Opening this week at the Santa Cruz Film Festival is The Catalyst, an engaging and long-overdue documentary profile of the 40-year-old nightclub. There are students drinking there right this minute whose parents stomped, writhed and were sometimes ’86ed from the very same premises.
News
Summer Whites
Why is it that some people give you pitying looks when you order white wine? It’s delicious, it’s complex, it doesn’t deliver a crushing headache and when the mercury rises it does what red wine can’t: it refreshes.
The Alfresco Almanac
Nothing says “I’m not at work right now” like eating outside. Lunch on the patio, dinner under the stars—it’s like an instant transport system to summer vacation on the Mediterranean or a tropical island getaway, where the tables are set out on the sidewalks and decks as a matter of course and where the night air is balmy enough for tank tops.
Sudden Oak Death’s Fungal Side
Last winter John Brown’s favorite chanterelle patch died. For years, the longtime member of the Fungus Federation of Santa Cruz had visited a particular cluster of live oak trees during walks in the woods just west of San Jose. Many mushrooms share a symbiotic relationship with particular tree species, and coastal chanterelles usually appear in the close presence of live oak and tanoak trees.
Enviros Seek Transportation Specifics in Climate Doc
A team of Santa Cruz environmentalists looked at the city’s Climate Action Plan, shrugged and arrived at a common conclusion: it could be better. Micah Posner of People Power, Transition Santa Cruz’s Michael Levy and Virginia Johnson of Ecology Action have released a 16-point list of suggested improvements to the plan, which serves as a blueprint for how the city will get its greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels by 2020.
Santa Cruz Poets, Santa Cruz Inspiration: Ellen Bass, ‘Gophers’
From the Santa Cruz poet and winner of the Lambda Literary Award, a selection titled “Gophers.”
Ten Questions for Mark Primack
The architect and outspoken former city councilmember on the next generation, building local and the real meaning of sustainability.
Hoedown at Pie Ranch
When I first walk into the barn, I meet a mass of bodies holding hands and reeling from one end of the hay-strewn wooden floor to the other as it spirals towards the center of the room. A blonde little girl in pint-sized cowboy boots tugs a tall, young bearded man—a farmer, judging by his boots—along, laughing. The train thunders like a summer storm, and although I am only 20 miles outside of town, I feel like I’ve traveled back in time with the dozens of other folks lined up shoulder-to-shoulder under the canopy of twinkle lights.
Touche’d By An Angel
Hamlet certainly knows what it is to grapple with self-doubt. In Mountain Community Theater’s production of Paul Rudnick’s I Hate Hamlet, the actor behind tragedy’s greatest hero does, too.
La Vie En Prose
We make our own lives out of words from the stories we tell ourselves and rarely realize our own good fortune. To understand, we need to see words that describe another’s life and fortune, to see that life from within after having seen it from afar.
