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May 21st
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Arts, Entertainment, Dining, Calendar

Theater

A Pinteresque Pairing

A Pinteresque Pairing

Two local theater companies collaborate to produce two one-act plays by the late playwright Harold Pinter

If what isn’t said speaks louder than what is said, then Harold Pinter’s work shouts volumes. And to explore the voluminous meaning between the late playwright’s lines, two local theater companies have banded together this season.

Jewel Theatre Company, in collaboration with Shakespeare Santa Cruz, presents two one-act plays by Pinter: “One for the Road” and “The Lover.” The show opens on Friday, April 26 at Center Stage in Santa Cruz. There will be one discount preview showing on Thursday, April 25.

Marco Barricelli, artistic director of Shakespeare Santa Cruz, is directing “One for the Road” and Julie James, artistic director of Jewel Theatre Company, is directing “The Lover”—marking the first time that the two companies have come together to collaborate on a production. Featured performers include James, Mike Ryan and Paul Whitworth.

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A&E

Dance Dance Santa Cruz

Dance Dance Santa Cruz

National Dance Week Santa Cruz April 18 to April 26

This year my work as a dance educator and presenter has brought me into contact with multiple dancers, teachers and administrators from other communities in the state and the country.

As I have moved through phone calls and emails, texts and chats with these new acquaintances and friends, looking for more inspiration and ideas to support dance in Santa Cruz, I am reminded once again, just how incredible this dance community is.

Our dance community continues to impress me with the endless commitment and joy that each and every one of our dancers bring to the stage, the studio and the streets. This is a mid-size city with a large-city commitment to dance.

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A&E

UnderWorld Beat

UnderWorld Beat

Celebrating world culture and exorcising demons with Dead Can Dance’s Brendan Perry

The disparity of the labels most commonly assigned to Dead Can Dance’s style—gothic, neoclassical, world fusion—bears witness to the breadth of this Australian-born ensemble’s artistic scope. Seemingly contradictory elements intertwine with the utmost grace in DCD’s work: The group’s very name juxtaposes the grim with the festive, while its music is both elegant and primal, foreign and familiar, ethereal and earthy, witchy and angelic, ghostly and vibrant … and, as singer/multi-instrumentalist Brendan Perry states, an exorcism as well as a celebration.

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A&E

Breaking Down Barriers

Breaking Down Barriers

Sixth annual National Dance Week Santa Cruz challenges preconceived notions of what dance can be

What do the post office, cafés, intersections and an abandoned Wienerschnitzel have in common? They will all—believe it or not—be transformed into performance sites in honor of National Dance Week Santa Cruz 2013 (NDWSC).

The sixth annual county-wide event will take place April 18-26, and feature numerous performances in addition to more than 100 free dance classes—from ballet to samba to hip-hop to African—open to the public. Created to recognize and grow the local dance community, NDWSC brings creative movement directly to the people, with performances in the street, in local dance studios, in community centers and in delightfully unexpected venues (in 2010, three dancers from The Aerial Collective twirled while dangling from the roof of Lulu Carpenter’s in downtown.)

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Literature

The Power of Conversation

The Power of Conversation

Local author Cecile Andrews emphasizes importance of community engagement in newest book

Cecile Andrews, author of the new book “Living Room Revolution: A Handbook for Conversation, Community and the Common Good,” probably wouldn’t get along too well with Larry David’s character from HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, known for hiding his face and avoiding communication with anyone he runs into on the street. Andrews is a longstanding part-time Santa Cruz (part-time Seattle) resident who says something that’s struck her about this town over the years is people's willingness to participate in a practice she’s dubbed the “Stop and Chat”—which is exactly what it sounds like.

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A&E

The Poems of Patrice Vecchione

The Poems of Patrice Vecchione

Editor’s note:  Just in time for National Poetry Month, local poet and collage artist Patrice Vecchione has released a new collection of poems, entitled “The Knot Untied.” Vecchione is the author of “Writing and the Spiritual Life: Finding Your Voice by Looking Within” and “Territory of Wind.” She's also the editor of many anthologies, including “Truth and Lies,” “The Body Eclectic” and “Revenge and Forgiveness.” She teaches both collage and creative writing workshops at community centers, universities, libraries and at Esalen Institute in Big Sur. She will read from “The Knot Untied” at 6 p.m. on Thursday, April 11 at the Watsonville Public Library.

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A&E

Renaissance Redux

Renaissance Redux

Local couple opens new classical figurative arts school at The Tannery

When viewing the work of artists Lisa Silas and Jonathan Ernest Chorn, it’s rather difficult to imagine possessing the ability to produce such work, or even that such work is being produced in the present day. Yet these are precisely the preconceptions the couple is looking to dispel with their ambitious new endeavor: a classical figurative arts school at The Tannery Arts Center.

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A&E

Dance, Monkee, Dance!

Dance, Monkee, Dance!

Charting the evolution of The Monkees’ Michael Nesmith

Michael Nesmith must have inherited pioneer genes from his mom, who famously invented Liquid Paper (Google it, kids). Arguably the most interesting member of The Monkees, Nesmith has played a crucial part in fusing music with television and video, first by playing guitar in the world’s first made-for-TV band, and then by coming up with the idea for MTV. For better or worse, his efforts have helped shape a music industry in which a powerful visual presentation is often as important to an artist’s success as the music itself.

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Theater

"Beach Blanket Babylon' (Still) Sizzles

Iconic San Francisco revue continues to improve with age

There are very few theatrical productions that make it to middle-age. Thankfully, “Beach Blanket Babylon,” which turns 39 this summer, is one of them. In fact, the revered San Francisco spectacle is the country’s longest-running revues.

That’s a terrific testament to the legacy that the late- Steve Silver left behind. Silver launched “BBB” back in the ’70s and the show immediately turned heads with its show-stopping musical parodies and clever plot—a whiny Snow White desperately searching for a Prince Charming. That may have been enough to lure audiences in initially, but Silver and his creative team went a step beyond, always updating the show by infusing it with a delicious gluttony of current events.

This is evident in the revue's latest incarnation—a nonstop powerhouse of sheer brilliance that majestically surfs the peculiar waves of pop culture, scoops up as many headline-grabbers as it can and feasts on their absurdities.

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Theater

Channeling Casals

Channeling Casals

Israeli musician Amit Peled brings famous cello to Aptos

Amit Peled has many blessings in his life. He’s an accomplished cellist and conductor, and has performed in top venues throughout the world. At 28, he became the youngest professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he and his wife are raising three children. And twice in his life, once when he was a boy and again as a man, his life’s path was altered by a man he never met: the preeminent cellist of the 20th century, the late Pablo Casals.

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    Bring Your Own Bag

    Single-use plastic bag bans are underway Shoppers in Capitola, Watsonville, the City of Santa Cruz, and the unincorporated parts of the county are, by now, becoming accustomed to the absence of plastic bags. On Sept. 20, 2011, Santa Cruz County became the first local jurisdiction to pass an ordinance that banned single-use plastic bags and implemented a fee for paper bags, which took effect last spring. Watsonville, Capitola, and Santa Cruz followed suit with similar actions: Watsonville’s ordinance went into effect last September, and, as of last month, the bans in Capitola and the City of Santa Cruz are now in place.

     

    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.

     

    The Tilt

    Although Jesse Malley, lead singer of the outlaw country, blues and rock ’n’ roll band The Tilt, no longer lives in Santa Cruz, she was born and raised here and this is where her love of music and performance began. “My dad worked at The Catalyst for 27 years, so I got to see a lot of music acts come through town,” she says. “Music always seemed to me to be such an incredible way to express yourself that I just stumbled upon my voice and jumped into it.” That jump eventually led to Malley heading down to San Diego to pursue a music career, and her band The Tilt has just released their full-length debut, Howlin’.

     

    Whole Lotta Blues

    The 11-piece, husband-and-wife-led Tedeschi Trucks Band headlines the Santa Cruz Blues Festival Guitarist Derek Trucks and vocalist/guitarist Susan Tedeschi, the husband-and-wife team at the helm of The Tedeschi Trucks Band, have learned that in a band as well as in a marriage, the best way to keep things running smoothly is sometimes to take a step back. That’s especially true when you’re dealing with an 11-piece group that, in addition to its namesakes, features two drummers, a keyboardist/flautist, a three-piece horn section and two harmony vocalists.

     

    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).

     

    Land of Lions

    New research provides foundation to look at protecting mountain lions, particularly when it comes to Highway 17 An adult male mountain lion called simply “Number 16” by the Santa Cruz Puma Project led a scientifically interesting life for the more than two-year period he was tracked by the UC Santa Cruz-based research project. According to Chris Wilmers, associate professor of environmental studies at UCSC and head of the Puma Project, the group initially caught and collared Number 16 in Loch Lomond. He then proceeded to cross Highway 17 several times, where he was eventually was hit, but survived. In an unusual move for an adult male, Number 16 then shifted his home range to the Forest of Nisene Marks State Park. Recently, the lion’s tracking collar went on “mortality mode.” The day before Wilmers spoke to Good Times, the researchers found his skeleton.

     

    So Sleep (Pralaya) Does Not Overtake Us

    Sunday is Pentecost, a festival of the Holy Spirit (Ray 3 of Divine Intelligence). Pentecost is the name given to the descent of the Holy Spirit as tongues of fire appearing above the heads of Christ’s (Piscean World Teacher) Disciples (students) in an upper room (plane of the Mind). Pentecost is not a simple bible story. It’s an actual experience for each individual as the Light of the Soul begins to direct the personality with spiritual gifts and virtues – wisdom, understanding (all ideas, all hearts), knowledge and Right Judgment (directing the intellect), wonder, fortitude/courage and respect/reverence (directing our willingness to serve).

     

    Legal Battles Drag On

    More than a year after the 75 River St. occupation, four defendants remain embroiled in ongoing case  More than a year and a half since a group occupied the former Wells Fargo building on River Street in an act of protest, felony charges linger on for four of the original defendants and a trial may be imminent. Gabriella Ripley-Phipps, Brent Adams, Cameron Laurendeau and Franklin Alcantara were scheduled to begin trial May 13 in connection with the late 2011 protest. That trial now has been pushed back to September due to scheduling conflicts. The four face a felony charge of vandalism and a misdemeanor for trespassing.

     

    Bringing the Message Home

    Former mayor and UCSC student recap their experiences at the United Nations’ Commission on the Status of Women While traveling to New York for the 57th United Nations (UN) Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), seasoned local activist Jane Weed-Pomerantz had a notion of what to expect. But, with the vast scope of worldwide women’s rights violations presented at the commission, she knew she would still be taken aback at times. “I was worried because I had a feeling I would be finding out what I did find out about women and girls in the world,” says Weed-Pomerantz. “I was trying to brace myself for the knowledge of the reality, because we are really very protected in this country.”
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    May Day in the Alps

    When my daughter returns to Santa Cruz from her new home in Los Angeles, she comments on how quiet it is here. It was even more so during a trip to Ben Lomond, when we set out for a sample of her second favorite macaroni and cheese. Sitting at the front of the Tyrolean Inn restaurant, the green tarp with plastic windows kept out the chill as well as the noise of an occasional passing car. A new draft beer celebrating the German spring, Maibok ($6) was refreshing, served in a hefty glass stein, but specialty cocktails are unique as well.

     

    The Power of Conversation

    Local author Cecile Andrews emphasizes importance of community engagement in newest book Cecile Andrews, author of the new book “Living Room Revolution: A Handbook for Conversation, Community and the Common Good,” probably wouldn’t get along too well with Larry David’s character from HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, known for hiding his face and avoiding communication with anyone he runs into on the street. Andrews is a longstanding part-time Santa Cruz (part-time Seattle) resident who says something that’s struck her about this town over the years is people's willingness to participate in a practice she’s dubbed the “Stop and Chat”—which is exactly what it sounds like.

     

    What are you a total sucker for?

    A cold beer after a long bike ride, gossip, and fighting over politics. Kyle McKinley Santa Cruz | Lecturer

     

    Best of Santa Cruz County

    The 2013 Santa Cruz County Readers' Poll and Critics’ Picks It’s our biggest issue of the year, and in it, your votes—more than 6,500 of them—determined the winners of The Best of Santa Cruz County Readers’ Poll. New to the long list of local restaurants, shops and other notables that captured your interest: Best Beer Selection, Best Locally Owned Business, Best Customer Service and Best Marijuana Dispensary. In the meantime, many readers were ever so chatty online about potential new categories. Some of the suggestions that stood out: Best Teen Program and Best Web Design/Designer. But what about: Dog Park, Church, Hotel, Local Farm, Therapist (I second that!) or Sports Bar—not to be confused with Bra. Our favorite suggestion: Best Act of Kindness—one reader noted Café Gratitude and the free meals it offered to the Santa Cruz Police Department in the aftermath of recent crimes. Perhaps some of these can be woven into next year’s ballot, so stay tuned. In the meantime, enjoy the following pages and take note of our Critics’ Picks, too, beginning on page 91. A big thanks for voting—and for reading—and an even bigger congratulations to all of the winners. Enjoy.  -Greg Archer, EditorBest of Santa Cruz County Readers’ Poll INDEX | Shops | Food & Drink | Arts & Entertainment | Health & Fitness | Professionals | The Rest |

     

    Vine & Dine: Pine Ridge Vineyards

    Chenin Blanc + Viognier 2012 On a recent trip to Palm Springs, I came across Pine Ridge Vineyards’ Chenin Blanc + Viognier at a new downtown restaurant called Lulu. Superbly decorated in Hollywood-esque style and with a very hip vibe, this California bistro is one of the hottest new dining spots—and the Chenin Blanc was just the right wine to pair with some of Lulu’s Happy Hour tapas-style food. And eating outdoors in the desert’s warm night air makes a chilled white wine taste even better.

     

    Making Sense of Soul

    Allen Stone wants to give R&B back some of its depth Whether fairly or unfairly, R&B and soul music often get typecast. Much of the music is groove-inducing and has an overtly romantic, sensual or sexual side to it, and the suggestive lyrics only reinforce this mood. That is fine and well, but for R&B and soul singer Allen Stone, it is not enough. “I love music that’s about love, and I love R&B songs, but I also like songs that have influence on culture,” Stone says. "I believe that if you’re given a microphone you need to use it in a positive way, and I feel like pop culture, more often than not, doesn’t. I think that [pop stars] are very bad stewards of the microphone they’ve been given, and the voices they’ve been given, and they tend to talk about pretty futile and shallow things, rather than subjects which uplift the children in our culture, or the teenage culture, or the young adult generation. If you’re given a microphone, you should say something that’s deeper than, ‘I’m going to the club and I’m going to drink cognac.’”

     

    Step on up to the Bar

    Here in Santa Cruz County, we are privileged to have farm-fresh greens year-round. Making a nightly salad at home is a snap since the emergence of pre-washed greens, and vinaigrette dressing is made easily with your favorite vinegar and small spoon of Dijon mustard whisked with a bit of olive oil.

     

    Exposed

    David Cay Johnston’s new book explains how big companies rob us blind In his late teens David Cay Johnston started to ask questions. “Why do we have these guys in uniforms with guns driving around in cars all day?” “Why is the Santa Cruz County Courthouse being built in such an unusual shape?” He wrote an article, while still living in his hometown of Santa Cruz, proving that the off-kilter courthouse building, which officials had promised would save money, actually cost more than a conventional building.

     

    Do you unplug often enough? Or do you need help?

    Santa Cruz | Caregiver