It’s getting warmer in Santa Cruz these days, festival season is brewing and the North Pacific String Band’s Stevee Stubblefield sits in a friend’s courtyard, wrapped around a breakfast beer and a fresh printed poster for an event that ripped through his contact list like a lawn mower a few months ago.
Articles by Kate Jacobson
Top 5 Beach Boardwalk Rides
One writer’s take on the Top 5 rides at the Boardwalk, as voted by the readers of Santa Cruz Weekly.
Wavy Gravy’s Seva Fundraiser to Rock the Rio
When the Seva Foundation teamed up with Wavy Gravy in 1978, organizers found themselves with a steady supply of funding and musicians. Gravy is knee-deep in famous names and has the personality of an entire circus, hauling everybody he knows into his philanthro-activism. A few phone calls from Gravy and Seva’s latest benefit concert comes together, and it turns out that when the hippie clown blows the horn, water turns into wine and the Avengers assemble: this Sunday’s show at the Rio features Steve Earle, John Trudell, Dave Alvin, Peter Rowan, Nina Gerber and other roots rock luminaries in a benefit for Native American health care.
World Book Night Goes Surfing
On the Monday after a hot weekend in town mobbed with tourists, Santa Cruz skies are solid and gray. The ocean is as flat as old beer from Cowell’s Beach to the Moss Landing power plant, and Vice Mayor Hilary Bryant looks mighty lonely paddling out on her waxy board, carrying a mesh backpack filled with books meant for the surfers who are lurking inland until they can ambush the real swell like a pack of alligators.
DIY Fashion: Arielle Rose
“When I was a kid my mom bought me those bulk Barbie dresses,” says the Santa Cruz dressmaker, “and when she came into my room 10 minutes later I had cut all of them up and put them together in completely different ways.”
Shutting Down Santa Claus Hotel in Santa Cruz
“Somebody complained that I put up the shed with no permit,” says Eugenia Wood, a small straw-haired woman in leopard print leggings and fuzzy red sweater. “How does she know I put up shed with no permit? And I say, ‘Well, it’s nothing to sleep in there, rent it or get money out of it. It’s only Santa Claus Hotel!’”
Beaks And Geeks in Santa Cruz County
Thirty-seven people assembled in the otherwise vacant Watsonville City Council chambers think they might know the answer to the question, “What is the most migratory woodpecker in North America?” Some blurt it out before author Stephen Shunk can finish asking the question. This is no classroom filled with slack-jawed university students—these are birdwatchers.
Burning Man Diaries
The Bureau of Land Management capped Burning Man at 50,000 for 2011. By mid-July, tickets had sold out for the first time in the event’s 25-year run, sparking desperate pleas for tickets and exorbitant prices set by scalpers. Those fortunate souls with tickets traded them in for a snow-globe of dust and sensory overload, becoming citizens in a fabled city of radical self-reliance mixed with radical mayhem and an eternal bass, a testament to human expression and the boundless senses of humor stretching over Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.
Deconstructing Santa
For several centuries American folklore has held that on Christmas Eve night, one man pulled by a team of flying reindeer has delivered presents springing forth from a single sack to all the good little children of the world. Against all odds, people have bought in. It’s not turning water into wine or parting the Red Sea, but Santa Claus sure has a following.
Fair Trade Boutique Opens Friday
Nathan and Cath George know that human trafficking and HIV are sour deals. For five years the pair has been banking on the best consumers in the world to create a fair-trade bid against exploitation and poverty, and on Black Friday they’re opening their first bricks and mortar boutique linking the U.S market to the crafts of AIDs victims and former sex workers.
