In some way you are diminished, and so these businesses—the moviehouse, the grocery, the Goodwill, the discount store that already slashes prices—knock a percentage off your purchases as a gesture of compassion for your shrunken condition. You don’t exactly feel old, unless you happen to notice your wizened visage in the mirror or the pain in your joints or the ancient habits you repeat as if in perpetuity, but you know you are.
Restaurant Week: Casablanca
Reopened last spring by Tyrolean Inn owners Whitney Belvin and Charles Cheatham, the Casablanca’s reinvention as an inn and bistro stresses a regional organic menu, thanks to chef Job Carder’s many personal contacts.
The Monarch Is Back
This weekend Santa Cruz turned out to greet the thousand of butterflies with their rich, autumn-colored wings, who will either winter in the park or move down to yet warmer pastures in Southern California or Mexico
Wild Beasts in Santa Cruz
The most pointed critique of contemporary indie rock is that the genre has calcified into an unthreatening stylistic form, while its perpetual sexlessness has metastasized into a regressive form of twee infantilization. English four-piece Wild Beasts has successfully resisted those trends, penning a body of unconventional work that is preoccupied with the tense power dynamics and negotiations of the bedroom.
Occupy Santa Cruz: A Movement Takes Root
“I don’t take credit cards anymore because they’ve made it too expensive,” says Bob Bailes, the owner of Bob’s Stop and Get It, a camping gear and redwood store in Ben Lomond. “They charged me, they charged everybody else instead of cutting back. Not like the old days. In the old days they would say, ‘We better tighten our belts.’ Now they just charge the people.”
Baaba Maal: Between Worlds
The Sahel is a ribbon of semiarid land, 600 miles at its widest point, that runs the width of Africa from Senegal and Mauritania at one end to Ethiopia and Eritrea at the other. It separates the rippling sand dunes of the Sahara in the north from a more verdant savannah to the south—or maybe it bridges them. In any case, the Sahel exists between two very different worlds, not unlike its most famous native son, the singer Baaba Maal.
Santa Cruz Poets, Santa Cruz Inspiration: Rosie King
From the Santa Cruz poet who grew up in Michigan down the street from Theodore Roethke, a poem about sounds.
Le Grand Prix-Fixe: Santa Cruz Restaurant Week
Just what we’ve always dreamed of: an excuse to eat out every single night of the week. All of the following fine eateries are offering $25 prix-fixe menus Oct. 5-12 as part of Santa Cruz Restaurant Week. Just call ahead, since some are closed Sundays or Mondays.
African Zombie Movie Opens
The zombie has a rich tradition in literature that dates back as far as The Epic of Gilgamesh, in which the spurned goddess Ishtar rages, “I will knock down the Gates of the Netherworld, I will smash the door posts, and leave the doors flat down, and will let the dead go up to eat the living! And the dead will outnumber the living!”
Taiko Celebrates 20 Years With A Boom
Taiko drumming beats with a rhythm as steady as the human heart—and as much life and soul. Letting out screams as they pound huge drums, teams of performers at Watsonville Taiko’s 20th anniversary celebration this weekend are sure to leave audiences spellbound.
