Chicken Mama is the moniker for local singer-songwriter Kasia Kugay, an SF transplant who was raised on Eastern European and world music. The daughter of Turkish and Polish immigrants, Kugay blends her musical heritage with elements of American jazz and R&B; the resultant folk is unique and intricately crafted, well-suited to Kugay’s deeply emotive voice, which ranges in scope from clear and bright to dramatic and sultry. Influences include Joanna Newsom, Ingrid Michaelson and Bill Withers. Chicken Mama will be performing songs from her recently released EP, The Advocate. True to her earthy aesthetic and naturalist spirit, Kugay recorded the EP in an old redwood tree in Nisene Marks. KATIE SMALL
There’s no shortage of fantastic brass bands in New Orleans, but the Rebirth Brass Band is a favorite among favorites. With deep grooves that don’t quit and rhythms that inspire parade-worthy rump-shaking from even the shyest of audience members, the band holds down the rich tradition of Crescent City funk and soul while its youthful exuberance introduces the sound to new generations. If you need to shake off the cobwebs or forget your worries, this Grammy-winning band will help you get it done. CAT JOHNSON
To lesbians of a certain generation or two, Ferron is a beloved kindred spirit—a master poet telling stories of our shared experiences better than anyone else. But the Canadian singer-songwriter’s fanbase doesn’t end there. Ferron appeals to anyone who finds comfort in embracing life as it is; beauty, struggles and all. Over decades of making music, she’s explored the joys and pain of being an outsider, while creating a space where everyone belongs. I was afraid that last time Ferron came to town might be her final Santa Cruz performance, but, luckily she’s coming back for what promises to be a sing-along celebration of love, diversity and unity. CJ
INFO: 7 p.m. Kuumbwa Jazz, 320-2 Cedar St., Santa Cruz. $27/adv, $32/door. 427-2227.
FRIDAY 3/3
PSYCH-FOLK
GREAT AMERICAN CANYON BAND
“Crash” sounds like a dream. It’s a potent track off Great American Canyon Band’s 2016 LP, Only You Remain. The duo, Paul and Krystal Jean Masson, who are partners in life as well as this band, sing “Don’t let me fall through, as I crash into you” in an almost hypnotic chant. The mood is tranquil yet oddly romantic, a fitting vibe to the twosome’s world-weary take on psych-Americana, with influences pulling equally from ’70s California folk-pop and middle America rustic roots rock. The band hails from Baltimore, but has spent years traveling and calling wherever its members lay their heads home for the night. The eclectic music reflects that. AARON CARNES
Blues-rock collective Birds of Chicago is centered around founding vocalists Allison Russell and JT Nero. The group draws heavily on gospel tradition, producing a country-twang, rock ’n’ roll secular gospel that varies from soaring and joyful to raw melancholy. Power-vocalist Allison Russell’s simmering restraint is deeply refreshing to a landscape scorched by post American Idol vocal gymnastics and over-emoting. The band is touring its sophomore album, Real Midnight, released in mid-February and recorded by Grammy award winner Joe Henry. KS
Chris and Oliver Wood grew up around folk music. With a guitar-playing father and a poet mother, the brothers were never far from the creative impulses that drive American roots music. They grew up to become musicians themselves, with bassist Chris going on to form avant-jazz-funk band Medeski, Martin and Wood, and Oliver playing guitar in bluesman Tinsley Ellis’s touring act, among other things. In 2004, they joined forces with multi-instrumentalist Jano Rix to create the Wood Brothers, a boundary-pushing roots outfit that blends blues, folk and rock to create a sound that’s at once familiar and fresh. CJ
INFO: 7 p.m. Rio Theatre, 1205 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. $28.50. 423-8209.
METAL
RED FANG
Red Fang continuously gets the “stoner metal” label, but for my money, that genre tag usually refers to bands that are aggressively slow. Not so with Red Fang. These guys kick out some head-banging, heavy-blues riffs, and some sweet, soulful vocals. Forget any talk about stoner metal, and call these guys what they really are: kick-ass, fist-pumping rock ’n’ roll. Since the group formed in 2005, that’s what it’s done. Last year, the band released its fourth album, Only Ghosts. It’s got just a little bit more polish than the previous three, but it’s not short on raw power. AC
A brash young innovator accompanying established stars. An acid jazz patriarch introducing a new sound. A producer responsible for albums by stars like Stanley Turrentine, Grover Washington, Jr. and David Sanborn. Hammond B-3 organist Ronnie Foster has ably filled all of these roles over the years, and now he’s an old-school master himself, proving he still has plenty to say. He made his mark with two early-’70s albums for Blue Note, sessions overlooked at the time but widely sampled by hip-hop artists in recent years. He went on to accompany heavyweights like Grant Green, George Benson, and Stanley Clarke. His excellent new trio features drummer Jess Gopen and well-traveled guitarist Jake Langley, who spent five years touring and recording with B3 king Joey DeFrancesco. ANDREW GILBERT
INFO: 7 p.m. Kuumbwa Jazz, 320-2 Cedar St., Santa Cruz. $25/adv, $30/door. 427-2227.
TUESDAY 3/7
FOLK
DAVID FRANCEY
Torn Screen Door, David Francey’s debut record, is a nearly flawless folk record: haunting melodies, with lyrics that perfectly evoke the plight of the working poor and the heartbreak of love. It shouldn’t be too shocking that Francey went out the gate with such a fantastic album—he was 45 when it was released, and these songs had been gestating for decades. If there’s one thing that makes a folk singer great, it’s life experience. Originally from Scotland, he moved to Canada as a teenager, and spent 20 years of his adult life working in construction. Since transitioning to music, he’s become a star in folk circles, but remains relatively unknown to the rest of the world. It’s a shame. AC
A fixture of Bay Area hip-hop since the early ’90s, Andre Nickatina launched his career as Dre Dog, releasing two albums—The New Jim Jones and I Hate You With a Passion—under that moniker. The rapper then changed his name to Andre Nickatina and proceeded to drop numerous albums, including Cocaine Raps, Tears of a Clown and Daiquiri Factory: Cocaine Raps, Vol. 2, that have secured his place as a Bay Area legend. On March 11, Nickatina heads back to Santa Cruz for his annual birthday bash.
INFO: 9 p.m. on Saturday, March 11. Catalyst, 1011 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz. $23/adv, $27/door. 423-1338. WANT TO GO? Go to santacruz.com/giveaways before 11 a.m. on Monday, March 6 to find out how you could win a pair of tickets to the show.
The original lineup of Isaac and the Haze didn’t have anyone named Isaac in the band—then again, it wasn’t called Isaac and the Haze yet, either. There was a lot about the band that was very different in those early days.
In its earliest, pre-gig stages, it was a throwback deep-cuts soul cover band. Then Isaac Tayrien joined the band as the lead singer, and by the time the band booked its first show as Isaac and the Haze, it had already scrapped the old soul sound for modern R&B, pop and hip-hop hits. The response has been great.
“We wanted to play what the crowd wants to hear. What people want to hear are popular songs that get people out of their chairs and on the dance floor,” says bassist Kevin Enos. “We do some Michael [Jackson], some Prince and stuff, really not going further back than that.”
They sometimes even do straight-up rap tunes—ones that have a soulful sound—or they’ll mash together a popular rap song with the original soul song they are sampling (Like Kendrick Lamar’s “I” which samples the Isley Brothers’ “Who’s That Lady”). That way, they can squeeze just a little bit of the old soul music into their set. This all started when they heard the song “Feel Right” by Mark Ronson, which features rapping by Mystikal. Enos volunteered to do the rapping.
“None of us had rapped before, other than some karaoke. I’ve been a fan of hip-hop since the ’90s. I thought I’d give it a try, and it sounded good,” Enos says.
INFO: 9 p.m. Friday, March 3. Crow’s Nest, 2218 East Cliff Drive, Santa Cruz. $6. 476-4560.
A 46,000-gallon rainwater tank made entirely of stainless steel hides behind a grove of oak trees atop the highest slope on John Haskins’ 5-acre Corralitos property. If all goes according to plan, that tank and two others will make the Haskins home water-neutral, which is why he wanted to install it after so many dry years.
This winter’s historically high rain levels, however, filled up Haskins’ new rainwater storage system quickly, and have left it consistently full. Still, these storms only reassure Haskins that he’s made a good investment as he resists temptation to call the five-year California drought over—no matter what the meteorologists say.
“Nobody predicted all this rain,” he says, noting that last year’s El Niño winter was slated to bring massive levels of rainfall to California, and didn’t. And this season, a La Niña year, was supposed to be rather dry. “Weather patterns are only becoming more unpredictable.”
The tank is 27 feet in diameter, and holds enough rainwaterto supply his family of four with the water they need year-round, so long as they remain frugal with their usage and cut back on irrigation during the summer.
The Haskinses hope to eliminate their impact on Santa Cruz County’s groundwater, which has been under stress from over-pumping since the 1950s.
Last year, the family used an average of 600 gallons of water per day during the summer months and 200 gallons per day during the winter, including household use, drinking water, irrigation, and filling their living swimming pool—a chemical-free alternative to the backyard amenity.
Haskins’ property is still connected to a well, which used to be the home’s primary source of water before the rainwater catchment system was built. And with the simple flip of a lever, Haskins can still draw from the well just as easily as before.
But in theory, if the Haskinses follow through with their plan to cut back on summer water use, they should have enough rainwater in the tank to shut off flow from the well year-round, something that would help out their many neighbors.
Water in the Pajaro Valley aquifer below—the Aromas Basin—has fallen well below sea level due to decades of over-pumping, causing seawater intrusion along the coast, which could permanently contaminate the groundwater source.
Haskins almost certainly won’t ever experience seawater intrusion on his property in Corralitos, but Chris Coburn, executive director of the Resource Conservation District of Santa Cruz County (RCD), says that drawing from any groundwater source in the county contributes to the overdraft problem. So by going off the water grid with his project, Coburn says Haskins has provided an “excellent example of what individual homeowners can do to help.”
Jack Schultz, a civil engineer with experience on what he calls “unconventional projects,” designed Haskins’ system—his second rainwater system in Santa Cruz County. Schultz hopes his design will inspire other locals to consider curbing their groundwater use by catching rainwater.
Schultz built solar water heaters beginning in 1974 with his company, Solar Utilities, long before home solar use became popular in the United States. Since then, he’s worked on a variety of projects—from protecting creek banks from erosion in Scotts Valley and Aptos with redwood-log cribbing to repairing water systems damaged in Sumatra after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami.
Schultz says rainwater systems designed for drinking water purposes are rare in Santa Cruz County, in part because the regulatory codes do not normally allow for them. He’s designed Haskins’ system to meet EPA requirements for water purification, which he hopes will eventually be approved for permitting in Santa Cruz County.
Regardless, the county still granted a permit to Haskins’ storage tank because his property has access to a well, and the new disinfection system is considered an addition, not the primary source of the home’s drinking water.
Schultz’s design uses three tanks, allowing for maximum capacity and purification. Rainwater that falls on Haskins’ roof runs downhill into a transfer tank and then passes through a series of filters, as it is pumped back uphill to storage and has all of the pollutants removed along the way.
The large storage tank is high on the property’s slope, allowing gravity to send the water back down to a supply tank connected directly to the home’s water pipes. On its way to the domestic supply tank, the rainwater goes through the final stages of its disinfection process.
Water districts typically disinfect municipal water with filters and chlorine, which protects against any accidental contaminants. Because Schultz’s design doesn’t use chlorine, its water runs through ultraviolet light and back into the supply tank, completely re-purifying it, about once a day.
The storage tank is also linked to a fire hydrant, and home use shuts off if the water level goes below 5,000 gallons, which gives the fire department an emergency supply in the event of a fire.
Schultz—whose son Jozseph owns India Joze restaurant in downtown Santa Cruz—thinks of Haskins as a pioneer in sustainable living, especially because the project benefits the whole basin, more than it does his own family.
Grounded Solutions
Another way to ease the groundwater problem is with aquifer recharge.
In October of last year, the Pajaro Valley Water District teamed up with the RCD and Andy Fisher, a professor of hydrogeology at UCSC, to launch their Recharge Net Metering program, the most recent step in a process Fisher has studied for years. The program provides financial incentive for landowners willing to retrofit their property to direct rainwater into the ground.
The five-year pilot program is the first of its kind in California, and aims to attract landowners whose properties are particularly favorable to groundwater recharge.
Qualifying landowners will provide upward of 100 acre-feet of water infiltration per year—roughly 32,600,000 gallons—and will receive a rebate from the district based on the amount they contribute. The program aims to serve as a model for future programs across the state of California.
The Scotts Valley Water District (SVWD) unveiled a groundwater strategy of its own last month, when it announced a recharge system at the Scotts Valley Transit Center.
Construction crews replaced portions of the concrete parking lot with permeable surfaces, allowing rainwater to percolate back into the Santa Margarita Aquifer, which provides drinking water to all of SVWD’s roughly 11,000 customers.
“The system is designed to add 1 to 1.5 million gallons of water to the Santa Margarita Aquifer on an average wet year,” says David McNair, the district’s operations manager who oversaw the recharge project. Construction is almost complete at the Scotts Valley Transit Center parking lot, and percolation into the groundwater store has already begun. “We’ll be monitoring it closely to see exactly how productive it will be.”
The recent deluge of rain has filled our lakes and rivers, but has the sun-scarce streak of weather had an opposite influence on our bodies’ levels of vitamin D? Also known as the “sunshine vitamin,” because it’s produced via UV exposure on the skin, vitamin D is lacking in much of the U.S population.
“Vitamin D deficiency is now recognized as a pandemic,” said Dr. Michael Holick, one of the country’s leading vitamin D researchers, in a 2008 article published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. More recently, a 2011 study published in the journal Nutrition Research found that 42 percent of all Americans were deficient. Symptoms of deficiency vary and are nonspecific, including muscle weakness, bone pain, fatigue, and difficulty thinking clearly. The best way to check for a deficiency is by getting a blood test.
Since vitamin D is involved in many biological processes throughout the body—some health professionals believe it should actually be classified as a hormone—deficiency can have vast and serious health impacts. Because it promotes calcium absorption in the gut and helps maintain adequate levels in the blood, vitamin D’s most commonly accepted health impact is on bone health and associated diseases like osteoporosis.
But emerging evidence is showing that it can affect cancer risk as well. According to an article published on the National Institute of Health’s website, “Strong biological and mechanistic bases indicate that vitamin D plays a role in the prevention of colon, prostate, and breast cancers.” It is also thought to be linked to cardiovascular disease because it’s involved in immune function and reducing inflammation. The article also states that vitamin D might play a role in both the treatment and prevention of conditions like type 1 and 2 diabetes, glucose intolerance, and high blood pressure.
New evidence published in February 2017 in the journal The BMJ showed that vitamin D supplementation protected against acute respiratory infections like colds and the flu. These two conditions are not only most common in winter and spring, when vitamin D levels are usually at their lowest, but are also a leading cause of doctor visits and days off work. Said the study’s lead author, “This major collaborative research effort has yielded the first definitive evidence that vitamin D really does protect against respiratory infections.” One explanation for this effect is that vitamin D increases levels of natural antibiotic-like substances in the lungs.
Vitamin D may also play a crucial role in psychological health and well-being through its impact on serotonin. Often thought of as the “feel good” neurotransmitter, it is implicated in long-term love and companionship as well as being acted on by drugs like antidepressants, LSD, MDMA, and psilocybin. A 2015 article published in the FASEB Journal proposed a direct link between not only vitamin D, but also marine-based omega-3 fatty acids, and serotonin synthesis, release, and function in the brain. The study estimated that around 70 percent of the U.S. population has inadequate levels of vitamin D and that optimizing intake “… may help prevent and modulate the severity of brain dysfunction.”
Being that vitamin D appears so crucial to both mental and physical well-being and that so many of us aren’t getting enough of it, what do we do? For one, don’t shun the sun. A little goes a long way: Vitamin D researchers generally recommend around 15 minutes of direct unprotected sunlight two to three times a week for sufficient vitamin D production. But conditions like cloud cover, shade, and pollution can reduce UV light by around 50 percent and it does not penetrate glass. And the more melanin that’s in the skin, the less UV light that gets through, meaning that darker-skinned people may need even more sun exposure in order to meet their needs. But it can also be obtained through the diet, although its natural sources are few, including fish liver oil, fatty fish like salmon and tuna, as well as cheese and egg yolks. The best vegan source of vitamin D is mushrooms, but many foods like breakfast cereals, orange juice, milk, and yogurt are fortified with it, and supplements are also widely available.
Most of us know the story of Edward VIII, the popular King of England in 1936 who gave up his throne for love. When his proposal to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson was deemed unsuitable and forbidden by the British government, he abdicated after one year of his reign, famously declaring he could not rule “without the woman I love.”
A decade later, another “scandalous” royal marriage shocked the British Parliament, as well as its African protectorate, the Kingdom of Botswana. A young African king-to-be also chose an “unsuitable” bride, who was not only a commoner, and a foreigner, but the wrong color—a white Englishwoman. Their story, less well-known than Edward’s, is told in A United Kingdom, a timely love story for this historical moment, dealing as it does with issues of race, immigration, persistence, and revolution.
The film was directed by Anglo-African filmmaker Amma Asante; her last movie, Belle, told the story of the abolition of slavery in the British West Indian colonies through the eyes of a young black woman raised in gentility by her aristocratic English grandfather. In A United Kingdom, a similar story of political liberation—as Botswana slips out of the yoke of British colonialism—is made personal through the experiences of a protagonist with a foot in both worlds.
We first meet Seretse Khama (David Oyelowo), heir to the Kingdom of Botswana, as a university student in postwar London in 1947. The spirit of independence is in the air as Britain has just ceded its colonial rule of India. Seretse is discussing politics with his fellow African students at a dance one night when he meets Ruth Williams (Rosamund Pike), who types documents at a government agency. They talk about jazz: she says she doesn’t trust Englishmen to play it. That night she goes home and looks up Botswana on a map. Next morning, he sends her a Louis Armstrong record. A romance begins.
Their relationship grows, until Seretse receives word from his uncle, acting as regent on his behalf, that it’s time to come home and assume leadership of his people. Unwilling to leave Ruth behind, he proposes marriage, and she accepts. The highest-ranking British diplomat posted to Botswana, Alistair Canning (played to oily perfection by Jack Davenport) quickly informs them the marriage is off, but Seretse and Ruth refuse to comply, and he takes her home to his kingdom.
The Brits are especially worried that Seretse’s mixed-race marriage will sour relations with their important ally, South Africa, which is just beginning to roll out apartheid, its vile program of separating the races. (“Have you no shame?” sneers Canning to Ruth.) Neither are the Africans crazy about the new white queen they consider a foreign interloper. “Were you not a king, would she even look at you?” snipes Seretse’s uncle (Vusi Kunene).
But Seretse pleads his case to the council of which he is chief, challenging his people not to judge his wife by the color of her skin—and they approve the union. Ruth, meanwhile, sets out to earn the respect of the tribal women, including Seretse’s disapproving mother, and his sister, Naledi (the fiercely beautiful Terry Pheto), who gradually becomes Ruth’s supporter and mentor.
Seretse and Ruth face many more obstacles—a period of forced separation, the looming specter of apartheid, and the evil machinations of British authorities less interested in governing Botswana than in stealing her resources. It’s a large canvas, but director Asante keeps it all comprehensible by maintaining her focus on the couple at its center. It helps that Oyelowo (who also played Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma) and Pike infuse their roles with a natural, easy rapport based on humor and affection that keeps us rooting for them.
Asante sometimes resorts to standard-issue storytelling moments—the ridiculous pomp of a British official attempting to take over leadership of the council; women rallying around Ruth with a song of admiration. But these moments are effective because the story is so compelling. And so is the prevailing idea that an individual, sticking to his or her principles, is the first step toward effective change.
A UNITED KINGDOM
*** (out of four)
With David Oyelowo, Rosamund Pike, Jack Davenport, and Tom Felton. Written by Guy Hibbert. Directed by Amma Asante. A Fox Searchlight release. Rated PG-13. 111 minutes.
As Santa Cruz-based Living Cultures Superfoods founder Arne Heissel explains the meticulous journey he and his wife Constanze have endured to create their Proven Probiotic Coconut Yogurt, I think to myself: leave it to the Swiss.
This yogurt is a powerhouse, a healing superfood packed with probiotics, aka living cultures that support a healthy microbiome and prebiotics, which are food for probiotics. The Heissels spent months sourcing pure coconut without shelf-stabilizing additives, which they fermented with scientifically proven strains of good gut bacteria, keeping a critical eye on taste and texture.
The result of their effort is a blend that he says, “Gives all the same benefits of a high-quality supplement in a real food.” Plus it’s free of dairy, additives, stabilizers, sweeteners, or anything else anyone may want to avoid.
But, as Heissel notes, none of this would matter if it wasn’t delicious. And it is. It’s so good. I can’t stop thinking about dipping my spoon into that luxurious, coconut-y goodness. With the thick creaminess and gentle tang of Greek yogurt and the sweet fruitiness of coconut, it’s far yummier than cow’s milk yogurt. It’s the best yogurt I’ve ever had.
Easy to love on its own, it’s also great sprinkled with cocoa nibs or fresh fruit. Heissel says some customers wait a week or so for the yogurt to naturally get tangier, and then use it like sour cream. “We’re always inspired by the creativity of how our customers use our product,” he says with a smile. Just don’t heat it up—doing so would kill the living cultures.
More than 70 percent of our immune system is in the gut, and consuming a variety of probiotic bacteria strains, like those occurring naturally in fermented foods, has been proven in multiple scientific studies to support overall health. What sets this coconut yogurt apart is that from the thousands of bacteria strains found in fermented foods, it includes only the highest quality of probiotic strains with the most proven results. While the $22 for 16 oz. price tag will shock some, Heissel insists that because just 2 oz. is enough to experience gut health support, it’s worth the nutritive value. As he puts it, “It’s either an expensive yogurt or an affordable supplement.”
A tasting will be held at Westside New Leaf on Sunday, March 4 from 2 to 5 p.m. Available at Staff of Life and Westside and Felton New Leaf Markets.
Located in Redwood City, the gem that is La Honda Winery is well worth a visit. Often called “a best-kept secret,” whose clients love to surprise their guests with “uniquely charming atmosphere and delicious artisan wines,” it’s only open to the public on certain dates, as the facility is used mostly for private and corporate parties, team building, charity events, wine tastings, cooking parties, winemaker dinners, and so on. Owner and general manager David Page oversees La Honda Winery and its 50 private estate vineyards between Hillsborough and Los Gatos.
One of La Honda’s artisan wines is the 2015 Santa Cruz Mountains Sauvignon Blanc. La Honda’s winemaker, Colin McNany, got everything right in this hand-nurtured wine with delectable aromas of passionfruit, papaya, star fruit, and melon—and its citrus fruit and floral notes combine for an enticingly crisp and dry wine. On the palate, the wine has a full impact and clean fruit purity balanced by a slight minerality, says McNany, adding that this wine should be drunk now as it’s not meant for aging.
Rounding up the team at La Honda are Thayer Dunwoody, vineyard manager, and Ken Wornick, vineyard consultant, who I first met at the long-gone Vinocruz wine shop nearly a decade ago.
La Honda wines are available all over, including local New Leaf stores, Whole Foods, The Fish Lady in Soquel, Deluxe Foods in Aptos, and at restaurants such as Café Mare and Café Cruz. I bought this Sauvignon Blanc at the Summit Store in Los Gatos for about $16.
The next date La Honda is open to the public is March 18, so put that date on your calendar if you want to pay this fun place a visit. It’s a small, fast-growing winery that has won “double golds and gold galore” from the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition. They are also members of the Santa Cruz Mountains Winegrowers Association and participate in Passport events. The next Passport is April 15, but check La Honda’s website for info.
La Honda Winery is open the third Saturday of every month from noon to 4 p.m. and for special events. Located at 2645 Fair Oaks Ave., Redwood City. 650-366-4104, lahondawinery.com.
One of my favorite characters is a book detective named Thursday Next, the star of a series by the wickedly funny British writer Jasper Fforde. Thursday Next can jump right into the world of a book, meet the characters face to face and even change the plot.
On Nov. 9, we all woke up to find that we had jumped inside a book, and the clocks had finally struck 13. Reality as we knew it had shifted on its axis, and we were living in a garish comic-book version of George Orwell’s masterpiece of a novel, 1984. Only if we overcame our shock and revulsion and came to terms with the specter of a petty, petulant Big Brother holding sway over our lives could we possibly aspire to change the plot of this nightmare story.
Months later, most of us continue to play catch-up, still baffled and demoralized by the inescapable feeling that our reality has been hijacked, bracing for a long struggle of fighting for our beliefs, and opposing bigotry and authoritarianism. The problem is, we’re being attacked where we live. It’s like being in a science-fiction movie where a sinister force invades us through the very circuitry of our consciousness. As a formerroving foreign correspondent for wired.com, it hit me during the campaign that the Trump style is like what we call a denial-of-service hack; we are bombarded with so many data points, so much strain on the attention span—many of them bewilderingly loony—that sooner or later we’re worn down and slump into mere anger and thirst for vengeance. This is not a way to steel ourselves for what’s ahead. The morose, life-hating worldview of the reality TV curiosity in the White House cannot be enforced on the rest of us, not without a good fight. We need to keep smiling. We need to keep laughing and keep our sense of wonder and amazement alive. We need to challenge ourselves not to be smug, and to put the current assault on decency in the larger context of history.
Readers have been flocking to Orwell since the election. In fact, the 1949 novel reached No. 1 in January at Amazon and was sold out at bookstores across the country. Top writers checked in with ruminations on the book’s relevance.
We do that through protest, and through support for fierce voices like new U.S. Senator Kamala Harris, but we also have to find more playful, creative ways to arrive at a deeper understanding of the bewilderment of our time. Back in the worst days of the George W. Bush presidency, former Bookshop Santa Cruz owner Neal Coonerty had the brilliant idea of a “Bush Countdown Clock” that sold like hotcakes, a great example of outrage with a smile. His daughter Casey Coonerty Protti, who now owns Bookshop, is carrying on the tradition with a Trump Countdown Clock that marks the days until his term expires.
Paging Resistance
In the meantime, why not use a public reading of the book we seem to have found ourselves in as a form of protest? That is what we’ll be up to at Bookshop on Thursday, March 2, staging a marathon reading of 1984, starting at 10 a.m. Three of us per hour will read aloud, from the first page to the last—a diverse group that includes Rabbi Paula Marcus and Reverend Deborah Johnson; local writers like Laurie R. King, Micah Perks, Thad Nodine and Karen Joy Fowler; Mayor Cynthia Chase; and prominent local journalists Wallace Baine of the Sentinel and Steve Palopoli of Good Times.
By page 10 we’ve already moved well beyond familiar tropes like “newspeak” (here’s to you, Kellyanne Conway) and “ignorance is strength” to a vivid scene involving something called the Two Minutes Hate.
Since the reading was my idea, I’ve been given the honor of kicking it off with the first 20 minutes, so I’ll crack open my copy of the novel and read aloud the amazing opening:
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.”
Reading those words now, I feel the cold shudder of recognition of Orwell almost single-handedly establishing the now thriving genre of dystopianism. He’d authored many great books, from Down and Out in Paris and London to Homage to Catalonia to Animal Farm, but it was 1984 that vaulted his name to another realm. That was the book that gave us the adjective Orwellian, which according to The New York Times is far and away the most popular adjective formed from an author’s name, though it has become a word people use to mean many things. Still, the definition in that Times article, back in June 2003, seems to hold sway: “‘Orwellian’ reduces Orwell’s palette to a single shade of noir. It brings to mind only sordid regimes of surveillance and thought control and the distortions of language that make them possible.”
Readers have been flocking to Orwell since the election. In fact, the 1949 novel reached No. 1 in January at Amazon and was sold out at bookstores across the country. Top writers checked in with ruminations on the book’s relevance. “Trump’s lies, and his urge to tell them, are pure Big Brother crude, however oafish their articulation,” Adam Gopnik wrote in the New Yorker magazine. “The blind, blatant disregard for truth is offered without even the sugar-façade of sweetness of temper or equableness or entertainment—offered not with a sheen of condescending consensus but in an ancient tone of rage, vanity, and vengeance.”
There are dangers in turning to Orwell’s famous novel for relief or grounding. No book could have predicted Trump, and no book can keep pace with his incessant need to shock everyone by saying or doing something stupid and offensive almost every day, so long as it gets him more attention, but the book does offer an uncanny road map to Trumpism. For example, by page 10 we’ve already moved well beyond familiar tropes like “newspeak” (here’s to you, Kellyanne Conway) and “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH” to a vivid scene involving something called the Two Minutes Hate:
“The next moment a hideous, grinding screech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s neck. The Hate had started.”
Minus the sound effects, that sounds an awful lot like all-too-many Donald Trump tweets: The Hate has started! Only now our attention spans are shorter, so it’s more like the Twenty Seconds Hate.
It somehow helps, in swatting away the perpetual droning annoyance of Trump’s antics, to realize that even writing in ravaged post-World War II England, it was not that hard to speculate that to move people, demagogues resort to manipulation of reality and promiscuous provocation of strong emotion. Orwell fills the book with this and other creepy insights.
“In all my years of bookselling, I’ve rarely seen a classic make such an impact so many years later,” says Casey Coonerty Protti. “If there is one silver lining, it might be that people across generations—those who already read the book or never got around to it—are discovering how the timelessness of storytelling sometimes allows us to feel and understand a greater truth than what you can get from scanning headlines in today’s media.”
Orwell was a great writer of nonfiction and essays, so much so that he was a beacon to generations of young journalists, including people like Hendrik Hertzberg, one-time editor of the New Republic, who for years wrote remarkably clear-minded political commentary for the New Yorker. But 1984 is much more than merely a novel of ideas, like, say, Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia—which imagined Northern California, Oregon and Washington forming an ecological utopia, and was cheerfully acknowledged by its Berkeley-based author to be more speculative-essay-as-fiction than three-dimensional storytelling. Orwell’s characters in 1984 come alive. We see them breathe, we see them develop, we feel them as human presences straining to come to terms with impossible demands, above all central character Winston Smith striving desperately to remain human.
“He stepped across the room. There was a memory hole in the opposite wall. O’Brien lifted the grating. Unseen, the frail slip of paper was whirling away on the current of warm air; it was vanishing in a flash of flame. O’Brien turned away from the wall.
“Ashes,” he said. “Not even identifiable ashes. Dust. It does not exist. It never existed.”
“But it did exist! It does exist! It exists in memory. I remember it. You remember it.”
“I do not remember it,” said O’Brien.
Winston’s heart sank. That was doublethink. He had a feeling of deadly helplessness.”
Because Winston Smith feels alive to us, the fusion of personal and political is perfect and haunting. Those of us who find ourselves grappling in Trump’s dystopian 2017 America with “deadly helplessness” know Winston Smith’s dread as we never knew it before.
And when we read the Party slogan “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past,” we know exactly what it means as we never could have before, because that is the nature of the Trumpian experiment, not only to attempt to wipe out decency and the values that animated the Founders’ experiment of conceiving a land on the principle that “all men are created equal,” but to wipe out even the memory of a time when we could attempt to believe in those core values without letting the siren song of avarice and cheap personal ambition trump all else. Read 1984 now—with us at Bookshop or on your own—and weep, and then smile through the tears as the book enables you to remember.
And keep in mind that a lesson of this year is: It could always get worse. As Coonerty Protti put it: “We can only hope the surge of interest in 1984 is not followed up with a resurgence of Lord of the Flies.”
Steve Kettmann is the co-director, along with Sarah Ringler, of the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods writers’ retreat center in Soquel, which offers weeklong writing residences and other programs in support of writers. wellstoneredwoods.org. Steve is the author or co-author of nine books, including four New York Times bestsellers, and a regular contributor to the New York Times andnewyorker.com.
‘1984’ Marathon Reading
The live reading of George Orwell’s ‘1984’ will be held Thursday, March 2, at Bookshop Santa Cruz from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. The novel will be read aloud from start to finish, 20 minutes per guest speaker. Free.
“I think we’re all aliens and we need to let the aliens in.”
Mike McCarthy
Santa Cruz
Bicycles
“I think it’s more complicated than most people treat it … and it makes some people seem like haters when they are just concerned about security.”
Anne Breiley
Santa Cruz
Bookseller
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