Animal lovers were elated to learn that the Downtown Association has recently decided to ask the Santa Cruz City Council to lift the 1976 prohibition against dogs on Pacific Avenue. While I am not personally a dog lover or owner, I do like cats, especially big cats, and most specifically my pet tiger, Borges, who lives contentedly in my Westside backyard. For years I have wanted to bring Borges with me when I go shopping downtown but have been frustrated by the irrational ban on large carnivorous quadrupeds.
Articles by Stephen Kessler
Shades of Lady Day
MY HAND is stamped, the sold-out show has adjourned for intermission and I am admitted to replace someone who needs to get up for work tomorrow and has freed a seat. Lady Day is in town, or her facsimile who channels or translates from the existing record of the original.
Santa Cruz Poets, Santa Cruz Inspiration: Stephen Kessler
A common Santa Cruz sight jogs poet Stephen Kessler’s memory in this month’s installment of ‘Local Poets, Local Inspiration.’
An Amazing Man
Morton Marcus, whose outsize presence animated and at times dominated Santa Cruz County’s literary culture for most of the last 40 years, died peacefully at home after a long illness early in the morning of Oct. 28. He was 73, and seemed both younger and older—younger because his attitude toward everything was one of boyish enthusiasm, and older because the amount of living he jammed into his years would have taken several lifetimes for anyone less charged with creative energy.
Quake Led to Setting of Santa Cruz ‘Sun’
It was hard not to take the earthquake personally. That October Tuesday, my newspaper, The Sun, which I had started three years earlier in a surge of journalistic urgency and entrepreneurial folly, was on deadline, preparing to go to press the following morning.
Does Santa Cruz Need A Poet Laureate?
A nominee to the post of Santa Cruz Poet Laureate ponders the necessity of the office.
A Supermarket in Santa Cruz
Across two streets from my old house on Younglove Ave., with only U Save Liquors in between, stood the sprawling monstrosity of the ancient Safeway, the Westside’s sole supermarket.
Santa Cruz Poet Flew Under The Radar
When someone close to you dies, it’s always strange, even if they were old and in poor health and you knew it was coming. When the deceased is a longtime friend, an exact contemporary and a peer in your shared obscure line of work, someone you spoke with over the phone the day before and who was no drunker than usual and otherwise in good health as far as you knew—when he is suddenly found dead in his San Jose cottage, apparently of a heart attack, at 62, your grief and disbelief are of a different order of magnitude.
