Nearly half of greenhouse gas emissions from Santa Cruz, San Benito, and Monterey counties come from energy production. In our western energy region, which includes pretty much all of California, 63 percent of electricity comes from gas-powered plants like the one in Moss Landing, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
A long-discussed solution—more than four years in the making—aims to create energy that’s cleaner, cheaper, and locally sourced. The reality is closer than ever. Monterey Bay Community Power (MBCP), a new group, aims to launch next spring as a green alternative to Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E).
Both the Santa Cruz City Council and the county Board of Supervisors officially signed on to MBCP, the tri-county Community Choice Energy (CCE) partnership, in late February. The agreement brings together local governments with ones from San Benito and Monterey counties.
“We understood that we have something in common, and that we can work together to solve our contribution to our greenhouse gas emissions and take control of our own energy,” says Virginia Johnson, the project manager for MBCP and analyst for County Supervisor Bruce McPherson, who also played a leading role in starting MBCP.
Johnson says there is a financial benefit of having more partners, as it increases the CCE’s purchasing power. Although not everyone has signed on so far, MBCP has more than enough partners to start the agency and be successful economically and environmentally, Johnson says, creating a local grid that harvests energy from solar and other renewables.
“CCE will allow us to do things more consistent with local values,” says Santa Cruz Mayor Cynthia Chase.
Two committees, one for policy and another for operations, will run the energy group, a joint powers agency with 18 municipalities.
Elected officials like Santa Cruz City Councilmember Sandy Brown will serve on the policy board, holding public meetings for input into deciding which types of electricity to purchase, setting the rate for customers, and deciding on how exactly to spend surplus revenue. MBCP will use that surplus revenue, expected to be about $9 million per year, to lower its rates, invest in local renewable electricity projects, and provide interest-free programs for solar home installations, says Johnson.
The operations board—made up of administrators like Santa Cruz City Manager Martín Bernal—will manage the agency’s day-to-day work. Both boards will meet monthly, with their first meetings coming up at the end of this month.
Municipalities with more than 50,000 citizens will get permanent seats on the 11-member boards, with the six remaining seats to be shared. Capitola and Scotts Valley, for example, will be swapping control of the seat every two years.
Starting this summer, MBCP will automatically enroll residents, who will have an option to opt-out and stay with PG&E, which will also operate the CCE grid, its meter readings, and maintenance services, PG&E spokeswoman Brandi Merlo says.
Santa Cruz County will set up a credit guarantee with a local bank for the projected $3 million cost of starting MBCP, and once it’s paid off by the end of 2018, the agency will be financially independent, says Johnson. Initially, MBCP will purchase green electricity from nearby renewable projects, like the local Panoche Valley Solar Farm, which currently sells its renewable electricity to Southern California Edison. But its leaders expect to buy renewable electric plants within the next several years, using surplus revenue.
“At some point, MBCP can choose to be an owner of plants or continue to purchase from renewable projects,” says Johnson. “In Southern California, we are overloaded with solar systems throughout the state. There are plenty of places to buy renewably generated power for our program.”
Of course, Santa Cruz residents can already install solar at their homes and sell it back into PG&E’s grid. MBCP could just make it even more lucrative for people to do so. A CCE in the Silicon Valley, for instance, will let residents sell energy at four times the rate that PG&E does, allowing such people to get up to $5,000 back, says Allterra Solar Marketing Director David Stearns, an avid supporter of the local CCE plan. “You’re taking the power back, literally and figuratively,” he says.
Today, in California, there are two fully functioning CCE programs, Marin Clean Energy and Sonoma Clean Power, and three other new ones—Clean Power San Francisco, Peninsula Clean Energy, and Silicon Valley Clean Energy—that are in the process of enrolling customers. Additionally, East Bay Community Energy, like MBCP, was recently approved, and more than 16 counties and cities, including San Jose, are exploring CCE programs.
This is the simplest and most effective way for Californians to make a big difference in reducing carbon emissions, says Tatanka Bricca, a long-time environmental activist who lives in Ben Lomond. He’s attended city council meetings on CCE in Santa Cruz and Watsonville.
“It’s a duplicatable model that is spreading across California,” says Bricca. “We can make a difference nationwide through CCE, even when the temporary residents of the White House make decisions hostile to the Earth and its people.”
Stellar Efforts
A look at Community Choice Energy efforts in the Bay Area
Marin Clean Energy (MCE)- Offers 50 percent and 100 percent renewable options for customers. 83 percent of meters in the municipalities served are signed-on with the CCE program.
Sonoma Clean Power (SCP)- Offers 36 percent and 100 percent renewable options for customers. 88 percent of meters in the municipalities served are signed-on with the CCE program.
Clean Power SF (CPSF) – Offers 35 percent and 100 percent renewable options for customers. 99 percent of meters in the municipalities served are signed-on with the CCE program, but they haven’t completed their enrollment.
Peninsula Clean Energy (PCE) – Offers 50 percent and 100 percent renewable options for customers. 98.3 percent of meters in the municipalities served are signed-on with the CCE program, but they haven’t completed their enrollment.
Silicon Valley Clean Energy (SVCE) – Offers 50 percent and 100 percent renewable options for customers. They are beginning their first enrollment phase this month.
East Bay Community Energy (EBCE) – Will begin enrollment this summer, renewable options not yet established.
Monterey Bay Community Power (MBCP) – Will begin enrollment this summer, renewable options not yet established.
“I don’t know. Coach was yelling something about—”
“It’s too loud in here, mostly because I’m yelling!”
On the streaming video, the Oklahoma City Blue’s two broadcasters were breaking down a play in the team’s D-League game against the Santa Cruz Warriors. Or at least trying to.
This Facebook Live feed was the only way to watch Monday night’s game, which was played in Oklahoma. Typically, a game has two announcers—a color commentator and a play-by-play one. But this game’s analysts clearly came from a different school of communications, as they repeatedly asked each other what was happening, leaned over to check in with the coaches and nervously criticized each other’s choice of words. The Cox Convention Center, where the Blue play, is a hockey arena built in the ’70s that seats close to 14,000, but looks like it has about 400 guests for the playoff game.
The Warriors got off to a hot start, as they often have lately, going up 29-16 in the first quarter, thanks to beautiful passing, limited mistakes, smart defense, and some wild shots finding their way into the hoop.
But that lead slipped away (another recurring theme), giving way to a competitive back-and-forth battle, until a fourth-quarter collapse left Santa Cruz with a 124-104 loss and the revelation that it had been eliminated from the playoffs. Now change is on the way.
In the D-League, every year is a rebuilding year, as rules restrict how many players a team can keep from the previous season. And athletes frustrated by the pay often try their hands playing overseas.
Both player consistency and pay may see an upswing next year, though, as the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement will create two-way players, who will make $50,000-$70,000 a year—about twice what traditional D-League players make—and bounce back and forth between the two leagues. It’s all part of the D-league’s growing reputation.
The second-tier organization is slowly adding a few teams each year, and the league announced it would rebrand as the Gatorade League next season—a rather brazen corporate sellout, but maybe it’ll lead to better compensation. (The switch also makes us feel bad about how, two years ago, we mocked the Warriors for adding sponsorship from the local company PayStand to its jerseys, an experiment that, comparatively, doesn’t look so bad these days.)
For an organization where executives pride themselves on fostering an environment that’s the “closest thing” to the NBA, part of the charm is that this lower-budget league is still different. The Blue’s bumbling commentators harken back to a time when professional sports were just a little less, er—professional … before $140 million contracts or even first-class flights, or announcers who are practically movie stars. When the only thing that mattered more than the game itself was just how much everyone loved it.
Sadly, the first World War did not live up to its advertising as “the war to end all wars.” Its consequences were devastating; particularly within the European community, where a generation of young men were lost, either dead or damaged, fighting their neighbors in the trenches. French filmmaker Francois Ozon revisits that era in all its complexity in Frantz, a moody, mysterious, and utterly engrossing tone poem on love, loss, and absolution.
The origins of Ozon’s story lie in a 1932 stage play by Maurice Rostand, which Ernst Lubitsch made into the film Broken Lullaby the same year. At that time, no one knew the world was on the brink of yet another Great War, which only proves how stubbornly the human species refuses to learn from its mistakes—a situation Ozon finds as disturbingly timely as ever today.
Protagonist Anna (poised, wistful Paula Beers) is a young German woman in a small town, whose fiancé, Frantz, was killed in the war. It’s 1919, and Anna has moved in with Frantz’s parents, doctor Hans Hoffmeister (Ernst Stotzner), and homemaker Magda (Marie Gruber), to share their grief. On one of Anna’s daily visits to the cemetery, she finds a stranger, soft-spoken young Frenchman Adrien Rivoire (Pierre Niney), leaving flowers on Frantz’s grave.
Adrien tells them all that he knew Frantz in Paris, where their Francophile son lived for a time before the war. Most of the townsfolk, Hans included, are suspicious of a Frenchman in their midst, but Magda warms up to Adrien; she calls him “shy and stormy”—like Frantz. They are charmed that Adrien plays the violin, like their son. Anna too befriends Adrien, showing him around to places that held special meaning for Frantz, in exchange for Adrien’s precious memories of her lost love.
The rest of the plot is best left to the viewer to discover. Let’s just say the movie keeps changing direction, but never quite ends up where you might think it’s going. Ozon (who made the elegant 2002 thriller Swimming Pool) shoots in expressionistic black-and-white, evoking both the between-the-wars period (special kudos to costume designer Pascaline Chavanne), and the element of mystery at the heart of his story.
Both visually and in storytelling terms, Frantz is an immersive experience. We are drawn to the characters and into their world even as we begin to unravel the intricacy of lies—some tormenting, others merciful—woven into the underpinning of their story. Ozon also subtly switches to color for some scenes, for reasons that become apparent only gradually. His images are as haunting and steeped in emotion as the story deserves.
Maybe it’s the black-and-white film, but the compelling Niney has the expressive look and demeanor of a silent movie actor, with his dark-rimmed eyes and pencil moustache. He doesn’t exaggerate, but you can read everything he’s feeling on his face. His Adrien desperately wants to do the right thing (by Frantz and his family, and by Anna) if only he could figure out how. He embodies the dilemma faced by everyone, at the front and at home, forced into unimaginable horror from which there will never be any escape.
Ozon quietly makes this point again and again, especially in his devastating riff on the uber-patriotic scene from Casablanca in which a roomful of French civilians stands up to sing “La Marseillaise” when German soldiers enter Rick’s bar. Except this time, Ozon provides subtitles to the anthem’s bloodthirsty lyrics, which puts a whole new spin on the scene, and the notion of passionate, unbridled nationalism.
Another telling scene occurs in the neighborhood taproom, where Hans’ peers who have lost sons in the war are denouncing the murderous French. Hans suggests they stop blaming the “enemy” and direct their ire at those who urged the young men to go fight and supplied them with weapons and a reason: the fathers themselves. And the Fatherland.
With Frantz, Ozon has gifted us with the kind of thoughtful, lyrical moviemaking we don’t see enough of anymore.
FRANTZ
**** (out of four)
With Pierre Niney and Paula Beer. Written by Francois Ozon and Philippe Piazzo. Directed by Francois Ozon. A Music Box Films release. (PG-13) 113 minutes. In German and French with English subtitles.
Anna Deraco really wanted to start a food truck. She had the perfect idea, too: Puerto Rican food. With no professional culinary experience—she always cooked at home—her friend encouraged her to start out doing pop-ups. Last September, La Sofrita was born.
Her Puerto Rican food pop-ups have been a huge success. Now she hopes to one day open a café. Deraco gives us the complete breakdown of La Sofrita.
Why did you start La Sofrita?
ANNA DERACO: I grew up with great Puerto Rican food. You don’t get a lot of that out here. On the East Coast, it’s all over the place. There’s a sizable Puerto Rican population in the area in Pennsylvania I grew up in. Whenever I would cook it, people would love it. Once I started doing this, what became really fun for me was seeing how many Puerto Ricans were in the Santa Cruz area. That’s been fun, having them show up and go, “Oh my gosh, I’m so excited to have this food here.”
What defines Puerto Rican food?
On the surface, it doesn’t sound terribly different. It’s rice, beans and chicken. Puerto Rican rice and beans have a distinct flavor. The rice is flavored and covered with something called achiote, which is a pebbly seed from a flower off a tree that grows in the tropics. Once you put them in some warm olive oil, it gives off this gorgeous orange color and subtle nutty flavor. It’s added more for the color. The stuff that I’ve been doing a lot is empanada. Those have been pretty popular. It’s just a flour-based dough stuffed with whatever you want to stuff it with. I do the traditional beef picadillo, which is ground beef. Puerto Rican food has lots of herbs and flavor, but it’s not spicy. It’s a lot of garlic base and cilantro and different sweet peppers, but not spicy peppers.
Why did you choose the name La Sofrita?
Sofrito is the base of about 90 percent—I’m exaggerating—of Puerto Rican dishes. It’s absolutely indispensable to Puerto Rican cooking. The base is traditional peppers that I don’t have access to here, but I substitute with sweet red and green bell peppers, onion, cilantro, tomatoes, that gets blended together into a relish. That gets fried up in olive oil and that’s what starts a lot of Puerto Rican food. It starts the rice. It starts the beans. It starts some of the fillings for the empanada. The counterpart is alcaparrado, which is a combo of roasted red bell peppers, manzanilla olives and capers. No authentic pot of Puerto Rican rice, beans, stew or empanada filling can be made without it. I wanted to call myself Sofrito, but my brother told me that the domain name was already taken. I had to be a little creative, so that became La Sofrita.
It’s hard to keep up with all of the different varietals that winemaker Richard Alfaro is producing these days. And his wines sell out so quickly. As of writing this, Richard and his wife Mary Kay Alfaro still have plenty of their estate Albarino 2015, made with grapes from the Ryan Spencer Vineyard, named after the Alfaros’ son.
A dry and zesty white wine, Richard produced 71 cases of Albarino after aging it for three months in neutral oak. Pale straw in color with a medium body, “it boasts the stone-fruit flavors of peach and apricot, but finishes with bright acidity,” the Alfaros say.
Originating in Spain and Portugal, the Albarino grape produces a highly aromatic wine that pairs well with seafood and spicy cuisines like Asian, Thai and Cajun.
Although most people don’t walk in the door after work and pour themselves a glass of Albarino, it is gaining in popularity and is becoming quite trendy, in fact. With its sturdy acidity and rather high alcohol content, it’s a versatile white to enjoy on its own as well as with food.
My husband and I were in Spain recently, staying with friends in their 100-year-old farmhouse. They cooked many a splendid dinner for us, and we all drank copious amounts of Albarino (Spanish wines are so inexpensive) – before, during and after dinner. I appreciate this varietal more than ever.
The Albarino sells for about $25 at Alfaro’s tasting room—an upbeat place to visit with an energetic vibe. You’ll have a great time, for sure.
SweetSurf Party Room is all set up to help you host a party in their new quarters—with Marianne’s and Polar Bear ice cream companies combined. “We are ready for your next birthday party, business meeting or team celebration! Let’s party!” says co-owner Mary Cody. They also do outside functions, of course. SweetSurf Catering, 1020 Ocean St., Santa Cruz, 687-9220. Visit sweetsurfcatering.com to check out their flavorful offerings.
Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Eric Thiermann lives for storytelling.His experience and imagination ignite the narratives at Impact Creative, a small production studio here in Santa Cruz that epitomizes “state of the art.” A member of the first graduating class at UCSC, company founder Thiermann feels that proximity to the university is key to Impact Creative’s future.
“I’d like to set up a funicular going straight down the hill from Science Hill to our studio,” he says.
With their pioneering work in virtual reality, companies like Seagate, Google, Hyundai, CISCO and Princess Cruises are coming to Impact Creative to help them launch ad campaigns, forgoing traditional TV spots and billboards for the opportunity to plunge their prospective consumers into an unforgettable experience.
But the company’s productions can have social applications, too, Thiermann says.
“Two people in two different parts of the world can have headsets and interact in a single virtual space,” he says. He cites Rising International, the nonprofit, founded by Carmel Jud, that has recently starting using VR technology to acquaint women in high-risk areas around the world with the women selling their handmade goods locally.
Thiermann has applied for a U.N. Impact Grant to deepen the social justice area of his work. “You gotta do something to feed your soul. All the companies are coming out with games,” Thiermann notes. “What I like to do is tell stories that connect people.”
The Studio
BRACED FOR IMPACT Members of the Impact Creative team on a shoot with the first autonomous robot to arrive at Walmart Supercenters. Left to right: Philip Lima, Kelsey Doyle, David Sieburg, Deva Blaisdell-Anderson and Donald Eldridge.
Two lively little dogs greet invited guests at the code-protected front door of Impact Creative. Once they have a sniff, the house mascots romp away to other regions of the spacious design studio. Huge enough to house studio and brainstorming areas, the first floor boasts at least two man-cave-sized lounge areas (wraparound couches, toys, what have you), a conference table that can seat the entire IC team, a central staging area for off-site shoots that also works up into a mini studio for product photography, and long counters filled with various snacks and drinks, plus water bowls for the canines. Desks and computers for programmers, producers, editors, and writers hold down a far corner—the business end of the studio, if you will. At the opposite corner is a vault protected by codes and locks, in which the house treasures are stored—cameras, drones, robotics, lithium batteries the size of toaster ovens, stabilizers, and assorted sound capture devices. Major motion pictures have been made with the exact same equipment. On one side of the studio, post-production is finessed. On the other, image and data captured. High-energy humans with laptops pace in between, mostly very young.
The first day I visit IC, a trade show booth is being finalized for its gig at a Las Vegas convention, and I’m invited to step into a fabulous virtual world. “With VR, you don’t use space and time in the usual way,” Thiermann says. “Creating experiential content requires a lot of craft.”
VR goggles cover my eyes, and I step out into space, looking at the Earth far below me. After floating for a few seconds, I turn my head and see the NASA space shuttle docking just beside me. I float inside it, and watch as it maneuvers through various intricate exercises that I can step into, or not. I can already feel the addictive pull of this sort of gorgeous illusion.
However sexy—and however rapidly evolving—the 360 VR technology needs much more content before it becomes the promotional industry standard.
“We’re not getting rid of our 2D bread and butter,” Thiermann admits, and that includes computer-animated videos, as well as shoots involving complex 360 live-action imagery.
Over 40 years, Thiermann’s group has grown and evolved. While he can’t reveal the name, he will say that “a major Hollywood film company” just contacted them about a collaboration. IC demos often get one million hits in a day.
Thiermann thinks the reason is simple: “People want engaging content.”
Raised in L.A., Thiermann learned to take photos and shoot movies as a UCSC student before getting his MFA at UCLA. “I worked around Hollywood, worked with Jonathan Demme. But I didn’t want to be an art director. I wanted to do movies,” he says. “I made short films, then applied for an AFI grant that was my ticket out of LA.”
After doing a PBS-style documentary of artists in prisons, Thiermann made The Last Epidemic, an anti-nuke film, exposing the medical consequences of nuclear war, nominated for an Oscar. “The next one, In the Nuclear Shadow—I was the shooter—did win the Oscar,” he says. “I made tons of documentaries, and we started getting lots of jobs. Once the internet came along, you could be anywhere, so you didn’t have to be in New York or L.A. The quality of life here, raising a family in a real community, has kept me here.”
“I think we have a good reputation. It’s all referrals, it’s not me,” he insists. “There are so may talented people here.” He points around the studio. “Young people who grew up with digital technology. I can still shoot really well, but they grew up with this stuff,” he says.
Thiermann and his team seem to inhale work. “Every year, we get bigger and better. All the demo videos you see at Best Buy stores all over the world—those are ours. Anything Google. We make all the videos on all those products.”
Thiermann likes doing it all. “I like shooting guerilla-style. I like building things,” he says.
Travel comes with the territory. “Every week or so we’re on location. I just got back from Standing Rock. Couldn’t get a plane, so we drove for two days in the snow to make a little documentary. We went up to the Northwest to do a really fun shoot for Hyundai. Going to Haiti next month, and then the Cameroons to document innovations that help keep young women in school.”
Why slow down? “I’d rather be working,” he says with a shrug. “It’s too much fun. And it’s all new, all the time.”
The Photographer
Philip Lima gets to play with the dazzling toys.Expensive (close to six figures) cameras—like the “Weapon,” which is made by Red and delivers megapixel images that are detailed enough to eat. The Martian, The Hobbit, and Transformers were all shot on similar Red cameras. These are stored in the code-protected vault, along with an arsenal of other digital cameras, VR hardware in its own James Bond-style case, robots, drones, etc.The man who handles all of this hardware was born and raised in Santa Cruz and has been with Eric Thiermann for 10 years—one third of his life.
LOOK HERE Judy Mo, motion graphics designer for Impact Creative, with VR goggles. PHOTO: KEANA PARKER
“I started editing video,” explains Lima, “and quickly shifted to computers and capturing images.”
He claims he still enjoys editing, but I can tell he likes image capturing the best.“Small projects begin with the directing team. They figure out the approach, and then come to me. I shoot, then they edit. I do color correction afterwards, usually with DaVinci Resolve.”
One of Lima’s most arduous VR camera shoots involved a parachute assault training exercise piece at Fort Bragg. “Since it was a VR shot, I had to be close to the camera, to monitor sound, and I had to fit in. The client in that case was VICE News, an investigative reporting group that does a very organic kind of news gathering.”
The result was a four-minute VR special that takes viewers inside a Boeing C-17 while paratroopers perform assault maneuvers. The camera and reporter had to capture everything with multiple camera arrays while staying out of the way of the military. Lima suited up in camouflage gear in order to blend in.
“Shooting a commercial with cameras, like the Reds, you have complete control,” Lima says. “All that goes away with 360 panoramas. Plus, there’s a real challenge with storytelling using 360, because it’s hard to move the viewer’s attention in the way that you can by using different lenses, different kinds of focus and light.”
So how does he guide the viewer’s eye in these wraparound panoramas? “Audio cues are helpful, and lighting. That can lead them in the desired directions.” But there are other challenges with 360. “All of the lighting equipment has to be invisible, because of the omni-direction of the views. Have to hide the lights—that’s a big challenge.”
But challenges also involve a lot of on-location fun. “We began using 360 a year and a half ago,” he says. “One of our recent clients was Princess Cruises. We all went to New York, and went on the boat as it docked. Then we did all the touristy things in New York, shooting it in 360 degrees so the viewer could get a feel for the cruise package experience. It was great.” How long does this kind of shoot take? Their Hyundai Canada commercial, he says, required three 12-hour days of shooting to produce two 30-second spots.
What’s fun, says Lima, is that “everything’s new in this field.” And the most fun involves aerial drones. “I started with drones five years ago,” he says, eyes widening. “The big thing is that you can achieve a stable image. You can put a camera wherever you want—it opens a world of possibilities beyond the obvious visual clichés.” Those ads that take you right out over the water with surfers, or soaring high above a car speeding through the desert—those are shot with a smart camera suspended from a drone.
Known for his aerial shots, Lima admits to strapping the costly Red cameras onto the bigger drones for some shots. “For those, we use both a flier and a spotter. Definitely lots of adrenaline,” he says.
The Tech Guy
Joe Goldin left the computer science program at UCSC to develop the emerging technology area at IC. Kinetic as a Tesla coil, the house technologist manages IT systems. “Making sure the internet’s running, researching server upgrades, new technology, how we can utilize it,” he says with a grin. “For a Seagate project, we had to research product mapping. Ninety percent of my research happens online.”
Barely 20 years old, Goldin grew up with gaming and computers.
“My biggest curiosity is how humans use technology,” he says. “VR is where psychology, storytelling, and technology come together.”
Which is why the pieces made by IC have such emotional power, as well as state-of-the-art graphics. Goldin’s work also involves stitching together digital images. “For the Princess Cruises piece, a 360-degree video, I started by looking at the shot list, at pre-production, how many shots would be indoors, or outdoors,” he says. “With 360, we use six cameras and a single brain that compiles all the images. After the shoot, I stitch it together on a computer.”
He often invents the required programs as he goes. After the compiled images are edited, Goldin smooths the edges so the final product is visually seamless.
Goldin surfs emerging technologies for exciting ways of displaying products, like logos mapped onto three-dimensional volumes. “With video projection mapping,” Goldin says, “we can project images onto anything—faceted objects, trees, hands. What is new is the ability to map onto the shape of an object with a single projector—saving lots of money.”
Goldin explains a simple but important distinction: everything VR is 360-degree, but not all 360-degree video is VR.
“VR is defined by the technology,” he explains. “If you are watching a 360 video on a computer, that’s not virtual reality. If you watched that same video in a VR headset, that is virtual reality. Current headset hardware has been perfected so that it won’t make you motion sick. It in essence moves with the user’s motor expectations.”
For example, my spacewalk was an animated 360 video that IC created for the hard drive company LaCie. It can be watched on a computer or tablet, but it was created with viewing on a VR headset in mind.
“A few years from now we won’t have the clunky headset, there will be a contact lens, or a chip that acts as a receiver,” says Goldin. He doesn’t believe this will all lead to a dystopic Matrix-type world.
“I still love to go outside and play,” he says.
The CEO
David Sieburg’s background in broadcast marketing for ABC, NBC and the Department of Defense positioned him to lead the product development direction of IC. He and his former wife had come out from Colorado, shopping for a future home. Santa Cruz sold itself, and a friend of Jacques Cousteau’s helped make a connection to documentary films—and that led to Eric Thiermann.
“The world is quickly transitioning into an ‘era of experience’ where the digital and physical merge,” says Sieburg. “We have a long track record in film and video production, but we are evolving into a new breed of production company.” Noting the overwhelming newness of the technology IC uses, Sieburg admits that “all of these terms—virtual and augmented reality, artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data, drones, autonomous cars—they’re all different pieces of this experiential future.”
Like Thiermann, he is attracted to social relief efforts, and has documented post-disaster efforts in places like New Orleans and the Philippines. There’s no stopping the move toward virtual and artificial intelligence, but Sieburg wants to keep his eyes on the big picture, and help influence the positive implications of technology.
What does a CEO of a video production company do? “I develop client projects,” he says. “I’ll ask about their goals—mostly by phone and email—and then build a proposal. Next come the three-phase pre-production, production and post-production. This is a group process. Half of what we do is animation, although it’s more fun to do the video projects.”
Sieburg estimates the eight-person team has “between 10 and 30 projects going at any given time, and each takes anywhere from six to 10 weeks for completion.”
People are surprised that a small studio like IC can produce such slick, high-powered work. “We blow them away with our ability. All of us, Eric, Deva, Donald, Philip—the whole team—we all edit and direct and write. We’ve mind-melded after almost eight years. We’re not the usual agency model,” says Sieburg. The team includes directors, producers like Deva Blaisdell-Anderson, Kelsey Doyle, and Toby Thiermann, plus motion designers Judy Mo and David Whitmer. “All of us, we are very hands on.”
The marketing angle is “all about eyeballs—getting people to notice and watch the content. The bigger topic,” Sieburg says, “is what are we—mankind—going to do with it? I’m not sure if it’s driving us, or if we’re driving us. We know that technology is evolving—you can’t stop it. We want to be part of the good uses. But what’s next on the horizon? There’s no portfolio yet for that. It’s the edge—that’s where it is exciting.”
A VR Glossay
VR (virtual reality) offers an immersive experience, one that simulates a three-dimensional world and places the viewer in a non-real somewhere, using a headset and motion tracking device. In VR, using a headset, you can look around a virtual space and it feels as if you’re actually there.
360 degree cinematography uses many cameras with multiple lenses to capture all angles, side to side, top to bottom. The captured imagery is then “stitched” together by computer programs to simulate a seamless encounter with a wraparound environment, seen from the viewer’s point of view. Anyone with an ounce of geek DNA can attach a 360 camera to a drone and make a fairly decent “oh wow” visual experience.
AR (augmented reality) lies somewhere in between a physical environment and a virtual one. It adds sensory data to the natural world, like maps and directions suddenly popping up along your sightlines when you need them. Think of the hologram of Obi Wan in Star Wars—thehologram of Princess Leia was a digital creation placed into a real space. Another great example of AR occurs in the film Minority Report when Tom Cruise’s character walks through the shopping mall and all of the window ads and billboards know his name and offer him his favorite product choices. This, as anyone surfing the internet knows, is already with us in the form of robots tracking our reading and purchasing choices. CHRISTINA WATERS
“It was always there, and always something you could count on,” retired art teacher Myra Eastman says, the sound of long-lost love lingering in her voice. “We were friends.”
Her late companion is defunct community radio station KUSP (88.9 FM).
Although she never worked at the station, Eastman—a local resident for 46 years—says community radio played an integral part in her family’s life. It was the station she turned to for the latest in local politics, or to hear new and strange music hand-curated by passionate disc jockeys. She fondly remembers raising her children with programs like “Castle Cottage,” and how it was “our only lifeline” for information after the devastating 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake.
“It was a local jewel,” she says. “These were [voices] you knew, they were your neighbors.”
So when she read about the financial trouble the station was going through two years ago, she became involved with Media Watch and KUSP Forward. Ex-KUSP programmers and community members in those groups did what they could to keep the station afloat, attending board meetings and even attempting several times to raise enough money to acquire the station’s license. Their latest attempt was in October of last year, when they were outbid by the Educational Media Foundation—an adult contemporary Christian music conglomeration—which won the rights to the bankrupt station’s signal with a $605,000 offer. The new Bible-thumping rock station on 88.9 calls itself Aware FM.
With KUSP gone, Eastman and others from Media Watch created a new coalition called Central Coast Community Radio (CCCR), with a new goal of purchasing an entirely different license, frequency and transmitter. Through its online crowdfunding campaign, CCCR has raised $82,500 toward the purchase of 90.7 FM. The new station, not nearly as powerful as KUSP, would be able to transmit from a small tower on the UCSC campus.
Still, their $82,500 is a far cry from the $265,000 needed to purchase the new license and transmitter, and even farther from the estimated $350,000 needed to fully operate a new station for an entire year. To help them reach this goal, CCCR received a challenge grant from a community member of $50,000, should they raise an initial $150,000. Raising the rest could be an uphill climb, and a steep one at that—as the members are well aware—but they hope media coverage will help them get there. If CCCR doesn’t meet its goal, all donors will get their money back.
After fundraising and bidding for the signal are wrapped up, the license transfer must still be approved by the Federal Communications Commission before new call letters get assigned.
“Our biggest need is obtaining more contributions to close the deal,” says business attorney and CCCR Steering Committee member Ned Hearn. “By the end of the month, our goal is to have a package of funds.”
Talking Point
Charlie Lange, another committee member, agrees that KUSP’s departure stripped the community of a vital service.
“The need for a locally based, locally supported media outlet is crucial in these times we live in,” says Lange, who serves on CCCR’s Advisory Committee. “For disasters, for public commentary, for entertainment and artistic expression.”
For nearly 40 years, he helped build the station’s listenership and maintained its local focus by hosting shows like “Soul Shack.” In the early days, he would even drive around in his Volkswagen van, broadcasting live from concerts and events. Although Lange’s faith in community radio’s importance remains unwavering, he often wonders if the public realizes what it’s missing.
“In my opinion, [the verdict] is still out on whether or not people in this community want to support it,” he admits. “We’ve had strong fundraising efforts for the last few months, but we’re not even halfway to the cost of just the license.”
Worries like these led Central Coast Community Radio to create an ongoing survey on its website, asking community members what they want to hear. Since the poll launched in January, 110 people have answered, and the results show a strong desire for the old KUSP-style formatting, with 85 percent saying they want to hear local news, 78 percent in favor of local politics and 69 percent in favor of live broadcasts from events around the county. When asked what community radio means to them, comments included “community-owned and operated,” “Radio of, by and for the people,” and even “The old KUSP.”
There were suggestions about bringing back some of the old programming, like “Talk of the Bay.”
“There seems to be a growing interest [in community radio],” says ex-“Talk”host and current CCCR Steering Committee member Rachel Goodman. “Once people hear about it, they get excited. It’s just a matter of getting the word out.”
A Peabody-Award-winning journalist and current co-host of “Planet Watch” on KSCO (1080 AM), Goodman believes the survey is a positive step in the right direction from the lessons learned after KUSP’s demise, something she felt could have been avoided.
“Being nimble and responsive to your community is very important,” she says, “along with looking at other successful models from around the country.”
Undivided Antennae
One model that radio-loving locavores admire is KPCW out of Park City, Utah.
“We’re growing audience and revenue while airing more shows we produce,” says KPCW General Manager Larry Warren. “We believe this is a great time to be in non-commercial radio.”
Now in its 37th year of broadcasting, the station frequently earns award nominations from the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB). It has eight paid staffers to go with roughly 50 dedicated volunteers. Underwriting represents half of the station’s revenue, with another 25 percent coming from listener donations, and the final quarter from other funds, such as grants from the Corporation For Public Broadcasting.
“Until Trump kills it,” Warren says with disdain.
The community station is affiliated with National Public Radio, although it broadcasts only the bare minimum of the media organization’s shows.
“I stripped away most of the syndicated programs,” he states. “Why should I pay for a show that a bigger station with a stronger signal is also running?”
Along with news and entertainment designed specifically for Park City, Wasatch and Summit Counties, KPCW also broadcasts helpful and empowering programs like The Classified Show. It’s like an on-air Craigslist, where listeners can call in about anything from garage sales they’re hosting to furniture they might be looking for.
When it comes to what communities crave, Lange believes one need not look farther than KPIG, which broadcasts out of Watsonville.
“I would rather listen to a show by someone who is passionate,” he says. “People might like the music, but it’s the personality that they respond to.”
“Here’s to alcohol: the cause of—and solution to—all life’s problems,” proclaimed the animated poet Homer Simpson. His thoughts on the matter may be closer to the truth than perhaps even he realized. Alcohol certainly does have a side as dark as a shot of Fernet: it is an all-too-commonly abused drug, plays a role in many car crashes and violent crimes, and can have disastrous and fatal consequences on health. But there is also scientific evidence that consuming it moderately may enhance well-being.
The Harvard School of Public Health’s website comes eerily close to agreeing with Homer, stating, “It’s safe to say that alcohol is both a tonic and a poison. The difference lies mostly in the dose.” So exactly how much should we be drinking? Where is the line between tonic and poison?
One of the first people to look at the question from what he called a “tight, defensible scientific perspective” was Dr. Wells Shoemaker, a local physician and co-author of the book The French Paradox and Beyond, published in 1992, just after the term “French Paradox” entered our lexicon. It refers to the finding that even though French people typically ate diets rich in saturated fats from things like butter and cheese, their incidence of heart disease was surprisingly low. One proposed explanation was that the French also consumed a lot of wine. Could this resolve the seeming paradox?
The answer, according to Shoemaker, is yes. “The alcohol molecule itself has a number of salutary effects,” he says. “It raises [good] HDL cholesterol, lowers [bad] LDL cholesterol, and reduces the tendency of platelets in the blood to clump together.” Wine also offers benefits: “There are a number of antioxidant compounds in wine, mostly in the skins”—which is why red wine is healthier—“that slow damage inside blood vessels,” says Shoemaker, referring to polyphenols like anthocyanins and resveratrol.
He says the timing and manner of how wine is often imbibed is crucial, too. “Typically, wine is consumed with a meal. While fats are being metabolized, the antioxidants are getting into the blood as well, and it is often consumed slowly, in integrative settings that have a social aspect.” Even famed (and French) 19th-century chemist and biologist Louis Pasteur was a proponent of wine, saying, “Wine is the most healthful and most hygienic of beverages.” “So it’s really not a paradox at all,” continues Shoemaker. “Moderate drinking does lower the risk of heart disease and stroke.”
But what exactly constitutes “moderate drinking?” For some, that term is itself the paradox, and unfortunately nine drinks on Saturday night and none the rest of the week does not count. Shoemaker says that the definition has slowly come down over the last two decades, and now sits at about two standard (12-ounce beer/5-ounce wine/ 1.5-ounce liquor) drinks per day for men, and one standard drink per day for women.
A 2017 study published in the British Medical Journal showed a reduced risk of heart disease for moderate drinkers relative to both those who didn’t drink at all and those who drank heavily. And 2015 research at the American Society of Human Genetics used DNA markers to look at alcohol’s effect on aging, and found that moderate drinking was correlated with the healthiest aging.
But a 2016 systematic review published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs looked at 87 previous studies and found that they all showed a reduced mortality risk for low-volume drinkers. After adjusting for insufficiently accounted-for differences between drinkers and abstainers, the effect disappeared.
A 2016 review of previous research published in the journal Addiction concluded, “There is strong evidence that alcohol causes cancer at seven sites in the body, and probably others.” That said, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the leading cause of death in the U.S. is still heart disease, and stroke is fifth, although cancer is second.
It is no wonder that Shoemaker calls this a “very murky field,” and stresses the importance of a case-by-case approach. He doesn’t recommend starting a drinking habit for health reasons, but says, “A physician recommending their patients not drink at all is not scientifically supportable. If you do drink moderately, it’s probably not harmful.”
It all comes back to the individual and his or her specific health issues, history, and genetic and environmental risk factors. Perhaps then the question is not, “How much should we be drinking?” but instead, “How much should I be drinking?”
Ever been called a birdbrain? According to Jennifer Ackerman, you should be so lucky.
In her wondrous new book, The Genius of Birds, she reminds us that there is more than one way to wire a clever mind. From the exacting beauty of their nests to the evidence of their empathy, navigational prowess, and ability to recognize faces, she lays out the surprisingly adaptable intelligence of birds, elevating it to its rightful place in the natural world. We talked recently about the delights and mysteries to be found in the avian brain.
How has your personal history influenced your interest in birds?
JENNIFER ACKERMAN: I started birdwatching with my dad when I was eight or nine years old. We had five girls in our family, so getting a little alone time with him was a big deal. He’d learned about birds in Boy Scout camp, so he was pretty good at identifying them by call and sight. I’ve held onto that love of birds all my life. When studies started to come out about their surprising cognitive abilities, I thought it sounded like a fascinating topic to delve into.
Birds are smarter than we give them credit for. What have we learned about the nature of their mental abilities?
The misrepresentation of the bird brain goes back to Ludwig Edinger in the 19th century. He suggested it was a primitive, reptilian structure, which turned out to be wrong, but it stymied research in the field for a very long time. Scientists finally began to sort out that birds may not have a neo-cortex like ours, but they have a structure that’s similar. Many species have brains that are large for their body size. Neurons in the brains of songbirds and corvids have a density akin to primates, but intelligence is not so much about brain size—it’s about the connections between neurons. When birds learn to vocalize, they use neural pathways similar to those we use to learn speech.
So birdsong is like language?
There are remarkable similarities between song learning in birds and speech learning in humans. Young songbirds have a period of vocalizing called subsong, which is like human baby babble. Some birds sing their songs in regional dialects and pass them down through generations. Some songbirds have speech defects. They stutter. Like humans, songbirds have a narrow window of time in which their brains are more easily wired to learn songs the way ours are more easily wired to learn language.
You write that birds having mapping minds. How does a hummingbird find his way to the same feeding ground each year?
The navigational abilities of birds so far exceed our own that they’re in a different domain. It’s believed that they use a sort of map and compass system, but it’s all cognitive. They tap into many different types of information, from sun and stars to magnetic fields, landscape features, wind, sound, smell, and more. All of it funnels into their brains and somehow guides them to their destination. Birds displaced from their natural migratory paths by hundreds or thousands of miles are able to beeline back to the right route within an hour or two.
Birds’ adaptability is often used as an explanation for their success, but many species are highly vulnerable right now. How can we help?
Birds that are adaptable are probably going to do all right, like blackbirds and sparrows. The ones that are highly specialized, particularly in mountain or tropical niches, are being squeezed out of their habitats. In terms of helping, being an ethical consumer is important, calling and writing your representatives about environmental issues can make a difference, but we can also do things in our own backyards. One of the great stories where I come from is the rise of the bluebird population. It happened because people put up bluebird boxes everywhere to protect them from predatory birds that were displacing their nesting sites. Growing native plants that birds love is another way to help, and you get the added joy of seeing them in your garden. I’ve even had an eastern screech owl roost in a tree right outside my kitchen window. That was pretty great.
Jennifer Ackerman will talk about and sign her new book at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, April 12 at Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz, 423-0900. Free.
In the traditional son jarocho song “Señor Presidente,” a peasant laments the sad state of his neighborhood. In each verse, the narrator asks the president if the common people will ever have things as good as they are in the president’s neighborhood. Will their streets ever be as safe? Will they ever be as rich? The questions go unanswered, but after all, they are rhetorical. The answer, it is clearly implied, is no.
Las Cafeteras perform their own version of the song on their new album, Tastes Like L.A., which comes out this week. The East L.A. band is known for their love of son jarocho, but that doesn’t mean there’s no downside to carrying on the centuries-old folk tradition from the Veracruz region of Mexico. For instance, Las Cafeteras member Leah Gallegos wouldn’t mind at all if songs like “Señor Presidente” weren’t so relevant today.
“Four hundred years later, we’re still singing about the same needs,” says Gallegos by phone, as the seven-member band prepares for an album release tour that comes to the Rio Theatre in Santa Cruz on Saturday, April 15.
On Tastes Like L.A., “Señor Presidente” leads into an even more direct comment on our times, the hip-hop-driven “If I Was President,” featuring lyrics like “If I was President/I’d free all my poor black and brown kids that got caught up in three strikes/And when they get out/They gettin’ free bikes.”
Few bands can find the humor and joy in a political protest song the way Las Cafeteras does (another great line from “If I Was President”: “My first lady would be my mom/Cause she’d slap me at the first thought/Of drone strikes and dropping bombs”). Gallegos doesn’t even see it as political, really, singing about the human experience.
“I think we sing about very basic human needs,” she says. “A lot of times that gets named ‘political’ or ‘radical,’ and I think that’s a little off.”
Perhaps the difference is that, as most of the band members come from immigrant families, the issues people have been most alarmed about since Trump took office are ones they’ve had to be worried about their whole lives.
“It’s become a little more loud, it’s a little more in everyone’s face,” says Gallegos. “But it’s not that new to us.”
Neither is the internal turmoil they had to deal with in 2015, when Annette Torres left the band; Torres released a statement claiming the members of Las Cafeteras weren’t living up to their stated feminist and democratic values, saying the women in the band were being pushed around by the men. The other band members denied most of her claims, and Gallegos took issue with anyone speaking for her. Any band that finds success—as Las Cafeteras has since the release of its popular last album, 2012’s It’s Time—is going to have tension, she says, but the story she saw represented by Torres and much of the media coverage was not her experience at all. Because Torres is the aunt of two of the band members, brothers David and Hector Flores, the break-up was that much harder.
“We’re still broken-hearted about it,” says Gallegos. “But I think internally it sort of allowed us to grow stronger. It really tested our caring for one another, because we lost a family member. We lost a friend.”
Weirdly, the conflict also pushed them to complete their long-overdue follow-up to It’s Time, which kept getting pushed back year after year as they continued to tour.
“It kind of put us in a place where we wanted to create, and be in the studio making music,” she says. “It was sort of our medicine.”
The finished product represents a lot of musical growth by the band, which has created a sonic stew on Tastes Like L.A. that goes well beyond their origins in traditional sounds and songs.
“We have a lot more originals. We’ve kind of strayed away from son jarocho,” says Gallegos. “We’re starting to experiment with more instruments and more sounds.”
INFO: 7:30 p.m., Saturday, April 15, Rio Theatre, 1205 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. $25. 423-8209.
