June 8 is World Oceans Day—a time to recognize the dire impact of climate change on our seas. In celebration of the big blue, Save Our Shores is co-hosting a screening of the Sea of Life documentary, which focuses on the perils faced by the marine ecosystem, and the positive things that we can do to help. Following the documentary, there will be a discussion panel of local ocean experts. Proceeds benefit Save Our Shores.
INFO: 6 p.m. Wednesday, June 6. Rio Theatre. 1205 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. 423-8209. riotheatre.com. $15.
After a successful 2017 debut, the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History’s summer art series is back for round two. This year’s series will feature one local artist per month, starting off with Tannery artist and Cabrillo College teacher Margaret Niven in June, then naturalist painter Diana Walsworth in July, and photographer Linda Cover in August. The show’s diverse content is inspired by nature and the great outdoors. Museum admission and artist receptions free on First Fridays.
INFO: Show runs through August. First Friday receptions 5-7 p.m. on July 6 and Aug. 3. Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History. 1305 E Cliff Drive, Santa Cruz. 420-6115. santacruzmuseum.org. $4 general admission, $2 students/seniors, free children under 18. Image: Margaret Niven: “Olives”
Maintaining a small business is no easy feat, and one of Santa Cruz’s most beloved home goods stores, Home/Work, knows it. The shop is celebrating three years in the community, and in an effort to celebrate and uplift other local artists and businesses, they asked over 15 locals to create work that represents what Santa Cruz means to them. The final works will be on display at the store’s third-anniversary party. There will also be cocktails and trunk shows from Blackbird Dagger jewelry, and local chocolatier Tiny House Chocolate.
INFO: 2-6 p.m. Home/Work. 1100 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. 316-5215. shophomework.com. Free. Image: Miranda Powell.
Last year’s Japanese Cultural Fair (JCF) was almost their last. Because JCF didn’t get a number of anticipated grants this year, they faced a budget shortfall of $6,000. But this year’s fair will still happen, thanks to donations and sponsor support. In fact, the lineup is one of the best yet. Taiko, martial arts demonstrations, folk dancing, tea ceremonies, and kimono workshops are just a few of the live events and workshops on the list.
INFO: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Mission Plaza Park. 103 Emmet St., Santa Cruz. jcfsantacruz.org. Free.
At the UCSC Student Print Sale, print media students get to sell their original artwork and the community gets to support budding artists while collecting beautiful one-of-a-kind art. Hundreds of original etchings, lithographs, woodcuts, digital prints, handmade books, and more will be on display and available for purchase (cash or check only). This is a unique opportunity to see and purchase high-quality handmade artwork, meet the artists and tour the UCSC arts facilities. The event is free and open to the public—all profits directly benefit the student artists and UCSC printmaking program.
INFO: 10 a.m.-6 p.m. UCSC Elena Baskin Visual Arts Printmaking Studio, Room G-101. 1156 High St., Santa Cruz. 459-3686. artsites.ucsc.edu/printsale. Free.
Live music highlights for the week of June 6, 2018.
THURSDAY 6/7
POST-PUNK
ICEAGE
Danish post-punkers Iceage got their start a decade ago when the members were still in high school. In the past decade, the group has managed to insert something subtle into their mix of Birthday Party-meets-Bauhaus punk: gentleness. It sounds counter-intuitive, but the Danish rockers pound out guitar-driven songs with the delicacy of a flower falling slowly onto a bed of leaves. Without all of the aggression that normally comes from all-male bands baring their soul, the music catches you off guard in a spectacular way. AC
L.A.’s Yeek has a video for his tune “I’m Not Ready” that’s jam-packed with a lot of culturally potent imagery—everything from aged video footage of kids skateboarding inside of an empty pool to him on stage flying solo with just a mic and working the crowd into a frenzy.You also see shots of him rocking a guitar punk-rock style. What the hell is this Yeek guy even doing? Let’s just say this video actually downplays the scatterbrain mass-attack of conflicting influences that is in his music. It’s lo-fi indie-pop, kind of rap, sort of R&B, a little bit of punk. Whatever he’s doing, it’s catchy, and is catching on. AC
Willy Tea Taylor comes through Santa Cruz a lot. He’s not exactly local, but comes from semi-nearby Oakdale—and Santa Cruz loves the kind of Americana-roots-heart-on-the-sleeve music he makes. Two things he’s known for are his epic beard, and his work as the frontman of Good Luck Thrift Store Outfit, which also rolls through town quite a bit. But to catch Willy Tea Taylor as a solo act is to see the singer in a much more intimate setting, and to get a more personal expression via his tender acoustic side. There are some intensely emotional songs here that will move you to tears if you happen to be a human with a heartbeat. AC
For years, singer-songwriter Nicki Bluhm and her husband Tim Bluhm were partners in music and in life. In 2015, however, the couple split up. The pain, loneliness and grief of that experience are all over Bluhm’s new album, To Rise You Gotta Fall. Bluhm turned to music to get through her own hard times, and, in turn, she shares her experiences on the album, which was recorded at the legendary Sam Phillips Recording Studio in Memphis. As she says in a trailer video for the record, “I’ve captured all those really intense emotions and put them into songs. If I can help someone else get through their pain, that’s my goal … Music makes you feel less alone.” CJ
Born and raised in Harlem, Smoke DZA is a product of ’80s and ’90s hip-hop living in the time of mumble rappers, and still delivering the solid beats and rhymes we deserve. Staying true to the classics of hip-hop that created the genre, he expands on new lyrical horizons and artists—collaborating with the likes of Kendrick Lamar, Schoolboy Q and Joey Bada$$ to create a sound that pushes towards the future while solidifying his roots in what made the music great. MAT WEIR
Petunia and the Vipers are no strangers to poetic description. The five-piece outfit has been dubbed “creative generators and innovators … defining the cutting edge,” “a total one-off,” “left-field genius,” and, my personal favorite from the Blasters’ Phil Alvin, “Petunia and the mutherfucking Vipers!” Rooted in American roots traditions, the band branches out into avant-garde, steampunk, jazz and rock to reimagine the boundaries of Americana and breathe new life into styles popularized by American music icons like the Carter Family, Hank Williams and Blind Lemon Jefferson. Also on the bill: local outlaw country favorite Miss Lonely Hearts. CJ
In 2018, musicians are back to releasing singles online just as previous generations did through seven-inch vinyl records. But to truly grasp what it was like during the fledgling days of rock ’n’ roll, look no further than Cash and King. For one exclusive night, Steven Kent and his band will rage through hit singles from two kings of pop music, Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley. For those of us who couldn’t be there from the beginning, this is an affordable time machine to capture the moments we wish we had witnessed. MW
INFO: 8 p.m. Rio Theatre, 1205 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. $28/gen, $40/gold. 423-8209.
MONDAY 6/11
JAZZ
BRIAN BLADE
When Brian Blade released his first album with the Fellowship Band in 1998, the protean drummer occupied a singular space in American music—a swirling, grooving vortex that inexorably attracted artists like Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell as well as powerhouse jazz improvisers like Joshua Redman, Kenny Garrett and Mark Turner. But it was joining saxophone legend Wayne Shorter’s all-star quartet in 2000 that lifted Blade into the jazz pantheon as one of the era’s definitive drummers. All the while he’s kept his love of folk and gospel music as the guiding force in the Fellowship, a passionately lyrical ensemble that released its fifth album last year, Body and Shadow (Blue Note). Blade performs the album’s cast, featuring newcomer Dave Devine on guitar, and founding members Jon Cowherd (piano and harmonium), Chris Thomas (bass), Myron Waldon (alto sax and clarinet) and Melvin Butler (tenor sax). ANDREW GILBERT
INFO: 7 p.m. Kuumbwa Jazz, 320-2 Cedar St., Santa Cruz. $31.50/adv, $36.75/door. 427-2227.
TUESDAY 6/12
ROOTS
DEEP DARK WOODS
An alt-country outfit from Saskatoon, the largest city in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, Deep Dark Woods is one of the best kept secrets in roots music. Led by frontman Ryan Boldt, the band gracefully merges gothic folk, Appalachian music traditions and rock. The resulting songs are spooky, sad and lovely tales of plagues, murder, prison, loss, death—you know, all the stuff that makes good roots music so compelling. Bridging traditional sounds from across North America with a style that appeals to contemporary music lovers, Deep Dark Woods is an under-appreciated gem of the roots scene. CJ
INFO: 8 p.m. Michael’s on Main, 2591 Main St., Soquel. $15. 479-9777.
IN THE QUEUE
MONSIEUR PERINE
Latin Grammy winning gypsy jazz outfit. Thursday at Kuumbwa
CHRIS TRAPPER
Singer-songwriter out of Boston. Friday at Flynn’s Cabaret
KEZNAMDI
Rising star of reggae. Friday at Moe’s Alley
LAURENCE JUBER
World-renowned guitarist. Sunday at Michael’s on Main
ULI JON ROTH
Metal pioneer and former Scorpions lead guitarist. Tuesday at Catalyst
In the 1970s, as rocksteady music made way for reggae, a music subgenre known as lovers rock was born. Popularized by artists like Ken Boothe, Johnny Nash and John Holt, lovers rock combined Chicago and Philly soul with the bass grooves of reggae. In the mid-’70s, Jamaican-born Beres Hammond emerged as one of the rising stars of the genre, a soulful artist who captured international attention. Peaking in the 1990s, Hammond became one of the genre-defining voices of lovers rock, and remains a giant of Jamaican music.
INFO: 9 p.m. Sunday, June 24. Catalyst, 1011 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz. $25/adv, $30/door. 423-1338. WANT TO GO? Go to santacruz.com/giveaways before 11 a.m. on Friday, June 15 to find out how you could win a pair of tickets to the show.
“Did you ever watch Petticoat Junction?” Shady Rest lead singer Cheryl Rebottaro asks me. Anyone remotely familiar with the show will recognize the band’s name as a reference (as in, the Shady Rest Hotel), and they chose it because of the two founding members’ names.
The band originally started with Rebottaro and guitarist Joe Bac. The duo would play covers of the Tedeschi Trucks Band. Originally, they combined their first names, calling themselves “Cheryl Joe.” As new band members got enlisted, they gave them a “Joe” last name (Cheryl Joe, Pat Joe, Mary Joe), like on the show.
“I don’t know how I got on this Petticoat Junction kick,” Bac says. “It was Cheryl Joe and the Shady Rest, then we felt bad that the rest of the people were the Shady Rest. So we dropped it. It’s just the Shady Rest.”
As more members joined, and the kinds of gigs they were offered changed, so did the song selection. Initially, leaning toward more obscure songs, they started to sprinkle in more hits so that more people would get up and dance. In many of the cases, they chose songs by female singers like Bonnie Raitt, Aretha Franklin and Sheryl Crow, who have a timbre similar to Rebottaro’s.
Currently the lineup includes Rebottaro on vocals, Bac on guitar and vocals, Par Greene on drums, Mary Rose Mackenzie on cello, Ariana Ebrahimian on violin, Max Ebrahimian on congas and Mike Westendorp on bass.
“We had to bring in more recognizable things. Now we’re mixing it up,” Rebottaro says. I think we’re unique because we bring different sounds to the music. It’s the same classic stuff that people are hearing, but we spin it a little.”
INFO: 5 p.m. Friday, June 8. Michael’s on Main, 2591 S Main St., Soquel. Free. 479-9777.
The manuscript arrived at Susie Bright’s house in Santa Cruz looking like any other package. The edges of the thick manila envelope in which it came seemed far more dirty and beat up than they should have been after a couple of days of travelling up the postal route from Malibu. Maybe it had slid around the floor of the filthiest mail truck in California, or maybe it had been re-used by the sender after having been stacked in a dusty, damp corner of the garage for a long time. An eternity.
Susie was used to getting some very strange mail. After all, it was her sex advice column in On Our Backs—the first women-run erotica magazine, which she helped to found back in the ’80s—that had debuted her alter ego as “Susie Sexpert,” under the banner of which she would go on to become one of the world’s most progressive, provocative and controversial thinkers on sexuality in books like Susie Sexpert’s Sexual State of the Union, Susie Sexpert’s Lesbian Sex World and Big Sex, Little Death: A Memoir. As the editor of more than 30 anthologies, including the popular Herotica series, she had received hundreds of manuscripts just like this one.
But maybe not entirely like this one. As she pulled out the typewritten pages and started to read through them, something about it felt different. Darker. And too close to home.
Susie finished reading. “Oh my god,” she thought. “What a psycho.”
And then she smiled, rubbing her forefinger absent-mindedly over her lips.
“It’s perfect.”
WICKED CITY Susie Bright is the mastermind behind ‘Santa Cruz’ noir. Photo shoot thanks to Brielle Machado at Faust Salon and Spa for hair; the Hat Company of Santa Cruz for Bright’s fedora; and Carlos de la Cruz of Kiss the Past Antiques for jewelry. PHOTO: KEANA PARKER
Into the Black
OK, maybe it didn’t unfold with quite so much pulp-fiction melodrama, but that is exactly what Bright remembers thinking the first time she read “Buck Low,” the short story by Tommy Moore that opens Bright’s new fiction anthology Santa Cruz Noir, the latest in a long line of city-specific noir collections from Akashic Books. Though longtime locals will recognize the names of many of the authors who penned the 20 original stories in it—from Lee Quarnstrom to Peggy Townsend to Elizabeth McKenzie to GT’s own Wallace Baine—Moore is one of four writers in the book who had never been published before, and his debut effort about a murderous druggie lowlife on Santa Cruz’s North Coast blew Bright away.
“That was a gift,” says Bright. “In sails almost exactly what you see here. The first draft is so close to this.”
Bright’s associate editor Willow Pennell, who grew up in Santa Cruz, couldn’t believe how creepily realistic the story’s narrator seemed. “That was one of the first stories to come in. And I was like, ‘I know that guy. I went to high school with that guy.’ Not because he was a jerk, but just the way he talks about the town. It’s local. He’s from here. Like force-feeding crabs into anemones [a habit the narrator discusses in the story]—that’s a kid that grew up with tide pools.”
Santa Cruz Noir is teeming with other local details that will make readers do similar double takes. It’s divided into three sections, the first of which is called “Murder Capital of the World,” as if to put any question of when Santa Cruz’s notorious serial killer lore is going to come up immediately to rest.
Each story is set in a different neighborhood in Santa Cruz County—and not just the more obvious settings like Seabright, Mission Street, UCSC, Pacific Avenue, Aptos and Watsonville, but also Bear Creek Road, Grant Park, Soquel Hills, the Circles, Seacliff and Mount Hermon, among others.
“I knew what would be more intriguing would be getting neighborhoods that not everybody knows about,” says Bright. “I explained to the publisher that this is not going to be Santa Cruz city limits, this is going to be countywide. The fact that the book begins in Davenport and works all the way down to San Juan Road on the borderline is extremely pleasing to me.”
She also found endless amusement in the way these dark and twisted crime stories subvert the shiny, happy conventional narrative of Santa Cruz.
“I probably laughed a little bit too much,” she admits. “Partly it’s because it’s tweaking the tourist information brochure. It’s not like, ‘Vacation in Santa Cruz!’ So I have to have my evil laughter. But also it’s just that these characters are real. We’ve met them; we know them. They’re our families, they’re our friends and neighbors. And one way this is an interesting looking glass is that I think Santa Cruz is so often portrayed as a quirky utopia. Who’s seen beyond that? I’m just trying to think of who’s written about Santa Cruz in more sensitive or vulnerable or exposing ways. You don’t see it.”
Bright credits Ariel Gore—who wrote the book’s second story, “Whatever Happened to Skinny Jane?”—with giving her the best summary definition of noir as a genre: “Often the narrator has her own agenda. The darker twist. Moral ambiguity. More cynicism. More fatalism. And the femme fatale, even if she’s Mother Nature herself.”
At the narrative core of Gore’s story is the most widely known element of Santa Cruz’s dark side, possibly the very person who first made people realize Santa Cruz had a dark side at all: “Co-Ed Killer” Edmund Kemper. For a figure so famous, Gore wanted to find a new and different approach.
“My mom worked on Death Row in San Quentin,” says Gore, “so she was haunted by serial killers. I wanted to look at it that way—how people were haunted by [what Kemper did]—rather than tell his story.”
The short story focuses on a modern-day couple who become obsessed with Kemper, and takes some crazy twists and turns. Gore wasn’t similarly obsessed with his legend, but she was affected by Santa Cruz’s reputation as a magnet for serial killers—although maybe not as affected as she should have been.
“In the ’80s when I lived in Santa Cruz, we still hitchhiked, even though those guys had ruined it. We were stupid teenagers,” she says.
Gore hadn’t written anything in a noir style until she contributed a piece to the Portland Noir collection. But she admits she’s gotten hooked on it, and is now editing a Santa Fe Noir book. For Santa Cruz Noir, she told Bright she only had one stipulation.
“I told her, ‘I’ve got dibs on the Jury Room,’ she says, referring to Kemper’s famous hangout spot of choice. “That was my only thing.”
Secret Histories
The Jury Room does play a pivotal role in Gore’s story, and she also drops references to Food Not Bombs serving meals downtown and Halloween at the Catalyst, among other things. Santa Cruz Noir features a lot of local touchstones like these—every dot from Santa Cruz’s designation as a “nuclear-free zone” to sign dancers on Mission Street gets connected over the course of the collection.
Some bits of local history that come up are downright startling. How many people know, for instance, that Santa Cruz County was the center of cockfighting culture in the 1950s? That fact is a central point in Lou Mathews’ “Crab Dinners,” one of the anthology’s short stories that most closely echoes the classic noir fiction of authors like Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain. In Mathews’ story, a mysterious woman walks into a detective agency in Seascape looking for help locating her father, a popular Chinese chef named Leonard Wong who spends most of his time outside the kitchen gambling on cockfights.
Mathews—who teaches fiction writing and lit for the UCLA Extension Writer’s Program and is the author of the acclaimed novel L.A. Breakdown, about SoCal street racing in the ’60s—graduated from UCSC in 1973. He lived in Santa Cruz for more than a decade, and wrote for papers here like Sundaze and Good Times (which is referenced in “Crab Dinners”). He says the Chef Wong character is based on a real Santa Cruz County celebrity chef, Francis Tong.
“He introduced Szechwan cuisine to Santa Cruz County,” says Mathews from his home in Los Angeles. “He was a talented guy, but he was also an inveterate gambler.”
The closing story of the collection, “It Follows Until It Leads” by Dillon Kaiser, tells the story of a Mexican immigrant who got caught up in the drug trade in his native country, and—like so many a noir protagonist—foolishly thinks he can leave his violent history behind him. He builds a new life in Watsonville, but when he discovers that his son is keeping a gun to style himself as a tough guy at Watsonville High, things begin to unravel.
The story culminates in a gut-wrenching conclusion, but besides its power as a piece of hardboiled crime fiction, it also sheds some light on how the influence of the drug cartels reaches into field work and other corners of the immigrant Mexican community in South County.
“It’s something that’s huge in Watsonville,” says Kaiser, who grew up there, and graduated from Watsonville High. “But the majority of Santa Cruz County doesn’t see it.”
CRIMINAL MINDS Three ‘Santa Cruz Noir’ authors, clockwise from top left: Tommy Moore, Ariel Gore and Dillon Kaiser.
First Blood
Kaiser is another one of Santa Cruz Noir’s first-time authors. At the time that Bright was accepting submissions, he was working at Bookshop Santa Cruz, and was encouraged by his fellow staffers and writers Richard M. Lange and Aric Sleeper to enter his story. He says working with Bright as an editor was a revelation; though she worked with him on many changes, she had a way of understanding his vision and never compromising it.
“I never felt like anything was being taken away from the essence of what I wanted it to be,” he says.
For the fiction veterans, Bright simply drew on her long lists of contacts.
“She knows everybody,” says Pennell. “She knows people with lots of other contacts. She just put out the Bat Signal.”
She connected with Mathews, for instance, through their mutual friend Carter Wilson, author of the 1960s novel-slash-anthropology-class phenomenon Crazy February. Mathews, in turn, introduced her to Moore, a Santa Cruz expat now doing film and video production out of Malibu who had literally no footprint in the lit world.
“They said, ‘We really like your story, but we can’t find anything about you online,’” remembers Moore. “And that’s because there isn’t anything.”
Still, Bright found him, and as he worked with her on “Buck Low,” he was impressed by the fact that whenever he would want to take something out, thinking it might be too extreme, she would be the one who’d want to keep it in.
In general, Bright says, one of the hardest things about working with authors was getting them to go as dark as the genre required.
“They’re all people who have read a lot and watched a lot of black-and-white noir movies. So it wasn’t like I had to say ‘this is n-o-i-r,’ it wasn’t that basic. But thinking about existential loss, a lack of neat conclusions, the fear and mistrust, the femme fatale, it ain’t gonna end cute. That kind of thing,” she says. “There were a couple of times when we got a manuscript and I said, ‘Oh you’re so sweet, it ends happily! No. Go back and break my heart.’ And they were like, ‘OK.’ Then they’d come back and we’d be like, ‘Whoa.’ I mean, it was there all along.”
“I think Jill Wolfson’s a good example,” Pennell says. “Because she writes teen books, and she just wasn’t ready for anybody to die. Somebody had to die. And she sure ran with that.”
Other established authors were happy to oblige, like Vinnie Hanson, a celebrated author in the “cozy mystery” genre known for its gentle and lighthearted approach to crime. “I was saying to Vinnie, ‘Are you ready for everything to go very bad, and for your protagonist to have no moral compass?’” remembers Bright. “And she was like ‘Oh, yes.’”
A Time for Noir
“Many people have asked me: do you think noir fits a certain moment that we’re in?’” says Bright. “And I’m like, ‘Well, I’ve never been in a moment where it didn’t feel right.”
Certainly, though, there is plenty of relevance in this time of fake-news hysteria and reactionary backlash for a genre that features criminal antiheroes and no end of moral ambiguity. Bright sees something deeper, too, at a local level.
“The famous noir films like The Big Sleep came post-World War II, but the literature came out of the Depression, and out of the sense of ‘nobody gives a damn about you, and nobody is coming to rescue you,’” she says. “The class conflict in Santa Cruz County today, which explodes into ethnic and community identities and localism identities of all kinds, is as strong today as it ever was, and so is that sense of ‘does anybody give a damn about these people?’ The working class voice of Santa Cruz in our book is something that is undeniable.”
All of the heavy themes aside, though, the book is escapist crime fiction at heart, and a lot of fun for fans of the genre. It’s clear that the people behind it enjoyed making it that way—especially Bright, who has a charming and hilarious enthusiasm for even the most obscure elements of putting together this collection.
“I love chapter ordering. It’s like, ‘now let the melody unfold.’ I feel like you want to be bookended by two killer stories, pardon the pun, and in between you want these different emotional peaks, humor, being knocked sideways. The only part that was hard was the suspense of whether we’d get all our neighborhoods covered, and then having too many good stories, and the pain of telling somebody who’s just fabulous ‘we couldn’t include you this time.’ I’ll never get over that,” she says.
The stories she wanted to publish but didn’t have room for could fill an entire second volume, says Bright. “I anticipate that in a small town like this, people who don’t see their story in here will be like, ‘Did you have to fuck Susie Bright to be in here?’ No … unfortunately! There were no sexual favors exchanged,” she says. “Maybe I’ll do a book like that in the future.”
Box: ‘Santa Cruz Noir’ Events
There will be a number of events over the next few months around Santa Cruz Noir.
The book’s launch, featuring authors, performance and signing, will be Tuesday, June 19, at 7 p.m. at Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz.
The first library author talk for Santa Cruz Noir will be at 2 p.m. on Saturday, June 30, at the Santa Cruz Public Library – Scotts Valley Branch, 251 Kings Valley Road, Scotts Valley. The second is 6 p.m. on Thursday, July 12, at the Santa Cruz Public Library – Aptos Branch, 7695 Soquel Drive, Aptos.
There will be a “Latinx Santa Cruz Noir” writing workshop at noon on Saturday, Oct. 13, at the Museum of Art and History, 705 Front St., Santa Cruz.
First Friday on Oct. 5 will feature Noir Shadow Puppets for all ages at 5 p.m. at MAH.
A Santa Cruz Noir “Murder in the Stacks” Clue game for all ages will be held at 11 a.m. on Sunday, Oct. 21, at MAH.
Made with organic grapes, the 2016 Sauvignon Blanc ($24) from Kathryn Kennedy Winery is a lovely white wine that is perfect for summer, when it’s time to have a few lighter wines on hand.
Winemaker Marty Mathis has crafted fruit from CCOF-certified organic vineyards in Napa, Lake, Mendocino, and Sonoma counties—each vineyard selected “for its exceptional viticultural care.” This Sauvignon Blanc smacks of bright fruit, sparkling flavors of key lime and honeydew melon, and has a succulent juicy finish. Its bright-green screw cap hints at the crisp-apple-fresh flavors within.
We ordered this easy-drinking wine and shared it with friends at Cantine Winepub in Aptos Village. The cozy Cantine has a good selection of wine and beer to pair with its delicious tapas-style menu.
Mathis, son of the late Kathryn Kennedy, who started the winery in the 1970s and was a pioneer of women in the wine business, is one of the more respected winemakers in the Santa Cruz Mountains—and his wines are always in big demand, both online and in local stores.
The second Aptos Wine Wander is an afternoon of tasting delicious local Santa Cruz Mountains wines in the heart of Aptos Village. The event is 1-4 p.m. Saturday, June 9, and proceeds benefit Aptos-area elementary schools. Participating wineries are Armitage, Bargetto, Burrell School, Integrity, Loma Prieta, Nicholson, Stockwell Cellars, Windy Oaks, Wrights Station, and Krazy Farm Cider Co. Organizer of the event is the Santa Cruz Mountains Winegrowers Association, and tickets are $35.
Visit scmwa.com for more info and a list of hosting businesses, which includes Cantine.
La Vita Release Party at Bargetto Winery
The always-fun release party features the unveiling of the new La Vita label, tasting of the new wine, live music with Extra Lounge, and light appetizers. La Vita retails for $60 a bottle, with a percentage of sales going to a local nonprofit. The release party is from 3-5 p.m. Sunday, June 10. Cost of tickets is $30.
Gustavo Hilsdorf, 35, and Maiana Lasevicius, 29, moved to Santa Cruz from São Paulo, Brazil more than three years ago, and brought with them an exquisite taste for quality-sourced chocolate. They started their company Tiny House Chocolate a year after the move, drawing from their experiences and techniques back home (Lasevicius’s father makes chocolate in Brazil). Together the couple roasts and grinds multi-origin cacao beans to make about 225 bars each week—an intentionally very small amount, they say, compared to other companies.
What’s unique about your chocolate?
Maiana Lasevicius: We want to keep it simple with two ingredients—cacao and sugar—so that you can taste the cacao. We have two lines; one is the single-origin that’s just cacao and sugar, and then the other has some inclusions. We add sarsaparilla, lemongrass, Earl Grey tea, or coffee. It’s a lot of work, especially with just us two, but it’s totally worth it. It’s what makes us happy at the end of the day.
Gustavo Hilsdorf: The chocolate bar as we know it came from a big industry, Nestle or Hershey’s, and then between seven and 10 years ago there was a “bean to bar” chocolate movement in California, which sources the beans straight from farms with less processing. We are part of that, and we want to to educate people on how we make chocolate. There are a lot of people who don’t know the process. Some think that chocolate comes from cows—we don’t use milk at all.
Why do it in Santa Cruz?
Lasevicius: We wanted to change our lives, that’s why we came here. We love it here. We both work other jobs, too, and now we really want to focus on our chocolate.
Hilsdorf: We want to bring our own research about cacao to the Santa Cruz market. The same bean in a different company would taste different, so the research we do and processes we use make us unique.
What’s important about craft chocolate?
Hilsdorf: This new movement, bean to bar, is changing farmers’ lives. Years ago, they wanted volume, and to pay a little for a lot. Now we have co-ops across the world, and people are harvesting and picking and are treated much better. So we want to stay craft and local, not industrialized. The chocolate product is amazing, but behind it all it’s a community that is becoming better.
Lasevicius: Before this movement, there was a lot of slavery and child labor on cacao farms. Now they are starting to get better. You pay more but it’s for quality, there’s a choice behind it all.
Tiny House Chocolate is hosting a trunk sale at Home/Work form 2-6 p.m. on Saturday June 9. 1100 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. Their chocolate is also available locally at Luma Yoga, 1010 Center St., Santa Cruz, and The Point Market, 23040 E Cliff Drive, Santa Cruz. For more information, visit tinyhousechocolate.com.
In 1976, Paul Schrader wrote the incendiary script for Taxi Driver, about a troubled loner so disgruntled by the vice and corruption of modern life that he plots to stage a horrifying act of violence in protest. The state of the world has not improved much in the 42 years since then; we can now add the ongoing destruction of the planet to the list of humanity’s crimes—an issue Schrader now addresses through another troubled protagonist in his powerful new drama First Reformed.
Directing his own script, Schrader crafts a slow-building drama of despair, loss, and attempted redemption. At its center is a conflicted Protestant pastor whose tragic past and bleak present lead him to question his faith and his own purpose. Ethan Hawke plays the part with the desperate self-control of someone who knows he’s teetering on the edge of the abyss. All the elements are in place as Schrader’s dark gears of story and sensibility grind toward what seems to be their inevitable climax. It’s not until the last few frames that the movie goes a little off the rails.
The story revolves around a small First Reformed church in woodsy upstate New York, established in 1767. It’s now mostly a quaint, Dutch Colonial tourist attraction (once a stop on the Underground Railroad, shepherding runaway slaves to freedom), with a tiny congregation ministered to by its pastor, Rev. Toller (Hawke). The plumbing leaks and the organ doesn’t work; all the action (and the funding) is at the flashy, modern Abundant Life church down the road, the organization that now also operates First Reformed.
As plans are underway for the little church’s 250th anniversary, Rev. Toller starts writing a diary in longhand at night, fueled by bottle after bottle of hooch. This provides a voice-over narration to his daily activities, as well as a glimpse of his tragic past—losing his only son in Afghanistan, and the subsequent break-up of his marriage. Toller is having crisis of faith, feeling he’s a fraud in his profession. “If only I could pray,” he says.
Toller’s already shaky grasp on his duties is further challenged by Mary (Amanda Seyfried), a young parishioner whose eco-activist husband, Michael (Philip Ettinger) has just been released from jail. Mary is pregnant, but Michael doesn’t want to bring a child into a world with what he considers such a short expiration date. Michael pleads his case with a series of alarming statistics and videos, which only adds to Toller’s sense of despair.
The nature of their conversation shifts to the question, “Can God ever forgive us?” for destroying His creation. The jolly, convivial pastor from Abundant Life (Cedric Kyle)—Toller’s opposite in every way—tells him that God “wants our obedience. Maybe destroying the Earth is God’s plan.” The industrial tycoon whose corporation owns the churches turns out to be one of the most venal polluters.
Early on, Toller tells Michael “Courage is the answer to despair.” Toller is heading for some kind of breaking point, and Schrader keeps us on edge as to what form the pastor’s “courage” will take. And a sort of courageous act (although not the one we’re expecting) does conclude the movie. But while it works as metaphor, the practical logistics of these last few moments are so skewed, the movie loses focus when it most needs it.
Schrader’s filmmaking is moody and atmospheric—small figures under vast, mottled grey skies; the silent, empty rooms, devoid of furniture, in Toller’s house, outside the shadowy, candlelit room where he writes and drinks away his nights. Portentous musical chords signal every emotional shift, ever deeper and darker as we head toward the finale. The effect is so rich and haunting overall, you might be tempted to forgive the poorly realized ending.
FIRST REFORMED
**1/2 (out of four)
With Ethan Hawke, Amanda Seyfried, and Cedric Kyle. Written and directed by Paul Schrader. An A24 release. Rated R. 117 minutes.
The construction project set to begin in Felton this summer isn’t your grandpa’s library building. There will be a park, a nature classroom, a cozy fireplace area, and plenty of high-tech amenities, including digital charging stations—all blended with an extensive book collection into a community center for the entire San Lorenzo Valley. In renderings, it almost resembles a ski lodge more than a hub for reading.
Just a few steps from the library’s patio, the park will feature native plants, interpretive displays, accessible paths, benches, natural play areas for children to climb about, and even a small stage.
“The emphasis is on environmental consciousness—opportunities for programs inside and outside. It’s going to be bigger, brighter and modern,” says Michelle Mosher, an organizer for the Felton library project. “We want it to appeal to people of all ages.”
Landscape architects who are designing the outdoor portion will share the plans with the public on Thursday, June 14, at 6 p.m. at Felton Community Hall, located at 6191 Hwy. 9. Library director Susan Nemitz says linking of indoor and outdoor space is a common feature of modern libraries.
Betsy Lynberg, the county’s capital projects manager, says $10 million from a $67 million 2016 bond measure is being spent on Felton’s new building, including furnishings and public art.
The Capitola Library is also starting over from scratch, having shut down last month, and the next facility will double down with a new play area and state-of-the-art technology.
Although demand for print books from libraries has declined in recent years, Nemitz says demand for technology grew 50 percent in the last year. People come into libraries when they need to fill out a job application, tax forms and financial aid paperwork.
The library bond measure, which got 70 percent voter support two years ago, is funding improvements to eight other county libraries as well, with cash going to branches in Santa Cruz, Aptos, Live Oak, Scotts Valley, Boulder Creek, and La Selva Beach—replacing failing roofs, outdated bathrooms, electrical systems, and structurally damaged areas.
The Capitola Library will go to bid by mid-summer, but Steve Jesberg, Capitola’s director of public works, warns that there is a high demand for contractors and subcontractors this year so it may make for a tight market.
Jesberg says the new building will replace temporary structures that have been in place for 14 years. Nearby libraries at Aptos and Live Oak will add hours while Capitola awaits its new facility. A book drop will be added at Jade Street Community Park and storytelling programs for preschoolers will be available at Porter Memorial Library in Soquel.
Nemitz says the plans for replacing the main library in downtown Santa Cruz have been complicated because the bond measure provided only $23 million, but estimates for a new structure are $38 million. She says the $67 million total offered to the voters in the bond measure “was based on what the public would pass—not what it would take to bring it into the 21st Century.”
A special library committee looked at future possibilities for the library, including the idea of integrating the new library into plans for a long-discussed parking structure that would replace existing street-level parking on the corner of Cathcart and Cedar streets downtown. It would spare library officials from having to pay for the structure’s foundation, but sustainable transportation activists are fighting the concept, leery to incentivize future car trips.
The Santa Cruz City Council will study the issues when it looks at downtown parking issues in a meeting that’s tentatively scheduled for Tuesday, June 19.
This past January, the Downtown Library Advisory Committee recommended a full remodel with a new parking structure, as it literally checks 13 of 15 boxes the group looked at, including one for cost.
The committee’s next-favorite idea was a full renovation of the current facility, which checks three fewer boxes and comes in at an estimated $11.1 million more.
Joape Pela isn’t your average lanky tech bro. Sure, the 30-year-old East Palo Alto native lives in downtown San Jose and works as a payment analyst at local startup Finxera. But the former University of Utah football player’s 6-foot-3, 320-pound stature made him wary of one trend quickly gaining traction with his startup brethren: electric scooters.
“I was surprised. They have some jump,” Pela says of the devices that started to appear on San Jose streets this past February. “It felt pretty good, having the wind blow through my hair and all that.”
The rental scooters represent the latest trend in a sharing economy that’s changing the world of transportation.
The city of Santa Cruz’s bike share system has seen more than 5,100 trips since the program’s unofficial launch on May 7. The pedal-assist electric Jump bikes allow riders to find, reserve and pay for them, all through an app on their phones. The bikes are $1 for the first 15 minutes and 7 cents for every minute after that, although $30 monthly plans are also available.
Over the hill, meanwhile, cities like San Jose have zipped full-throttle into the next frontier.
And Pela is one of many San Jose residents, commuters and business owners navigating the sudden emergence of hundreds of scooters available through two deep-pocketed app providers. San Mateo startup Lime has raised $132 million to offer on-demand shared bikes and scooters in San Jose and more than 50 other cities nationwide. Bird, a startup based in Santa Monica, is backed by $115 million and focused solely on e-scooters.
New riders can set up an account in minutes by downloading the free app, uploading a credit card and agreeing to terms of service that include parking out of the public right-of-way and wearing a helmet. Bird also requires users to scan a valid driver’s license. From there, users who pay a flat $1 fee, plus 15 cents per minute, can use the app’s map feature to find an available scooter and take a picture of a QR code to unlock the device.
The scooters, controlled by a simple hand throttle and brake, can reach a speed of 15 mph and hold a charge that lasts up to 18 miles. In San Jose, which lacks quick transit options, the scooters alternately attract praise from loyal users, ire for clogging public sidewalks, skepticism about safety, and criticism as a perceived harbinger of gentrification—controversies that also surround sharing economy services such as Uber, Lyft and other programs.
Claire Fliesler, a Santa Cruz transportation planner, says that Surf City has no plans to pursue a scooter system at this point—as leaders have their hands full trying to make bike share as robust as possible—but she adds that local officials have been following the issues as they unfold in other cities.
THROTTLE BEHAVIOUR
The trick with scooters: They’re just obscure enough to make them tough to regulate.
“There was no coordinated strategy for introducing the scooters to the street,” says Colin Heyne, a spokesman for the San Jose Department of Transportation. “Not surprisingly, we didn’t have a policy around e-scooters.”
Concerns the city has heard mostly include illegally riding scooters down sidewalks, users discarding scooters on lawns at the end of the ride and riders not wearing helmets. As a result, scooters have emerged as the latest uniquely 21st century question of where a company’s responsibility ends and a city’s or consumer’s begins.
“Riders are required to obey the law, but enforcement is difficult for us,” says Sam Dreiman, Lime’s director of strategic development for California. “In some ways, it’s an even bigger question of how much we can enforce or should enforce.”
If companies try to dodge enforcement responsibility, though, it’s not clear whether the city is ready to step in.
Both San Jose and the state are hashing out first-ever attempts at regulations designed specifically for e-scooters, but San Jose’s aren’t due until September.
GRAY AREA
Take a trip to Diridon Station during rush hour, and it’s clear that commuters in Silicon Valley are already seeking alternatives to the region’s decades-old mass transit systems. From foldable bikes and electric skateboards to the occasional pair of inline skates or old-fashioned Razor scooters, long commutes and already-overflowing BART and Caltrain cars have pushed the non-car-dependent to get creative.
In some ways, Silicon Valley is late to the party that planning wonks refer to as “multimodal urban mobility,” where future transportation systems stand to encompass more options than 20th-century cars, trains and buses.
Fast-growing cities in China, for example, have already spent the better part of the last decade trying to figure out how electric scooters of varying sizes can coexist with electric bicycles and other car alternatives. Automakers like Hyundai and Toyota have unveiled their own high-tech scooter prototypes in recent years, and Lyft in late May signaled an interest in rolling out e-scooters in San Francisco.
“It’s just very costly to use cars to make short trips, especially in cities,” says Ratna Amin, transportation policy director for Bay Area urban planning think tank SPUR. The rise of scooters and other smaller-scale alternatives, she says, “require us to now think differently about our streets.”
For the past several months, scooters have been a touchy subject in San Francisco, wherea temporary ban on them went into effect on Monday, June 4, as the City by the Bay gets a permitting program in order.
E-scooters’ more recent arrival in San Jose has been marked by a wide range of reactions.
“Bros are racing app rental electric scooters outside my apartment,” San Jose Sharks digital media coordinator Ann Frazier wrote on Twitter. “This is now normal everyday life in downtown.”
Dueling opinions between people who either love or love to make fun of the service surfaced almost as fast as the scooters themselves.
In San Jose, Lime scooters were the first to appear, in late winter, Heyne says.
Soon after came Bird, which opted for same-day deployment instead of advance conversations with the cities.
“That was shorter notice,” Heyne says. “As in, we got a call that they were going to be dropped off on our streets.”
Kenneth Baer, a Washington, D.C.-based consultant for Bird, declined to detail the company’s approach to entering San Jose or other new cities. “Obviously, we have a deliberative process,” he says. “I’m not going to get into the details.”
Despite the unconventional rollout, demand has ramped up quickly for the scooters, sometimes making it difficult to find an available device near hubs like Diridon Station.
In the meantime, though, business operators like Cafe Stritch’s Maxwell Borkenhagen say the largely unregulated devices can cause problems day to day.
SCOOTER COPS
Spending months crafting detailed policies just for e-scooters might seem a bit excessive. At stake, though, are much bigger questions about who’s responsible for the less-desirable side effects of the sharing economy. As venture capital-backed startups seek rapid growth with minimal costs, that tension can come to a head in multiple ways.
First and foremost, Lime contends, e-scooter companies are providing cities with a publicly accessible transportation option at no direct cost to the city. All they ask is that municipalities pay for necessary taxpayer-funded elements, like bike lanes and road maintenance.
“We provide the subsidy-free mobility,” Lime spokeswoman Emma Green says. “Cities provide the infrastructure.”
But what happens if riders violate the company’s terms of service, or laws governing riding on sidewalks, parking scooters in the right of way or not wearing a helmet?
State lawmakers are just now writing policies to govern bike lane usage for scooters. In San Jose, using traffic cops to police such low-level nuisances isn’t practical, Heyne says.
“We are woefully understaffed for traffic enforcement,” Heyne says, noting one recent tally counted just a half dozen citywide traffic cops.
Companies, too, are eager to avoid costly, on-the-ground scooter patrols.
“That’s a big one, trying to hold people accountable for how they park,” Dreiman says. He noted that Lime now requires users to submit a photo of how they park their scooter in order for the trip to officially end and billing to stop. The company is also considering using riders to police each other, submitting photos of other riders’ parking fails, or offering yet-undefined “incentives” for good behavior, he says.
Still, safety is another moving target. In San Francisco, a Twitter account registered to Facebook product manager Dan Grover in mid-May posted a screenshot from the Lime app alongside an X-ray showing a broken wrist.
“Took a spill as they don’t handle uneven pavement well,” Grover tweeted. “Aside from broken bones, UX was good.”
Though Lime keeps records of user-reported injuries, not all get reported. Green says the company carries business insurance mandated by each city it operates in. Lime has also started a helmet distribution center in San Francisco or done occasional helmet giveaways. Bird has sent some 22,000 helmets to users who request them, Baer says.
In San Jose, Heyne says helmets and other safety rules will likely be included in the city’s September policy recommendations.
“It’s like bring your own seat belts if you’re renting a car,” Heyne says. Still, he added, injuries are also difficult for the city to track: “Nobody calls the DOT if they get into a scooter crash.”
Event highlights for the week of June 6, 2018.
Green Fix
World Oceans Day with Save Our Shores
June 8 is World Oceans Day—a time to recognize the dire impact of climate change on our seas. In celebration of the big blue, Save Our Shores is co-hosting a screening of the Sea of Life documentary, which focuses on the perils faced...
