When you’re trying to establish an annual festival in Santa Cruz, you have to take a hard look from year to year at what works and what doesn’t. Like how local comic and promoter DNA, who put together this week’s third annual Santa Cruz Comedy Festival, spent a lot of time mulling over the strengths and weaknesses of last year’s festival, thinking: what could be funnier? What venues worked best? What can I do to avoid being murdered by surfers?
In other words, there will not be a repeat of last year’s event in which he had comedians set up for two hours in front of Steamer Lane, providing snarky commentary on the action.
“We’re not going to heckle the surfers again,” DNA says. “We almost got our asses beat.”
Still, he says it with a bit of glee. This is why he and a network of more than 100 volunteers are presenting 75 comics at 10 venues over four nights, Oct. 13-16. He wants to try things that haven’t yet been done, and push everyone—especially himself—a bit out of their safety zones.
And there will definitely still be snarky commentary at this year’s festival, but it’ll be aimed at what’s probably a better target on Saturday night, when four comics will be at the Del Mar riffing Mystery Science Theater 3000-style on the midnight movie, which will be Roger Corman’s 1959 beatnik B-horror flick A Bucket of Blood.
For those not familiar with the “live riffing” phenomenon, it came about after the MST3000 crew had finished 10 seasons of mocking bad movies from start to finish on the show. In the mid-2000s, Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett with RiffTrax Live!, and Joel Hodgson with Cinematic Titanic evolved their original format into providing real-time commentary over movies at live events. The SCCF’s version will feature four Bay Area comics, including Kaseem Bentley and trans comedian Natasha Muse.
“Everyone does that with their friends, but when you see four professionals doing it, it’s mind-blowing,” says DNA. “That’s when I love comedy—when it gets to the edgy, wild side.”
There are comedians from all levels of fame at the festival, which opens with a “New Faces” showcase at Blue Lagoon on Thursday that reflects how the SCCF draws on and promotes the local underground comedy scene.
“I’m really excited about the new crop of comedians,” he says. “Sometimes we have droughts, but there’s a huge new crew.” A show at 8 p.m. on Thursday at the Kuumbwa features comedy singer-songwriter Mishka Shubaly (“The Only One Drinking Tonight,” “Your Plus One at My Funeral”) and Portlandia’s Kristine Levine.
On Saturday at 8 p.m., Pure Pleasure is once again hosting an “All Ladies Line Up” (which sold out last year), this time featuring Marcella Arguello, who’s made a name for herself on Comedy Central’s @midnight, Natasha Muse, Virginia Jones and Nicole Calasich. Also on Saturday, at the Kuumbwa, is the festival’s “All Stars” headliner show (also a sell-out every year), that features comedians who have all been on television, been voted best comic in their city, or have met some other high-profile criteria.
Saturday night also features free shows at Streetlight Records, Metavinyl, the Poet and the Patriot, 99 Bottles and Rosie McCann’s. “I think comedy should be non-elitist,” says DNA. “That’s why at least half of the shows in the festival are free.”
The SCCF’s big finale on Sunday is a TV taping at the Rio for a comedy special from Santa Cruz native Ian Harris. This will be Harris’ second special, but his first filmed in Santa Cruz—the other was filmed in Los Angeles, where he has lived now for more than a decade—and he’s hoping to bring out a massive show of hometown support for it.
Like DNA and the SCCF, Harris is also fine-tuning his approach. Known for smart, sharp comedy that challenges popular beliefs ranging from religion to left-wing conspiracy theories, Harris found that his last special, Critical and Thinking, was considered a bit too “edgy” for some.
“What I call ‘edgy’ are thoughts and ideas,” says Harris. “I had one dick joke in 71 minutes—and that joke was about alternative medicine. I don’t do much of that, period.”
But after finding that “a lot of people were afraid to touch it,” he acknowledges that going so hard after sacred cows limited the appeal of Critical and Thinking, even though he considers it his best work in two decades of comedy.
“It can get a little bit dicey,” he says. “I think that hurt me a little bit more. This one is more mainstream, but it’s still skepticism-based.”
In considering how to balance those two approaches, he realized that as a result of focusing his comedy mission over two decades, he had abandoned some elements that he actually enjoyed, and had won acclaim for, like his impressions. So he’s closing the show with a barrage of impressions—everyone from Robert De Niro to Gary Busey to Terrence Howard to more than a dozen more. And he even found a way to make it fit into his brand of comedy rather than just seeming tacked on to the set: he wraps it in a premise that satirizes climate-change denial.
For Harris, it’s a big deal that he’s able to do this in Santa Cruz—it’s not only the first special by a native comedian taped here, but as far as anyone can remember, the first special to be taped here that will actually air. Harris is donating all the proceeds from the show to charity.
“I’m really stoked that I’m able to do it in Santa Cruz,” he says. “I love that I’m from here. I love this place. I want to represent Santa Cruz well.”
The Santa Cruz Comedy Festival runs Thursday, Oct. 13 through Sunday, Oct. 16. More info is at standupsantacruz.com.
Every now and then, even in a top restaurant, a single dish stands out. Seriously stands out. The restaurant is La Posta, the dish was a plate of gnocchi. Chef Katherine Stern keeps an eye on the seasons, noting the exact moment that this or that latest harvest is particularly ripe. Tomatoes are having their moment just about now, which is why a handful of those tiny sweet orange cherry tomatoes adorned the plate of gnocchi Angie and I shared last week.
Let me back up a bit and set the table. I opted for a quartino of the excellent house Montepulciano, and Angie went rogue with a glass of opulent Sicilian “pink” wine the color of liquid rubies. From I Custodi “Alnuis” came this Etna Rosato 2015 that tasted like salted plums ($8). Addictive. Next, our two opening dishes.
Late summer honeydew melon layered with lavish maroon leaves of bitter Treviso radicchio looked like a Frank Gehry miniature. A tangle of shaved fennel topped this salad, with added sex appeal coming from flecks of Calabrian chili and shreds of fresh mint ($10). The bitter leaves playing off the ripe sweet melon, all kicked up a bit by the chilis and mint—late summer inspiration in every bite.
Another starter of house-cured king salmon arrived on a slick of fermented chilis and cilantro ($12). All by itself, it was a sensuous combination of flavors—with the surprising visual of both underlying sauce and the salmon itself being the exact same shade of vermillion. My favorite part was the topping of fresh purslane, one of my favorite herbs, with its cushiony, crunchy mouthfeel. Green against orange.
For my entree I chose the evening’s special pasta—a dish of plump gnocchi that had been sauced with shreds of slow-cooked pork and those little orange tomatoes ($20). The pork and pomodori formed a sauce synergy that bathed each pasta. The star of the entire dinner, these gnocchi were full-bodied and comforting. The sauce was rich enough to act like a main course, yet subtle enough to flatter without overwhelming the pasta.
Another entree of plump fresh Petrale sole arrived in a delicate broth, with spinach, branches of roasted fennel and zest of lemon ($28). It was deeply satisfying and redolent of late summer. Throughout this terrific meal I realized that this is what the advertising cliché “market-driven menu” really means. I need to build a wormhole between the West Side and Seabright so I can dine here more often. La Posta, open Tuesday-Sunday from 5 p.m. 538 Seabright Ave., Santa Cruz. 457-2782.
Open Hearth at Food Lounge
For 10 years Beth Freewomon’s innovative approach to cooking—The Open Hearth— has won her a following among inquiring diners looking for improved health along with flawless ingredients and intriguing flavors. A firm believer in the power of food as medicine, entrepreneur Freewomon has developed a long list of clients who subscribe to The Open Hearth’s customized packages of nutritionally-inflected meals. “My clients are busy professionals or families who want organic food that supports a heart-healthy, anti-inflammatory lifestyle,” says Freewomon, who created such outside-the-box items as Tempeh Reuben Entrée Salad, and Smoky Mac and Cheez with a Café Gratitude-inspired nut and seed Parmesan garnish. From 5-9 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 3, newcomers to Freewomon’s tasty philosophy can celebrate her 10-year milestone with a free “healthy food sampling,” a no-host bar with freshly prepared mixers from The Open Hearth, and acoustic music. At the Food Lounge, 1001 Center St., Ste. 1, in downtown Santa Cruz. Delicious fun that might change the way you take charge of your health. Find out more at iamtheopenhearth.com.
An unfortunate result of visiting Thailand is that “Thai food” in America usually doesn’t measure up to the ultra-fresh, vibrant cuisine eaten half a world away. My refuge in Santa Cruz is Real Thai Kitchen and the colorful meals created by owner Ratana Bowden. Bowden, who owned a restaurant in her native Bangkok, took over the decades-old Real Thai Kitchen four years ago this month, updating the dark, kitschy faux-Asian decor to a bright dining room decorated with modern art from a Thai artist in San Francisco and bringing her favorite recipes from her homeland. “I want my guests to have a good experience for not a lot of money,” says Bowden.
As I sip a floral Thai iced tea, Bowden explains that the captivating flavors in her native cuisine are achieved by balancing what she calls “the variety of taste”—sweet, sour, salty and spicy. In different proportions, these seemingly disparate flavors enhance each other and the fresh ingredients incorporated to create a harmonious finish.
She believes many Americans are hesitant to try Thai food because they’re afraid they can’t take the heat, but more than 80 percent of her menu isn’t spicy. Many of her most popular offerings, like pineapple fried rice, green curry and pad Thai, aren’t hot at all. That said, if you want to eat like a local and spice it up, all you have to do is ask.
One of my favorite Real Thai recipes is Trout in the Jungle, a panko-crusted filet deep-fried and topped with an aromatic mix of Thai and purple basil, cilantro, mint, green apple, scallion and raw cashews, then tossed with her spicy lime dressing—a simple Thai sauce with beautiful depth. I also adore the green papaya salad, a traditional snack found on almost every street corner in Thailand. Ripe papaya is very sweet, but when it’s still green, Thai people treat it like a vegetable. Shredded and tossed with green beans, peanuts and spicy lime dressing, it’s a refreshing low-cal snack. Intensely aromatic and textured, it’s dishes like these that take me back to the heady humidity and foreign sights, sounds and smells of faraway lands.
I’ve been drinking a lot of Viognier lately—my new hot-weather favorite. When the mini-heatwave arrived on the Central Coast last month, I much preferred a glass of chilled Viognier over a heavier red wine. Also, after a few weeks in Greece and England, drinking fairly good wine in Greece and some rather humdrum wine in the U.K., it was refreshing to return to wonderful local vino.
At Gourmet Grazing on the Green, held on Sept. 24 in Aptos Village Park, I enjoyed Pelican Ranch’s 2015 Viognier (Mettler Vineyard, Lodi). This is a truly delightful mouthful of nectarine and flower blossom, complete with heady floral perfume. I tried many wines that day but kept going back for this one’s intriguing flavors.
Longtime owner and winemaker Phil Crews really knows his onions, er, grapes. He and his wife Peggy can be found in their tasting room most weekends, where you can try this vibrant Viognier ($24) and all of their other interesting wines as well.
After a honey tasting at a farmers market in Walnut Creek, I bought some raw unfiltered Blackberry Blossom Honey. Reading the label at breakfast, I saw that the company, the Honey Ladies, based in Los Gatos, actually helps out bees. The label reads: “This honey is made by bees that have been saved from extermination. When unwanted hives are found we safely collect the bees and hives and relocate them to our farm where we harvest the honey. Each jar of honey bought helps us save more hives.” Visit thehoneyladies.com for more info.
Strut Your Mutt
The Haute Enchilada in Moss Landing will hold a Strut Your Mutt event at their lovely restaurant to benefit Peace of Mind Dog Rescue. So, strut your mutt for a tail-wagging paw-ty from 12:30-4 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 30—complete with prizes for the best costumed pooch. Tickets are $25. For more info and to RSVP visit peaceofminddogrescue.org or call 718-9122.
Saturday is the Full Hunter’s moon, which means it’s the Libra solar festival (23 degrees Libra). Everyone is invited to join the New Group of World Servers, reciting the Great Invocation (Mantram of Direction for Humanity) with the purpose of helping humanity arrive at Right Choice (especially in the U.S.). All of humanity is at present experiencing a Crisis of Reorientation and Initiation. The Libra festival involves Uranus in Aries, bringing us “all things new.” It may be a time of unexpected events and new realities. We observe with poise and equilibrium (Libra’s task).
Sukkot is the Jewish Festival of Joy. The Aquarian new world religion will contain seeds from all previous religions (developmental stages) given to humanity since the beginning of time. Sunday evening,Sukkot, festival of the harvest, building temporary shelters and of remembering, begins.
Sukkot, a seven-day festival, is both historical and agricultural. Historically, Sukkot commemorates 40 years during which the children of Israel crossed the Sinai desert (left Egypt, the Taurus Age, for Israel, the Aries Age), were surrounded by protective “clouds of glory” and constructed temporary shelters. Creating and dwelling in a sukkah commemorates G-d’s kindness to his people. Agriculturally, Sukkot is the harvest festival of Ingathering.
The word “sukkot” means temporary dwellings (shelters). Sukkot is pronounced “Sue COAT,” or the Yiddish, rhyming with “Book us (Sook-us).” Watch the YouTube video on how to build a sukkot. While building our temporary shelter, gathering the “citron, myrtle, palm and willow,” we must make sure we always see the stars.
ARIES: So many changes are occurring—it’s good to be aware of different ideas, beliefs, behaviors and responses in all interactions. Recognize your ability to carefully handle money and resources, your capacity to discern and discriminate, and your competence in giving (and then giving some more). Relationships are important and of great value to Aries at this time. What value do you place in relationships?
TAURUS: The ways we interact in relationships develop (in most cases) from what we observed and experienced as children with our families and the adults around us. Often you hide away in relationships, dedicated with constancy to those you love, hardly ever to leave. This dedication allows others to progress forward into expansive safe transformational places. We thank you. Do you feel loved enough in return?
GEMINI: It’s important to know that even though it’s compelling to return to previous ways of believing and thinking you won’t remain there. The purpose of a return is to relearn the lessons, discover all the goodness, offer forgiveness (if needed) and gratitude. Then go forward to meet your future. It is the story of the Dweller on the Threshold turning into the Angel of the Presence. One is Saturn, the other Venus.
CANCER: Are you feeling restricted by family or is family helping you restructure your life? Is there a need for a rebalancing within the family or wherever you call home? Is your communication all about forgiveness, gratitude, balance, choices and resting in this interlude? A specific creativity is calling to and needed by you. Does it have to do with your home and garden? Are you winter planting?
LEO: Remember in ancient times when we cooked, baked, picked fruit in the garden, and made fires by day and night? Remember walks at daybreak and evenings under the stars? Remember the sense of community, yet also the loneliness, solitude and the ways a healing from family wounds came about? Remember that as adults we release all things sorrowful through forgiveness? Remember who loved you? What/whom do you love now?
VIRGO: You want freedom—especially financial. Let’s figure out all of the ways you can have resources and make money that’s your own. Or, if already making money, how you can encourage more to come in. One of the most important aspects of receiving money is tithing to those in need. When we give, we experience freedom. Give more and love more. Even though the issue may seem like money, what you are truly seeking is liberty.
LIBRA: Your future is unveiling itself in transformative ways. Can you feel a change? Your self-identity, how you see yourself, is expanding and reorganizing itself. Your professional and personal lives and how you interact with the world will subtly change too. Be very professional when communicating. Listen more and listen carefully. Use words that support and uplift. Your future holds new prospects, new openings and a new state of beauty.
SCORPIO: There will be something given in the coming weeks, a discovery, a new learning about how you see yourself. It will begin with helping another. We see our own humanity when we help others. It’s like a mirror. When we embrace the needs of the times, seen through the needs of others, we build a new understanding. And our daily life changes. You are a resource for so many.
SAGITTARIUS: Are you feeling self-protective? This question concerns your well-being in present and future relationships. In non-violent communication, also called compassionate communication, a core message is understanding the needs of self and others simultaneously. Discerning needs becomes a creative act, profoundly affecting all outer experiences. Cooperation begins in earnest with you. Note: you’re in the Nine Tests.
CAPRICORN: Profound changes continue, especially in your self-identity and life direction. Group work is of great importance now. Perhaps your group is your family and a small coterie of friends. In groups people experience you as a transformer. This is your spiritual task in groups. It just happens. Sometimes it’s a difficult task. Understanding this helps you maintain confidence. And explains your purpose.
AQUARIUS: Tend to your resources and finances with the utmost care. It’s most important to continue to downsize so you can move forward quickly into where you’re really to be. This may feel unstable. However, it’s vital as a way to create the new sharing society. So, when able, give lots away. Then you’re less dependent upon physical things and more upon freedom, which you seek. Balance comes in having less.
PISCES: “Amidst the whirling forces we stood confused. Swept up and down the lands, bewildered, blinded, nowhere to rest.” Finally, we said, “Here I stand and will not move till I know the law governing this very moment. I face many ways and soon I will determine for myself which way to go. I will travel no longer up and down the land. I will no longer be blinded. I will only upward move.” (Words from the Old Commentary for Neptune in Pisces).
ARIES (March 21-April 19): A study published in the peer-reviewed Communications Research suggests that only 28 percent of us realize when someone is flirting with us. I hope that figure won’t apply to you Aries in the coming weeks. According to my analysis of the astrological situation, you will be on the receiving end of more invitations, inquiries, and allurements than usual. The percentage of these that might be worth responding to will also be higher than normal. Not all of them will be obvious, however. So be extra vigilant.
TAURUS (April 20-May 20): The ancient Greek sage Socrates was a founder of Western philosophy and a seminal champion of critical thinking. And yet he relied on his dreams for crucial information. He was initiated into the esoteric mysteries of love by the prophetess Diotima, and had an intimate relationship with a daimonion, a divine spirit. I propose that we make Socrates your patron saint for the next three weeks. Without abandoning your reliance on logic, make a playful effort to draw helpful clues from non-rational sources, too. (P.S.: Socrates drew oracular revelations from sneezes. Please consider that outlandish possibility yourself. Be alert, too, for the secret meanings of coughs, burps, grunts, mumbles, and yawns.)
GEMINI (May 21-June 20): The Helper Experiment, Part One: Close your eyes and imagine that you are in the company of a kind, attentive helper—a person, animal, ancestral spirit, or angel that you either know well or haven’t met yet. Spend at least five minutes visualizing a scene in which this ally aids you in fulfilling a particular goal. The Helper Experiment, Part Two: Repeat this exercise every day for the next seven days. Each time, visualize your helper making your life better in some specific way. Now here’s my prediction: Carrying out The Helper Experiment will attract actual support into your real life.
CANCER (June 21-July 22): New rules: 1. It’s unimaginable and impossible for you to be obsessed with anything or anyone that’s no good for you. 2. It’s unimaginable and impossible for you to sabotage your stability by indulging in unwarranted fear. 3. It’s imaginable and possible for you to remember the most crucial thing you have forgotten. 4. It’s imaginable and possible for you to replace debilitating self-pity with invigorating self-love and healthy self-care. 5. It’s imaginable and possible for you to discover a new mother lode of emotional strength.
LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): It’s swing-swirl-spiral time, Leo. It’s ripple-sway-flutter time and flow-gush-gyrate time and jive-jiggle-juggle time. So I trust you will not indulge in fruitless yearnings for unswerving progress and rock-solid evidence. If your path is not twisty and tricky, it’s probably the wrong path. If your heart isn’t teased and tickled into shedding its dependable formulas, it might be an overly hard heart. Be an improvisational curiosity-seeker. Be a principled player of unpredictable games.
VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Some English-speaking astronomers use the humorous slang term “meteor-wrong.” It refers to a rock that is at first thought to have fallen from the heavens as a meteorite (“meteor-right”), but that is ultimately proved to be of terrestrial origin. I suspect there may currently be the metaphorical equivalent of a meteor-wrong in your life. The source of some new arrival or fresh influence is not what it had initially seemed. But that doesn’t have to be a problem. On the contrary. Once you have identified the true nature of the new arrival or fresh influence, it’s likely to be useful and interesting.
LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): Most of us can’t tickle ourselves. Since we have conscious control of our fingers, we know we can stop any time. Without the element of uncertainty, our squirm reflex doesn’t kick in. But I’m wondering if you might get a temporary exemption from this rule in the coming weeks. I say this because the astrological omens suggest you will have an extraordinary capacity to surprise yourself. Novel impulses will be rising up in you on a regular basis. Unpredictability and spontaneity will be your specialties. Have fun doing what you don’t usually do!
SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): During the final ten weeks of 2016, your physical and mental health will flourish in direct proportion to how much outworn and unnecessary stuff you flush out of your life between now and Oct. 25. Here are some suggested tasks: 1. Perform a homemade ritual that will enable you to magically shed at least half of your guilt, remorse, and regret. 2. Put on a festive party hat, gather up all the clutter and junk from your home, and drop it off at a thrift store or the dump. 3. Take a vow that you will do everything in your power to kick your attachment to an influence that’s no damn good for you. 4. Scream nonsense curses at the night sky for as long as it takes to purge your sadness and anger about pain that no longer matters.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): A Buddhist monk named Matthieu Ricard had his brain scanned while he meditated. The experiment revealed that the positive emotions whirling around in his gray matter were super-abundant. Various publications thereafter dubbed him “the happiest person in the world.” Since he’s neither egotistical nor fond of the media’s simplistic sound bites, he’s not happy about that title. I hope you won’t have a similar reaction when I predict that you Sagittarians will be the happiest tribe of the zodiac during the next two weeks. For best results, I suggest you cultivate Ricard’s definitions of happiness: “altruism and compassion, inner freedom (so that you are not the slave of your own thoughts), senses of serenity and fulfillment, resilience, as well as a clear and stable mind that does not distort reality too much.”
CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Now is a perfect moment to launch or refine a project that will generate truth, beauty, and justice. Amazingly enough, now is also an excellent time to lunch or refine a long-term master plan that will make you healthy, wealthy, and wise. Is this a coincidence? Not at all. The astrological omens suggest that your drive to be of noble service dovetails well with your drive for personal success. For the foreseeable future, unselfish goals are well-aligned with selfish goals.
AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Has your world become at least 20 percent larger since Sept. 1? Has your generosity grown to near-heroic proportions? Have your eyes beheld healing sights that were previously invisible to you? Have you lost at least two of your excuses for tolerating scrawny expectations? Are you awash in the desire to grant forgiveness and amnesty? If you can’t answer yes to at least two of those questions, Aquarius, it means you’re not fully in harmony with your best possible destiny. So get to work! Attune yourself to the cosmic tendencies! And if you are indeed reaping the benefits I mentioned, congratulations—and prepare for even further expansions and liberations.
PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Some astrologers dwell on your tribe’s phobias. They assume that you Pisceans are perversely drawn to fear; that you are addicted to the strong feelings it generates. In an effort to correct this distorted view, and in accordance with current astrological omens, I hereby declare the coming weeks to be a Golden Age for Your Trust in Life. It will be prime time to exult in everything that evokes your joy and excitement. I suggest you make a list of these glories, and keep adding new items to the list every day. Here’s another way to celebrate the Golden Age: Discover and explore previously unknown sources of joy and excitement.
Homework: Happiness, that elusive beast, may need to be tracked through the bushes before capture. What’s your game plan for hunting down happiness? Tr**********@gm***.com
I grew up in the ’80s, when the hippie movement’s stock was at an all-time low. With yippies-turned-yuppies like Jerry Rubin oozing sleaze in the news, ’60 idealists were considered either sellouts, or—if they had actually stuck to their values—silly burnouts who had lost touch with reality.
It wasn’t until I came to UCSC that I started to get an inkling of what hippies had actually accomplished, and started to understand how their legacy had been distorted. The worst part was that a lot of the actual hippies I met in Santa Cruz had bought into the mainstream narrative of how the flower children had “failed.”
Reading Christina Waters’ cover story this week, and seeing the pictures from new books documenting what the actual hippie movement was like, that mainstream narrative seems so cartoonish and ridiculously wrong now. The stories about and photos of Ben Lomond’s Holiday Cabins commune were particularly eye-opening for me, and even most longtime locals don’t know much about this offbeat chapter in San Lorenzo Valley history.
As the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love approaches next year, hippies are suddenly cool again—or at least the negative “dirty hippie” stereotypes have finally faded. Stories and books like these that give the world a clearer look at the utopian ideals that the movement reached for are steps in the right direction.
Unless you are happy with the current state of our transportation system, “yes” is the only way to vote on Measure D. Measure D is a balanced plan to greatly improve our current system. Measure D will fix our local streets, build better pedestrian and bicycle facilities including “Safe Routes to Schools” for our children, enhance our bus system, improve the commute along Highway 1, build the rail trail and complete the environmental study needed to make a wise decision about the rail corridor. Voting No just means things will get worse. Join me in voting Yes on D, and let’s get everyone moving.
Mark Mesiti-Miller, P.E. | Santa Cruz
Future of D
The farmers market in Santa Cruz was bustling Wednesday afternoon, the weather was perfect. But what will a typical September day look like in 2030, when Santa Cruz residents would still be paying sales tax because of Measure D, and increasing their contribution to greenhouse gas emissions on a wider, congested, treeless Highway 1? Will the temperature be hot and dry, the shoreline altered by sea level rise, or life in the Bay declining because of warm waters and ocean acidification? Â Will it be difficult to pay the highway bonds, complete a bike trail or continue funding any sort of METRO system?
Back at the farmers market in September, every person I spoke with while passing out fliers told me that from their experience highway widening will not work and they want good public transportation. It is time to listen to the earth and the people who oppose Measure D.
Susan Cavalieri | Santa Cruz
Monster Secrets
After reading your article about Pokemon Go, “Monster Headaches” (GT, 8/24), I came across another story about how the inventors of this game are selling all the images, logistics and coordinates collected on the cellphones of the players to completely map everyone’s backyard, bedroom and military base! So every time someone plays this game on their cell phone, they are acting as corporate/government intel agents to photograph and map every foot of space on this planet, including what was once your private space. Time to wake up everyone.
Just wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed your article, ‘String Break?’ I was in a coffee shop and happened upon the article. Your last paragraph cracks me up because I feel as though it’s very true. I swear by flossing. Mouth feels super clean. Feels like I’m taking the best care of my choppers and gums. Not to mention, my dentist always compliments me specifically on the condition of the spaces in between my teeth. So yeah, get and keep your flossing poppin’. Nice article. Glad to see it. Made me smile.
The platform that Santa Cruz for Bernie came up with makes sense to me. Why shouldn’t We The People aim for better than just mediocre? I feel like Santa Cruz is an amazing city that should be leading the county with our progressive, helpful values and ideals.
That’s why Drew Glover, Chris Krohn, Sandy Brown, and Steve Schnaar have my vote this November. They are standing up for their progressive ideas, and put their names on the line by agreeing to the platform.
They have my respect and my vote.
— Danielle Glynn
PHOTO CONTEST WINNER
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GOOD IDEA
BILL TO LAST
A Student Loan Borrowers’ Bill of Rights will go into effect in two years to better help people navigate the world of debt. The bill, authored by California Assemblymember Mark Stone (D-Scotts Valley), was signed by Gov. Jerry Brown last week. The new law will provide a licensing program to regulate servicers, giving state officials the authority to revoke, deny or suspend licenses. It also aims to better inform students and consumers.
Love and peace. Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. What else did we need? The Age of Aquarius was busy gearing up for its patchouli-scented 15 minutes, and California was the place to be. Ground zero of that back-to-the-garden odyssey was the San Francisco Bay Area, with Santa Cruz and its surrounding mountains serving as the ultra-hip backyard.
Everyone who could roll a joint, hitchhike, and/or fake a laid-back attitude headed West in advance of the 1967 Summer of Love. Many arrived early, already attuned to the spectacular setting, weather and vibes of our seaside paradise. Along with other communes dotting the West, such as Taos and El Rito in New Mexico, the Hog Farm in Sonoma, and Ken Kesey’s digs in La Honda, Santa Cruz had already established itself as a home base of alternative lifestyles, with plenty of shady canyons and inaccessible mountain acres for those who needed to chill out (or flee the Establishment for one reason or another).
Three new books offer first-hand perspectives and authentic analysis to the chorus of hippie-era memoirs, as the summer of 2017 approaches, marking a half-century since the brief flowering of utopian ideal. Each, in its own way, serves as a scrapbook of the time.
It’s worth noting that the half-mythic, half-prankster persona of Neal Cassady (immortalized by Jack Kerouac as Dean Moriarty) passes through each of these books. Cassady was the first sales clerk at the Hip Pocket Bookstore and a fixture at Ben Lomond’s Holiday Cabins as well as Kesey’s La Honda spread. Complex, drug-drenched, handsome, he was a one-man bridge from the Beat to the Hip era. Indefinable, yet omnipresent.
“Trying to capture Neal with words is like trying to find the baby Jesus in a Snow Globe,” former Merry Prankster Lee Quarnstrom told me recently. Clown prince and activist Wavy Gravy, a man for whom the hippie era never ended, also pranks his way through these memoirs, spreading joy and revolution wherever it was needed.
‘Hip Santa Cruz’
By the time the Hip Pocket Bookstore opened on Pacific Avenue in 1966, the tie-dye was cast.
“That was the beginning,” says mathematician and hip-era chronicler Ralph Abraham. “The minute the Hip Pocket opened, that marked the real beginning of the Santa Cruz phase of hip culture.”
“People came and sat on the floor, reading books, never buying any,” Abraham recalls of the Hip Pocket. “Which is why it soon went broke.”
DOORS OF PERCEPTION Cover image of ‘Irwin Klein and the New Settlers’, which documents, via Klein’s photography, the counterculture of the New Mexico commune El Rito between 1967 and 1971. PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE IRWIN B. KLEIN ESTATE
A hotbed of hip culture, Santa Cruz attracted the royalty of the drugs and music scene. “In the spring of 1966, a benefit concert was held at the civic auditorium in Santa Cruz. [Felton dentist] Dick Smith and his wife were among the organizers, and he also provided the light show,” recalls eye-witness Doug Hanson.* “The first act was Big Brother and the Holding Company, sans Janis [Joplin]—she was back in Texas on one of her first failed attempts to dry out. The headliner was Jefferson Airplane. Dick Smith, who embedded gems in the dental work of Ken Kesey and Wavy Gravy, also set up prototype light shows at The Barn in Scotts Valley, another venue attracting local hippies, acid-heads, and road bands traveling between L.A. and San Francisco.
“I knew that moment was miraculous at the time. Absolutely,” says Abraham, whose cavernous California Street Victorian mansion was both a communal household and crash pad for dozens of hard-core searchers. “People my age were more aware, because we were older and had a history both before and after that moment. The younger people were too stoned to realize it in the same way.”
In retrospect, Abraham believes, “it ended because it was unsustainable. A lot of people had enormous amounts of pain. The drugs covered it up, but then once the moment was over, the pain returned.”
Abraham, who had left a tenured teaching job at Princeton to settle in Santa Cruz, brought with him a wife and children—“which was very unusual for a communal house.” Hip Santa Cruz (2016)offers rare first-person accounts of Santa Cruz during the 1960s, including Abraham’s own ambitious trips through spiritualism, psychedelics, blackjack, teaching in London, and being homeless in India and Amsterdam after his wife joined a southern California cult. Eventually he returned to teaching at UCSC, pioneering theoretical research in fractals and chaos theory before his retirement.
“It ended because it was unsustainable. A lot of people had enormous amounts of pain. The drugs covered it up, but then once the moment was over, the pain returned.” — RALPH ABRAHAM
“Drugs defined the culture. The arrival of cocaine and heroin marked the end of the hip era, though lots of that era’s cultural changes still survive—psychedelics as therapeutic, gay liberation, feminism, organic farming, and yoga,” says Abraham.
The golden moment of the mid-1960s, says Abraham, was like an island with its own ecology, myths, folk music, styles of dress, ethics, and food preferences. “Once the eruptions of the 1960s subsided, we were a cultural island peopled by those who remembered psychedelics as a supremely positive life-transforming time.”
The metaphorical mainland, many thousands of miles away, “was peopled by those who missed all that, or had rejected and regretted those times,” he says. Calling himself a “vegetarian, animal-loving, recycling, rock-’n’-roll-dancing hippie,” Abraham says he’s “still seeking the company of his fellow islanders, and practicing compassion for those stranded on the mainland.”
‘Inside a Hippie Commune’
Gathering the vibrant memories of her almost fairytale youth into a photographic scrapbook of the hippie flowering, Holly Harman opens a window on the simpler, back-to-the-land era of Ben Lomond’s Holiday Cabins commune, circa 1966-1968. Filled with personal photographs taken in the San Lorenzo Valley, Inside a Hippie Commune documents the gathering of those on mellow vision quests determined to live together, grow their own food, and let each afternoon unfold in a haze of sweet weed.
Harman’s mother had started the nearby Bridge Foundation art school, so Holly had access to the communal cottages while she was still in high school. “We had the art school, then we moved to a ranch house near the commune. I started hanging out in 1966 first at Boxer Apartments then moved to Holidays,” Harman says.
The Holiday Cabins occupied a secluded property bordering the San Lorenzo River. The pastoral, ramshackle collection of dwellings in Ben Lomond had been “sitting empty” for some time before it became a place to hang out or simply pass through on the part of luminaries like the Grateful Dead, Timothy Leary, the Jefferson Airplane, and Ken Kesey’s Pranksters. The site flourished for a year and a half but began to unravel once a salacious Los Angeles Oracle article drew public attention—and wannabe hippies—to the commune from all over the country. And the Summer of Love brought more, not all of whom were as interested in “love and peace” as the original mountain dwellers.
MEMOIRS OF UTOPIA Holly Harman in the Haight, 1972. In ‘Inside a Hippie Commune,’ Harman writes about her teenage years at Ben Lomond’s Holiday Cabins.
“Everyone fixed their cabins, working on the foundations and walls, growing gardens, keeping it nice,” Harman recalls of Holidays’ zenith. “The day’s work was planned together around a morning campfire. Everybody gathered, held hands and chanted “Om” before deciding how the day would unfold. The commune-dwellers worked on renovating their cabins after breakfast, which, she recalls, was usually whole grains and fruit. “Then it was crafts, gardening, playing music, smoking weed, kicking back,” Harman says. Holidaze, indeed.
The peaceful, innocent vibe of the place comes through in the hundreds of vintage photographs of Harman’s book. Lots of tie-dyed T-shirts, leather vests and long skirts. Glimpsed from the 21st century, it all looks rather tame; the hair was not as long as many had boasted.
“Village life in the mountains of northern New Mexico offered a chance to see how it felt to make it on their own in a physical and human landscape that seemed to come straight out of peyote dreams and illuminated Hollywood Western movie stills.” — BENJAMIN KLEIN
“There was a lot of spirituality up and down Alba Road, and a hip scene in this vortex—Ben Lomond, La Honda and Santa Cruz,” Harman maintains. “But after a year, things began to change. The people who came in then were all about drugs,” Harman says regretfully. “I think they came because the cabins were so accessible, so close to the highway.”
The original hippies, the ones who had gardened and renovated and been content with brown rice and granola, began to leave. The large-scale glossy pages of Harman’s book are filled with newspaper clippings, oral histories, and personal photographs of now far-flung participants.
“Some left for careers, some wanted to go back to school, some to build families. I look back and think how it was a great year—every day was a new experience, a new adventure. So exceptional, like living inside a story,” she says. Harman moved on to study at California Art Institute in 1968 when she was 17. Since then she has lived in the Bay Area, working in advertising and graphic design.
‘Irwin Klein and the New Settlers’
New Mexico and its rugged terrain has long beckoned renegade artists and escapees from the bleakness of cities, establishment jobs, and bourgeois codes. Providing haunting imagery and anthropological context, Benjamin Klein’s newly published book Irwin Klein and the New Settlers, offers gritty insight into a harsher landscape of bohemian lifestyle. Lacking the sunny seaside temperament of Santa Cruz, the El Rito settlement was challenged by New Mexico’s high elevations and hard winters. The volume of black-and-white photographs taken by Irwin Klein between 1967 and 1971, records the efforts of counter-culture settlers to El Rito, New Mexico—“dropouts, utopians, and renegades,” (in the photographer’s words), who did their own thing for as long as they could, before mostly moving on and growing up. El Rito already had a cluster of communal dwellings before the diaspora of the 1960s, when Irwin Klein joined his brother Alan and those Irwin called “the children of the urban middle class.” Through El Rito came Beat poets, and archetypal gurus of psychedelia such as Wavy Gravy and the Diggers. Klein’s stark images are gorgeously mounted in this University of Nebraska Press volume and accompanied by essays from his nephew, historian and UCSC alumnus Benjamin Klein, who helped guarantee that the important visual legacy his uncle never lived to see exhibited will ensure his place in American documentary art.
COME TOGETHER, RIGHT NOW A photograph entitles ‘Reunion,’ taken by Irwin Klein, from the book ‘Irwin Klein and the New Settlers.’ PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE IRWIN B. KLEIN ESTATE
“Village life in the mountains of northern New Mexico offered a chance to see how it felt to make it on their own in a physical and human landscape that seemed to come straight out of peyote dreams and illuminated Hollywood Western movie stills,” writes editor Klein and collaborator David Farber. Indeed, the images are filled as much with Wild West bravura as they are with hardship, loneliness, and communal struggle.
The volume’s spearhead and editor, Benjamin Klein, came to Santa Cruz after growing up in various communal settings, including The Canyon in the Oakland Hills. “The book’s challenge was reconstructing my uncle’s movements,” Klein says. Wanting to become a photographer, he had dropped out of grad school. But the big picture magazines, Look and Lifewere on the wane.
“Earning a living as a photographer just wasn’t viable,” he says. After a stint at San Francisco’s Zen Center, he stopped at El Rito on his way back to the East Coast.
“It’s right next to Carson National Park,” Klein points out. “Winters are hard. It’s remote. It’s impoverished. And it was violent. Shoot-outs were common.” It was not the love-peace world of John Lennon.
“Irwin was older than most of the settlers, he wasn’t 18. He came through, hung out, visited, and then moved on,” says Klein.
Achingly captured are a spare yet joyful wedding, lines waiting for daily meals, the backbreaking labor of making adobe bricks, shepherding flocks of goats, and the unfocused body language of marijuana-laced torpor. Dorothea Lange and Brassaï haunt these compelling images of a powerful, yet fleeting, moment of baby-boomer youth.
Embraced by incisive essays, Irwin Klein and the New Settlers displays the counterculture in New Mexico as yearningly distinct from—yet subliminally joined to—the hippie flowering in Santa Cruz. Together this trio of new books offer many paths back to an indelible time.
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HIPPIE BOOKS
*Doug Hansen, memoir. ralph-abraham.org/1960s/
Lee Quarnstrom. When I was a Dynamiter! Amazon.
Ralph Abraham. Hip Santa Cruz: First Person Accounts of the Hip Culture of Santa Cruz, Bookshop Santa Cruz, Logos Bookstore, Amazon.
Benjamin, Klein. Irwin Klein and the New Settlers: Photographs of Counterculture in New Mexico, Amazon.
Merimée Moffitt. Free Love, Free Fall: Scenes from the West Coast Sixties, Amazon.
Holly Harman. Inside a Hippie Commune, Second Edition. harmanpublishing.com; Amazon.
Amanda Sloan took down a poster from her cell late at night, revealing a pipe in the wall. She then took out a piece of gauze, wrapped it around the pipe, hanged herself and died at the Santa Cruz Main Jail.
Sloan was on suicide watch on that night three years ago, and the sheriff’s deputiesat the jail were supposed to be checking on her every 15 minutes—but they weren’t. The tragedy of 30-year-old Sloan’s death prompted a lawsuit from her family, and last month, the county settled the suit for $1 million, making it the third-biggest settlement ever for a jail suicide in California.
“It was a problem of not having adequate policies, and then violating the policies they did have,” one of the lawyers, Eric Nelson, says.
Sloan’s death is one of six that have happened since August 2012, and the county’s grand jury has released scathing reports on the jail and its medical provider, California Forensic Medical Group (CFMG), in each of the past three years. Still, the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors last month extended its contract with CFMG, which has been the defendant in lawsuits around the state, including in Santa Cruz.
In the two years leading up to her suicide, Sloan suffered one hardship after another, having abruptly lost her dad to a brain aneurysm in 2011. Then her husband, Jeff Smith, got into an argument with his neighbors over an apparent theft a year later. Shots were fired, and Smith died in Sloan’s arms, according to Amanda Sloan’s mother, Fox Sloan.
“Amanda was furious the sheriff’s deputies questioned him rather than let the medical personnel on scene tend to him,” Fox says. “She believes they let him die.”
Fox says Sloan saw the shooter, but no arrests were ever made, and the murder remained unsolved, deepening Sloan’s ire toward local law enforcement. A few months later, Capitola police pulled Sloan over. During the stop Amanda Sloan became angry and sped off, reportedly discharging a gun out of the sunroof. Police said she fired at a police officer, a charge that carries serious jail time.
After being booked, Sloan escaped from jail and headed out on the run, changing her hair color and moving her children from location to location in the Soquel Hills, where her family has lived for four generations. She quickly landed at the top of Santa Cruz’s Most Wanted list.
Eventually, her mother grew concerned that Sloan would do something rash, and when Fox found her daughter at the family’s ranch property in the hills, she called 911, telling dispatchers her daughter was bent on suicide by cop and imploring them not to harm her.
Officers surrounded the property, and when Sloan jumped out the window brandishing a gun, deputies shot her five times, most of the shots hitting her in the legs.
After arresting her, deputies took her to a local hospital and then to the Santa Cruz County Jail, where she repeatedly talked of suicide. When Sloan learned her children had been seized by social services, her depression deepened.
On July 17, 2013, nearly a year after her husband’s death, Sloan was found dead in her cell. According to federal statistics, suicide has been the leading cause of custody deaths nationwide every year from 2000 to 2013—the most recent year with data available.
The four lawyers who filed the suit claimed not only negligence, but also deliberate indifference, which occurs when officers know about excessive risk to an inmate’s health or safety, but disregard it.
“What makes this case different than most cases, aside from the obviously tragic result, is the complete lack of adequate policies—and then the attempt to cover it up by falsifying the observation logs,” said attorney Jonathan Gettleman, one of a team of lawyers that sued the county on behalf of Amanda Sloan’s three children.
The legal team included Gettleman and his partners Eric Nelson and Elizabeth Caballero, along with Diane Vaillancourt, a civil rights lawyer who lives in Santa Cruz.
Not only did the case never reach trial, but it also failed to even reach the motion-to-dismiss phase at the federal court—fairly atypical in cases against local governments. “But the facts were so egregious in this case,” Vaillancourt explains.
Sloan’s death was the last of five jail deaths over an 11-month period between 2012 and 2013 in Santa Cruz.
The following fall, the initial grand jury investigation into the jail found that staff violated two safety protocols before Sloan’s suicide. The first of those mandated officers to perform routine hourly safety checks, and another forbid inmates from placing anything on cell walls, doors or windows.
The staff tasked with safety checks made several entries in the jail’s observation logs, claiming to have visited Sloan’s cell five times during the morning of her suicide from 2:21 a.m. to 3:26 a.m., about an hour before Sloan was found dead.
When the Grand Jury reviewed the video, however, the footage revealed jail staff made only one observation to Sloan’s cell over that time. Staff members had falsified the visitation logs.
On top of that, the door’s window into the cell was obscured by a poster Sloan had placed there, in addition to the one on the wall.
Vaillancourt praised the county for quickly settling, saying this way most of the money will go to the children, rather than paying attorney’s fees, expert witnesses, court costs and other expenses associated with these lawsuits.
“Although no amount of money can make up for her death, we hope this settlement will provide what she wanted most [for her children]: opportunities for a better life,” she says.
Gettleman says the case highlights ongoing problems with conditions at the county jail, which last year had its sixth death in four years, since CFMG became the jail’s medical provider in 2012. The grand jury has investigated the local jail three times in that span.
The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that between 2000 and 2013, inmate deaths ranged from 121 to 151 per 100,000 inmates per year. By that metric, the jail, which has a population of around 500, could expect around three deaths per four years. That’s twice the county’s rate, although all but one of those deaths happened in the first 11 months of that stretch.
According to the most recent grand jury report, 82 percent of local American jails experienced zero deaths over that 13-year period.
In its latest report, the grand jury studied the death of Krista DeLuca, who died a year ago of drug withdrawal, even though she was being supervised by medical staff. The report lays responsibility for 23-year-old DeLuca’s death directly at the feet of CFMG. The grand jury also strongly suggested the death rate can directly be tied to the jail’s Monterey-based medical provider.
CONTRACT RENEWED
Despite the grand jury’s criticism, the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved an approximately $3.3 million contract with CFMG on Sept. 13 for the next five years, with an option for renewal every year. County officials say they want to make sure that CFMG gets certified from the Institute for Medical Quality before renewing again. The institute will lend added oversight to CFMG’s operations at the jail, says Board Chair Bruce McPherson. “It’s a very serious situation and I feel comfortable that we made the right choice,” he says, adding that the jail’s new policy is that anyone at the jail can request an inmate be transferred to the hospital.
The contract was on the consent agenda, a spot reserved for non-controversial votes, until a member of the public asked it to be pulled and discussed. Sheriff Jim Hart told the board he believes “CFMG is the best company available to provide services to the people in our jail facility.”
Hart says the county initiated a request for proposals for medical service companies at the jail and fielded only two responses—one from CFMG and the other from a company called Corizon, which has had problems of its own. (Alameda County, for instance, just discontinued its contract with Corizon and opted instead for CFMG after Corizon appeared to mishandle an inmate’s case of severe asthma, resulting in his death.)
Hart also notes that the county made robust changes to its inmate safety protocol, including a care program for incarcerated seniors, a suicide prevention team, a physical plan for the jail aimed at reducing potential hazards, and the meeting of jail authorities seven days a week to identify and manage high-risk patients.
According to a search of court records on the federal and state court level in California, CFMG is a defendant in 83 different cases. The claims range from simple breaches of contract to major civil rights suits, asserting that inmates who died were denied appropriate medical care.
One of the cases was filed by Krista DeLuca’s child in federal court this past June.
Another case was filed in federal court in May by Lisa Allison, claiming Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office deputies stripped her naked and left her lying on a floor of the jail, where she suffered a severe medical episode including profuse vomiting that caused her to be hospitalized. After returning from the hospital, she alleges, her medical care was so inadequate that she suffered a stroke from which she’s never recovered.
Hart notes that CFMG is the medical service provider for county jails in 27 counties in California. There are lawsuits against CFMG in almost all of these jurisdictions.
Chief Jail Deputy Jeff Marsh, however, says these trends are at least partially attributable to how vulnerable the inmate population can be, particularly in Santa Cruz, where drug abuse is common.
“We have to do better,” he adds. “We don’t like it when anyone dies in our jail.”
Gettleman says part of the problem is that governments jail people suffering from mental health crises and drug addiction instead of finding other solutions or sending them elsewhere.
“Incarceration becomes the triage for mental health crisis,” he says.
The grand jury has noted that it can’t investigate CFMG because it’s a for-profit company, but the report lists 12 recommendations to improve oversight over CFMG, as well as detoxification procedures. And although it doesn’t make the recommendation, the report also notes that the county does have the authority to switch back to using the county’s Health Services Agency (HSA) in-house at the local jail, as it did four years ago. The notion of phasing out private medical care in jails is something Gettleman wants county leaders to consider, but Hart told the supervisors last month that the Santa Cruz HSA had trouble with maintaining staffing levels necessary to provide adequate care when it ran the jail.
McPherson believes the county jail wasn’t behind the times, but rather that it is struggling with “changing times.”
“Our jail system in this county and everywhere else is discovering how to not only be a law enforcement, but also a medical treatment type of environment as well,” says McPherson, who encourages people to take tours of the jail to understand how it’s run. “We’re trying to update ourselves as well.”
