A Beats Antique performance is less of a concert and more of a full-body, multi-media experience that relies on the audience to bring it all to life. Imagine people dressed like animals, carnival ringleaders, mythological creatures and cabaret characters dancing to gypsy-influenced violin melodies that slowly build to a crescendo before a cross-cultural, worry-consuming beat drops, turning the whole thing into a rhythmic collective of bouncing, swaying bodies. A decade in, Beats Antique has inspired a generation of world-fusion artists and beatmakers, and established themselves as one of the enduring bands of the Bay Area electronica movement. On Halloween, the band brings the party to the Catalyst.
INFO: 9 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 31. Catalyst, 1011 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz. $30/adv, $35/door. 423-1338. WANT TO GO? Go to santacruz.com/giveaways before 11 a.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 25 to find out how you could win a pair of tickets to the show.
There isn’t a great story behind the name Bananarchy—turns out it was simply the only name everyone in the band could agree on. However, Bananarchy’s genre of choice, “hangar rock,” has an interesting story.
What makes it hangar rock? Well, technically the band plays garage rock, but they practice in an airplane hangar in Watsonville, so why not?
“It’s oddly specific,” guitarist/lead singer Matt Ruiz says, laughing.
You see, Ruiz partially owns this hangar. He was getting airplane lessons, but has kind of stopped.
“Paying for recording studios was getting expensive, and finding houses to practice at in Santa Cruz is difficult without pissing off neighbors or police.”
Ruiz believes Bananarchy turned out to be a fitting name for the group, which plays aggressive rock songs with sad lyrics, and adds a whole bunch of silliness when they play live.
“It’s kind of funny, but also slightly angsty. So, it was a match,” Ruiz adds.
Just how sad are the lyrics? Well, don’t sit down and read a book of Ruiz’s words without the heavy guitar-bass-drums blast of the band behind him unless you want to get bummed out.
“If you sat down and read the lyrics, it would just look like sad poetry,” Ruiz says. “People have fun at the shows. We’ll be cracking jokes between every song to make sure everyone knows that we’re not trying to take ourselves too seriously. Our presence and our performance is usually pretty silly.”
INFO: 9 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 24. Blue Lagoon, 923 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz. $5. 423-7117.
What do most people know about the East Bay punk scene? Green Day, certainly, and Rancid, too. Possibly Rancid forerunners Operation Ivy and Crimpshine, and maybe the Berkeley punk playhouse that brought up those bands, 924 Gilman.
If you want a clue about how deep the new documentary Turn It Around: The Story of East Bay Punk—which is showing for one night only on Wednesday, Oct. 18, at the Del Mar in Santa Cruz—dives into this long-underappreciated punk history, consider that it doesn’t even get around to Gilman Street and Op Ivy until an hour into its two-and-half-hour running time. A less ambitious documentary on East Bay punk might very well start there, but with its zeal to chart the complete lineage of the scene, Turn It Around is truly exhaustive.
But not exhausting. In fact, it moves along at such a rapid-fire pace for most of its running time that it probably requires more than one viewing to truly wrap one’s mind around everything it has to offer. How can you not get behind a documentary that within literally two-and-a-half minutes of mentioning “punk rock” for the first time, has already referenced the Ramones, Sex Pistols, Patti Smith, Dead Kennedys, Avengers, X, the Cramps, the Clash, Lou Reed, Angry Samoans, Fastbacks, Blondie, Flipper, the Buzzcocks, the Pretenders, Tuxedomoon, Blondie, the Stooges, David Bowie, the Dils and Devo—and that doesn’t even include the bands I didn’t think I recognized as they flashed by on the screen. That’s how fast this thing moves sometimes.
Those who come to it most interested in the scene’s breakout success stories might be surprised at how absorbing the pre-Lookout Records material is, and that’s partially thanks to some brilliant structural work by director/writer Corbett Redford and his co-writer Anthony Marchitiello. For instance, the film starts with a crude DIY-style animation sequence set to Crimpshine’s “Another Day,” then jumps back to footage of Vietnam War protests in Berkeley, with Country Joe and the Fish’s “Feel Like I’m Fixin To Die Rag” playing on the soundtrack. There’s a lot of mirroring going on here: both of those songs are by Berkeley bands, who released them exactly 20 years apart, in 1987 and 1967. The former approaches social commentary on a personal level, while the latter attacks it from a political one, setting a template for the themes of personal and political transformation that are at the heart of Turn It Around.
The long list of musicians, artists, activists and other members of the scene featured in Turn It Around runs from the expected (Lookout’s Larry Livermore, Dr. Frank of Mr. T Experience—whose “At Gilman Street” is sort of the movie’s unofficial theme—and the members of Green Day, Op Ivy, Crimpshine, Rancid, Neurosis, and pretty much every band from the last four decades of the scene) to the unexpected (Miranda July, Metallica’s Kirk Hammett, Guns N Roses’ Duff McKagen, Primus’ Larry LaLonde, Angry Samoans’ “Metal” Mike Saunders) to the simply delightful (the Yeastie Girlz, Pansy Division’s Jon Ginoli, Michael Franti, Tre Cool’s parents). Iggy Pop’s narration is just as gruff and quirky as you would hope it would be.
The highlights, to me, are the most offbeat bits, like Tim Armstrong suddenly breaking into Op Ivy’s “Hedgecore” on an acoustic guitar during his interview, Billie Joe Armstrong explaining how Pinole is different from the rest of the East Bay, the story about the Yeastie Girlz somehow performing Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” on tampons, Franti remembering his band the Beatnigs driving their van directly from playing Gilman Street to opening for U2 in Yankee Stadium (and Bono admonishing him for accidentally calling the Irish superband’s guitar player “Ed”), and the tense tale of what happened when Nazi skinheads invaded Gilman.
The bottom line is that no matter how well you think you know the story of this music, you’re going to learn something from this film—probably a lot—and it’s a fun ride down the East Bay streets that drove this community to find each other and make some of the best underground music of all time.
‘Turn It Around: The Story of East Bay Punk’ plays Wed., Oct. 18, at 7 p.m. at the Del Mar in Santa Cruz.
Event highlights for the week of October 18, 2017.
Green Fix
The Missing Arm
When things go missing around Waddell Creek, you can blame family, your memory, or the dog, but it’s really Benjamin Basin’s larcenous severed arm that’s taking your stuff. His arm was cut from his body nearly 150 years ago and buried in a meadow, but legend has it that it still haunts the Big Basin redwoods today. To hear the rest of the story, join Big Basin State Park rangers for a nighttime tour around the redwood loop, complete with music and marshmallow and apple roasting. Bring a flashlight and a friend for protection from the tenacious phantom arm.
INFO: Registration opens at 6:30 p.m., tour at 7 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 21. Big Basin Redwoods State Park, 21600 Big Basin Way, Boulder Creek. thatsmypark.org. $10 per vehicle.
From Sherlock Holmes to The Godfather, all of the best stories (and movies) come from mystery novels. But what goes into the hair-raising suspense mystery novels? The norcal chapter of Mystery Writers of America brings a panel discussion on “what is suspense?” to answer that question. The panel includes New York Times bestselling author Laurie King and USA Today bestselling author Gigi Pandian, plus many more mystery specialists. The discussion is open to mystery enthusiasts of all ages.
INFO: 6-7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 19. Santa Cruz Downtown Public Library, 224 Church St, Santa Cruz. mwanorcal.org. Free.
Saturday 10/21
Heritage Harvest Festival
Travel back to the early 1900s Wilder Ranch for some old-timey square dancing, wool spinning and pumpkin decorating. In celebration of the harvest season, the state park hosts the annual event, complete with tours of the ranch’s Victorian house, live music, and Heritage apple tasting. This historical recreation may be your only chance to see an antique tractor or blacksmith shop. Carpooling is encouraged, since parking spaces are limited.
In the age of fake news, NPR has led the way in both national radio coverage and localized dialogue. There are few things better than lounging about listening to NPR’s weekend edition, but one is seeing NPR correspondent Richard Harris live. Harris is a UCSC alum and reporter focusing primarily on environmental issues, science and medicine and has travelled pretty much anywhere you can think of, or damn near close to it. He will be talking about his new book and the issues he’s seen during his career as a science journalist. This free event was relocated to a larger venue after receiving tremendous interest—meaning you should probably show up early for a good seat.
INFO: 7 p.m. Rio Theatre, 1205 Soquel Ave, Santa Cruz. riotheatre.com. Free.
You make it, they glaze it. Join Good Life ceramics in making your very own slab vase while sipping a glass of wine. Sculpt your vase, attach the bottom by slip-and-scoring, chose your glaze, then pick up the finished piece a few weeks later. This is the ideal workshop for creating a one-of-a-kind holiday gift with all of the tools and materials provided. Quinta Cruz winemakers will be pouring wine, and snacks will be included.
An epiphany struck Brayden Estby as he sat in a coffeehouse near Pinecrest Lake four years ago: he realized that, despite the fact that he had never roasted coffee before, he wanted to open a coffeehouse of his own.
“It wasn’t actually the coffee that got me into it—the coffee at this place was pretty horrible, actually—but the design was beautiful and the aesthetic, the passion of the people that worked there and the overall environment inspired me.”
Estby bought 200 pounds of green coffee and a home roaster, and began teaching himself to roast in earnest when he returned to Aptos. After working for a short time at Verve, he and his brother Joel Estby established 11th Hour Coffee, Santa Cruz County’s newest coffee roasting company, earlier this year. The fledgling business managed to snag a spot at the new farmers market in Willow Glen last winter, and shortly after began selling at the downtown Santa Cruz farmers market, where they were an instant hit.
My friend adores 11th Hour’s handcrafted, whole bean coffee so much that she brought me a bag of an Ethiopian called the Origin to try. The next morning, as I inhaled the robust aroma and took my first sips, I could see why she had fallen in love with the bright, fruity, well-rounded brew.
11th Hour eschews the three overarching coffee categories of light, medium and dark, and instead roasts every bean to whatever degree brings out its best natural attributes. “When people ask, we like to say ‘it’s roasted until it’s roasted,’” says Joel. Their dynamic, single-origin coffees from Costa Rica, Guatemala, Kenya and Ethiopia can be brewed a variety of different ways, including as espresso.
If the enticing aromas wafting through the farmers market don’t draw you in, their gorgeous, hand-made coffee cart decorated with swirling river stones and succulents might. Joel explains that even their design is meant to enhance their customers’ coffee experience: “We want every detail taken into consideration to provide a custom craft experience that puts you into a mindset of imagination, creativity, and passion that can be taken with you into the rest of your day.”
11th Hour is available at the downtown Santa Cruz farmers market, Staff of Life and Deluxe Foods of Aptos. eleventhhourcoffee.com.
We took our bottle of Muns Syrah to friends who had invited us for dinner. Turns out their favorite wine is Syrah, and they even planted a vineyard of Syrah grapes a few years ago.
Produced by Ed Muns and partner Mary Lindsay, the 2011 estate-grown Syrah ($25) is rich, well-balanced and complex, with intense aromas and flavors of dark fruits, licorice, earth and herbs. It paired well with our hearty split-pea soup.
Muns Vineyard does not open very often to the public, but 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 22 is their next open house and vineyard tour. Please contact Lindsay at ma**@mu**********.com for reservations and directions. Muns says on his website, “Muns Vineyard brushes the sky on the Loma Prieta ridge top at 2,600 feet above Monterey Bay,” so, if it’s delicious wine and a grand view you’re looking for, then you’ll find it at Muns. They will also be participating in Passport Day on Nov. 18 (visit scmwa.com for info on that), and will be pouring for Winemaker Wednesday at Shadowbrook in Capitola on Dec. 13—when you can join them for some holiday cheer.
Dining at Hyatt Carmel Highlands
After a hectic week walking all over Washington D.C. in the summer heat, we were glad to get back to the clement weather of the Monterey Bay. Then to re-charge our batteries, we headed to one of our favorite spots for lunch, the Hyatt Carmel Highlands, where an unrushed meal is as soothing as a visit to a spa. The hotel is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, so check their website for special planned events at highlandsinn.hyatt.com or call 620-1234. A sumptuous dinner on Nov. 9 featuring the wines of Bernardus Winery will be one of the highlights. The event starts at 6 p.m. and tickets are $120 inclusive.
Two new restaurants have opened in Aptos—Akira Sushi at 105D Post Office Drive (next to Armitage Wines tasting room and Starbucks); and Parish Publick House at 8017 Soquel Drive (in the space that was the Britannia Arms and then Kauboi). Welcome additions to the transformation of Aptos Village.
As I walked among the embers of what was the Coffey Park neighborhood in Santa Rosa Monday morning, my eyes burning from the smoke as I watched weeping residents gazing at where their homes once stood, I was shocked not only by the devastation, but by the fact that a wildfire could reach so far into the city. I thought wildfires were supposed to stay in wild lands, not move into subdivisions with busy intersections, schools and restaurants. Of course, fires don’t follow any such rules, but if this neighborhood could fall victim to a wildfire raging down the hills like a flood, what neighborhood is safe?
Indeed, Coffey Park was outside of the city’s “very severe” hazard zone. As the Los Angeles Times reported Sunday, that meant homes were exempt from regulations to make them more fire-resistant. It’s not clear how such precautions would have protected the neighborhood from the early-morning firestorm. More than 1,200 homes were incinerated in a matter of minutes.
I don’t see this as city or state negligence, but as a chilling testament to the fact that we live in a different era of fire danger. The climate has changed, and so have the risks. This is the terrifying new normal.
Poised for Catastrophes
Sparking PG&E power lines may have pulled the trigger on last week’s catastrophic fires, but evidence shows that climate change built the weapon and aimed it right at the North Bay. And we remain under the gun.
The devastated landscape of Santa Rosa captured last week as fires continued to burn. PHOTO: STETT HOLBROOK
As this issue went to press, a 125-acre blaze that started Monday night northeast of Boulder Creek in the Santa Cruz Mountains had injured five firefighters and destroyed at least four homes, and was threatening 150 more.
From the most destructive hurricane season on record to the devastating fires still burning in the North Bay, the reality is becoming devastatingly clear: the climate has changed and the conditions for fires like the ones burning in Northern California will intensify. It was just two years ago that that the Valley fireexploded in the parched hills of Lake, Napa and northern Sonoma counties, burning 76,000 acres and 1,350 homes and killing three. Northern California’s 15 concurrent fires have scorched 220,000 acres, burned an estimated 5,700 structures and caused at least 40 deaths, making them the deadliest and most destructive wildfires in California history.
“That’s the way it is with a warming climate, dry weather and reduced moisture,” said Gov. Jerry Brown in a press conference last week. “These kinds of catastrophes have happened, and they are going to continue to happen.”
Wildfires in California are a fact of life. Fire plays an important ecological role in the chaparral and conifer forest ecosystems of the North Bay. Problems arise when people choose to live in those fire-prone environments. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and local fire departments mandate property owners carve out a ring of defensible space to help defend against wildfires. But there was little chance of fending off wind-whipped fires of such intensity and speed.
“We know that Northern California’s climate has changed,” says Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University, “and we’re in a climate that’s different than when a lot of what we have on the landscape was designed and built.”
Climate plays an important role in wildfire risk, but it’s not the only influence, says Diffenbaugh. Human elements such as forest management and where and how we build also play a role, he says. Then again, climate change is the biggest human element of all.
“Climate sets the stage, and we have strong evidence that the global warming that’s already happened has increased wildfire risk in the western United States through the effects of temperature drying the landscape,” he says.
“For this particular event, we can really see the impacts of heat. We had record hot conditions during the drought. We had record high temperatures that coincided with record low precipitation that created the most severe drought on record that killed tens of millions of trees. Those record drought conditions were followed by extremely wet conditions this winter that were again followed by record hot conditions.”
In short, climate change primed the landscape for a vicious wildfire.
Fueling the Fires
Rising temperatures also lead to less snowfall in the Sierra and earlier melting of that snow, he says, meaning there is less runoff available during the hot, dry days of fall.
Hundreds of homes and businesses were destroyed in the fires in Santa Rosa, which were fueled by Diablo winds that reached hurricane strength at higher elevations. PHOTO: STETT HOLBROOK
In California, Diffenbaugh says, low precipitation levels are twice as likely to produce drought if they coincide with warm conditions. “Overall, we’ve seen a doubling in frequency of drought in California in recent decades.”
The east-to-west Diablo winds that fanned the flames, reaching hurricane strength at higher elevations, may also be pegged to climate change, Diffenbaugh says.
Richard Heinberg, a fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, a nonprofit think tank focused on climate change and sustainability issues, lives in Santa Rosa and was evacuated the first night of the fire. His house was spared. While the links between climate change and wildfires can be indirect, he says the impacts of a warming climate on California are clear. Heinberg says research shows that increased CO2 in the atmosphere leads to rapid but less viable plant growth—more fuel for fire.
“It’s almost like we’re growing junk food with more CO2 in the atmosphere,” he says.
On a larger scale, he says data shows that California is moving into a hotter and drier climate.
“The 20th century was a wet spell for California,” he says.
City officials say Santa Rosa will rebuild and will be “better than before.” But better in what way? Better prepared for future wildfires? Better built to reduce the CO2 emissions that contributed to the perilous state we’re in? Or will better just mean bigger? While Gov. Jerry Brown admirably sounds the climate change alarm, the sentiments are not keeping pace with the explosive conditions on the ground.
Urgent Action
In an essay on the North Bay fires called the “The Devil in Wine Country” to be published in the London Review of Books, Mike Davis, author of Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imaginations of Disaster,admits he’s “an elderly prophet of doom” as he laments “the hopelessness of rational planning in a society based on real estate capitalism.”
“We’ll continue to send sprawl into our fire-dependent ecosystems with the expectation that firefighters will risk their lives to defend each new McMansion,” he writes, “and an insurance system that spreads costs across all homeowners will promptly replace whatever is lost.”
Santa Rosa Mayor Chris Coursey says he’s thought about how the city might rebuild to be more resilient, but with the fire still blazing and people’s lives at risk, now is not the time for that. “I’m not there yet,” he told me after a press briefing at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds.
Ann Hancock, executive director of Santa Rosa’s Center for Climate Protection, says that when the time is right, she hopes the conversation centers on reducing the impacts of climate change.
“It’s not too early to start thinking about that, so long as the people who are suffering are taken care of,” she says.
As a trained public health professional, Hancock is a strong advocate for prevention: “Prevention is where we have the best opportunity for impact with the lowest cost.”
Local measures such as better forest management and more defensible space are worthy, but her organization is focusing on bringing down the greenhouse gas emissions that helped get us into this crisis.
“It is a wholesale systemic change and that’s overwhelming for most people to think about, and yet we have to,” she says.
When the North Bay rebuilds, Heinberg calls for building great resiliency into local infrastructure—redundant electric and water systems, larger inventories of food and supplies—that can better withstand future disasters. Knowing that climate change is exacerbating the risks, he says the region should deepen its investment in mass transit, zero-energy buildings and clean energy.
“Ultimately, though, what all this suggests is we need to build differently, change our patterns of living and build a lot more resilience into our whole society, because we unquestionably have more disasters on the way of different kinds, not just wildfires,” he says. “We in California have the opportunity to see the handwriting on the wall and make some changes.”
Those looking to help with relief efforts may donate to the Rebuild Sonoma Fund, which supports the nonprofits on the front lines of the Sonoma and Napa areas. For more information, visit rebuildsonomafund.org.
Naturalist John Muir once said that when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it attached to everything else in the universe. He was probably talking about studying trees or glaciers, but he might as well have been talking about the affordable housing crisis in Santa Cruz.
“It’s important to understand that when we talk about affordable housing, we aren’t just talking about units built,” says Santa Cruz Housing and Community Development Manager Carol Berg. “We’re talking about parking, density, the height of buildings, what our town is going to look like in 30 years. Ultimately, it’s about our values as a town.”
With Santa Cruz Affordable Housing Week kicking off Thursday, Oct. 19, event organizers aim to increase public awareness and participation to find solutions that have broad community benefit.
The housing crisis isn’t unique to Santa Cruz. Gov. Jerry Brown recently signed a bundle of bills aimed at increasing low-income housing statewide, including one placing a $4 billion affordable-housing measure on the ballot. Even if that bond passes, the state measures will make only a small dent in California’s problem. And locally, given the pressures from university students living in town, the proximity of Silicon Valley and the increasing number of units being rented to overnight tourists, even working professionals struggle to find housing.
Similar struggles are unfolding around the country.
“Everyone who lives in a desirable location is fighting the same battle,” says Todd Brown, a town councilmember for Telluride, Colorado, a high-end resort town with a median household income similar to Santa Cruz. “We’re all trying to maintain a thriving local community in the midst of skyrocketing housing and land costs.”
In Telluride, city leaders have been working for two decades to make sure everyone from dishwashers to teachers to mid-level shop managers can afford to live there. Fifty percent of the town’s workforce lives in deed-restricted affordable housing. “But it’s nowhere near enough,” Brown says.
Efforts to provide affordable housing in Santa Cruz go back to the 1979 passage of Measure O, an ordinance that called for 15 percent of all units built in the city to be made available for low- and moderate-income residents. Thirty-seven years later, only 7 percent of our housing stock is deed-restricted. And the City Council is poised to cut the current requirement in half.
When housing construction slowed, the city began allowing developers to opt out of actually building the less profitable lower-income units, hoping to encourage the creation of more housing. Developers were allowed to pay an in-lieu fee, and funds went into an Affordable Housing Trust Fund.
How much money has the city collected from in-lieu fees? How many affordable units were built with contributions from the Affordable Housing Trust Fund? No one at Santa Cruz City Hall seems to know the answers to these questions.
The city hired financial consultant Kathe Head, of Keyser Marston Associates, to help them get a grip on the issue. She concluded that requiring builders to make 15 percent of their units affordable would result in no new construction. “She told us it wasn’t financially feasible,” says Berg. “It just won’t pencil out for a developer.”
According to local affordable housing advocate Sibley Simon, investors want to see a 20 percent return in order for a project to “pencil out.”
“Development is really risky and expensive here in California,” Simon explains. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars are sunk into projects that never get built.”
Currently, Simon sees mostly high-end housing getting built in Santa Cruz, with a few affordable units. In an effort to provide housing for the vast population in between, he’s approached foundations and nonprofits for funding for new projects. “These groups are willing to accept lower returns, like 5 or 6 percent, in exchange for having a positive social impact,” says Simon, who’s working on building a complex of small units near the Homeless Services Center.
Meanwhile, the Santa Cruz City Council is considering dropping its affordability requirement from 15 percent down to 7.5 percent, in an effort to appeal to developers and spur new housing construction.
In the coming months, the council will also be hearing a plan to rezone Lower Pacific Avenue for up to six floors. Lee Butler, the city’s new director of Planning and Community Development says current height restrictions were a “roadblock” for developers.
With few vacant sites left in the city, finding a place to locate any new units poses a significant challenge. “The city is pretty much built out, so infill housing is the way we need to develop in the future,” says Berg. Infill could involve subdividing large lots with one unit into multiple lots with single-family homes, building taller high-density developments or allowing mixed-use developments. But every time a developer is allowed to opt out of actually building affordable units, there’s less available land where any low-income housing can be built in the future.
Many city leaders fear imposing conditions that might make developers walk away from the table. “What if we pass something really well-intentioned, and it results in developers not being able to build anything?” asks City Councilmember Richelle Noroyan.
Butler insists that market realities guide Santa Cruz’s development. “We need to consider the market implications of whatever program we put forth,” he says.
Every town has to take market forces into account, but not every town lets developers dictate the terms. In Telluride, for example, city leaders’ commitment to building affordable housing is stronger than their allegiance to the free market.
“We recognized that if we let the free market dictate housing construction, our workforce wouldn’t have anywhere to live. If we can’t provide housing and parking for our working class, we won’t have a community left,” Councilmember Todd Brown says. “So the town government stepped in and decided to let carefully crafted policy guide housing construction, not market realities.”
The city of Telluride, with just 3,000 residents, actually hires contractors to build affordable housing. Less than six months ago, they completed an eight-unit project in town. Right now, the city has 18 more apartments under construction, three tiny homes and an experimental 44-bunk rooming house that can be converted back to apartments if the effort doesn’t pan out as planned.
In Santa Cruz, a town with 60,000 residents, there are currently six affordable housing units under construction. Two are being built with assistance from Habitat for Humanity, and another two are accessory dwelling or in-law units.
In Colorado, sales tax is only 2.9 percent, compared to 7.25 percent in California. The town of Telluride has chosen to take on some of the financial burden of providing workforce housing themselves.
Some of the funding for Telluride’s projects comes from a 1 percent sales tax devoted to affordable housing. Some of it comes from fees. In Telluride, any development project, including a single-family home or significant reconstruction, must pay fees to the town’s affordable housing fund. While the calculation for in-lieu fees is complex in Santa Cruz, in Telluride it’s a simple formula involving percentages and square feet.
When the proposed project is larger than about 3,800 square feet, the developer can no longer opt out of building affordable units by paying a fee. They need to build an affordable unit, either on-site or at another location within the city limits. Or, the developer can purchase a free market unit and hand it over to the housing authority as a deed-restricted unit. Developers have a variety of options, but every time a large project gets built in Telluride, the town gets more affordable housing.
“When developers say ‘that won’t pencil out,’ we say ‘that’s your problem,’” says Brown. “We know there’s always another developer in line behind them.”
Affordable Housing Week runs Thursday, Oct. 19 through Saturday, Oct. 29, with a total of 17 events, including discussion forums, legal clinics and government meetings. For more information, visit santacruzcommunitycalendar.org.
When it comes to health and healing, Americans are living in a difficult but interesting time. As we imagine new ways to heal ourselves and create healthy communities, two timely books—A Mind at Home With Itself by Byron Katie and Stephen Mitchell, and Slow Medicine: The Way to Healing by Victoria Sweet—are helping to light the way.
Katie knows a lot about healing. Emerging from a depression that almost consumed her, she developed a system of self-inquiry called “The Work,” designed to help alleviate the suffering that comes with anxiety, fear, depression and anger. A Mind at Home with Itself proposes that asking four simple questions can shatter our damaging beliefs.
“The Work is experiential,” she says. “Sometimes I refer to it as ‘checkmate,’ because those four questions are deadly to the ego, yet it works for anyone whose mind is open to it. The more we question what we believe, the more open our minds become.”
A Mind at Home with Itself explores the common thread between the Work and The Diamond Sutra, one of the most important ancient Buddhist texts. Mitchell—a writer and scholar who is also Katie’s husband—lays out the nature of mind to be found in both. “The more you realize that there is no such thing as the separate self, the more you become naturally generous,” he says. “This is something that Katie has lived out.”
Katie believes that a kinder way of living and more compassionate point of view come when we cut through the hypnotic spell of our own beliefs. “Most of us take the thoughts that come rushing at us for granted,” she says. “If we slow down with an open mind and contemplate the thoughts arising within us, they can become different. That’s a state of grace as far as I’m concerned. An open mind is a privilege.”
Slow Up
As a physician at San Francisco’s Laguna Honda Hospital for more than 20 years, Victoria Sweet came to understand that the intrinsic nature of medicine is slow and personal, an experience she wrote about in her book, God’s Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine. In her new book, Slow Medicine: The Way to Healing, she offers an alternative to the tyranny of efficiency at the expense of healing. In a recent conversation, I asked her to flesh out her ideas.
What do you mean when you say slow medicine?
VICTORIA SWEET: I mean that the doctor, nurse or therapist spends a certain kind of time with you. It’s focused, attentive, and slow in terms of its pace. Slow medicine is a counterpart to the slow food movement, with everything that it implies—as in, the way to something is the way of it. You can’t have a beautiful meal unless it’s prepared in a certain way. The same applies to medicine.
You consider the term “health care” to be problematic. Why?
We didn’t have “health care” when I was in medical school. Doctors practiced medicine. Suddenly this weird concept emerged of “providing health care,” which prompted economists to ask how much we spend on medical care, nursing care, hospitals, medicine, advertising, etc., and put it all in a box. I’m like the retail clerk who will provide you with health care for the least amount of money, but I can’t give you health. Doctors take care of sick people. If you’re not sick, but you just don’t feel right, there’s not a lot I can do on my own. What you eat and drink, your activity level, temperament, mood, stance toward life—these are things that you control.
I like your analogy of the human body being more like a plant than a machine. What’s the benefit of thinking like that as a doctor?
Both concepts are useful, as long as they’re applied at the right time for the right reasons. When you get acutely ill, it’s most helpful to find out what’s broken. That places me in the role of mechanic. But once the appendix comes out or the cancer is removed, a shift takes place. The body moves into self-repair and healing. Then my job is as a gardener. Now I ask myself, how can I nourish the patient’s power of healing and remove whatever is in its way?
Can slow medicine be cost effective in a fast-paced, high-tech world?
Trying to fix health care has only made it more expensive, because they took out the crucial piece, which is getting the right diagnosis. The best way for a doctor to get the right diagnosis is to see you, talk to you, listen to you and examine you. When doctors can take the time necessary to get the right diagnosis and treatment, there are fewer ER visits, fewer hospital admissions, fewer medications. It’s just better all around.
You talk about medicine as a spiritual pursuit. How have you found it to be spiritual?
My patients give me a sense of deep connection. When I can sit with them and hang out, it’s incredibly moving—the way it’s supposed to be. I would not be the same person if I hadn’t become a doctor and been able to experience this a lot.
It was in juke joints and southern barbecue shops that pre-rock musicians would hammer out boogie-woogie, rowdy blues and high-octane gospel music—the kind of music that celebrates life while simultaneously dancing away the pain. That’s the era in which Quinn DeVeaux finds his inspiration.
But as much as DeVeaux loves the music of the past, he felt that he needed to carve out his own musical genre, something that honored the music’s legacy while emphasizing innovation and a blending of many different styles. He called it “blue beat.”
“It signifies a beat I’m riding. I call it blue beat because there’s not really a name for it,” DeVeaux says. “Sometimes for shorthand, I say ‘I play soul.’ I learned that calling it blue beat, there’s like a five-minute explanation of what that is.”
He’s been playing music in some form since 1998, but in 2010, he made his new genre official, billing his group Quinn DeVeaux and the Blue Beat Dance Band.
Since then, he’s released two solo records, and two Blue Beat Dance Band records. His two solo records hearken back to when he came up in the late ’90s at Evergreen State College in Washington, playing contemplative songs with no backing band. With the BBDB, he plays feel-good dance music.
“I’m a generally happy guy,” DeVeaux says. “That’s the kind of music I like to listen to—music that lifts me up. I guess I would say it’s uplifting. Life is so short and so beautiful and so worth celebrating that it drives me to do that.”
Originally from Indiana, DeVeaux moved to Oakland in 2002, and stepped up his musical game a notch. While playing solo shows in the Bay Area, he briefly joined a band called Blue Hurt that played dance music. It completely changed his perspective.
“That’s really addictive, when people start dancing to your music. You really want that to continue. So I went off on the whole dance thing,” DeVeaux says.
By 2015, he was starting to feel the limitations of high-energy dance music, and moved to Nashville to focus on the craft of songwriting.
“The problem with dance music is that no one really listens to the words. No one really knows what you’re doing, or cares,” DeVeaux says. “I’m kind of splitting the distance. I love writing, I love the dance stuff, but I also like to have a point to the music. I think music should have a point to it. I felt like I was combining everything that I’d been working on for 10 years or so.”
He’s no longer backed by the Blue Beat Dance Band, but he has a new band that blends his deeper songwriting side with his high-energy dance music. And he’s still in the Bay Area a lot, mostly because the other primary member of his band, Joe Lewis (formerly of Foxtails Brigade), lives here. The duo, along with various other musician friends, helped record DeVeaux’s new record, which is tentatively scheduled for an early 2018 release.
“Me and Joe are still filling out the roster. We are the nucleus of the band,” DeVeaux says. “There are a few guys we work with out here, a few guys we work with out in Nashville. I don’t know exactly who’s going to be in the band. But we are looking for a specific thing. We want to fill out the band in the right way, so we’re taking our time doing it.”
Quinn DeVeaux plays at 9 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 20, at the Crepe Place, 1134 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. $10. 429-6994.
When things go missing around Waddell Creek, you can blame family, your memory, or the dog, but it’s really Benjamin Basin’s larcenous severed arm that’s taking your stuff. His arm was cut from his body nearly 150 years ago and buried in a meadow, but legend has it that it still haunts the Big Basin redwoods today. To hear the rest of the story, join Big Basin State Park rangers for a nighttime tour around the redwood loop, complete with music and marshmallow and apple roasting. Bring a flashlight and a friend for protection from the tenacious phantom arm. 
From 
In the age of fake news, NPR has led the way in both national radio coverage and localized dialogue. There are few things better than lounging about listening to NPR’s weekend edition, but one is seeing NPR correspondent Richard Harris live. Harris is a UCSC alum and reporter focusing primarily on environmental issues, science and medicine and has travelled pretty much anywhere you can think of, or damn near close to it. He will be talking about his new book and the issues he’s seen during his career as a science journalist. This free event was relocated to a larger venue after receiving tremendous interest—meaning you should probably show up early for a good seat. 
You make it, they glaze it. Join Good Life ceramics in making your very own slab vase while sipping a glass of wine. Sculpt your vase, attach the bottom by slip-and-scoring, chose your glaze, then pick up the finished piece a few weeks later. This is the ideal workshop for creating a one-of-a-kind holiday gift with all of the tools and materials provided. Quinta Cruz winemakers will be pouring wine, and snacks will be included. 
