Identified as one of Shakespeare’s three “problem plays”—stories with complex, ambiguous and shifting tones—Measure for Measure explores themes of justice, mortality, corruption, purity, virtue, compassion and forgiveness. Described as a dynamic, dark comedy, the play is part of the 2017 Santa Cruz Shakespeare season, and a co-production with California Shakespeare Theater. Directed by Tyne Rafaeli, Measure for Measure runs July 21 through early September.
INFO: Grove at DeLaveaga Park, 501 Upper Park Road, Santa Cruz. $25-$55. 460-6396. WANT TO GO? Go to santacruz.com/giveaways before 11 a.m. on Friday, July 14 to find out how you could win a pair of tickets to the play.
In the music world, it’s pretty common for fans to say they worship a band. However, how many bands can actually brag about being their own religion? The members of Santa Cruz’s prog-surf-psych brethren Cosmic Reef Temple can, as they spread the word of Cod to anyone who will listen.
“It started as a joke, but it’s gotten more serious,” says guitarist “Friar” Sam Boodt with a smile. “There’s even a website that archives different churches and [lists] us. They basically took our info from Facebook and pasted it. Not sure if they noticed that.”
Founded by Boodt and drummer Chris Patzke in 2014, Cosmic Reef Temple was birthed from the ashes of their blackened-doom group, Folivore.
“At that time, I was out of projects,” Patzke remembers. “So I had to do something to keep playing.”
“Chris and I wanted to originally do a surf metal band when we started jamming,” Boodt says. “Then we kept adding more and more people to the band.”
In April, CRT released their first “sacrament,” Age of the Spaceborn, a beast of a debut that was recorded in three days with only three songs, but clocks in at over 38 minutes. While the members have been fluid throughout the years, the recording consisted of the core members: Boodt, Patzke, Kevin Reyes on bass, Daniel Sleeper on synths and Jonathan Weidel on saxophone. As if the recording itself isn’t impressive enough, CRT was able to get the Italian master of heavy metal cover art, Paolo Girardi, to do their album cover.
“We’re all fans of his work,” Boodt explains. “I just messaged him and he responded within an hour. Super friendly!”
Temple’s live shows blend the constant flux of their influences, and are often played with minimal lighting on the floor or around Patzke’s kit, creating a calming atmosphere while their music sonically assaults the ears. Through this, Cosmic Reef Temple create a progressive, psychedelic sound that flows through an ocean of space, surf rock, doom metal and more. Fans of the Mermen, Hawkwind, King Crimson, black metal, krautrock and everything in-between can congregate in unity at the feet of Cod in the Cosmic Reef Temple.
“Usually we discuss what type of atmosphere we’re going for and write down the composition,” Weidel remarks. “But ‘happy accidents’ happen and are allowed.”
For those who can’t make Cosmic Reef Temple’s SubRosa show on June 30 with Oort Cloud and Barrows, the wizard-priests will be throwing another sermon on July 29, in the great outdoors of the Davenport Ditch.
“Those are always fun, because we’re not on a timeline. We just do it as we go, and that makes it more memorable,” Patzke says.
INFO: Friday, June 30. 6 p.m. SubRosa Community Space, 703 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz. $5. 426-5242.
Like a wealthy scrap merchant seeking a coat of arms, director Michael Bay hired Anthony Hopkins’ integrity to fluff up the class of Transformers: The Last Knight. As “Sir Edmund Burton,” an earl with historical connections to the medieval roots of this Transformers business, Hopkins keeps a level voice intoning lines like “without sacrifice, there can be no victory … without leaders, chaos reigns.”
The speediest way down the path to madness is to try to synopsize a Michael Bay movie. It begins in King Arthur’s day with a drunken Merlin (Stanley Tucci) muttering dialogue that could be improved by any Renaissance faire busker. The magus unleashes a three-headed mega-Ghidrah to save Arthur’s skin.
The Arthurian scenes look more lavish and exciting than the recent King Arthur movie by Guy Ritchie, but then it’s off to our near future. It’s a dark time—we know this because we’re told it’s a dark time. The Transformer robots are in hiding and being besieged by soldiers, and Optimus Prime has floated off to find his home world.
Above the clashes, we almost hear something topical about immigrants (“One day, we’ll wake up and they’ll be in charge,” says a character of the ’bots). In the colossus-battered slums of Chicago, the plucky little girl Izabelle (Isabela Moner)—who will give the movie’s climactic fist pump and shout of “Yes!”—looks like she’s going to be the movie’s heroine. But she’s off to a junkyard in the Dakotas where Mark Wahlberg is waiting—his Cade Yeager is protecting an odd lot of bots, including a burly soldier voiced by John Goodman.
Ever restless, Bay heads for Oxford, where the hottie history professor Vivian Wembley (Laura Haddock) is insulting the memory of King Arthur because of long-standing father issues. Sad things happen in this movie, but maybe the saddest is when Yeagar accuses this skinny, Olivia Wilde-like Oxford don of wearing a stripper dress, and she replies, “I could take it off if it would make you more comfortable.”
Locations, locations: Stonehenge, Havana, Namibia. At one point John Turturro is on the phone claiming that Dublin’s Book of Kells is printed on “goat scrotum” (parchment). Why go after the Book of Kells? And what was this movie’s script printed on?
I’ve heard the vulgar-auteur arguments about how Bay’s ability to blow stuff up mitigates the really terrible dialogue that occurs again and again in his work. And there are certain sequences that justify the gigantism of it all, such as a robot in pieces pulling himself together in mid-air while simultaneously clobbering a group of soldiers. It may be that movies that have quite good demolition sequences don’t require defending—the first Avengers movie, for instance, where the Manhattan skyscrapers seemed to be fulfilling their architectural function by exploding into fountains of glass, or the low angle car chase in Rome in Spectre, particularly exciting in IMAX. Since the critical loathing for the Transformers saga is so high, you’ll hear that we’re missing something—an angle on the maligned genius of Bay.
There is craft here. It’s a pity the movie is bewilderingly bad, with Bay’s reliably smelly sexual politics perfuming the joint. Giant robots are impressive when they punch their mammoth heads out of a 3D IMAX screen; in closeup, these mega-goliaths look like the work of Boris Artzybasheff, who did for gears and bolts what the artist Arcimboldo did for zucchinis. But watching Bay, you never know where you are, you never know who’s shouting, you never know why every entity in the universe has to bump its chest or bitchslap something’s face.
TRANSFORMERS With Mark Wahlberg, Laura Haddock, Stanley Tucci and Anthony Hopkins. Written by Art Markum, Matt Holloway and Ken Nolan. Directed by Michael Bay. PG-13; 150 minutes.
In the spring of 1907, a fascinating story appeared in the pages of the Santa Cruz Surf, one of the community’s three robust daily newspapers in that era, chronicling a baseball game played at the city’s popular athletic field, Vue de l’Eau, at the end of the streetcar line near the corner of Woodrow Avenue and West Cliff Drive.
“North Santa Cruz Team Defeated by Colored Nine,” the Surf headline proclaimed.
“An exciting game of baseball at the Vue de l’Eau diamond was held yesterday afternoon, and attracted quite a crowd,” the newspaper reported. “Bats were crossed by the North Santa Cruz nine, Earl Owens captain, and the colored nine, mainly made up of the shoe polishers about town, with Jack Harris as captain. They put up a good game, the colored team winning out by a score of 8 to 5.”
The “colored nine,” as it turned out, was a baseball team called the Santa Cruz Colored Giants, an all African-American (and sometimes Latino) squad that formed in Santa Cruz during the first decade of the 20th century.
Several weeks later, a game between the Santa Cruz All-Stars and Colored Giants was held again at Vue de l’Eau, where, according to the Surf, another “large crowd” gathered to see “the famous colored team struggle through nine acts of fitful spasms,” losing 14-10.
The following weekend, the Giants returned the favor to the All-Stars, defeating them 8-4. The account in the Surf noted that “Crubs, the colored pitcher, pitched good ball and never did he go astray.” However, the All-Stars’ pitcher, Al Amaya, “was hit freely” by the Colored Giants. “It seemed,” the Surf noted, “that the colored boys could slam the ball wherever they wanted it.”
[dropcap]S[/dropcap]anta Cruz was a baseball-crazy town in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Widely attended amateur and semi-professional games were staged not only out at Vue de l’Eau, but also at the community’s waterfront diamond, Dolphin Park, located at what is today the Santa Cruz Seaside Company’s main parking lot, located across Beach Street from the Boardwalk’s Casino Arcade.
In the late 1890s, the Santa Cruz Beachcombers (later to become the Sand Crabs) were a prominent team in the California State League that finished in second place during back-to-back seasons, in 1897 and 1898.
HISTORY OF POP Hall of Famer John ‘Pop’ Lloyd (on the Philadelphia Americans in 1909) played in Santa Cruz in 1914 with the Chicago ‘American’ Giants. PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL PASTTIME
The Beachcombers featured an African-American mascot—13-year-old Edward Purse—who would grow up to be a fine baseball player, but who was not allowed to play on professional teams anywhere in the U.S. when he came of age. The so-called “color line,” which prevented African Americans from playing in professional baseball, was first established informally in the 1880s and 1890s, and was firmly enforced by the turn of the century in all of organized baseball, including here in Santa Cruz.
The “line” wasn’t crossed until Jackie Robinson famously crashed through it with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.
In the face of this institutionalized racism, African-American baseball in the United States—often referred to as “Black Baseball,” “Colored Baseball,” or, later, the “Negro Leagues”—thrived on the margins of mainstream American society and formed a rich and dynamic cultural history of its own. In 1990, the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum was founded in Kansas City, Missouri, to commemorate this significant contribution of African-American players to baseball history.
As someone who has spent a good portion of his life chronicling Santa Cruz history—with a specific emphasis on baseball and working-class ethnic communities—I originally presumed that the idea of a local African-American baseball team in the early 20th century seemed something of an unlikelihood. But many years ago, the late Santa Cruz historian Phil Reader came across a clipping of the Santa Cruz Black Giants from 1908; a few months later, he came across another.
Reader—the author of To Know My Name: A Chronological History of African Americans in Santa Cruz County, and a friend—called me to tell me of his findings. We met. He handed me a copy of his small file, with his chicken-scratch notes written directly on it, and said something to the effect of “Have fun.”
For the next four decades, I came across little tidbits here and there related to the Black Giants, but nothing substantial. Two of my favorite Santa Cruz elders, Harold Van Gorder and my great uncle Malio Stagnaro, shared some colorful memories and photographs with me, and slowly the barest of outlines emerged.
Then, in just the past two years, with the advent of digitized newspaper searches, a new treasure trove of information became available. The various dots that I had assembled over the years in Reader’s well-worn file could finally be connected. A fascinating—and troubling—piece of Santa Cruz history gradually came to life.
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n late April of 1908, the Black Giants scheduled a game against a Scotts Valley club for a Sunday game at Vue de l’Eau, where they dominated their opponents by a lopsided score of 20-6. While some of the racialized remarks in the local press were subtle, the Santa Cruz Sentinel’s coverage of this game was not.
Under a headline reading “Colored Boys Hot Ball Players,” the newspaper declared:
Cotton picking is not to be compared with the way in which the Santa Cruz colored team picked the Scotts Valley team at Vue de l’Eau Sunday, running up a score of 20 to 6.
The feature of the game was McEachen’s twirlers, which Scotts Valley found very hard to connect with. Any teams desiring games, should address Jack Harris, 214 Pacific Av[e].
The Evening News also made note of “McEachen’s twisters” in a single-sentence account of the game.
These references to “McEachen” marked the first such appearance of the name associated in print with the Colored Giants, and the pitcher must have been Isaac McEachen, then 25, and the son of Reverend Tink Arthur McEachen, the founding minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (A.M.E. Zion Church) in Santa Cruz.
Reverend McEachen arrived here in November of 1905 from Modesto; his family followed him from Hollister in 1906. According to the California Voter Registration of 1908, Isaac McEachen was listed as a laborer in Oakland, but it’s very possible that he came down to play in the games since his mother and father were still associated with the local church until 1909.
‘NEVER LET A CHANCE SLIP’ Louis Berry as featured in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, November 22, 1909. PHOTO: GEOFFREY DUNN COLLECTION
McEachen’s A.M.E. Zion Church, as it turned out, was the social hub of Santa Cruz’s black community during that era and formed the backbone of the Giants squad.
The local papers rarely listed the names of the Colored Giants in accounts of their games, but team captain Jack Harris (who scheduled the teams’ games) was a well-known figure in the Santa Cruz community. The 1900 Federal Census lists Harris, born in 1872 in South Carolina, as married, with two children; his occupation is listed as “boot black.” He also lived on Park Street with his mother, an ex-slave, who had been born in 1852.
In 1906, Harris was listed as singing in the Santa Cruz Male Quartet, featuring three other local African Americans—Will Brown, Lou Venable and Samuel Pulett. Harris also served as mascot for the Santa Cruz artillery band, which played summers at the beach.
In To Know My Name, Reader noted that brothers Louis and Floyd Berry both played on the Colored Giants. Born in 1889 in Ben Lomond (which had a small black community of lumberjacks and wood cutters during that era), Louis Berry was one of the most distinguished athletes and young scholars in the Monterey Bay region in the era preceding World War I.
By the mid-1900s, the Berrys had moved to Santa Cruz, where the Berry family is recorded in local newspapers as being active in the “newly organized African Methodist Church.” Both of the Berry parents, Charles and Sarah (“Sallie”), were identified as church officers; many of the other families associated with the team were also members of the congregation.
The 1910 Federal Census lists the Berrys as “mulattos.” Charles’ occupation was identified as a “cook” at a local restaurant. Also living at home were four other siblings of Louis, including his brother, Floyd, a year younger and also a gifted athlete.
The first public notice of Louis Berry in the local press appeared when he was 15 years old, in 1905, when it was noted that he performed a recitation of “Maid Bess” at the church’s Christmas proceedings.
In the fall of 1909, Louis Berry was named captain and fullback of the Santa Cruz High School football team, and in a front page story in the Sentinel, it was noted that Berry and Principal George A. Bond addressed an assembly of students on the “significance of the game.” In one account of the team, the Evening News noted: “The democratic spirit which prevails in high school athletics is shown by the fact that the captain [Louis] and one other member [Floyd] of the team are colored students.”
Louis Berry also played shortstop on the high school baseball team and, in track, he ran various dashes and held the league record in the high jump.
Younger brother Floyd Berry was also a gifted athlete; and, like his brother, he was a fine student who often performed in the community by presenting recitals and comedic routines. The Berrys’ uncle, Louis Venable, then 34, almost certainly played on the baseball team as well; he was also active in the A.M.E. Zion Church, sang with captain Harris and advertised himself in the local newspapers as an “expert shine artist and Janitor.” Venable later operated the popular lunch house “The Squeeze Inn,” known for its “Spanish dishes,” on Pacific Avenue from 1918-1920.
Also on the Colored Giants was Raymond Hunter, the same age as Louis Berry. In 1900, the Hunter family is listed in the Federal Census as living in Alisal in Monterey County, where Robert Hunter, Raymond’s father who had been born a slave in South Carolina, was listed as working as a janitor. In addition to his diamond skills, Hunter was a phenomenal track star, placing first in a high school meet in the 50, 100, 220 and 440-yard races, as well as in the high jump and shot put.
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n spite of the social and economic limits imposed on them by Jim Crow racism, the Black Giants were clearly a vital (and apparently beloved) component of the local baseball scene during their brief run in Santa Cruz.
In the aftermath of Fourth of July celebrations in 1907, the Santa Cruz Surf carried headlines proclaiming “The Colored Team and Pedmontes [sic] to Cross Bats,” with the newspaper identifying the “Pedmontes” as “the undisputed champion baseball nine.” It proved to be an accurate description, as the Giants lost to the squad named for its star pitcher, Jack Pedemonte, 12-3.
The Surf’s coverage of the contest provided some insight into the financial backdrop of these games. Each team put up $2.50, with the combined purse of $5 going to the winners. The umpire for the game was identified as Thomas Alzina, a descendant of one of Branciforte’s earliest families. And while the Surf’s coverage identified every player (and their position) on the Pedemonte team, not a single player on the Colored Giants was named.
At the end of July, the Colored Giants played against the Watsonville Pippins in Watsonville. The Watsonville Pajaronian chronicled the contest with a headline, “The Black and Tan Baseball Game,” and asserted in a subhead that: “A Poor Article of the National Game Was Dished Up By Colored Visitors from the County Seat.”
The newspaper further described the Giants as “in reality a black and tan aggregation.” Several players who appeared on other local teams of either California or Southern European descent played for the Colored Giants team in this game. Pitching for the Giants was Al Amaya, a descendant of Branciforte’s Rodriguez and Amaya families, whose performance for the Colored Giants was highlighted in the Pajaronian.
In 1908, the Colored Giants scheduled games again in late winter and spring, though their coverage in the local press wasn’t as extensive as it had been the year before. In March, they played against a strong local club calling themselves the Crescents that included Jack Alzina at shortstop.
The game was played at Vue de l’Eau Park, according to the Evening News, with the Crescents defeating “the crack colored team in a ten-inning game by a score of 12-11. The feature of the game was the heavy stick work of the Crescents. Martin [Silva] rapped the ball to right field for a home run, and Ernest Rodriguez pitched a good game for the Crescents.”
In June, the Giants staged a slugfest with a Santa Cruz team billing itself as the “White Rats,” which had previously lost to teams from Soquel and Scotts Valley by large margins that spring. No names of players were listed in any of the newspaper accounts of the games. On June 8, the Surf registered a headline: “Colored Team Defeated,” noting that “the famous Colored Giants met defeat at the hands of the White Rat team on the Vue de l’Eau diamond Sunday afternoon. Both teams played poor ball, but the White Rats maintained a lead throughout the entire game, easily winning by a score of 26 to 15.”
It was the last game played by the Colored Giants ever to be reported in the local press.
[dropcap]A[/dropcap]fter the Berry brothers and their various teammates completed high school, there is no further record of African-American baseball teams playing in Santa Cruz County until 1914. In January of that year, it was announced that the most celebrated black ball clubs from the east would be traveling to Santa Cruz—the Chicago American Giants, managed by the legendary Andrew “Rube” Foster, one of the greatest pitchers, managers, and executives in Negro League history.
By late January, articles announcing a West Coast tour by the American Giants appeared in newspapers across the country. In early February, the Evening News reported that the Giants would be appearing “on the coast about March 1,” declaring that “the negroes are of big league caliber and are said to be better than the Coast league teams.”
Three weeks later, the schedule was set. The Evening News reported that “the Chicago American Giants, the greatest colored team in America, will meet the Portland Coast League team at Bush League Park [located on the lower grounds of present-day Santa Cruz High School], Tuesday March 24 … The Giants, after defeating every club played during 1912, set up a record eclipsing anything yet performed by any baseball club and have the reputation of traveling farther than any individual baseball club in the world.”
The American Giants’ tour generated national controversy. Organized baseball’s “color line” was still strictly enforced in Jim Crow America, even in the less rigid Pacific Coast League (PCL). In 1913, the American Giants had made a similar tour west, winning five out of six games against the Portland Beavers. Coverage of their tour contained numerous racial slurs, not the least of which was a Giants pitcher being referenced in headlines of the San Francisco Call as a “Big Smoke Twirler,” while the team was dubbed the “Dusky American Giants.”
The following year, shortly after the Giants’ West Coast swing was announced, the Call stirred up racial controversy by noting that “some of the magnates and officials” of the PCL were “bitterly opposed” to Portland playing games against “the dusky tossers.”
In spite of the racially infused acrimony, the game in Santa Cruz was played as scheduled. More than 1,000 fans—“one of the largest crowds that ever attended a week-day game at Bush League Park,” according to the Evening News—showed up to witness the contest between the American Giants and Portland.
Portland won the game 6-2—it’s speculated that the Giants might have “went easy” during a few games on the tour—but local fans witnessed some of the greatest Negro League stars who ever played the game.
The Evening News included a full box score in its lengthy account of the game, and the Giants’ line-up that day included four future Hall of Famers (and a fifth, in Foster as their manager), most notably John Henry “Pop” Lloyd, also known as “El Cuchara” (The Spoon), widely considered one of the greatest shortstops of all time and viewed by Babe Ruth as the greatest baseball player to ever take the field. Lloyd banged out three hits in the game and served as the pivot on a double play.
Also in the lineup for the Giants were future Hall of Famers “Smokey Joe” Williams (widely considered the best Negro league pitcher of his day), center fielder John Preston “Pete” Hill, and first baseman Ben Taylor.
The American Giants went on to play a game against Portland the following day in Watsonville, where the legendary Foster took the mound. For the first five innings, Foster pitched shutout baseball (he “made the Portland bunch eat out of his hand,” according to the News account), before allowing four runs in the sixth, with Portland ultimately winning the game 6-5.
[dropcap]W[/dropcap]orld War I marked a dividing line in local African-American history, particularly with respect to black baseball. There were obviously racial restrictions on employment opportunities in Santa Cruz during this era, as African-American men worked primarily as bootblacks, cooks, and laborers.
In To Know My Name, Phil Reader noted the following:
During this 25 year period [from 1916-1941], the attitude of Santa Cruzans toward its African American citizens did an about face. Up to this point in history it had been a tolerant community throwing up few, if any, roadblocks into the path of their Negro brothers. Now, however, bigotry became a policy in many quarters as blacks were banned or discriminated against at local hotels, road houses and inns….Finding housing and jobs became an impossible task, so many Negro families left the area in anger and discouragement.
In spite of his varied talents as a scholar-athlete at Santa Cruz High, Louis Berry, who played for the Colored Giants a decade earlier, worked as a bootblack downtown. A 1916 article in the Evening News headlined “New Shoe-Shining Parlor for Santa Cruz Women” also noted: “The Walsh-Mellot shoe company will have the addition of an up-to-date ladies’ shoe polishing parlor conducted under the direction of Wilbur Hayes. Louis Berry will be employed in this department.”
Berry also sang in local ensembles the Harmony Boys and the Jolly Trio. But the first global “war to end all wars” provided him with opportunities that were not available to him in his hometown. In October of 1918, a headline in the Evening News declared “Berry is Lieutenant,” with the accompanying notice: “Louis Berry, a former Santa Cruz lad, who attended high school and was so prominent in athletics, is now 2nd lieutenant and stands a fine chance of being promoted to first. Ambitious and energetic, this colored boy never let a chance slip by that would mean progress.”
There was no place, apparently, for him to direct his ambition and energy in Santa Cruz.
By the 1920s, the number of local African Americans of baseball-playing age had dwindled significantly. The Federal Census of 1920 reveals that several members of the Berry family moved to Oakland. Floyd Berry died in San Francisco in 1952 after running a shoeshine stand in the city for many years. Raymond Hunter and several of his siblings moved to Salinas, where he also ran a shoeshine business.
As for Louis Berry—the young man heralded as both an athlete and scholar during his days at Santa Cruz High and later described by the Sentinel as “ambitious and energetic”—lived out the remainder of his life throughout California, where he first joined his brother Floyd in the shoeshine business in the East Bay.
The 1920 census lists him as living in Los Angeles and working as a laborer in a garage. By 1930, he was back in the Bay Area, employed as a hotel janitor and residing in a boarding house on Sixth Street, in the South of Market district of San Francisco. A decade later, the 1940 census identifies him as a “window washer” living in the multi-ethnic residential Livermore Hotel on Harrison Street in San Francisco, inhabited entirely by older single men. By then, his racial identification in the census had been changed from “mulatto” to “negro.”
Louis Berry lived long enough to see Jackie Robinson cross baseball’s so-called “color line” in 1947, though not quite long enough to see the New York Giants move to his adopted city. He died in San Francisco on April 17, 1956, and is buried at Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno. His headstone inscription reads simply: “California, 2nd Lieutenant, 164 Depot Brigade, World War I.”
There is no mention of his career as a baseball player in Santa Cruz. •
______________
Geoffrey Dunn is the author of Santa Cruz is in the Heart and Images of America: Sports of Santa Cruz County. An earlier version of this story appeared in Do You Know My Name?: History Journal No. 8, published by the Museum of Art and History and dedicated to the memory of Phil Reader.
A twice-monthly committee looking at the downtown public library started meeting this month, to plan for the branch’s future.
Armed with $23 millionin recent Measure S money, the Downtown Branch Library Advisory Committeewill make recommendations on the future site of the library. In other words, should it stay, or should it go?
The branch obviously wouldn’t move more than a few blocks, as no one wants to see it leave downtown. But there are deeper questions for the group, says Susan Nemitz, who moved from the Minneapolis area a year ago to oversee Santa Cruz Public Libraries.
“What should it do? I think that’s really, really important,” says Nemitz in her office overlooking Union Street, as she thumbs through binders of plans from her St. Paul days to look for examples of remodels. “While I was in Minnesota, I got to remodel three libraries, and I got to rebuild four libraries. And I think it’s one of the reasons they hired me. I worked really closely with communities about ‘What do you want?’”
Any library, in this day and age, aims to balance the needs of a variety of users—kids, teenagers, working professionals, the homeless, and more. “We used to say, ‘The library is the center of the community.’ Now we’re moving toward ‘The community is the center of library,’” says Nemitz, who takes inspiration from the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, as reinvigorated by Executive Director Nina Simon. Nemitz suggested at the first committee meeting that the group focus more on what programs the library might offer than where it will be or how it will look.
When it comes to future locations, Nemitz doesn’t speak in vague abstract terms for the library’s options. At this point, she says library stakeholders will probably decide between three choices: renovate the current location, tear down the 50-year-old stone structure to rebuild on the same site or start over a few blocks away. That last plan would likely involve putting the branch on the first floor of a controversial six-story building on Cedar and Cathcart streets, with offices and parking upstairs. In terms of vision, the latter has the most upside, with the ability to design a state-of-the-art, ADA-accessible facility, while giving the city more bang for its buck. It also comes with the most controversy—especially given environmental concerns about building a car garage in Santa Cruz.
Talk to anyone who loves the library the way it is, and none of the options seem easy.
“I try not to get too engaged in the process, because at some point the politicians have to make difficult decisions,” Nemitz says. “What I try to do is make the public understand the pros and cons of each option. People ask what I think. It doesn’t matter what I think.”
Shelf Esteem
The committee will be meeting the second Wednesday and fourth Thursday of every month, with its second meeting happening at 6 p.m. on Thursday, June 29 at the Church Street location.
Committee members will meet at the downtown library for a tour of the current site and to see the conditions. Last month, it had to shut down for 36 hours and move a major Star Wars event planned there. (City Manager Martín Bernal has said it would be cheaper to rebuild it from the ground up a couple blocks away than it would be to renovate the current building.)
Next month, the committee will be going to the Los Gatos Library, which was planned by the same architecture firm that Nemitz hired to work with the committee.
That library is home to massive windows, art hanging from the ceiling and an outdoor reading area. The children’s section has games and lit-up, colorful holes cut into walls—“reading pods” they’re called—for kids to curl up in and read.
Nemitz would like to know in the coming weeks if they can narrow down their options from three choices down to two recommendations. “I don’t want to limit your options too much,” she told the committee, “but in terms of working with architects, they want to know how many drawings they’re going to have to draw.”
Board meetings will continue for the next five months or so, with library staff submitting a report to the Santa Cruz City Council in the late fall. They’ll rotate the responsibility of board chair.
Ultimately, the story of the library’s future could have more chapters than The Lord of the Rings books—especially if the saga involves a possible parking garage at site of the downtown farmers market.
The city’s economic development department is working on a report, due out later this summer, about downtown parking and incentivizing alternatives to driving. And a working group has also been meeting to look for a permanent home for the downtown farmers market.
Checking Footnotes
“We want permanence. What does that mean? That means we never want to move ever again,” says Nesh Dhillon, executive director of Santa Cruz Community Farmers’ Markets. Dhillon has heard chatter for years about a multi-story garage on Lot 4, in between Cathcart and Lincoln streets.
What he wants is for the market to have a pavilion feel, with some permanent signage, and a canopy or something else that will create a sense of space.
He’s serving on the working group, along with city staffers and stakeholders like Bonnie Belcher, organizer of the Santa Cruz Antique Faire.
Belcher says the event has been shuffled around a few times in its two decades and worries that if it had to move again, it wouldn’t survive, because it needs a high-visibility spot.
“I kind of like the status quo. I told them, for us, we really can’t move. We’ve had to move four times since the event started 24 years ago. Location, location, location,” Belcher says.
Some business owners aren’t keen on the idea of the garage, either.
Suna Lock, owner of Stripe Design Group and two Stripe clothing stores on Walnut Avenue, says the downtown area has a lot of things to patch up—trash and public safety included—but parking isn’t one of them. Lock just termed out as Downtown Association boardpresident, but stresses she doesn’t speak for her fellow members, as they haven’t taken a position.
Lock, who moved to Santa Cruz in 2003, concedes that growing up in Great Britain may have influenced her opinion, but she says she seldom hears customers or anyone else complain about having a hard time finding a spot. Sure, there are sometimes busier, more chaotic Friday nights when it is difficult to park, but that squeeze only enlivens the streets and creates more of a big-city atmosphere, à la “Great! Look how active my city is. There’s so much going on,” she says.
Dhillon says it hasn’t been easy identifying ideal spots for the market—areas with a big enough footprint to fit the whole year-round event, which swells in the summer and shrinks slightly during the colder months. His ideal scenario would be for the council to agree to make Lot 4 the official farmers market pavilion, with permanent signage.
Of course, if a six-story structure went in, one might think market organizers could always place their event on top of it—creating a highly visible pavilion with a view spanning Santa Cruz, with expansive signage several stories high and a couple layers of parking underneath. That isn’t what Dhillon’s picturing.
“It just wouldn’t look right. You’re putting this street-level event six stories up. It doesn’t jive right. Is there anything physically preventing that from happening? I don’t think so,” he says.
Sometimes people suggest moving the market across the river to San Lorenzo Park, he says, but that would be a logistical nightmare. The fields get soggy in the winter, and it’s lacking in an important resource: “Being adjacent to parking is really important,” Dhillon says. “Until everyone decides they don’t want to drive their car anymore, we need to have parking.”
The summer theater season gets off to a boisterous start with The Addams Family, the first of this year’s musical productions from Cabrillo Stage. Although it seems odd to apply words like “lively” and “exuberant” to characters so famous for their morbidity and ghoulishness, you can expect to have an, er, spirited time at this handsomely produced, enormously good-hearted, family-friendly show.
This is a relatively new property that opened on Broadway in 2010 and ran through the end of 2011. Written by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, with music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa, it is, of course, inspired by the macabre, darkly funny single-panel cartoons by Charles Addams that ran in The New Yorker for decades. The classic TV sitcom from the 1960s, and a couple of more recent theatrical films have kept these characters in the public eye since then, but the writers here cook up an original storyline that mostly takes its cues from the cartoons.
Director Bobby Marchessault sets the mood right off, inviting us to feast our eyes on William “Skip” Epperson’s splendid proscenium arch decorated with skulls, dagger-shaped supports, and cobwebs above a row of headstones. Fittingly enough, the show begins in a graveyard, where the entire Addams clan—led by proud patriarch Gomez (Adam Saucedo) and his slinky wife, Morticia (a seductively deadpan Danielle Crook)—arrives for its annual celebration of the dear departed.
Calling forth various ghosts of Addamses past, from different eras (a flapper, a conquistador, etc.) they all sing a very funny paean to their ghoulish life in “When You’re An Addams.” (These silvery-grey ghosts, in cheeky but elaborate historical costumes by Chiara Cola, serve a dual purpose as both chorus line and stagehands throughout the rest of the show.)
The plot kicks in with the show’s biggest departure from the source material: little daughter Wednesday, usually portrayed as a middle-grade moppet, is now a teenager (Gabrielle Filloux) in the throes of her first love. A dynamic singer, Filloux makes droll teen angst out of her struggle to reconcile the joys of love with the family credo of gloom. The problem is, her boyfriend Lucas (Ryland Gordon) is “normal.” And he and his straight-arrow parents, controlling Mal (Benjamin Canant) and dutiful but neglected Alice (Jessica Ellithorpe) are coming to dinner.
Wednesday confides to papa Gomez that she and Lucas want to marry. But she doesn’t want her mom to know until they announce it after dinner. This is a huge conflict of loyalties for Gomez, who has never, ever kept a secret from his beloved Morticia.
But, of course, the plot is the merest hook on which to hang the main business of observing the Addamses at play. And that’s where this production excels. John G. Bridges all but steals the show as a delightfully sweet and goofy Uncle Fester. (Fasten your seatbelts for the funky, yet utterly beguiling bit of stagecraft when he flies up to cavort with the moon.)
It’s a running gag that Wednesday routinely tortures kid brother Pugsley (Michael Navarro) on a rack—and how much he loves it. Deborah McArthur plays witchy Grandma with screechy sass, while David Murphy’s zombified butler Lurch, always in slo-mo, provides the show’s biggest, best surprise. Lippa’s songs are consistently clever, and the book is very funny. (“Wednesday’s growing up,” sighs Gomez. “She’ll be Thursday before you know it!”)
I’m pretty sure the concept of Gomez as a Latin lover originated with the delightful John Astin in the TV show; it continued with Raul Julia in the movies. In Addams’ cartoons, the characters are unnamed—and if the patriarch, as drawn, resembles anybody, it’s Peter Lorre, or possibly the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
But whatever the character’s origins, Saucedo plays Gomez with gusto, geniality, and a terrific singing voice. He couldn’t be any better. His long-awaited tango with Morticia concludes the show on a note of rollicking high spirits.
The Cabrillo Stage production of ‘The Addams Family’ plays through July 9 at the Crocker Theatre, Cabrillo College. Call 479-6154, or visit cabrillostage.com.
Of all the of strange twists and turns in musician Zander Schloss’ life, the weirdest has to be inspiring one of modern film’s most memorable cult characters, Napoleon Dynamite.
OK, technically it’s unclear if filmmakers Jared and Jerusha Hess were inspired by Schloss to create their 2004 hit indie-comedy. But Schloss is certain his role as Kevin the Nerd in the 1984 cult film Repo Man was the basis of this character.
And since he based his portrayal of Kevin the Nerd on himself, it means that he inspired Napoleon Dynamite—or at least that’s what he assumed when he saw the movie.
“It was like looking in a mirror. It was unbearable for me. I couldn’t fucking believe it,” Schloss says. “I had the same hairdo. The same glasses. I probably wore the same suit to my graduation. Had the same attitude, the same mannerisms.”
Acting in underground films is only a small part of Schloss’ odd career. Around that same time, he played bass in seminal first wave L.A. punk bands the Circle Jerks and the Weirdos. Later, he played guitar and collaborated with a ton of musicians, most notably the Clash’s Joe Strummer.
Now, for the first time, he’s working on a solo record. He swings by Santa Cruz on his first solo U.S. tour, which follows a successful solo European tour. Despite such a long career, his biggest challenge is connecting with people that have been fans of his various other projects, but are likely unaware that he was part of them.
“I don’t think anyone really knows who I am,” Schloss says. “I jump around with genres. I do film scores. I act. I pop up in the strangest places. Maybe it’s to my detriment to not pigeonhole myself. I’m just a 55-year-old dude with 35 years of experience touring in bands and making records. Who’s interested?”
If people do know who he is, most likely it’s from his early ’80s punk bands, which are pretty far removed from the vulnerable acoustic music he’s playing nowadays as a singer-songwriter.
“It’s a terrifying concept. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, but was always too scared to do. It’s personally coming from my heart, and if you don’t like me, I’ll just fucking die,” Schloss says.
It’s not entirely uncommon for aging punk rockers to go acoustic, but the ones that do tend to bring a raw, aggressive element to the stripped-down sound. Schloss’ music sounds like that of a weathered storyteller raised on roots music, which is essentially the case. His early bands were not punk. He grew up in St. Louis, and his first idols were Bob Dylan, Doc Watson and Neil Young.
“I’ve gone full circle back to the beginning,” he says.
He got involved with the punk scene after moving to LA to try to score films. He landed an acting role in Alex Cox’s Repo Man, and also got connected with the punk community. His roots may have not been punk, but it shaped his attitude from then on.
“The most punk rock thing I can do is be fragile,” he says. “It’s no longer about turning people into a frenzy and getting them to beat one another up. It’s mainly about, ‘Hey man, let’s connect. Let’s heal for a moment. Transcend this shitty world, just for a moment.’”
It was Strummer that encouraged him to give the guitar and songwriting a shot. The two worked together on Sid and Nancy and Straight To Hell—“he said to me, ‘What are you doing playing bass in a hardcore band?’”
The two worked on four albums together in the late ’80s, and Schloss has collaborated with several other people since. Now, with his solo debut in the works, he can’t help but focus on the stranger contributions he’s made to the larger culture. His Kevin the Nerd character, for instance, introduced the fauxhawk to mainstream America, and he happily takes credit for that.
“I believe in my crazy own mind that I created the fauxhawk,” he says, laughing maniacally. “You never saw the fauxhawk before that.”
INFO: 9 p.m., Friday, June 30, Catalyst, 1011 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz. $8/adv, $10/door. 429-4135.
After a 16-month run in the upstairs kitchen of the downtown club Motiv, Ulterior chef Zachary Mazi and business partner Tighe Melville of LionFish Supper Club have decided to pursue other passions. Ulterior closed at the end of May, and on July 12 the beloved fried chicken delivery service and self-proclaimed “lords of late night” Kickin Chicken will take over the space. After a long residency at the Food Lounge, this is owners Justin Williams’ and Daniel Mendoza’s first full-service restaurant—an upgrade they’ve been pursuing for their successful delivery-only venture for at least a year.
And really, is there a pairing more apropos? What could be more satisfying after a couple of Motiv’s well-crafted cocktails than fried chicken? Williams and Mendoza plan on sticking to their tried and true menu of tender, crispy fowl, and are looking forward to adding their offbeat yet undeniably delicious comfort food. Williams reports that miso butterscotch ribs are likely to be on the menu, as will their “Trash Salad,” a mélange of repurposed vegetable odds and edds that would have otherwise ended up in the compost bin. It’s served in a tiny trashcan in order to really drive their point home—and maybe put a smile (or a grimace) on customers’ faces.
“We’re almost going back to our Midtown pop-up roots,” says Williams, referring to the popular pop-ups they threw in 2015 at the now-shuttered Midtown Café on Soquel Avenue. “That felt like the most ‘Kickin Chicken.’ Our menu was playful, and a little bit low art.”
I remember ordering offbeat creations like macaroni and cheese with Flamin’ Hot Cheeto breadcrumbs, or incendiary hot chicken, which arrived between two pieces of white bread that did nothing to deter the addicting fiery flavor. After tossing out menu ideas like housemade American cheese and giant dill pickles, Williams offers a revealing declaration about their playful menu: “Forget farm to table; we’re fryer to couch.” If you prefer to enjoy Kickin Chicken in the comfort of your home, don’t worry, their delivery service will continue uninterrupted.
FOOD TRUCK EVENT
With all of the lovely warm weather we’ve been having, doesn’t a picnic in the park sound nice? The first Food Truck Event is coming to San Lorenzo Park on Friday, June 30. Food truck event company Food Trucks A Go Go is putting on the event, which will feature six local food trucks including Saucey’z, G’s Mexican Tacos, Ate3One, Lindsey’s Palate Pleasures, Aunt LaLi’s Mobile Cafe and Drunk Monkey’s, plus a beer and wine garden with Santa Cruz Mountain Brewing and Bargetto Winery.
BREW CRUZ PARTY
Brew Cruz, the local brewery tour bus and brainchild of Annie Wolff-Pautsch, is celebrating its third anniversary from noon to 9 p.m. on the Fourth of July at Shanty Shack Brewing. The Brew Cruz Session IPA, a special collaboration beer brewed for the event, will be on tap and Gordo Gustavo’s BBQ will serve up pork products lovingly coaxed to smoky, tender perfection by Austin Towne. The lovely and infamous Betty Jane, Wolff-Pautsch’s converted 1989 Thomas International school bus, will be converted into a photo booth and SLV rockers the Coffis Brothers will play a show at 5 p.m. Even if the upcoming holiday feels marred by our current political climate, I’m looking forward to celebrating two things to which my loyalty has never swayed—our community and beer.
As I prepare kale for dinner, I guide my knife along the long, tough stem, separating it from the tender leaves. Once I finish the bunch, I gather the undesirable odds and ends and move toward the trash. I think, as I have a thousand times before, that there must be a better way to dispose of my kitchen scraps, but lacking the time and tools to compost, I swallow my misgivings and throw it all in the garbage.
This was my daily routine until I discovered Santa Cruz Composting Co., the bicycle-powered residential compost collection service serving the city of Santa Cruz from Shaffer Road and Delaware Avenue to Capitola’s Jewel Box. Now that I’ve subscribed to their $5 weekly service, I fill the five-gallon bucket they provide with my organic trash, which is collected weekly and transformed into rich garden gold.
The Compost Fairy behind this ingenious system is Ivy Young, a local woman who became an entrepreneur when she realized the dearth of composting services in the community. “The city is trying to get something together, but they have to go through a lot of red tape,” says Young. “It made me really sad because I knew how much food was being thrown away without other options.” Now, each week she and her team collect waste from more than 300 households and bring it to the Homeless Garden Project’s Westside farm to become garden fertilizer. Food waste makes up a large percentage of landfill, but can easily be transformed into a valuable resource via programs like Young’s, which is modeled after the Compost Pedallers, a similar program in Austin. Since she started in 2014, Santa Cruz Composting Co. has diverted more than 200,000 pounds of waste from the landfill. Says Young, “We’re grabbing a drop in the bucket of the waste in the community.”
You can also have your compost returned to you to use in your own garden. Young keeps meticulous notes on the waste produced by each household and awards each one via a point system per pound. “The way I see it, it’s an extra monthly bill, so we want people to feel like they get something back,” says Young. For every 20 pounds of waste, the household receives five pounds of compost, or other gifts and rewards from her Compost Rewards Program. Whatever’s leftover goes to the Homeless Garden Project in exchange for the space.
Does Tempranillo go with paella? Yes, it does. Both Tempranillo and paella hail from Spain, and they pair up like a matador and his cape. This easy-drinking red also pairs very nicely with beef stew. These were our two entrees at Au Midi a couple of weeks ago. My husband and I headed there on a Wednesday because I had a craving for paella, and Chef Muriel Loubiere makes an excellent one. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays only, she prepares this traditional Spanish dish, and it’s always bursting with succulent shellfish and a variety of meats.
I had bought the Casa del HerreroTempranillo 2013 ($30) at an event at Stockwell Cellars, and I took it along to Au Midi to have with paella. Casa del Herrero is another label of Stockwell Cellars and means “house of the blacksmith.” Don’t miss the anvil in their Westside tasting room—a cool industrial addition to Stockwell’s rustic wine cellar piled high with barrels. Winemaker (and steelworker) Eric Stockwell is turning out some splendid wines, the Tempranillo being one of them.
Michel Loubiere, the other half of Au Midi Restaurant’s husband and wife team, uncorked the Tempranillo for us and I took a sip. It’s an excellent wine, for sure, but with its high acidity levels, it needs a little time to breathe—and then its earthy aromas become more prevalent, and the flavors more mellow. If anything, the wine’s rather tart flavors of raspberries, cherries, rhubarb and pluots paired beautifully with the creamy Arborio rice and sauce of the paella, and the richness of the beef and gravy. Every time I drink a full-bodied Tempranillo, this wine—from Spain’s Rioja region—grows on me a little more.
Head to Stockwell Cellars to try it—you’re guaranteed to have fun in the tasting room most Friday nights, when his place becomes a music venue with an upbeat vibe.
Stockwell Cellars, 1100 Fair Ave., Santa Cruz, 818-9075. (Entrance on the Ingalls Street side of the building). stockwellcellars.com.
Au Midi Restaurant & Bistro is at 7960 Soquel Drive, Aptos (in Aptos Village Square next to The True Olive Connection), 685-2600. aumidi.com.
