Something profound happened in the days after Lakshmi Narayan visited the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley a few weeks ago to see an exhibit by ecological artists Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison. “It stayed with me for days and seeped into my consciousness. I understood it better over a few days’ time,” says Narayan, founder of Awake Media, a Santa Cruz-based web and print design company. “It made you think of yourself as a steward of the planet.”
Articles by Traci Hukill
Wild Irises: A Short Happy Tale
First Saturday in May, 2003. Spring on the Atlantic seaboard had settled into a sultry, perfumed affair that hinted at the damp torpor to come. Throughout the city unremarkable lumps of hedge had burst into bloom: azaleas, lilacs, roses, all the botany of domestication. To a lifelong Westerner raised amid rabbitbrush, they seemed impossibly exotic.
In Downtown Santa Cruz, Designer Handbags Galore
When Lara Marotta decided to open Twist last summer, “with no money and Facebook,” it was all about the clothes. In the Pacific Avenue storefront where she used to run Galla Cabana before selling it several years ago, her concept for a high-end consignment store stocked with designer labels began to take shape. Sophisticated Ralph Lauren dresses and Gucci jackets would hang next to playful Free People sweaters and shimmering Bebe halter tops, carefully chosen fashion pieces at a fraction of the original price. With slide show.
Big Ideas Head to Santa Cruz
Peter Meehan remembers when the only two companies making organic chocolate were Newman’s Own Organics, the company he co-founded in Aptos with his business partner Nell Newman, and the Switzerland-based Rapunzel. In what some might consider an unfortunate if principled decision, Rapunzel was sweetening its chocolate with molasses rather than refined sugar. “It was a very challenging piece of chocolate to eat,” Meehan recalls.
Independent Panel Slams Strawberry Pesticide
How bad does a pesticide have to be before the California Department of Pesticide Regulation locks it up and throws away the key? We’ll soon find out. Last week a scientific review committee released a report on the fumigant methyl iodide, created by chemical company Arysta as an alternative to methyl bromide in strawberry fields.
Tips From Tigers
Humans having made such a mess of things, it’s natural to suspect animals know something we don’t about almost everything. So in honor of the cosmic alignment that has the Year of the Tiger beginning on Valentine’s Day, we turned to the animal kingdom to see what wisdom we might glean from the swimming- flapping-prowling set on the subject of love.
Fancy Cars Santa Cruz-Bound
Car lovers, hang on to your driving caps: this Labor Day weekend, Surf City will play host to the first Santa Cruz Concours d’Elegance at Chaminade, drawing gorgeous luxury automobiles and muscle cars from all over the Bay Area like a giant magnet of cool and giving Pebble Beach one less thing to lord over everyone else.
Charcuterie for Santa Cruz
When Chris La Veque was still working at restaurants, he’d go in on his days off and practice his newfound hobby of making sausages, mixing meat with herbs and spices as inspiration led him. “I wasn’t even clocking in because I love doing it so much,” he says. “It’s my passion.”
The San Jose Sentinel News?
MediaNews watchers, take note: more mergers are on the way for the conglomerate that owns the Santa Cruz Sentinel, the San Jose Mercury News and dozens of other papers.
Notes From Classical’s Underground
It’s nothing like the rest of Remy Le Boeuf’s work. Here in his hometown, the 23-year-old sax player is best known as one half of the formidable jazz duo formed with his twin brother, pianist Pascal. That work has been hailed by the New York Times as reaching for “the gleaming cosmopolitanism of our present era.” But during his jazz studies at the Manhattan School of Music, which awarded him bachelors and masters degrees, Remy had a little side thing with classical composition. This Friday, his piece The Third Elegy, a contemplative, Eastward-looking number for cello, violin, bass clarinet and vibraphone, receives its world premiere as part of the New Music Works concert Night of the Emerging Composers.
