I always loved winter holidays because Dad would take us somewhere we’d never been to do something we’d never done. Wherever we found ourselves, we’d go to a museum. We went to museums of art, history and science to learn about ships, neon and archaeology; we visited raisin museums, roadside museums—what vivid worlds we explored!
News
Jerry Brown’s Choice
I recently asked my friend Angela Oh, defense attorney and Buddhist priest, what she thought about the karma of Jerry Brown. She paused for only a moment. “His karma,” she replied, “is to inherit the collapse of so many institutions his father built.” Infrastructure decay. Traffic congestion and pollution. Water shortages. More prison inmates than state university students.
Kids’ Theater Program Launches
It’s not easy being Ugly. That’s “Ugly” as in “duckling,” the “aesthetically challenged farmyard fowl” rejected by everyone except for his mama in Honk!, the musical adaptation of the famous story in which a young swan finds himself rejected by a family of ducks.
Scotts Valley Hotel Facing Foreclosure
There is plenty in the news about homes facing foreclosure, but little about other properties. That may soon change. Lenders are foreclosing on the Scotts Valley Hilton for an unpaid debt of $16.8 million. Though some estimates place the number of hotels in California in distress at about 1,000, this is the first hotel in Santa Cruz County to actually face foreclosure.
Alpo Goes Missing
Over the past few months, SantaCruz.com has reported on the dearth of food in the city’s food pantries and how that affected the holiday season. But people aren’t the only living things to go hungry in these times of need. Many animal lovers are struggling to feed their pets too, which is why the local SPCA launched its pet food pantry 10 years ago.
Franzen at Santa Cruz High
2010 was a banner year for Jonathan Franzen. In August, the author released his fourth novel, Freedom, a piece of literature so deftly crafted it instantly garnered him the kind of attention usually reserved for movie stars and heads of state. He graced the cover of Time Magazine in September (the first living writer in more than a decade to do so) above the headline “Great American Novelist.” He appeared on Oprah, where the daytime talk show Queen-pin heaped on the praise and the two buried the hatchet after a 2001 dust-up regarding her selection of his novel The Corrections for her Book Club.
County Has First Homicide of 2011
Santa Cruz County experienced its first homicide of 2011 on Sunday. The victim, Jose Alfredo Coronel, 32, was stabbed in the chest in Watsonville shortly after midnight. Police transported him to the hospital, where he died of his injuries. There were no reports of disturbances in the area before the stabbing was reported, and police have yet to find the murder weapon. They do not, however, think that the murder was gang-related.
NYE, Santa Cruz Style
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.
