Blog Archives

NATURAL BRIDGES STATE PARK 1954. Yes that’s West Cliff Drive, that’s also Swanton Blvd. — and yes, it would have been a wise investment to have bought an acre or two back then.                                                     photo credit: Covello & Covello Historical photo collection.

DATELINE May 14, 2015

SANDY BROWN, THE SENTINEL & ERIC GRODBERG. Sandy Brown sent BrattonOnline a couple of questions re the Sentinel & Grodberg’s attack. “(1) why would the Sentinel put a picture of a council member’s home on the front page because she voted in support of a measure that does not cover her? (2) Why would a guy who receives income from 26 renters in the city file a frivolous complaint that will do nothing but waste taxpayer (city and state) money? Answer: the Pacific Legal Foundation and the California Apartment Association”. A never ending stream of support for Sandy is flashing through the internet. We’re learning that Eric Grodberg is a landlord with 26 tenants. He’s already evicted some who support Rent Control. We learn too that Santa Cruz Sentinel reporter Jessica York has written really negative reports on Drew Glover, Rachel O’Malley, Chris Krohn and Sandy Brown before. Others asked why doesn’t The Sentinel print a photo of Grodberg’s house at 208 Trescony Street? Jeffrey Smedberg asked, “Let’s see: 10,791 city residents sign a petition to put rent control on the ballot; 1 landlord files a spurious conflict-of-interest complaint with the Fair Political Practices Commission on a case they had previously cleared. Which does the Sentinel find newsworthy? Personally I’m also saddened by what I thought was a shift from the Sentinel’s historic prejudiced and one sided editorial position. When you want to get a sense of the Sentinel’s “other” — or is it their main readers’ opinions — read the “comments” to York’s biased attack. Shameful.

HOMELESS ATTITUDE AT HOME AND ELSEWHERE. We need to consider this! Santa Cruz is no different from most USA communities…they don’t like the homeless. They/we want them to disappear, vanish, just stay away and stop. At the very same time, and with the exact same breath, we send money, goods, food, anything possible to Cuba, Puerto Rico, Venezuela to aid and assist folks living there who need help. Why the difference in attitude: why are we so opposed to helping our struggling neighbors and locals…what’s that about? There are resident Hawaiians with so many of the same struggles — housing, drugs, employment, education, health — yet we manage to totally ignore them while we float, swim, and cavort on their land. How little we hear if anything about the financial scandal in The Office of Hawaiian Affairs, or what the latest news is about the huge development of the 13 telescope sites on their sacred land of Mauna Kea (read Wikipedia  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Meter_Telescope_protests ).

RENT CONTROL, THE NITPICKING AND FINAL SOLUTION. Regardless of The Sentinel’s obvious opposition to rent control, other folks seemed to have worked hard to find kinks and sections that may need examination. These can, and will be, dealt with as time goes on. This is the time and certainly the place for rent control. We’ve seen it work in 15 California cities that have rent control policies. Wikipedia says, “Fifteen cities are currently listed as rent controlled by the State of California:[119][120] Yet three of these cities are not listed here, but further below: Campbell (does not have rent control per se, but offers a mediation service), Fremont (rejected rent control in 2017), and Thousand Oaks (has limited rent control: mostly just for mobile home parks).[121] The remaining twelve: Berkeley,[122] Beverly Hills,[123] East Palo Alto,[124] Hayward,[125] Los Angeles,[126] Los Gatos,[127] Oakland,[128] Palm Springs,[129] San Francisco,[130] San Jose,[131] Santa Monica,[132][133] West Hollywood.[134] Alameda,[135] Mountain View,[136] Richmond.[137][138] The present grand total is fifteen.[139][140]

PICKET LINES. ABOUT YOU AND YOUR FRIENDS. The recent UCSC picket lines brought up an interesting discussion point. A point that has in the past, and will in the foreseeable future, split otherwise “liberal-progressive” friends. “Will you cross a picket line, any picket line, for any reason…and have you done so in the past?” Ask your friends, see what happens.

KZSC AND PUBLIC SERVICE SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENTS. At the last KZSC staff meeting many of us spoke to the fact that KZSC isn’t getting enough dated Public Service Announcements — otherwise known as PSAs. Tell every well-intentioned nonprofit group you know of to go to the KZSC website, read the easy PSA rules, and send them in. They are free, and are read many, many times.

CIRCLE CHURCH AND DEVELOPMENT. Latest rumors have it that the former church property is only “in a holding pattern” for about a year. Lighthouse Realty, with its present connections to “the circle”, will then start with the long-intended development…probably high rise and high cost apartments/condos.

KSCO AND TRUMP SUPPORT QUESTION. In answer to many questions over the last few years…NO, I do not know why well-intentioned progressive locals would purposely produce programs that bring profits to a TRUMP-supported radio station. It wasn’t so long ago that folks like Mardi Wormhoudt and other notables refused to be involved with KSCO. What’s changed and why?

UCSC’S LETTER TO ALUMNI AND “SLANTED”? As if UCSC hasn’t done enough to bring distrust and outright anger against itself, they’ve now sent out a letter to select alumni asking for support and opinions over their proposed East Meadow and West Side housing developments. We’ll watch closely to see how the response is shared with the public. Watch too to see if they sent those letters to mostly or only new alumni who couldn’t possibly share the historical or traditional respect the campus environment means to all of us…just watch and wait.

TOM SCRIBNER REVISITED AGAIN. From out of nowhere Will Combs sent me a copy of the original poster which he drew for the concert to raise money to re-pay Marghe McMann for the bronze statue she made of Tom. Note the guest artists who were very happy to appear on Tom’s behalf. Will even got Tom’s lost knuckle on his left hand. The Concert was in 1978.

May 14th 2018

LESS IS MORE
Since a picture is worth a thousand words I’ll keep this brief as you ponder the before and after visuals of what is proposed for the west side of the UCSC campus. This, in addition to building on the pristine East Meadow.

If you have any place in your heart for the physical beauty of the campus lands, these images may leave you speechless. There is, however a lot to say about the developer, Capstone Management Partners.

UCSC is venturing for the first time into what is called a Public Private Partnership or P3 with the above developer. A February 15th City on A Hill article titled The Many Faces of Capstone gives an overview of some of the company’s alleged construction and labor violations. Capstone’s website already shows Student Housing West and the East Meadow family student housing/child care projects in its Portfolio so they must be optimistic that approval is a given. The many comments submitted on the Draft Environmental Impact Report for the project, including legal opinions citing CEQA violations and a strongly worded letter from 27 graduate student parents, protesting the privatizing of the child care facility under an entity named Bright Horizons, citing increased expense, lower quality teacher certification standards, and unsafe location on the East Meadow suggest that such optimism may be premature.

Capstone Development Partners LLC describes itself as a student housing real estate development Company. Their draw is that they take on the housing debt with tax-exempt financing, cover maintenance and management costs with an on-site management team, set the rents and reap profits from those rents and after 20 or so years, hand the housing back to the universities who take over the functions previously managed by Capstone. I’m no expert in such matters but numerous red flags went up the pole on this arrangement.

UC is a public educational institution and partnering with a private entity seems a violation of that tradition and mission.  UC would argue that they are forced to look to the private sector as public funding has shrunk. Critics would argue that UC should spend its money on professors and students instead of ever-increasing upper management. (Student housing is not state supported. It has to be self-supporting.) Apart from that issue, many concerns remain. Capstone eventually hands the housing back to the university. Such an arrangement seems a disincentive for Capstone to properly maintain the housing. Not that UCSC is a model of care. That the once lovely two story Family Student Housing apartments built in the mid-sixties have been allowed to decay to the point of needing to be torn down (or so they say) is an indictment on UCSC, which boasts a Sustainability Office.

Then there is the issue of an on-site management team brought in from the outside by Capstone.  According to their website, ” Campus Management Partners will work closely with residential life staff, campus safety, police, Environmental Health & Safety and others to provide for the safety and security of students.” This is a formula for disaster: a new layer of management to get lost in the maze of campus departments, rules, regulations, protocols or lack thereof. The Student Housing West complex (pictured) will contain 2,800 students. Nothing at UCSC comes close to that number of students living cheek by jowl. The ten colleges each house around 700 students max. To help make such living arrangements more human they each include dedicated student and professional staff with clear lines of communication and reporting responsibilities. Each has its own identity and physical space. And even with all that, mistakes are made and social conflicts arise. The college model, touted as a crown jewel of UCSC is here abandoned. One wonders if that choice was made by Capstone, which specializes in mega-student housing complexes or whether UCSC has forever lost its values or both.

As you contemplate the scale and visual impact of the proposed new student housing from the West entrance to campus, evaluate the words of the Chairman Emeritus of Capstone, Mike Mouron who says of their projects, “We cut the pattern to fit the cloth.”

Gillian Greensite is a long time local activist, a member of Save Our Big Trees and the Santa Cruz chapter of IDA, International Dark Sky Association  http://darksky.org    Plus she’s an avid ocean swimmer, hiker and lover of all things wild.

May 14, 2018

“People with advantages are loathe to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves ‘naturally’ elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves.” 
? C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

Movement For Housing Justice moments before presenting the Santa Cruz City Clerk with 10,791 signatures of registered voters. Pictured Left to Right: Cynthia Berger, Josh Brahinski, Viveka Jagadeesna, Steve Schnaar, Drew Glover, Nita Hertel, Steve Pleich, and Jeffrey Smedberg.

THE RENT CONTROL DEBATE; CLASS WARFARE UNBOUND IN SANTA CRUZ
I’m convinced the city of Santa Cruz has to become a much bigger player in the housing market because the market is not serving the people. That “magic hand of capitalism,” as we know too well when left unattended, has allowed for fabulous profits in rentals and sales for a very few in this town. As the sociologist C. Wright Mills, and later G. William Domhoff, both describe in their work the notion of a ruling class elite, and the insular nature of such a class often leaves them with little empathy for the have-nots. (Yes, realtors, multiple parcel property owners, and developers are all directly and indirectly part of a Santa Cruz ruling class.) The rent control debate has shined some light on class difference in Surf City. As elucidated in Mills’, The Power Elite (1956: Oxford University Press). and Domhoff’s Who Rules America (1967: Prentice-Hall), not to mention the flotsam and jetsam lives of service provider jobs chronicled in Barbara Ehrenreich’s clear-eyed depiction of the working poor in Nickel and Dimed (2001: Metropolitan Books), the poor are often left unattended by the rich until it is too late. Of course, you might say those books are dated until a certain Thomas Picketty, the French economist comes along and puts it all together and says yes indeed, the rich are in fact getting richer and the poor, well, they’re getting poorer (Capital in the Twenty-first Century, Harvard University Press, 2014 (English version)). Picketty also comes down on the side of government stepping in to make things more equal. (Imagine that!) The Rev. William Barber of North Carolina is one of the bright lights of our generation and he focuses on what Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 sojourn to Memphis was all about: protesting low wages, high housing costs, and poor living conditions (The Third Reconstruction, Penguin-Random House, 2016). Reflecting back on Dr. King’s Memphis moments, it turns out much of our community is also siloed and in need of a wake-up call. The wealthy in Santa Cruz are having a difficult time getting in touch with the “rent burden” and pocketbook pain of everyday tenants. The wealthy and moderately wealthy in our town reside within particular bubbles. They tend to travel in the same social circles–Rotary breakfasts, Chamber of Commerce lunches, Downtown Association social outings– often attend similar religious institutions, and daily mingle at similar bars (not the Jury Room, Poet and Patriot, or Rush Inn) and restaurants (probably not Jack’s, Zachary’s, or the Bagelry). They by and large tend to stay mostly within their narrow class bounds. And with both rich and poor participating in this class segregation, along comes government to act as some sort of arbiter, a referee with a whistle, and impose a rent freeze, which not only acknowledges the fact we are in a housing crisis but also affects the profits of the ownership class.

Will Santa Cruz Residents Seize this Moment?
American history is littered with the wealthy’s tales of woe, brought to the attention of the government by the institutions they own: newspapers, TV stations, magazines, and now most significantly, large swaths of the internet. Most of that history sees “government authorities” facilitating the flow of capital for capitalists through government legislation. The economic crème de la crème come along and define “blight,” for example, (quaint cafes like Pergolesi? iconic venues such as the Rio Theatre (‘but we will save the marquee’ they exclaim)? and historic structures including the La Bahia?), and then they go about alleviating their defined pain of blight with an “urban renewal” plan through endless government PLANS: Beach and South of Laurel Plan, The Corridors Plan, and most recently, the Downtown Recovery Plan. So, the class on top keeps planning (Thatcher and Thompson, Jonathan Swift), and the developers keep developing (Swenson and Devcon). They get money not from the likes of Bay Federal or the Santa Cruz Credit Union, but through those same large banks (B of A, Wells Fargo, Citi Bank) that have been discredited by many of the national heroes that Santa Cruzans frequently turn to: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Noam Chomsky; and also, the likes of Amy Goodman, Dan Ellsberg, and Bill McKibben who all three by the way will be in Santa Cruz this week. It does seem the rich in Santa Cruz are thinking big…500 hotel rooms (Hyatt, Marriot, La Bahia) here and 800 units of market-rate housing (current downtown plan) over there. And they are, from their perspective doing good (aka getting richer). We have a hot, hot housing market and “the market” says we have to raise the rents. Their same mindset seems to believe that corporations will save us too–Marriot, Hyatt, Five Guys, Habit Burger, Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts (Dunkin Donuts?!?) have all been shepherded into SC under the auspices of the city’s own Economic Development Department. Oh, government facilitating the needs of capital…cha ching! Fast disappearing are the Logos, Tampicos, and Pergolesi’s, too funky the elite says. In with the new and out with the old has always been part of the Horatio Alger American mythology story, and it is generally the way of the wealthy in Santa Cruz too. But/And, then along comes a petition: Rent Control, and the government is asked to ‘hold it a darn second,’ stop for a moment facilitating the wants of the wealthy, and for a short time entertain the needs of tenants. A rent freeze is born.

“Nobody talks more of free enterprise and competition and of the best man winning than the man who inherited his father’s store or farm.” (C. Wright Mills)

‘Backlash,’ Not Just a Susan Faludi Best-seller
Uh oh, suddenly all is not well in the land of skateboards and espresso, ever-climbing median home prices and sky-rocketing rents. The local mighty are now cowering in their clubs and restaurants, or while climbing atop their $3,000 mountain bike, latte in hand, for part of the ride and ever-ready to conquer West Cliff Drive or the Pogonip or Upper Campus, all the while plotting and planning on how to defeat, no… annihilate, any spark of support for rent control and finally extinguish all memory of conviction for a notion that now exists and is a long time in coming: fair rents, housing justice, and inclusion of tenants needs in the community planning decisions.  All is not right within business lives of this town’s wealthy right now, and it may not be for some time to come. Is the flotsam poor squealing too loudly with this rent control ballot petition that they hope will help “redress their grievances?” Beware of the struggle that now ensues in the City of the Cross because real $money$ is on the table. The rent freeze pushback is just the beginning. It will be short-lived, but rent control, if passed this November, will likely have some staying power and the petition itself is driving realtors nuts. They’ve even come up with terms like “housing providers,” and “mom and pop” landlords in order to shield their remaking of the community through profit and plunder. It’s an old story. There are perhaps several Moms and Pops out there who the real estate industry is now using as fodder on the frontlines. The big landlords, including Cypress Point Apartments on Felix Street, Pacific Shores on Shaffer Road, the Seaside Company units that are everywhere, and the Outlook Apartments on Western Drive, they’re the ones who fear rent control the most, especially if the repeal of the anti-rent control legislation passed in 1995 known as Costa-Hawkins, makes it to the ballot. If Costa-Hawkins qualifies for the ballot, the Secretary of State’s office is still counting signatures, then the big financial guns–banks, real estate interests, and the California Apartment Association–will set their collective efforts on defeating what these interests fear most. If passed, Costa-Hawkins would finally lift state restrictions on rent control. If Costa-Hawkins passes all bets will be off as Californians everywhere would be saying that housing for profit does not work for most people in the Golden State. If universal healthcare and education are rights to be enjoyed by all, surely housing is too. The current rent control movement led by the Movement for Housing Justice and begun by a rag-tag band of housing activists–the Organizing Circle–canvassing in poor neighborhoods and asking residents what they think about high rents and low wages just happens to be fortuitously supported by the scholarly research of Steve McKay and Miriam Greenburg’s work locally concerning the vast housing and wage gap now experienced in Santa Cruz county. Everybody’s response: The rents are too damn high!  Are we truly witnessing an historic pendulum-swinging time, or just another rent control skirmish in a long war of attrition that’s already experienced multiple casualties including artists, musicians, teachers, and service workers leaving this community? Perhaps C. Wright Mills’ “sociological imagination” can come into play in Santa Cruz today. Was Mills referring to our community when he said way back in the 1950’s, “You can never really understand an individual unless you also understand the society, historical time period in which they live, personal troubles, and social issues.”

THE SPURIOUS ATTACK ON COUNCILMEMBER SANDY BROWN
Sandy Brown, was attacked and ridiculously vilified by a Santa Cruz Sentinel reporter last week. (What was it she did? She rents from a landlord who supports rent control? Does the hedge fund have an agenda?) The article is full of innuendo and yet again sees the Santa Cruz Sentinel missing so many good stories. There was no story after the near 11,000 signatures were turned to the city clerk last Thursday, just a photo; no story about the many homeowners and landlords who actually support rent control; and of course, no story of the courageous UCSC students who worked tirelessly to gather signatures for the petition. You have to go to the exemplary student newspaper, City on a Hill, for this information. The attack on Sandy Brown cannot go on without the newspaper hearing from the public. Some may say; oh if we contact the paper doesn’t this just make the story keep going? To them I would say, 1) Sandy Brown is the perfect model for why we are struggling for rent control. She is someone who is fighting to stay in Santa Cruz, even as a member of the city council, and to demean and dismiss her own story is at the Sentinel’s peril, and we must point this out; and 2) this issue is not going to let up until November 6th, so we must push back every time any media outlet over steps the bounds of truth and ethics and attacks struggling activists for working to make their lives and this community better. This attack is not just about Ms. Brown, it is an attack on every one who was involved in the struggle to keep this town from being divided up by wealthy interests who do not have the whole of the community in mind. Please respond to these outrageous ploys by either writingor calling (831-423-4242) the Sentinel.

“If you are concerned about education, infrastructure and health care, then you should be concerned about foreign policy.” May 14

(Chris Krohn is a father, writer, activist, former Santa Cruz City Councilmember (1998-2002) and Mayor (2001-2002). He’s been running the Environmental Studies Internship program at UC Santa Cruz for the past 12 years. He was elected last November to another 4-year term on the Santa Cruz City Council). Email Chris at ckrohn@cruzio.com

May 11, 2018 #131 / The Twitter Mob

The picture illustrates an article in The Wall Street Journal entitled, “When the Twitter Mob Came for Me.” The article was written by a conservative political commentator, Kevin D. Williamson, and bemoans the fact that Williamson was, as he sees it, hounded from his new job at The Atlantic by swarms of unfair and largely unjustified comments relating to one of his long ago statements that was taken out of context. He suggested (not seriously, he claims) that anyone involved in an abortion should be hanged until dead.

Another example of how an online “mob” might cause real grief, to real people, in the real world, is the story related by Jesselyn Cook, a Canadian-American journalist, who writes for HuffPost, and who seems to be of a more or less “progressive” persuasion, politically. Cook relates her experience with Facebook, not Twitter, and tells us about an online reaction to a picture, which made her look rather attractive, and an accompanying invitation to comment on whether she should be “smashed” or “passed.” Cook identifies the comments made in response to this invitation (completely unprovoked by anything she said or did) as “sexual harassment.” Her story is truly distressing.

If you click the links, you can get the details of both Cook’s and Williamson’s experiences. It appears to be pretty clear that neither Williamson nor Cook were treated fairly by the online commenters who attacked and demeaned them. Is there something we can, or should, be doing about that?

Basic tort law might well allow both Cook and Williamson successfully to sue those who harassed and demeaned them. Suing Facebook and Twitter directly, however, would not be a successful legal strategy, since such online platforms are legally shielded from liability for what persons who use these platforms say. 

The situation is analogous to the problem that you or I would have if we attempted to sue the telephone company because someone harassed us over the telephone lines. You can’t successfully sue the telephone company for what someone says on the phone, and you can’t sue an online service provider for what people say as they use their online service. Click right here for an outline of defamation law and social media.

While the kind of attacks that Williamson and Cook suffered are genuinely distressing, and the power of social media to amplify such personal attacks is obvious, there isn’t any easy way to provide additional help for those who have been attacked online, though we do need to be working on the problem. 

An article in The New York Times on April 22, 2018, indicates the horrors that can follow when untrue and inflammatory stories are disseminated on social media. Reporters Amanda Taub and Max Fisher document how inflammatory postings on Facebook led to arson and murder in Sri Lanka, stoking fires of ethnic cleansing. As The Times headline writer put it: “Where Countries Are Tinderboxes and Facebook Is a Match.” A presidential adviser in Sri Lanka, commenting on the story told by Taub and Fisher, said it this way: “We don’t completely blame Facebook. The germs are ours, but Facebook is the wind, you know?”

Considering how quickly the winds of contagion and outrage can disseminate hatred online, in a way that causes real world consequences, from personal attacks to murder, this might be another good reason to live more of our lives offline.

In the real world, I mean!

Gary is a former Santa Cruz County Supervisor (20 years) and an attorney for individuals and community groups on land use and environmental issues. The opinions expressed are Mr. Patton’s. You can read and subscribe to his daily blog at www.gapatton.net Email Gary at gapatton@mac.com

CLASSICAL DeCINZO. Check out DeCinzo’s classic and foresighted “DROID COMPETITION” just a scroll below.

EAGAN’S DEEP COVER. See Eagan’s “National Health Alert #17 Scabies Trump”                  down a few pages. As always, at TimEagan.com you will find his most recent  Deep Cover, the latest installment from the archives of Subconscious Comics, and the ever entertaining Eaganblog.

MUNCHING WITH MOZART. This free (FREE) concert series on May 17th (every third Thursday) Is titled  “Music for Two Cellos“. Louella Hasbun and Roger Emanuels are the cellists.

They’ll play ;

• Adagio cantabile by François Francoeur (1698-1787)
• Suite for Two Cellos by David Popper (1843-1913)
• Estampas y Estampillas by Jaime Mendoza-Nava (1925-2005)
• Tangos by Carlos Gardel (1890-1935), arr. Diego Collatti
• El cant dels ocells (Song of the Birds), traditional Catalan song, arr. Pablo Casals (1876-1973).

It happens this Thursday, May 17 th 12:10 – 12:50 at the threatened and endangered Santa Cruz Public Library’s Downtown Branch – in the upstairs Meeting Room.

UCSC’S MIRIAM ELLIS AND HER 18th INTERNATIONAL PLAYHOUSE. The Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics, and Cowell and Stevenson Colleges at UCSC will present the 18th season of the Miriam Ellis International Playhouse. In this unique multilingual program, students will be featured in fully-staged excerpts of short works in Punjabi, French, German, and Spanish, with English super-titles. There are exciting innovations in our program this year, with our first presentation of works in Punjabi, including a short play and poetry, directed by Arshinder Kaur, and excerpts from Mozart’s opera, The Magic Flute, sung in German, directed by Sheila Willey, and performed by students of the University Opera Theater as a preview of their upcoming production of the opera, which will take place from May 31 to June 3 at the UCSC Music Center Recital Hall. Students of French will portray scenes from Marcel Pagnol’s Fanny, one of the plays in his trilogy about a group of serio-comic characters in Marseille, directed by Miriam Ellis and Renée Cailloux. Spanish will offer a contemporary comedy, Black and White, by Ignacio Dominis, directed by Carolina Castillo-Trelles. Which explores characters that live in two different worlds, separated by a line never to be crossed. Over the years, our multilingual theater presentations have attracted loyal audiences who look forward to hearing their native or acquired languages in this unusual format, and we cordially invite the community to attend. It’s at the Stevenson Event Center on the UCSC campus, it’s free…go here for details https://language.ucsc.edu. Everyone is invited. The four performances are; 05/17/2018 – 8:00pm , 05/18/2018 – 8:00pm 05/19/2018 – 8:00pm and 05/20/2018 – 8:00pm  

LISA JENSEN LINKS. Lisa writes: “Celebrate a real American superhero, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg in RBG, this week at Lisa Jensen Online Express (http://ljo-express.blogspot.com ). Celebrate my Beast novel finally heading into the home stretch (only 2 more months to go!) with a cool new Beast of the Month illustration. And celebrate the life and legacy of James Aschbacher as more tributes roll in. Art Boy lives!” Lisa has been writing film reviews and columns for Good Times since 1975.

UNIVERSAL GRAPEVINE. Each and every Tuesday from 7:00-8:00 p.m. I host Universal Grapevine on KZSC 88.1 fm. or on your computer, (live only or archived for two weeks… (See next paragraph) and go to WWW.KZSC.ORG. May 15 has environmentalist Grey Hayes guesting the entire hour bringing us up to date on nature’s needs. On May 22 Wilma Marcus, George Lober and Rosie King will be reading and discussing poetry and discussing The Hummingbird Press Collective. C.L.U.E. (Coalition for Limiting University Expansion) co-chief John Aird will follow them and talk about UCSC growth, measure U and the June elections. The top winners from the annual Bookshop Santa Cruz Short Story Contest read their works on May 29. On June 12 Students from Maria Pirata’s UCSC class will report on the UC Strike. Then Lisa Sheridan and Robert Morgan talk about Soquel issues. June 19 has Lisa Robinson from the San Lorenzo Valley Museum describing their current exhibits and future plans. Jane Mio discusses our river system and what’s needed to protect it on June 26

OR…if you just happen to miss either of the last two weeks of Universal Grapevine broadcasts go here… http://www.radiofreeamerica.com/dj/bruce-bratton You have to listen to about 4 minutes of that week’s KPFA news first, then Grapevine happens. Do remember, any and all suggestions for future programs are more than welcome so tune in, and keep listening. Email me always and only at bratton@cruzio.com

UNIVERSAL GRAPEVINE ARCHIVES. In case you missed some of the great people I’ve interviewed in the last 9 years here’s a chronological list of some past broadcasts.  Such a wide range of folks such as  Nikki Silva, Michael Warren, Tom Noddy, UCSC Chancellor George Blumenthal, Anita Monga, Mark Wainer, Judy Johnson, Wendy Mayer-Lochtefeld, Rachel Goodman, George Newell, Tubten Pende, Gina Marie Hayes, Rebecca Ronay-Hazleton, Miriam Ellis, Deb Mc Arthur, The Great Morgani on Street performing, and Paul Whitworth on Krapps Last Tape. Jodi McGraw on Sandhills, Bruce Daniels on area water problems. Mike Pappas on the Olive Connection, Sandy Lydon on County History. Paul Johnston on political organizing, Rick Longinotti on De-Sal. Dan Haifley on Monterey Bay Sanctuary, Dan Harder on Santa Cruz City Museum. Sara Wilbourne on Santa Cruz Ballet Theatre. Brian Spencer on SEE Theatre Co. Paula Kenyon and Karen Massaro on MAH and Big Creek Pottery. Carolyn Burke on Edith Piaf. Peggy Dolgenos on Cruzio. Julie James on Jewel Theatre Company. Then there’s Pat Matejcek on environment, Nancy Abrams and Joel Primack on the Universe plus Nina Simon from MAH, Rob Slawinski, Gary Bascou, Judge Paul Burdick, John Brown Childs, Ellen Kimmel, Don Williams, Kinan Valdez, Ellen Murtha, John Leopold, Karen Kefauver, Chip Lord, Judy Bouley, Rob Sean Wilson, Ann Simonton, Lori Rivera, Sayaka Yabuki, Chris Kinney, Celia and Peter Scott, Chris Krohn, David Swanger, Chelsea Juarez…and that’s just since January 2011.

QUOTES. “VOLCANOES“

“Love, my territory of kisses and volcanoes.”  Pablo Neruda
“It is spectacular to watch an erupting volcano; but it is even much more spectacular to watch the rise of a newly exploding revolutionary idea!” Mehmet Murat ildan
“I noticed that volcanoes, earthquakes and floods, though are not good events, they are better than the silence of good people when bad people take the podium. The latter are to an extent uncontrollable, but the former can be stopped.” Israelmore Ayivor
“All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution”, Havelock Ellis