As idealists gaze into the clouds, yearning for a day when the electoral college ceases to exist, some Californians—including ones here in Santa Cruz—are dreaming up a different kind of election reform.
Alocal group called Yes on Ranked Choice is not just imagining a different kind of election, but also working to create it from the ground up. Ranked choice is a system that allows voters to bubble-in selections for their first, second and third choices on their ballots. The local group is holding a meeting on March 19 at the Garfield Park Community Church to discuss creating such a balloting system in the city of Santa Cruz.
One advantage to this instant-runoff system, supporters suggest, is that voters may be more likely to pick their favorite candidate, instead of reluctantly supporting a politician who’s more likely to win. Of course, in Santa Cruz—at least for the City Council—voters already get to vote for three or four people each cycle.
Ranked choice is already in place in the Bay Area cities of San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and San Leandro.
The idea seems intuitive enough—it’s how sports writers vote for most valuable players—but it still has high-profile opposition. Gov. Jerry Brown has criticized it for making voting more complicated. He vetoed a bill to extend ranked-choice voting to the state’s general law cities, if they chose to implement it, this past fall.
Because Santa Cruz is a charter city, it’s still eligible.
The ranked-choice meeting will be from 2-3:30 p.m. on Sunday, March 19 at the Garfield Park Community Church at 111 Errett Circle.
Sitting in a comfy, flower-print upholstered chair, Sunshine Tomlin asks if I want any water or hot tea. The soft colored walls are inviting and homely, welcoming guests to sit back and relax. The air is filled with the sweet smell of scented candles. It’s the calm, warm environment one would expect a loving home to be, so it makes sense this is how Tomlin would want to design her birthing center.
Located on the corner of Mission Street and Chrystal Terrace, the Full Moon Birth and Family Wellness Center is Santa Cruz’s first birthing center in more than four decades. The original Santa Cruz Birth Center was shut down in 1974, following a sting operation and raid by police resulting in the arrests of three local midwives. However, midwifery and home birthing have made strides in the past decades, with better laws and clearer understandings of what midwives actually do. Recent public interest in the commercial side of the medical industry has also led to a resurgence in natural and home birthing—inspired in part, it seems, by The Business of Being Born, a 2008 documentary produced by Ricki Lake.
“We really can thank Ricki Lake,” says Tomlin, a midwife for 12 years. “She knew the exact things to say, and the right way to say them. I’m still getting phone calls from people saying they just saw it and don’t want a hospital birth.”
As the name implies, the Full Moon Birth and Family Wellness Center is more than just a place for soon-to-be parents. The center currently has 18 employees—midwives, chiropractors, massage therapists and even an acupuncturist—along with weekly, monthly and single-day classes. Ranging from couples retreats to classes on topics like the natural development of babies and how to utilize chemicals released in the brain during birthing, Tomlin hopes Full Moon can be an alternative health center for the community.
“I want this to be a Wellness Center,” she says. “It’s not just about the births.”
Throughout human history, midwives have been assisting women throughout prenatal, childbirth and aftercare, usually in the home. Traditionally, their knowledge was passed down to apprentices through hands-on learning.
Because of changing times and laws, there are now two kinds of midwives in the U.S.: Certified Professional Midwives (CPM) and Certified Nurse Midwives (CNM). Both have to attend midwifery schools, but CNMs must also graduate from a registered nursing program.
According to the Santa Cruz Chapter of the Certified Nurse Midwives Association, approximately 1,200 CNMs are working in California, with Santa Cruz employing 35-40. Most practice out of Dominican Hospital and the Sutter Maternity and Surgery Center, but some also work with the downtown Planned Parenthood and the Salud Para la Gente Center in Watsonville.
To fully grasp why a new Birth Center and the changing times are so important to California midwives, it’s essential to understand their history of practicing under fear of arrest.
HISTORY OF MIDWIFERY IN SANTA CRUZ
“Every baby has a birth story,” Kate Bowland says with a hearty smile and chuckle. “We just don’t know what it is at first.” With more than 43 years of midwifery under her belt, Bowland has “caught” (the preferred midwife term) her fair share of babies—“a little over 1,000” she estimates. Retired in 2015, Bowland was one of the midwives arrested in 1974 for practicing medicine without a license at the original Santa Cruz Birth Center.
Established in 1971 by midwife, birthing advocate and Doctor of Oriental Medicine Raven Lang, the Victorian house located on Capitola Road near 7th Avenue employed 6-12 midwives at any given time and administered classes and prenatal care.
“It was never a freestanding birth center,” she explains. “We did a lot of home births.”
Bowland began her lifelong profession almost accidentally. While she was living in Oregon, Lang—a friend from college—invited her down to Santa Cruz to hang out. Little did she know she would be participating in her first birth, which set her on a life path that often skirted the law.
While she knew she was violating the law, Bowland also believed midwifery was essential to women’s rights. Even though the Santa Cruz Birth Center would not allow births within, Bowland estimates they still attended roughly 20 home births a month while active.
SHELF LIFE Sunshine Tomlin inside the new Full Moon Birth and Family Wellness Center
It was Bowland who first felt that client Terry Johnson’s chart was suspicious. In the book, Bowland explains how Johnson had missed prenatal visits, would not turn in her blood work and went into labor before her child was due. While most of the women did not want to work with Johnson, they sent two midwives out during her supposed labor anyway, out of good faith. Johnson turned out to be an undercover police officer.
“Thirty minutes later I looked out the window over the shoulder of the woman I was examining to see two cars pull up across the street,” she writes. “I knew immediately that they were plainclothes police.”
The midwives’ work at the center was illegal under California law, and Bowland—along with Jeanine Walker and Linda Bennett—were arrested. Over the course of the next three years, the women would fight their case to the California Supreme Court, where the judges returned the case to the municipal court. In 1977, the district attorney threw out the case over lack of evidence and, by that time, the laws had already begun to change.
The year the women were busted in Santa Cruz, California passed a law allowing the legal certification and practice of Nurse Midwifery in hospitals. Seeing the slow changing of the times, Bowland became a CNM in 1983, and continued her practice in hospitals. It wasn’t until 1993 that California legalized the licensed practice of midwifery. Even then, however, all midwives had to be supervised by a doctor until 2014, when the state removed that stipulation, but added others, restricting midwives from delivering twins or breech births.
But despite the struggles, Bowland remains firm in her views of the benefits of midwifery.
“Birth is one of the most important events in a person’s life,” she tells me. “Birth can be very empowering for a woman, or it can be disempowering and traumatic. While there are no guarantees a birth will be natural, midwifery supports a process of birth.”
SUNSHINE OF THE FULL MOON
Like Bowland, Tomlin didn’t always know she wanted to be a midwife. The daughter of an ER nurse and the mother of three, Tomlin didn’t begin looking into having an at-home birth until her third pregnancy.
“I was happy enough with my OB, but they tried to assign me a midwife through Medi-Cal, which I declined, because I wanted a “real doctor,’” she remembers. “When I finally learned about home birth, it was this ‘ah-ha!’ moment … Birth is normal. Birth is natural. Why are we messing with it?”
It was then she decided to enroll at the National Midwifery Institute, completing her certification in 2005. Throughout her training, she continued to work as a doula, participating in her first birth at Sutter Maternity Center in 2001. Unlike a midwife, doulas are there for emotional and physical support. As current doula and midwife-in-training Ashley Shea describes it, “a doula is a cheerleader and the midwife is the lifeguard.” Since doulas and midwives are so different by profession, a person can be a certified doula, but it is not required by law since there is no medical aspect.
After graduating, Tomlin opened Sunshine Midwifery in Ben Lomond, where she had an office for 11 years and delivered roughly 400 babies, along with participating on the board of the California Association of Midwives and as a membership director for the Bay Area Birth Information, or BABI. However, being located in Ben Lomond proved difficult for many of her clients throughout the county, so she decided to look closer to town. In May 2016, she signed the lease for the Mission Street office, and closed Sunshine Midwifery the following June.
“We’re closer to the hospital than some people in the county might live,” Tomlin says. Sometimes, complications arise during a midwife-assisted birth, and a hospital is needed. “Also, there are so many people [in Santa Cruz] who can’t afford to live in their home by themselves. They have roommates, or moved back with their parents, or their place is so small they aren’t comfortable in it. This gives them an option to have a home birth somewhere else, with the care they deserve to receive, and feel safe.”
Shea—who is in her second year of acquiring a Bachelor’s in Science from the Midwives College of Utah—agrees, with a first-hand experience.
MIDWIFE CRISIS Midwife Kate Bowland on the day after she was arrested in the sting operation.
“For my birth, I was living in a second-story apartment that was super tiny. I was so self-conscious about noise because my neighbors were right there,” she remembers. “To have a place where you can just go without worrying about pets, or your roommates or neighbors is so awesome for families to have that option.”
Shea says she always wanted to be a midwife, ever since one gave a presentation to her elementary school class. As she grew older, the idea always remained in the back of her mind, but she never knew how to find her way into the world of birthing. In 2008, she finally enrolled in doula training classes in Colorado, but thought she wasn’t prepared to do it because—at the time—she didn’t have a child of her own.
“I wish I knew then what I know now—that it’s much easier to be a doula while not being a parent,” she says with a laugh. “You can sleep all day after!”
As fate would have it, when Shea’s best friend asked her to be her doula, it was not only Shea’s first time, but Tomlin was also the midwife. Since then the two have formed a close relationship, working side by side to give women an alternative in how they want to bring life into the world.
“She’s a champion,” Tomlin says of Shea. “She’s vocal [about midwifery and home birthing], and you have to be.”
Since opening Full Moon last September—the grand opening also marked Tomlin’s 200th birth—the birthing center has made strides in becoming fully functional. Money has been raised through a three-day fundraiser, a benefit show at Don Quixote’s last month, and even a GoFundMe campaign. However, they estimate they’re still shy some $50,000 in funding, needed to install a shower, a permanent birth tub and other amenities for women in labor.
“When you think about how many people there are that want this,” Tomlin says. “Even if they gave just a little bit, it would add up so fast.”
Santa Cruz native Heidi Olson says she chose to have a home birth with midwives over going to the hospital for several reasons. When she was pregnant with her daughter two years ago, she sought out Tomlin’s care after hearing of her reputation, philosophy and care.
“I knew I couldn’t birth the way I wanted in a hospital,” Olson says. “Unfortunately we didn’t have any birth centers then … I didn’t necessarily want a home birth either, but I knew I wanted a hospital birth even less.”
She believes the birth center will open up a large array of new opportunities for soon-to-be parents, but that it might not be for everyone.
“I think women should talk to practitioners at both [hospitals and birth centers],” says Olson. “I think doing what feels right in your gut is what’s best for women. I’m just glad there’s another option here for those that want it.”
HOSPITAL BLUES
America is currently the most expensive country to give birth in. According to one study released last September by the U.K. medical journal The Lancet, out of 14 developed nations, the U.S. is “disproportionately more expensive” for hospital births than other high-income countries. Vaginal births are roughly $10,232 on average, and cesareans are $15,500 compared to Australia which is $6,775 and $10,500, respectively. A separate study released last November by The Lancet found that not only are childbirths 25 percent of all hospital discharges, but between 1996 and 2013, the cost of having a hospital birth within the country has tripled.
“My friend went to the hospital for a one-day stay, and her bill was $40,000,” says Brooke March, who teaches the Full Moon Mother’s Support Group. “Women used to give birth at home all the time. It used to be a beautiful thing where women were honored.”
Last July, the financial website marketwatch.com published a report from the healthcare information company Castlight Health that the San Francisco Bay Area is the second-most expensive place to have a child in the country—either vaginally or through cesarean—after Sacramento. Which is one of the reasons the women at Full Moon Birth are so adamant about the center.
“It’s amazing, because so many women are already afraid, because we haven’t grown up in this culture where it’s natural and normal and beautiful,” says March, whose first child was born over 52 hours in a hospital; her second was born at home in three hours. “This is what our bodies are designed for. Even when you go to the doctor for your prenatal care, it sets you up for a ‘doctor-patient’ relationship. There’s a hierarchy that’s not there with an at-home birth.”
Tomlin agrees.
“It’s protocol and fear,” she says. “As far as the place of litigation goes, it’s always safer to do the C-section than it is to allow someone to go 50 hours. That’s risky. What if something bad happens and they get sued?”
IN CASE OF EMERGENCY
A 2015 U.S. study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that perinatal mortality is higher among out-of-hospital births; however, the study was criticized for not taking into account factors such as lack of health insurance. It also found maternal mortality rates were at an all-time high in the last 25 years, regardless of whether the birth was in a hospital or at home.
DELIVERING FOR TWO GENERATIONS Sunshine Tomlin and Kate Bowland at Full Moon.
Full Moon Birth asserts that at-home and natural births are well attended and safe, with their midwives following the pregnancy from start to finish. A typical birth is measured in 40 weeks, and the prenatal care the expecting mother receives is the same whether they go to an obstetrician or a midwife. Yet, unlike a doctor who might only spend small periods of time with a patient, the midwife makes time to get to know the patient and discover what other stresses are in their life, Tomlin says. She spends at least an hour in each face-to-face appointment with her patients, discussing dietary needs or restrictions, checking their blood pressure, measuring the uterus and feeling out their general well-being. She also does home visits on the first, third and seventh day after a birth, and then again two weeks after.
“Taking time to check in, see if they have any questions and even see how their family is doing,” she says. “The relationship that I build with people is part of what makes my care so special.”
“Also, midwives know not to take ‘high risk’ pregnancies,” March says. “There’s a screening process they give to determine whether the pregnancy is healthy.”
Because of the nature of her certification, and the way the laws are written, Tomlin has several restrictions, which is another reason to be located closer to a hospital. Tomlin, who graduated from the National Midwifery Institute in 2005, cannot administer epidurals or pain medication, nor perform cesareans. However, she is fully trained and equipped to resuscitate a newborn, stop hemorrhages and other complications that may occur.
“It’s almost never an emergency ‘right now,’” she says. “It’s more nutritional and preventative based. If the baby begins to breech, we get them to a chiropractor to see if we can fix it instead of doing a C-section.”
She estimates that of the 36-48 births a year that she administers throughout the Bay Area, about 5 percent (or two to three a year) need to be transferred to the hospital.
“It’s the spectrum of what birth could look like,” she says. “But if you start at the hospital, there are many things you can never experience.”
“The best-kept secret,” says Bowland, “is that home births are as safe as, or safer than, hospital births.”
It’s only 3 p.m. on a Friday and frustrated drivers are already circling through downtown Santa Cruz in search of the last few remaining parking spots.
On most weekday afternoons, the city’s parking structures nearly fill up, hovering around 90 percent of full capacity. The downtown concrete buildings, which range from two to four stories, have wait lists several months long, with requests for almost 1000 permits, according to a city report from December.
On top of that, as many as three downtown Santa Cruz parking lots could disappear in the not-so-distant future, as they are privately owned. So it may come as no surprise that the city manager’s office is looking at building a new parking structure at a site long discussed for such a project—the parking lot between Lincoln and Cathcart streets, along Cedar Street.
But some environmentalists contend that the city hasn’t been listening to its own consultants, and that staffers have not adequately begun transportation demand management efforts—essentially incentives to get people to drive less—in order to cut back the demand for parking.
Rick Longinotti, co-chair of the Campaign for Sensible Transportation, points to Stanford University, where administrators scaled back car trips dramatically, reducing the number of employees who drive alone to work from 72 percent to 46 percent over the course of seven years.
“The county of Santa Clara really made the conditions clear to Stanford to continue to grow,” Longinotti says. “If they were going to grow, they needed to limit the amount of new trips during commute hours to zero. Under those circumstances, Stanford really had to do something. So I want to give credit to the citizens of Santa Clara County. We could do something similar here.”
Longinotti and his fellow co-chair, Bruce Van Allen, organized a meeting on the morning of Saturday, March 4 with Brodie Hamilton, Stanford’s former director of transportation and parking, to explain how he helped shift a culture in sustainable transportation. Hamilton told activists at the Santa Cruz Police Department Community Room that one challenge was figuring out how to get workers to stop coming up with excuses for driving.
“The approach I took at Stanford was to address the ‘yes, buts,’” recalled Hamilton, who retired in 2014. “People say, ‘Well, I use alternative transportation, but … it costs too much.’ All right, we’ll make it free. ‘Oh. Well … when I get to work, sometimes I need to run errands.’ That’s fine—we’ve got car-sharing. We’ll give it to you for free. And there were all kinds of other things that we ended up addressing because we were looking at all the ‘yes buts’ to alternative transportation.”
Under Hamilton’s guidance, Stanford partnered with local train systems and began a massive marketing campaign. Stanford parking permits cost $700 annually, and if someone didn’t purchase one, the university would give them $300 each year instead. By 2002, the university had fewer parking spots than it did 10 years earlier, despite growing by more than 4,000 students.
Here in Santa Cruz, it’s hard to say exactly how long it will be before the supply of parking spots starts dropping, as more than 100 spaces are in lots that the city doesn’t own—some of which could soon be developed. According toa strategic plan from 2015, city leaders would like to consolidate parking into one lot near the center of downtown and free up single-story lots for mixed-use buildings, presumably with new housing.
The current rough draft proposal for the Cedar Street lot is to put a library on the ground floor, usingmoney from Measure S, which voters approved in June. City Manager Martín Bernal estimates that it would be cheaper to build a brand-new, state-of-the-art library than to renovate the old one. Five stories of parking—plus a little office space—would go up above.
At a meeting in December, Transportation Manager Jim Burr said the city already does a lot to encourage alternative transportation, as 19 percent of people already bike or walk to work in the city. Longinotti has pressed the city to do more, including build more bike lockers, but the city’s lockers—which cost a nickel an hour—have garnered notoriously little use, something a city committee is studying.
Generally, planners like to start building a new parking structure before they absolutely need it, because once they break ground, the city will lose all 135 spots in the current lot until the project’s finished.
It isn’t clear how the city would pay for the $35 million, 632-space building, although a separate subcommittee is looking into it. Parking permits are currently $37 a month, and most city councilmembers have shown little interest in hiking up rates because many workers make meager wages and pay steep rents.
At Saturday’s meeting, George Dondero, executive director of the Regional Transportation Commission, asked the speakers about the differences between doing transportation demand management for a university and doing it on a municipal level.
UCSC’s transportation and parking director Larry Pageler, who spoke after Hamilton, conceded that part of the problem seems to be one of people living farther and farther away—sometimes out of the county—due to a lack of affordable housing. He also noted that the city doesn’t have the same authority over downtown employees that UCSC has over its community. “We are very different,” Pageler said.
Alan Schlenger, who attended the meeting, serves as board treasurer for Santa Cruz Community Farmers Markets, which holds its popular weekly Wednesday event downtown on that same Cedar Street lot that may turn into a parking structure. Although he isn’t ready to support or oppose the plan, he has felt encouraged by Bernal’s commitment to finding a permanent location for the market.
Bernal has even talked about building a pavilion for the market to use, and city leaders are forming a working group to discuss it.
“You don’t have a definite proposal,” he says, “and you’ll have to see when they come back.”
It was nearly two years ago that more than 20 dogs and their owners, leashes in hand, wended down curvy paths in an unsuccessful effort to beg UCSC administrators to let them continue visiting a coastal refuge near Santa Cruz’s Westside. Thedog owners protested a decision to bar pooches from the UCSC-owned trails near the school’s Long Marine Lab and Seymour Center, but the school refused to reverse it.
It’s a familiar battle in Santa Cruz, Live Oak, and other California cities, but one that may shift after canine advocates scored a major victory over the National Park Service (NPS) this year.
With a few hours to spare, two determined Marin women helped stop the NPS from making major cuts to dog walking in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA), which stretches from the county of San Carlos to Marin County.
The very day that the NPS was scheduled to finalize a restrictive Dog Management Plan, the agency capitulated, halting the plan until further notice—in part due to the work of Laura Pandapas and Cassandra Fimrite, who say they simply want to keep walking their dogs in the recreation area.
Neither activists nor rabble-rousers, Pandapas, an artist from Muir Beach, and Fimrite, a Tamalpais Valley mom of two teenagers and one black lab, stood against the NPS and its plan, which would have slashed off-leash dog walking by 90 percent and on-leash dog walking by 50 percent.
Although park experts provided no site-specific data, the NPS had given various reasons for the sweeping changes, including the protection of wildlife and newly planted native species. The women, who have been fighting the NPS for years, say they wanted to ensure that the agency ran a fair planning process and complied with the law. They lobbied lawmakers, requested NPS documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), hired a lawyer and filed a lawsuit. For now, at least, they have won in a bizarre saga that’s at least a little embarrassing for Park Service staffers.
“It’s the birthright of everyone here to use the public lands of the GGNRA in the way that Congress intended,” Pandapas says.
An act of Congress established the GGNRA in 1972, designating the land as a recreation area rather than a national park. A pet policy followed in 1979, allowing dog walking on select portions of the GGNRA, which amounted to less than 1 percent of the land.
The NPS has bandied about the idea of further restricting dog walking in the GGNRA for 15 years. In 2005, courts aborted such an attempt, citing lack of proper public notice. The NPS began the necessary public process the following year.
At meetings and in public comment periods, dog devotees cried foul. They argued that the NPS was not providing the public with adequate scientific studies to demonstrate the need for a change, and that the agency had a heavy bias against dog walking. The NPS decision, they said, was a fait accompli.
“There are tried and true conservation methods such as a land buffer, seasonal buffers and time-of-use restrictions,” says Pandapas. “The NPS could have given the public a buy-in, but they didn’t. Instead, the only tool they employed was the removal of dogs.”
NPS presented a draft plan with extensive changes in the dog rules last February, banning all off-leash dog walking on the fire roads and trails in Marin and left only Rodeo Beach for dogs to play off-leash. Concerned that the plan was too restrictive, the Marin County Board of Supervisors, Mill Valley City Council, Muir Beach Community Services District and Marin Humane Society opposed the plan. Congressman Jared Huffman suggested off-leash access in some areas before 10 a.m., as well as other compromises, but the GGNRA refused to budge.
The final Dog Management Plan rolled out last month and was almost identical to the draft. On-leash trails in Marin had been cut from 24 miles to just 8 miles. Then, on Jan. 10, when the NPS was to sign the Record of Decision and publish the Final Rule for Dog Management at GGNRA, they issueda press release stating that they were halting the plan until further notice.
Why the unexpected change? Perfect timing, according to Pandapas and Fimrite. “We showed that the NPS had a systemic pattern of bias and inappropriate relations with external groups,” Fimrite says.
When the NPS initially provided its draft plan, a coalition of dog and recreation advocate groups, including Marin County DOG (Dog Owners Group), an organization founded by Pandapas and Fimrite, requested public records from the NPS under FOIA. The NPS refused to comply. The groups filed a FOIA lawsuit to obtain the information and a federal court recently ordered the NPS to produce the documents.
More than 260,000 heavily redacted pages trickled in and were methodically combed through by the four plaintiff groups: Marin County DOG, Save Our Recreation, SFDOG and Coastside DOG of San Mateo County, and their attorney Chris Carr, of Mill Valley, a partner with Morrison & Foerster.
On Jan. 4, less than a week before the final plan would be signed into the official record, the plaintiffs revealed examples of unethical and perhaps illegal conduct on the part of senior GGNRA officials and staff. They posted more than 40 damning documentson a website they called WoofieLeaks.
In one instance, former GGNRA Director of Communications and Partnerships Howard Levitt, who retired last October, used his personal email account to conduct business regarding the dog management plan.
The decision-making process was required to be unbiased, but Levitt had worked with several private organizations to stack the deck against dog walking.
Levitt also directed staff to destroy emails and discuss aspects of the plan offline. “Everyone: Please delete this and the previous message,” Levitt wrote in a September 2013 email. “These conversations are best done by phone.”
A GGNRA wildlife ecologist urged staff in a 2006 email to leave out data from the Dog Management Plan Environmental Impact Statement, because it did not jibe with their desired outcome, specifically, to virtually eliminate dogs in the GGNRA.
It also seemed that Levitt had a personal bone to pick with dogs. In April 2014, he wrote to Kimberly Kiefer of San Francisco Recreation and Parks about his broken finger: “Ironically, it’s my middle finger … probably broke it expressing my opinion of out-of-control off-leash dog visitors.”
The documents that came to light on WoofieLeaks spurred the decision by the NPS to halt the signing of the plan and conduct an internal investigation.
Congresswoman Jackie Speier believes that doesn’t go far enough and has called for a “truly independent inquiry into whether NPS employees acted improperly with regards to their work on the GGNRA Dog Management Plan.” Speier also said that the use of personal email to improperly coordinate with outside advocacy groups is potentially illegal.
The possibly incriminating emails were among 260,000 pages that the NPS recently dumped on the plaintiffs. Though the federal magistrate who is presiding over the document production aspect of the lawsuit warned the plaintiffs that they wouldn’t find a smoking gun, they ended up uncovering an arsenal of information that they say demonstrates a clear bias on the part of the GGNRA staff.
The NPS declined to comment on the documents. Carr says they are just the tip of the iceberg.
“The records belong to us, the people,” says Carr, who adds that he and his clients will move ahead with the FOIA lawsuit against the NPS. Fimrite considers the emails as proof that the entire plan must be thrown out.
“Someone has to address what happened in the GGNRA,” Pandapas says. “The NPS can’t seem to engage in an honorable process. What’s happening in the Bay Area is nothing to be proud of.”
In the Pussy Riot documentary A Punk Prayer, there’s a clip of Vladimir Putin railing against the utter disgrace that the band has brought on Russia. Why, just look at their name! It has the word “pussy” in it.
“These people made all of you say it out loud,” he intones creepily in Russian, sounding like he trained under the narrator for one of those old pot-panic flicks from the 1930s.
What’s funny is that he’s actually right. Pussy Riot did bring the word “pussy” to the people—when mainstream media outlets began reporting on the band in 2012, it was the first time it had been said on the evening news in reference to anything besides a cat.
Jump ahead four years, to news images of millions of women in bright pink pussy hats, marching on Washington D.C. and in cities around the world. It’s not hard to connect the dots—even the hats themselves resemble the bright pink knitted balaclavas that became so associated with the band that they were sold to raise money for their defense after two members were sentenced to two years in jail by a Russian court for “hooliganism” in August of 2012.
The balaclavas and the pussy hats will meet this week in Santa Cruz, as I hear fans are planning to wear both to the show at the Rio on Saturday, March 11, where Pussy Riot member Maria Alyokhina will bring music and her personal story for Pussy Riot Theatre Presents: Revolution. Alyokhina became one of the most visible members of Pussy Riot—which is a loose collective of a dozen or so women who began playing explosive punk songs like “Kill the Sexist!” in disguise at short impromptu concerts—when she served prison time, along with bandmate Nadia Tolokonnikova, on the “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” charges which stemmed from a Pussy Riot performance in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior. They were released in 2014 under an amnesty bill passed by the Russian legislature.
Revolution is a music-and-theater piece based on Alyokhina’s memoirs as published in Pussy Riot! A Punk Prayer for Freedom. It would seem like a fine time to consider the impact Pussy Riot has had on protest culture, especially in light of the worldwide pink-hatted marches, but when I reach her by phone from Moscow, she laughs when I assert that there could not have been a pussy hat without Pussy Riot.
“Well, of course for me that was a dream that became real,” she says of the Women’s Marches. “It’s not only about me, all of us were very excited.”
Her only disappointment was that there were no such marches in Russia. “I think we will someday have this march as well,” she says. While that activist structure may not yet exist in Russia in the same way, I tell her that the anti-Trump marches remind me of the widespread Russian protests when Putin was returned to power in 2012.
“Yeah, the situation was very similar,” she says. “The protests which we had in the beginning of 2012 were really incredible and huge. We started Pussy Riot when [then-president Dmitry] Medvedev and Putin decided to change places. The show we are bringing starts at that moment.”
The parallels run deeper than just the marches, says Alyokhina. She knows all-too-well what it’s like to try to stand up to a cult-of-personality petty tyrant in a time of shrinking civil rights.
“The story is not about 2012. The situation in the United States looks really, really similar compared to our situation. What we’re going to say is that this is a story about now. We really want people to wake up and to do as much as they can,” she says.
Pussy Riot’s extreme style and music drew an equally extreme reaction, especially in Russia, leading many to assume it was orchestrated purely for shock value. But Alyokhina doesn’t agree. To her and her bandmates, she says, it was an organic process of expressing themselves.
“I don’t know how it looked from outside, but it was just a feeling of life, of freedom,” she says.
The band members were influenced by American riot grrrl bands like Bikini Kill, not only in their brutal sound and feminist lyrics, but also in their bright-colored, art-directed look and theatrical performances. In many ways, Revolution seems like a next logical step for Alyokhina; her collaborators on this project include Belarus Free Theatre’s Kiryl Kanstantsinau, experimental Russian “junk-punk” band Asian Women on the Telephone (AWOTT), director Yury Muravitsky and more.
“It’s a punk manifesto. It’s a mix of music and words and theater,” she says. “I’m a friend of experiment. I don’t want to be stuck in one form of art. Theater for me is a new form, which I really like. I hope everybody will like it, too. We should speak in all languages we have: Music, videos, theater, street protests, everything. We can just try to do and act.”
Pussy Riot Theatre will perform ‘Revolution’ at 8 p.m. on Saturday, March 11 at the Rio Theatre in Santa Cruz. Tickets are $26.50, $40 gold circle, available at Streetlight Records and at pulseproductions.net.
Hugh Jackman has been trapped in the Wolverine character since his star-making debut in the first X-Men movie back in 2000. The franchise has had its ups and downs since then, so when Jackman announced last year that the next Wolverine movie would be his last in the role, who could blame him? The question was: could the filmmakers come up with an exit strategy for their indestructible mutant hero that obeyed the rules of the X-Men mythos and gave Jackman a satisfying send-off?
The answer is yes and no, in Logan. Yes, the storyline is plausible enough (well, as plausible as anything ever is in the X-Men universe). But satisfying? Not so much. Previous franchise films have explored weighty themes like racism, xenophobia, intolerance, and whether or not social outsiders would choose to be “normal” if they could. But Logan is one interrupted chase melodrama from beginning to end, with an endless parade of faceless bad guys to be dispatched in endlessly gruesome ways. (This is the first X-Men movie to get an R rating, and it’s not only for the f-bombs.)
Jackman is as watchable as ever. But in a film almost entirely unburdened by humor or emotional connections—two attributes at which he excels in other movies—his uber-brooding Logan (aka Wolverine) has nowhere to grow.
The new movie was directed and co-scripted by James Mangold, who delivered a shot of adamantium to revive the series with The Wolverine in 2013 (after the fiasco of X-Men Origins: Wolverine). This time out, Mangold seems to think he’s keeping the focus on Logan’s tormented psyche and (often inconvenient) moral decency, mainly by introducing a new little mutant, Laura (Dafne Keen) for him to look after. But the constant, vicious fighting—as Logan faces off against carjackers, a lynch mob, convoys of sinister government ops, and his own genetically engineered doppelganger—leaves little time for further character development.
In the year 2029, Logan is holed up in an abandoned desert water tower on the Tex-Mex border caring for the ailing, elderly Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), attended by the albino mutant Caliban (Stephen Merchant). Mutants have been eradicated, and Logan moonlights driving a limo across the border hoping to save enough to buy a boat and take Professor X out to sea to live out his last days in peace.
But trouble arrives when a Mexican nurse brings them Laura. Grown in a secret clinic in Mexico by shady agents who plan to make a new generation of “more efficient” mutant weapons (by breeding them without human souls), Laura has adamantium claws of her own—and, boy, does she know how to use them.
Soon besieged by an army of evildoers out to nab Laura before Logan can drive her cross-country to join her friends at a sanctuary for new mutant kids in Canada—a place that may only exist in the pages of the X-Men comics the kids all read. This self-referential idea is an interesting subtext, as is the comparison to a sinister corporation raising genetically modified super corn. But like everything else, these themes are overwhelmed by brutal action as Logan and Laura slice and dice their way through the villains.
It would be helpful, story-wise, if they found another way to bond besides shredding bad guys. A moment when they compare nightmares (Laura dreams that “people hurt me,” Logan, that “I hurt people”) is a step in the right direction—but then, the script delivers another platoon of nasty adversaries to be decimated by the family that slays together.
Jackman is up to the task, as usual. But he, the character, and the fans might have wished for the saga to go out with a little less bang, and a lot more heart.
LOGAN
**1/2 (out of four)
With Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart and Dafne Keen. Written by Scott Frank, James Mangold, and Michael Green. Directed by James Mangold. Rated R. 137 minutes.
Update 03/10/17 3:55pm: According to the Catalyst Club website, this show has been cancelled.
How does New Orleans’ Russ Liquid Test sound so futuristic, but also so old-school—“Vintage Future,” as the group’s Russell Scott describes it?
Long answer: Russ Liquid Test’s music is driven by hard-hitting dance beats—electronic, but also organic. The grooves bounce while shooting moody chills down your spine, and while it’s certainly danceable, the subtle complexity of the songwriting merits listening on headphones.
Short answer: aliens.
The subject was first brought up 10 minutes into my phone interview with Scott, when I asked him how he and his creative partner Andrew Block met. That’s when things took an unexpected turn.
“An alien visited me this one time I was in Asheville, North Carolina, and told me that I was supposed to make music with Andrew Block. I met him three months later. So that was pretty trippy,” Scott says. “Every time I tell people that they go, ‘something’s wrong with you.’ I keep saying it. Maybe someone will believe me.”
At first, I thought he was pulling my leg, but he insisted to the point where he had to either be 100 percent serious, or was so committed to his prank that he was willing to seem crazy. Either way, I was on board.
“Vintage Future,” I learned, isn’t just a snappy way to describe Russ Liquid Test’s penchant for combining old-school funk and jazz, and mixing it with cutting-edge, inventive psychedelic electronic sound design. It goes right back to the aliens.
“The aliens from the future came to the present—which would be the vintage of the future—to implant the ideas of futuristic music, like little seeds to influence the future of music. These new beings take a little piece of that back to the past, the vintage part, sprinkle a little bit more of that in. It’s a feedback loop,” Scott explains, not stopping to take a breath. “It’s easier if I could draw a diagram, but I don’t have a piece of paper, and you can’t see through my phone.”
It sounded a lot like Back To The Future, when Marty McFly influenced Chuck Berry by traveling back to 1955 and playing one of Berry’s songs at a school dance, and Berry’s cousin played it for him over the phone. How cool would that be if it were true?
What I can verify is that Scott, who’s previously been a solo electronic musician and a trumpet player and saxophonist in jazz bands, met guitarist Andrew Block while they both toured in electronic/hip-hop artist Gramatik’s band. Block’s history prior to Gramatik was strictly in the realm of live music: jazz, blues, funk. Scott and Block immediately clicked, so much so that Scott moved to New Orleans to work with Block on the Russ Liquid Test project.
Scott handed the phone to Block, who talked with me for a little while.
“There’s so many more things you can do in the electronic genre that you really can’t do in jazz. There’s like a hardcore contingent—that if your jazz doesn’t sound like this, nobody wants to hear it,” Block says. “The thing about playing with Russ is I’m just able to use the language of jazz, but through this filter of electronic music, so that it gets heard by people that maybe wouldn’t necessarily pick up a jazz record.”
As he spoke, all I could think about was aliens. There was something eerie I couldn’t quite put my finger on about the debut Russ Liquid Test EP, which is oddly titled 1984. I asked if the title was a reference to the George Orwell book or the Van Halen record. Scott and Block immediately jumped into an a capella rendition of Van Halen’s “Panama.”
Then Scott told me it was about a potential end of the world that we’re spiraling toward. “I want to take credit for these things, but it’s not me. Somebody told me inside of my brain to name it that. Plus, we had this really sweet sample of this robot chick going ‘1984.’ It just felt right, you know, like the first time you eat a grilled cheese sandwich with a tomato.”
Did I understand correctly? The full scope of the Russ Liquid Test is that aliens from the future were sent to our present to tell Scott and Block to form a band so they could make an album titled 1984 to warn humanity about the apocalypse?
Sort of. “They just presented it as one of the many possible paths that we are on. It’s definitely a possible future somewhere down the line,” Scott explains, somewhat flippantly.
As much as I had a hard time believing time-traveling aliens existed, I didn’t doubt Scott’s warning about the end of the world. Just look around. At least we’ll have good music to dance to in the apocalypse.
INFO: 9 p.m., Mar. 15, Catalyst, 1011 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz. $14/adv, $17/door. 429-4135.
If location is everything, then the newly opened Sotola Bar & Grill already has a tasty advantage. With its wrapped balcony overlooking both the ocean and the Soquel Creek estuary, the new dinner house and lounge is sure to attract a steady stream of summer visitors. But already the new destination—in the site of the former Stockton Bridge Grille—is busy winning local fans, thanks to the seasoned skills of chef Anthony Kresge. The brainchild of locals Ashley and Adam Bernardi, Sotola boasts a gleaming new dining room—attractive furniture, lavish plants, Mediterranean windows—and a separate, spacious bar area.
Katya and I were ready for a serious dinner, and the Sotola menu fit the bill. Farm-to-table is the central theme of this short but exciting menu of new American cuisine. And while the cocktails seem destined to spark excitement, we opted for glasses of La Honda Sauvignon Blanc 2015, filled with grassy citrus and minerals, and a velvety Syrah from Zaca Mesa 2012 ($10 each).
A generous order of frito misto provided plenty of pre-dinner foreplay—calamari, broccoli, zucchini, batter-fried and drizzled with excellent garlicky rouille ($13). But it was the intricate entrees that made the biggest impact. I ordered the evening’s line-caught special yellow tail, which arrived richly aromatic, seared to perfection ($28). Surrounding the fish was a ring of distinctive and spicy chimichurri and a bouquet of golden beets sliced paper-thin. But there was more textural interest, as well. A generous band of earthy wild rice/barley pilaf nestled next to the fish, along with a distinctive salsa of micro-diced pineapple and fresh thyme. The dramatic creation was crowned with a froth of infant sprouts. Yes, it does sound like a lot going on, but it all worked, each sauce and accompaniment flattering the central point—the spectacular piece of fish. Even though pineapple is not my favorite item, I had to admit it made a brilliant flavor note along with the rich yellow tail.
Katya’s incredibly huge pasture-raised New York steak (40-day aged Black Angus weighing in at $38) came with its own opulent array of enhancements. On top were crisp clouds of onion rings, plus a beautiful saute of mushrooms and cipollini dripping the sort of mushroom reduction that beef adores. Under the gorgeous piece of steak—which arrived exactly rare as requested—lay a delicious though mysteriously unwarm layer of potato and spinach gratin. Tiny rosettes of garlic and basil aioli had been piped along one side of the plate—lots of fun to dredge each forkful of beef into. The message was clear: here was a serious dish living up to its serious price tag.
Even in the dimly lit dining room, we enjoyed every bite of our generously portioned entrees, both of which supplied enough high-quality items for another dinner the next night. I admit we ordered the pasture-raised steak just to see what might justify such a hefty price tag. The proof was in every juicy bite. It was easily the best steak I’ve had west of Manhattan.
Tempted as we were by the idea of a flourless chocolate torte called Heaven on Earth, we absolutely couldn’t manage another bite. Next time; the menu’s listing of bouillabaisse linguine studded with fresh local seafood sounds like an excuse for another visit all by itself.
Sotola was packed the evening we went, and given that service fine-tuning is ongoing, I’m betting this attractive labor of love finds a strong clientele of regulars. Kudos to the Bernardis and their ambitious dinner house on the Capitola Esplanade.
Sotola Bar & Grill is open open daily from 11:30 a.m.-10 p.m. 854-2800, sotolabarandgrill.com.
Roberto Petruzzi has dreamed of opening an Italian café for years—having grown up in Rome, he always felt he had a lot to offer Santa Cruz diners. Along with his wife and children, he made that dream a reality on Jan. 2 of this year in the former location of D’Anna’s Deli. The café is open for breakfast and lunch, and includes a variety of offerings: sandwiches, pizza, pasta, pastries, frittatas. But as Petruzzi explained to us, their menu is a work in progress.
Growing up, your family owned a café in Rome. How is this Café aRoma shaped by that?
In the beginning, with the food, with the drinks, I made it like the way I grew up. I’ve been here 32 years. I’ve gotten to know the way people eat here for a long time, what they want. I like the way they eat, too. So now I try to make it the way they like, and the way I grew up. My focaccia where I grew up, we warmed the bread, then we’d press it a little bit. It wasn’t crispy. Now after a month and a half, they wanted it their way, crispy. I liked the way they wanted it. I do it the way they want it. Now I use American cheeses, Italian cheeses, American sausage, Italian sausage. I use all kinds of food.
What about the drinks?
The drinks are a little bit of a challenge for me because when I was doing it in Italy, we didn’t have many choices. We had the basics, like the cappuccino, café latte, café macchiato, espresso, cioccolato. Here you’re doing the mocha, the double latte, the white chocolate, the chai. There’s a lot to remember. I’m getting my coffee from Danesi. It’s good coffee.
What are your breakfast options?
We have sandwiches, burritos, pizza, everything from pastries to cookies. We have focaccia bread if you want it already made in the morning, pizza if you want it. We make basically everything in the morning. If you want a burrito, the one with the sausage, we make it. We are not open for dinner. We want to open for dinner later. We don’t have the right things yet. We want to do it in May, June, you know, summertime. We have a nice patio. It’s a nice outdoor thing. We still need a drinking license for the beer and the wine, then it will be ready. We will add some fish, some meat.
2841 Porter St., Suite B, Soquel, 475-1436, cafearoma.it.
Looking for a terrific Malbec? Then head to Villa del Monte Winery’s tasting room and try the 2013 single-varietal, single-vineyard, 100-percent Malbec from Pedregal Vineyard in San Benito County. Warm weather blesses the Pedregal Vineyard in the Paicines American Viticultural Area (AVA) and helps to create a rich, lush Malbec that is chock-full of red and black fruit, and bursting with flavor.
Gallons of Malbec are imported from carne-loving Argentina, so it’s not surprising that this wine pairs very well with meat. Throw a couple of steaks on the grill and enjoy a locally made Malbec ($34) from Villa del Monte that is deeply concentrated in both color and flavor. Villa del Monte is open only once a month on weekends, but you can try their wines at Shadowbrook’s Wine Wednesday on March 15.
Villa del Monte Winery, 23076 Summit Road, Los Gatos, 408-353-0995 or 888-788-4583. villadelmontewinery.com.
True Olive Connection
Spring is around the corner—the clocks “spring” forward Sunday, March 12—and we tend to turn toward lighter foods, eating less of the heavier stuff we crave in winter, such as meat and starch. My cooking, be it spring, summer, autumn or winter, always involves an abundance of olive oil. Having lived in Greece for nearly 13 years, where olive oil is king, I don’t use anything else. Why use bottled dressing on salads, when all you need is EVOO (extra virgin olive oil) and good balsamic vinegar? Most Greeks would be horrified at some of the sugary-sweet dressings poured on salads. The True Olive Connection carries an impressive assortment of olive oils and balsamic vinegars from all over the world, and you can try them in the store. While you’re there, check out other interesting items they carry, such as gourmet salts, Olivella body-care products and unique gift items. Co-owner Susan Pappas can also custom-make a gift basket. At a recent wedding reception I went to, all of the guests were given small bottles of olive oil and balsamic vinegar—from True Olive Connection—as parting gifts.
True Olive Connection, 106 Lincoln St., Santa Cruz, and 7960 Soquel Drive, Suite C, Aptos. trueoliveconnection.com.
