If anyone could turn the color orange into a visual statement both subtle and sophisticated, it’s fashion designer Christina MacColl. Even the front door of her cozy Craftsman bungalow is painted orange, I notice, as the dressmaker guides me through the spacious back garden and into her sewing studio. MacColl took up sewing a while back at the suggestion of her sister, and became expert enough to now enjoy a Bay Area cult following for her bold coats and dresses. MacColl’s hallmark is her surprising choice of upholstery fabric. “I like to work with patterns,” she explains, as we make our way through her laundry storage area filled with dresses and coats hanging from zippered bags. MacColl’s clientele grew as people began stopping her on the street and asking where she got the clothes she was wearing. “They asked where they could buy them,” she laughs. MacColl now shows her work with artisan colleagues of the Look Collective twice a year in Santa Cruz, and takes orders year-round from her expanding fanbase. “I shop at Hart’s [Fabric] and wherever I travel,” says the seamstress, freshly returned from two weeks in Cuba. Bins of antique buttons and rainbows of thread decorate her tidy studio. “Portland has good fabric stores,” she reveals. “In San Francisco, I go to Britex for buttons—I love buttons. Or to Satin Moon on Clement,” she adds. My eyes enjoy the sight of giant carved deco-style buttons, the Bakelite kind my Auntie Da used to sew onto her swing jackets. “Usually I make one-of-a-kind pieces. I want them to be distinctive, unique,” she says. The studio, whose central work table was custom-made for the statuesque seamstress, is lined with sewing counters. Her equipment arsenal includes the workhorse Pfaff, a Serger—“to finish edges”—and, most recently, an industrial sewing machine for working with leather. “Buttonholes are the trickiest thing,” she confides to me. As a lifelong amateur seamstress, I can relate. “I love to use big buttons.” “If I wanted to sell my stuff in San Francisco or Carmel, I could charge twice as much,” MacColl says. But she wants her clothing to be accessible to everyone. “I look at clothing in stores these days,” she says, raising her impeccable eyebrows. “The prices!” Born in Philadelphia and raised in South Jersey, MacColl is one of five sisters. She graduated from UMass with a degree in literature, but says she didn’t want to teach. “I was a jock, and I didn’t tap into my creativity until late,” she grins. (Her coral lipstick is perfection.) “My first girlfriend came out here for Five Branches in the mid-’80s and I came with her,” she says. Fashion design beckoned, but unable to afford an art school education, MacColl settled on Wayne’s College of Beauty in downtown Santa Cruz. As a hair stylist at Jillz Hair Design Studio for many decades, MacColl is her own best model. “My clients see what I’m wearing, and they want me to make them something.” Word of mouth does the rest. “I’m excited by interesting clothing. Always coats. I bought upholstery for coats, and lots of buttons,” she says. “I make lined things in winter, and loose drapy cottons in the summertime.” MacColl believes there’s no rhyme or reason to what sells, but likes to push her clients beyond their usual attire. “I don’t have much black in my collections,” she says. “I think people don’t think they can dress up here in Santa Cruz. But every day I dress for myself. I think you can be comfortable in these clothes. I’m not afraid to wear anything.” A dog lover, MacColl says that her animals and her sewing are what keeps her going. “I watch basketball while I sew,” she says, laughing, and claims she never gets sick of fabric. “The best thing is hearing how a client enjoys wearing a piece I’ve made,” MacColl says. “I always like to try new patterns, or bring back old favorites—no rhyme or reason. When I first started I was really into vintage. The ’50s fabrics have great texture and pattern.” MacColl went to Paris for the first time a few years ago. Good buttons in Paris. “I have a sister in London—so I’m looking forward to seeing about fabric and buttons there,” she says. Radiant in a sundress of her own construction, MacColl is enjoying a bit of down time from dressmaking. “Right now I don’t have a show in front of me,” she says. “It’s good, because I have some ideas for leather that I want to explore. Sometimes you need time just to let things materialize.” We both grin. I take another close look at the dress she’s wearing. Custom.
INFO:Christina MacColl, Grant Designs. Email cm********@***il.com to be added to her mailing list.
How many times have you gone to the beach and thought, “I could totally go for a hot dog right now,” but there’s nowhere to get one? How about all those times you forgot a towel and sunscreen? If you’re at the beach in Capitola, these are two concerns you can kiss goodbye. Left Coast Sausage Worx is the latest place to grab a bite in Capitola Village, and they sell a variety of hot dogs and sausages (using local ingredients), and, come summer, they’ll even sell beach supplies. Josh Fisher (who co-owns with Scott McDonald) tells us about their dogs, and their Sasquatch Challenge.
Tell me about the menu item ‘Left Coast Connection.’ JOSH FISHER: That is one of my random creations. You can use the regular-sized hot dog, or a foot-long or sausage from Corralitos Market. Then you have our secret sauce. The only ingredient that I can tell you is in there is a crema sauce, like a Mexican sour cream. Then we use avocado for a guacamole as well as Doritos ranch chips and bacon bits—not fake, it’s real bacon. You have chips in several of your dogs. Throughout life, Doritos and Fritos and Cheetos, they all tasted good. Throughout the years, we’ve created random food, and adding chips gives it that crunch, and a little flavor that sets it off. Not necessarily everybody does it. If you meet someone that’s never tried chips in their sandwich or hot dog or anything, they can experience it here. I love it. What’s the Sasquatch challenge? That’s going to be like a timed thing like Man vs. Food, where it’s going to be extremely hot, and you have to sign a waiver to do it. We’ll have an extra-hot hot link, along with crazy pepper sauce. We’re still working on it. We’ll have it ready by summer. We’re trying to figure out the appropriate amount of time. We’re thinking three minutes to eat the whole thing. You’ll have a little container of milk that if you drink, you forfeit. It’s a good-sized sausage from Corralitos Meat Market. The main thing is that it itself will be hot, as well as peppers and everything. It’ll be insane. It’s a little bit of self-torture, but hot foods are fantastic. If you can do it, you win a free T-shirt and sticker, so that’s also pretty cool. Do you really sell towels and sun tan lotion? This summer I plan on having some towels. We’re thinking really basic, like “oh I forgot something. I’m getting a hot dog, and I need a towel, and some sunscreen, and lip balm,” or something like that. Just some basics. And we should have some clothing soon, some T-shirts with a couple of different logos, probably some hats as well.
Red-and-white tiles line the walls under framed reviews from around the country. An army of 20-somethings stands behind the counter sporting matching red-and-white T-shirts, and sacks of potatoes and boxes of peanut oil rest near the register, looking almost forgotten in the middle of the room. It’s Wednesday, April 20, opening day for the Five Guys restaurant on Pacific Avenue. Only a half-dozen tables in the 2,500-square-foot space are taken. It would appear to be an inauspicious debut for a burger joint on what happens to be stoners’ biggest weed-smoking celebration of the year. But Malav Patel, one of the franchise owners, says the chain never promotes the opening of new locations, hoping instead to spread the news through word of mouth. Today is something of a “soft opening,” he says. Five Guys likes to open a location on a Tuesday or Wednesday, and by Saturday night, Patel says, a line will be out the door. “It just happened to be Wednesday. Nothing to do with 420,” he says. The atmosphere that Patel and his cohort are going for is “fast-casual,” a dining experience that’s slightly higher-end than traditional fast food, and a term that’s come to be the latest buzzword in the American food industry. Around the U.S., there is a growing number of chain restaurants itching to cater to the fast-casual crowd, including Shake Shack, the Habit, the Counter, and Blaze Pizza. Then there are the local eateries like Santa Cruz’s the Picnic Basket, which opened in 2011, and India Joze, which re-opened after a 10-year hiatus in 2010, and even a rotating slate of pop-up restaurants, like Lawman Ramen, which are only open a few hours a week. The arrival of Five Guys as Santa Cruz’s first major chain in this category raises some questions, starting with whether or not Five Guys is fast-casual at all. “They’ve got hamburgers, hot dogs and fries—and nothing else. How do you call that fast-casual?” asks Jozseph Schultz, chef and founder of India Joze, who suggests fast-casual dining is something closer to Chipotle Mexican Grill. Patel, though—who for his part refers to the chain as the “Chipotle of burgers”—says it takes them just a little longer to prepare a meal than it would at a typical fast-food joint. “We don’t do fast food,” says Patel, who owns two other Five Guys locations, one in Salinas and the one in the Capitola Mall that opened last fall. “It takes up to seven minutes to get the burger and the fries and the shake. So, it’s different than In-N-Out or somebody else, which has drive-through. We can’t do drive-through, because our food takes longer.” Patel, who prefers not to say what he did before coming to Five Guys, is wearing a McAfee anti-virus polo and light-blue jeans. He says that with 1,350 locations worldwide, Five Guys is on the cutting edge of the fast-casual trend. Shake Shack, an East Coast-based burger chain with more than 80 locations, made a splash of its own two years ago when it went public on Wall Street, where its stocks have performed well. After McDonald’s launched its “premium” burger line in the United Kingdom last year, many interpreted it as a response to the growth of chains like Five Guys and Shake Shack. “It’s an interesting time when people are thinking, ‘Let’s try something really new and daring. How about … hey, hamburgers! Now there’s something we haven’t ever had,’” says Schultz, who worries that the efficiency and simplicity in a chain like Five Guys leaves out what’s best about restaurants. “It started about 10 years ago that people started to do this, ‘Whoa. Let’s be really transgressive. Let’s have a burger,’” Schultz says. The fast-casual trend appeared to secure its footing in the Great Recession’s aftermath, as wages were slow to recover, prompting Americans to be more conscious about their dollars. (That may help explain why more expensive chains like Red Lobster and Olive Garden have suffered major losses in the past few years, forcing sales and restructuring.) Particularly in Santa Cruz, Schultz says he doesn’t know how young people survive with living costs so high, insisting that 20-somethings pay 20 to 50 times what he paid when he moved here over 40 years ago. Zachary Davis, who helped create the Picnic Basket and other “it” Santa Cruz dining destinations, says that after the recession, people have been more concerned about value than ever before, but that people are valuing more than just a great deal—they crave authenticity and want to know the story behind what they’re eating. That, he suggests, is why many chain restaurants have suffered. “People want to understand their food in a way that never concerned us before,” explains Davis, a fresh order from the Kickin’ Chicken lunch popup in front of him. Davis and his business partner Kendra Baker run HEY POPUP, a space right next to their restaurant Assembly which can be rented by culinary upstarts like Kickin’ Chicken. Patel has also seen a shift in people wanting to know more about their food, and he says that’s why they leave containers of peanut oil and potatoes out in the open. “We want to convey the message of fresh. Those ones, those exact ones—that’s the oil that we’re going to fry them in,” he says. Patel says part of what customers love about Five Guys is that the food is healthier than typical fast food. But with a $8.29 bacon cheese burger coming in at 925 calories before adding any toppings, eating off this menu doesn’t exactly scream healthy. And for years red meat has been linked to heart disease. Still, Patel says that Five Guys is selective about its meat, which is never frozen and doesn’t come pre-cooked. Typical customers, he adds, only eat at Five Guys once every week or two, maybe after a good workout. “When I work out, I don’t mind eating whatever I want, because I feel that as a reward for my workout,” he says. “A lot of our customers eat here every week, every two weeks. They have planned it in their schedule—every Saturday I’m going to eat here, or every Sunday, I’m going to eat here, or whatever. They have a full schedule worked out.” Davis, who can see Five Guys from Assembly’s patio across the street, says he’s curious to see how the chain does in Santa Cruz. “I wouldn’t want to be a burger shop next door to them,” Davis says, his voice trailing off. “But you know, I don’t know if that’s true. Like, if I was Verve [Coffee Roasters], I would be tempted to open up next to Starbucks and steal their customers, because I think Verve is better than Starbucks. That was the Starbucks’ model for a long time—open up next to a local business and take their business. But I feel like if you’re doing something well, you can put the shoe on the other foot.”
Director Tonje Hessen Schei’s Drone, a documentary about modern drone warfare, may seem like a strange selection for the Reel Work May Day Film Festival, which has been showcasing films about labor issues and working people for 15 years. But festival organizer Jeffrey Smedberg says it’s a natural. “Soldiers are workers in the military industry. Combatants and casualties on both sides of every conflict are working people,” explains Smedberg. “The Bill Motto VFW Post recognizes this connection and has partnered with Reel Work for many years, [highlighting] the brutalization of human beings and military workers’ resistance to dehumanizing conditions.” This year’s festival runs through May 3 in Santa Cruz, Monterey and Santa Clara counties, with films on subjects as varied as California labor history, the link between mass incarceration and poverty, South African apartheid and climate change. Drone will screen at 7 p.m. on Saturday, April 30, at the Vets Memorial Building, paired with a talk by former CIA analyst Ray McGovern on “America’s Drone Program: The Dark Realities of Modern Warfare.” In 1990, after 27 years with the CIA, McGovern found himself an expert on a country that no longer existed, the Soviet Union. After retiring, he dedicated himself to social-justice activism, including co-founding Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). GT spoke with McGovern about drones and his history with the CIA. Ray McGovern The film Drone features Brandon Bryant, an ex-U.S. Air Force drone pilot who killed more than 1,600 people. In the film he says of drone warfare, ‘It’s sort of like a bad science-fiction story. And we’re watching it happen.’ What are your main concerns about drones? RAY MCGOVERN: Drones were developed for a specific and legitimate purpose: intelligence gathering. Satellites used to go over a certain point on earth just twice a day and people could predict exactly when they would come, so camouflage could easily be arranged. The intelligence community had a felt need for what we called a “dwell” capability—a platform that would dwell over a certain suspected terrorist training camp, etc., and be there 24 hours a day, and watch for as long as a week. Lockheed and all those high-tech arms manufacturers were delighted to do this. And then a general in the Pentagon said, “I bet we could put missiles on those things. That would kill a lot of people.” So they asked the arms manufacturers, “Do you think you could do that?” and they said, “No problem.” When I was in the Army we struggled about “capture or kill.” Now it’s just kill. How does the use of drones affect the ‘war on terrorism?’ Drone warfare comes across to so-called militants or terrorists as the utmost cowardly act. So if you’re interested in inciting and cultivating the field for new terrorists, you couldn’t come up with a better idea than drone warfare. I say that not facetiously. There are people profiteering from making drones, from supplying the technicians, for training. There are billions of dollars to be made on this technology. And racism is a main factor in our blithe attitude toward killing people who don’t look like us. Activists Kathy Kelly and Brian Terrell were arrested recently at Volk Air National Guard Base in Wisconsin where ‘shadow’ drones are piloted. What do you think are the best strategies for challenging the use of drones? INFERNAL MACHINES The documentary ‘Drone’, directed by Tonje Hessen Schei, screens at 7 p.m. on Saturday, April 30, at the vets Memorial Building on Front Street. I have the utmost admiration for Kathy Kelly. She and I were on the U.S. boat to Gaza in 2011. Alice Walker was also on that boat. We got 9 nautical miles into the Aegean when we were intercepted by very apologetic Greek Coast Guard people who said, “Please turn around. We’re under orders.” What does Alice Walker say about activism? She says, “I look at activism as the rent I pay for living on this planet.” … A group of Catholic workers and I shut down Hancock Air Force Base, where they push the buttons for the drones. I’m very happy to put my skin in the game. If you care about the kind of country that your children and grandchildren are going to inherit, it’s time now to put our bodies into the works, as Mario Salvo once said. That has had some consequences for you personally, such as in 2011 when you stood with your back to Hillary Clinton as she gave a speech at George Washington University. Hillary Clinton comes in and everyone stands and applauds. The president of the university gets up and flowerly gives her fulsome praise. We’re all standing and I think, “This woman is responsible for untold misery for her own political fortunes.” I couldn’t let her leave thinking that everybody was rapt in warmth for her. That morning the only clean undershirt I had was my Veterans For Peace shirt, so I took off my outer shirt and stood up and turned my back on her. I didn’t say a word, and just fixed my gaze on the back of the auditorium. It went well for about two minutes. Then all of a sudden I see this bulky guy in a civilian suit and I think, “Uh oh, this is going to have a no-good end.” And I’m taken down from behind. They put me in a chokehold and took me outside, where they administered some brutal stuff. Two pairs of steel handcuffs, and I was bleeding profusely from my wrists. Hillary Clinton’s speech that day was about the necessity to provide protection for dissent … in Iran! It was something out of Franz Kafka. You worked for the CIA for 27 years. How did the agency change in that time, and why did you leave? What people have to realize is that there are two CIAs. There is the one that President Truman intended—the analysis group—to tell him without fear or favor what’s going on in the world. He knew the Pentagon would tell him the Russians were 10 feet high. By ’48, the Russians had overrun Eastern Europe and the KGB was flitting all over the world overthrowing governments, so the leaders of our country in their wisdom said, “If the Russians are doing it, we have to have the capability to do it, too. We’ll put the covert action people right in with the analysts, and they’ll be one big happy family.” I was able to tell the president what I thought about the Sino-Soviet split, and later about larger things when I worked under presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan. President Reagan liked to sleep in, so we did the morning briefing to his chief advisors and they briefed the President later at 11:30 a.m., a decent time for somebody from California. George H. W. Bush actually was a friend of mine; I briefed him every other morning for four years. I told them the truth. Quite often, I didn’t know the whole truth. But they never asked me for the whole truth, because they were getting the whole truth from the covert operators. I was kept in the dark about covert actions. So, to this day you have this hybrid—what I call a “structural false.” I turned 50 in August 1989, and I quit in January 1990. In November, it became clear the Soviet Union was going to collapse. I became an expert on a country that didn’t exist anymore. That was a bummer. I can see where people would have a cognitive dissonance trying to figure out, “was there a part of the agency that did tell the truth?” There was, but it was corrupted by the likes of Bobby Gates and George Tenet and their acolytes. Bill Clinton came in and NATO was enlarged and that’s where we are today. Little did I know that I’d see my former profession corrupted to the point of falsifying intelligence to justify deceiving our elected representatives to authorize war. That’s as bad as it gets. Be afraid—not of terrorists so much. Be afraid of the incipient fascism that’s being introduced under that rubric military-industrial-Congressional-media-security-services-complex.
Reel Work Festival: Three Highlights
WHEN VOICES MEET Sharon Katz & Marilyn Cohen, 2015, 86 min, South Africa 11 a.m., Sunday, May 1, Nickelodeon Theatre, followed by 1 p.m. reception and performance at Calvary Episcopal “Red” Church When Nelson Mandela was released from prison, courageous South African musicians broke through Apartheid’s barriers to form a 500-voice, multiracial children’s choir. Threatened with bombs and thwarted at every turn, they prevailed and railroaded across the country aboard the Peace Train, singing their way into the hearts, minds and souls of a divided nation. When Voices Meet tells their story, and in conjunction with this screening, South African singer, choir director and activist Sharon Katz will perform songs from the Peace Train project featured in the film. Joining her will be the Santa Cruz Peace Chorale and Zabalaza, directed by Aileen Vance. Refreshments will be served. HOW TO LET GO OF THE WORLD AND LOVE ALL THE THINGS CLIMATE CAN’T CHANGE Josh Fox, 2016, 125 min, USA 7 p.m., Thursday, April 28, Del Mar Theatre (May 3 in Monterey) The Oscar-nominated director of Gasland continues in his deeply personal style, investigating climate change. Traveling to 12 countries on six continents, the film acknowledges that it may be too late to stop some of the worst consequences and asks: what is it that climate change can’t destroy? What is so deep within us that no calamity can take it away? Speaker: John Laird, Secretary of the California Natural Resources Agency. Event Host: United Nations Association. SISTERS IN THE BROTHERHOOD Dan and Sue Schultz, 2015, 18 min, USA THE COST OF CONSTRUCTION Jordan Ehrlich, 2016, 90 min, USA 7 p.m., Wednesday, April 27, Live Oak Grange Sisters in the Brotherhood is a realistic look at what it’s like to be a woman carpenter. Women in the trade talk honestly about the challenges, as well as the pride they feel from their work. The film title refers to the official women’s group of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters. The Cost of Construction explores a string of controversial deaths during the construction of MGM’s CityCenter in Las Vegas, the most expensive private construction project in U.S. history. The film looks at worker safety nationally, revealing a pattern of negligence at the highest corporate and government levels. Complete schedule and information: reelwork.org.
In 2000, Jenni Charles moved from the Lake Tahoe area to go to UCSC. She studied philosophy, religion, early childhood education, and jazz violin. But it was the extended Santa Cruz bluegrass community—found in jam circles, open mics and house concerts—that left a lasting impression, and satisfied the longtime musician’s need to play roots music. “When I moved [to Santa Cruz], I was blown away by how many bluegrass musicians there were,” she says. “So many people were willing to play with bluegrass novices, such as myself. I was really impressed with how welcoming the community there is and how many people I met.” These days, Charles is the fiddler and one of the vocalists in Dead Winter Carpenters, a North Lake Tahoe-based band that blends progressive bluegrass, Americana, folk, and country into a sound that elicits both a careful listen and a good old foot-stomp. The band draws from American roots and pulls in some indie rock and psychedelic influences, but the thing that sets it apart from many other young roots acts is its embrace of the classic country sound, with slow slide guitar runs, perfectly placed Telecaster licks, and quick and tight drums. It’s a sound the band—comprising Jesse Dunn on guitar, Charles on fiddle, Dave Lockhart on upright and electric bass, Bryan Daines on guitar, and Brian Huston on drums, with all of them contributing vocals—comes by honestly, as several of the members grew up listening to classic country. They hail from different areas of the States, but they all love the classic country sound. “We grew up all over the country,” says Charles “and the classic country thing is one thread that we all have in common. We love to pull from it, because it is such great music.” You don’t hear of too many bands emerging out of the Lake Tahoe area but, according to Charles, the local music scene is rich and thriving. “Even though the population is small, the community of musicians here is quite strong and diverse,” she says. “With the casinos, we get huge acts that come in and play, but we also cater to tourists that come up, as well, so just about every bar or restaurant has a place for live music.” Though they play in their hometown occasionally, the members of the band are bona fide road warriors, averaging about 180 Dead Winter Carpenters shows per year. This year, they’ve reduced that number to about 150, which still averages out to nearly three shows per week. Formed in 2010 in the middle of winter—a fact that helped inspire the name—the band “hit the road hard” their first year. They had only been together five months before they started touring. Now, six years in, they’re working on furthering their own style. “We’re always evolving our sound,” says Charles, “and trying to come up with new ways to stay fresh.” A multi-faceted group, the members all write songs and take turns singing about love, letting go, the beauty of the natural world, and drinking—sometimes in the same song. They’re a fun, home-style band that’s open to new experiences. Among other things, they’ve been featured on Jam in the Van, where bands record videos inside a solar-powered mobile studio, and the Gondola Sessions, where, during the course of a gondola ride in Aspen, Colorado, bands record two music videos—one on the way up the mountain and one on the way down. On their new album, Washoe, the Dead Winter Carpenters introduce more indie rock to their saloon sound. The album sees the band evolving and growing, but staying true to their high-energy, mountain music roots. For this album, it was important to the band to capture the energy of their shows. They recorded as much as possible live in the studio, with everyone playing together. “This album, with all its little nuances and everything, really has a lot more spirit than our last album,” says Charles. “It really captures what our energy is live. It sounds like us.”
Dead Winter Carpenters will perform with Bay Area roots band the Sam Chase at 8:30 p.m. on Saturday, April 30 at Moe’s Alley, 1535 Commercial Way, Santa Cruz. $9/adv, $12/door. 479-1854.
The new spring menu at Au Midi in Aptos is knocking me out. Braised halibut with lemongrass and ginger emulsion served on a potato cloud. A potato cloud. Doesn’t your mouth want a bite of that? Chef Muriel Loubiere has pulled out all the Gallic stops in honor of le printemps. Lamb tenderloin with cream of garlic and tarragon sounds outrageous, but the piece de resistence has to be bouillabaisse Provençal. Lobster in saffron broth with baby fennel, potatoes, spicy aioli, and toasts. All of the aromatic and toothsome food groups in a single, luscious dish. Carnivores need to check out the Loubiere touch on classics like Daube Provençal, duck breast with rosemary sauce, and filet mignon with morels and Madeira sauce. I cannot remember a more mouthwatering menu at this charming bistro. It reads like a visit to the sunny South of France. aumidi.com.
Spring into the Garden
It’s that time again. UCSC’s giant Farm & Garden Spring Plant Sale will once again unfurl its botanical smorgasbord up at the intersection of Bay and High streets from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday, April 30, and 10 a.m to 2 p.m. on Sunday, May 1. Vegetable growers will be tempted by the sale’s enormous selection of tomatoes and peppers (of all kinds), as well as lettuces, herbs, squashes, pumpkins, kale, cucumbers, and more. Let’s stay with tomatoes for a minute. Almost nothing is as memorable as a bite of a sun-warmed, ripe tomato tasted right on the spot in your own garden. Tomatoes reward growers with fresh salad ingredients as well as the ingredients for a year’s worth of pasta sauces. The collection for sale this year features pomodori specially chosen for their adaptation to our coastal microclimate. The Marvel Striped, Yellow Pear, Camp Joy Cherry, Rainbow’s End, Brandywine, and dozens more await your purchase. And the flower possibilities are endless. casfs.ucsc.edu.
Envirotokenism
You’ve got your favorites, I’ve got mine. Those little slots by the exit at New Leaf Community Markets, where you choose the nonprofit you want your token (for bringing in your own shopping bag) to benefit. These little 10-cent tokens offer a chance to put New Leaf’s money where your conscience desires—Native Animal Rescue, the Homeless Garden Project, Save Our Shores, Friends of Santa Cruz State Parks, Friends of the Sea Otter, and Seymour Marine Discovery Center, have all received donations during the past year. Well, now New Leaf customers can vote on which environmentally friendly local nonprofits will be the recipients of Envirotoken donations for the coming year. And these donations do add up. Last year New Leaf donated more than $56,000 to 22 different local organizations. You can help decide where the money will go next. Online voting happens until May 31 at newleaf.com/community/envirotokens. Don’t forget to bring your bag.
Eco Products of the Week
The drought responsibility project at Friend in Cheeses Jam Co. strikes us as a great idea. The new Prickly Purple Heart Jam is a prime example of a tasty jam made from fruits that need no additional water to grow and ripen. The use of organic dry-farmed ingredients like tomatoes and figs helps cut down on water waste. And the artisanal group has partnered with the Homeless Garden Project for harvests of organic Padron peppers. Not only are the peppers dry-farmed but they are cultivated by trainees learning valuable employment skills. Check out the friendincheeses.com/blog for updates about this sensitive new direction for the Tabitha Stroup kitchen. And look for the Blue Label!
Wine of the Week
The ambidextrous Clos de Gilroy Grenache made by the house of Doon (Bonny Doon Vineyard). Red currants, berries and white pepper, driven by Monterey County grapes. Unbeatable for $14.99 (Shopper’s Corner).
Every year toward the end of the Do-It-Ourselves Festival, Jeff Wilson picks up a banjo, a guitar and a Dobro and heads over to the amphitheater to play. “I just let it all out there. I just show up in the morning and treat it like a gospel-y sort of thing,” explains Wilson. Two years ago, the festival’s stage on Sunday morning was still wet from an overnight rain and the tarp over a tent above Wilson sagged with a puddle of water. Suddenly, the puddle spilled out from the top of the tent, nearly splashing Wilson, as he tuned up. “I knew you were gonna do that,” he growled at the tent without looking up, as the small audience chuckled. Wilson’s curmudgeonly persona is part shtick and part Sunday morning fatigue. The hard-working festival organizer was up late the night before, after all, listening to ska band Dan P. and the Bricks perform a set featuring sing-alongs, happy dances, and even an epic stage dive from frontman Dan Potthast. Wilson had hijacked the mic for a few minutes to grumble about how happy he was and how much he loved everybody. “I’m always stoked,” Wilson, who sometimes goes by the stage name Birdman, says of his Sunday morning festival routine. “It’s a therapeutic thing for me on Sundays to space out and feel the morning vibes and feel that the festival’s ending.” This weekend marks the fourth annual DIO Fest at Camp Krem in Boulder Creek. The festival, which runs April 29 through May 1, has announced more sponsors than ever, including Mountain Feed & Farm Supply, and Lagunitas Brewing Company, which is supplying the festival with several kegs of Northern California beer. “Not that it’s a cornerstone of the festival, but we all appreciate beer, and it’s a part of festival culture,” Wilson says. “Financially, it’s going to help us out a lot.” Wilson, who handles the festival booking, is also bringing in San Diego funk group Sure Fire Soul Ensemble, and Golden Void, a ’70s-style rock outfit, as well as Rushad Eggleston, an eccentric cello player who performed last year. Eggleston, a Carmel resident, is known as much for his virtuosity as he is for his wacky outfits, funny hats and standing up while playing and holding his cello, as if it were a guitar. “We’re really honored to have him there again. He’s by far the weirdest but also the most prolific and amazing artist that will be at DIO this year,” Wilson says.
LAUNCHING PAD
When the first DIO Fest kicked off three years ago, many Santa Cruz songwriters who have since blossomed into successful touring acts were still so green that they hadn’t even developed local followings yet. Marty O’Reilly and his Old Soul Orchestra, for instance, had only been together six months. “We were still developing and figuring this out, and we had just recorded our first album,” O’Reilly says. “It was a new festival, and we were very much a new product. We’ve seen each part grow.” “It’s kind of like a family reunion,” he says of the festival now. “You get to see what everyone has done in the past year and what everyone’s worked on.” O’Reilly lives at the Tannery Arts Center, although he tours year round. His band released a new EP in December, and their next two-month tour begins in May in Indiana, followed by New York City, Switzerland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Singer-songwriter and Aptos native Kendra McKinley, who, like O’Reilly, played the festival in 2013, says she wouldn’t miss the event because she says she can’t imagine anything better than camping with friends and making music. “The first year was just nice,” she remembers. “Not one of us could believe that it happened on Sunday. We were all just blissed out and hungover. But we were like, ‘Yep, we’ve been through a music festival, and tomorrow’s Monday.’” McKinley moved to San Francisco two years ago, and has been playing big shows at venues like the Fillmore. McKinley, whose sound is somewhere between bossa nova and 1960s rock, is releasing a full-length album called Treat this summer, and following it up with a tour. O’Reilly finds himself constantly telling people about DIO Fest and convincing friends they can’t skip it. The only festival he ever encountered that rivaled it in atmosphere was the Stendhal Festival of Art in Northern Ireland last August, when “it was just pissing rain for two weeks,” he says. “Everyone is just covered in mud by the end of it because it’s pouring rain, and I didn’t go to bed until 11 in the morning because I was hanging out with all these amazing kids from England and Northern Ireland,” he says. “When festivals get too big, it’s hard to meet people that easily.”
The Do-It-Ourselves Festival starts at 1:50 p.m. on April 29 and runs through May 1. A three-day pass to the festival is $125. A one-day pass is $45. For more information, visit doitourselvespresents.com.
Two dozen rented rowboats floated all Saturday on Loch Lomond, captained by weekend fishermen hoping to surprise some largemouth bass. For three years, nobody fished the Felton reservoir, due to closure from drought, until it reopened in March, following a stormy El Niño winter. The creeks are flowing again and the reservoir—an important water source for Santa Cruz—is brimming. Santa Cruz’s water department has lifted its mandatory rationing, and many locals, who have grown accustomed to leaving lawns unwatered and toilets unflushed, are sighing with relief, believing that El Niño has ended the unprecedented drought. But what many don’t realize is that a danger lurks underground, and Santa Cruz County’s water problem is bigger than the four-year drought. A favorite analogy local water experts use to describe the county’s water problem is that of an “overdrafted bank account.” The county’s main water source is underground basins, water-bearing rock and soil from which wells draw. In the winter, rains deposit water back into the basin by seeping through layers of soil, rock and clay to reach the water table below. For decades, starting in the 1950s and accelerating with population booms in the 1980s, the county has drawn from its underground basins faster than the rains can replenish them. In January, two of the county’s three main basins were designated by the state as “critically overdrafted,” the most dire classification. As of mid-April, the El Niño winter brought 31.8 inches of rain to the county, 110 percent of normal for the season to date, according to the National Weather Service. That was enough to get rivers and streams flowing again, but nowhere close to refilling the basins. Unlike the rest of the county, Santa Cruz has quickly recovered, since it relies almost entirely on rivers, streams and its main reservoir, Loch Lomond. Only five percent of the city’s water comes from underground sources.
“We don’t have a supply problem,” says Menard. “We have a storage problem. What that means is there’s plenty of water in the system in the winter. We just don’t have a place to put it. So if we solve the storage problem, we won’t have a supply problem.”
That means that when rains stop, Santa Cruz is the first to feel the effects, and when rains return, it is the first to recover. In 2014, the City of Santa Cruz Water Department was one of the first districts in the state to begin rationing, says Rosemary Menard, the department’s director. Now Loch Lomond is full for the first time in three years, and the San Lorenzo River, another main source for Santa Cruz’s water, is gushing. Earlier this month, Santa Cruz’s water department announced that it will not restrict customer water use this year. For the last two years, Santa Cruz had the strictest rationing mandates in the county. Of the few local districts with mandatory rationing, Santa Cruz’s is the first to lift restrictions.
Long-Term Drought Look
The state water board has the final say on whether the state’s drought is officially over, a decision it will make by the end of the month. The state’s drought outlook is more complex this year, since El Niño rains hit the state unevenly. Parts of Northern California are no longer considered in drought, whereas Southern California has seen almost no change. As of April 13, Santa Cruz County was classified as “abnormally dry,” the lowest of five levels of drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, a weekly map of drought conditions produced in part by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). That’s a significant improvement from three months ago, when most of the county was in “extreme drought,” the second-highest level. Heavy rains in January and March have improved the local drought outlook for the meantime, but researchers predict greater weather extremes for California—hotter, drier and longer droughts, punctuated by colossal storms. LOCH STOCK While Felton’s Loch Lomond Resevoir is full for the first time in three years, it’s the county’s underground water supplies that are the hardest to retain. A Stanford University study published this month predicts a “feast or famine” weather pattern for California, a warmer future with large swings between huge storms and severe droughts, similar to the current unprecedented drought. Also, on April 14, NOAA reported an increasing likelihood of a La Niña season this November. La Niña is the atmospheric counterpart to El Niño—meaning a drier winter is likely ahead, especially in Southern California. So for Santa Cruz, that means this winter’s rains are just a temporary fix. “We don’t have a supply problem,” says Menard. “We have a storage problem. What that means is there’s plenty of water in the system in the winter. We just don’t have a place to put it. So if we solve the storage problem, we won’t have a supply problem.” “But until we solve this storage problem … we are extremely vulnerable to shortages in years that we don’t have adequate precipitation.”
‘An Almost Insignificant Dent’
By the end of the month, the state may also set water use reduction goals for each district, like it did last year. Menard said she is confident that Santa Cruz will meet any goals set by the state, even without mandatory rationing, since many customers now have drought-friendly landscaping and low-flow appliances. However, the rest of the county, which accounts for 80 percent of the county’s water use, has a more dismal outlook. Soquel Creek Water District, which serves 38,000 residents between Soquel and La Selva Beach, has one of the county’s two critically overdrafted basins. The Soquel Valley basin is the district’s sole water source. The El Niño rains had “an almost insignificant dent” on recharging the basin, says Ron Duncan, the district’s manager. Rains take years to penetrate the ground and refill the aquifers, the water-bearing parts of the basin. Even several heavy rain seasons in a row wouldn’t solve the district’s problems, he says. “One way we could fill the aquifers back up is to stop pumping for eight years,” Duncan says. “We can’t do that, but that tells you the magnitude of the problem.” Complicating the issue is saltwater intrusion, which happens when the coastal basins are drawn below sea level and pressure sucks seawater inland into the underground basin. Once seawater creeps inland, it’s tough to stop. Further south, in Monterey County, seawater has nearly reached Salinas, roughly 10 miles inland, according to 2013 data. When saltwater reaches a well, the well is contaminated. So far, in Soquel Creek’s district, saltwater has been detected underground along the coast at Pleasure Point and near Seascape, the southern third of its district. “Seawater intrusion is coming our way, as we speak,” Duncan says. “If current conditions persist, it’s just a matter of time before it hits our production wells.”
The Scary Map
The county’s other critically overdrafted basin belongs to the Pajaro Valley Water Management Agency, which serves mostly agricultural customers, as well as Watsonville residents. The Pajaro basin supplies the region with 98 percent of its water. In the Pajaro Valley, seawater has already crept 3 miles inland in some places, according to Mary Bannister, the agency’s manager. She refers to a map of where the basin’s water is below sea level, year by year. Like a tumor’s growth, it shows the area of depleted aquifers stretching outward each year. “The ‘scary map’ is what I call it,” she says. “In red, it shows that groundwater levels, all the way back to the San Andreas Fault, were below sea level [in 2013].” IN THE RED Dubbed the ‘scary map’ by Pajaro Valley Water Management Agency manager Mary Bannister, the map shows the expanding areas where the groundwater is below sea level, which invites seawater intrusion. “That’s terrifying to us. Seawater is more dense than freshwater. Not only do we need groundwater levels to be at sea level, we need it to be above sea level by 10 or 20 feet,” says Bannister. “If we’ve got groundwater levels at or below sea level all the way back to the fault [10 miles inland], we’re inviting that seawater front to move inland.” Agriculture uses 85 percent of Pajaro Valley’s water. Over the past few decades, farmers have shifted from apples to more water-intensive crops such as berries and lettuce—which is part of the reason the valley’s basin is overdrawn, Bannister says. She adds that while growers use most of the water, they also drive a $616 million local crop industry, which helps pay for big-ticket water conservation and water supply projects. For example, a $48 million Watsonville recycled water facility built in 2009 produces 4,000 acre-feet of water each year, paid largely by state and federal grants but also by fees from growers. One acre-foot of water is 326,000 gallons, enough to supply two families of four in the Pajaro Valley for a year. “We’re searching for every drop of water we can get our hands on to try to solve the problem here,” Bannister says.
Saving the Basins
In 2014, Gov. Jerry Brown signed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which requires the formation of local groundwater agencies to draft and enact plans to save their basins within 20 years. In March, the Santa Cruz Mid-County Groundwater Agency was formed, which includes elected officials, water district staff and private well owners. A plan has yet to be made. However, districts have already started collaborating and creative solutions are being tested. Soquel Creek Water District recently completed a feasibility study for a recycled water facility that would purify wastewater otherwise destined for the ocean. The purified water would be injected underground, to restore the basin. Santa Cruz and Scotts Valley’s water districts are also considering building recycled water facilities. Last month, Pajaro Valley Water Management Agency’s board approved a project with the Resource Conservation District of Santa Cruz County that would pay landowners to build recharge basins on their property. The project is modeled after solar panel systems that pay owners who return electricity to the grid. Landowners would be rewarded based on how much rainwater they can return underground. Another possible project: Santa Cruz’s water district is considering sharing the water it pulls from the San Lorenzo River with the Soquel Creek Water District. That would allow Soquel Creek customers to let their basin rest and recharge a bit when the river is running strong. Santa Cruz County already has among the lowest per capita water use in the state. “We feel the public’s done their part, and we’re really trying to do our part now,” says Duncan, who is also part of the Santa Cruz Mid-County Groundwater Agency’s staff. “We have to have supplemental [water] supplies. We can’t solve this problem through conservation. I think we all understand that now.”
Pam Randall is wheeling a cart of 350 books into Live Oak’s newly opened Boys & Girls Club. It’s Wednesday, April 13, a milestone day for Randall, a board member for local nonprofit Free Books For Kids, which is about to hand out book number 25,000. “I’ve got classics. I’ve got Hardy Boys. I’ve got the Little House on Prairie series. For our 25,000th book, I chose this one,” she says holding up a copy of Beezus and Ramona. “Beverly Cleary just turned 100 years old. She’s still alive. She wrote this book when I was a little girl, and she lives near Monterey.” The tradition of passing out books began in 2009 when Malcolm Kushner, a former teacher, started a group called Free Books for Teachers, which eventually distributed about 20,000 books throughout the county. The effort paved the way for Free Books for Kids, the all-volunteer group that started in 2014. Randall, a retired principal for Del Mar Elementary School, estimates that she has 1,000 more books scattered around her garage. “They’re along the back wall. They’re on the washer and dryer. They’re on [my husband’s] workbench,” Randall says, as children scurry around her, thumbing through novels. “We can still get the car and motorcycle in, but all the way around are books. I have to be diligent about distributing our books so that we can still park our vehicles in there.” Randall goes to the Bargain Barn, Goodwill’s Harvey West outlet, to buy books by the bag, with each bag coming out to $6. “You want to get as many books as you can in there, so it’s like a little game of Tetris to get all the books in the bag,” Randall says. Meanwhile, Kushner, who now lives in Sacramento, buys books by the palette from a Salvation Army in Northern California, where he has expanded distribution, and drives extra books down to Santa Cruz. The group spends almost all the money they raise on books, which come out to 4 cents a pop, on average, Randall says. They donate the books to kids at after-school programs via the Beach Flats Community Center and through groups representing farm workers. Jennifer Sherry, the unit director for the Live Oak Boys & Girls Club, says she loves when the club gets several copies of the same book, and they’re able to launch a book club. “They can each read, they can each interpret, and they can discuss,” Sherry says, sitting across the table from Randall. “Without her, we wouldn’t be able to do that.”
For more information on Free Books For Kids, including how to donate, visit freebooksforkids.org or check out the group’s Facebook page.
Six years ago, Mikey Maramag didn’t know anything about making electronic music. Nor did he have any professional gear. Yet music blogs like Pitchfork started raving about the dreamy lo-fi electro-pop tunes they found on his MySpace page, which he initially created under the moniker Bye Bye Blackbird, then later Blackbird Blackbird. Part of what made Maramag’s music so compelling was the vocals, which were mixed low and treated like an additional synthesizer, adding another spacey layer of chill vibes. It’s reminiscent of other bands circa 2010, like Washed Out and Beach House. But far from attempting to start a movement, Maramag’s sound was more a product of his technical limitations than anything else. “I didn’t have any cool equipment. I was literally trying to pay rent. I didn’t have the means to get a nice microphone,” he explains. “I was just singing into a MacBook microphone, and put AutoTune on that shit, and then sampled it and put it in the background. It turned out cool. I want to go back to it, but not really.” That initial batch of tunes were made in Santa Cruz while Maramag was a student at UCSC. He currently resides in L.A., but at the time he lived on River Street, and stayed up all night making music on his computer. “You can see the house from the highway. It’s literally about to crumble apart. People might die there, so someone should probably get them out of the house,” he says. As Blackbird Blackbird gained more attention, Maramag was able to finally get some better gear. His more recent music doesn’t have the same laptop-chillwave feel; instead, he’s evolved into blending live and analog instruments with computer sounds and samples. He incorporates guitar and drums (instruments he’s been playing longer than he’s been programming electronic music), which results in a thicker, more genre-bending sound. He’s also stopped mixing the vocals so low. But the dreamy vibe present in his early work is still all over his newer records, like 2014’s brilliant Tangerine Sky. The songs strike a balance between moody indie-rock and laid-back synth-pop. “I’ve always really loved pop music. A lot of my first stuff was really experimental. I was just figuring out what I was doing. Now I’m taking more of an arrangement-based approach when I write music,” Maramag says. “I definitely keep pop music in mind when I make music. I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily pop music. I definitely kept the catchiness in mind.” Maramag hasn’t gone in one single direction. Some of his music is more in the realm of pop, while some of it is more experimental. He’s generally attempting to mix ingredients of electronic and live instrumentation to create something new and exciting, but sometimes tunes will be exclusively electronic or only include live instruments. “All in all, it doesn’t matter which one you use, as long as you know how to get what you’re going for. It doesn’t matter if it’s analog or digital, as long as you can create a sound that you want. It shouldn’t matter. That’s just how I see it. Back then I was like, ‘I want to get sick analog sounds and get really good warmth with synths and stuff,’” Maramag says. Currently Blackbird Blackbird is touring as a solo act. At his shows, Maramag plays guitar and sings while the synths and beats play as backing tracks. But he’s considering ways to tweak his live performance, like adding other people. “Depending on what I’m writing next, I could be needing some help from other musicians. Preferably a multi-instrumentalist like myself, someone that can play guitar, drums, bass, keyboards—do everything I do, like a clone of me,” Maramag says. “I might just clone myself.”
INFO: 8:30 p.m., Friday, April 22. Catalyst, 1011 Pacific Av.e, Santa Cruz, $12/Adv, $15/Door. 429-4135.
Pam Randall is wheeling a cart of 350 books into Live Oak’s newly opened Boys & Girls Club. It’s Wednesday, April 13, a milestone day for Randall, a board member for local nonprofit Free Books For Kids, which is about to hand out book number 25,000.
“I’ve got classics. I’ve got Hardy Boys. I’ve got the Little House on Prairie...
