Films This WeekCheck out the movies playing around town.With: Reviews Movie Times click here.Santa Cruz area movie theaters > ....... New This Week ADULT BEGINNERS TV regular Nick Kroll stars in this comedy (he came up with the story) as a would-be entrepreneur reduced to leaving Manhattan to move in with his estranged sister’s family and...

Win tickets to THE NEXTIES at The Rio on SantaCruz.com On the surface, Santa Cruz is a surf town, a tourist town, an artsy town. But stick around long enough and you’ll discover the not-so-secret secret about our little city: it’s full of innovators, changemakers, and entrepreneurs. Once a year, the Nexties honor some of the...

For garage-rockers and surf bands, playing the annual two-day music festival in Southern California known as Burgerama is an important milestone in their career. For locals Subpar, this happened last year—while most of the members were still juniors in high school, and they’d only been a band about a year. It went so well they were...

How DIY culture—and the way we document it—is evolving What happens when an entire subculture has no archive? No story exists. When no story exists, we assume there’s no story to be told. For most of this country’s history, underground cultural movements were rarely documented. That changed in the 20th century, when musicologists, sociologists and historians...

I remember the first time I told my therapist I had been a sex worker. Immediately, her disposition changed; adjusting her glasses, she became brusque and businesslike. “How old were you and for how long?” she asked, pen poised by her pad of paper, body canted slightly forward so as not to miss a word....

Three lit events this week in Santa Cruz illustrate why we cherish independent bookstores Last Saturday was Independent Bookstore Day, and, like my fellow bookworms, I headed out, wish list in hand, to pay my respects. But for me, it was bittersweet. As a former co-owner of Capitola Book Cafe, I know what it means to...

Soif to begin serving bar food at Motiv while renovations are underway, plus a gathering at Gabriella Cafe Soif is currently closed for its first remodel and expansion in 13 years. “The retail wine shop will be moving to the other side of the restaurant,” says owner Patrice Boyle, which means that the wine shop will...

Women shine in backstage drama ‘Clouds of Sils Maria’ The milieu is theatrical—actors, directors, stage and film. But there’s more than the typical backstage melodrama going on in French filmmaker Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria. It’s very much a movie of ideas, rather than action, in which a highly lauded and beloved French actress—played by...

A little bit of looking on the Internet, a little bit of watching the Daily Show,  a whole lot of just getting outside and enjoying the world. Morgan Culp, Santa Cruz, Customer Support                 I go out to my garden and work on my avocados and my tomatoes and...

Lunatics and pranksters hijack California’s broken initiative system Under Joe Decker’s theocratic law, shrimp, oysters, scallops, winkles and clams would become a controlled substance. Eating or peddling shellfish of any kind would render the guilty felonious, fined—$666,000 to be exact—and sent to the slammer. “Pretty harsh,” he concedes with a shrug, “but at least it’s not...