Did you know that crows can remember human faces? Birds are astonishingly intelligent, and according to new research some are even more so than primates and humans! This Wednesday, April 12, award-winning science writer Jennifer Ackerman presents her latest work The Genius of Birds for a look into the cutting-edge frontiers of research and the exceptional talents of our winged neighbors. Ackerman’s book immerses readers in the unique science of ornithology with a surprising look into the inner life of birds through a mixture of travelogue and scientific investigation.
INFO: 7-8 p.m. Wednesday, April 12. Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz. 423-0900. Free.
Art Seen
‘Hall of Fashion’ Runway Show
Take a seat and enjoy the latest local creations as they (and their wearers) promenade the catwalk at R. Blitzer Gallery this Saturday, April 8—from wearable art pieces to cutting-edge hand-made garments and concept-driven wearables. “Hall of Fashion” is the latest from Pivot: The Art of Fashion, which showcases the work of local designers such as fan favorites I.B.Bayo, Ellen Brook, Kathleen Crocetti, Rachel Riot, Rose Sellery and so many more. This year, 14-year-old high school freshman Adam Wormhoudt, winner of the Pivot Visionary Award, will join their ranks with his latest creations. This runway show coincides with the R. Blitzer Gallery’s “Fiber Selections: Shared Dimensions.”
For many veterans, transitioning back to civilian life is the single biggest challenge they will face. That’s why the Veterans Board of Trustees, United Veterans Council and Veterans Services Office have teamed up with other local organizations to present their first veterans job fair. Held by professionals who understand how to translate a DD-214 to civilian work experience, the fair will offer guidance and resources to veterans from all backgrounds. There will also be a resume workshop on April 4 and a mock-interview on April 5 at the Veterans Memorial Building to improve interview presentations. Twenty employers will be present at the fair, which is open to all vets, their friends and family.
INFO: 1-4 p.m. Veterans Memorial Building, 846 Front St., Santa Cruz. Free.
Many people living with Parkinson’s Disease suffer from weak or quiet speech because of the disease’s affect on the muscles of the face, mouth and throat. In order to strengthen those muscles, Santa Cruz Cruz County offers an ongoing singing group for people with Parkinson’s and their caregivers. The group is usually self-led, cooperatively supported by the St. John’s Parkinson’s project and Ease PD Inc., and made up of people who enjoy singing a mixture of musical styles together every Thursday.
INFO: 1-2:30 p.m. Episcopal Church of St. John the Baptist, 125 Canterbury Drive, Aptos. easepd.org/singing. Free.
Ever wanted to be one of those people who whips out a cool trick at a party and wows everyone with their sleight of hand? How about juggling with not only your hands, but with your feet as well? Now is your chance to hone those Cirque du Soleil skills with the ninth annual juggling convention at UC Santa Cruz. Free workshops will run all weekend long, featuring all sorts of circus arts for various skill levels in addition to the Saturday night gala with a host of juggling masters.
INFO: 4 p.m. OPERS UCSC 1156 High St., Santa Cruz. 360-820-2306. $10.
“My husband used to drink and then he’d come home and throw me against the wall and choke me—all this in front of our seven-year-old while he was fussing around with the lady across the street,” says Paula Smith, 67. “He’d say ‘This is all your fault that I’m doing all these things’ … it got to the point where I couldn’t do it anymore.”
The abuse lasted for about three years before Smith left. At the time, Smith thought she was pregnant with her second child but after irregular symptoms sent her to the hospital, the doctors told her it was a molar pregnancy—tissue that would normally grow into a fetus instead becomes an abnormal growth—that would have to be treated with chemotherapy. She was on food stamps, couldn’t work because of the chemo, didn’t have medical insurance, and couldn’t afford the doctors. The divorce took Smith’s money, her house, and for two years she lived in one room with her daughter. When the court finally settled, she was awarded $100 a month for spousal support.
“When I met Carmel Jud,” she says, “I had lost everything.”
Jud’s organization, Rising International, changed Smith’s life, and since its inception in 2002 has changed thousands more.
WOMEN’S UPRISING Josephine Ngirababyeyi stands (top left corner) with the Azizi Life basket weavers in Rwanda. PHOTO: MARBLERYE PHOTOGRAPHY 2013
Rising is a locally based nonprofit that connects women in high-risk environments across 26 countries with underemployed women in Santa Cruz, Monterey and the Bay Area. It’s a simple model: Rising satellite groups train women all over the globe in a craft to raise them out of poverty, human trafficking, sexual slavery and other unsafe situations. The baskets, dolls, jewelry and other handmade items are then sent to the U.S. and sold at “home parties”—popularized by companies like Tupperware—by women here like Smith who are struggling to find a stable income.
“If a woman in Afghanistan sews a beautiful purse, we buy that purse from her, she uses that income to impact some profound change in her life,” says Jud. “Then we’ve trained a woman in Santa Cruz in a homeless shelter to run her own home party business, she sells the purse for that woman in Afghanistan, she earns 20 percent, and she uses that money to move out of the homeless shelter.”
Jud estimates that there are about 4,500 women around the world benefitting from their involvement with Rising International.
“When we take into account their children and other family members, there are usually at least five family members benefiting from that income,” says Jud. “Most women that we help are widows, or the men are absent. The women’s income is the only source of income.”
About 160 local women, some referred from homeless shelters, have gone through the Rising training to start their own home party small business. When signing, they’re required to purchase a few items so that they have made an investment in their business, says Jud, and if they don’t have the funds it comes out of their commissions. It’s self-empowerment, but it’s also about building support, says Jud.
“Imagine you’re surviving some crisis and you find yourself in shelter,” says Jud, “Your social network has changed, it’s hard to get out and meet people who could open some doors.”
The average home party and pop up event can bring in $1,000 with the holidays peaking around $2,000. Of that money, 25 percent goes to local representatives, 25 percent goes to the global artisans who make the items (normally they would make about 1 percent in a sweatshop, according to Jud), 15 percent goes to training representatives, another 15 to shipping, customs, exchange, and the last 10 percent goes toward administration and fundraising costs.
When Smith started at Rising she was in the office working part time, learning QuickBooks and the bookkeeping ropes. Within three months, Smith had made $1,500—enough to make a new life possible. Nowadays Smith works as a bus driver for UCSC and takes on Rising jobs when she wants to. Smith can bring in $3,000 in commissionable sales if she works it right, she says.
Last year, Smith increased her income by 163 percent, she says. She’s also the top-selling Rising representative.
Smith tells the story of her domestic abuse, chemotherapy, and everything in between, with a lightness of a woman who’s reached the other side.
“I never thought that I could get in there and even help other women. I was in dire straits myself, I was having so much trouble,” Smith says. “I love telling about the women [artisans] and the success they have. We want to know how it’s empowered them and this has empowered me to talk about these women. At first I was embarrassed to talk about myself, but Carmel helped me with that and now I don’t mind. I’m not going back to that situation ever again in my life.”
MANY HANDS
When Jud hosted her first home party in May 2002 in her Soquel home, she was just beginning to learn about the plight of women in high-risk areas.
“I was born and raised in Santa Cruz, and I wasn’t at all very globally minded, I didn’t get to travel very much, so I just had no idea that we had these sorts of things happen against women in our world,” she admits.
Jud first launched the preliminary group after learning how women were being treated under Taliban rule in post-9/11 Afghanistan.
HEALING HANDS In the wake of genocide, Rwandans have found it healing to focus on commonalities. Here, Josephine Ngirababyeyi, center, weaves baskets with women from different backgrounds through Rising International’s partner group, Azizi Life. PHOTO: COURTESY OF CHRISTI WHITEKETTLE
Fifteen years later, Rising has an extensive global network, branching together organizations in the “worst countries to live as a woman,” says Jud. Approximately 10,000 people a year attend Rising events in the U.S. alone, says Jud—that’s 10,000 people educated on the plight of women in these regions.
According to the IRS, the group was the first to try the home party model for a social cause.
And they’re only using the best parts of the Avon model, Jud clarifies, not the multi-level marketing methods or binding recruitment tactics.
Although their team is small, says Jud, the direct-selling model has proven successful in mobilizing all participants.
“I have to say I don’t really clearly understand how we even exist, because we don’t have steady funding. It’s just volunteers who are totally driven by the cause,” she laughs.
The goal, she says, it to get even just a fraction of the number of people who attend Avon and other home parties to a Rising event. Numbers like that (6.4 million women sold $10 billion of Avon products in 2013) could change the course of global poverty, says Jud.
The stories of women turning their lives around are countless, says Jud. In Afghanistan, a woman was forced to sell her children out of poverty and was able to buy them back after working with a Rising satellite group making dolls. After escaping the brothels of Calcutta, a girl named Priyanka was able to raise money through jewelry making to buy her mother out of prostitution.
Susanna Camperos, 27, was able to move her family out of the eastside of Salinas where her brother was killed in a gang-related murder in 2007, to a safer part of town. Camperos was in high school when she started and the living wage transformed her life, she says. Now working for Kaiser Permanente in Sacramento, Camperos says that Rising has made it possible for her to help send necessities to family back in Mexico.
THINKING LOCALLY, ACTING GLOBALLY
Jud was first inspired by news reports about women in Afghanistan, so she started volunteering for an offshoot of the Feminist Majority Foundation, selling handcrafted goods made by Afghan women fleeing the conflict, which was founded by Mavis Leno, Jay Leno’s wife. Jud was tabling at an event in Palo Alto when an Afghan woman, Nadia Hashimi—now a Rising board member—recognized the handcrafted items on display. Hashimi put Jud in touch with her mother, who was still living in Kabul, risking her life to run an underground school for girls in the Taliban-controlled city.
Rising’s expansion to other countries grew organically after that—interest among members was increasing, says Jud, so she started reaching out to make connections in other countries.
DRIVE ON After surviving domestic abuse, cancer, and housing instability, Paula Smith turned her life around with the help of Rising International. PHOTO: KEANA PARKER
In 2009, Rising sent intern Katrina Makuch to Rwanda to find a group of women in need of economic support. Makuch found Food For the Hungry volunteersChristi Whitekettle and Tom MacGregor, and together they forged Azizi Life to connect local artisans to the international market.
Whitekettle is the international liaison for Azizi Life, and she says that the country has taken many strides since the genocide—almost 64 percent of parliamentarians are women—but it can take something extra to break free from traditional gender roles at home.
“One overall cultural idea is that the man is the head of the home and the woman is the heart. In many families the husband and the wife work really hard, but the woman does all the housework, cooking, cleaning, caring for children, as well as participating in farming work,” says Whitekettle. “Any time she needs something she can’t grow herself she needs to ask the man: you could imagine that even in the most functional of relationships that can be taxing for both spouses, so even for those women, having an independent source of income is really liberating and it helps to highlight her value and her dignity.”
Even for a single woman like Josephine Ngirababyeyi, 42, who survived the genocide—sleeping on the ground for two years as a refugee in the Congo, seeing her parents and first husband die—Rwanda’s societal structure puts a majority of the work on her shoulders.
Skyping from the Azizi Life office in Gitarama with a translator, Ngirababyeyi still grins as she explains the measures she has to take to get there: from her village, Ngirababyeyi hitches a ride on a motorcycle to the main road and then a bus from there to the office. The journey takes three hours, if the bus doesn’t break down—which it does, often.
But as a single mother with four children, the extra income is worth the journey, she says.
Most of her time is filled with subsistence farming—as is common for over 70 percent of the population—but the money from selling her hand-woven baskets helps with buying food, clothes, health insurance, school fees for her children and even with items for other families.
FREEDOM FIGHTERS
While Ngirababyeyi’s extra income helps her cover the basics to survive, in India some women have risked far more to make it to a living wage. Stories like those of Priyanka buying her way out of sexual slavery through jewelry-making are, unfortunately, the exception. Human trafficking and slavery are an all-too pervasive phenomenon in the country, says Sarah Symons, who created Her Future Coalition, a group that trains jewelry makers in India and Nepal and collaborates with Rising.
Sometimes family members sell their daughters, other times girls go to the big cities thinking they’ll get jobs in a kitchen or as a maid, not knowing that it can often end up being a brothel, says Symons. Separated from their support network, often unable to speak the local dialect or language, they’re left vulnerable.
“They tend to be girls from rural communities, either from India’s poor areas or surrounding countries Bangladesh, Nepal, the traditional communities,” says Symons, “so because they’re a girl—a poor girl, they just have no value. If there’s any money in the family the boys are sent to school and without job opportunities girls are seen as a burden. It becomes a decision of survival.”
When they’re rescued by agencies or the police, the girls are sent to shelters to recover—some of which offer the option to start training in jewelry smithing with Her Future Coalition. In addition to vocational training, the organization also provides human and legal rights training.
“We’re really trying to elevate them in every way so that they’re not just making jewelry, we want them to be free in every aspect of their life,” says Symons.
THINKING GLOBALLY, ACTING LOCALLY
While Azizi Life and Her Future Coalition are just two of the partner organizations working with Rising on the international scale, Jud is also busy building a local network for human trafficking survivors.
“Just two years ago, I actually said in our office out loud. ‘Hey wait, I was born here and I don’t know if human trafficking is happening here?’ How can we even say we’re a women’s empowerment organization if we don’t know if girls here are being trafficked?” says Jud. “The very next day I got a call from a girl being sold by her father. The next day.”
Most programs are set up to deal with what happens after someone has been trafficked, says Jud, not prevention. Instead, the coalition leads workshops for foster youth and adults combining jewelry making and tactics on how to stay safe through their Safe and Sound Program.
“Ultimately if you look at what all this work is for, why are we doing all of this? One of the things that we believe as an organization, that we dream of, is to see what the world would look like if women had an equal voice, because we’ve actually never seen that world. Ever. We know that where violence happens the most is where women are the most marginalized,” says Jud. “We want to see if women did have a say in those communities the change that would happen there so that we can see a world that none of us have ever seen.”
Upcoming Rising International Pop-Up events: 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. Thursday, May 4, ETR Corporate Office, 100 Enterprise Way, G300, Scotts Valley. 11 a.m.-4 p.m., Saturday, May 13, Toyota of Santa Cruz, 4200 Auto Plaza Drive, Capitola. Film screening ‘I Am Jane Doe’ 7-8:30 p.m., Thursday, May 25, Rio Theatre, 1205 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. risinginternational.org.
Updates 04/06/2017: The strides taken by Rwanda since the genocide were underestimated—almost 64 percent of parliamentarians are women, but traditional gender roles are the norm in domestic situations; subsistence farming is common amongst 70 percent of the population of Rwanda, not 90 as originally reported; Christi Whitekettle and Tom MacGregor were volunteers at at Food For The Hungry and did not lead the program as originally reported.
Okay, maybe you can go home again. But you might not want to chance it after seeing T2 Trainspotting, Danny Boyle’s 20-years-later sequel to his incendiary 1996 cult classic about white punks on dope in the depressed industrial town of Leith, Scotland. Boyle’s prodigal protagonist has cleaned up his act, only to find the unclaimed baggage of his misspent youth still waiting for him the minute he sets foot back on his native soil.
Based on the Irvine Welsh novel, the first Trainspotting was a molten social comedy with a nasty streak. It didn’t glamorize its junkie anti-heroes (who were a pretty sorry lot), but observed in bracing, scatological terms, why they turned to heroin as an alternative to middle-class banality. An anti-drug campaign of the era, exhorting users to “choose life!” was roundly mocked in the film, equating that idea with choosing a starter home with a fixed-rate mortgage and dental insurance—which paled in comparison to the nihilistic bliss of a heroin high.
But Boyle, the characters, and the actors who played them are all 20 years older now. The fact that they’ve survived another two decades is miraculous in itself, but beyond that, their relationships with each other are still driven by the same animosities and grudges. Scriptwriter John Hodge borrows a few elements from Welsh’s Porno, the author’s own follow-up novel to Trainspotting, but most of T2 is an original Hodge story about what happens when Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) comes home to Leith for his mother’s funeral, 20 years after betraying his mates, big-time, at the end of the first film.
Mark doesn’t do drugs any more; he’s more of a gym rat, trying to stay in shape. Spud (Ewen Bremner), the sweetest, most harmless of his old pals, is still a junkie, recently unemployed, and long separated from his wife and son; Mark’s surprise visit interrupts a suicide attempt (a gross, but funny scene). When Mark urges him to kick the habit and channel his compulsions elsewhere, Spud starts writing the unexpurgated story of their lives together.
Sick Boy, now called Simon (Jonny Lee Miller), has inherited his aunt’s decrepit pub and the three or four elderly barflies who call it home. His drug of choice is now cocaine, which he snorts constantly, fueling his dream of turning the pub into an upscale “sauna” (code name for a bordello) run by his girlfriend, Veronika (Anjela Nedyalkova), a young Bulgarian prostitute. In the meantime, he attempts to extort financing from upstanding citizens he photographs upstairs in compromising positions with Veronika.
Complicating matters, as usual, is violence-prone Francis “Franco” Begbie (the ever-menacing Robert Carlyle). He’s been in prison for 20 years, and when he’s denied parole yet again, he breaks out—just in time for a few way-too-close encounters with Mark, the mate who stole forty thousand pounds of illicit drug money from them all and moved to the Continent.
Like its predecessor, T2 is loud, profane, pulsing with music, and often caustically funny. Franco despairs that his son is choosing hotel management over a life of crime. Mark goes into the sauna business with Simon because he doesn’t know what else to do with the life recently extended by a stent in his heart. (To get a bank loan, they describe their venture as “an artisanal B&B.”)
The new millennium provides a catalogue of new social ills for Mark to rail against: “Updating your profile, Instagram, blogging, slut-shaming.” But this time around, he talks himself back into the hard-won wisdom that one might, in fact, choose life. This centerpiece speech is delivered with wicked precision by McGregor, who embraces the return to his star-making role with relish, even as Mark faces up to the wreckage of his past.
Director Boyle tells the tale with his usual kinetic, stylistic verve, including interwoven time frames, and occasional floating subtitles for the knottier bits of Scottish dialogue. There’s nothing mellow about T2 or its characters, but it’s a savvy companion to the first film if you like your biting social commentary spiced with a dash of rue.
T2 TRAINSPOTTING
*** (our of four)
Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, and Robert Carlyle. Written by John Hodge. From the novels by Irvine Welsh. Directed by Danny Boyle. A Sony Pictures release. Rated R. 117 minutes.
The eucalyptus grove atNatural Bridges State Beach—for four months out of the year, a clustering and resting place for butterflies—stands empty.
So too does the park’s visitor’s center and its parking lot, as if mourning the departure of this year’s monarch population, which recently fluttered away for the season.
Docent Abbey Pulman, dressed in the official brownish green California State Parks garb, looks up in surprise when I walk through the doors of the Natural Bridges visitor center. Not many people, apparently, wander into the gray, stout building when monarchs aren’t around.
These days, fewer of those winged insects are visiting Natural Bridges. The black-and-orange vortexes that greeted generations of field-tripping children and tourists are gone—in their place, a much smaller community of monarch butterflies barely clings to a few dying trees in the winter.
“We’ve had a significant butterfly decline in just the last three years I’ve been here,” Pulman says. “Over 50 percent.”
But the populations were in freefall even before that. Since 1997, monarchs’ overwintering population at Natural Bridges has dropped 97 percent. This year, a paltry 3,500 butterflies made Santa Cruz’s Natural Bridges their winter home, down from 130,000 two decades ago.
“Our grove is getting old,” Pulman says. “Trees are falling down, and the grove is not as protected. But threats come from man and nature.”
Beyond Natural Bridges, monarch butterfly populations have plummeted across the nation—around the whole continent, actually. Their overall numbers have fallen 78 percent since the mid-’90s.
For centuries, monarchs have dined almost entirely on a flowery plant called milkweed. Genetically modified crops and Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide have virtually wiped out milkweed on 165 million acres of prime monarch habitat and feeding grounds, an area about the size of Texas,according to the Center for Biological Diversity. This has led to monarch starvation on a mass scale, disrupting an annual migration that was previously one of the most spectacular in the world. Since 1997, milkweed prevalence has declined by 58 percent in Midwestern agricultural areas, while monarch populations there dropped 81 percent.
Below the border, monarchs have taken constant hits from illegal logging, which continues to eat large swaths out of Mexico’sMonarch Butterfly Biosphere Preserve.
Extreme weather fueled by climate change poses an additional threat. Today’s entire monarch population would have been killed three times over by the single storm that raged in 2002. That event permanently disrupted migration routes, and destroyed a whopping 500 million butterflies.
If these trends continue and disrupt the monarchs’ migration paths, the butterflies will stop coming to Santa Cruz, which would spell trouble, Pulman explains. “They won’t survive if they don’t migrate,” she says slowly, looking me straight in eye. “They would all die.”
Groups all the way from Canada to Mexico are trying to prevent the monarch from literally disappearing off the face of the Earth. The butterflies need a very large population size to be resilient, says George Kimbrell, a senior attorney at the Center for Food Safety.
It’s absurd that monarchs are still not protected under the Endangered Species Act, says Kimbrell—and many scientists and environmentalists agree. The responsibility goes beyond national borders, and at a time when U.S. diplomatic relations with Mexico and Canada are poor, it appears the monarch’s fatemay depend on whether or not the three nations can come together with a shared plan.
“Working together with Canada and Mexico is vital. The U.S. leading the way is extremely important, and without ESA protection, monarchs will go extinct,” Kimbrell says.
After years of battling bureaucrats to try and protect the species, the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit conservation organization, recently made some major progress. The center—whose officialmission is “saving life on Earth”—has been fighting the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In late 2016, after numerous petitions and legal wranglings, it finally forced the department into action. The latest legal settlement requires Fish and Wildlife to decide on monarch protection by June 2019.
The center’s experts believe that the plummeting population of the monarch—along with other butterfly and bee species—threatens the well-being of humans, because our food security depends on the specialized ecological support that pollinators provide.
At this point, saving butterflies would likely require a massive amount of time and energy, even if the Fish and Wildlife Service decides to protect them in two years. (A big if, given that President Donald Trumptried to block similar protection for the rusty patched bumblebee on his first day in office.)
The Monarch Joint Venture (MJV) provides ground support for the Center for Biological Diversity in its ongoing battle. MJV is a partnership of federal and state agencies, non-governmental organizations and academic programs that work together to protect monarch migrations nationwide. The partnership of more than 60 organizations aims to add 1.6 billion stems of milkweed in the Eastern United States and conserve overwintering habitat through conservation, education and monitoring. “If people in every sector get involved in monarch conservation, we can make a difference and bring back the monarchs,” says MJV spokesperson Cora Lund Preston.
MJV has partnered with other entities like the U.S. Forest Service, Make Way for Monarchs, Journey North, Monarch Alert, the Environmental Defense Fund, the North American Butterfly Association, and the World Wildlife Fund.
Down in Mexico, one tiny butterfly-saving outfit called Alternare combats logging in the country’s butterfly preserve.
Alternare and its director, Lupita del Rio Pesado, have built a sustainable model that protects the forest and shares it with locals. Del Rio Pesado teaches farmers about alternatives to trees—like using adobe instead of wood, or switching to wood-saving stoves.
In Canada, organizations like the Butterflyway Project work on creating a complex of butterfly-friendly urban corridors, while the government debates whether or not monarchs should get protection as a Canadian endangered species. That decision is less than nine months away.
Abbey Pulman calls monarchs a “gateway bug,” and says that the monarchs’ decline is a harbinger of widespread environmental change. The significant monarch decline at Natural Bridges worries her and has her questioning the survival of another important species, human beings.
“The next generation will only hear about these things in stories,” says Pullman, “and that’s sad.”
Eddy Dees, dressed in a pale blue and gold Warriors T-shirt styled like the 1979 cult movie of the same name, is sitting courtside at a Santa Cruz Warriors game as he spins toward the scorer’s table, demanding to see a lousy call from the refs up on the the big screen. The long, narrow table seats the team’s laser-focused unsung heroes, their eyes glued to the hardwood—among them Santa Cruz’s Interim Planning Director Alex Khoury, who runs the scoreboard.
Oftentimes when a controversial decision is replayed on the Kaiser Permanente Arena’s jumbotron, Dees is the one who requested it. He pivots back to the big screen above, shaking his head, as the whole crowd groans.
The mood was tense at last Friday’s game, with the Warriors up 81-71against a team leading their conference—a few days after both teams had already clinched playoff spots, no less. They were competing for seeding and a little pride against the Los Angeles D-Fenders, who are two and a half games ahead of the Warriors in the NBA Development League’s Pacific Division. The Warriors, who started off the season 2-7, have been hot lately. Their fans have gotten used to winning, and the Warriors were up 27 in the first half, which is why a 10-point lead felt oddly precarious at the regular season finale.
“I don’t ever feel overconfident. I do see a theme with this team. They tend to do really well in the first half. They sometimes sputter in the third quarter, and then they do well in the fourth quarter,” Dees says after the game, which the Warriors went on to win 127-117, having led virtually the entire night.
The Warriors finished with five players scoring in double digits, led by Damian Jones—who put up 25 points, seven rebounds, and five blocks—while an ecosystem of superfans like Dees cheered from the front lines every step of the way.
Dees knows the refs by their full names, gives tips to the Warrior players and argues with the sports reporters in the row behind him—finding a way to embed himself in pretty much every facet of the game.
“I am a fanatic, that’s who I am. I am over the top. I love my team. I love Coach Casey Hill, and I love the President Chris Murphy, and I love the ownership,” says Dees, who has also been to 240 San Francisco 49er home games, starting when he was 4 years old.
Dees and his friend Fred Keeley, the former county treasurer, make friends with opposing teams, too. The Salt Lake City Stars even hosted the two men for a game against the Warriors in Utah last week, the night Santa Cruz clinched a playoff spot.
After Friday night’s game, Coach Casey Hill laughed in astonishment that the team finished 31-19, one year after they went 19-31.
Every team, in any given season, has its quirks, and Hill admits he’s tried a little bit of everything to fire up the team in the third quarter.
“The biggest thing is going into the halftime locker room with a lead, everyone takes a deep breath and relaxes and doesn’t realize that other team is in their locker room making adjustments,” explains Hill. “Necessarily, you don’t make a ton of adjustments when you’ve got a big lead going into the half. You just tighten up on the things you’re doing well, and you try to motivate them. With this group, we’ve struggled sometimes, and we’ve come out and had phenomenal third quarters, but it’ll be a focus for us. I’ll talk about it at some point probably during our preparation.”
He says the team still needs to work on rebounding, and that he told the young team that the upcoming games will be the hardest that many of them have ever played.
Looking ahead, Dees feels great about the Warriors’ chances, even though, in this first round, the Warriors take on an Oklahoma City Blue team that beat them four times in the regular season. He says Santa Cruz is a different team now.
Jones, the Warriors’ center who was drafted last year, could get called back up to Oakland at any time. Neither Hill nor Jones himself knows for sure where he’ll be playing.
A couple of weeks ago, Dees ran into Murphy and told him, “This could be the hottest team going into the playoffs,” a few days before Santa Cruz had even secured a spot in the playoffs.
Not wanting to get ahead of himself, Murphy responded, “Hey Eddy, let’s just get there first!”
Right now, though, Murphy and Dees agree that the team looks pretty hot.
“I don’t think there’s a team that can beat us,” Dees says. “We can beat ourselves on turnovers. And lack of rebounding.”
The Santa Cruz Warriors tip off Game 1 of the Western Conference Semifinals on Wednesday, April 5 at 6:30 p.m. (PDT) against the Oklahoma City Blue at Kaiser Permanente Arena. The game will air live on ESPNU.
As anyone who follows digital privacy issues has heard by now, the Republican-controlled congress voted last week to repeal actions designed to prevent internet providers from spying on their customers.
Cruzio, Santa Cruz’s local service provider, has already stepped up to say that not only has the company never fiddled with their customers’ data, but the company’s co-founder and president Peggy Dolgenos proudly insists it never will.
These President Obama-era Federal Communications Commission rules—which have not yet gone into effect—would have stopped companies like AT&T and Comcast (which has a history ofwildly misrepresenting its internet speeds) from tracking and selling customer information, like browsing history, location and much more.
“Data collection, data mining. Those big telecommunications companies saw what Google and Facebook were doing to track customers, and they said it wasn’t fair,” explains Dolgenos. “Instead of saying Google has to ask your permission too before selling your information, history and location, Congress did what AT&T and Comcast wanted them to do and said, ‘You can do even more than Google.’”
“It gives our competitors a competitive advantage over us because they’re going to get the money from selling your information. They’re charging you in two ways,” Dolgenos says.
Nevertheless, we’ll hold out hope that, at least in liberal-leaning Santa Cruz, Cruzio’s decision to forgo extra money-making through nefarious schemes turns into a smart marketing move. If so, perhaps Watsonville’s Graniterock Construction—whichhas said it would happily build Trump’s proposed border wall—might take note.
QUESTIONABLE PARKING JOB
Although some downtown business leaders appear skeptical of a new parking garage, as GT reported last week, others’ positions are more complicated. On the latter list is Hula’s Island Grill owner Ian McCrae, who we incorrectly reported opposes the garage outright.
“We’re still gathering information. We haven’t taken a public stance on it,” says McCrae, who concedes that some people have misunderstood Hula’s position ever since the restaurant held a parking meeting a few weeks ago.
Obviously, it’s still early, and the City Council has not approved a couple million dollars in design work yet. But Casey Beyer, who took over as director for the Santa Cruz Area Chamber of Commerce April 1, calls it a “reasonable plan” to combine the garage with a brand new downtown library.
“It’s going to change the whole street. But is that a bad thing, if it’s designed properly?” Beyer asks. “What I hear is that people would ride bikes and take public transportation to get downtown, instead of the city putting in a garage. But how many people who come downtown can regularly ride their bikes or take public transit options?”
The most ambitious artists are always trying to outdo their last project, constantly self-analyzing while attempting to get their message across to a mass audience. That’s why Ra.be (pronounced “Robby”) feels he must be fearless.
“I have an energy of ‘yes,’” he says. “I go into a project being 110 percent positive.”
Good thing, too, because Ra.be is the mastermind behind the Tap the Flow 24 project, a music and visual project with a tight deadline and a big heart.
Ra.be’s idea for Tap the Flow 24 was to collaborate with other artists, musicians and videographers to write and record new songs—with accompanying videos—within a 24-hour time period for each. The songs are then uploaded online where fans can donate money to download them. The proceeds are donated to generosity.org, a nonprofit that helps provide clean drinking water to people around the world. Recently, Tap the Flow 24 released a compilation of all eight videos in honor of World Water Day.
The inspiration for the project came to the freestyle hip-hop artist after moving to Santa Cruz four years ago. A year later, he brought it back with a new twist.
“I thought it would be a really amazing idea if we could take these talents that we were blessed with and turn them into a form of service with something we all believe in, which is clean water for everyone,” he says.
The project blossomed with its first video, “Thundering Heart” by Tryllium, featuring Marya Stark. The crew spent 12 hours on the concept, writing and recording of the song. After a 90-minute break, they scouted locations around San Luis Obispo and shot the final project. Since then, the collaborative artists have refined their process, cutting it down to a few hours.
“We wrote, recorded and shot ‘Conduit’ in 10 hours at Indigital Studios,” says Ra.be. “It was produced by LowGritt [Santa Cruz’s Logan Gritt]. He’s produced a number of tracks and albums for me, and is a wonderful artist on his own.”
“I ended up doing a take on Wu-Tang’s ‘C.R.E.A.M.’ called ‘Water Rules Everything Around Me,’” he says with a laugh.
Last month, Tap the Flow 24 dropped the final song for the album—featuring Cello Joe, Ra.be, Kat Baxter, and Galactic Vibes—bringing the 21-month project to culmination. As he performs some of the songs at shows around town, he hopes awareness of the project will continue to grow. Anyone interested in the Tap the Flow 24 project can go to rabemusic.bandcamp.com for the music, or give.generosity.org/taptheflow24 to donate to the project.
“Everyone has so graciously offered their time and talent thus far,” says Ra.be. “The intent is to create a bigger impact by inspiring more people to donate for more wells.”
With his biochemist alter ego and the spiky-haired, bespectacled caricature of his look that has become iconic after appearing on Descendents’ album covers for the last 35 years, Milo Aukerman is punk rock’s original nerd.
Still in his teens when he took over as lead singer for Descendents in the early ’80s, both Aukerman’s own style and the band’s melodic hardcore sound were instantly defined on 1982’s Milo Goes to College, their debut record. As Descendents rose from obscurity in the SoCal punk scene to be recognized as arguably the original pop-punk band, Aukerman’s geeky mystique also grew, especially after he left music to get his doctorate in biology, alternating for years afterward between punk rock and a career in biochemistry. Now, with Descendents touring and even releasing their first album in 12 years—2016’s Hypercaffium Spazzinate—Aukerman is proud to know he’s inspired a generation of punk nerdlings.
“Punks need to get educated, too,” he says by phone, with a laugh. “I always like to hear from people who say, ‘I went to college because of you.’ I’ve even heard from people who went all the way through grad school, got a Ph.D., and now they’re working at a university. That’s always very heartwarming to me. That’s the kind of schizophrenia of my personality; I have this equal passion for science and music.”
Certainly in 1982, no other punk band was writing songs like “Suburban Home,” a title the uninitiated might assume to be ripe with irony. It is not. Written by then-bassist Tony Lombardo, who was also a mailman, it featured lyrics like “I don’t want no hippie pad/I want a house just like mom and dad” that must have puzzled a hell of a lot of punks back then.
“We kind of took the punk sound and applied our own more nerdy perspective to it. Especially in ’81, ’82, that came across as completely against the grain,” says Aukerman. “It was like, ‘These guys don’t have tattoos, they don’t have Mohawks, and yet they’re playing this extremely fast, aggressive music.’ That’s been something we’ve been real proud to inject into punk—almost an anti-punk viewpoint.”
After all, the original view of punks, he says, was “more of a doofus, Sid Vicious kind of a deal. Nothing against Sid or whatever, but I just have a whole different life experience than that.”
By the mid-’90s, though, the sound Descendents had helped to pioneer (let’s not forget the Buzzcocks, although Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto might have punched you if you called them “pop-punk” in 1977) had broken through to the mainstream, with bands like Green Day and Blink-182 all over the radio. At the time, Aukerman had left the band, with the other members (led by drummer Bill Stevenson, who had been the architect of Descendents’ sound) soldiering on as All. Ingeniously, they picked this moment to come back together for 1996’s Everything Sucks, the first Descendents record in nearly a decade and the one that endeared them to the Warped Tour generation. The album will be re-released next month in celebration of its 20th anniversary.
“You think about what people define as ‘pop-punk,’ and then you look at what we did on Milo Goes to College and it’s like, ‘wow, that’s really more punk than pop. So when we started to write for Everything Sucks, it was like, ‘we gotta put the punk back into punk-pop.’”
Aukerman admits that was also the most stressful time in the band for him, simply because their sudden discovery by a legion of new fans meant they were burning themselves out trying to do 200 shows a year. He retreated to his science gig again, and the rest of the band went back to All. But after coming together again sporadically for years, he believes they’ve worked out a way to keep Descendents together for the long haul.
“Back then, we thought ‘let’s cram as many shows as we can into one year!’ Now we’re thinking ‘no, let’s see how many years we can do this.’ Because this is something that’s so valuable and so precious to us right now that we don’t want to mess it up by grinding ourselves into the ground,” he says.
It comes at a time when he’s starting to see his own view of the band shift, having finally given up his day job.
“It’s only as of the last year that I’ve considered music a career,” he says. “Prior to that, music was a hobby. And that gave me a unique perspective of ‘it’s a hobby, it’s supposed to be fun. ‘That’s been my mantra from the very start of all this. When it stopped being fun, I would leave. And then after a few years, I’d think ‘wait a minute, it wasn’t that bad! I should get back to this!”
Info: 9 p.m. on Thursday, April 6 and Friday, April 7 at the Catalyst, 1011 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz. Tickets are $35.
Like Homeshake’s previous two records, the new Fresh Air is a riff on ’90s R&B, but to me it sounds slower, weirder, and more surreal. But Peter Sagar, who uses Homeshake as his moniker, insists that this is actually his fastest record.
Insist is a strong word. Much like his music, Sagar speaks as though he’s coasting somewhere between “just finished meditating” and “about to take a nap.” He doesn’t demand I believe him, so much as politely suggest that the BPMs on his laptop register, on average, slightly higher than the prior records.
Sagar’s low-key approach spills over into the delightfully strange and peculiarly infectious music of Homeshake. When he started the project in 2014, he had left a gig as Mac DeMarco’s touring guitarist. The non-stop touring life wasn’t for him, and he found himself never having time to focus on his own indie bedroom music, which he had been doing plenty of prior to DeMarco’s status as a slacker indie rock god. But thanks to DeMarco’s enormous success, Sagar now had a built-in audience.
“I was travelling around with my best friends—it was obviously great. But it had to stop, otherwise I would have completely lost my mind,” Sagar says. Regarding his own touring schedule, he says that “instead of spending every waking hour trying to find another tour to do, I just go to the places that I’m supposed to, I guess. I play as little as I can. I’m not much of a road dog.”
Touring wasn’t the only thing wearing him down—he was also getting sick of the guitar. He’d played under a variety of pseudonyms since he was 19. He toured with DeMarco since his very first tour, and watched him become a Pitchfork buzz artist. But when he started Homeshake, it was a complete reset: back to playing solo, but with keyboards, electronics, and lots of ’90s R&B influences.
“Ideas stopped coming to me on the guitar,” Sagar says. “It’s pretty invigorating after spending so much time writing on one instrument to open a door to a new texture with a different layout, even just the difference between the way you see the keys on the keyboard. I needed something to shake up the creativity.”
The songs meander at a snail’s pace, and are filled with a combination of modern and retro R&B sounds. It’s touched by nostalgia, but coated in outer space freakishness, and plenty of falsetto vocals. It’s oddly romantic, but not sensuous. The structures and instrumentations are loose, yet little meticulous elements pop in and out sporadically. Generally, Sagar says, he tries to keep the songwriting and recording process simple. (“I don’t like getting too lost in some black hole of little details. It’s best sometimes to revert to your original decision.”)
Fresh Air, Sagar says, is his most positive release. He once said that his greatest influence was sadness, but that’s not the case anymore. Still, it’s not actually a happy record; the vibe is not so much sunshine as heroin-induced coma.
With Fresh Air, Sagar’s entire process changed. Rather than trying to write complete songs, he’d lock himself up in his home studio and write a bunch of instrumentals. He’d take the ones he liked best and try to flush them out into complete songs with vocals and other details. His goal was one song per day. It was released approximately a year and a half after his last album, Midnight Snack. He says he started working on Fresh Air immediately after finishing Midnight Snack.
In terms of what the albums are about, Sagar seems deliberately vague. Other sites have reported that his first two records dealt with his departure from DeMarco’s band. He laughs and calls that “clickbait.”
Fresh Air, he says, is about trying to find spiritual balance, a process that confounds him.
“I don’t really know how to go about it, so I just wrote a bunch of songs. I can feel relaxed, so maybe it worked,” Sagar says. “I’ve grown up a little bit, I guess.”
INFO: 8:30 p.m., April 10, Catalyst, 1011 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz. $10/adv, $12/door. 429-4135.
We love Mediterranean flavors, me and Bev, so we arranged a rendezvous last week at the newly opened Zameen at the Point, a vibrant slice of Pleasure Point ambiance with a healthy dose of tzatziki on the side. Packed with hungry fans of all shapes and sizes, Zameen offers a short, spicy menu of appealing classics, from the signature Moroccan Madness Soup to hummus to the house specialty lamb burger.
Bypassing crispy calamari, we went for an order of freshly-made dolmas ($7) and sweet potato fries with an outrageous pomegranate walnut dipping sauce ($6). I had to try the lamb burger, on a ciabatta roll with tzatziki, baby greens, feta, tomatoes, and pickled onions ($12). Bev went for the special lamb wrap, in a spicy sauce with almonds, raisins, cucumber, cinnamon and, yes, more of the irresistible tzatziki (think garlic, dill, and yogurt).
The cool thing here is that you can customize your Zameen order. Choose a wrap, a salad (mixed greens, veggies, olives, garbanzos, feta, lemon vinaigrette), or a bowl (saffron rice or pearl couscous). We sat and started on our luscious dolmas—served with sliced lemons and ripe cherry tomatoes— and terrific sweet potato fries, and noticed that many of our fellow diners had embraced the bowl approach to build-your-own lunch. Once you’ve decided on a delivery system—wrap, salad, or bowl—you can then add your choice of main attraction: falafel, chicken, gyros or lamb. Bev’s lamb wrap was a monument to soft pita that enfolded a substantial interior of spicy (with cinnamon and garlic) lamb, plus all of the other goodies. My lamb burger, frosted liberally with tzatziki and pickled onions, was delish (a bit too much bun) and came with a king’s ransom of textbook french fries, which are not exactly Mediterranean, but definitely a welcome addition. Next time, I would go with one of the bowls, and probably add the lamb. We ate till we could eat no more, and some goodies came home with us, mostly fries and dolmas. The vibe is excellent here at Zameen, yet another star in the hot surfing constellation that is Pleasure Point. Critical mass has been achieved, what with East Side Eatery, Verve, Kaito, Betty’s, Penny Ice Creamery, and now Zameen.
Verve’s Chocolate Sin
I caved in. I couldn’t resist it any longer, the barely legal chocolate orange cake that is one of the main gluten-free temptations at Verve these days, thanks to Manresa bakers. A pretty creation, the deep deep chocolate cake is barely sweet, feather-light, and topped with a thin layer of ganache icing flecked with cocoa nibs. The entire ethereal bon bon is perfumed with orange, and comes with a thin transparent ribbon of candied orange peel. $5 and terrifyingly good. Oh, and it’s gluten free too. I ate an entire one of these in a single sitting, in training for my trip to Vienna next month, where I will cruise the pastry shops in between operas.
Liquor License for Bantam
It’s true, chef Benjamin Sims told me last week: his chic little Westside pizza bistro has acquired its very own liquor license. But no, Ben said with a smile, I can’t get a dirty martini at Bantam just yet. There are some hoops to jump through, code-wise—more sinks, different configuration of infrastructure. The wine bar will remain, but the front window counters will be expanded to become prime real estate for those Moscow Mules to come. When? Sims rolled his eyes. “Probably two months.” So that means Bantam’s cocktail scene will unveil just in time for the summer. Stay thirsty, my friends.
Did you know that crows can remember human faces? Birds are astonishingly intelligent, and according to new research some are even more so than primates and humans! This Wednesday, April 12, award-winning science writer Jennifer Ackerman presents her latest work The Genius of Birds for a look into the cutting-edge frontiers of research and the exceptional talents of our winged neighbors. Ackerman’s book immerses readers in the unique science of ornithology with a surprising look into the inner life of birds through a mixture of travelogue and scientific investigation. 
Take a seat and enjoy the latest local creations as they (and their wearers) promenade the catwalk at R. Blitzer Gallery this Saturday, April 8—from wearable art pieces to cutting-edge hand-made garments and concept-driven wearables. “Hall of Fashion” is the latest from Pivot: The Art of Fashion, which showcases the work of local designers such as fan favorites I.B.Bayo, Ellen Brook, Kathleen Crocetti, Rachel Riot, Rose Sellery and so many more. This year, 14-year-old high school freshman Adam Wormhoudt, winner of the Pivot Visionary Award, will join their ranks with his latest creations. This runway show coincides with the R. Blitzer Gallery’s “Fiber Selections: Shared Dimensions.”
For many veterans, transitioning back to civilian life is the single biggest challenge they will face. That’s why the Veterans Board of Trustees, United Veterans Council and Veterans Services Office have teamed up with other local organizations to present their first veterans job fair. Held by professionals who understand how to translate a DD-214 to civilian work experience, the fair will offer guidance and resources to veterans from all backgrounds. There will also be a resume workshop on April 4 and a mock-interview on April 5 at the Veterans Memorial Building to improve interview presentations. Twenty employers will be present at the fair, which is open to all vets, their friends and family.
Many people living with Parkinson’s Disease suffer from weak or quiet speech because of the disease’s affect on the muscles of the face, mouth and throat. In order to strengthen those muscles, Santa Cruz Cruz County offers an ongoing singing group for people with Parkinson’s and their caregivers. The group is usually self-led, cooperatively supported by the St. John’s Parkinson’s project and Ease PD Inc., and made up of people who enjoy singing a mixture of musical styles together every Thursday. 
