This beautifully written first novel by Santa Cruz author Thad Nodine is a rare experience. A road trip about a blind protagonist and his ramshackle journey through the deep South, Touch and Go bristles with ingenuity and style. It’s Jack Kerouac meets Huck Finn, with a dash of 21st century Tennessee Williams.
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Cliffgawking at The Coldwater Classic
Steamer Lane is one of the best venues for a surf contest there is. The amphitheater-like cliffs allow spectators to watch the action from angles usually reserved for helicopters. O’Neill is kind enough each year to set up bleachers right on the cliff, facing straight into the action. This is a wonderful, if singular, view. Take advantage of the surroundings; watch one heat from the bleachers, another from the point and a third from midway between the two.
PLATED: Strong Presence
With the original 41st Avenue site humming along, the co-owners of Verve Coffee Roasters are in expansion mode—a second shop just opened smack dab in the middle of the funky industrial zone off Seabright and Murray and a third location is slated to open downtown in November.
Santa Cruz Outfit Works Towards Cleaner Oceans
Jim Holm and Nick Drobac, co-founders of The Clean Oceans Project (TCOP), are thinking big. They’re working toward a multi-step plan to locate, harvest and dispose of plastics that have accumulated in the “great Pacific garbage patch,” or the North Pacific Gyre, the convergence zone where research suggests millions of tons of plastics have collected.
Venture Capitalist Brings Social Message to Santa Cruz
Jacqueline Novogratz is the founder of The Acumen Fund, a non-profit global venture fund incorporated in 2001 with the goal of using “patient capital” to change the lives of millions living in poverty around the world. Described as a “third way” bridging classic entrepreneurial investment and pure philanthropy, patient capital is used to fund projects geared toward the social good that involve risk and no promise of short-term reward.
The New Santa Cruz Shredders
The Coldwater Classic is Santa Cruz’s biggest surf contest of the year. Each fall an international contingent of surfers descend on the town to show off their talent, earn a few ratings points and, if all goes as they want it to, take home a bit of Jack O’Neill’s sweet prize money. Surfers packing international fame and six-figure contracts have been known to show up, names that are all too familiar to the average surfing fan: Jordy Smith, Joel Parkinson, Bobby Martinez and Adriano de Souza, to name a few.
Pot Club Makes Changes As Laws Shift
The Boulder Creek Collective, tucked in the back of the San Lorenzo Valley on the winding ribbon of Highway 9, sits 550 feet from a preschool. That’s 50 feet too close, according to a county ordinance passed by the board of supervisors this year, leaving Marc Whitehill, who runs the collective, two options—shut down or move shop. “You’ve got to submit to the process,” says Whitehill, director of operations for the collective, which hopes to move early next year.
Faces of Occupy Santa Cruz
“I want to support change in the election system and change how the whole system is tilted toward the rich. The Supreme Court made a decision to allow corporations to give as much money as they want, so anyone can just buy off votes. Votes should not be bought . . . that’s not democracy. We don’t have democracy here—money runs things.”
Faces of Occupy Santa Cruz
“I’m a grandmother, so I would like for children to have a home on our planet, and if we don’t stop killing each other [that won’t happen]. I stand with the Women in Black regularly on Friday nights—we stand for peace. I think [Occupy Santa Cruz] is part of what the Women in Black stand for.”
End to Rent Control in Capitola
Capitola put an end to a rent control ordinance for mobile homes that has been on the books for 32 years, the Sentinel reports. The decision was made in response to a series of costly legal challenges over the past 10 years, particularly from the owner of one mobile home park, Ron Reed. Most other mobile parks are either owned by the city or nonprofits. Reed, however, is a property owner who still has two ongoing lawsuits against the city.
