Yesterday’s public meeting of the Santa Cruz Public Works Department had an unexpected guest. As residents and representatives of environmental groups discussed a proposed ban of single use plastic bags in unincorporated areas of Santa Cruz County, they had a chance to hear from the Bag Monster himself.
The War At Home
“Babies still cry, telephones ring, Saturday morning cartoons screech, but without the men, there is a sense of muted silence, a sense of muted life,” Siobhan Fallon writes in You Know When the Men Are Gone, a collection of loosely connected stories about experience of Army wives and their soldier husbands deploying from Fort Hood, Texas.
Utah Phillips Tribute A Classic Folkie Affair
Duncan Phillips never wanted to play the guitar, at least not as a kid. In his young mind it was the thing that kept his father, legendary folk singer/activist/storyteller Bruce “Utah” Phillips, away from him. “It’s hard to say what I thought at the time,” says Phillips. “I just knew he was a singer out on the road, out there somewhere doing what he was doing.”
The Money Is Ours, Council Says
Faced with a $28 billion deficit, Gov. Jerry Brown has been eying funds from the state’s 400 redevelopment agencies to help balance the budget. Many cities across the state have questioned that assertion and sought ways to secure RDA moneys, which are used for everything from affordable housing to small business loans. San Jose and Fremont have already secured at least part of their funds by reaching collaborative agreements between their respective City Councils and RDAs. Now it is Santa Cruz’s turn.
The Exhibitionist: Robert Ogata
The eloquent simplicity of Robert Katsusuke Ogata’s recent paintings is a state achieved only after a lifetime of exploration. Ogata traveled many roads as an artist to get here—here, where an ambiguous gesture in black chalk on white canvas speaks volumes and draws the viewer closer, all the better to dive into the warm, sensuous emptiness of a pond of luminous white, but also pushes the viewer back for perspective and a view of the whole vision.
Santa Cruz Poets, Santa Cruz Inspiration: More David Swanger
From the winner of the John Ciardi prize in poetry, a poem about the ocean and its mal contents.
Health & Fitness: Sheer Hill
Gravity dictates the truest mantra on Earth: What goes up must come down. But give me a bicycle and a mountain and I’ll break that law or die trying. Whether by blessing or curse, I am drawn irresistibly to hills and the roads that go up them. I scorn horizontal distances, thriving instead on elevation gain. And while I do worship the beauty of the high country—its aswnimals, the trout streams staircasing down its canyons, the sun slipping through its peaks every evening—in the end, mine is a world of numbers.
Health & Fitness: Scrubbing Troubles
As a burgeoning market of detox products is only too happy to remind us, our inner workings are ripe with mysteries we might rather ignore. Our intestines, marketers tell us, are coated with petrified “gook,” parasites and toxins—but it doesn’t have to be this way. Laxative capsules and powders like “Colonblow” can see to that.
A Curiously Strong Entrepreneur
Logan Christopher assumes a bridge position: balanced on his feet and the back of his head, back arched, belly up, with his arms straight up in the air and a large kettle bell in each hand. A stack of three concrete blocks is placed on his stomach. A sledgehammer-wielding assistant winds up and lets fly. Concrete bits spray in all directions.
Calls for Civility on Lompico Board
It wasn’t exactly a Kumbaya moment, but tensions on the Lompico Water Board did ease somewhat last week after board member Sherwin Gott issued a public apology to board president Rick Harrington over the previous week’s kerfuffle, which saw rattled boardmembers call a recess in order to restore decorum in the tiny meeting room.
