Arts & EntertainmentArts
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A young woman finds a stranded baby sea otter on a beach south of Big Sur after a storm. Peering down at the damp, shivering fur ball, she grabs her cell phone and makes a call, setting in motion a story about the otter’s struggle for survival and humans’ efforts to protect an iconic species.
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Santa Cruz Bird Whisperer Tells All
ArtsLit May 14, 2012, by Traci Hukill
The Westside is foggy and cold when Jon Young and I meet on Delaware Avenue, at the back entrance to Natural Bridges State Beach, for a morning lesson in bird language. With him is Josh Lane, a mentor at Young’s Bonny Doon–based 8 Shields Institute, a nonprofit promoting connection with nature.
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A specter haunts the Condomine household, but the incorporeal emanation of Charles Condomine’s first wife is the spirit with which Blithe Spirit, which plays at Center Stage through May 20, concerns itself the least. Instead we are invited to laugh at the vanity, arrogance, pretense and pomp of the English middle class.
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You have a motion-triggered bomb loaded with nails. It’s armed. You, as an anti-clearcutting “Green Mafia” terrorist, are presumably going to deliver this weapon to the Redwood Empire some 200 miles north of the Bay Area. Question: would you first put this bomb under your car seat and take it for a nice twisty drive, 75 miles in the wrong direction, down Highway 17 from Oakland to Santa Cruz?
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If you can answer “yes” to this, the FBI needs you. -
She has paid $2,000 for Grape Camp, a three-day getaway for tourists who want to learn how to pick grapes in the vineyards. She has perfect salon hair, neatly plucked eyebrows half hidden by sunglasses, and the relaxed demeanor of, well, someone who can afford to spend $2,000 on Grape Camp. While Mexican laborers work the vineyards behind her, she speaks to the camera.
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A 20-foot blue whale comes floating down Soquel Creek when suddenly a rowboat carrying two passengers emerges from the mouth of the leviathan. The astonished onlookers gathered on the banks gasp at the sight, then gasp again as the boat and its passengers are sucked back into the giant maw. This drama repeats several times as the boaters paddle madly, only to be consumed again and again, until at last they free themselves from the watery beast to the delighted cheers of the people on the shore.
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Weekend Guide, May 3–6, 2012
ArtsStageMusic May 01, 2012, by Traci Hukill
Every once in a while a weekend rolls around that is so crammed with goodness we have to tell you about all of it. This is one of those weekends—so good luck deciding how to spend it!
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What impulse drives people to create? And who chooses such an (often) unappreciated, solitary voyage in the first place? These are two of the central questions explored over a 12-year period by essayist and author Tom Bissell, whose new nonfiction collection, Magic Hours: Essays On Creators and Creation (Believer Books, $14), highlights a cross-section of writers, artists and filmmakers —from the relatively obscure to the relatively famous—all connected by their ability to produce something from nothing.
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Hundreds packed the Del Mar on Saturday night, April 14, for the Seventh Annual Secret Film Fest, a delectable 12-hour run of movies from around the world. Among the eclectic mix were Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope, Morgan Spurlock’s surprisingly poignant documentary about the annual convention of comic book geeks, and The Raid: Redemption, an Indonesian martial arts thriller wherein a rookie cop must bust out of an apartment building full of underworld thugs after a special task force mission goes horribly awry.
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Dance Week in Santa Cruz
ArtsStage Apr 19, 2012, by Traci Hukill
National Dance Week kicks off (pardon the pun) in Santa Cruz Thursday, April 19, at 5:30pm right outside Santa Cruz Weekly’s doors—lucky us!—with performances in front of the Civic, City Hall and the Church Street Library. And what do the organizational wizards at Dance Week Santa Cruz have in store for the dance fans of Santa Cruz?
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