Gary Wise of Gilroy has a passion for guns, and his personal collection, consisting of at least 75 pieces, was worth at least $2 million. He was careful about it and kept the weapons locked in a home safe, confident that no one would be able to gain access to them, but he was wrong. On Sunday night, a group of home invaders broke into his house, tied him up and managed to get access to the collection. They beat him up severely and took off with the guns. They made off in Wise’s truck, but it was later found burned out in the mountains near Highway 9 and Highway 35.
Cabrillo College Struggles with Budget
Administrators and trustees of Cabrillo College are making contingency plans for next year’s budget without actually knowing how much money they will have. The problem, they say, is Gov. Jerry Brown’s current proposal to slash $400 million from the statewide community college budget. Cabrillo, which now has an operating budget of about $60 million, could lose as little as $4.2 million or as much as $10 million. In either case the college stands to face a deficit.
Unusual Valentine’s Day Raffle Takes Shape
Local landscaper Ken Foster acquired 930 pounds of dried rose petals and decided to raffle them off to quell addition to oil and drugs in Santa Cruz. On Valentine’s Day, Foster, with the assistance of local celebrity surfer Darryl “Flea” Virostko, will raffle off the rose petals at Greenspace. A portion of the proceeds will go to Transition Santa Cruz, whose goal is to design our future to raise our quality of life independent of oil. Foster will personally arrange the petals as mulch wherever and however the the lucky winner chooses.
PLATED: Fresh Beginnings
The Weekly‘s new food column by award-winning writer Christina Waters debuts with a report from the Wine & Crab Taste-Off and news from local eateries and artisan food purveyors.
Paul Bowles @ 100
If you were a creative artist—composer, writer, dramatist, musician—during the middle of the 20th century, you knew the work of Paul Bowles. If you were an international insider, you probably vacationed at his Moroccan lodgings. His arc of influence left no art form and no intriguing personality untouched, and sooner or later the gifted and celebrated found their way to his Tangier hideaway. Known to mainstream audiences as the author of The Sheltering Sky and renowned among art world cognoscenti as an innovative composer, Bowles led a charmed and utterly independent life on three continents. To celebrate 100th anniversary of his birth, UCSC will host performers, filmmakers and scholars to celebrate “all things Bowles” this weekend, Feb. 4-6. All lectures, readings, exhibitions and performances are free and open to the public.
The Exhibitionist: Gloria Alford
Well-raised, well-read and well-educated, the middle-class girl from Northside Chicago went to Berkeley in the 1940s to get a degree in social sciences and—as was expected of young women of her time and class—choose a brilliant man to marry and with whom to have genius children. In the 1950s, Gloria Alford worked as a kindergarten teacher to put her husband through his Ph.D. program, then, with children in school and husband’s career launched, she took up again what she had begun as a youth at the Chicago Art Institute, re-entering the world of art via the acceptable milieu of sewing, fabric printing and design. With an innate intelligence and awareness of the turmoil of the 1960s, however, Alford did not fail to notice the growing influence of the computer in every sector of society. Compelled to make art that commented on the changing world around her, she increased her vocabulary, learned to vacuum-cast plastics and paper and investigated the language of computer code.
Santa Cruz Poets, Santa Cruz Inspiration: More Ellen Bass
From the Santa Cruz poet and winner of the Lambda Literary Award, a selection titled “Carpe Diem in The Backyard.”
Ten Questions for Garth Illingworth
An article appearing in the Jan. 27 issue of Nature made big news last week when a team of scientists reported they’d found the earliest and most distant galaxy in the universe, one that came into being fewer than 500 million years after the Big Bang. The UCSC astronomer who served as team leader for the project answers our puny, insignificant (yet somehow also universal… right?) questions.
Little Dragon on The Wing
Little Dragon is a Swedish band that plays American music. At least, that’s what everyone says. And certainly hearing their dark and deep-grooved electronic neo-soul for the first time, one could just as easily expect them to be from Detroit as Gothenburg.
Uncertain Future for The Tannery
The dream has always been for the Tannery Arts Center to become a hub of artistic and economic activity. Salz Tannery, constructed in the 1800s at the confluence of Pogonip Creek and the San Lorenzo River, closed in 2001 and shortly thereafter became the cause celebre for a clutch of city officials and planners who envisioned a thriving community of artist residences, studios, galleries and performance spaces. George Newell, the organization’s project director, says he sees it developing into a state-of-the-art production and performance site for musicians, videographers, dancers, painters, sculptors and actors. He says it could even become a tourist draw.
