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.
News
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.
Bag Monster Shows up at Meeting
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.”
