A Chicano band from East L.A., Las Cafeteras blends traditional Mexican music with Afro-Mexican styles, storytelling, spoken word, folk music, and zapateado dancing. The band members’ collective social conscience is front and center in the music with songs and stories of the civil rights movement, United Farm Workers, the DREAM Act, immigration reform and more. Las Cafeteras comes to Santa Cruz as part of Carnaval the Tour, a four-week tour celebrating Carnaval, the folk traditions of Latin America, and the “resilience of the human spirit.” Also on the bill: Making Moves and Alex Cuba.
INFO: 8 p.m. Thursday, May 24. Moe’s Alley, 1535 Commercial Way, Santa Cruz. $20. 479-1854. WANT TO GO? Go to santacruz.com/giveaways before 11 a.m. on Thursday, May 17 to find out how you could win a pair of tickets to the show.
The Restless Souls’ song “The Lodge” is based on a real place the group’s members frequented as teenagers. It was just a redwood grove up in the Aptos Hills, but they made up the name to make it sound less like a drinking spot and more like an actual, respectable place in case any of their parents heard them talking about it.
“We would go party there. We’d go howl at the moon and drive our cars up there, try not to drive off the road, go up and hang out. That was our nighttime hang out spot after surfing and cutting loose on the weekends,” says bassist David Adams.
Adams and guitarist/lead vocalist Jerry Best grew up together and they wanted their carefree formative years to be the muse that guided this band.
“It was the end of our high school years and going into our adventures in college and having our first band and stuff like that,” Adams says.
And they went with an anything-goes attitude as far as musical styles.
“We do some reggae, world beat stuff, we have a ska song, we do rock stuff, we do Americana stuff, we do rhythm and blues, rock ’n’ roll,” Adams says.
At the end of last year they had a record release party, but it was an early mix of the album Walk on Water. On May 10, the band will be releasing the finalized version of the record, along with new packaging.
INFO: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, May 10. Michael’s on Main, 2591 Main St., Soquel. $15. 479-9777.
While curious environmentalists nibble on local strawberries, MariaElena De La Garza, the executive director of Santa Cruz County Community Action Board, is posing some tough questions about the future of the planet, climate change and its potential effects on this area.
“What would happen to this valley if the world warms 2 degrees hotter, 4 degrees hotter, 7 degrees hotter?” asks De La Garza, as she emcees a Watsonville event unveiling a survey that examined anxieties about the county’s environmental future. “What would happen to those strawberries? And more importantly, what would happen to the community that works in those strawberries?”
In a packed house at the Watsonville City Hall Community Room on Thursday, May 3, attendees gathered to hear the findings of the community-based research project, the first to engage Watsonville residents on their experiences with and concerns about climate change. For 73 percent of those surveyed, this was their first time participating in a survey. Eighty-four percent of participants were Latino.
Xitlali Cabadas is a member of Revolunas, the volunteer group that took the lead in talking to 186 residents in public places like parks and shopping centers throughout Watsonville, with 138 more completing the survey online.
Cabadas says it should come as no surprise that farmworkers in the fields picking the food we eat are deeply affected by all types of extreme weather. Survey findings show that 74 percent of agriculture workers are impacted by extreme heat conditions in the workplace, whereas only 40 percent of non-agricultural workers say they feel those impacts directly. Several respondents reported an increase in people fainting in the fields and having to reduce work hours, or work only during the earliest hours of the day due to the rising temperatures.
Cabadas found that people were eager to offer input about a problem that for them has already become very real. “As a community member, you want what’s best for the environment because you live here, and it is affecting our water,” she says. ‘It’s affecting our air. It’s affecting our schools.”
The event, hosted by Regeneración – Pajaro Valley Climate Action, was a revealing look at the environmental justice challenges Santa Cruz County is already facing, particularly in disadvantaged communities.
Francisco Rodriguez, who has served as president of the Pajaro Valley Federation of Teachers since 2008, has been teaching in Watsonville for more than 20 years. As the son of migrant farmworkers who traveled throughout agricultural areas in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas and California’s Central Valley, he is concerned with the use of hazardous pesticides and fumigants near schools.
“We know there’s climate change, but we also want to understand the impact on people,” Rodriguez says. “And not just the impact, but understand the disproportionality of the impact and who is being affected and to what degree.” He adds that he was encouraged to see so many respondents show an interest in making their community a better place.
Dr. Shishir Mathur, associate dean of Research at San Jose State University’s College of Social Sciences, oversaw the study, training the volunteers and conducting the analysis.
The number one initiative the community favored to reduce pollution and greenhouse gas emissions was increasing access to local organic agriculture. Concerns with pollution including litter, pesticides and car exhaust topped the list as negatively affecting the community.
The potential ramifications of climate change pose threats that local governments are grappling with as well. The city and county of Santa Cruz both filed complaints against 29 fossil fuel companies this past December to recover damages incurred from climate change. Sher Edling, a law firm based in San Francisco, is representing both the city and county, along with at least five other California communities. The firm is covering the bulk of the fees, with some support from local counsel.
In its findings, the Climate of Hope survey shows a preference among Watsonville residents for better forms of public transportation, including the rail connection between Davenport and Watsonville, as well as better sidewalks for walking, bike lanes and clean energy.
Looking at the finished work, Cabadas sees the survey as a conversation starter.
“Seeing actual data about what Watsonville thinks is going to help us steer the way we need to go,” she says, “what policies need to change, what we need to bring in.”
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]’m strolling across an artichoke field on the ocean side of Highway 1 at Four Mile Beach, just north of Santa Cruz. The day is awash in late afternoon sunshine, and as fresh as only April days can be. Behind me, the hills near Bonny Doon are screaming yellow with wild mustard flower.
I arrive at a vista spot 40 feet or so above the beach. I gaze out at the silver Pacific, the diffused sun making a trail of diamonds on the water’s surface to the horizon. The view is intoxicating.
Then I put in my ear buds, and soon I feel something akin to flying.
The song “Unto the Resplendent” opens with a pillowy build-up that suggests a gradual dawning of light. It then comes to one simple, majestic, tremolo guitar line that quickly sweeps me out of my body to some elevated vantage point above the ocean, above my life, above history.
In that hypnotic melody, I’m feeling a sense of momentous arrival after a journey, of the thousand trails and mountain passages across the continent behind me, of Walt Whitman’s “public road,” of the migratory impulse that explains the American story.
It’s the bliss of being alive, sure. But it’s also the communion of standing where nameless others have stood before me, the triumph of meeting the end of a long road, the wonder of being small and facing the immensity of natural forces.
This is the music of the Mermen.
This is peak California.
The Drowning Man Knows His God
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he tyranny of the pop singer dictates that any band that goes without a vocalist altogether is likely to pay a steep price for such heresy. That’s not the only reason, or maybe even the primary reason, that the Mermen, almost 30 years after their first recording, have never found big-time mainstream popularity. But it matters. A singer gives a band a protagonist, a storyteller, a theatrical hero figure with which to seduce the audience. Not having one is a handicap.
The Mermen have no Jagger or Joplin. They are, and always have been, a rock instrumental trio—now featuring drummer Martyn Jones, bassist Jennifer Burnes, and the band’s guitarist, composer, and creative lodestar James “Jim” Thomas—who emerged out of San Francisco in the late ’80s, where a hive of intense fans on the club scene grew into a diaspora of devoted Mermen lovers around the world. For more than a decade, they have been based in Santa Cruz.
In recent months, the band has experienced a creative boom, releasing not one but two new albums at the end of 2017; We Could See It in the Distance and The Magic Swirling Ship, both of which will be showcased at a Moe’s Alley concert on Friday, May 11. Like much of the Mermen catalogue, the new recordings are jewels of cinematic, expansive, gloriously eccentric rock music.
The Mermen are often thought of as “surf music,” a label that is paradoxically exactly right and all wrong. Thomas, the band’s frontman, is a devout surfer and ocean lover—“I’m living in between this wave world of sounds and a wave world of water,” he says. His music is often used to provide musical muscle to surfing documentaries, particularly those by his buddy, the big wave surfer and filmmaker Grant Washburn. And he’s clearly influenced by Dick Dale, the widely admired King of Surf Guitar.
On another level, though, “surf music” as a genre blossomed and faded in the early 1960s, a quarter century before the Mermen played their first gig. Thomas and his bandmates will still occasionally come together in an alter-ego band called the “Shi-Tones” in which they tackle all the great surf hits of yesteryear. But the Mermen’s music is of an entirely different character. Many fans of old surf bands like the Surfaris, the Chantays and the Tornadoes don’t think of the Mermen as surf artists.
ROGUE WAVES Coming out of the San Francisco music scene, the Mermen built a following with their mind-bending live sets.
As a programmer at KFJC in Los Altos Hills, Phil Dirt championed surf music for 25 years. He’s a fan of both the old-school surf groups and the Mermen’s idiosyncratic sound. Dirt says that in the ’60s, “instrumental surf music was the indigenous folk music of Los Angeles.” Coming a generation or two later and from the Bay Area, the Mermen represented an evolution of the form, a new synthesis of SoCal surf and San Francisco psychedelia. If surf is more about energy, says Dirt, “psychedelia is much more about mood. And [the Mermen] can combine them. It’s the two things I love most in music in one band.”
Mermen superfan Tim Foley says, “I always categorize it as ‘psychedelic surf.’ When you mix salt water with LSD, you get the Mermen.”
The visionary behind the band and its unique approach to “surfadelic music” is an affable but studious Buddha-like figure who conjures his muse and faces down his demons at his custom-built recording studio/man cave near Pleasure Point. Many of those who think of Mermen music as the quintessential soundtrack of Northern California might assume that Thomas was born on Ocean Beach in the shadow of the Cliff House. The truth is much stranger.
The chief Merman is originally from Jersey.
Between I and Thou
[dropcap]F[/dropcap]or someone who plays wordless music, Jim Thomas is a surprisingly verbal guy. For a guitar god, he is not too interested in talking a lot about guitars or gear. But if you want to talk books, he can wile away the hours.
In my first interview with Thomas in his Pleasure Point studio, we talked for an hour about the books most meaningful to him. He had just discovered the illuminating essay collection Where Light Takes its Color From the Sea by the late Santa Cruz novelist James D. Houston. In a corner of his studio, bookshelves run from floor to ceiling, and as he talked about the insights he had drawn from Houston, he scanned the books for other titles that inspired him: a Van Gogh biography, Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven by John Eliot Gardiner, and especially Martin Buber’s philosophical treatise I and Thou.
Allen Whitman, the Mermen’s original bass player throughout the 1990s, says that Buber has always been a preoccupation with Thomas. “Once we were driving together,” says Whitman, “and he’s just reading to me out of Martin Buber, because that’s what he did. Suddenly, he reads this phrase, ‘glorious lethal euphoria,’ and I said, ‘Wait, that’s it. That’s the name of our next album.’” Sure enough, it was the name of their 1995 release.
“He’s always struggling to answer questions that don’t require an answer,” says Whitman.
Thomas grew up surfing, but not in California. He developed his love for the ocean at the Jersey shore. His experience as a teenager in New Jersey was wretched, a deep dive into drinking, gambling and blowing off school that he says he was lucky to escape. “Surfing probably saved my life,” he says.
Thanks to his mother, he had a solid grounding in musical education. “My mom was a real estate agent and she rented a business that happened to be a music store. So she was like, ‘You wanna take guitar lessons?’ Remember, this was Sopranos’ New Jersey—all Italians. And all the guitar teachers were these, like, great jazz guitar players.” Later, she took her son to see guitar giant Andres Segovia at Lincoln Center in New York.
Still, Thomas was miserable. As a young man, he discovered that he had a heart condition, which left him frightened of physical activity, and convinced him to chase all kinds of alternative treatments and wrestle with mortality. It wasn’t until he was in his 30s that a buddy convinced him to take a one-way trip to California. Thomas was working as a car salesman, so apathetic about life, he says, that “I never even picked up my paychecks. I was kind of depressed. I didn’t care if I lived or died, honestly.”
He arrived in the Bay Area in the mid 1980s with nothing more than a guitar and a surfboard. He discovered the waves at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, and eventually settled in the neighborhood.
The Mermen creation story began soon after Thomas took a job in a San Francisco music store, where he had access to guitars and other equipment. It was then he began writing songs, some with lyrics. With a four-track recorder, a drum machine, a reverb unit, and a borrowed Stratocaster, Thomas laid down instrumental tracks in the hour before the store opened for business.
Whitman was a co-worker at the store. “We didn’t feel comfortable around each other when we first met,” he says, “because he’s Jersey and I was Philly. There was already a frisson there.”
Soon, though, Whitman caught Thomas in the act of working on his music, and asked to hear it. “There were these great melodies and catchy little hooks,” he says. “It was a simple but very clear vision. You could tell right from the start there was real artistic integrity there.”
Whitman asked Thomas if he could lay down some bass parts. After that, the two went out in search of a drummer to replace the cheesy drum machine. Thomas put an ad in the local weekly, which said only that a drummer was wanted for “surfing bongos.” Answering the ad, and driving up in a primer-gray Cadillac hearse, was former record-store clerk Martyn Jones, a local kid who was born in Liverpool, the hometown of the Beatles.
“I told Jim, ‘He can play, but more importantly, he’s the living embodiment of what you’re looking for,” says Whitman. It was Jones, incidentally, who came up with the name of the band.
“He was very Jersey,” Jones says of Thomas, “rough and kind of rude, the kooky guy with long hair. His personality didn’t gel with these beautiful songs he gave me on this cassette. I had a little trouble figuring him out.”
The Mermen played their first gig in March of 1989, and that same year, Thomas’s music-store compositions, recorded in a Mission District studio run by a former member of the Steve Miller Band, was released under the title Krill Slippin’, available at the time only on cassette.
For the next 10 years, the band pushed on through a furious schedule of gigs in venues all around San Francisco, from dive bars and private parties to prominent clubs like the DNA Lounge, Slim’s, the Great American Music Hall, even the Fillmore. All over town, the Mermen were a hot ticket. Soon, they were cultivating a loyal fan base that felt their psychedelia represented San Francisco’s millennial counterculture.
In 1994, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction included a song by surf legend Dick Dale, and almost overnight surf rock was hot again. The Mermen, who were ruling San Francisco’s live music scene, felt the ripple effects. That same year, they became one of the first bands to livestream a concert over the Internet.
Also in ’94, Whitman went to Burning Man for the first time. “It was pretty damn amazing,” he says. “I came back and I was frothing at the mouth. I said to Jim and Martyn, ‘Sit down, check this out. We have to do this.’”
For the next decade, the Mermen were the most prominent live-music act at Burning Man, playing on platforms on the playa, at Center Camp, and on a dizzying variety of vehicles in a surreal landscape that fit the band’s mind-expanding sound almost too perfectly.
“Playing Burning Man when we did has to go down as one of the funnest and weirdest experiences of my life,” says Jones. “There was only one thing going on. We played and the entire focus was on us. The last time we went, there were 10 billion things going on to watch and do.”
Jennifer Burnes, who eventually replaced Whitman on bass in the band, remembers a moment from 2002: “We were driving around on the top of a little ship built just for us made out of driftwood. The theme that year was ‘The Floating World,’ an ocean theme. And these giant ships were following us, and people dressed as krill on bicycles and Moby Dick and the Yellow Submarine. It was a total Mermen moment, especially the way the music was echoing across the playa. That band was perfect for Burning Man.”
Unto the Resplendent
[dropcap]F[/dropcap]rom the club scene in San Francisco to the discovery of the Mavericks surf break near Half Moon Bay to the emergence of Burning Man as a touchstone event, the Mermen created the sound of a broad, emerging counterculture of Northern California.
Foley remembers the band’s regular gig every Thursday at the Beach Chalet: “The fun bus would arrive, and there would be fire dancers and belly dancers. The whole fun bus freak show would unload. And these tourists are all looking on. Yep, just a Thursday night in San Francisco.”
SWIRL-WIND TOUR The Mermen’s album art reflects their mix of surf and psychedelic influences.
The decade culminated in the release of the band’s most important album, The Amazing California Health and Happiness Road Show, released in the summer of 2000. “Amazing California” displayed a new diversity of sound, bringing in Eastern flavors and marking an evolution beyond the classic Mermen sound of Krill Slippin’ and Food for Other Fish. It was the band’s most ambitious bid for mainstream attention. But its trippy, kaleidoscopic textures and sounds were never going to capture the imagination of a record-buying public that seemed to want more of Destiny’s Child and Matchbox Twenty.
The label pushed Thomas to bring in a star producer on the album. Names offered included Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham and Bruce Springsteen keyboardist Roy Bittan. But Thomas insisted on producing the record himself. “The band hated me after that,” he says. “Now, yeah I regret that a bit. I would have gotten a connection to Springsteen. There were a lot of opportunities for me back then that I just walked past.”
Thomas’s quirky decisions and brash personality created tensions in the band. “We had our fights,” says Whitman, who was replaced on bass in 1999. “He did drive me to blind fury on many occasions.” Despite the stormy relationships, the band has remained in its present form for more than 20 years and even had a rapprochement with Whitman.
“When I think about how much those guys have gone through together,” says Denise Halbe who has designed album covers for the band and currently moderates the Mermen’s Facebook fan page, “and they’ve always managed to have their battles and then just go forward. It’s OK to have these problems and just accept each other and still love each other. Everybody’s got a story about how they got mad at Jim. But at the end of the day, I always end up respecting him. He’s authentic and he’s forgiving and he tries.”
After 2000, rising rents on downtown rehearsal spaces in San Francisco compelled the band to relocate to Santa Cruz. Burnes came first. Thomas followed. Burnes engineered and built the studio that the band still uses today—one that sounds so tight, marvels Thomas, “you could fill this place up with water like a fish tank.”
The last year has given Thomas, 65, a jolt of energy, thanks to the out-of-left-field inspiration for the band’s two new albums, which came at a crucial moment in his creative life. “I went a long time thinking that I’m never going to write something meaningful again. It’s a little miracle, almost, to make a decent record.”
The guitar lines are still as buoyant and lyrical as they’ve ever been, and the new music still crackles with life. Much of it pushes fearlessly into the mystical. The band still performs regularly, and the Mermen fan base is unbowed by the years.
“My guess,” muses Whitman about Thomas, his friend and sparring partner, “is that the ocean is more important to him than music. You know, people change. Who he was when we worked together is not who he is now. I think he’s butted heads with the universe pretty strongly, and it’s humbled him. I remember him describing to me the perfect life as he gets older. He said, ‘I’m going to go to some place like Fiji and marry some Samoan woman, have eight kids and just sit around on the beach.’ That sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?”
The Mermen
Friday, May 11, 9 p.m. Moe’s Alley, 1535 Commercial Way, Santa Cruz. $12 advance; $15 day of the show. moesalley.com.
Chris Schneiter, Santa Cruz’s assistant director of public works, calls the crossroads of Rankin and Seaside streets “a tricky intersection.” There are a few of them on this 1.3-mile segment of the rail trail running from Natural Bridges Drive to Bay Street that should be open by next spring.
In order to lay down a bike and pedestrian trail through the Westside of Santa Cruz, builders will have to transform the juncture near the Mission Street Safeway from a four-way intersection into something more creative. Engineers realized they couldn’t add extra stop signs on Rankin Street, as that would force cars to stop on the railroad tracks that border the proposed trail. Nor could they route the trail directly along the tracks the entire way, because that would send the trail through the intersection at an awkward diagonal angle. Instead, the new path will veer hard, stopping on Seaside and allowing cyclists to turn onto the street and then rejoin the trail on the other side of the intersection.
Design features like these keep cyclists and pedestrians on the path, instead of sending them on complicated reroutes that would decrease use of the highly anticipated trail that could one day stretch 32 miles, all the way from Watsonville to Davenport, with trains carrying passengers alongside it.
But citing cost and space constraints, critics of the plan, including groups like Santa Cruz County Greenway, have instead proposed tearing up the tracks and building a wider trail that they say would be cheaper and get more use.
As it is, the new trail will have flashing beacons to help people cross Fair Avenue and Swift Street. And engineers developed unique configurations for other intersections, as well, including at Bay and California streets, where they’ll be reorganizing stop signs and infrastructure to make it easier for bicyclists to turn safely. A sidewalk on Lennox Street will bulb out in one area to route cyclists around a heritage tree.
To supporters of the rail trail, the plans for what is known as Segment 7 are a triumph of creative engineering. But upon closer inspection, they also offer hard evidence that critics have been right about some of the problems the rail trail will face that have been downplayed by train proponents.
For instance, even though Lennox Street’s girthy cypress tree will get protected, construction will require removal of six heritage trees along the route. (There would have been a seventh tree removal, but someone apparently went rogue and cut down a heritage tree on their own—and no one knows who it was. “It wasn’t a permitted removal,” Schneiter says.)
When it comes to the big picture, Manu Koenig, a boardmember for Greenway, says that a train could never possibly offer passengers much bang for their buck, given its estimated cost of up to $176 million and a meager estimated ridership of up to 6,800 daily fares by 2035, according to the Santa Cruz Branch Rail Line Rail Transit Feasibility Study.
Koenig has supported building Segment 7, as it’s currently planned, because it’s the fastest way to get a trail that pedestrians and bikers can use, but he didn’t do so without reservations. “Cutting down any trees that you don’t have to is a shame,” he says.
Another issue raised by rail trail critics that’s coming to the fore is one of retaining walls. At the next stop along the line, Schneiter and his fellow civil engineers have almost finished construction drawings for phase 2 of Segment 7, where it winds past Neary Lagoon on its way to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. That part of the route is momentarily tied up in a lengthier environmental review process because of federal funding. When crews get started, they’ll need to excavate part of a slope to make room for the trail and build retaining walls to hold up the remainder of the hill.
A wall like that is a minor detail to many transportation enthusiasts. But it’s also exactly the kind of additional cost that Greenway supporters had said that engineers would run into from the beginning. The Monterey Bay Sanctuary Scenic Trail Master Plan outlined retaining walls in a few passages that got factored into the estimated $127 million along a couple segments of corridor. But it was not included in all of the areas, and it was not in Segment 7. An analysis by Greenway found that Segment 7 was actually the least constrained part of the corridor, and Koenig believes these issues don’t bode well for the rest of the rail trail as planned, especially if county leaders want to stay anywhere close to budget estimates.
“We’re going to run into a ton of challenges that we haven’t yet,” he says.
Running the Numbers
Considering that an unforeseen retaining wall in the very beginning isn’t a good look for the rail trail plan, I brought up the concern with Mark Mesiti-Miller, a retired civil engineer and proud train lover. “That’s totally valid,” Mesiti-Miller, the chair of the Friends of the Rail Trail, told me.
But he also noted that planners will save $5.3 million on the bridge over the San Lorenzo River just a mile or so farther east, which should make up the cost. A few weeks ago, Mesiti-Miller met me by the old truss bridge at the edge of the Boardwalk to talk about coming changes.
“They saved $5 million!” says Mesiti-Miller, his thick gray hair blowing in a gust of wind. “Last time I checked, $5 million was still a lot of money, so you can do something else with that $5 million. The next segment might [cost] more.”
The master plan had originally called for a brand new bike and pedestrian bridge to launch off the levees and land on the other side of the river, by East Cliff Drive. The bridge would have run parallel to the existing truss bridge, which already has a pedestrian path of its own, but it’s far too narrow. For years, cyclists have wondered if it might be possible to cantilever an extension off to the side of it, making more room for a wider path. After a study deemed such an extension feasible, Schneiter estimated the fix should cost about a half a million dollars, less than 8 percent of the original projection.
Generally speaking, Cory Caletti, rail trail program manager for the Regional Transportation Commission (RTC), says that departures from the rail trail master plan should not be seen as an indictment of the plan itself, which she stresses is “a high-level document.”
“So it isn’t meant to be interpreted as detailed construction drawings—where exactly a retaining wall would be needed, how high the wall would be,” she explains.
Be that as it may, it’s safe to say that large-scale government projects are historically no stranger to cost increases or overruns.
A 2014 study from Oxford University’s business school found that when it comes to major infrastructure overhauls, “megaprojects” routinely run way over budget for a number of reasons—planning errors, overly optimistic projections and even “strategic misrepresentation,” wherein planners knowingly lowball their estimates to make their projects look better on paper.
To be clear, the megaprojects covered in the study were billion-dollar undertakings, putting them well beyond the scope of whatever the county decides with the rail corridor, even though the rail trail is a huge project by Santa Cruz County’s standards. But the criteria could certainly apply to a much bigger transportation effort not far away. The original cost estimate for California High-Speed Rail, which is supposed to run through San Jose, was $45 billion 10 years ago.
Current estimates say the project could end up costing more than double that.
Koenig once voted in favor of California High Speed Rail, but he says it was the daunting cost overruns at the state level that gave him second thoughts and also forced him to give the local rail corridor a closer look.
And once he did, he says he didn’t like what he saw.
Facing Complications
Although trail building may have its quirks, Steve Taty says it pales in comparison to the challenges of introducing passenger rail service.
Taty, a retired principal construction inspector for the VTA light rail system in San Jose, signed Greenway’s petition, because he can’t picture passenger rail in Santa Cruz doing anything other than causing a major headache. “I just hang my head, because they have no idea of the complications of it,” Taty says.
Taty, 72, says planners will also have to worry about where to put park-and-rides and how to handle liability claims when someone gets hurt or when a car and a train collide. He predicts that one of the biggest challenges will be how to get riders on the train, as even VTA has suffered troubling decline in ridership over the past couple years.
Mesiti-Miller believes questions like these are important, calling them all “relevant issues to discuss when the time is right.”
“The time to make those decisions is when you actually have a proposal in front of you and you can think about, ‘Where do I want my parking lot? Where do I want my rail station?’” he says. “The rail stations in the feasibility study—they’re just dots on a piece of paper. They’re meaningless. They don’t actually represent anything. Those locations will be decided at some future time with the input of the neighbors, community input. That’s when you need to be thinking about, ‘Oh, so how many cars do you think we will need to park in this park-and-ride lot? Or, should we subsidize Uber rides for our passengers, instead of building parking lots? And can we get enough employers to provide employee shuttles that we don’t actually need parking at all?”
When it comes to building any transportation project, RTC Executive Director George Dondero says unexpected things pop up. Discovering sensitive habitat along the route—plants, animals, underground springs—will all drive up costs, for example.
Dondero is optimistic, though, about engineers’ ability to work within tight constraints, having walked Segment 9, in the Seabright area, with Schneiter and Steve Wiesner, the county’s assistant director of public works. The two civil engineers discussed the route along the way, engineering it out loud as they went.
Schneiter tells me that that portion, heading east from the San Lorenzo River, is “a challenging location.”
“So we’re looking at that,” he says. “We’ll be looking at it more closely pretty soon.”
Update 5/21/2018: This story has been updated to clarify information about a hypothetical commuter train’s projected future ridership.
With a glimmer in his eye and a toothy grin, Daniel Wenger advises doing what you love and loving what you do. But that’s not easily accomplished when you’re a jack of all trades.
Wenger is a former U.S. Space Program computer programmer and former UCSC humanities computer director. He says he was the first to introduce dial up internet to Santa Cruz, with only three or four clients including T. Mike Walker.
Daniel later founded the furniture company Wenger Designs after he began making steel and leather furniture in the late 1960s. He is best-known for his mid-century modern lotus chair, of which he’s made around 300 to date. In addition to furniture, Daniel also makes sundials—one of which was in San Lorenzo Park in the ’70s—and large cube structures.
When his son Sam was born, Daniel took some time off from furniture-making, landing a job at UCSC as a computer director in the humanities division. After a 30-year hiatus, he returned to furniture-making a decade ago when a couple asked if he would make them another lotus chair to replace the one that they had regrettably sold.
“I said ‘no, I am done making my chairs,’” he recalls. “Then my wife said, ‘oh, yes, OK.’”
That was the beginning of Daniel’s return to the furniture business. A couple of years later, his son Sam moved back to Santa Cruz and partnered with him in their current father-and-son design company. Today, Wenger Designs ships dining and lounge chairs, bar stools, and coffee tables to galleries and customers all over the world. Since they began working together, they say that their work has evolved—they use new colors and finishes and have become more precise in their measurements.
“I remember there was a pending order for some chairs, and my father asked me to come over and help bend some steel,” Sam recalls. “I had no idea what was in store and we started bending it and did it all by eyesight. I thought ‘there has to be a better way than this,’ and I was immediately interested in streamlining the process and accuracy.”
Daniel and Sam have begun using a thicker steel on the larger lotus chair frames to make them stronger and more substantial. They say they are also tweaking the comfort levels of the chairs and trying to focus on repeatability, so that the chairs are more consistent.
“It’s a convergence toward something that we are happy with in the long term,” Daniel says.
The Wengers cut and measure the leather and shape the steel frames themselves in their home garage. Their workshop is full of tools scattered alongside large steel frames, with various leather hides piled high. They use around 20 to 30 hides annually, sourced mostly from Tennessee and Napa Valley. From start to finish, it’ll take them anywhere from six to 10 weeks to fill a custom order, depending on the color and type of piece.
“People are surprised that it takes that amount of time,” Daniel says. “Some people think that they can do it in six hours.”
In an increasingly technological world, true craftsmanship is a rare luxury. Between Daniel, Sam and three-year-old Hunter, the three generations of Wenger men walking around the workshop is a refreshing time warp.
“It’s nice to work with your hands, and there is just a real joy in finishing off a chair,” Daniel says. “It smells good and looks good and it’s comfortable. Then you know its going off to a show or a customer and it’s a sweet parting. You have it in your existence for a short while and then it is gone.”
“There is also a real process from just seeing the steel on the ground, cutting it, sanding it, bending it, grinding it, and transforming it,” Sam adds. “Then you add the leather and just the feet and lacing, it’s a real sense of accomplishment. It’s really rewarding in an artistic sense.”
The Wengers say their steady stream of commissions provides income for the family while allowing them the flexibility of doing other things. Sam holds a bartending job and Daniel has free time to work on his genealogy database and “watch the Washington drama” unfold.
Daniel says some have unsuccessfully tried to copy the lotus chair a number of times. “It goes on,” he says with a seemingly uncaring shrug. Looking back, Daniel says that he is glad that he had the freedom and flexibility to leave his other professions and focus on furniture-making full-time.
“I want people to know that they should be engaged in doing what they want to do,” he says. “That’s what the message is: do what you want to do.”
Wenger Designs furniture will be available for purchase at Agency, 1519 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz, through June and online at wengerdesigns.com. Agency will have limited hours, call for more information.
There are psychedelic bands, and then there are psychedelic bands. Mother Island’s claim to the name goes much deeper than the Italian band’s sound—swirling rock ’n’ roll peppered with weird atmospherics and moody counter-melodies. The whole philosophy driving the group’s creative process will have your head spinning if you dig in just a little bit.
“Music must have the ability to possess, there is nothing more beautiful,” says guitarist Nicolò De Franceschi. “It’s not only music that inspires us; we take cues from many different dimensions connected with each other. Every suggestion, every emotion evoked is converted into sound. It’s very important for us.”
The group describes itself not so much as a band, but as “Magic Theatre, for madmen only,” a reference to Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf, which gives you a sense of the mystical place they go inside of themselves to create music.
“We decided to pay homage to this work because the Magic Theatre represents the last stage of a dreamlike path full of passions, instincts, but also of introspection,” Franceschi explains. “It’s a path that allows the protagonist of the novel to accept the contradictions of existence itself. It seemed to us that it could describe very well the characteristics of the creative process.”
Other non-musical influences include Carmelo Bene, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Federico Fellini, Andrej Tarkovskij, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jacek Yerka, and Fedor Dostoevskij.
“They are figures we owe a lot to. Their works reflect certain canons that we’ve made in some way our own, which now belong to our imagination from which we draw to write our music,” Franceschi says. “We strongly believe that cinematography, literature, painting and art in general cannot be excluded from any discourse on the creative process.”
The group started back in 2013, and even in describing the group’s origins, Franceschi can’t help but give the backstory a bit of a mystical flair.
“We didn’t really meet and say ‘hey, why don’t we start a band together?’ It’s more like we got in the same train at different stations. Each one of us came across Mother Island on his own, for disparate reasons,” Franceschi says. “We’ve been spending lots of time doing what we love the most: exploring the forms our creativity may acquire.”
In that time, the group has released two records: 2015’s Cosmic Pyre and 2016’s Wet Moon. The debut is a little bit more out there musically, and overall has a harder edge—it’s almost punk rock at times—whereas Wet Moon flirts more openly with pop music.
“Wet Moon is much more direct and cohesive than the previous one. We aimed to write something with simpler structures. We were interested in building atmospheres and transferring the listener to what each song may suggest,” Franceschi says. “What came out is an album with a strong connection to that unconscious world.”
There are moments on Wet Moon where the band drops the pop pretense and explores the very structure of music in the same vein that they are exploring their subconsciousness. “La Danse Macabre,” an homage to the work of Charles Baudelaire, is a prime example.
“‘La Danse Macabre’ was one of the most entertaining pieces to get recorded in the studio,” Franceschi says. “We let ourselves go and followed what the flow suggested. Writing and recording an album requires considerable concentration and attention, which can often lead to a lot of tension. The ‘Danse Macabre’ exorcises all this.”
This will be the group’s first trip to the U.S., which they are very excited about. They’ve played considerable shows already in Europe, and in that time, they’ve perfected their live show, which is the place they feel like all of their philosophies, creativities, brainy theories and psychedelic instincts flourish, and give it something living and breathing, beyond just thoughts about the unconscious.
“Live concerts are where we tend to deeply lose ourselves,” Franceschi says. “It’s a dimension that belongs to us.”
Mother Island performs at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, May 15, at Flynn’s Cabaret and Steakhouse, 6275 Hwy. 9, Felton. $18. 335-2800.
Mother’s Day is Sunday; Tuesday is the new moon (24.36 degrees Taurus) and soon after, Uranus (planet of revolution, ultimate change) enters Taurus (stabilizing new archetypes, new ideas). This is a change for Uranus after seven years in Aries (all things new).
Happy Mother’s Day to all mothers (whatever gender or species) and to fathers who are also mothers. We nurture and nourish and bring comfort to our mothers today in ways they need and understand (not our ways and needs). Mercury (talk) and Moon (mother) enter Taurus Sunday, too. We speak comforting words and create beauty and the Art of Living for our mothers.
Tuesday early morning is the Taurus new moon. Sun/Moon in Taurus—creating a new moon. The personality-building keynote for Taurus is, “Let struggle be undismayed.” It reveals the Ray 4 of Taurus—understanding harmony emerges from conflict and chaos.
The Moon is exalted (works well) in Taurus. And Taurus is the Mother of all forms. It’s a time of stability, we don’t want change, we don’t want hurry or stress or disharmony. We want a comforting couch to sit upon, to rest; fine foods; quality friendships; art and beauty.
Amidst this kindly scene, Uranus quietly shifts into Taurus (8:16am west coast time, Tuesday). And a new rhythm begins. From out of the darkness of form, a newly awakened perception of Light is “seen”: From darkness to light, the unreal to the real, from chaos to beauty.” More on Uranus next week.
ARIES: You could feel the need to spend and spend. However, it’s best to restrict this desire. If you must, concentrate on preparation of foods, water, medicines, things needed in case of emergency. I know this may be difficult for a fire sign to concentrate on details needed for this task. However, it may save your life. Be a leader in this. Others will learn and follow.
TAURUS: A growing sense of importance and a new state of self-identity begins to be realized by you along with a new level of courage. Others see this, too, and they call upon you for strength, leadership and knowledge. You have dreams and visions concerning future accomplishments. Soon others will join your visions and bring new Aquarian community ideas into form and matter. Concentrate on vivifying your health.
GEMINI: Your energies are slowly receding to a place of rest and reflection. It’s good to read about communities during this time, considering how you would create community, what community means to you, and what talents you bring to a community you would choose to help create and live in. Turn inward more and more. A spiritual circadian-rhythm time schedule emerges.
CANCER: While the past becomes more visible, especially in dreams, you gradually become more visible in social groups, in the work you’re accomplishing at home and in the world. It’s most important you listen to others without judgments, opinions, taking sides, or giving advice. You have many ideas, and much thinking, based on the past. Events now will bring you into the present/future.
LEO: I often tell everyone that Leos need praise and recognition so they can evolve more easily. This is true. There will be upcoming new and challenging work you might consider doing. You will have assistance from colleagues who recognize and respect you and the outcome will be more than good. This will be gradual and take some time. You will develop the needed fortitude and patience.
VIRGO: Your mind is focused on learning something large and important. You are also thinking about teachers who helped develop your mind, providing new avenues of thought, perceptions and creative ideas. You might want to be in touch with what your true hopes and wishes are. And resume studies set aside long ago. You may also want to travel. Desire, independence and aspiration lead you.
LIBRA: Are you concerned with money and finances? It’s important to use your resources to prepare for the future. Not a retirement far-off future, but soon into the future. Let’s consider the following. What would you do without food, power, water or gas for your car? What can you do now that would care for you, loved ones, family and friends should any type of emergency occur? Because you’re the sign of balance, you must balance this reality with previous future hopes.
SCORPIO: Wherever you are, no matter whom you’re with, something fiery seems to pulsate and things swift and moving seem to be on the verge with everything changing minute by minute. These energies are complex and almost not understandable. It’s best to agree with everyone, take yourself far away somewhere, seek the silence of clouds, oceans, sand, gardens, trees, forests and stars. They make everything as new within.
SAGITTARIUS: Money’s something you simply can’t understand at times. Don’t try. You’re experiencing a secret wound somewhere. Being creative becomes an overwhelming feat. There’s so much approaching, you can’t decide things anymore. Try not to burn out with anxiety. You wish for safety in relationships but only sense the past. The only thing left are friends who are serious and responsible. They care for you.
CAPRICORN: This month allows you to be freer than usual, setting its pace according to your needs, calling for you to seek all types of creative art forms, to have fun, and to be a bit more social. Home is the best place to be after a long trip. As you look around you’ll see the opportunities to change its appearance, expanding its comfort and joy and creating art of living there. Your home loves you.
AQUARIUS: Be the family member everyone can communicate with. Reach out to everyone with this in mind. Refrain from solving problems, offering advice, making judgments, stating opinions. True communication occurs, continues, and lasts when listening is the main component. People communicate so they can be heard. They don’t communicate in order to be advised. Knowing this changes our lives.
PISCES: Two tasks occupy your mind. Tending to money and finances; arranging and beautifying your environment. First, either set up a new account or take your money out of the bank and buy gold and silver. Tithe regularly. Create a time schedule for organizing your environment. Set up shelves; give away what’s not being used. Don’t hesitate; be lavish in these tasks. Beauty is at stake. Without beauty, order and organization, you simply cannot function well.
ARIES (March 21-April 19): The Torah is a primary sacred text of the Jewish religion. It consists of exactly 304,805 letters. When specially trained scribes make handwritten copies for ritual purposes, they must not make a single error in their transcription. The work may take as long as 18 months. Your attention to detail in the coming weeks doesn’t have to be quite so painstaking, Aries, but I hope you’ll make a strenuous effort to be as diligent as you can possibly be.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Born under the sign of Taurus, Edmund Wilson was a renowned 20th-century author and critic who wrote more than 30 books. He also served as editor for Vanity Fair and The New Republic, and influenced the work of at least seven major American novelists. When he was growing up, he spent most of his free time reading books: 16 hours a day during summer vacations. His parents, worried about his obsessive passion, bought him a baseball uniform, hoping to encourage him to diversify his interests. His response was to wear the uniform while reading books 16 hours a day. I trust you will be equally dedicated to your own holy cause or noble pursuit in the coming weeks, Taurus. You have cosmic clearance to be single-minded about doing what you love.
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): It’s possible you could pass for normal in the next three weeks; you might be able to fool a lot of people into thinking you’re an average, ordinary contributor to the dull routine. But it will be far healthier for your relationship with yourself if you don’t do such a thing. It will also be a gift to your less daring associates, who in my opinion would benefit from having to engage with your creative agitation and fertile chaos. So my advice is to reveal yourself as an imperfect work-in-progress who’s experimenting with novel approaches to the game of life. Recognize your rough and raw features as potential building blocks for future achievements.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): “Paradise is scattered over the whole Earth,” wrote the scientific poet Novalis, “and that is why it has become so unrecognizable.” Luckily for you, Cancerian, quite a few fragments of paradise are gathering in your vicinity. It’ll be like a big happy reunion of tiny miracles all coalescing to create a substantial dose of sublimity. Will you be ready to deal with this much radiance? Will you be receptive to so much relaxing freedom? I hope and pray you won’t make a cowardly retreat into the trendy cynicism that so many people mistake for intelligence. (Because in that case, paradise might remain invisible.) Here’s my judicious advice: Be insistent on pleasure! Be voracious for joy! Be focused on the quest for beautiful truths!
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): These days, your friends and allies and loved ones want even more from you than they usually do. They crave more of your attention, more of your approval, more of your feedback. And that’s not all. Your friends and allies and loved ones also hope you will give more love to yourself. They will be excited and they will feel blessed if you express an even bigger, brighter version of your big, bright soul. They will draw inspiration from your efforts to push harder and stronger to fulfill your purpose here on Planet Earth.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): One of the advantages you get from reading my horoscopes is that I offer confidential information about the gods’ caprices and leanings. For example, I can tell you that Saturn—also known as Father Time—is now willing to allot you a more luxurious relationship with time than usual, on one condition: that you don’t squander the gift on trivial pursuits. So I encourage you to be discerning and disciplined about nourishing your soul’s craving for interesting freedom. If you demonstrate to Saturn how constructively you can use his blessing, he’ll be inclined to provide more dispensations in the future.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Vincent van Gogh’s painting The Starry Night hangs on a wall in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. He created it in 1889 while living in a French asylum. Around that same time, 129 years ago, a sheepherder in Wyoming created a sourdough starter that is still fresh today. A cook named Lucille Clarke Dumbrill regularly pulls this frothy mass of yeast out of her refrigerator and uses it to make pancakes. In the coming weeks, Libra, I’d love to see you be equally resourceful in drawing on an old resource. The past will have offerings that could benefit your future.
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Love everyone twice as much and twice as purely as you ever have before. Your mental health requires it! Your future dreams demand it! And please especially intensify your love for people you allegedly already love but sometimes don’t treat as well as you could because you take them for granted. Keep this Bible verse in mind, as well: “Don’t neglect to show kindness to strangers; for, in this way, some, without knowing it, have had angels as their guests.”
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): After meditating on your astrological aspects for an hour, I dozed off. As I napped, I had a dream in which an androgynous angel came to me and said, “Please inform your Sagittarius readers that they should be callipygian in the next two weeks.” Taken aback, my dreaming self said to the angel, “You mean ‘callipygian’ as in ‘having beautiful buttocks’?” “Yes, sir,” the angel replied. “Bootylicious. Bumtastic. Rumpalicious.” I was puzzled. “You mean like in a metaphorical way?” I asked. “You mean Sagittarians should somehow cultivate the symbolic equivalent of having beautiful buttocks?” “Yes,” the angel said. “Sagittarians should be elegantly well-grounded. Flaunt their exquisite foundation. Get to the bottom of things with flair. Be sexy badasses as they focus on the basics.” “OK!” I said.
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Now is a favorable time to discuss in elegant detail the semi-secret things that are rarely or never talked about. It’s also a perfect moment to bring deep feelings and brave tenderness into situations that have been suffering from half-truths and pretense. Be aggressively sensitive, my dear Capricorn. Take a bold stand in behalf of compassionate candor. And as you go about these holy tasks, be entertaining as well as profound. The cosmos has authorized you to be a winsome agent of change.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): In his 1931 painting The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dali shows three clocks that seem to be partially liquefied, as if in the process of melting. His biographer Meredith Etherington-Smith speculated that he was inspired to create this surrealistic scene when he saw a slab of warm Camembert cheese melting on a dinner table. I foresee the possibility of a comparable development in your life, Aquarius. Be alert for creative inspiration that strikes you in the midst of seemingly mundane circumstances.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): “My whole life is messed up with people falling in love with me,” said Piscean poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. She spoke the truth. She inspired a lot of adoration, and it stirred up more chaos than she was capable of managing. Luckily, you will have fewer problems with the attention coming your way, Pisces. I bet you’ll be skilled at gathering the benefits and you’ll be unflummoxed by the pitfalls. But you’ll still have to work hard at these tasks. Here’s some help. Tip No. 1: Stay in close touch with how you really feel about the people who express their interest in you. Tip No. 2: Don’t accept gifts with strings attached. Tip No. 3: Just because you’re honored or flattered that someone finds you attractive doesn’t mean you should unquestioningly blend your energies with them.
Homework: Do you allow your imagination to indulge in fantasies that are wasteful, damaging, or dumb? I dare you to stop it. Testify at Freewillastrology.com.
The daughter of organic garden guru Orin Martin and his printmaker wife Stephanie, Caroline Martin is offering a Flower Popup at Companion Bakeshop just in time forMother’s Day.
Farmer-florist Martin of Wild Moon Flowers will be selling some of her exquisite bouquets featuring locally and organically grown flowers. Martin is a recent UCSC Farm & Garden apprentice program alumna, and has worked growing, arranging and selling (Saturday Farmers Market) flowers for several years now. “I have been working on local farms and for a local florist for the past few years,” Martin says, “but am now starting my own business growing and arranging flowers. Erin [Lampel, owner of Companion] is a fellow UCSC farm and garden alum and I knew she has been supportive of local, organic flowers—so I approached Erin with the idea for the pop-up.”
Martin says she will be offering two different sizes of bouquets, very likely priced between $15 and $30. The best news of all is the timing! Come by Companion this Saturday, May 12, or on Mother’s Day itself—Sunday, May 13, from 9 a.m.-1 p.m. 2341 Mission St., Santa Cruz.wildmoonflowerssantacruz.com.
Summer Beer Barbecue
Make plans now for the May 23, 7-10 p.m. first installment of the Summer Supper Series at the Ingalls Street Santa Cruz Mountain Brewing. The delicious concept involves a four-course dinner ($50) designed for pairing with four different Flanders-style beers made according to a day-long collaboration by Emily Thomas and Chad Brill of SCMB and Sean and Fran Fitzharris of Brewery Twenty Five. Celebrating the wildly popular brewery’s 13-year anniversary, Thomas and Brill are launching this outdoor, family-style serving event that will include a bottle of each guest’s favorite Flanders brew and a souvenir glass. The California barbecue (subject to change according to seasonal produce availability) includes a first course of grilled Rodoni baby artichokes and Flanders hot artichoke dip, followed by a second course Mediterranean salad with roasted plums and Garden Variety feta. The entree of Flanders brined Fogline chickens, roasted baby carrots and fennel leads to a finale of tart berry crumble with crème Anglaise. Throughout the summer, Santa Cruz Mountain Brewing will host a beer-pairing event with local chefs and food artisans. All meals, served on selected Wednesdays, will be presented in the open-air beer garden. Check ev****@*****ew.com for details and tickets.
Wines of the Week: Beauregard Vineyards
It’s always exciting when one of our local winemakers hits the trade news. Kudos to intrepid (he never sleeps) oenologist Ryan Beauregard, who blew away the editors of Wine Enthusiast with some new releases. “It took me 10 years to discover what terroir actually is, and it took me another 10 years to be able to effectively put that into a bottle,” says the winemaker, who says his “whole focus these days is on terroir-driven wines.”
I’m a big fan of light alcohol, unoaked Chardonnays, and Beauregard’s 2016 Bald Mountain Chardonnay rated a whopping 91 points. This beauty is part of an intriguing experiment—aging in concrete! (Specifically a concrete egg, or “oeuf en béton.”) What this does is release full minerality without the interference of oak flavors, and at a refreshing 12.5 percent alcohol. Maximum terroir shows itself in stone and shell flavor profiles, plus lemon zest and a hint of flowers. Look for it immediately—only 77 cases were produced. The perfect excuse to cruise on up to the tasting room in Bonny Doon for some in-depth tasting. Nice work, Ryan! beauregardvineyards.com.
