With Earth Day two days away, the Downtown Santa Cruz Farmers Market is throwing a party for Mother Earth this Wednesday, April 20 (yes, that is 4/20). Writer/activist John Robbins will be on hand, as well as Save Our Shores Executive Director Laura Kasa and other eco-visionaries. Now opening at 1:30pm, the expanded market will feature more sit-down dining action, everything from Raw Daddy and Rib King to Penny Ice Creamery.
News
Yevgeny Sudbin Inaugurates Concert Grand At Cabrillo
Available for purchase only since early 2010, the new Yamaha CFX 9-foot grand piano has already won wide acclaim as “the Rolls Royce of concert grands.” So agrees John Orlando, who runs Cabrillo College’s Distinguished Artists series. The piano has a “beautiful singing quality,” he says, “like the human voice.”
Grisman Premieres New Mandolin Piece at NMW
To describe the legendary David Grisman as a mandolin player who advocates for acoustic string music makes him sound vaguely academic. Not so the company he has kept: Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead, Stéphane Grappelli, John Hartford, Bonnie Raitt, Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor, to name just some. A multiple Grammy nominee, Grisman is also a composer, arranger, bandleader and producer whose pioneering synthesis of jazz and bluegrass inspired Garcia to name it “Dawg” music. Grisman headlines the New Music Works spring concert, Whirled on a String, at Cabrillo College this Saturday.
The Great Santa Cruz Frog Rescue
“The world’s a better place with frogs,” says devout amphibian lover Kerry Kriger. Kriger is sitting in his Santa Cruz office, his arms and legs crossed and his shoes kicked off to reveal white socks. “For me it’s enough just protecting wilderness because I like wilderness,” he says. “It’s our ethical responsibility to other organisms on the planet.”
UCSC Scholars Link Cosmology to Human Fate
UCSC professors Nancy Ellen Abrams and Joel R. Primack once again bring philosophy and astronomy together in a powerful new book about the cosmos—this one offering hope for a troubled planet.
Santa Cruz Fundraiser Unfazed by ‘Three Cups’ Probe
According to a 60 Minutes investigation, author and philanthropist Greg Mortenson fabricated or exaggerated the stories in his books Three Cups of Tea and Stones to Schools and has misused the funds of the Central Asia Foundation, the charity he founded and for which two Santa Cruz benefits raised nearly $30,000.
‘This Cosmically Pivotal Moment’
In Chapter 5 of their provocative new book The New Universe and the Human Future: How a Shared Cosmology Could Transform the World, (Yale University Press, 2011, $28), UCSC scholars Nancy Ellen Abrams and Joel R. Primack make the case that we are living at the “midpoint of time on multiple timescales.” Against this dramatic backdrop, they write, humanity finds itself at a pivotal moment in the sense that it’s approaching the end of a period of very rapid growth and can now, if it chooses, change its behavior to create a more sustainable future on Earth. Portions of the chapter are excerpted here.
Earth Day Santa Cruz 2011
On The Bubble Adam Freidin snapped this photo at the Earth Day Santa Cruz celebration at San Lorenzo Park on April 16.
Santa Cruz Poets, Santa Cruz Inspiration: Maggie Paul
Two poems from the college writing teacher and author of a new collection of poems.
Author Daniel Clowes’ Cringe Binge
We adore embarrassment, so long as it is not our own. Those who make us uncomfortable, whose misfortunes are so overwhelming as to inspire laughter instead of tears, are beacons of hope to anyone with anything left to lose. But it takes a consummate artist to create losers we love.
