al-Assad and his use of chemical weapons. Hoffman, who’s seen the effects firsthand, however, reports that the weapons are being used by most major groups in the region, not just Assad.
Outside of Syria, Hoffman says the situation in Lebanon is as complicated as it is anywhere, given the dramatic change in demographics.
“People are cordial and kind and are respectful,” he says, “because there is so much tension. They don’t want to step on anyone’s toes.”
There’s an old meme that comes to mind for me when I think about the local rail trail debate.
It traces its origins back to Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense under President George W. Bush. Rumsfeld was taking questions from reporters at a 2002 press conference, in the early days of the Iraq War, when he said: “As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know.”
And that’s when things got deep, with Rumsfeld explaining, “There are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
Rumsfeld was roundly derided at the time for spouting nonsense, but over the years, policy nerds have come around to quoting it regularly. That’s because it’s not as obvious as it sounds, since people often fail to ask the important question at its core: how can anyone make an accurate prediction when they don’t even know what questions they should be asking about the future in the first place?
The fact this somewhat profound sentiment came from someone evading a tough question about an unpopular war is irrelevant. Rumsfeld’s lesson was that sometimes we forget how little we truly comprehend about the future that we think we’re planning for. The notion seems especially relevant to local heated public meetings, where most everyone in the room already has their mind already made up about the best solution to any given problem.
Here in Santa Cruz County, the Regional Transportation Commission (RTC) has plans to build a bike and pedestrian path along the county’s coastal rail corridor. Staffers and consultants are currently studying the possibility of introducing passenger rail service on the tracks, along with other options. Citing concerns about cost, ridership and overall feasibility, activists from both Greenway and Trail Now have suggested the RTC instead remove the tracks and use the corridor for an extra-wide trail.
Going forward it’s, at this point, still relatively unclear how either plan will really look or would get funded, much less what shape California’s transportation future will take decades from now.
Moving Parts
The corridor’s future came into a little more focus on June 14, when the RTC tied the knot with Progressive Rail, voting 8-4 to ink a 10-year agreement with the freight operator in a hotly contested meeting. Reflecting on last week’s vote, Greenway Executive Director Gail McNulty, who opposed the draft agreement, says she’s “very worried” and believes the contract will tie up the county’s transportation options over the next decade. McNulty says her group needs to regroup before deciding on its next steps, although she says Greenway’s supporters are more motivated than ever.
Four commissioners voted against the agreement—including Capitola City Councilmember Jacques Bertrand and Scotts Valley City Councilmember Randy Johnson, along with Virginia Johnson and Patrick Mulhearn, alternates for county supervisors Bruce McPherson and Zach Friend, respectively.
Progressive Rail’s supporters—most of whom also support passenger service—have high hopes for the freight operator. With previous operator Iowa Pacific in violation of its contract, Watsonville-area shippers had been unable to send anything out on the local line, which is clogged with empty rail cars.
Supervisor Ryan Coonerty and county counsel both stressed that the RTC will get to make its decision on passenger service after the Unified Corridor Study (UCS) gets released, evaluating all options for the corridor.
Mulhearn, though, argued that the RTC’s path out of the agreement isn’t particularly clear.
“This contract is, in many ways, word for word, the Iowa Pacific contract,” Mulhearn said. “I realize now that the talking point is, ‘Well, we didn’t have a bad contract. We had a bad operator.’ Yeah, we had a bad operator, but we had no levers in our contract to remove that operator … I can’t support a contract that further disadvantages our decision makers.”
Mulhearn brought up other proposals to address the needs of the county’s major freight shippers in the coming months.
But before the RTC voted to approve the contract, those South County businesses asked for immediate relief and help getting their goods moving.
Bob Perlage, spokesperson for Big Creek Lumber, said that Big Creek bought property in Watsonville nearly 50 years ago on the rail line. His employer, he added, could lose half a million dollars a year if it had to ship all of its lumber by truck, which is less efficient than hauling by train, and therefore pricier.
Executives from two local cold storage businesses—Del Mar Foods and Lineage Logistics, each based in Watsonville—both said they process about 100,000,000 pounds of fruits and vegetables a year, and they’re heading into the busy season. They said switching to truck shipments would hurt their bottom lines, because their rates would go up.
P.J. Mecozzi, Del Mar’s president, tells GT that without a new freight rail agreement, his customers might have decided to look elsewhere.
“The rail’s an important asset to us here, and it has been for a long time,” he says.
Shared Platform
When it comes to passenger service, the issues aren’t black and white for everyone.
The environmental nonprofit Ecology Action has generally supported RTC’s approach. However, Piet Canin, the group’s vice president of transportation, says Ecology Action isn’t necessarily married to the idea of a train, but rather that the organization has taken the position of not giving up on the idea of transit on the corridor.
“We’re agnostic as to what type of transit might be on the corridor,” Canin says, “but we think that preserving the tracks is important to fully investigate rail transit as an option.”
The most obvious non-rail transit option for the corridor would be bus rapid transit, alongside a bike/pedestrian path—something consultants have been looking at as part of the UCS. That could represent something of a middle ground, and it’s something Ron Goodman, former director of People Power (which is now called Bike Santa Cruz County), has been advocating for. Both Mark Mesiti-Miller, chair of Friends of the Rail and Trail, and some Greenway boardmembers have expressed tepid openness to me about that idea in recent months—even if it wouldn’t be their first choice.
Canin does note, however, that a train can accommodate far more bikes than a bus can.
There are other ideas floating around, too. Brett Garrett of the Campaign for Sustainable Transportation has been calling for personal rapid transit (PRT), an idea that has come up periodically in Santa Cruz for decades. Although PRT systems come in various forms, some resemble the Sky Glider bucket ride at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk more than they do a traditional transportation network. Others look more like a monorail with miniature one-car trains.
Garrett says these pod cars and the rail corridor would be a perfect match for one another, though he realizes that many people have a hard time thinking about it with a straight face.
“But at the same time, in most cases, it means people haven’t taken a second look at it,” he says. “If you’ve never heard of the concept, you have to look at it and think about it. It’s forcing us to change the way we think about public transit. Thirty years ago, when people told us we’d all have little phones in our pockets, we’d think they were crazy, but here we are. We know all the basic components. Why not build it?”
Garrett, who’s been studying PRT for years, believes it would have lower carbon emissions and operating costs than other kinds of transit.
RTC Chair John Leopold is not yet ready to hitch a ride on the pod car dream.
“I haven’t studied it enough to say ‘no way,’” he says, “but I haven’t seen anything that would make me go toward wanting pod cars.”
In the meantime, the next few months make for something of a waiting game, while everyone awaits the UCS and the next step in the public process. There’s more than a small chance that the corridor study will have more than enough conflicting information for everyone to cherry pick their favorite parts to reinforce their own point of view.
I’m reminded of the city of Santa Cruz’s wide-ranging 2003 Master Transportation Study. Over the years, I’ve heard active transportation activists and city leaders from totally different parts of the political spectrum tell me the exact same thing about it: “It’s like the Bible. People read into it whatever they want to.”
Here’s hoping the UCS doesn’t end up the same way. Leopold says it matters less how the document is written, and more how the report gets read and interpreted—because if people want to cherry-pick data from a long-winded document, he says, they will.
“It falls into the ‘no-win’ category. The study’s going to use data and make some points,” says Leopold. “And there’s going to be recommendations from staff, but people will find the part of the report that most validates their point of view. The UCS isn’t going to be a magical document that gives all kinds of answers. It’s going to be open to interpretation. That’s pretty normal.”
“I heard there’s a shaman,” a man says as I wait to get into the new “Spektrum” exhibit at lille æske. “I don’t think I’ll be able to not say anything the whole time.” Meanwhile, his friend sniffs and puts his ear to a wooden stump before plopping down on it, giggling. Things are getting weird in Boulder Creek, and the main event hasn’t even started.
I’m sitting with five others around a fire, waiting to be called to enter lille æske’s new “Spektrum” installation. Everyone receives a numbered card, indicating what order they will be called in, and enters individually. Illuminated by a reddish hue, the exhibit starts with a warm and welcoming beginning, but the rabbit hole behind the door is enough to make anyone curious—or in my case, slightly anxious.
Upon entry, I’m fairly sure I’m going to be murdered by a masked man wearing a white apron. I’m not supposed to talk, but out of awkwardness I mumble a hello to the silent masked man and sit down. Music that sounds like it’s out of the ’50s quietly plays amid a vibrant orange glow in the retro kitchen. Twine is spiderwebbed around the ceiling and there’s nowhere to go but to a rickety kitchen table. My masked friend and I sit silently together, and with clammy hands I open a letter sitting in front of me and try not to look him in the eyes.
It reads: “Light of the World, isn’t it funny the way some things seem to choose you as much as you choose them? For example, why are you here right now? Do you even know, yourself? (Do you even know yourself?) Light of the World. There are so many things I want to tell you and of course there is no time. There is never any time.”
The masked man stands up and walks over to the kitchen counter, and I know I am going to die. But instead I’m led to the next room—five of which have somehow been fit into the tiny venue, each based on a different hue in the color spectrum (hence the name). Only 12 people are allowed in each night, given the individuality and personalization of it all, and the artist changes every weekend. There are several interesting characters along the way, some real and some fictional, all of them unique. It’s a journey through color and light, but also a journey into consciousness and awareness.
Leading me from room to room are silent masked hosts, who give a ghostly gesture between the sheeted rooms. The uneasiness of it all turns to comfort by the third room, where Los Angeles-based artist Black Mare waits to put on a show just for me. It’s delightfully gothic and magical—who knew I’d find solace in a masked woman wearing a kimono? She taps a large horn on her staff, hums and gives me a red rose wrapped in parchment before sending me on my merry way. I’m so glad that I’m not on drugs.
A truly sensory experience, “Spektrum” isn’t for the faint of heart, but rest assured it’s worth every second for those who have an open and curious mind. The rooms build on each other, and just when it seems like things couldn’t get any stranger, the fog machine, violet lights and canopied four-poster bed appear. From the rooms to the performances and art pieces, everything is intentional in this small space, and it’s a true wonder in itself.
Spektrum challenges what art looks and feels like. It’s awkward, cohesive and transformative at the same time, a range of emotion and otherworldly experiences all tucked away in a little wooden box in the woods.
“Spektrum” runs Thursday-Sundays through June 30. lilleaeske.com. $32.
If your idea of parents and offspring playing music together begins and ends with The Partridge Family, you may change your tune when you see Hearts Beat Loud. In Brett Haley’s engaging, gently calibrated story, a middle-aged father and his teenage daughter bond over a shared love of songwriting and playing music together. It’s a simple scenario brought to life by nuanced performances and a light and easy directorial touch.
Haley is becoming renowned for his small, indie films (I’ll See You in My Dreams; The Hero) populated by life-sized characters who look and act like, you know, actual people. There’s nothing tricky about his presentation; his unassuming movies earn our affection with their humor and honesty. Hearts Beat Loud touches on serious themes—financial hardship, broken dreams, grief and loss—but the movie’s attitude is refreshingly buoyant.
In the Red Hook district of Brooklyn, Frank Fisher (Nick Offerman) runs an obscure little storefront shop selling the vinyl records he loves. (One of the movie’s pleasures is spotting vintage album covers hung up in plastic sleeves on the walls of Frank’s shop.) His few customers are curiosity-seeking young hipsters who are gentrifying the neighborhood.
An outwardly crusty, bearlike man, with something a little nutty going on behind his eyes that suggests he’s got some scheme or other in mind, Frank used to play guitar in a rock band on the fringes of the club scene. But he gave it up for the (relative) stability of a shopkeeper when his daughter was born.
Daughter, Sam (vibrant Kiersey Clemons, so noticeable in a small part last year in The Only Living Boy in New York), is off to college in the fall to study pre-med. Business has not been great at the shop—the rent is way past due—and she’s looking for financial security for the future. No big deal is made of the fact that Sam is mixed-race, but it’s gradually revealed that her late mother was black and sang with Frank’s band.
Sam has showbiz in her blood from both sides, and while she tries to be the grown-up in the household, she’s vulnerable to her dad’s wheedling when he wants her to take a break and play music with him. Her instrument is the electric keyboard, augmented by her own powerhouse voice. When Frank learns she’s been noodling around with some songs of her own, he buys an electronic musical keypad to augment their sound. The exasperated Sam insists, “We’re not a band!” which Frank adopts as their new band name.
During the course of the summer, they compose songs and record them in Frank’s makeshift home studio. (After he secretly emails one out as a demo, he has an exuberant epiphany at the local coffeeshop when he hears their song playing on Spotify.) Meanwhile, Sam starts to fall in love with Rose (Sasha Lane, from last year’s American Honey), a young woman from the neighborhood with artistic ambitions. Lane and Clemons are easy and likable together, although the part of Rose is underwritten.
But the rest of the supporting cast has better luck. Toni Collette brings shading to the part of Frank’s sympathetic landlady who wants to give him every chance. Blythe Danner (Haley’s muse and star in I’ll See You in My Dreams) has a couple of droll scenes as Frank’s wayward mother. And it’s great to see Ted Danson behind a bar again as the proprietor of Frank’s favorite watering hole, a cheerful stoner who has never quite let go of the ’60s.
The story’s main conflict is set up between Frank’s rock ’n’ roll dream, so long delayed, and the nature of Sam’s future. But Haley’s understated approach suggests that no option is absolute, and enlightened compromise might be the best way forward in this thoughtful, entertaining film.
HEARTS BEAT LOUD
***(out of four)
With Nick Offerman, Kiersey Clemons and Ted Danson. Written by Brett Haley and Marc Basch. Directed by Brett Haley. A Gunpowder & Sky release. Rated PG-13. 97 minutes.
Have you ever thought about what Philip Roth was thinking when Bob Dylan won the Nobel Peace Prize? Singer-songwriter Amy Rigby has. She even wrote a song about it, imagining the email that Roth would fire off to Dylan. (“When you’re standing in the spotlight where you’ve always been/I’ll be alone with the pen, alone with the pen.”)
“I kind of felt like probably a lot of us feel about Bob Dylan—not angry at him, but we will never be him, to have the depths of his talent,” Rigby says. “I felt like even Philip Roth would have to shake his head and say, ‘For all the hard work I’ve done, for all the body of work I’ve created, I just can’t touch that guy.’ He just looms so large.”
The song opens Rigby’s new album Old Guys, her first solo record in 13 years. It’s a welcome return for Rigby. The singer-songwriter was an indie darling in the ’90s, particularly with her solo debut in 1996, Diary of a Mod Housewife. She’s collaborated on several records with husband Wreckless Eric. The last record they did together was 2012’s A Working Museum.
Old Guys sees her confronting age, death and loss head on, particularly on the title track, which along with “Bob,” were two early songs she wrote and helped her establish the lens for the record.
“Over the last 10 years, I was starting to lose friends—not just musical heroes, but people that I worked with and were really important to my musical life,” Rigby says. “I didn’t want it to sound mopey and sad, but more of a gratitude sort of thing, like a celebration, and have a bit of sadness.”
This vibe carries through all of the record. Much of the lyrics have a strong sad bent, yet are performed behind a mostly upbeat fuzzy rock sound. She delivers the words with her weathered voice, which hides the depth of emotion to a certain extent.
The track “Playing Pittsburgh” is a seemingly sad song about her perpetual disappointment of playing in that city, which she grew up in and left at age 16. She always feels like homecomings are underwhelming, and the shows for whatever reason are not that great. Yet the music for this song is peppered with a pride in Pittsburgh you might not expect from someone expressing this level of sadness. (“I’m playing Pittsburgh tonight/I got the hometown blues.”)
“Something about the music made it feel like Pittsburgh in a positive way,” Rigby says. “I was looking for the sound of a crowd at Pittsburgh sporting event, people cheering, like you felt you’d gone to Pittsburgh Stadium to see a Pirates game or something.”
What it creates is an album that is highly reflective without being soaked in sentimentality, nostalgia or bitterness. Her earlier work was known more for its emotional rawness. Her new album is subtler. This is something Rigby attributes to working with her husband for so long, and also to living in France some years back and getting used to expressing herself to an audience that didn’t speak English.
“I was just starting to feel the expression that comes out of playing notes and volume and sound,” Rigby says. “I was falling in love with the guitar. In the past I saw it more as a tool I needed to write songs. It was liberating.”
It was this more impressionistic approach that moved the record into a new direction. On the surface, the record seems confessional, and it times that’s a major element, but Rigby approached the songs—even the ones intimately about herself—as an abstract project of projecting images into the words.
Even in that opening track, where Roth fires off at Dylan, there’s an odd ending where after Roth speaks his mind to Dylan, Rigby acknowledges the contradiction of Dylan both being an epic person that exists in a higher plane than the rest of us, and a symbol for all of us. She expresses this complex idea by repeating “Spartacus” as the song concludes.
“Spartacus is the slave that represents all the slaves. It wasn’t about him. He was doing it for everybody,” Rigby says. “That was just so perfect to me. The word sounded good, but what it meant was even more what I wanted it to mean.”
Amy Rigby plays at 2 p.m. on Sunday, June 24 at Michael’s on Main, 2591 Main St., Soquel. $15. 479-9777.
5 Things to Do in Santa Cruz June 20-26
Green Fix
Water Department Open House
The City of Santa Cruz Water Department will host an information session about the plans for the Newell Creek Dam—a major tributary to the San Lorenzo River. Representatives from the agency will also be tabling at the event to answer questions. There will be six additional environmental...
