Phil Collins recalls seeing John Cage and Lou Harrison at one of New Music Works’ early Avant Garden Parties. The two old friends, who’d been artistically and personally separated for several decades after they’d both studied with contemporary music icons Arnold Schoenberg and Henry Cowell (not the California landowner), had taken a walk together and returned to the party arm in arm.

Looking across the diamond from field level, it seemed as if Aubrey Huff appeared out of nowhere. Walking toward the dugout from the outfield, the 35-year-old veteran and 2010 World Series champion passed a dozen young players who, when he joined the San Jose Giants on a rehab assignment a few hours earlier, had become his teammates. They continued to stretch and goof around, the way all ballplayers do before a game, and he just walked by. Not just a man among boys, it looked like he was in another dimension, a different world.

A couple of weeks ago, while blazing temperatures and azure skies drew thousands of people to Santa Cruz beaches, the Santa Monica-based group Heal the Bay threatened the summery good vibes with a press release headlined “Top Ten Beach Bummers.” In its annual Beach Report Card, the group gave Cowell’s Beach, right next to our beloved Steamer Lane, an “F” and listed it as one of the two most polluted beaches in California.

Last fall, the acclaimed environmentalist and nutrition guru John Robbins was invited to the home of his friends Foster and Kimberly Carter Gamble, near Santa Cruz, to view the Gambles’ just-completed film, Thrive. Robbins, who makes a brief appearance in the film, says he was “overwhelmed” by what he saw.

Dust off your tin foil hats! The locally produced film with the cult following claims the government is suppressing a mystical source of “free energy.” And that’s just the start of the wackiness. Thrive also lionizes radical libertarians, John Birchers and conspiracy theorists who believe a race of lizard people rule over us.

As the camera pans away from the glare of the rising sun, jagged white and blue ice peaks fill the screen. The tallest catches the first pink light of dawn. In the foreground we see a climber encased in his red down survival spacesuit. He is walking very, very slowly, inching up a steep knife-edge ridge toward us. As the scene shifts to slow motion, we can see that he is stumbling.

One Sunday last November, while 10,000 people encircled the White House to protest the Keystone XL pipeline, judges at the Banff Mountain Film Festival were giving an award to a powerful documentary about a less well-known pipeline.