Cat Johnson is a freelance writer and blogger who reports on music, arts, community and culture for SanJose.com, Metro Newspaper, Santa Cruz Weekly and Shareable. Follow her on Twitter at @CatJohnson.
Entries by Cat Johnson:
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Sara Watkins Defies Genre Boundries
ClubsMusic Nov 28, 2012, by Cat Johnson
Sara Watkins grew up playing bluegrass. A gifted fiddler, singer and songwriter, she was just 8 years old when she first put bow to string. For the next 18 years, she played alongside her brother Sean Watkins and 2012 Genius Grant recipient Chris Thile in the Grammy Award-winning progressive bluegrass outfit, Nickel Creek.
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Santa Cruz’s Wooster Unveils New Album
ClubsMusic Oct 16, 2012, by Cat Johnson
A local band that shows up regularly on Best of Santa Cruz lists, Wooster has caused a sensation in both California and…Guam? Yup, the video for the song “Ooh Girl” has received hundreds of thousands of hits on YouTube, and a good deal of the traffic is coming from the little island.
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Heartless Bastards Take An ‘Arrow’
Music Aug 07, 2012, by Cat Johnson
Erika Wennerstrom doesn’t mind explaining her band’s name. As frontwoman for the Heartless Bastards, she’s heard plenty of misconceptions about her band, including that it’s a death metal group and a man-hating rock band. But behind the oft-misunderstood moniker lies an American rock outfit that takes on themes of love, life and heartache with heartland style and a bluesy, alt-country flair. And the name? It was an incorrect answer to the trivia question “What’s the name of Tom Petty’s band?”
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Heartless Bastards Take An ‘Arrow’
Music Aug 07, 2012, by Cat Johnson
Erika Wennerstrom doesn’t mind explaining her band’s name. As frontwoman for the Heartless Bastards, she’s heard plenty of misconceptions about her band, including that it’s a death metal group and a man-hating rock band. But behind the oft-misunderstood moniker lies an American rock outfit that takes on themes of love, life and heartache with heartland style and a bluesy, alt-country flair. And the name? It was an incorrect answer to the trivia question “What’s the name of Tom Petty’s band?”
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Local Nonprofits Benefit from CSA Shares
NewsCommunity Jun 19, 2012, by Cat Johnson 1 Comments
To visit the Homeless Garden Project’s Natural Bridges Farm is to step into a simpler world. Just blocks away from the unending flow of traffic on Mission Street and the chaos of downtown Santa Cruz, the farm sits away from it all. Bursting with life, it’s a collage of colors, scents and sounds.
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Stripe’s Secrets: Retro Eclectic Design Interiors
Business Apr 17, 2012, by Cat Johnson
Most people don’t look at a rusty old hammer and see the perfect thing to hang on an interior wall, or see a pile of padlocks as potential art or weatherbeaten wood as a place to put cherished photos. These are things that you find in junk piles and salvage yards. But to those with an eye for upcycling and repurposing, these things are treasures that have the potential to add an inspired touch to a space.
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Juncos Bend Genres
Music Apr 10, 2012, by Cat Johnson
In 2001, Joshua Lowe walked into More Music, his George W. Bush economic stimulus money in hand, and bought his first mandolin. He knew a few chords on the guitar, but he had never taken it seriously, and on the heels of a breakup from a longtime girlfriend he needed an outlet. He liked the instrument’s percussive chk chk chk.
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How 3-D Printing Works
Business Mar 20, 2012, by Cat Johnson 4 Comments
When describing the actual 3D printing process, a good analogy to use is that of an inkjet printer, which takes information and prints it onto paper, in two dimensions, line by line, from the top down. In a similar fashion, 3D printers take information and print it, in three dimensions, layer by layer, from the bottom up.
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Why 3-D Printing Matters
Business Mar 20, 2012, by Cat Johnson
On Star Trek: The Next Generation, crew members use a machine known as the replicator to make replacement parts for the ship, prepare food and fix Captain Picard’s usual: “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.” Creating something out of nothing, the replicator is, sadly, pure science fiction. But using a newly emerging technology, we can design a wrench, a toy, a bike or a flying monkey, and with a click of the mouse, create it. This replicator is a printer, but what it makes is not a two-dimensional image of the design; not a paper model that folds into a 3-D one. This printer creates, quite literally, the object. Three-dimensional printing is here.
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Singer Dayan Kai’s Blind. So What?
MusicNightlife Mar 13, 2012, by Cat Johnson
It’s a sunny but brisk day and I’m sitting at Blue Ball Park with local musician Dayan Kai. He’s there with his family, and every now and then one of his kids runs over to pounce on him or give him a toy to hold. We’re talking about music and the fact that some people are just born musically gifted. “In the Indian tradition,” he says, his long blond hair blowing about in the winter breeze, “they say that you cannot learn to play tabla in one lifetime.”
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