Founder Rick Walker on what makes the inventive Y2K-X Live Looping Music Festival a global hit. And why it will be his last.

Rick Walker can't sit still. Sporting a black Nine Inch Nails T-shirt and sipping his preferred drink of choice, a cosmopolitan, the local drummer tells an endless supply of stories with animated hand gestures and impassioned sound effects. To illustrate his points, he spontaneously acts out air drums, air guitar, air maracas, air sitar, air (insert remote African instrument you’ve likely never heard of before).

When he goes over his 40-year music career, it’s like he’s reliving the excitement of each chapter; there’s the time in college at UC Santa Cruz in the early ’70s when he witnessed a Central African pop band and it made him discard his rock records for world music and, he says, “changed my life;” and then the time decades later when hearing Aphex Twin jolted him further into electronic-infused music and, again, he says, “changed my life.”

Editor’s Note: October offers a feast for the eyes with hundreds of artists opening doors and welcoming crowds. In our Art Issue, we spotlight the head-turning, downright creative works featured all around the county, beginning with Cabrillo Gallery’s new, month-long exhibit dubbed “Visually Invisible.” Beyond that, take note of two Open Studios artists that captured our attention, too. But there are so many others. Get out there. Look around. Embrace the creativity. Onward ...

It was launched in Scotts Valley, went nuclear and is now one of the most successful companies in America. The Netflix story.

At a glance, it doesn’t look like much. It’s red, square and fits neatly between your bills in the mailbox. But for Netflix founder and Santa Cruz resident Reed Hastings, his now-famous red envelope represents something more: A revolution in the way America watches movies.

What began as a small business in Scotts Valley 13 years ago has become the world’s largest subscription service streaming movies and television shows on the Internet and mailing DVDs. According to its website, Netflix members add 2 million movies to their Queues every day. With more than 15 million members as of June 2010, paying $8.99 a month to instantly watch movies online or have them delivered to their homes, the company has rapidly become a force to be reckoned with.

Get growing! Our annual Fall Home & Garden issue tills the creative soil of locals—on the farm, in the garden, in the living room, and beyond.
Inside:
Love Them Apples 
TerraGnoma Time
Madison Interiors
Get Baked: Solar Ovens
Feng Shui It
Taking Gardening to New Heights
You, Your Garden, Your Food
Seven Tips for Your Fall Garden
Greenspacing
Seven Household Tips for Fall

Esalen Institute in Big Sur is a portal of progressive thought, education, healing, and more. A look inside the haven that attracted some of history’s most adventurous thinkers.

Commas, apostrophes and periods.  I couldn’t stop thinking about them. They sat there, a haunting trinity of punctuation, lounging on a wicked conveyor belt in my mind. A conveyor belt that seemed only to be increasing in speed.

Commas, apostrophes and periods.

Long before Umi was a Zen master in the Santa Cruz Mountains, he was a seafaring rock radio pioneer who riled the establishment and ushered in the British Invasion. In this spirited interview, he shares tales of his colorful journey and sheds light on the nature of Zen.
As I approach the end of the long driveway on Empire Grade that leads to Stillpoint Zen Community, Pink Floyd’s “One of These Days” is blaring from the nearest building. With its relentless, menacing bass line and its maniacal, howling pedal steel guitar, it’s a far cry from the soft sound of bells and wind chimes you might expect to hear at a spiritual center in the Santa Cruz Mountains. But taken in context, it’s not an unfitting welcome: From 1964 to 1968, Stillpoint’s focal figure, now known to the members of his community as Enlightened Master Umi, served as DJ and program director for Britain’s first offshore pirate radio station, Radio Caroline. During those years, the station’s crew sailed the English Coast, defying the establishment by broadcasting the rock & roll music of the day. In so doing, they played a key role in sparking the British Invasion and bringing color and life force to a staid, button-down society. Their exploits are echoed—albeit in highly sensationalized form—in the film Pirate Radio, currently on the New Releases shelves of video stores.

Former Cruzan and best-selling author Geneen Roth opens up about food, life, God and the legion of emotions that can illuminate our deepest held beliefs

When you take your pulse, you know you’re alive. But are you really “living?” If Geneen Roth were asking that question, she’d no doubt add: How are you really living?

I Can't Get It Out of My Head.
When your internal DJ won’t stop playing an infuriatingly catchy song, you’ve got yourself an earworm. Our intrepid reporter dissects the tunes that drive us insane—in the membrane.
You know what's a shitty song? “Animal” by Neon Trees. This tune sucks like it’s trying to inhale a balloon through a straw. It sucks with the wild, furious abandon of a desperate addict trying to use a flashlight as a crack pipe. So why has some sick, self-persecuting part of my psyche been playing it over and over since the moment I woke up this morning?

What we have here is an earworm: a piece of music that burrows into the mind and refuses to leave. An earworm might take the form of a hit song of the present day, or it could be some piece of pop culture gunk that got lodged in the folds of your brain 20 years ago. TV commercials are among the worst offenders: Online forum users show great disgust for a tribal chant addressed to an anonymous figure in possession of a Kit-Kat bar, and a musical testimony to the deliciousness of the baby back ribs at Chili’s seems to be the object of almost universal contempt.

Santa Cruz nonprofit The Clean Oceans Project has big hopes for cleaning up trash from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

The world’s largest landfill is an accidental one.

Dubbed The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, it stretches across the Northern Pacific Ocean about half way between Hawaii and the San Francisco Bay Area. Depending on whom you ask, its estimated bulk ranges from the size of Texas to bigger than the continental United States, and can reach depths of 100 feet.

The Season’s New Looks Are Brought To Santa Cruz

Fashion Editor’s note: This year’s Fashion Issue takes a close look at the trends and personal interpretations of what fall fashion can do for you. Locals weigh in on the verdict of what’s in and out, and how to maintain a stylish wardrobe as the fall weather creeps in on us. Following this article is a photo spread by local designer-stylist-photographer Alexis Meschi. The multi-talented Meschi blew us away with her powerful images that capture fall fashion in all of its glory. Enjoy.  —Christa Martin

Fashion comes in all shapes and sizes, trends and classics, and oftentimes it’s here to stay, whether you like it or not—think skinny jeans. GT caught up with some of the local people involved in fashion to discover how the fall runway looks will (or won’t) translate to the fashionable residents here in Santa Cruz. What we’ve discovered is encouraging, and, most importantly, we found that the fashionistas amongst us are doing what Santa Cruzans always do—they push the envelope and make a statement that’s unique to them. Incorporating fall fashion into one’s own “look” only furthers the creative expression found by way of what you wear.