NewsObituaries
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Adrienne Rich, 1929–2012
Obituaries Mar 28, 2012, by Traci Hukill
She wasn’t the most visible poet in Santa Cruz by any means, but Adrienne Rich was certainly its greatest. The winner of a National Book Award, MacArthur “genius” grant, two Guggenheims and numerous other distinctions died in her Santa Cruz home on Tuesday, March 27 from complications related to rheumatoid arthritis.
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Cassidy Meijer, 1978-2012
Obituaries Feb 21, 2012, by Steve Palopoli 13 Comments“All the smiles were prescription/And the laughter was canned/And nobody listened to my asteroid band” — “Asteroid Band,” Sin in Space
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My Career as a Cartoon Vandal
NewsObituaries Nov 29, 2011, by Richard Von Busack 1 Comments
So Bil Keane is no more. At age 89, this celebrated and beloved cartoonist has gone to meet Winsor McCay and Charles Schulz. The creator of The Family Circus, a redoubt of simpler times for more than 50 years, died Nov. 8.
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Few among us have not gloried in the world’s most widely syndicated one-panel cartoon, or chuckled over the gentle, homey foibles of Bil, Thelma and their four rambunctious kids, Billy, Jeffy, Dolly and young P.J., as well as the grim specters “Ida Know” and “Not Me.” -
Scott Kennedy: A Peaceful Warrior
Obituaries Nov 23, 2011, by Traci Hukill
Right up to the sudden end, Scott Kennedy was a fount of energy and ideas about how to make a better world. Last Friday, Nov. 18—just hours before his death early Saturday, most likely of a heart attack—he spent a long lunch talking with Mark Primack, his old ally on the Santa Cruz City Council.
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Lifelong Quaker Directed First Santa Cruz Head Start Program
Obituaries May 27, 2011, by Ken Foster
In loving memory of Eleanor “Ellie” Speer Foster, who died of congestive heart failure on April 27, 2011 in Santa Cruz. An activist, humanitarian and dedicated advocate for peace and justice, Ellie was known and loved by many in and beyond the Santa Cruz community.
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F. A. Nettelbeck, Outlaw Poet
Obituaries Jan 24, 2011, by Stephen Kessler
F. A. Nettelbeck, who died Jan. 20 in Bend, Oregon at age 60, is probably the most important avant-garde poet you’ve never heard of. Through his 23 books and chapbooks, countless magazine (and more recently online) publications, quite a few infamous readings and, for me personally, a friendship and correspondence spanning nearly four decades, Nettelbeck since 1970 established himself more than anyone else I’ve known as a truly outside-the-law literatus, a man who, if not for poetry, very likely would have ended up in prison. His genius as a writer was to echo or reflect back through a fractured idiom some of the deepest pathologies of our culture, and through anger and outrage and an irrepressible need to offer some cry of defiance, to create a formally meticulous, visually musical, highly personal yet anti-lyrical poetry.
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George Hitchcock, Jorge-of-all-trades
Obituaries Sep 01, 2010, by Stephen Kessler
When I was an undergraduate and aspiring poet at school in upstate New York in the mid-1960s I started reading the small-circulation independent literary journals known as little magazines. It was a volatile historical moment when cultural life was starting to erupt in all sorts of unpredictable forms, and one of those forms was this suddenly dynamic proliferation of creative periodicals run by eccentric individuals with a taste for poetry and some esthetic agenda or political viewpoint to promulgate, and read by a self-selected bohemian elite. One such journal was the San Francisco quarterly kayak, a remarkably lively magazine launched in 1964 and publishing some of the best poets, both famed and unknown, then writing in the United States. The editor and publisher of kayak was someone named George Hitchcock.
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Michael Been: 1950-2010
Obituaries Sep 01, 2010, by Steve Palopoli 19 Comments
There are cult bands, and then there are cult bands. Fans of the Ramones or the Misfits, for example, may treat them like cult bands, quick to point out that they were so far ahead of their time that the mainstream simply didn’t know what to do with them until long after they were gone, when they were vindicated by a rise to legendary status.
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An Amazing Man
Obituaries Oct 29, 2009, by Stephen Kessler
Morton Marcus, whose outsize presence animated and at times dominated Santa Cruz County’s literary culture for most of the last 40 years, died peacefully at home after a long illness early in the morning of Oct. 28. He was 73, and seemed both younger and older—younger because his attitude toward everything was one of boyish enthusiasm, and older because the amount of living he jammed into his years would have taken several lifetimes for anyone less charged with creative energy.
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Madam Mayor
Obituaries Oct 29, 2009, by Traci Hukill
I never met Mardi Wormhoudt. In the late 1990s, when I was getting my start in journalism and relegated to the sandbox of features writing, I would hear her name uttered in the newsroom and wonder at the hallowed tone employed by my usually cynical hero-colleagues. In the same way children take cues from their parents, espousing essentially baseless opinions about frivolous aunts or shiftless uncles, I came to understand that Mardi Wormhoudt was one of the good politicians. I didn’t know why. I just accepted it.
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