From anarchist to Zen master, New Year’s Eve celebrations in Santa Cruz are a cross section of our fair city’s rich diversity. Whether a person wants to march through the streets or meditate, rub up against a sexy stranger, mine a buffet for all it’s worth or just catch some great live music, there’s a party for every persuasion and price point. Not afraid to be of service, we’ve compiled a guide to the best parties of (the last night of) the year.
2010: The Year in Review
The ups and downs of a year we’d mostly prefer to forget.
The Exhibitionist: Ceramic and Glass
Surprisingly, lots of kids with adults in tow marched up the stairs to the Museum of Art & History on a recent rainy weekend. In the lobby, a few seriously playful men in conductor hats sat behind a miniature landscape where long streams of colorful carriages careened over tiny tracks in a high-speed choreography of all-out races and near-misses: MAH’s annual Toy Trains family exhibit. Excited young voices rose cheerfully to MAH’s second floor and the “clay” part of the Association of Clay and Glass Artists of California exhibition, which opened last week.
Butterflies Enjoy a Break from the Rain
It wasn’t only last-minute Christmas shoppers who decided to take advantage of the sunny spell on Wednesday. In Lighthouse Field, the monarch butterflies were out in full force, taking advantage of the relatively warm air to flutter across the grass in their persistent search for nectar.
Organic Farmer Wins Landmark Pesticide Case
Larry Jacobs takes pride in his organic dill, which he grows at Jacobs Farm/Del Cabo. For years he’d been supplying Whole Foods with the bright green herb, grown organically on his farm just north of Santa Cruz. Then one day he received a phone call. His dill had tested positive for pesticides. It could not be certified organic. The problem, he discovered, was the liquid pesticides used to spray Brussel sprouts on a neighboring, non-organic farm. Those pesticides vaporized and were carried in the wind to his dill.
Homeless Center Remembers the Dead
Homelessness kills. That was the message you could have taken away from the ceremony at the Homeless Services Center on Tuesday night. There were 30 new flags, each with a name, to remember the 30 homeless people who died on the street in Santa Cruz in 2010. They were added to the flags for the victims of previous years, for a total of 463 flags—463 people—since 1999. And that’s only the people we know about.
Santa Cruz Poets, Santa Cruz Inspiration: Sally Ashton
From the San Jose State University creative writing teacher and editor of the DMQ Review, two poems.
The Exhibitionist: Lost Murals
My new career as mural detective started, as such things do, with a morsel of intriguing information. In the course of writing about Eduardo Carrillo’s retrospective at the Museum of Art & History last year I saw an image of the mural that Carrillo and his UCSC students painted in the tunnel entrance to El Palomar Restaurant in downtown Santa Cruz and learned that, decades ago, this powerful work, called Birth, Death and Regeneration, was painted over.
Deconstructing Santa
For several centuries American folklore has held that on Christmas Eve night, one man pulled by a team of flying reindeer has delivered presents springing forth from a single sack to all the good little children of the world. Against all odds, people have bought in. It’s not turning water into wine or parting the Red Sea, but Santa Claus sure has a following.
Senator Calls Grateful Dead Archive “Wasteful”
Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma is more than just a politician. He is also an MD and an ordained deacon in the Southern Baptist church, and something of a controversial figure. In the past, he opposed the regulation of tobacco by the FDA and referred to the prime time screening of Schindler’s List, saying that TV had been taken “to an all-time low, with full-frontal nudity, violence and profanity.”
