Essay writing is a sideline to Stephen Kessler’s life’s work: the “marginal yet essential” creation of poetry, the translation of Spanish verse and the editing of the Redwood Coast Review, a quarterly literary broadsheet. Kessler’s new collection The Tolstoy of the Zulus: On Culture, Arts & Letters (El Leon Literary Arts, $20) on the whole looks backwards to older writers, artists and technologies: the little magazine, the postcard, the personal letter. The author, a longtime contributor to, and sometime publisher of, Santa Cruz’s many weekly newspapers since coming here to attend UCSC in the 1960s, looks at the scenes of his Southern California youth, at Disneyland and Watts Towers. He revisits Hollywood Boulevard, with its crap icons of Marilyn Monroe (“Marilyn is everywhere, lifeless, and sadder than ever”). There’s also a celebration of the typewriter many of us still have cached in case of worldwide computer crash.
Articles by Richard von Busack
The Book of Crumb
Fans of Robert Crumb were expecting a takedown job when the former Northern Californian and the world’s most famous underground cartoonist announced his project to illustrate Genesis, the first book of the Bible.
Peace, More Ukes
The heresy that Santa Cruz is actually a strayed Hawaiian island isn’t denied by Under The Boardwalk, Nina Koocher’s sweet and sometimes sad documentary about the Ukulele Club of Santa Cruz. They’re reputedly the largest group of uke-fanciers in the world—“a Mormon Tabernacle uke chorus”—riding the new wave of popularity for the four-stringed instrument.
‘The Catalyst’ Premieres at Santa Cruz Film Fest
Opening this week at the Santa Cruz Film Festival is The Catalyst, an engaging and long-overdue documentary profile of the 40-year-old nightclub. There are students drinking there right this minute whose parents stomped, writhed and were sometimes ’86ed from the very same premises.
The Curious Esthetic of Charles Burns
Halloween comes early this year with the release of X’ed Out, the new book by Charles Burns. Of the phantoms that stalk it, one of the unquiet is the ghost of punk rock, called forth from the late-1970s setting of this nightmarish but oddly innocent graphic novel created by one of the most notable exponents of the form.
PRFF: Catalyzed By Katrina
Many immigrants to the United States have had the experience of not understanding that they were really and truly American until that moment when someone suggested otherwise. Such a moment might be seen at the end of Leo Chiang’s documentary A Village Called Versailles, one of the highlights of this year’s Pacific Rim Film Festival, which kicks of Friday and offers free films through next Wednesday.
Pacific Rim Film Fest: Triste Tropics
For years, the relationship between the United States and the Mariana Islands could be called “give and take”; the islanders gave and the United States took. Vanessa Warheit’s The Insular Empire: America in the Mariana Islands is an exploration, among other things, of what the U.N. describes as “The Guam Question.”
Jazz Masters Celebrate Django Reinhardt
THE FLOURISH of strings fans out into an exquisite patter of notes as sharp as icicles. Then a sad violin takes up the refrain. The music is age-old yet fresh, accessible yet mysterious. The sound is a mélange of musics. It’s made up of jazz—that blend of Civil War–surplus brass instruments, of Armstrong and Ellington, of African roots and snazzy New York Jewish songwriters. As played by guitarist Django Reinhardt, violinist Stéphane Grappelli and the Quintet of the Hot Club of Paris during the 1920s and 1930s, it was a music that enraptured the world.
