There are two surprising new additions to the Nutcracker cast this year: Santa Cruz County District Attorney Bob Lee and Former Assemblyman and current Santa Cruz County Treasurer Fred Keeley. Santa Cruz Ballet Theater has welcomed the two local officials into their production, and the dancers, age eight to 20, are teaching them “about dignity, grace and discipline,” while the men show how important it is to get involved in programs that help empower our kids.
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The Ticker
UC Regents Want to Raise $1 Billion
UCSC -After approving an ominous 32 percent student fee increase at their Nov. 18 meeting (see goodtimesantacruz.com’s Slug Report for more info), the UC Regents have announced that they are kicking off a massive system-wide private fundraising drive to give back to the students. Project You Can, as it is called, aims to raise $1 billion in donations—more than the 10 UC schools have raised over the last five years for undergraduate, graduate and professional student support. The regents hope the drive will help them make amends with the thousands of UC students and faculty that have been protesting their financial practices as of late.
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Students Protest 32 Percent Fee Increase
Frustrated students leave classrooms and take to the streets
“I think it's great that enough people want to make a change, that they're all out here, skipping classes, not eating, not doing anything,” said UC Santa Cruz freshman Tess Geyer. “They're just out here protesting [and] standing up for the rights of our class itself and then future classes.”
The Nov. 18 protest was organized weeks earlier in conjunction with the regents' expected approval of a 32 percent fee increase that same afternoon.
The Ticker
The Gratuitous Dead
The word is out and generating hoopla at the national level: UC Santa Cruz is looking for a full-time archivist for their Grateful Dead archive. So far the position, offering $52,000 to $68,000 a year for a Deadhead with a master's degree in archive management, has produced media interest (and some jeers) from the Daily Show to the Wall Street Journal. The archive itself, while full of tripped out tidbits and stoney memorabilia, is in actuality no laughing matter, and was awarded $615,175 by the Institute of Museum and Library Services to continue their work. The archive covers the now legendary band's history from 1965 to 1995 and is comprised of thousands of pictures, documents, and other memorabilia, two-thirds of which were donated by the surviving members of the band in 2008. No one has yet been selected for the position (which will entail continuing the archive's move onto the web, among other things), but whoever does get the job, with mockery at the national level and outright objection from taxpayers (although the job is not supported by taxpayer money) and students with ever-rising tuitions at the local level, is going to have their work cut out for them.
The Ticker
Slugs Protest Budget Cuts, Fee Hikes
UC SANTA CRUZ - On Friday, Nov. 13 hundreds of UC Santa Cruz students marched into the Science and Engineering Library and refused to leave, creating a sit-in protest of the UC-wide budget failures and the resulting affects (like the library being closed on weekends). Hundreds more students participated in a statewide protest of the UC Regents meeting on Nov. 18. Read more about the controversial 32 percent student fee increase and student protests in this week’s Slug Report blog at goodtimessantacruz.com.
The Ticker
Rail Trail Creates a Buzz
Santa Cruz County’s transportation agency has until next June to spend millions of dollars in grant monies awarded to the county for rail trail acquisition, and is hoping to close a deal with Union Pacific by the end of this year, thereby purchasing the 32-mile stretch of railroad from Davenport to Watsonville. Among the questions being raised: Is it financially responsible? Even if we can afford it now, what are the long-term costs?
Mind & Body
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The Body Speaks-Photo Essay
They came for their portraits with expectations of the perfection of their postures and I saw the beauty in their worked bodies, alive and in the midst of something.
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Rainbow Theater Hits the Stage
Don Williams, founder of Rainbow Theater at UC Santa Cruz, is proud of his students and of his unique creation, now in its 16th year.
“We do an in-depth study on a multitude of cultures that the main canon will not touch upon,” says Williams of his flourishing theater program that produces plays by both amateur and professional playwrights. “Quite often we deal with student writers of color, giving them an opportunity to express their lives and their ways of living that we are able to bring in and have a greater appreciation for.”
The multicultural theater organization's fall season opened Thursday, Nov. 5, and is continuing this weekend with two separate productions each with two plays. On Friday, Nov. 13 actors will perform “Stop Kiss,” a love story about two young women who struggle to have their relationship accepted, and “Saint Lucy's Eyes,” which is about abortions in the African American community during the Civil Rights Movement. On Saturday performers will showcase their talent in “In the Time of Rosalia,” a tale of a family reunion in Honduras and “Poet's Corner,” a collaborative project of dancers, singers and slam poets.
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- The Gypsy
Free Angela
Political activist and UC Santa Cruz Professor Emerita Angela Davis commands the spotlight in a riveting new documentary. PLUS: UCSC’s Bettina Aptheker opens up about the political upheavals of the ’60s and ’70s—and today. Angela Davis is not a human being who can be easily summed up in several sentences or paragraphs—books maybe, but, even then, capturing the political activist, scholar and author in the most comprehensive light is downright complex. That’s because Davis is an undeniably unique political creature, one who should be seen and heard to be fully absorbed and downloaded. Which is what makes Free Angela and All Political Prisoners, the new documentary about Davis and the turbulent political upheavals she faced during the late-1960s and ’70s, so inviting. In it, filmmaker Shola Lynch marks the 40th anniversary of Davis’ acquittal on charges of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy with a historical vérité style of filmmaking to illuminate a side of Davis few may have seen (or can recall), and captures the events that thrust the woman into one of the most fascinating orbits of notoriety and political intrigue of the 20th century.
No Big Surprises
The highly anticipated draft Environmental Impact Report for desal is finally out. Will it change anything? When scwd2, the group pursuing the proposed joint desalination plant for the Santa Cruz Water Department and Soquel Creek Water District, set up a booth at the Santa Cruz Earth Day festival in 2012, its reception was less than warm. Signature gathering for Measure P, the “right to vote” on desal ballot measure, was in full swing, as were tensions over the controversial project, which would produce up to 2.5 million gallons per day of desalinated water and cost an estimated $100 million. What were representatives of an energy-intensive desal plant doing among the recycling and conservation booths? That was the attitude Melanie Mow Schumacher, public outreach coordinator for scwd2 (pronounced “squid squared”), remembers sensing.
The Maya-Ixil Move Forward
Local nonprofit works to educate and create opportunity for indigenous communities in Guatemala In an isolated region of the Guatemala mountains called Ixil, the indigenous Maya population was devastated by a civil war between the government and leftist guerrilla factions that spanned 1960 to 1996. During that 36-year war, the Guatemalan military eradicated entire Mayan communities. In what amounted to genocide, soldiers burned Mayan farmlands and homes, raped and tortured the people, and scattered families. By the end of the war, 200,000 Mayans had been killed, 7,000 of whom were Maya-Ixil.
Public Thinking
Watsonville teens host TEDx event Santa Cruz County is no stranger to the TED brand. TED—which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design—talks have come to the area through independently organized events 10 times since 2011. This month, the gathering returns to the county with a new twist, thanks to the Watsonville Youth City Council. TEDxYouth@Watsonville, which will take place Sunday, May 19 at the Henry J. Mello Center for the Performing Arts in Watsonville, will feature only speakers younger than 19 years old and will traverse topics from racial stereotypes and renewable energy to traditional Mexican dance.
Transoceana
Danny Moriarty’s musical influences have been known to impact his life beyond his local rock band, Transoceana. “I went through two periods,” confesses the singer, guitarist and songwriter. “I borrowed Bono’s mullet look from the ’80s for a while, and then I dressed like I was from the ’70s and had big hair like Jimmy Page.” Bono and Page are also symbolic of Transoceana’s evolution as a band during their three years together.
Cruzin’ for Inspiration
Former resident pays homage to Santa Cruz with locally shot thesis film When he left Santa Cruz for the University of Southern California’s graduate film program in 2010, Christopher Guerrero had completed the film major at UC Santa Cruz in 2008 and worked on campus in the film and digital media department. It wasn’t until he headed south, that Guerrero began to reminisce about the coastal town. “It was really really hard when I moved to L.A., to acclimate and find friends,” he says, adding that—counter to the philosophical, conversational culture of Santa Cruz—he found nowhere in his new town where he could simply sit and talk about life with someone. “I didn’t really realize why I love [Santa Cruz] so much until it was gone.”
Beck to the Future
In celebration of Beck’s solo acoustic show at The Rio, GT explores Song Reader, the alternative rock icon’s most ambitious interactive art piece yet. Here’s an odd little paradox of the digital revolution: The more sophisticated our technology gets, the more our musical milieu begins to resemble that of a bygone era, when song ideas were passed around from musician to musician, perpetually taking on new twists. Dozens of different YouTube users might try their hand at setting somebody’s rant about cats or double rainbows to music, or you might hear the Belgian musician Gotye turning the many and varied covers of his song “Somebody That I Used to Know” into a virtual orchestra (see below).
Growing Berries Without Bromide
Researchers test a new alternative to a controversial chemical The scarecrows perched in Santa Cruz strawberry fields do little to scare away the birds, much less the insects and fungi harbored in the soil. Everything likes to eat strawberries, which makes growing them a risky business. This predicament led UC Santa Cruz professor Carol Shennan to take an unconventional approach to pest management. Nine years ago, the fatal plant disease Verticillium wilt was wiping out strawberry plants at the university farm. Chemicals hardly phase the pathogen, and Shennan saw little improvement with crop rotation, which is typically used to treat infested fields. A visiting plant pathologist from the Netherlands recommended a little-known organic technique called anaerobic soil disinfestation, and, with so few other options, Shennan decided to give it a try.
Uniting All That Has Been Separated
