The chance to sing one of the great oratorios in the Western musical canon is a thrill. Choral singers live for these experiences. Singing with a large group of accomplished musicians, accompanied by orchestra, interwoven with solos—an oratorio is a huge musical adventure. When it is over, the players have reached the end of a heroic journey.
Through countless rehearsals and a gradual mastery of the material, the ensemble achieves—if all goes well—a beautiful and authentic interpretation of the composer’s vision. Filled with space, texture and intricate vocal color, this is the apex of choral music.
Audiences for a live music event know the matchless experience of feeling the music as a living organism, filling the hall, embracing the listener in ways impossible by recorded or digital means.
As a singer with the Santa Cruz Chorale, I have enjoyed the sensory enchantment of making and experiencing the music from the inside. Nothing is as ephemeral yet enduring as being within the soundscape created by and with fellow singers. These are the peak moments of a performing artist’s life.
And those of us working on this great work for the upcoming concerts on May 18 and 19 do it for two reasons: Brahms and Christian Grube. One is the teacher who guides us through the innovative chords, fugues and counterpoint of the other.
There are only a handful of great oratorios, and the Brahms Requiem is one of them. A meditation on our finite time on this earth, it is filled with hope and trust in life eternal, presented by chorus, orchestra and two soloists.
Joining the Chorale are soprano Jennifer Paulino and baritone Daniel Cilli, both well-known performers with leading Bay Area symphonies and music groups. The chorale will be joined by the Monterey Bay Sinfonietta, an ensemble of strings and wind instruments. Ascending soprano lines that reach the stars, thundering progressions for bass and tenor voices, the intricate, unforgettable fugue sections—this oratorio has it all.
Basics of Brahms
Most of us old enough to remember life before the cell phone know a little something about Brahms: the beautiful lullaby and the somber funeral march—both of which were wildly popular during his lifetime, and beyond. A German composer, Brahms was born in 1833 in the middle of the Romantic era and, like many artists of the period, lived and worked in Vienna. A Romantic composer, Brahms explored the human response to nature and art, from the expressive to the sublime.
Finished at the end of the American Civil War, the mass was begun just as Brahms’ mentor, composer Robert Schumann, had died. The exquisite oratorio came into fruition a few years later upon the death of Brahms’ own mother. The task of writing the music became a very personal one for the popular composer, who composed its text in German, making it more accessible to those who sang it, as well as those who listened to the composition’s sweeping emotional arc.
The Brahms Requiem is unusual in that its biblical passages are sung in German. In the music, Brahms emphasizes complex and often unexpected harmonic progressions. “Great stamina is required of sopranos and tenors,” Artistic Director Grube says, “as they must sing many very high notes, and the altos and basses must deal with difficult and complicated harmonies.”
“Instead of composing a setting for the Latin texts of the traditional liturgical Requiem (Kyrie, Gloria, etc.), Brahms went to the trouble of creating an entirely new Requiem text from his knowledge of the Bible,” Grube explains. “The result is a work that is absolutely positive in its message and that does not drown in grief. I believe that these positive thoughts are of particular importance today.”
Santa Cruz Chorale presents Johannes Brahms: Ein Deutsches Requiem, May 18, 8pm, and May 19, 4pm, at Holy Cross Church, 210 High St., SC. $5-$30. santacruzchorale.org/concert/spring-concert
Anyone in the word game, from writers to editors to publishers to professors of literature, knows that collectively we have one hell of a huge problem on our hands. The books we love, the books we view as a foundational requirement of a life well lived, they are basically in the crosshairs. People read less. When they do read, their attention spans are shorter. The books they do read are more often “content” to be skimmed and processed, nothing to be confused with literature.
It’s a full-fledged crisis and people who care deeply about books and book-reading have to take creative action to get people reading, which is just what the good people of the UC Santa Cruz Humanities Institute have done by launching a “Deep Read” program now in its fifth year.
Think of it this way: If reading a book is good, and reading a book together with a few others in a reading group is great, then a super-reading-group of thousands of others, bolstered by the expertise of UC Santa Cruz experts on various subjects all reading the same text at the same time, amounts to more like a potentially life-changing epiphany.
That at least is the hope, especially as participation has climbed from 3,874 the first year (featured author: Margaret Atwood) to 6,135 in 2021 (Tommy Orange), to 7,035 in 2022 (Yaa Gyasi), to 8,544 last year with Elizabeth Kolbert—and, as of last week, 9,576 and growing for this year.
“People often ask if the Deep Read is ‘just one giant book club’—we have almost 10,000 deep readers now—and in some way, yes, it is, but it is so much more!” Irena Polić, a co-founder of the program, told me via email.
“We designed it from the very beginning to be a place for the community to gather and read together, but also to use this amazing resource we have in our community, the University of California, to be able to enter a work of art through various perspectives. … All of the faculty are doing a deep read of the book with us and coming together for a conversation. That’s the unusual piece: bringing together different perspectives and taking the time to really delve into something deeply, and slowly, two things we are missing dearly in our political and cultural discourse today.”
BOOK LOVERS Teachers and readers Irena Polić, Sean Keilen and Laura Martin in 2023.. Photo: Crystal Birns
This year’s phalanx of discussions and online considerations culminates with a live Santa Cruz appearance by this year’s featured author, Hernan Diaz, a genuine star in the literary world whose novel Trust won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and hit many best-books-of-the-year lists.
Diaz will talk about his novel at Kaiser Permanente Arena on Sunday, May 19, in conversation with Zac Zimmer, a UC Santa Cruz associate professor of literature. (The event, which is free, starts at 4pm.) Anyone interested can sign up to take part in the online discussions—thi.ucsc.edu/deepread—or attend the in-person discussion with Diaz.
Really, if you take a step back and think about it, people like Irena Polić and Program Manager Laura Martin are heroes, pushing the boundaries to try to unite town and gown in a larger community of engaged minds.
“I’m from Croatia originally, but Santa Cruz has been my home for decades and I have dedicated my work at the Humanities Institute for the past 15 years to breaking down any barriers that exist between the university and the community, real or perceived,” Polić told me.
“The whole town/gown distinction is silly—there is no UCSC without Santa Cruz, and Santa Cruz is such an amazing, dynamic and interesting place to live in large part because of the university.”
Martin, who came to Santa Cruz to study literature and never left, spends countless hours thinking about every aspect of the program, and always trying to stretch her mind to do more with it.
Take the book giveaway aspect of the program. More than 1,000 books are purchased from Bookshop Santa Cruz and distributed for free, some to the community, but primarily to UC Santa Cruz students and some area high school and community college students.
“Any student can have a free book, basically,” Martin told me. She freely admits she was slow to warm to the idea of giving away the books, but came around.
“That’s a big part of what Irena wanted to do, and I’ve been convinced,” she said. “It’s a big draw, and a big part of the program. We can tell authors: It’s not just an event, it’s book sales for them as well—and that matters to them more than the fee they get.”
STAGED Ezra Klein interviewing last year’s Deep Read author, Elizabeth Kolbert. Photo: Crystal Birns
Martin, who earned her PhD at UCSC, focusing on portrayals of indentured servitude and slavery in 17th- and 18th-century novels, hopes to continue to expand the program through more partnerships, for example at Cabrillo College and other community colleges. She also teaches a class each year on the Deep Read choice, a seminar she’s currently teaching with 18 students, running through next month.
“Thinking about it more as a public program, a campus-supported public program, is sort of the goal,” she said. “But we don’t want to lose the academic character of what we do. We’re trying to highlight our faculty’s research and interests and help them speak.
We’re trying to bridge town and gown, so we want to keep choosing books that we think are engaging and important and raise topics that we think people should think about, often complex ones, and help people do that. We want to be accessible but also challenging. Hitting the right balance is key.”
This year’s reading selection, “Trust,” checking in at more than 400 pages, might not be for everyone, but as someone who has been reviewing novels for quite a few years now, I’d confidently assert it’s a great novel—ambitious, packed with writing of precision and incantatory power.
Critics gushed over the clever four-part construction of the book, which builds and feeds on itself in surprising ways (not to give away too much). The first part is a novella by a fictional novelist, telling the story of an early-20th-century financier and his patron-of-the-arts wife; the second features sections of an incomplete autobiography in the voice of the financier whose life was appropriated for the novella; the third tells the story of the woman asked to ghost-write that autobiography; and the fourth consists of fragmentary diary entries from the patron-of-the-arts wife of the financier, the less said about this diary the better.
I freely admit that, for me at least, it felt a bit like a chore getting through the first couple hundred pages, in which, from my point of view, the larger-than-life financier is presented less like an actual person, the way one might expect a novelist to want to portray his characters, and more like a moving billboard meant to inspire hisses and catcalls from we the reader. (Capitalism! Bad! Boo!)
Diaz, tipping his hand in one interview, talked of reading “manspreading” memoirs from the likes of industrialists Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford for inspiration. (Diaz wants the reader to squirm through these sections, and in that sense I may have been his ideal reader, slogging through them stuck on a cross-country flight middle seat, wedged between two big dudes, one of whose “manspreading” was no wink-to-the-crowd cute metaphor.)
Finally, gloriously, by Book 3 beginning on page 193, we shift to “A Memoir, Remembered,” by Ida Partenza, and the story opens up in surprising ways and the clever structure starts to pay off in a way that moves beyond the underlying sense of being stuck inside an MFA proseminar on clever narrative techniques.
I loved the Ida character, right away, and I expect most readers join me on that. Scrapped for cash, living with her anarchist Italian-immigrant father, a typesetter, she applies for a job in a Wall Street office, with no idea what to expect. The next thing she knows she’s being handed an envelope containing ten crisp twenty-dollar bills: For her, at the time, an unimaginable fortune. (Her father and her paid twenty-five a month in rent, unpaid until the envelope arrived.)
“They were unused and clung to one another,” Ida (though actually Diaz) writes. “Wondering what the actual smell of money—rather than that of the multitude of hands that had touched it over the years—could be, I stuck my nose into the envelope. It smelled just like my father.
But beneath the ink there was also a forest-like scent. An undertone of damp soil and unknown weeds. As if the bills were the product of nature. … My father was right: money was a divine essence that could embody itself in any concrete manifestation.”
Book 3 is constructed from the vantage of many years later, looking back after Ida has gone on to a long career as a writer, and her importance to the book springs not only from her role as ghost-writer for the industrialist, trying but failing to persuade him to present his late wife, by then dead of cancer, in something like three dimensions, a brilliant force of nature with an agile mind and sublime taste in music and the arts. Instead, the wife of this narrative is reduced down to almost nothing, barely a person at all. But Ida herself finds an actual diary, kept by the actual wife, Mildred Bevel, snippets of which are presented in Book 4.
“I liked the form of the book, and I think I liked the experience of reading it: I read it blind,” Martin told me. “I didn’t pay much attention to any writing about the structure. I didn’t love it at first, it was kind of slow.
I liked the different pacing, and how it was sort of uncovered as you read. To me it was fun, reading almost like a detective looking for clues. It wouldn’t let you get immersed in it.”
It’s not too late to get involved with this group-reading project. Pick up the book at Bookshop Santa Cruz, or wherever, and read what you can before Diaz arrives. Sign up and follow online as the UCSC community shares different perspectives—including that of “Deep Read Scholars” Lori Kletzer of the economics department, Campus Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor, Madhavi Murty of Feminist Studies, and Dard Neuman of Music.
The project represents a rare opportunity for people in the community—and beyond—to work together, and I for one wish these organizers well in continuing to grow their following.
I’m reminded of a series of stories I did from Europe years ago for Wired.com in which I told of an online battle between Internet-artists based in Switzerland and a Southern California-based toy company; they were fighting over a URL, in an important early skirmish about whether the Internet would be more about commerce or about creativity.
“This is the Battle of Bull Run!” John Perry Barlow, best known for his work as a Grateful Dead lyricist, told me for one article. And it kind of was: etoy, the internet artists, versus etoy.com. Thanks in part to my efforts, flogging this story for Wired.com for weeks, the side of creativity won. Zai, one of the etoy guys, told me that etoy’s artistic project was all about multiplying “surface area.” Meaning the coverage I offered, and the huge audience it generated, was part of the art, part of the project. I’d gently suggest that Deep Read participants might want to think about that moving forward.
I can totally see why they chose the Diaz novel this year, even if in the end Trust strikes me as a novel about novel-writing as much as anything else, but I’ll offer a little constructive advice and encourage them to take next year’s pick in a more accessible direction. By then we’ll all be unpacking from the decisive year of 2024.
In fact, in the spirit of this being a broader community discussion, I’d like to nominate a book for next year: Small Acts of Courage: A Legacy of Endurance and the Fight for Democracy by Ali Velshi, known to many as an MSNBC anchor but also the grandson of Gandhi’s youngest student at Tolstoy Farms in South Africa. The book, which actually has a publication date of today, offers startlingly powerful background on the antecedents of the student protest movement we’ve seen sweeping the country in recent weeks.
“From childhood, Velshi’s grandfather was imbued with an ethos of public service and social justice, and a belief in absolute equality among all people―ideals that his children carried forward as they escaped apartheid, emigrating to Kenya and ultimately Canada and the United States,” the publisher, St. Martin’s, explains in its blurb. “In Small Acts of Courage, Velshi taps into 125 years of family history to advocate for social justice as a living, breathing experience―a way of life more than an ideology.”
That to me powerfully sums up what Irena Polić and Laura Martin and the many others at UCSC who have put so much heart and soul into the Deep Read program have in mind: Reading thought-providing books as a way of life and encouraging, through deep reading, and deep discussion of all the ideas and emotions the experience of reading can bring, a “living, breathing” commitment to social justice with a mentality that is generous and not exclusionary, open-minded and never intellectual one-upping.
I took the liberty of running the idea by Velshi, and he told me he’d be delighted to take part.
The free event has been moved from the campus to the Kaiser Permanente Arena Sunday, at 4pm.
Up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a couple dozen boxes towering over a corner of Atlantis Fantasy World!
Normally, this inventory would already have been entered into the system and on the shelf ready for busy hands to flip through. However, this week’s haul is poised and ready for the comic shop’s busiest day of the year: Free Comic Book Day.
“In 2007 we ordered 4,800 comics to give away,” Atlantis Fantasy World owner Joe Ferrara explains.
“This year we have over 8,800. So it’s grown and grown and grown over the years.”
Since its inaugural launch in 2007, Free Comic Book Day is a staple in the industry. Held on the first Saturday of the month, the event gives readers a preview of publishers’ next big storylines and shows non-readers that comics aren’t just for kids. This year alone there are more than 2,300 retailers across the country giving away up to 48 different titles.
And it all started right here in the Bay Area with Joe Field of Flying Colors Comics & Other Cool Stuff in Concord.
“Joe went to work one day and there was a line around the block,” Ferrara states.
“He asked what was going on and they said it was the day Baskin Robbins gave away a free scoop of ice cream. So he said, ‘If they can do it, we can do it.’”
This year, just as it was in 2007, FCBD also falls on May the 4th, which—officially since 2011—has been recognized as International Star Wars Day.
“It only happens every few years,” Ferrara says. “And it’s going to be even more exciting because Downtown Santa Cruz is having their yearly Kids’ Day event on the same day.”
To celebrate, Atlantis Fantasy World is offering 40 percent off all Funko Pops and 10 percent off all Star Wars graphic novels in addition to free comics. Rebel Scum beware, because the 501st Golden Gate Garrison—a ragtag group of storm trooper cosplayers from the Star Wars universe—will be on site to keep things in an orderly fashion.
A couple blocks over, Comicopolis on Front Street is similarly surging with excitement.
“We’ve participated in every single one,” Comicopolis co-owner Johnnie Arnold says of FCBD.
“We usually have a little bit of a line in the morning but by the first hour we’re pretty packed. It’s usually one of our biggest non-holiday days of the year.”
As for the books that will be handed out, readers will have a smorgasbord of different titles from the familiar—like The Avengers, Star Wars and Pokémon—to the more obscure, like The World of James Tynion IV. Those looking for nostalgia need look no further than the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or the G.I. Joe and Transformers crossover, Energon Universe.
Arnold says Comicopolis is busy going through the more than 1,000 free comic books they ordered, and customers should look out for upcoming sale announcements.
“We call it ‘Nerd Christmas,’ because there’s something for everyone. Everybody leaves happy, and it’s so festive,” Atlantis Fantasy World operations manager Trisha Wolfe exclaims.
This is Wolfe’s 18th Free Comic Book Day and she has watched it grow into the unofficial national holiday it’s become.
“Comic Book Day lets us fulfill our mission statement,” Ferrara says, turning to Wolfe before asking, “Which is what?”
“People will be happier when they leave than when they came in,” she says in earnest.
Her colleague, inventory manager Nate Brand—who will be marking his 14th Free Comic Book Day this year—has fond memories of past holidays.
“In 2019 it was another Free Comic Book Day, Star Wars Day lineup,” he recalls with a laugh.
“And this little kid came in dressed as a stormtrooper. He was so in awe of this entire rack of free comics and the other stormtroopers walking around that he dropped his helmet on the floor and said, ‘This is the coolest place ever!’”
Since the inception of comic books, there has always been a market for titles aimed at adults.
Early pre-code (before 1954) horror books contained themes of the macabre, while many Marvel comics of the 1960s and 1970s were aimed at college-age audiences. Despite that, comic books have historically been seen as either for kids, or as potentially profitable collectibles.
Today’s comic books, however, are finally getting the credit they’re due as viable sources of entertainment, often with philosophical and existential themes. Ferrara says it all changed in 1992 when D.C. published Superman #75, also known as “The Death of Superman.”
“That was the first time the media talked about the editorial content of a comic,” he remembers. “That was really a quantum leap for comics.”
That same year, Art Spiegelman won the Pulitzer Prize for his graphic novel, Maus, an autobiographical story about being the child of Holocaust survivors and the generational trauma surrounding the horrors of war.
Since then, authors like Neil Gaiman, Joe Hill, Alan Moore, James Tynion IV and others have written content that continues to show the diversity of comics and graphic novels with award recognitions like the Hugo and Nebula.
“I’ve spoken to librarians who say, ‘I’m afraid [if they read graphic novels] they won’t read real books,’” Ferrara states. “And I have to say, ‘Excuse me, these are real books. Have you ever read Persepolis?’”
Michael Mitchell, a lifetime Atlantis customer turned employee, agrees.
“You’re reading a movie,” he says of today’s books. “It’s an escape from everything in the world and provides you the enjoyment of an awesome story.”
Thankfully for Santa Cruz’s young minds, Atlantis Fantasy World and the Santa Cruz Public Library have a long history of working together to get kids reading more. Through the library’s summer reading program, AFW has given away $92,000 in comics and graphic novels since 2008.
Back at Comicopolis, Arnold touts Free Comic Book Day as “a great way to get younger kids into the shop and get them reading.” He asserts, “Our biggest market right now is selling ‘Under Teen’ graphic novels to the younger kids.”
Today, comics have taken modern society by storm with the help of billion-dollar franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Fans of all ages can find virtually anything about their favorite comics from the books themselves to movies, television shows, podcasts, worldwide conventions, clothing lines and much, much more.
Heed this word of caution, however: It’s an incredibly addicting hobby for anyone who enjoys having complete sets of things, shiny art, or twisted tales of the good, the bad and the weird.
Brand sums it up nicely.
“There’s something for everyone. Comics are a medium like television or film. It’s a format and an accessible one at that. For people that tell me they aren’t into comics I say, ‘Give me five minutes and I’ll find something you’ll be into.’”
There’s a cartoon in the 9/9/22 New Yorker that shows salmon jumping upstream over rocks with leopards, pelicans, crocodiles, raccoons, lions, alligators and wolves catching them in mid-air. In the foreground one bear says to another bear, “You just had to Yelp this place, didn’t you?”
It is a short walk from where you park on Farmer Street to the bridge over the new $2.3 million rebuild of the Fall Creek Fish Ladder (see How to Get There below.) A ten-minute walk at most. I park along the road, observing where the No Parking signs start. Their Neighborhood Watch probably includes policing parked cars, but just a few blocks back, toward Felton, there are plenty of spaces. I walk up the residential street toward the fish ladder, and meet another hiker headed there too. Dark red hair, salted with white, middle-aged lanky guy. He looks and walks like a walker.
He looks at me and says, “Hey, you’re that guy.”
I’m not sure exactly what guy I am, but in the spirit of hiking brotherhood we fist bump.
He says, “You’re the hiking guy. Hey man, you’re not going to tell people about our cool trail here?”
“The trail is cool, but why do you say, ‘our’ cool trail?”
“It’s just the two of us.”
“I can go with calling it ours if you mean everybody. Everyone. The animals.”
“But you’re going to get more and more people to come out here.”
“Yes. That is exactly what I hope to do.”
“But it will be overrun by new hikers!”
“Wouldn’t that be great?”
“No! It’ll ruin it. I don’t want other people here. Why would you spoil this?”
“Because, OK. We are at war with ourselves, people are fractured, melting down, and I believe if we can get people to lace their boots up and get out in nature, maybe we’ll all get healthy enough to survive.”
“But, somewhere else. Not here!”
“The newbies could come here—you and I go deeper into the wild.”
“What?”
“We’re hikers, man. When it gets too crowded for us, we do what we do, we just keep walking.”
If you are in a bad mood, go for a walk. If you are still in a bad mood,go for another walk.” —Hippocrates, Father of Medicine
After the row of houses stop, it’s only another two hundred yards to the ladder.
We find a younger guy on the bridge, using a camera with an enormous lens. All three of us lean over the wooden bridge railing to look down on five workers in hard hats in the bottom weir working with a crane to move boulders.
HEAVY LIFTING Work continues on the Fall Creek Fish Ladder
Ladder Back Story
The upgraded ladder is a half-mile upstream from the San Lorenzo River on Fall Creek in the Henry Cowell Redwood State Park. The San Lorenzo Valley Water District has rebuilt six new weirs, or tanks, at the fish ladder, at the intake that serves water to Felton.
Carly Blanchard, the San Lorenzo Valley Water District’s environmental programs manager, tells me, “The previous fish ladder, built 30 years ago, had steps too tall to allow the fish to move up the creek, but the new design lowers the ladder steps from 18 to 12 inches. The new ladder is essential for steelhead and coho salmon to make the trip upstream where they spawn.”
Romeo went up a stone wall to Juliet and got in all kinds of trouble, but he had vines to climb.
I have an idea for a Felton Fish Ladder bumper sticker: Keep Santa Cruz Weir!
Am I trying too hard with the fish jokes? OK, I’ll scale back.
Climbing the Ladder of Love
The younger guy taking pictures on the bridge is a biology student at UCSC. He tells us how the salmon and steelhead do it.
“The adults leap their way upstairs, and then spawn. The babies stay in the lowest weir until they are big enough to make the leap. A smaller male will follow a female and start nudging her to release her eggs. [How cute it that? A little guy nuzzling big momma with his nose.] Then he will rush to get in line.
The female releases ova, unfertilized eggs, into the nests and gravel on the bottom of the stream, while the males release their milt, or sperm, into the water to fertilize the eggs. If a male and a female are hanging out together in a tank, they are mating.”
I think it’s only right that the design of the ladder keeps the little ones from getting all the way up to the top, so they don’t have to witness their elders having sex and become scarred for life. In the first grade my buddy Paul heard odd noises coming from upstairs and climbed the steps only to see his parents in the throes of passion. Paul has lived in one-story buildings his entire adult life (bathmophobia: fear of stairs). No telling what that would do to a youngster coho salmon.
Into the Forest
After the UCSC student finishes telling us how salmonids mate, the three of us turn toward the trail leading to the labyrinth of hiking possibilities in Fall Creek State Park.
I hear my new, red-haired hiking buddy’s concern about crowded trails; on weekends, there are way more people. But now the three of us go deeper into the forest, each taking our own path, our own speed, finding our own solitude. There is a lot of wild out there if you keep going.
Fall Creek State Park’s 4,650 acres contain 20 miles of trails, plus the skyscraping, old-growth redwoods that are accessible from the day-use side of the park, located off Highway 9 in Felton. And the park has grassland, river and sandhills as well. You can see banana slugs, black-tailed deer, coyotes, bobcats … and now, steelhead trout and coho salmon.
You can also see people running on the Fall Creek trails. But no dogs on the Old Growth Redwood Gove Loop Trail.
If you’re any kind of eco-nerd, hydrology-nerd, ichthyologist or someone who just likes to see cement in volume, the Fall Creek Fish Ladder near Felton might be the Disneyland ride for you. I love it.
How To Get There
The day-use area is located south of downtown Felton on Highway 9 in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
To the day-use entrance: From Highway 17, take the Mt. Hermon Road exit. Follow Mt. Hermon Road until it ends at Graham Hill Road. Turn right, and go to the next stop light (Highway 9). Turn left on Highway 9 and go through downtown Felton. Head up Empire Grade, turn right on Cooper, left on Farmer and park before the No Parking signs start.
All eyes are on Porter Wayne Hoover. He’s sitting in the bright conference room at Housing Matters on Coral Street, across the way from his residential unit at Casa Azul. Hoover sports a trucker cap and a denim jacket as cameras and lights are set up across from him, ready to give him their undivided attention.
It’s February 2024 and Hoover, 53, is telling his story for Housing Matters’ Community Voices series. The interviews are meant to highlight the lives of formerly unhoused people in order for others to connect with them, and are posted to the Housing Matters website. During his interview, Hoover, feeling vulnerable, chokes up with emotion as he relates how he previously came to be homeless.
“I didn’t know how to get off the streets. I didn’t have a support group or a caseworker and nothing like that at first. I thought about taking my life a couple of times and they hospitalized me,” Hoover says.
Dealing with bipolar disorder, PTSD, depression and debilitating nerve pain, Hoover has now obtained housing at Casa Azul, which serves chronically homeless individuals who need long term assistance.
Hoover’s experiences and those of others dealing with housing insecurity is the focus of “Look Me in the Eyes,” a one-night-only multimedia art exhibition coming to the Museum of Art & History on May 3. The interviews and accompanying photographs were used by local artists as inspiration for original works.
The project was headed by Housing Matters Artist-In-Residence Abi Mustapha, a renowned local muralist and activist. Mustapha is also a co-founder of the Santa Cruz Equity Collab and was involved with the creation of the Black Lives Matter mural in downtown Santa Cruz.
“Coming in as an artist, I’m using my type of lens to highlight some of the inequity and problems that maybe could be addressed through art. So this is experimental, like all public art, and the point of this show, specifically, is to really highlight and humanize people who have experienced being houseless in Santa Cruz, which is a lot of people,” Mustapha says.
Mustapha reached out to various local artists for the project, including photographer Abram Katz, who took the portrait photos other artists used for reference.
Katz did 30-minute sessions with the participants, time, he says, that was spent getting to know them as people and listening to what was going on in their lives.
“The idea was to take photos that showed dignity, that showed pride, power, place and purpose in this world,” Katz, 46, explains in an interview.
While the participants were grateful to be in a secure housing situation, Katz says they all expressed concern over those that are still unhoused.
“I found that the most fascinating and the most heart-wrenching and impactful for me was that those with almost no resources were more concerned about other people than themselves,” Katz says.
“Look Me in the Eyes” has brought together artists and participants from different life experiences, and some of the artists can relate personally to being unhoused.
Harley Hudson always felt like an artist. Originally from Georgia, the 28-year-old wasn’t encouraged to pursue art as a child, however. Now, she is delving into photography, and armed with a used camera and rolls of film, she is capturing vibrant images of unhoused people in the Santa Cruz community.
“When I was experiencing homelessness one of the things that I noticed was feeling invisible. And I just don’t want anyone to feel invisible. So now that I am in a place where I can use my voice, I would like to use my voice to amplify the voices of others,” Hudson says in an interview.
The artists and participants behind “Look Me in the Eyes” will be in attendance at the MAH event, engaging in conversation about the works and their personal stories. Other artists include Melissa West. Karina Jade Neeley, Andrew Purchin, Marsa Greenspan and Kyle Sanders, to name a few.
Hudson says she feels honored to be included on the roster.
“It’s really unbelievable that a girl with Trailer Park Road stamped on her birth certificate—someone who grew up being told that she would never become an artist—can stand next to such legends in the Santa Cruz community. I’m in disbelief. I have to pinch myself every day,” Hudson says, overcome with emotion.
The exhibition is also meant as a primer for the upcoming March Against Homelessness on May 18. The march is in its second year and is put on by Housing Matters in order to bring “actionable solutions to homelessness through the advancement of public policy,” according to their website.
Mustapha hopes “Look Me in the Eyes” will build connections in the community amongst people who have more in common than they think.
“There’s such a stigma around what [homelessness] looks like or what people believe that it looks like. So, to have people that are very relatable, who have the capacity to come and speak to people and connect, I think will hopefully draw a crowd that could be influenced by the connection, similarities and overlap that everybody has in this,” Mustapha says.
“I mean, we’re all living in the same town.”
“Look Me In The Eyes” will exhibit at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History for one night only on May 3, 2024. The event will be held from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. as a part of First Friday and is free to attend.
When thinking of Santa Cruz, a pervasive soccer culture may not be the first association that comes to mind. But one family of soccer fanatics is trying to change that.
Father-son duo Germán and Rodrigo Plaza are launching Santa Cruz’s first-ever semi-professional men’s and women’s soccer teams to start playing in the fall. Their local youth soccer club, Eclipse Soccer Academy, is partnering with the United Premier Soccer League (UPSL) to grow the sport’s competitive program locally by creating adult fourth division national teams.
“I am looking for players who are willing to dare to dream and journey together,” Germán says.
Germán, who is originally from Peru, has more than 60 years of soccer experience both as a player and coach. Over the last four decades, he has coached boys and girls youth teams, high school, college and professional teams from the east to the west coast, as well as internationally in South America.
Before co-founding Eclipse Soccer Academy in Santa Cruz, he coached recreational teams across the city for over a decade, including with Santa Cruz City Youth Soccer Club. As a result of Germán and Rodrigo branching out on their own, the Santa Cruz organization severed ties with them last May for allegedly violating league rules and bylaws.
But starting these competitive adult teams in his American hometown of Santa Cruz has been a dream Germán has been working toward. He says oftentimes soccer careers stop abruptly once a player turns 18, and there are few places for passionate players to turn to that aren’t college or professional—and not everyone is cut out for those paths.
What a local UPSL team provides is a pipeline for young and mature players to continue playing at a competitive level without the full-time commitment. And it can still act as a stepping stone for players who eventually want to go on to play in higher divisions, even major league teams.
“We want to create something here where you can keep chasing the dream but stay close to your community, to your family,” Germán says. “That’s what we don’t have right now.”
This is part of the rapid expansion of UPSL partnerships across the nation, which started in 2011 in Southern California with just 10 teams. Today the league has more than 400 teams, with a recent push to include more women’s teams in its growth plans. Santa Cruz teams will play opponents from in and around the Bay Area, including teams from Salinas, Oakland, San Jose and Napa.
Rodrigo, 31, has played soccer since he was 4 under his father’s tutelage. He says most people assume a high level of play only comes from big cities with unlimited amenities—but that’s not necessarily true.
“There are examples of individuals that have been able to reach very significant levels of play that are coming from our county,” he says. “There is a lot of talent in town that has yet to be given this opportunity.”
One aspiring player is Sadie Strout, 19, who has been participating on soccer teams in Santa Cruz since she was five years old. She graduated from Soquel High School last year and is currently playing for the Cabrillo College women’s team.
As a younger player she commuted to nearby cities like San Jose and Salinas to get exposure to more competitive leagues, but her hope was always for Santa Cruz to launch a program like the UPSL.
“I got really excited when I heard it was starting in Santa Cruz,” Strout says. “It will be nice to have a team here to represent my hometown.”
Playing center midfield, Strout says her role is to be a playmaker, looking for sneaky ways to pass a ball through difficult defensive lines so her teammates can get a break for the goal.
When considering the types of players he’s looking for, Germán says he wants to bring a group of people together who can collaborate without ego, regardless of their differences. The goal is for the culture of the club to reflect the city it’s serving, so Germán and Rodrigo are looking to Santa Cruzans for guidance on how best to represent the people through soccer. They are also taking note of established teams nearby like the Oakland Roots and Galaxy Silicon Valley to get inspiration—both clubs emphasize a strong culture of support from local fans.
“You can’t ever promise fans that you will win no matter what,” Germán says. “But what we can promise them, and do, is that it will be exciting and entertaining.”
Strout, who already registered for tryouts on April 27 and May 19, says she would be proud to play for the women’s team, especially as respect for female players has grown in recent years. If selected, she wants to do whatever it takes to contribute to the success of the team.
“When people usually look at Santa Cruz they think beach-town surfers, but there are a lot of athletes here, hidden talents,” Strout says. “Now that this team is coming, soccer will be more of an initial focus and everyone will be able to see the important talent.”
The world’s record for jumping rope in six inches of mud is held by an Aries. Are you surprised? I’m not. So is the world’s record for consecutive wallops administered to a plastic inflatable punching doll. Other top accomplishments performed by Aries people: longest distance walking on one’s hands; number of curse words uttered in two minutes; and most push-ups with three bulldogs sitting on one’s back. As impressive as these feats are, I hope you will channel your drive for excellence in more constructive directions during the coming weeks. Astrologically speaking, you are primed to be a star wherever you focus your ambition on high-minded goals. Be as intense as you want to be while having maximum fun giving your best gifts.
TAURUS April 20-May 20
I don’t casually invoke the terms “marvels,” “splendors” and “miracles.” Though I am a mystic, I also place a high value on rational thinking and skeptical proof. If someone tells me a marvel, splendor or miracle has occurred, I will thoroughly analyze the evidence. Having said that, though, I want you to know that during the coming weeks, marvels, splendors and miracles are far more likely than usual to occur in your vicinity—even more so if you have faith that they will. I will make a similar prediction about magnificence, sublimity and resplendence. They are headed your way. Are you ready for blessed excess? For best results, welcome them all generously and share them lavishly.
GEMINI May 21-June 20
In accordance with astrological omens, I recommend you enjoy a celebratory purge sometime soon. You could call it a Cleansing Jubilee, or a Gleeful Festival of Purification, or a Jamboree of Cathartic Healing. This would be a fun holiday that lasted for at least a day and maybe as long as two weeks. During this liberating revel, you would discard anything associated with histories you want to stop repeating. You’d get rid of garbage and excess. You may even thrive by jettisoning perfectly good stuff that you no longer have any use for.
CANCER June 21-July 22
Graduation day will soon arrive. Congrats, Cancerian! You have mostly excelled in navigating through a labyrinthine system that once upon a time discombobulated you. With panache and skill, you have wrangled chaos into submission and gathered a useful set of resources. So are you ready to welcome your big rewards? Prepared to collect your graduation presents? I hope so. Don’t allow lingering fears of success to cheat you out of your well-deserved harvest. Don’t let shyness prevent you from beaming like a champion in the winner’s circle. PS: I encourage you to meditate on the likelihood that your new bounty will transform your life almost as much as did your struggle to earn it.
LEO July 23-Aug. 22
Ritualist and author Sobonfu Somé was born in Burkina Faso but spent many years teaching around the world. According to her philosophy, we should periodically ask ourselves two questions: 1. “What masks have been imposed on us by our culture and loved ones?” 2. “What masks have we chosen for ourselves to wear?” According to my astrological projections, the coming months will be an excellent time for you to ruminate on these inquiries—and take action in response. Are you willing to remove your disguises to reveal the hidden or unappreciated beauty that lies beneath? Can you visualize how your life may change if you will intensify your devotion to expressing your deepest, most authentic self?
VIRGO Aug. 23-Sept. 22
If human culture were organized according to my principles, there would be over eight billion religions—one for every person alive. Eight billion altars. Eight billion saviors. If anyone wanted to enlist priestesses, gurus and other spiritual intermediaries to help them out in their worship, they would be encouraged. And we would all borrow beliefs and rituals from each other. There would be an extensive trade of clues and tricks about the art of achieving ecstatic union with the Great Mystery. I bring this up, Virgo, because the coming weeks will be an ideal time for you to craft your own personalized and idiosyncratic religious path.
LIBRA Sept. 23-Oct. 22
Hidden agendas and simmering secrets will soon leak into view. Intimate mysteries will become even more intimate and more mysterious. Questions that have been half-suppressed will become pressing and productive. Can you handle this much intrigue, Libra? Are you willing to wander through the amazing maze of emotional teases to gather clues about the provocative riddles? I think you will have the poise and grace to do these things. If I’m right, you can expect deep revelations to appear and long-lost connections to re-emerge. Intriguing new connections are also possible. Be on high alert for subtle revelations and nuanced intuitions.
SCORPIO Oct. 23-Nov. 21
It’s fun and easy to love people for their magnificent qualities and the pleasure you feel when they’re nice to you. What’s more challenging is to love the way they disappoint you. Now pause a moment and make sure you register what I just said. I didn’t assert that you should love them even if they disappoint you. Rather, I invited you to love them BECAUSE they disappoint you. In other words, use your disappointment to expand your understanding of who they really are, and thereby develop a more inclusive and realistic love for them. Regard your disappointment as an opportunity to deepen your compassion—and as a motivation to become wiser and more patient. (PS: In general, now is a time when so-called “negative” feelings can lead to creative breakthroughs and a deepening of love.)
SAGITTARIUS Nov. 22-Dec. 21
I assure you that you don’t need “allies” who encourage you to indulge in delusions or excesses. Nor do I recommend that you seek counsel from people who think you’re perfect. But you could benefit from colleagues who offer you judicious feedback. Do you know any respectful and perceptive observers who can provide advice about possible course corrections you could make? If not, I will fill the role as best as I can. Here’s one suggestion: Consider phasing out a mild pleasure and a small goal so you can better pursue an extra fine pleasure and a major goal.
CAPRICORN Dec. 22-Jan. 19
I invite you to take an inventory of what gives you pleasure, bliss and rapture. It’s an excellent time to identify the thrills that you love most. When you have made a master list of the fun and games that enhance your intelligence and drive you half-wild with joy, devise a master plan to ensure you will experience them as much as you need to—not just in the coming weeks, but forever. As you do, experiment with this theory: By stimulating delight and glee, you boost your physical, emotional and spiritual health.
AQUARIUS Jan. 20-Feb. 18
Aquarian author Lewis Carroll said, “You know what the issue is with this world? Everyone wants some magical solution to their problem, and everyone refuses to believe in magic.” In my astrological opinion, this won’t be an operative theme for you in the coming weeks, Aquarius. I suspect you will be inclined to believe fervently in magic, which will ensure that you attract and create a magical solution to at least one of your problems—and probably more.
PISCES Feb. 19-March 20
Which would you prefer in the coming weeks: lots of itches, prickles, twitches and stings? Or, instead, lots of tingles, quivers, shimmers and soothings? To ensure the latter types of experiences predominate, all you need to do is cultivate moods of surrender, relaxation, welcome and forgiveness. You will be plagued with the aggravating sensations only if you resist, hinder, impede and engage in combat. Your assignment is to explore new frontiers of elegant and graceful receptivity.
It looked like the new cannabis dispensary at the old Emily’s Bakery site on Mission Street was approved…but all of a sudden there’s been a fear campaign against it, with educators claiming it’s too close to schools.
It’s not. It fits within the legal requirement of more than 800 feet from a school. But for whatever reasons, people are using fear tactics to shut down not just any dispensary, but one started by WAMM, the people who fought hard and risked jail to provide cannabis to people who were terminally ill back before it was legal for everyone.
As anyone who has entered a dispensary knows, it’s virtually impossible to get in without solid legal credentials, such as a license. Kids have less chance of buying weed there than they would of buying alcohol in a liquor store. See the letter on this page about the quandary.
You have only one day to see an important pop-up display of art by homeless people May 3 at the Museum of Art & History. Read about it on the news page, the same place you will learn about a new semi-pro soccer league forming here.
Kids rock and they learn how to perform in front of crowds at the Be Natural Music School in Santa Cruz, our cover story. Writer John Louis Koenig follows them from rehearsal to show time. You can catch some of their bands for free 11:30am-2pm Saturday at Abbott Square during Kids Day, the day downtown devotes to things for kids. There will be booths, art projects, dancing, performances and music in the heart of downtown. It’s a great event.
When is a coffee shop more than a coffee shop? When it’s Norma Jeans in Aptos, which serves homemade and exotic pastries. Andrew Steingrube checks it out for you.
We have our first youth poet laureate, Dina Lusztig Noyes, and you can read about her and one of her poems in the arts section lead story, written by Josué Monroy.
Mushroom worship and education has grown from a small event downtown to a much bigger one at Roaring Camp this weekend. Check Elizabeth Borelli’s column on the event.
Local author and part-time Hawai‘i resident Leslie Karst has made a volcanic pivot from her popular Sally Solari series with a brand-new adventure mystery, Molten Death. Christina Waters investigates.
Thanks for reading and enjoy this issue.
Brad Kava | Editor
PHOTO CONTEST
DAZZLING A stunning winter sunset from the Seabright Bluff above the San Lorenzo. PHOTO BY: Leighann Curci
GOOD IDEA
The County Office of Education is presenting a free, powerful movie about fentanyl made by student filmmaker Kyle Santoro, a senior at Los Gatos High, who produced an incredibly powerful, timely documentary about the impacts of fentanyl to students and families. It’s called Fentanyl High and scheduled for a sold-out show at the Rio Theatre on May 2. Let’s hope they show it again.
GOOD WORKS
Free phone? Yup. You can pick one up right by the downtown Santa Cruz bus station in front of CVS. There’s a booth giving out Stand Up Wireless phones free and tablets for $10. You need ID and proof that you are on Medicaid, SNAP, a veteran’s pension, SSI or some low-income program. They are out there M-F 8:30am-5:30pm or Sat. 11:30-4:30. Put this on the list of things I never thought I’d see in this life, along with legal cannabis.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“The sheep spend their whole lives fearing the wolf, only to be eaten by the shepherd.” —Robert Mugabe
Santa Cruz school superintendent Kris Munro sent a letter to parents warning of a catastrophe: a proposed cannabis dispensary, partly owned by a nonprofit that provides affordable medicine for patients with cancer, multiple sclerosis, pediatric epilepsy and more — WAMM (Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana/WAMM Phytotherapies) — that would open on Mission Street at Laurel at the former site of Emily’s Bakery.
Though the City Planning Department and Planning Commission both authorized this project, the City Council will vote on May 14 to possibly reverse the decision. The public should be concerned over misinformation in the letter on two important points:
1. The letter claims the site is “a block…from Santa Cruz High…on a well-established walking route to and from- school and during breaks for both Santa Cruz High and Mission Hill students.“ This does not reflect reality. I taught Mock Trial for four years at Santa Cruz High, and know the site is several blocks from the schools, and that students overwhelmingly cross Mission at Walnut Street. They rarely walk or ride bikes on Mission to either school.
2. Those opposed to the dispensary are worried about youth abusing marijuana. I agree that we must protect our children. But there is no evidence that youth are accessing dispensaries.
There is research that indicates the location of a dispensary consistent with the Santa City ordinance is appropriate. Our City created conservative rules, mapped approved sites, and the proposed dispensary is in an approved location.
WAMM has benefited our community for 30 years. Vocal public support has come from health professionals such as Arnie Leff, MD, the County and the City’s Health Officer; law enforcement leaders such as former Police Chief Rudy Escalante; and beloved civic leaders including Senator John Laird, Mayor and Supervisor Mardi Wormhoudt.
WAMM’s story was told nationwide after its Medical Marijuana Collective was raided by Federal Agents in 2002. Some of the best attorneys in the U.S. helped WAMM. The City of Santa Cruz and County of Santa Cruz joined WAMM in fighting the Feds because WAMM helped sick and poor patients. WAMM changed cannabis history when the federal government agreed to allow medical cannabis collectives to comply with local and state laws. Therapeutic cannabis has helped millions of people. Learn more at wammphytotherapies.org.
Val Corral and her former husband Michael founded WAMM. She put her life savings into meeting all requirements for this project. If the approval is overturned, WAMM will cease to exist, and citizens in need will lose a source of medicine. Before May 14, please let the City of Santa Cruz know you want them to vote in favor of WAMM. And please share this with friends.
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ARIES March 21-April 19
The world’s record for jumping rope in six inches of mud is held by an Aries. Are you surprised? I’m not. So is the world’s record for consecutive wallops administered to a plastic inflatable punching doll. Other top accomplishments performed by Aries people: longest distance walking on one’s hands; number of curse words uttered in two...
It looked like the new cannabis dispensary at the old Emily’s Bakery site on Mission Street was approved…but all of a sudden there’s been a fear campaign
Santa Cruz school superintendent Kris Munro sent a letter to parents warning of a catastrophe: a proposed cannabis dispensary, partly owned by a nonprofit
