Trader Joe's and the Death of Froot Loops

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GREENJEANS JEFF WING PUNS ‘N’ ROSES TRADER JOE’S - BLAME IT ON THE RAIN...

- THE DEATH OF FROOT LOOPS

SBVIEW.COM EGG McMILPAS - HERB PETERSON DAY

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t is late winter; it’s time to plant bare-root roses and there are lots of varieties at nurseries through this month to choose from...

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Content

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S haron’s Take – Sharon Byrne gazes into her political crystal ball, attends the League of Women Voters’ panel presentation, and proclaims that district elections loom large

P.6 P.7

S tate Street Scribe – Jeff Wing discovers that Joe Coulombe, the name behind Trader Joe’s for the “better educated,” is no average Joe

P.8

T he Bi-weekly Capitalist – Jeffrey Harding explains what an Ineptocracy is and why President Obama’s proposal to raise taxes on the rich will backfire while eroding our free-market capitalism

P.9 P.10

Beer Guy –Zach Rosen explains why trouble is brewing within the craft industry, including a lawsuit between brew crews

L etters – Doug Pocius and Jeffrey Harding on minimum wage and economics; Paul Kontos on minimum wage and free enterprise; Jenny Kontos sounds off about Cuba; and business owners write open letter to councilmember Cathy Murillo

The News Page – Lennon James scrutinizes parking in Isla Vista; Fallon vs.

Kimmel; sexual activities; in the jailhouse; DUI checkpoint; on ethics; welfare check; football; speaking German; night music; feeling presidential; and gone to the dogs

P.14

The Fortnight – Jeremy Harbin takes an analytic, discerning approach to special events in select places around Santa Barbara and vicinity, beginning with the SB Public Market; he also shuffles in an interview with No Simple Highway guitarist Zach Korth

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SB View – Sharon Byrne celebrates Herb Peterson Day set for January 27 and touches on resolving the homeless problem, while Cheri Rae chronicles the Kindness and Justice Challenge and copes with managing while awaiting managed health care

P.20 P.21 P.22 P.24

Shop Girl – When she’s done exercising, Kateri Wozny reaches for the nutritious power of Peter Gaum’s Santa Barbara Bars

We Are

Art

Holistic Deliberation – Allison Antoinette is talkin’ about a resolution, or New Year’s resolutions, and how to approach them for best results

Behind The Vine – Hana-Lee Sedgwick pours a glass with Santa Barbara winemaker Gavin Chanin, who has grape expectations with low-alcohol wines

In the Garden with Mr. Greenjeans – Randy Arnowitz returns with his green thumbs to remind us the drought isn’t over – so the likes of roses and fruit trees still need tender-loving care

P.25

Cinema Scope – James Luksic changes his column’s name but not his discerning attitude, taking to task the Academy Award members who nominated Meryl Streep again, while Taken 3 should be taken away

P.26 P.27

American Girl – Tommie Vaughn chats it up with Polly Hoganson of the new fullservice music promotion company Ones to Watch Productions

SBMM Santa Barbara Maritime Museum

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Man About Town – Mark Léisuré looks ahead to the SB International Film Festival, encapsulates Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald concert, criticizes Camelot, touches on Marchforth Marching Band, and previews the sounds of music at SOhO and beyond

P.28 P.29 P.30

Girl About Town – Julie Bifano makes like a bookworm, reminiscing about reading as a kid while visiting the Santa Barbara Children’s Library

Plan B – Briana Westmacott and family slip away for the holidays, venturing to Roatan (near Honduras) and then Guatemala City

Santa Ynez Valley Snapshot – Eva Van Prooyen is on the move, catching up with Pilates trainer Allison Howie and her new fitness business, Mommy’s in Motion; and SY Valley Restaurant Week

P.34

Up Close – Jacquelyn De Longe delves into the wild – namely the Wilderness Youth Project – and tells of her son’s experience

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by Sharon Byrne

take

Sharon’s education in engineering and psychology gives her a distinctive mix of skills for writing about and working on quality-of-life, public safety and public policy issues. Her hyper-local SB View column can be found every other week.

District Elections Will Be THE Big Thing This Year

I

attended the League of Women Voters’ panel presentation on district elections January 21.

Whatever you’re doing while reading this, drop it and go see if the video of this discussion is up on their website yet.

Carve two hours out of your schedule (yes!) and watch it. I’ve been following this issue closely, and I learned a great deal in this session.

Oddly enough, it won’t matter if you’re for or against. The issue is before a judge, and a whole lot of things hang in the balance of his decision. It is virtually certain the judge will find racially polarized voting, and the remedy imposed will be district elections. It may include a switch for city elections to move to even years. This is an election year.

The immediate need now is to find a way for citizens to participate in the drawing of the district lines and figure out a schedule of when district elections will start. They could start this year or next. Do you cut over all at once,

or phase in three districts with the next election, and then the rest later?

What happens to the existing council members who still have terms to serve out? Should a citizens’ commission draw the lines? Can we even do that?

Speakers included Shane Stark, former counsel for Santa Barbara County; Kristi Schmidt with the City of Santa Barbara; Jacqueline Inda, plaintiff on the lawsuit against the city to impose district elections; Lucas Zucker with CAUSE (formerly PUEBLO); and Sheila Lodge, former mayor of Santa Barbara and current planning commissioner.

The league took the position of favoring at-large elections during the time when the city moved to adopt them and left the old district elections system in 1968.

Part of this session was for them to get enough information to decide whether to revise that position. Since 1968, Latinos have become a larger population of the city, and the California Voting Rights Act

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passed in 2001 to allow the imposition of district elections as a remedy to racially polarized voting. Under that act, a city cannot recover its cost from successfully defending itself from a lawsuit charging racially polarized voting, yet must pay the plaintiffs’ cost should it lose. No city has yet prevailed in being sued, so the deck is stacked against the city that tries to defend itself.

The speakers had interesting viewpoints to present, but Stark had the legal details down. The districts must be equal in population, but voter registration is another story. You could see where some future districts could be voter-dense, while others have low registration.

Inda laid out a timeline that went back quite a few years, and leveled the charge that the city’s flat-footedness in response to their call for district elections escalated the plaintiffs’ decision to file the lawsuit.

The CAUSE speaker, Zucker, had some interesting statistics. Twenty-six percent of registered Latinos voted in the last city council election, vs. 41percent of whites. In odd years, voting in both groups drops off markedly from even years. City elections cost $200,000+ to city taxpayers, while running them on the county’s ballot costs $60,000.

Far more people vote for school board members in even years than they do for city council members in odd years. Both

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Inda and Zucker encouraged the league to push for even year elections as part of the district elections process.

Sheila Lodge had perhaps some of the most eye-opening points and covered decades of election shifts in her commentary. She’d talked with the mayor of Modesto, and someone else there, a Latina, that was disappointed in district elections. They only got to vote for one councilmember every four years now, instead of multiple councilmembers every two years – a striking loss in being able to determine your city government make-up.

Some plaintiffs have argued that if they had a representative on city council, they could get needed improvements in their community, like the Cacique Street bridge replaced on the lower Eastside.

Sheila pointed out that election does not confer automatic power to commandeer city resources. You still need four votes on council to do anything. Turns out, Cacique neighbors didn’t actually want their bridge replaced with a road. They like the street quiet. The people around them wanted a road bridge for easier commuting through the area.

Things will start moving quickly on this front, starting with a presentation of a plan to council for public input on this process. Get informed and engaged right now.

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STATE STREET SCRIBE

by Jeff Wing

Jeff is a journalist, raconteur, autodidact, and polysyllable enthusiast. A long-time resident of SB, he takes great delight in chronicling the lesser known facets of this gaudy jewel by the sea. Jeff can be reached at jeffwingg@gmail.com

The Beast That Scientific America Built: Trader Joe’s and the Death of Froot Loops

I

visited the Temple this past weekend.

We needed milk. “Oh, we love Trader Joe’s!” someone hissed with enthusiasm by the unsalted peanut butter. “Oh, my god, it’s the best!” her friend rasped in concurrence. When the conversation turns to the tingly pleasure of the TJ’s shopping experience, the votes are nearly unanimous. Nearly. The loving and loveable oddballs who staff the swank grocery store are a blessing, and the product line manages to be all things to all people. My fellow shoppers are the problem, and they are a monster of Joe’s creation.

In 1954, Stanford Business School hotshot Joe Coulombe, the “Joe” in Trader Joe’s, got a job doing convenience store research for Rexall, the aspirin and suppository giant. Coulombe so wowed his new bosses, they were soon suggesting their wunderkind consider creating a convenience store chain in California that mimicked Texas’s allpowerful 7-Eleven. Joe jumped at the idea, got financing from Adohr Milk Farms, and began building his blitzkrieg of grocery-hipness by opening a bunch of mini-marts all over the state of CA. He called them Pronto markets, and they were a hit. When the company that had financed his Pronto rollout acquired 7-Eleven, though, the handwriting was on the wall.

Casting about for a market segment he could call his own, Joe stumbled onto an article in Scientific American that pointed out that 60 percent of Americans who qualified for college were going to college, at that time a heartening and newsworthy factoid.

In that statistic Coulombe saw (and in fact invented) a new species of grocery consumer; the self-identifying wise-ass who purchased lowly boxes of Froot Loops only grudgingly and aspired to a boutique grocery-buying experience beyond the reach of the unlettered masses.

And it had to be cheap. Or as Coulombe himself once put it, “Trader Joe’s is for overeducated and underpaid people, for all the classical musicians, museum curators, and journalists,” to which he later pointedly added, “I didn’t say smarter. I said better educated.”

Bless him. His odd idea took flight, and the flattered smarty-pants set came running. TJ’s took off like a rocket, initially selling everything from cereal to ammunition – a practice that ended with the shooting of Bobby Kennedy in ’68. In 1970, thanks to another Scientific American article (it could be argued that Trader Joe’s fans owe a debt of gratitude to Scientific American magazine), Coulombe was introduced to “Green” thinking, and an unstoppable grocery cult was born.

On a recent trip to the Trader Joe’s on De la Vina, I took several minutes to soak up the atmosphere. Santa Barbarans bustled purposefully through the glass doors with brightened, wideeyed expressions, the TJ’s crew skipped jauntily about, radiant with what always looks like tightly contained joy. It was, per the norm, a little unnerving. And of course, the workers run the sartorial gamut. I’ve never been in a Trader Joe’s anywhere whose crew didn’t boast the sort of mad personnel mix typified by

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Many of the cashiers at Trader Joe’s could be your favorite uncle or aunt, if your favorite uncle or aunt were inked from ankle to jawbone. Some of the workers stocking the shelves look like they could play bass for Arcade Fire.

Although TJ’s is today owned by a German grocery conglomerate, it still operates from a simple premise: rebrand bar soap and waffles as swinging, ironyexuding emblems of cool that gratify the shopper with a stylized sense of self. It works. Hoo, boy. It really works. But. There is an implacable phantom angst haunting Trader Joe’s happygo-lucky aisles, like the creepy comehither twins in The Shining, but vegan and scarier. Despite the mediating karmic glow of the TJ’s crew, the place at rush hour is a parade of Tension Hippies, mate-seeking tofu enthusiasts, wildly pierced salsa unpackers, and the occasional bewildered housewife looking desperately for Clorox with an “I’m Lost in the Funhouse!” expression of growing confusion and terror. Will the misplaced maven raise her hands to her face and scream, like Patricia Owens in The Fly? I’m waiting for the day. For those who have yet to partake of a Trader Joe’s outing (are there still such people in our fair state?), I offer this portrait of a pilgrimage to the De la Vina store.

The layout of the place is a Feng Shui mishap that begins in the parking lot, where an expanse of slanted parking spaces as snugly patterned as herringbone already puts you on edge.

You first thread the needle to get into the De la Vina lot, and there begin worriedly seeking a spot for your little buggy as glandular luxury SUVs stalk the car park like a herd of bulbous predators, their chrome grillwork grimacing menacingly as they maneuver the hairpin turns of the overstuffed little acre. You finally manage to dock your car into a suddenly available little slot, and as you pull in there is the inevitable TJ’s customer in hemp chinos, slowing his walk to a theatrical crawl and glaring dead-faced at the empty air because he

is angry to have had to slow his gait, angry at your oak-strangling, internal combustion engine, and angry that his braided, faux-nativist ponytail went out of fashion with Billy Jack posters and “One Tin Soldier” lunchboxes.

Inside TJ’s the cool-looking diagonalized aisles create a spiritual and spatial confusion that has artfully tattooed shoppers bumping into each other with pursed lips and clenched/ enlightened souls. You pause to look contemplatively at a box of orange lentils for more than four seconds, and a Progressive with lavishly pierced nasal flanges and those big ear discs will park behind you and start belting out an aura the color of spoiled bean curd. You feel the New rAge with your Spidey sense and allow the pissed-off spirit-pilgrim to pass by, pressing your back against the reconstituted old-growth-forestfavoring, single-ply toilet paper. The soul pioneer breathes out in the yoga practitioner’s version of a disgusted sigh and moves through without acknowledging you.

You go to make your purchase and while in line, an overcaffeinated pixie with a bag of Free Trade Shade Grown Madagascar Decaf chirps a rolling 4-megaton blast of happytalk at you that within one withering minute has turned your rigid organic banana to a useless tumescent throwaway not fit for purchase. If there are happier or more loquacious shoppers anywhere, they need to be restrained and tranquilized.

You leave checkout and enter the narrow little exit aisle where more passive-aggressive maneuvering stands your remaining hair on end as you clip hopefully toward the door.

You pick your way back to the car, more frozen expressions glimpsed through expensive windshields as those attempting to park suffer your affronting pedestrianism. You slowly pull your car out of the tiny parking space, receive more blank-faced Califorbearance as you painstakingly steer through the swarming lot with the fingertip-lightness of a vascular surgeon. You get home and heave a sigh of gratitude and, having lusted for a bowl of Cap’n Crunch for two hours, discover you bought soy milk by mistake. You weep.

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Letters

Although you might not believe it, we actually want to hear from you. So if you have something you think we should know about or you see something we've said that you think is cretinous (or perspicacious, to be fair), then let us know. There's no limit on words or subject matter, so go ahead and let it rip to: Santa Barbara Sentinel, Letters to the Editor, 133 East De La Guerra Street, No. 182, Santa Barbara, California 93101. You can also leap into the 21st century and email us at tim@santabarbarasentinel.com.

Minimum Wage and Taking Control

J

effrey Harding’s response to Leoncio Martins’s comments on the minimum wage question (Letters, Sentinel #4/1) got me thinking about the problem from a controlsystem standpoint.

Leoncio gets it conceptually right characterizing the system as a “virtuous cycle,” but MIT Professor Ton’s reasoning misses the hard-wired reason why this is so. Arguments about promotion of excellent operational execution fall flat for me, as a mere wage increase does not automatically result in enhanced productivity.

What does improve productivity is investment in employee training and on-the-job morale. I know this because I worked for (and actually retired from) a large Silicon Valley firm that, in the last century, was lauded for their investment in employees with extensive training, prudent fiscal governance and fanatical attention to career stability (never a layoff until the last founder was dead and buried).

What they were not known for was paying high wages; competitive, but not at the top.

However, stable employment allowed employees to make longterm commitments to putting down roots along with attendant economic activities, such as starting and raising families and making stretch purchases in real estate. It is important to note that this situation was not lost on mortgage lenders who would often give us the benefit of the doubt based on faith in the company I worked for.

The control loop I refer to has nothing to do with this situation, however, except as being somewhat compensatory for the continuing erosion of employment stability. Quite simply, Leoncio is correct in stating that “rising labor costs are offset by workers buying more with their bigger paychecks.”

When Jeffrey asks how shifting money from producers to employees ends up as a positive, he misses the point that producers will only spend what is necessary to meet demand, and bank the rest as profit, while employees (especially those chronically underpaid) will spend most if not all that they receive. And what do they spend it on? They spend it on the goods that the producers produce, of course! Herein lies the nut of the “virtuous cycle,” the engine that

drives the consumer economy: the more you make, the more you spend. The more you spend, the more producers produce. The more producers produce, the more employment is available. The more employment is available, the more you make. First order, it’s a positive feedback loop.

Of course, this positive-feedback loop can’t go on forever, turning the Earth into an immense pile of refrigerators, flat-screen TVs, and plastic garden gnomes. A balance will be achieved as producers siphon off profits that could be invested in increased production capacity, with such decisions being informed by sales forecasts (negative feedback). Right now, it seems as though folks would spend more if they had more to spend, but they don’t, so why add capacity?

We’re stuck at a balance point driven largely by the expectation of business investors of ever-increasing returns. Any control loop will settle into equilibrium and stay there, absent a change in external stimulus. One such stimulus is the minimum wage, admittedly an artificial construct, but one intended to offer some degree of input by the “little guy.” Contrary to Jeffrey’s apocalyptic predictions at the end of his response, the declining trends in individual middle-class wealth correlate oddly well with the decline in inflation-adjusted minimum wage over the past few decades.

Since the 1970s, worker-consumers have lost ground not only quantitatively but qualitatively. Under pressure for ever-increasing return on investment, the company I retired from is no longer a leader in enlightened employment, having suffered round after round of layoffs this century. Defined-benefit pensions are a thing of the past, and Social Security is under continual attack from the right. Employees are now expected to manage their own retirement funding in an investing environment that seems to consist of nothing but land mines (tough to do on any minimum wage).

It seems that the “makers” are doing their making by taking incrementally from the worker-consumer, pushing the economic balance point to near the breaking point for the average person.

In light of drastically reduced security in employment, a fair minimum wage is one of the last things resembling a safety

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net for the person who genuinely wants to work and make [his or her] way in this world.

Doug Pocius Santa Barbara (Jeff Harding responds: Doug, thank you for writing to the Sentinel. I find your comments interesting. However, there are a few reasons why I disagree with your analysis and conclusion, and part of the reason is from your own experience with your former employer.

You mentioned how your company invested in programs that increase productivity and employee loyalty but didn’t pay higher wages. The reason they didn’t pay higher wages is because workers were not productive at higher wage levels. Unfortunately, they weren’t able to maintain their market edge as you pointed out and are now forced to lay off workers.

I suspect paying wages higher than worker productivity was one of the reasons for their decline and probably changing markets was another.

We have a fundamental philosophic difference here about how the economy is driven. While I understand the mainstream thinking is that it is driven by consumer spending (a Keynesian concept), the fact is that it is driven by savings, capital investment, and production – not spending. Recent research of the real

7

economy show that if you measure the entire production cycle from production to consumer spending that the consumerspending factor is only about 40 percent of the GDP [Gross Domestic Product].

Amazingly, former GDP measures did not include the entire production cycle in its measures.

There isn’t room here to go into the entire reasoning behind this, but if you and a few friends ever find yourself stranded on an uninhabited island, just try to spend money to survive. It won’t work, and that’s why you have to have production first, and then savings, in order to spend. That said, your premise that shifting income from producers to employees will boost the economy doesn’t work. No money is static in the economy unless you hide it under your mattress. It is working all the time, whether deposited in a bank or invested. But you do bring up an interesting point where you say the minimum wage is a welfare program; I think that is the essential truth here. There are no valid economic reasons for wage controls by the government, but I think the welfare aspect of minimum-wage laws is perhaps the underlying reason for it by its proponents. Perhaps there is a better way to do this than minimum wage. Good letter, thanks. – J.H.) ...continued p.32

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Bi-Weekly Capitalist

by Jeff Harding

Jeff Harding is a real estate investor and a writer on economics and finance. He is the former publisher of the Daily Capitalist, a popular economics blog. He is also an adjunct professor at SBCC.

Ineptocracy (in-ep-toc’-ra-cy)

A

system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers.

If you don’t think we have an ineptocracy, then you would be wrong.

What triggered this tirade was the news that President Obama wishes to confiscate more wealth from producers (“rich folks”) and give it to those whom the Democrats believe are more worthy of this wealth. This proposal is supposed to help the middle- and lower-income folks by narrowing the income gap between rich and middle class.

In his State of the Union address, President Obama proposed the following: • Raise the top rate on capital gains from 23.8 percent to 28 percent (it was 15 percent when he took office in 2009).

• Eliminate the stepped-up basis “loophole” that gives a person’s heirs a new tax basis for inherited assets based on current values.

• Triple the child-care tax credit to $3,000.

• Mandate seven days of paid sick leave for all workers every year.

• Create a new $500 credit for families in which both spouses work.

In addition, there is a whole raft of giveaways and programs that the president believes will aid the middle class. Oh, he also wants to give a free college education to those who go to community colleges.

Now if you are on the receiving end of these giveaways, you would think this is just dandy; after all, don’t you need it more than those undeserving rich people? Unfortunately, that line of argument misses the point and is actually counterproductive to your interests. We will all be worse off as a result.

Before I get into the folly of these proposals, you might wonder why the president is proposing these programs now. The reality is that he has no chance in hell of getting these passed by a Republican Congress dead-set against tax increases and increased spending.

Is this some quixotic fantasy of the administration? Well, yes, to an extent – but the real reason is to set up the Democrats for the 2016 election cycle.

They wish to “define the debate” by pitting Americans against each other over “wealth inequality.” To put it in plain language, they wish to seize money by force from rich people and give it to segmented interest groups in the Democratic base to buy votes.

It’s not more complicated than that.

The Republicans do it, too; they just have different issues with which they

buy votes, but wealth redistribution isn’t high on their list. Instead they seem to like wars, they apparently don’t like Mexicans, and they like corporate bailouts.

The deal is that wealth redistribution can never make middle-income people better off. It can help low-income folks in the short run, but by doing so it kills the golden goose, depriving the poor of opportunities to better themselves in the long run, thus perpetuating an underclass of the poor. And ditto with the middle classes. Such schemes have been tried over and over and over throughout history, and have never worked and never will.

If you think the rich don’t pay their fair share of taxes, you should know that the top 10 percent of earners pay about 70 percent of all federal income taxes (2010). Poor people pay almost nothing and get more from the government than they contribute.

The middle-income taxpayers (50th to 90th percentiles) pay only 27 percent of income taxes.

Which gets me back to the concept of ineptocracy. There is only one way to make everyone better off.

As a result of that one path, all benefits from society, including those provided by government, come from it. Without it, we would all be poor, and government services such as public safety, roads, education, and various welfare programs would be marginal or nonexistent. None of the poor countries in the world use this one path to wealth and well-being, yet all the rich countries of the world use this

path – some more, some less.

That path is called free enterprise within a legal system granting us rights according to Natural Law. Another term for it is free-market capitalism. Our country was founded on this idea, and as a result we became the richest country in the world where even our “poor” are better off than the average citizens of those non-capitalist countries.

The engine of our wealth is the entrepreneurs who create businesses, take the risk of failure, create jobs, and, if they don’t fail, create wealth for them and for their employees. Government doesn’t create any wealth; it just spends the wealth of others.

So it seems to me that you would want to encourage the wealth creators and incentivize them rather than disincentivize them. After all, they are the ones who create jobs. Wouldn’t you want to reduce their taxes rather than raise them? Wouldn’t you want to remove barriers to enterprise and entrepreneurship rather than raise them?

Yet, higher taxes and burdens and barriers for these wealth generators are exactly what President Obama is proposing. Increasing the capital gains tax is a direct blow against successful entrepreneurs. Increasing death taxes only tells them that the government is going to confiscate much of their hardearned wealth when they die.

The Obama proposals will create equality, but not in the way they are thinking. They will instead give us “equality” with those other nations who confiscate wealth, discourage opportunity, and sink into stagnation.

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9

by Zach Rosen

Trouble Brewing in Craft Beer Industry

T

he average beer geek is passionate and opinionated. We tend to idealize our beer morals and idolize those who represent them. To us beerdoes, the brewers are rock stars, philosophers, and spokespeople, all in one. We believe that a brewery’s actions and beers represent that brewer’s own ideals and values, and by drinking their beers you are supporting those opinions.

In the beginning of the craft beer movement, every craft brewer was the little guy and anybody else was the establishment. Decades later, these early craft brewers are no longer their young, idealistic selves. These major craft breweries are renowned companies in the international marketplace and are elaborate businesses with millions of dollars in revenue. Things change. And in the past few years, these changes have resulted in some growing pains in the spirit of the craft beer movement.

Co out of Illinois had long produced their 312 Urban Wheat. A controversial purchase occurred in May 2011 when Anheuser Busch purchased this Chicagobased brewery for $40 million. 312 is the area code of Chicago. Shortly after the purchase a press release was circulated that stated Anheuser Busch had trademarked the area codes of almost every major city that had an airport. They had seen the

Zach Rosen is a Certified Cicerone® and beer educator living in Santa Barbara. He uses his background in chemical engineering and the arts to seek out abstract expressions of beer and discover how beer pairs with life.

marketing value of 312 Urban Wheat.

Firestone was lucky enough to get the rights to 805. Fast-forward to the present day, when Firestone’s 805 Blonde has soared in popularity and is being branded ...continued p.35

Weekly Happenings in Santa Barbara:

Our Letters Look Alike

The most recent caused a national uproar from beer drinkers. It was to many beerdoes’ shocking when Tony Magee, owner and brewmaster of Lagunitas Brewing Co, filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against Ken Grossman and his Sierra Nevada Brewing Co with their new release, Hop Hunter IPA. The complaint was focused at the graphic design of the “IPA” on Sierra Nevada’s label. The lawsuit stated that the “block typeface, black lettering, and kerning of the letters” replicated the “distinct branding” of Lagunitas’ IPA. Seconds after the lawsuit’s announcement, beerdoes relentlessly attacked Lagunitas on social media.

Tony pulled the lawsuit within 24 hours. The beer people had spoken.

Since the occurrence of this ordeal, many people have cried for a boycott of Lagunitas, seeing the lawsuit as a declaration of corporate war and the loss of the camaraderie of craft beer. Having had many conversations with brewers and brewery owners, I can tell you that there is a real need to protect the branding of a brewery. Ideas get copied.

Look locally: the success of Firestone’s 805 Blonde Ale has led to its imitators with several other locally produced light brews donning three-lettered titles that muster local sentiments.

But Firestone didn’t brew the original location-themed beer. Goose Island Beer

Is the bold lettering of Lagunitas’s IPA distinct enough to be considered their creative property?

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theNEWSPAGE

Out with the Cars ■ Vehicles be Damned:

So, you believe there aren’t enough parking spaces in Isla Vista now? Wait until the new Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office campaign takes full effect.

Uh, oh: they’re coming for your vehicles! “As part of an ongoing community effort to improve pedestrian safety in Isla Vista,” the notice reads, “and to best utilize newly installed sidewalks, the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office on February 15, will begin issuing citations to vehicles that are illegally parked on or are blocking a sidewalk.”

It’s tough enough to find a parking space in Isla Vista, and since virtually every garage has been converted to living space – requiring property owners and renters alike to park their cars outside at the end of their driveways – that option will now be severely limited. There is also the problem of eight people – most of whom have their own car – living in an apartment meant for two.

Which necessitates doubling and tripling up in whatever parking area one can find. The stated goal of the Sheriff’s Office is to eliminate parking on sidewalks and “to provide better visibility for the thousands of pedestrians, bicyclists, skateboarders, and motorists.” But, sensible Sentinel readers know this is just a beginning salvo to actually reduce the number of cars in Isla Vista. Especially in light of UCSB plans to add an additional 5,000 students to the university’s roster.

In October, the Public Works Department completed the first of a four-phase sidewalk safety project co-designed by Third District Santa Barbara County Supervisor Doreen Farr’s office. Sidewalks were installed all along the 6500, 6600, and 6700 blocks of Del Playa Drive. Additional funding is needed to complete the next phase of the project, which would include new sidewalks along El Nido, Trigo, Seville, and Madrid Roads, as well as for the 6500, 6600, and 6700 blocks of Sabado Tarde.

Fallon vs. Kimmel

■ Next Johnny Carson?: They’re both Jimmys, but NBC’s New York Citybased The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon is crushing the competition between himself and his cross-country ABC rival Jimmy Kimmel Live.

According to Variety, Fallon, after taking over from Jay Leno, pulls in 3.93 million viewers and 1.5 million of those are in the highly desirable 18-49 age group, up a whopping 41 percent from Leno. Kimmel, while his numbers are up too, they’re up only slightly; he attracts 2.34 million viewers and just 727,000 18-to-49-year-olds...

Easy There, Big Fellah ■ Straight Mish: Just in time for weight-loss season, those men lucky enough to regularly participate in sexual activities (mostly single people and married folks under the age of, say, 45, okay, okay, 50. Say what?), have, in addition to sexually transmitted diseases, something new to keep them up (or down) at night: penile fractures. According to the latest issue of Advances In Urology Journal, over a period of 13 years in and around the city of Campinas, Brazil, 44 men presented themselves to various medical facilities to report a fracture of their sexual organ. Of that number, a full 50 percent of the men heard “a crack” at the time of the fracture. Additionally, the Journal reported that the most dangerous position, accounting for fully half the medical emergencies, was the “woman on top,” followed by the “doggy” maneuver. The “safest?” The missionary position, naturally.

Behind Bars Again

■ Not Another Big Box Store: A groundbreaking ceremony for the new and improved North County Jail could be held as early as this September, says sheriff Bill Brown, as reported by Janane Scully in Santa Barbara County’s net-based news gatherer, Noozhawk. The jail could be up and running by January 2018, she reports, and it will be positioned on 50 acres just outside the city limits of Santa Maria, reasonably close to the Betteravia Center.

Ms Scully writes that the design calls for a Mission-style facade on the outside and a “Costco” look and feel in its interior. The new $140-million facility is expected to house up to 604 inmates when fully completed.

by Lennon James

Speaking of Jail ■ Drinkin’ Drivin’:

reflects that at the age of 24 he had no income and was embarrassed that he had to rely “on other people for everything.” He goes on to say that he is pleased that the 41-percent tax he now pays on his income “goes to support social welfare rather than coming from it.”

The Last Days of Football

You really don’t want to get caught up in one of these, especially if you’ve had one or even half of one too many

A Goleta DUI checkpoint is planned for Friday, January 23 – the day we publish – so you are probably going to read this a little too late if you find yourself in one, but hey, better late than, well, even later. In any case, DUI checkpoints are placed in locations based on collision statistics and frequency of DUI arrests.

Drivers caught driving impaired can expect the impact of a DUI arrest to include jail time, fines, fees, DUI classes, and other expenses that can exceed $10,000, not to mention the embarrassment when friends and family find out...

Teaching and Learning “Ethics” ■ Bell Curve?: The course was called “Sports, Ethics, and Religion” and was aimed at helping student athletes who may not have been quite up to adhering to Dartmouth College’s supposed high academic standards, 64 of whom were charged with cheating in order to pass.

Not to worry, the professor in charge of the course, Randall Balmer, has decided to simply reduce the grade of each cheater by one full letter rather than fail them. Which is, apparently, a really good lesson learned by anyone wishing to emulate the cadre of student athletes: go ahead and cheat. If you are not caught, you’ll make a good grade.

If you are caught, you’ll only go from an A to a B, probably better than your stupid self would have earned anyway...

The Brain Drain

■ Punched Once Too Many: Conor McGregor tells Breitbart Sports that relying on welfare “can drain a man’s mind.”

“He knows firsthand,” writes Dan Flynn. “In 2012, when the charismatic featherweight signed with the UFC, he depended on the dole.” McGregor

■ Stick with Two-Hand Touch: Dan Flynn’s latest book is The War On Football, Saving America’s game. He lives in Worcester, Massachusetts, and visited Santa Barbara early last year, whereupon we interviewed him about the game.

“The crowd is bashing football at this moment,” he says, “but the truth about football is that the game is safer than it’s ever been played, and it’s a game that’s good for you. If you jump around a field, if you run around a field, if you lift weights, if you refrain from smoking, all that stuff will have good health effects on your life.”

Flynn says that research on football players indicates that while there are pains and problems going through the game that, “ultimately it’s a healthy sport... Football teaches you to get up and fight,” he notes. “Everyone in life gets knocked down. Not everyone gets up and fights. That’s the difference between winners and losers. Getting back up after getting knocked down is an awesome lesson to learn in life.”

So, the real lesson in all this is if we’ll just combine Dartmouth’s ethics course with the New England Patriots’ slightly deflated footballs we can create a country of... winners?...

Walk with a Cop

■ Meet a Peacekeeper: Here’s a walk you probably should go on: The City of Goleta has invited all and sundry to participate in a “Walk with a Cop” scheduled for Thursday, January 29, featuring Community Resource deputy Dave Valadez. The walk begins in the Ellwood Mesa parking lot (across from Ellwood School) and will include a hike through the Goleta Butterfly Grove. The monarchs should be out in full force, and if you’ve never enjoyed looking up through a stand of eucalyptus trees to observe thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of butterflies fluttering among the branches, well, you really have missed something unique.

The walk begins at noon and will go until 1 pm. If you do plan on going, bring comfortable walking shoes, sunglasses, hat, sunscreen, and water, suggests Public Information officer Valerie Kushnerov...

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The Germans Have a Word for It

■ Smorgasbord: It may take the French 10 words to describe what can handily be described in three perfectly succinct English words, but wait: the Germans have perfected the art of combining disparate feelings, circumstances, desires, and results into just one albeit often long, word.

Nick Schaferhoff writes in FluentU, a German language and culture blog that, “other languages sometimes get word-envy when comparing themselves to German,” which, he says, “has smashed all manner of words together to form new, unique vocabulary.”

Many are familiar with the term Schadenfreude (“harm-joy”) that loosely translated means, according to Dictionary.com, “satisfaction or pleasure felt at someone’s else’s misfortune.” Wanderlust is another German word, meaning, “a strong desire to travel.”

The following are more German words that Mr. Schaferhoff suggests you may be less familiar with: ■ Ohrwurm (Ear worm): A situation of having a song stuck in your head that you cannot shake, as if it wriggled itself into your brain through your ear.

■ Fernweh (Distance pain): The feeling of wanting to be somewhere else. It’s kind of like a reverse homesickness (Heimweh), a longing for a place that isn’t where you are right now.

■ Kummerspeck (Grief bacon): Excess weight put on by emotional overeating.

When you find yourself on the couch watching ”Bridget Jones’ Diary” with a quart of Haagen-Dazs and a pack of Oreo cookies, you are feeding your grief bacon.

■ Innerer Schweinehund (Inner pig dog): The tiny voice in the back of your head trying to convince you to live a life of inertia and which you will have to overcome to rid yourself of Kummerspeck.

■ Fremdschämen (Exterior shame): The feeling of shame when seeing someone else in an uncomfortable or embarrassing situation.

■ Torschlusspanik (Closing-gate panic): The feeling of urgency to accomplish things you’ve always wanted to do before some imaginary gate closes and “it’s all too late.” It’s mostly used for those who sense their biological clock is running out and feel the need to settle with a partner or have children immediately.

■ Treppenwitz (Staircase joke): The joke or comeback line that comes to your

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mind on the way down the stairs after talking to your neighbor in the hallway two floors up.

■ Lebensmüde (Life tired): This word literally means being tired of life and was used to describe the dramatic and soul-crushing emotional agony of young Romantic poets (see also Weltschmerz and Weichei).

■ Weltschmerz (World pain): The pain one feels upon realizing that the world isn’t what we wish it were.

■ Weichei (Soft egg): Someone who is weak and cowardly. The same is also conveyed by calling someone Würstchen, the diminutive of sausage.

■ Backpfeifengesicht (Slap face): Describes someone who needs a slap in the face.

■ Erklärungsnot (Explanation poverty): What you find yourself in when put on the spot without a sufficient explanation or excuse for something you have done or failed to do. Most often used in the form of in Erklärungsnot geraten or in Erklärungsnot sein.

■ Sitzfleisch (Sit or seat meat): Describes a character trait. Those who possess a lot of “seat meat” (basically, a big butt), are able to sit through and weather something incredibly hard or boring.

11

■ Purzelbaum (Tumble tree): describes a somersault on the ground, a favorite way of children to get their clothes dirty.

■ Dreikäsehoch (Three cheeses high): A vertically challenged person, implying they’re only as tall as three wheels of cheese placed on top of each other. Usually this label is reserved for small children, together with Zwerg or Pimpf.

■ Zungenbrecher (Tongue breaker): The German equivalent of “tongue twister,” a phrase that’s hard to pronounce even for native speakers due to its sequence of letters. A very common one in German is Blaukraut bleibt Blaukraut und Brautkleid bleibt Brautkleid.

■ Schattenparker (Shadow parker): An accusation of unmanly behavior.

In this case, of parking a car in the shadow to avoid heating up the interior. These kinds of derogatory terms were something of a meme some years back and whole lists of them exist on the Internet. Alternatives include Warmduscher (someone who showers with warm water), Sitzpinkler (a man who urinates while sitting down), or ...continued p.12

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...continued from p.11

Turnbeutelvergesser (someone who used to forget their gym bag in cardio class).

If you enjoyed the above, the FluentU folks suggest you will like their method of learning German. FluentU is available for learning German, English, and several other languages.

You can tap on any word and look it up instantly. Every definition has carefully-written examples that help you understand how the word is used.

Visit them at www.fluentu.com.

Music of the Night ■ High School Drama:

SBHS’s Music of the Night 2015 directors are Aaron Linker, Sable Layman, Rio Salazar, and Dante Gonzalez

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Music of the Night was created in 1999 by students Blake Berris, Ashley Rodgers, and Evan Hughes. What started as a little show to fill the long break between the fall show and the spring show, often done only with a piano or canned music, has become a full-blown stage production, with costume, set and light designs, videos, and a live band. It is cast, directed, choreographed, designed, and produced entirely by student directors (Aaron Linker, Sable Layman, Rio Salazar, and Dante Gonzalez) under the supervision of artistic director Otto Layman. This year, the cast of 26 students will perform musical numbers from Broadway musicals — among them Bullets Over Broadway, Matilda, Jersey Boys, Pippin, and The Little Shop of Horrors.

The full cast includes Nick Blondell, William Blondell, Kendall Christensen, Isaac Cortes, Shug Cvitanic, Blake DeVine, Bradley DeVine, Spencer Glesby, Quique Hernandez, Sofia Hsu, Natalie Jimenez, Amaia Laskin, Meredith LeMert, Nolan McCarthy, Alessio Morello, Alana Ochoa, Olivia Ochoa, Mae Pendergast, Hannah Robinson, Lizzie Saunders, Hailey Simmons, Irving Soto, Kylie Transki, Hailey Turner, Camille Umoff, Ben Zevallos, and David Zevallos.

Music of the Night 2015 plays January 29, 30, 31, in the Santa Barbara High School Theatre. Tickets are $15 for adults and $10 for students, with all proceeds benefiting Santa Barbara High School Theatre’s spring musical, The Mystery of Edwin

Drood. For ticket reservations and more information, visit www.sbhstheatre. com/tickets.

So, You Wanna Be President?

■ Buck Stops Here: Or any elected official? In which case, you are in luck: Paramount Communications is holding a series of free one-hour candidate consultations for anyone interested in running for elective office. In Santa Barbara, consultations will be held on Wednesday, February 18, from 9 am to 2 pm at Fess Parker’s DoubleTree Resort at 633 East Cabrillo Boulevard.

Potential candidates will have the opportunity to ask political professionals directly their most important questions regarding launching and winning a political campaign. Issues expected to be discussed include filing requirements, fundraising, polling, media strategies such as direct mail, electronic, Internet advertising, and voter contact programs.

There is no charge or any obligation for these consultations, so prospective candidates would be well-advised to reserve a time by calling (831) 5958914 by Thursday, January 29.

A symposium called “How To Learn To Lie With A Straight Face” or “The Art Of Speaking Out Of Both Sides Of Your Mouth” has been scheduled for the following... Whoops, just kidding... .

In Dog We Trust ■ All Bark, No Bite:

Who do you trust? Apparently, according to the Pinellas County sheriff, not this rug manufacturer.

The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman Cecilia Barreda in Largo, Florida, reported that a new $500 rug at the sheriff’s administration building was delivered reading “In Dog We Trust” instead of “In God We Trust.”

The forest-green rug with the sheriff’s yellow badge was in the entrance area for a couple of months when the error was discovered by a deputy. Barreda says the error was made by the rug manufacturer and it’s in the process of being corrected. A second rug did not have the misprint.

We here at the Sentinel don’t trust too many people, but we didn’t know one could order a brand-new especially-made rug for only $500. Okay, they made a little mistake on the spelling, but...

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theFortnight

JAN 24 - FEB 7

by Jeremy Harbin

Tell us all about your art opening, performance, dance party, book signing, sale of something we can’t live without, or event of any other kind by emailing inthezone@santabarbarasentinel.com.

If our readers can go to it, look at it, eat it, or buy it, we want to know about it and will consider it for inclusion here. Special consideration will be given to interesting, exploratory, unfamiliar, and unusual items.

We give calendar preference to those who take the time to submit a picture along with their listing.

Food and Music

W

elcome back to The Fortnight, the Sentinel’s new column. It replaced my old events calendar, 15 Days a Week, in spite of that column’s rabid fan base. Here’s how this is different: I handpick some worthwhile events instead of running down a day-to-day listing that you might fall asleep reading.

Here in these opening paragraphs, I’d like to wax poetic about the literal and metaphysical life-giving properties of food and music. I’d like to do that so as to lay out a theme, to establish a connection between the two events I’ve detailed below. But isn’t that enough? It seems like there’s something to be said about renewal or feeding the soul or coming into communion with other people… you can imagine how that paragraph might read, right? So let’s skip it and get to the good stuff, the events, my friends.

Read on for a good reason to check out the Santa Barbara Public Market (January 24, 25, and 31). After that, a chat with guitarist Zach Korth about his band No Simple Highway and their upcoming show at SOhO (January 31).

Food, then music… it’s these two things that are, like… connected, ya know? You know.

Sunday

January 25 Living Well at the Public Market ■ The Santa Barbara Public Market is the still new-ish spot over at West Victoria and Chapala where you can go to cross whole sections off of your to-do list all at once. Need some fresh bread? Crazy Good Bread Co. peddles its loaves there. Need some sustainable meat from the company that still won’t sell you foie gras?

Belcampo is there. (It’s worth noting that Belcampo remains foie-less because it doesn’t believe its health-conscious demographic is interested. To quote the company’s CEO Anya Fernald from her interview with Eater: “Gavage is — on the spectrum — one of the least-offensive ways that livestock are fattened in this country.” But I digress.

Back to me posing questions to myself and then answering them.) Need some coffee? Check out Green Star.

Are you into juice? JuiceWell sells the stuff you want. Craft beer or fine wine your thing? The not-so-imaginatively named Wine + Beer has wine and beer. My point is this: it’s a pretty cool place to shop for your (albeit high-end) groceries. Or to sit and eat a cooked meal.

But some folks, as I understand it, still haven’t stopped in to check out the Public Market. That’s forgivable for now; it’s not as if it’s actually been opened since 2012 like its signage tries to make it seem (oh, established 2012… way to get technical, SB Public Market). But it’s time now – time to go see the new thing that people talked about a little bit when it finally opened.

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That’s your duty as an American citizen. When a new thing opens – be it a T.G.I Fridays in a flyover state somewhere, or a luxury, mixed-used facility by the sea – it’s your right, nay, responsibility, to at least go look at it so you can hold up your end of the conversation and be like “Yeah, I went in there once” whenever someone brings it up.

If patriotism won’t get you there, maybe you’re the type who needs an event of some kind. Well, I’ve got just the thing for you: the Live Well Series.

It’s a three-day event of free workouts, samplings, and demos that started yesterday (January 24), continues today (January 25), and ends next Saturday (January 31).

The main events are yesterday’s workout with fitness expert Dr. Izzy Lira in the Market’s courtyard at 11 am (sign up starts at 10:30 am), a healthy food expo inside afterward, and next week’s similar schedule, but I have the Live Well series on the calendar for today for one reason: cauliflower.

Today’s lone event in the Live Well series is a cooking demonstration by Leslie Thomas, who goes by “the accidental chef.” It’s called “Stealthy Healthy Dishes: Cauliflower Power,” and it takes place from 2 to 3 pm inside the market’s demo space called The Kitchen. She’ll be taking cauliflower to heights you never really wanted it

to go, but now that it’s gone there, you’re kind of like, “Well, I guess I’ll try it. Hey, that’s actually pretty good.”

Pizza crust, buffalo “wings,” “meat” balls, and – most curiously – chocolate cake. (Really, cake? No scare quotes on that one?) These recipes are not only vegetarian but gluten-free, so actual Celiac sufferers and self-diagnosed wheat wimps rejoice.

Leslie recommends early arrival to this one, and encourages you to RVSP via a Facebook page. Just go to Facebook and search the title of the class.

Saturday

January 31 Let there be Songs to Fill the (crisp, clean, Santa Barbara) Air ■ In a lot of ways, Santa Barbara feels more complete than other cities.

Residents of places such as the major metropolitan area 100 miles south of here take constant change as a point of pride, but we Santa Barbarans seem to like things fine just the way they are, thanks. The mountains there, the beach here, the places we eat and work and shop and play in between. And though we still don’t have that Target superstore, we continue toward civic completion in subtle and surprising ways. Here’s a good example of that: the city’s new Grateful Dead cover band.

Every great town needs a Grateful Dead cover band, and we have ours in No Simple Highway. (This being Santa Barbara, it’s worth noting ours is better than just any old GD tribute group – naturally.) Taking its name from a lyric in the song “Ripple,” this band of enthusiasts will play Dead tonight (January 31) at SOhO (1221 State Street). It’s only their second show ever, but if video from last year’s engagement is any indication, you’d never know it. They play tight with the harmonies and loose with the jams; their show is carefully curated to please casual fans and diehards alike.

With a devotion similar to that of wine aficionados, trekkers, or people who buy season passes to Disneyland, some folks who like the Grateful Dead really like the Grateful Dead. It’s a fun world to enter and explore a little bit, a subculture with its own language and customs and, of course, gods.

I had a little chat with one of the faithful, No Simple Highway’s guitarist Zach Korth, via email earlier this week.

He told me a bit about the source material, recreating the music, and the merits of different Dead eras and live bootleg recordings. Sound a little insider-y? Trust me, we barely scratched the surface.

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Q. On your website, you write that you try to set yourselves apart from other Grateful Dead tribute acts by “bringing a fresh energy to the repertoire.” What kinds of things do you do to approach the music with fresh energy?

A. I think there’s two parts to this answer. For one, the whole idea for No Simple Highway came very organically, out of years of casually playing together. We would all get together with some acoustic guitars at a party and just start jamming our way through songs, and in that way we developed the chemistry that forms the backbone of the band. The other part of the formula is more deliberate: we’re total Dead geeks, so we really get our kicks out of crafting a fun show. We’re not satisfied playing a typical show with a couple of sets; we have to make it a three or four-set extravaganza chock full of medleys and surprises, and what have you. In the end, we just want people to be having as much fun on the dance floor as we are on the stage.

Can you pick a favorite period of the Dead to listen to? And what’s your favorite period to pull songs from to play live?

I wouldn’t be surprised if we all have different answers here, though I think

I can say we all appreciate every era in one way or another. Being on the younger end of the band, I missed out on seeing a real show when Jerry was alive, so I don’t really have a natural “my period” that I cherish. I’m most partial to the early 70s – from the famous ‘72 Europe tour into ‘74 when they had the Wall of Sound (Bear Stanley’s, not Phil Spector’s!). There was still so much of that primal jam spirit and gravelly blues, but the band was definitely moving toward a more polished sound with amazingly crafted songs.

That said, our set lists are all over the map. Some bands will try to emulate a particular tour or period, but that’s not our thing. Last show, we played “Mr. Charlie” (last played in 1972) followed by “Althea” (written in 1980) and then “China Cat Sunflower” (played only once between ‘74 and ‘79).

On the spectrum of the guy who only knows some studio albums to the guy who could hear the opening chords of a live bootleg and give you a date, venue, and set number, how obsessive are you guys as Dead fans?

I would say we’re all way over to the latter end of the spectrum. Some of us are a little sharper with the history

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than others (Dave and Chuck will be the guys you might hear going “Well now, hold up, because we’re doing the intro like they did in ‘77, but now our interlude is sounding very 1974…”), but for the most part we’re all familiar with the various eras, and I’d venture a guess that we could all pinpoint a particular recording to within a two- or three-year period.

Do you have a favorite live show?

It’s very hard for me to pick just one, but I can give you a few of my favorites. Obviously, 5/8/77 at Cornell is well-known and is an excellent recording of the Dead in (one of ) their prime(s). I’m also a big fan of 5/2/70 at Harpur College (a.k.a. Dick’s Picks 8), mostly for the killer allacoustic first set. Finally, I find myself listening to 8/6/71 at the Hollywood Palladium a lot. That’s the one where Jerry supposedly fell down to his knees during the blistering crescendo on “Hard To Handle.” Then again, there’s so much more!

What should people who have never seen you guys play expect from your show?

A good time! Format-wise, we always start with an acoustic set or two to get the mood going, then come back

electric style to rock the rest of the night away. Expect a long night of Grateful Dead, with some fun segues and special treats thrown in here and there for those who are paying attention. I’m really excited about some of the stuff we have planned for this next show.

What’s next for you guys? Any plans for 2015?

Our first show last July was very well-received, and we’re super-pumped to be getting back to it at SOhO this month. We’re hoping to start playing with a little more frequency, which just hasn’t been possible yet due to people’s schedules and the sheer number of tracks we had to learn together (we’ll have about 100 now between the last two shows). Please follow us online and look out for some more shows coming up soon! But, before that, come to our show on the 31st!

Zach, along with bandmates Corey Linberg, Dave Linberg, Chuck Hammel, Geoff Levy, and Scott Foreman, plays SOhO tonight (1/31).

Go to www.sohosb.com for tickets ($5 advance, $7 at the door). Find No Simple Highway online at www. nosimplehighwaysb.com.

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Santa Barbara’s Online Magazine, Published Twice Daily

sbview.com

Milpas on the Move

by Sharon Byrne

Sharon Byrne

It’s Herb Peterson Day January 27

sbview.com

B

it of Milpas food history for the epi-curious: The Egg McMuffin was invented on this street. Modeled after Peterson’s personal breakfast favorite, Eggs Benedict, he presented his breakfast product idea to McDonald’s founder, Ray Kroc, and in 1972, the Egg McMuffin became the first McDonald’s breakfast item.

At the time, no other quick service restaurant offered breakfast, and Peterson asked a local blacksmith to make an iron ring to keep eggs round and tidy, as they were cooked for a hand-held sandwich. On Tuesday, January 27, McDonald’s here will celebrate the creation of the Egg McMuffin with $1 sandwiches during breakfast hours. Limit two sandwiches per customer.

Personal note: when I was little (getting to be a long time ago), my parents loved Egg McMuffins and marveled at American ingenuity in inventing a breakfast sandwich one could take on the go. Breakfast in restaurants, up until the introduction of the McMuffin, was largely a sit-down, fairly formal affair or the purview of the local casual diner.

This was a radical departure from those early days of dining out for breakfast!

Sharon Byrne is executive director for the Milpas Community Association, and currently serves on the Advisory Boards for the Salvation Army Hospitality House and Santa Barbara County Alcohol and Drug Problems.

Herb Peterson with the Egg McMuffin

Want to Solve Homeless Problem? Get Involved

I

n January 2011, I was in Santa Monica overnight counting their homeless population to learn how it was done. Three weeks later, I was out at 4 am with a team in the Cacique/Milpas area, interviewing homeless individuals for the Point-In-Time Count here. Two years later, we did the count, this time covering the beach west of State and lower Funk Zone.

Why does anyone get out of bed at 3:30 am to go out and wake up homeless individuals in the cold and interview them?

If you want to solve a problem, you need more than anecdotal evidence of the problem. You need facts. You need data. And you need to see how you’re doing with the problem over time, to see if whatever you’re doing to solve the

problem is actually working… or not.

The Point-In-Time Count for 2015, which is coming up quickly, is where you can get involved. This costs about eight hours of effort total every two years, and is totally worth it. It’s a place where you can step up and help your city work on a problem that affects us all.

Our experience on the Milpas Outreach Project, in working with the most chronically homeless, has opened my eyes to how hard this problem is to solve. I now see that we can make solid progress when we exit the policy clouds and work at the street level, within our neighborhoods.

Please volunteer to help us do the Point-In-Time Count. Most of us can probably afford to invest eight hours every two years to help move this ball forward for our community.

Living on One

by Cheri Rae

Knee Learns to Manage While Awaiting Health Care

I

t was the week before Christmas, a time of rushing around too fast and not paying enough attention. The last person who had driven my car had moved the seat back and lowered it; I planted my foot and, when the seat wasn’t where I expected it to be, I twisted my knee.

The minute it happened, I knew something went wrong. But I thought it was just a stretch, a strain, something that would go away. Besides, I had too much to do at that time of year to deal with it: a birthday celebration for my daughter, a drive to Orange County for a shopping trip with my sister, holiday gifts to select, food to prepare, friends and family to entertain.

Through it all, I tried to ignore my throbbing, swollen knee. Well, not

exactly ignore: I did the whole rice thing, rest (as much as possible), ice, compress, and elevate. Every morning ,I hoped it had magically healed overnight; every morning, that first step confirmed it had not.

A couple days after the holiday, my husband finally convinced me to go to urgent care to get medical assistance. But when we walked in, the place was filled with people in obvious distress with bad colds and flu, and the waiting time was three to four hours. Not possible.

So I called Sansum Clinic, the local medical clinic approved by my new Platinum insurance plan with Anthem Blue Cross, and got the first available appointment, for the second week in January. When that blessed day finally arrived, I soon learned that my co-pay had been increased from $40 to $50.

Fine. I paid the money, looking forward to relief.

I finally saw the physician’s assistant, who examined my knee and said it was a classic injury. He suspected a torn meniscus. That part of the knee doesn’t heal on its own, he explained, an MRI was needed so they could figure out exactly what is going on, and what to do about it. We’d get the “okay” from the insurance company – which takes just a couple of days, and schedule it. I could just manage pain with over-the-counter medications, he noted.

That’s when the new reality of “health care” kicked in. The injury occurred on December 17; the appointment was on January 8; I am writing this on January 20, and still no word. Actually, there was word: I called a couple of times and was told it was still too soon to be concerned.

Funny, I was pretty concerned about my increasingly painful knee, and the restrictions it was putting on my life. All this waiting was doing no good at all.

Last week, I called to talk with the insurance liaison at the clinic. She told me that it’s her job to process and prioritize, that there were a number of cases waiting because one person was out of the office.

She noted that I was lucky I wasn’t one of the ones who is dying or bleeding out.

Those “emergent” cases take precedence.

She told me that they have 14 business days to make a determination about whether or not to authorize the procedure

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Cheri Rae

Cheri Rae is the senior editor and columnist for sbview.com. Known for her civic activism and insightful chronicles of the local scene, Cheri has a hard-won reputation for writing about issues that other Santa Barbara-based writers are reluctant to tackle.

Friday Evening Salon Series

On Friday, February 6,

sbview.com

Pacifica will host one in

(the one recommended by the medical professional who had examined my knee).

She said I could appeal if they denied the MRI, suggesting maybe cortisone or physical therapy could work. She reminded me that no matter what the doctor had recommended, everything has criteria that need to be met – and that imaging procedures receive a great deal of scrutiny. She told me this is managed care.

And here’s the problem: my blasted knee hurts. Walking more than a block or two is a painful proposition, something quite humbling for an active person who wrote the book on walking Santa Barbara, for whom a sedentary life is unthinkable. Going up stairs is difficult, going down them is even worse – just at the time that the elevator is broken at the place where I work. I’ve learned to live with the pain, but it’s taking a toll by limiting my activities and affecting my mood.

I try to ignore it; sometimes I take ibuprofen, other times I take naproxen, hoping to take the edge off. The idea of taking anything stronger scares me, messes with my head, and makes me realize how easy it would be to get hooked on some painkillers while waiting for the medical procedure that would take care of the cause of the pain.

This is not health “care.” This is health business. Health bureaucracy.

With people evaluated, shelved, and inventoried like so many troublesome widgets.

I guess if I was paying cash for an MRI, I could get it scheduled in no time. And if I could afford a fancy concierge doctor on demand, my knee would be fine by now. Apparently, those hundreds of dollars we shell out every month aren’t enough to get basic medical care in a timely manner.

Somehow, I don’t think this is what Universal Health Care is supposed to be, with the local health clinic serving as a way station and the insurance companies calling the shots about whether people get care – and how long they suffer before they get it. Or not.

Stay tuned for the next chapter of managing life on one knee in Santa Barbara. And waiting for health care to deal with it.

a continuing series of informal evening salons.

Facilitated by Pacifica core faculty member Dr. Jennifer Selig, the topic will be “Our One Wild

JA N UA RY 24 – F E B R UA RY 7 | 2 0 1 5

On February 7, You’ll Learn Everything You Need to Know to Begin Graduate Studies in 2015

and Precious Life: What

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Attend a day-long introduction to Pacifica’s

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GIRL

by Kateri Wozny Kateri is an award-winning journalist with a

background in print, online, radio and TV news. A native of Minneapolis, MN, she has written for the Chicago Sun-Times Media Group, Pepperdine University and Acorn Newspapers. She works full time as a public relations manager locally and loves exploring the Santa Barbara fashion scene. Follow her on Twitter @kitkatwozny.

Power up: SB Bar Company

W

alking the treadmill, lifting weights, and kickboxing is my usual weekly workout routine at the gym. I often find that a healthy snack is needed afterward – a protein shake, yogurt with berries, or even peanut butter and a banana – until I noticed a guy (cute, I might add) munching on a Santa Barbara Bar. Santa Barbara has its own nutrition bar company? ! I knew I had to munch into this further.

“The bars are for all age groups and not limited to just women, weight-lost programs or athletes,” explained CEO/ founder Peter Gaum as he invited me into his kitchen. “Ninety-five percent of people say it’s the best tasting bar they’ve ever had.”

Gaum – also the owner of the successful Santa Barbara Baking

Company and Debbie’s Delights for more than 20 years – founded Santa Barbara Bar in May 2013 with a mission to create something mixed with super foods, seeds, and nuts.

“I wanted to make healthy nutrition bars that are delicious and have low sugar,” Gaum said. “My CEO friend from Balance Bar encouraged me to start making bars.”

Nutritional Benefits

Between 180 to 190 calories and packed with omega-3s and omega6s, four grams of fiber, eight grams of protein and eight to nine grams of nonrefined sugar, Santa Barbara Bars come in three delicious flavors, which include Coconut Almond (the most popular flavor), Peanut Chocolate Cherry, and Cranberry White Chocolate. Sounds

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Peter Gaum stands side by side with his SB Bars

like a healthy combination to me!

“My goal was to make the best-tasting bars with a balanced nutritional profile,” Gaum explained. “(Depending on the bar) they contain ingredients such as chia seeds, cranberries, pumpkin seeds, almonds, dark cherries, coconut, and sesame seeds to make them nutrientdense to give you energy.”

Santa Barbara Bars are also certified gluten-free, kosher, soy-free, and nonGMO. “They are great meal replacements, or can be eaten as a snack in between meals,” Gaum said. “It’s a bar you can throw in your backpack, and it doesn’t melt.”

#RaiseYourBar

Gaum’s company raises the bar in more ways than one. Not only does

he donate to local schools and organizations, he also created the hashtag #raiseyourbar so that fans can engage on social media.

“It means to raise your bar in your job, sports, school, and relationships,” he said. “That’s what we want to promote.”

Sales in the past year have also been impressive, with 750,000 sold and a goal to sell two to three million in 2015. Wow! The bars are sold in Vitamin Shoppes nationwide, natural stores, and other locations that can be found on the company’s website. Prices range from $1.75 to $2.50 depending on the retailer.

“We want to get into Costco in Southern California and sell even more bars,” Gaum said.

Soon the bars will be joined by two new flavors. Gaum is currently working on Mango Lemon and Whole Almonds, Dark Chocolate, and Cranberries.

“All I can say is, they are in development,” he said with a smile.

Gaum sent me home with a sample pack, and I can’t decide which bar I love more. What I do know is that cute guy I’ve been eyeing at the gym can raise the bar with me in more ways than one... now that’s a conversation starter!

Santa Barbara Bar Company (855) 722-2701 www.sbbar.co Don’t forget to follow on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at #raiseyourbar

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HOLISTIC

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by Allison Antoinette

Owner of The Juice Club – a local, organic juice delivery service – lifestyle coach, and yoga instructor. Allison’s diverse nutritional wisdom is rooted in Eastern traditions, with years of mindful eating and an inquisitive mind always on the lookout for today’s latest research on health.

Talkin’ about a Resolution

S

etting goals for ourselves is an essential step to a fulfilling life. At the turn of each New Year, over 50 percent of Americans will take time to reflect and revise their daily routine, setting at least one resolution for the months to come. It’s no great surprise that losing weight, getting organized and spending less money continue to top the popularity list here in the U.S. The build-up to a fresh start renews our hope for a better version of ourselves, and we start out with the best of intentions. While we may have failed at resisting temptation in years past, we feel certain this time is different.

The downfall of a wellintended resolution lies in the behavioral structure that surrounds it. More often than not, we center resolutions around “fixing” ourselves and fail to support them in a way that makes real success possible. Before too

long, our inner critic takes over. “Just stay in bed a little longer,” it will echo in our heads. “The gym can wait.” Then, as soon as we hit the snooze button, it starts with thoughts like, “You never do anything you say you will. You’ll never be in shape. You’re so unattractive.”

By the end of January, 30 percent of all resolutions will have been broken and

by July more than half will have lapsed.

That’s 156 million failed resolutions and disappointed minds annually. In spite of our well-intended efforts, why do we continually bump up against the same self-doubt and critical “inner voices” that have long created barriers to achieving our goals?

Creating a new habit or breaking a bad one requires willpower, and we are coming to understand that willpower functions like any other muscle.

Housed in the prefrontal cortex of our brain and powered by glucose in the

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bloodstream, willpower is the ability to delay gratification, resisting short-term temptations in order to meet long-term goals. As we exercise this muscle over the course of a day, our willpower “reserves” become depleted. Only relaxation and sleep can replenish it. Research shows that people are more likely to lie, cheat, or lash out as the day progresses and most violent crimes are committed after 10 pm. Furthermore, individuals who learned self-control at a young age grew into adults with greater physical and mental health, fewer substance-abuse problems and better savings behavior.

Again, like any muscle, willpower has to be trained and will always have a failure point. The key is to know our limits and use our strength wisely.

In order to build willpower, it’s necessary that you establish specific goals and build supportive habits. For instance, if your resolution is to quit smoking, then your habit might be to stop smoking that one cigarette you have every morning after breakfast. If your resolution is to eat healthier food, your habit might be to start substituting that daily morning pastry for a banana.

Either way, the problem is clear: any abstract goal that is not tied to a specific behavior is nearly impossible for your brain to focus on. Breaking down each resolution into tangible goals and identifying the smallest, most accessible

habit to support your progress will increase your chances of success by 50 percent. Still, this is no guarantee. If you use willpower only to deny yourself pleasures, it will often become a grim, thankless form of defense.

As we learned earlier, desire will eventually trump discipline. Most of us could agree that positive reinforcement does wonders for keeping one on track.

After all, dopamine is today’s greatest drug. As we build our willpower muscle, we can also increase our chance for success if the well-intended resolution is pleasurable, even a delight. That is why it’s beneficial to identify a gain in return for your efforts.

In essence, set up your own dangling carrot. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a splurge; it could be something to help take you through the next phase, like a new outfit or trip to the spa. In the case of food, you might start off by allowing for dessert on the weekends while building the willpower necessary to go cold-turkey in the weeks or months to come.

At the end of the day, our resolutions are more likely to manifest when we attack them from multiple angles.

It may not be the magic wand we are looking for, but by taking baby steps, knowing our limits, and closing the escape hatch, then we are certain to enjoy the sweetness of our dangling carrot at the end of the journey.

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BEHIND THE VINE

by Hana-Lee Sedgwick Hana-Lee Sedgwick is a digital advertising executive by day and wine consultant and blogger by night. Born and raised in Santa Barbara, she fell in love with the world of wine while living in San Francisco after college. Hana-Lee loves to help people learn about and appreciate wine, putting her Sommelier certification to good use. When not trying new wines or traveling, she can be found practicing yoga, cooking, entertaining, and enjoying time with friends and family. For more information and wine tips, visit her blog, Wander & Wine, at wanderandwine.com.

The Art of Wine Winemaker Gavin Chanin in Lompoc (photo courtesy Chanin Wines)

Lutum is known for Chardonnay & Pinot

I

t takes some winemakers years to find their perfect balance in winemaking or their signature style, but somehow Gavin Chanin figured it out pretty quickly. In a short period of time, he’s established himself as a top Santa Barbara County winemaker, producing restrained, low-alcohol wines using grapes from the same vines notoriously known for producing bigger, riper wines.

How? He picks his fruit much earlier than some other producers, as much as 4-5 weeks before, and takes special care

in producing terroir-focused wines with little intervention.

Gavin started his wine career in 2004 at Au Bon Climat and Qupé as a harvest intern, before he could even legally drink! Over the next few years, he worked his way up to assistant winemaker, taking time off each fall from his art studies at UCLA to work harvest.

He also spent time working harvests in New Zealand and South Africa, and traveled throughout Italy and France before returning to California to finish his degree. Talk about dedication.

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In 2007, at the ripe old age of 21, Gavin started his own label, Chanin Wines, while continuing his work at Au Bon Climat and Qupé. He managed it all before going out on his own full time in 2011. Soon after, he and Bill Price of Classic Wines LLC established Lutum Wines together. Like Chanin Wines, Lutum, which means “dirt” or “soil” in Latin, focuses on producing singlevineyard Chardonnay and Pinot Noir.

Both wineries produce around 3,000 cases a year.

Quite accomplished for someone who is still in his 20s, Gavin is not afraid to break the mold to make wines that most larger corporations wouldn’t dare to create. His wines are made without filtering or modern additives, roughly 20-30-percent whole cluster at Chanin and 100-percent de-stemmed at Lutum, and are low in alcohol. All of this has earned him titles like “winemaker to watch” by the San Francisco Chronicle, and one of the 2012 “winemakers of the year” by Food & Wine.

I met with Gavin at his winemaking facility in the Lompoc Wine Ghetto to try some of his wines. He’s energetic and

easy-going, and seems like the type of guy who gets along with almost anyone.

Make no mistake though, Gavin is driven and passionate about his wine… and it’s good. His 2012 Lutum Sanford & Benedict Chardonnay and 2008 Chanin Bien Nacido Chardonnay are some of the best Chardonnays I’ve tasted from this region – super minerally and clean with perfect balance. Coming from someone who isn’t a big Chardonnay fan, needless to say, I was impressed. The 2013 Chanin Los Alamos Pinot Noir has earthy and dark fruit flavors with a touch of spice, and the 2012 Lutum Sanford & Benedict Pinot Noir has vibrant red fruit aromas followed by a nice lengthy finish. Overall, everything I tasted was great for drinking now, but these are all age-worthy wines.

It’s true that Gavin has access to some of the best grapes from the Santa Maria Valley and Santa Rita Hills, but it’s undeniable that it’s his passion and gentle winemaking style that’s making a name for himself. Plus, his own artwork adorns each bottle of Chanin, which makes it literally a piece of art.

Cheers!

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20,000 DreamS

COUNTING

To many of us, the coming of a new year signifies new beginnings, a fresh outlook, an opportunity to affect positive change.

But for the adults served by Dream Foundation, the end of one year and start of the next may well be wrought with fear, uncertainty or hesitation about the future. Their days may be marked by worry about things left unsaid or undone, financial hardship, and physical and emotional pain. To them, not only does a new year hold no guarantees, tomorrow doesn’t.

As dream makers, we are charged with positively touching the here-and-now for the 2,500+ dreamers and their families we expect to serve in 2015, just as we have for the 20,000 who came before them.

Making LasTing MeMories wiTh Loved ones Our 20,000th dream milestone was met recently when we served a young California woman named Yvonne. At 34, she was a wife, mother to two young children and was losing her battle with breast cancer. Financially depleted as a result of her illness, Yvonne had never been able to enjoy a special getaway with her family.

The opportunity to do so was the dream Yvonne brought to our organization.

Dream Foundation was privileged to send this young family to San Diego, where they enjoyed theme parks, relaxing accommodations, views of the Pacific and— most importantly—made lasting memories.

Thank You Today, 20 years after the inception of Dream Foundation, your generosity continues to be the fuel that allows us to serve more. On behalf of our dreamers like Yvonne, thank you.

The work of Dream Foundation expands the service and scope of palliative care: to care without curing by providing comfort and closure to the end-of-life journey.

Yvonne & Family

When you make a contribution, your gift directly impacts a terminally ill adult— and by extension of that, his or her loved ones, caregivers and communities— in the greatest of need.

As you count your blessings and look ahead to the new year, please remember the families we serve. Your heartfelt contribution—in any amount—will go far in the life of someone whose here-and-now may be profoundly touched in the most positive way with the realization of a dream come true.

www.dreamfoundation.org @dreamfound

/Dreamfoundation

@dream_foundation

San Diego

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In the Garden with

These bareroot roses got a jump on it.

They were potted up a month ago and purchased in the container. More expensive but lower mortality rate! The peat pot gets planted, too.

Mr. Greenjeans

by Randy Arnowitz “Mr. Greenjeans,” as he is known around

Santa Barbara, is a gardener, horticulturist and writer. He particularly enjoys working with roses, orchids and sharing the day with his golden retriever Peaches, who faithfully accompanies him in the field.

Contact him at greenjeansmr@gmail.com

Rainfall or Not, Mind the Drought January is the best month to prune your roses. Some folks take them down low, some are more conservative. These are just right.

I

have to admit that for a garden columnist, I’ve been spending a lot of time and space these last few months not talking about gardening.

This is primarily because, like many of you, I’ve been shutting off the irrigation controllers and the hoses, and watching lawns, beds and trees die. Not a very uplifting subject for my column.

Only some of my gardens have been replaced with drought-tolerant and succulent plants, because mostly it’s been a wait-and-see game to determine if it was going to rain. I’m sure you know that even though it has rained a bit this winter, we are not even close to being out of our drought condition. Even if Lake Cachuma were to fill up, I would hope that folks wouldn’t go back to thirsty lawns and water-loving landscapes.

In spite of the no-water situation, I thought that I would offer a few notes on the care of some of the more permanent residents in our gardens, such as roses and fruit trees. Assuming you have judiciously doled out some water and kept them alive, these plants still need additional care and attention.

I’ll probably not mention that you could also be feeding your cool-season lawns and flower beds that are teeming with colorful blooms, because I’m guessing many of you no longer have lawns or large, annual flower beds that are teeming with anything.

Roses

• By now you should be finishing up pruning your hybrid teas, floribundas, miniatures, and climbing roses. If you’re a little shaky and not sure what you’re

doing, and you’ve missed the pruning demonstrations that some of the local nurseries offer – look on YouTube, ask a knowledgeable friend or hire a professional, like me, to help you out.

• It’s also time to plant bare-root roses.

Lots of varieties are still at the nurseries through this month. See my Quick Pick for a startling new alternative to bareroot roses. Okay, not that startling, but certainly worth considering.

• After pruning, you might be tempted, but remember, don’t feed roses until March when the soil begins to warm up.

Prune Deciduous Fruit Trees

• Most deciduous fruit trees, the ones that drop their leaves in the winter, that is, need to be pruned every year to maximize fruit production and to stay healthy.

• Peaches and nectarines bloom and fruit on new wood and require a different pruning technique than do plums, apricots and apples, which fruit on older wood. And to make matters not worse but more interesting: plums, apricots, and apples get pruned slightly differently from one another.

Do the homework and learn to do this important garden job correctly. It may take some practice, but it’s fun once you get the hang of it. Pruning properly can mean the difference between a backyard bumper crop and having to buy your fruit from Vons again.

The “M” Word

• Give all the beds a thick layer of mulch. If your garden already has some,

Randy’s Quick Pick Last year, a few of my gardening clients planted roses during bare-root season that were purchased, pre-planted into peat pots. The pots were then popped into the ground – peat container and all. I noticed how exceptionally well those guys did compared to conventional, “bare-root” bareroot roses. This season I decided to try out some of these pre-potted roses and bought a large number of them from Windmill Nursery up there in Buellton.

Sales manager John Mehalco was exceptionally helpful and filled my order without a hitch. Owner Bob Blokdyk was also professional and friendly, and made sure I received all the rose varieties that I had asked for. If you haven’t been up there, take a mini-fieldtrip to Buellton and check these guys out. it’s probably broken down and needs some refreshing. If your gardeners have raked your beds clean, read them the riot act (again) and have them pick up a truckload of compost. It’s much cheaper to buy it in bulk than in bags.

• The leaves and garden litter is supposed to be there. Nature puts it there for a reason. That is, to conserve moisture, dissuade competing weeds from germinating and taking hold and, to insulate and keep plant roots cool.

Brrrrrrr...

• Up at my house, near Foothill, we’ve had a mild winter so far. The Mexican bird of paradise (Caesalpinia pulcherrima) that I planted a few years ago in my driveway is supposed to be deciduous, but so far this winter, it is not.

Its feathery leaves look fresh and green, and it’s been growing intermittently all season. However, if you live in a chillier part of Santa Barbara and have had frost

damage, don’t prune off the burned sections of your plants until all danger of frost is past. If you tip off the damage now, it can initiate a flush of new growth that would be vulnerable if temps dip down again.

• Wait a little longer before planting bougainvillea, citrus, and other tropicals into your garden.

Other Bare-Root Stuff

Cane berries, deciduous fruit trees, asparagus, artichokes, wisteria, rhubarb, and strawberries are available as bare root and get planted now. It’s usually less expensive to plant bare-rooted plants because you’re not paying for the extra soil, container, and labor. Usually, a reputable nursery will have the stuff out now that gets planted now.

Windmill Nursery, 925 West Highway 246, Buellton (805) 688-3993

Randy’s Quick Pick, PART II The reason I was interested in trying these roses in particular was because I’ve found that without special care and some coddling, conventional bare-root roses often seem more vulnerable and difficult to get established.

The advantage of the Windmill Nursery peat pot roses is that they’ve been started in their pots a month or so earlier, and the tender roots are already protected by the soil in the pots and are less likely to dry out.

Oh, and to avoid confusion, these potted-up roses are not the same as the ones in plastic, five-gallon nursery containers that you can buy in the spring and summer that are established, leafed-out, and blooming rose bushes. They’re just bare-root rose plants that come in their own decomposable, ready-to-plant, peat pots. I will let you know how they do this season.

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CINEMA SCOPE worked nationwide for several websites and publications – including the Dayton Daily News, Key West Citizen, Topeka Capital-Journal and Santa Ynez Valley Journal.

California is his eighth state. When he isn’t watching movies or sports around the Central Coast, you can find James writing and reading while he enjoys coffee and bacon, or Coke and pizza.

And The Oscar Goes To...

O

ne man’s hunch and quick predictions for the Academy Awards hopefuls in the top half-dozen categories:

Best Picture: Boyhood (though I prefer Birdman to win) Best Director: Richard Linklater Best Actress: Julianne Moore (though I’d prefer Felicity Jones) Best Actor: Michael Keaton or Bradley Cooper (flip a coin) Supporting Actress: Patricia Arquette Supporting Actor: J.K. Simmons (though I’d prefer Edward Norton)

M

Oscar Baloney

W

hile many observers bemoan the Academy Award “snubs,” I tend to question the thought process of selecting a few specific nominees. I’m less exasperated that England-born David Oyelowo – the Martin Luther King Jr. impersonator of Selma – got slighted in the Best Actor category, and more flummoxed about that same film’s curious casting of British performers in the role of key Southerners: Tom Wilkinson (as President Johnson), Tim Roth (as Governor Wallace), and Oyelowo.

Among those on the actual ballot, can’t help but wonder about the choice of Foxcatcher’s Steve Carell. Although the normally comedic performer might be respected in Hollywood circles, was he nominated merely for mimicking the oddball philanthropist John du Pont? I suspect that Academy members were enamored with the surprising notion of Carell caking on make-up and acting out of character, literally. (To be sure, I have nothing personal against the actor; he was excellent in The Way Way Back, one of 2013’s greatest movies).

But my perception favors more genuine efforts by undervalued actors, including Jude Law as the loose cannon in Dom Hemingway, an unusual dramedy. In his finest hour to date, Law seized a meaty role, chewing it with abandon and 100-percent sincerity.

Among the fairer sex, disappointing is the selection of Rosamund Pike; Academy folks chose the wrong girl from Gone Girl. Carrie Coon, as Ben Affleck’s sister, was the best thing in that bizarre movie. As pointed out in a previous column, viewers seem more infatuated with Pike’s icy, reticent character than the actress herself.

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The same concept applies to our fair ladies who ventured Into the Woods; instead of nominating Meryl Streep for an absurd 19th time, why not Emily Blunt?

Given all the complaining in filmmaking corners about the lack of major roles and quality characters for women, perhaps it would behoove the Academy to share the wealth and honor more of them. Yet here we go again, feeling the need to put Streep on a pedestal, as if her three Oscars aren’t sufficient. With the social-media uproar about “Why wasn’t so-andso nominated?” and countless critics bringing up the race card, it seems more logical to wonder why Streep – a class act but not above reproach – was granted one of the five exclusive spots. Since she was on the ballot each of the past three years, my crystal ball never envisioned Streep would be exalted this time for masquerading as a witch.

Meanwhile, it’s nice to see a bone tossed to the aforementioned and hard-working Arquette for Boyhood, though no supporting turn surpassed that of Noomi Rapace in the masterful and underseen The Drop. But then, how can Hollywood be bothered to recognize diamonds in the rough, when it’s de rigueur and easier to roll with a screen legend they’ve already picked 19 times?

by James Luksic A longtime writer, editor and film critic, James has

y line of reasoning for those picks: Boyhood is about real life, real people, and – as has been trumpeted often – was shot over 12 years. Linklater will be recognized (though Alejandro Iñárritu is equally worthy) not only for Boyhood but his overall body of work; there’s no need to honor Clint Eastwood again, much as I appreciated American Sniper.

Moore is a heavy favorite for two simple reasons: she has never won an Oscar, and she portrayed an Alzheimer’s patient. Although a similar argument could be made for Eddie Redmayne, who embodied the physically challenged Stephen Hawking, I’m confident Academy voters will favor the respected veteran Keaton, or possibly up-and-coming Cooper.

If there’s one lock, it’s in the Supporting Actress realm, where Arquette figures to be a landslide winner. On the men’s side, Simmons – whom I’ve long considered a national treasure – appears to be the sentimental darling, though Norton’s poignant panache in Birdman took me by storm.

Despite my reverence for ingenious Wes Anderson, don’t be traumatized if The Grand Budapest Hotel gets shut out – not unlike American Hustle – at least in the major categories. Although the filmmaker may capture the prize for Best Original Screenplay, I wouldn’t wager a wooden nickel.

It would be irresponsible not to point out that Inherent Vice is enjoyable beyond words; Joaquin Phoenix and Josh Brolin continue to grow on me like no others.

JA N UA RY 24 – F E B R UA RY 7 | 2 0 1 5

Last and least, my lone summary of one mainstream, would-be thriller that isn’t anywhere near Oscar’s radar:

Take It Away

T

aken 3 spotlights Liam Neeson, again, whose family is in danger, again. Let’s just say our Irish hero, with each passing year, is less conceivable as a one-man wrecking crew, and this third time isn’t the charm for his ex-wife (Famke Janssen) On the lam again, Neeson’s player tells a confidante, “I’m going down the rabbit hole” – which would make sense if he didn’t proceed to the L.A. freeway, the polar opposite of a rabbit hole. Forest Whitaker, not given much to do but portray the law-enforcement stooge, plays second-fiddle quite well. The token Russian evildoer, albeit without vodka, spews stale dialogue (“We have a little trouble,” he warns).

Among this recycled rubbish, finding a realistic moment took time, but I must mention the bereaved daughter’s (Maggie Grace) reaction is priceless when a homicide detective fondles a stray piece of clothing: “That’s mine – it isn’t even hers.”

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OH YEAH, ALL RIGHT...

by Tommie Vaughn Tommie adapted her love of the stage to the love of the

page. As lead singer for the band Wall of Tom, she created This Rock in My Heart and This Roll in My Soul, a fictional book series based loosely on her experiences in the L.A. music scene. Now she’s spending her time checking out and writing about all things Santa Barbara. Reach Tommie at www.TommieV.com or follow her on Twitter at TommieVaughn1.

Ojai’s Todd Hannigan will thrill you at the Americana series on January 31

There Are No Coincidences

A community of cool (from left): Omar Velasco, Mia Dyson, Lee Pardini, Brendan Willing James, Josh Halpern, Chris Pierce, and Erin “Syd” Sydney

M

usic people attract other music people… I know, it sounds vague, but maybe I want it to be, or maybe it’s the truth. You have indeed heard that like minds attract each other, so let’s just say that when there were more than three coincidences that led me to discover a new music company in the Santa Barbara area, I knew to pay attention.

Steve and Polly Hoganson are names that may sound a bit familiar, as being the owners of the once widely loved Ventura live music venue/bar and lounge “Zoey’s Café”, and now residents to our Santa Barbara community, as well as the heart and soul behind Ones to Watch Productions (OTWP), a fullservice music promotion company.

Is This the Real Life?

You see, when one of my musical kindred’s from L.A. (Leslie Stevens) and a good buddy from Ojai (Todd Hannigan) got booked on the same bill for an Americana Music series at the historic and newly renovated Plaza Playhouse Theatre in Carpinteria on Saturday, January 31, by none other than OTWP, I had to dig a bit deeper.

Who was this company, and how had it found them? Because they are in fact part of the underground pulse of music masterminds, a community of cool, a camaraderie of musicians whose truth is their art, bled directly from their instrumental souls.

How did this booking company find them? Why was this show put together?

I was totally intrigued… and then the third chip fell into place: Polly contacted

me. Okay… Santa Barbara was indeed a super-duper small place and our Uber (no, not the taxi service – wait, yes, call me a taxi) secret community of musical ninjas had been cracked wide open.

I caught up with Polly, a true music enthusiast, a champion for artists and huge believer in the power of the musical word. She is the den mother that we all wish for, as she and like-minded husband Steve are here to create a musical mecca, one that all artists dream of.

Any Way the Wind Blows

Q. So I hear through the SB music grapevine, we have some new amazing promoters who have just moved into our community! Can you tell me a bit about your company, The Ones to Watch Productions, and what your mission is here for our music fans?

A. We are Santa Barbara music foundation, a 501(c)(3), curating concerts and events under our production company Ones to Watch.

We are excited to present events and to be able to donate part of the proceeds to local art and music organizations. Our mission is to build a music community by showcasing local and national artists who we believe are “ones to watch.”

You recently hooked up with The Plaza Playhouse Theatre in Carpinteria, how did that come about?

We had heard of the Plaza through musician friends and finally saw a performance about a year ago. We fell in love with the intimate vibe, the great sound, the warm staff, and overall aesthetics. We approached

Omar Velasco will be performing with his full band on Saturday, January 31

the management and found we had a shared vision. They have been very accommodating to us, and we are grateful for the opportunity.

Your upcoming show on Saturday, January 31, is an all-star Americana music lovers’ line-up. Have you worked with these artists before?

We have worked with and are great friends with all of the artists for this particular concert: Todd Hannigan & Sleeping Chief, Omar Velasco with his band, and the lovely Leslie Stevens and her band. We look forward to this kick off show for our 2015 Americana Series.

Let’s say there are some wonderful artists out there that would love to work with your company – what is it that you normally look for in a band?

There are so many super-talented musicians out there. We do have a method to our madness when we put together a concert lineup. There has to be cohesiveness. We build it like a musical story with a beginning, middle, and an end. We look for emerging artists who have unique, original stories who believe in their art, and present it in a manner that captivates an audience. It’s hard to explain, but when we hear their music or see a performance, we just know. It’s that “wow” moment.

Steve Hoganson – the man, the myth, the leader

Social media plays such an important role in most bands marketing. Can you give any advice to aspiring musicians as how to handle such a fickle tool?

Fickle, so true and I understand Facebook has moved to make artists’ pages harder to reach more fans unless they pay by sponsoring ads. Social media is an important tool, but musicians need to focus on quality over quantity. When you bombard your fans via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, blogs, and emails, you need to make sure your message is clear, concise, amusing, and informative. Successful posts shows the artist’s true personality, nothing contrived. It’s also cool to interact once in a while. Not to every comment, but engage your fans. There are a lot more tips that I can talk about with regard to promoting and branding, but I’ll leave that for another time.

What’s next for The Ones to Watch Productions?

We have fantastic shows through July and hope to bring at least one concert a month, for as long as it works and makes sense for the community, the Plaza, and us. We are very excited and thankful for what is to come!

I know where I’m gonna be on the 31st... is that you sitting next to me? www.onestowatchproductions.com

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with Mark Léisuré

Mark spends much of his time wandering Santa Barbara and environs, enjoying the simple things that come his way.

A show here, a benefit there, he is generally out and about and typically has a good time. He says that he writes “when he feels the urge” and doesn’t want his identity known for fear of an experience that is “less than authentic.” So he remains at large, roaming the town, having fun. Be warned.

Three Decades and Counting for SBIFF

T

he Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s (SBIFF) 30th edition gets underway this first Tuesday (January 27), which is two days earlier than normal, as the fest has expanded to 12 days, ending on Saturday night, February 7. Truth be known, even though opening night is just around the corner as I write this – and just about everybody I know is asking me if I’m all excited about the festival, far more than mentioning any other event ever – truth be known I haven’t yet slogged through the schedule.

Have you seen that thing? It’s huge!

Oy, who has time to go over it all, let alone go to the actual movies?

We’re kidding, of course (not about lagging, on delving, though). The festival is deservedly one of the great cultural events of the year, a huge undertaking that hits on just about every segment of movies, from a wide swath of current Oscar hopefuls and other Hollywood hoopla to obscure documentary, foreign films, and indies you’ll only ever get to see again on Netflix, if at all.

The tributes really are impressive, even if the slate isn’t as impressive as last year’s offerings, which included both Robert Redford and Oprah Winfrey, to name just two. Never mind that The Durls – as the Indy’s Peeps columnist used to refer to exec director Roger Durling a few years back – missed on a couple of picks, namely Jennifer Aniston and The Lego Movie.

So what. More than 40 percent of the current acting nominees will be on stage at the Arlington before the fest comes to a close; all five of the foreign film nominees will be screened, most with directors on hand for Q&As; the panelists add another couple of handfuls of Oscar hopefuls, and there are always various and sundry famous visitors that haven’t yet been announced.

Who cares that the nation won’t see Aniston in those really weird camera shots when they read through the nominees. We’ll still have her on stage for 90 minutes or so going through her career, from Friends’ Rachel to the much darker Claire, the caustic woman in chronic pain who grapples with her own personal demons, in 2014’s Cake.

You already know the other tributees, so we won’t waste space. But may we be

so bold as to suggest you really do want to see as many of the stars’ films as you can before the tribute evenings. Even if most of the movies are already left town or haven’t arrived yet. You might check Netflix or maybe BitTorrent downloading sites (did I say that out loud?). It’s especially recommended for the Virtuosos night, when the brief interviews really do focus on each actor’s current film. Best bang for your buck, too.

Alright. ‘Nuff said. More next issue after the fest’s first week. See you in the dark.

Slogging with Loggins

How fun was it to see Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald together on the stage at SOhO last weekend? The two pop icons who have accounted for so many great hits in the 1970s and 1980s came together to help the club financially as part of the 20th anniversary benefit series, and they easily could have just dialed it in. But instead they really went for, jamming together on a big selection of the hits – including one they co-wrote (“This Is It”), and getting the crowd up and dancing for the encores.

Only one question: why did they close the night with a Stevie Wonder cover?

Marchforth in January

The 13 musicians in the big-band Marchforth Marching Band are accompanied variously by stiltwalkers – rather dancers, who shake and shimmy to the big beats – and other big top-style attractions. But it’s not a gimmick. And

JA N UA RY 24 – F E B R UA RY 7 | 2 0 1 5

there are no slouches. Just about every member of the band did a solo or two and quite finely, too, at the group’s gig at SOhO earlier this week. You can’t help but move your feet and gyrate your joints to the band’s brassy beats and rambunctious rhythms. What a great way to beat the mid-winter blues.

Xmas in Paradise

My out-of-town guest and I walked around town for a spell after the concert – after she’d already noticed the Christmas lights strung from the ceiling in the club – and asked me if the white lights that hug the trees on State Street were all up year. I’m not sure, but I think the answer is yes, right? It’s a bit curious that I didn’t actually know, because it is kind of a strange thing. But we’re just that kind of place. I mean, when you live here, isn’t everyday a bit like Christmas?

Not So Happily Ever After

I’m not one who normally criticizes the Broadway shows that come to town, even back when they were at the Arlington, even less so in the gleaming, sparkling, and much more intimatefeeling Granada. But I’ve got to say that Camelot left me a little disappointed.

Perhaps the idea of truncating the original script for the tour was a good one, and using a single set (a big metallic tree that towered over stage-left) I’m sure made economic sense.

But some of the changes left the story a little disjointed. My guest, who had never seen Camelot, had a bunch of questions about motivations of the characters. I myself nearly drifted off because the actors – who had lovely voices – nevertheless didn’t really sell their songs. Not just “C’Est Moi,” Lancelot’s entrance, which should be played for fewer laughs than normal.

But right from the start, with “I Wonder What the King is Doing Tonight”, the punch lines were under-delivered – I heard nary a snicker let along a good

27

laugh during some of that number’s clever moments and “The Simple Joys of Maidenhood” and “The Lusty Month of May” suffered similar fates.

On the plus side, the orchestra was fabulous, the most smartly arranged and boldly delivered version of the score I’ve ever heard. And the acting itself was right on the mark. But a local theater veteran who shall remain nameless pronounced it “flat”, and I can’t really disagree. Maybe it was the amplification or microphones. Or that the version with the Santa Barbara Symphony last spring was so stupendous it was hard to see it again so soon. But Camelot has so much to offer, and with the right energy there could have been a lot more emotion as well as laughter.

Fret not, though. Next up is Stomp on Monday, February 9, which doesn’t require any subtlety at all.

Lounging with Léisuré

Looking for merry melodies or other musical mirth with Mark? Here’s where you might find me this fortnight: A triple dose of really great and welltraveled guitarists are headed our way to start off this two-week period at the end of the year’s first month, and you’ll find them in progressively larger halls.

Robben Ford, who lives in Ojai, heads back down the mountain and over to SOhO on Sunday night, January 25, with his relatively new Ford Blues Band, which captures the axe-man in his most comfortable and familiar genre... The following night, Bill Frisell, who also plies a variety of styles but with a much more cerebral approach, returns to town with his latest project – the curiously nostalgia-free Guitar in the Space Age – which recreates some of the great guitar hits of the 1950s and 1960s, passed through Frisell’s always tasteful filter.

If you liked Frisell’s reinterpretation of John Lennon’s catalogue last year, you’ll love this show at the Lobero... Then ...continued p.31 Marchforth’s lucky 13 members march on SOhO

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with Julie Bifano Ms Bifano is drawn to micro-fiction and is currently writing her first novel – The Grace Below. She has a B.A. in English with an emphasis in writing from the University of San Francisco and a M.F.A. in Creative Writing, also from the University of San Francisco. More of Julie’s stories and poetry can be viewed on her website juliebifano.com.

A Place for Imagination Rob Pearson, Rob Jones, and Robin Jones can’t wait for the SB Children’s Library to open

I

fondly remember the library as one of my favorite places in the whole world.

Wandering down aisles and aisles of books, one could delve into any new adventure, simply by plopping down in the library and reading a new story.

The smell of the old pages, and the way the pages would ripple through fingers from chapter to chapter. The library was a magical place where imaginations soared and my first love of creative writing blossomed.

On the night of January 9, I had the opportunity to view the 6,000-squarefoot space of the upcoming Santa Barbara Children’s Library for the groundbreaking “Building a Love of Reading” Capital Campaign. The space is located on the lower level of the SB Central Library. Although it was evening, massive windows would let in inviting natural light.

Before the presentation began, the future SB Children’s librarian, Gwen Wagey, expressed joy for the opening to occur. She described how wonderful it is to have one space solely dedicated to children’s learning. She explained, “I love that it’s all for SB’s kids.”

The presentation kicked off with a hilarious children’s song played on the guitar about avocados. Silly lyrics included “Holy guacamole” and a

Laura Capps and Tina Wood are excited to support the upcoming opening of the library

Children’s librarian Gwen Wagey poses for a quick shot with friends Jennifer Bergquist and Kate Perlis

Representing Friends of the SB Children’s Library, Krista Plieser and Linda Love present a $34,300 check

plethora of ways to say avocado in different languages.

Emcee and library co-chair, Janet Garufis, explained the huge impact the SB Children’s Library will have on children’s lives. Additionally, she encouraged the audience to imagine a performance space for story time, music, and children’s theater programs, as well as library aides that will help children with homework. With a goal of $5.6 million to get the library up and running, already $3.9 million had been raised, leaving a gap of $1.7 million. Many audience members vouched to donate, some promising $25,000.

As the evening continued, renowned children’s author Lee Wardlaw gave an entertaining and theatrical reading from one of her favorite books, Winnie the Pooh. Amid giggles and gasps, she captivated the audience, as everyone seemed to be transported back in time to the innocence and pure joy of hearing a fun story read aloud.

I couldn’t wait to one day bring my own child to this magical place, one of wonder and excitement; a place where life-long learning begins.

To donate to the SB Children’s Library and jumpstart its summer 2015 opening, visit sbchildrenslibrary.org.

Jana Johnston and Will Tomlinson show delight to support the library

Pam Maines and Ian Rhodes support the library’s crusade

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Co-chair of the Honorary Committee, Dianne Duva, gets together with Peter MacDougall, Taylor Woodward, and Barbara Woodward

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Plan B

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Delivering packages on Christmas

by Briana Westmacott When Briana isn’t lecturing for her writing courses

at UCSB and SBCC, she contributes to The Santa Barbara Skinny, Wake & Wander and Flutter Magazine. Along with her passion for writing and all things Santa Barbara, much of her time is spent multi-tasking through her days as a mother, wife, sister, want-to-be chef and travel junky. Writing is an outlet that ensures mental stability... usually.

A Hop, Skip, and a Plane Away

Meet Gracie! She’s a 13-year-old dolphin that lives in Roatan, and she was quite unforgettable.

W

e did it. We successfully skipped Christmas – the entire thing. There were no packages, no lights, no cookies, no sings. Instead we swam with dolphins, blew bubbles with barracudas, watched volcanoes spit lava into the sky, and went barefoot for close to half the month of December.

This was the first year that we successfully dodged all of the traditional “cheer”… and it all started by booking our family on a red-eye.

Get Out of Town

We took a midnight flight from LAX to San Salvador, where we connected to Roatan. Roatan, in case you may be wondering, is an island just off the coast of Honduras, balanced right below Belize; one of a small chain of Bay Islands infamous for their unparalleled coral reefs.

It was December 17 when we left the U.S. Mid-December was the perfect time to depart. We ducked out before all of the singing performances, gift ceremonies, and Secret Santa exchanges.

It’s really the only way to officially hide from the holidays. You are probably thinking that I’m a Grinch, and I wouldn’t argue with you on that. But sometimes being barefoot on a beach can be more fulfilling than baking cookies.

Back to Roatan – the water was like sugar with a dash of aquamarine.

We brought snorkels, and our resort provided kayaks that enabled us to pass hours each day immersed in viewing the undersea happenings: barracudas, sea turtles, jelly fish, squid, and too many more schools of fish to mention. To say we enjoyed ourselves would be an understatement.

out wrapped gifts to lines of children.

With wide eyes and smiles, the young Guatemalans tore open the wrapping and found their only holiday gift.

Immediately afterward, they came to us with open arms. As we hugged every one of them, we experienced something much stronger than what our typical Christmas morning would deliver.

Instead of filling up our toy bins with new gadgets, we filled our hearts with

the sensation of giving.

At midnight that evening, as we lit off obscene amounts of fireworks in the street with bunches of Guatemalans, my daughter Elli turned to me and declared, “Mom, this is better than any present I could have asked for.” It was then that I realized the importance of forming new traditions and stepping beyond the boundaries to which we are accustomed.

Briana’s Best Bets We took a few international flights in 2014, and each time we had to get to LAX to depart. We contemplated driving our car or booking out of SB (which was not usually practical for us) and found the Santa Barbara Airbus was the best route to get to LAX. With some of our trips lasting a month at a time, the paid parking would be ridiculous. The Santa Barbara Airbus drops you right at the airport gate, and you don’t have to deal with driving on the L.A. freeways. I highly recommend it: www.sbairbus.com/

Lake Atitlan, Guatemala

Two days before Christmas, we departed Roatan and flew (on a teeny, tiny propeller plane) to Guatemala.

As much as we had become used to the island lifestyle, it was time for us to do more exploring. We landed in Guatemala City and spent Christmas Day in the city.

We had holiday magic – it just came in a different form than what we have experienced in the past. We trekked to Lake Atitlan, hiked through Guatemalan jungles and up volcanoes.

Our feet landed on a black sand strip of beach for part of our stay, and we got to be experts at lighting off fireworks.

Santa Barbara Seafood Pasta

Fresh Fish and Succulent Shrimp simmered with tomato, vegies, fresh basil & garlic tossed with Fusilli pasta & topped with shredded Parmesan.

Finding the Heart of the Holiday

On Christmas morning there weren’t piles of presents, at least not for my children. However, something special did take place. My husband’s cousin took us to deliver packages to an impoverished section of Guatemala City. The “houses” were built from corrugated pieces of tin and cardboard.

Many children had sores on their hands and faces, and I wanted to pack each of them home with me to care for them.

My two daughters timidly handed

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SYVSNAPSHOT

by Eva Van Prooyen Keeping a finger on the pulse of the Santa Ynez Val-

ley: what to eat, where to go, who to meet, and what to drink. Pretty much everything and anything situated between the Santa Ynez and San Rafael Mountains that could tickle one’s interest.

Stroll-ering Along, Restaurant Week, & Top Picks

Mommy’s In Motion

S

unny Field Park passerbys will soon witness mothers sprinting toward and away, joyfully sashaying around, and jumping up and down in front of their strollered children, as Allison Howie a certified Pilates instructor, avid athlete, and mother to Genevieve (age two) and Andrew (three months), launches her new fitness business, Mommy’s In Motion.

“Our workouts are designed for mothers with their children in tow,” says Allison, adding, “children stay in their Mommy’s in Motion’s Allison Howie looks forward to strollers while the parent engages in what leading an army of mommies and their children as is essentially an exercise-based interactive they participate in high-energy workouts in Santa peek-a-boo, entertaining, and engaging Ynez Valley (photo by Justin Courter) with their children.” Allison explains the classes will be Pilates-based with mat work, cardio, lunges, plyometrics (essentially jump training), and creative ways to address the strength, flexibility, and endurance required by moms throughout each day.

Allison says she trained with Santa Barbara based master Pilates instructor Sarah Bertucelli, earning a certification from BASI (Body Arts and Science International) five years ago. Upon the arrival of her second child, Allison says she has been inspired to find more practical ways to get post-partum healthy: “There aren’t enough support groups, particularly for moms looking for a healthy activity to do with their children. Not everyone has childcare.” Even so, Allison says everyone is welcome with or without children.

“I think I am able to handle two kids under two years old well because I have help from my parents, husband, a list of babysitters… and I’m able to work out,” says Allison. “Exercise keeps me sane, even-keeled, clear-minded, and my stress levels low. I feel better as a mom knowing I’m doing something healthy in front of my kids. I think it sends a great message to have them see me take care of myself, so I am better able to take care of them.”

Allison says her new classes are “a safe place for mommies to exert energy, meet other women going through the complete change and shift in lifestyle (physically, emotionally, environmentally), and start feeling back to their normal selves with a support system.”

Classes begin Monday, February 2, in Santa Ynez Valley, and will meet Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at Sunny Fields Park (tucked in-between Santa Ynez and Solvang) from 10:30 to 11:30 am, with Santa Barbara times following shortly. Drop in rates are $25 and reduced fee package deals are available. Classes are limited to 20 and Allison notes with a smile, “Daddies are welcome, too.”

Visit www.mommysinmotion.com to schedule online or call (805) 705-0680 for more information.

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Restaurant Week in SYV Let the Food Adventures Begin!

Piggybacking on California’s 5th annual statewide Restaurant Month in January, the 5th Annual Santa Ynez Valley Restaurant Week gets cooking Sunday, January 25, and runs through Saturday, January 31. Restaurants throughout Santa Ynez, Solvang, Buellton, Ballard, Los Olivos, and Los Alamos are offering three-course prix fixe tasting menus for $20.15 (excluding tax, tip, and beverages).

The statewide event showcases California’s agricultural variety while highlighting and drawing in tourism. The Valley weeklong version clearly aims to do the same, as well as be a food lover’s utopia – with over 20 participating restaurants flaunting creative gourmet dinners, wine-pairing specials, and exclusive seasonal offerings.

“This year there is an emphasis on partnering with the Vintners’ Association and encouraging wine paring,” says Jessy Osehan, Visit SYV Board of Directors member and general manager of The Hamlet Inn of Solvang. Jessy explains, “Visit SYV promotes the event and is the hotel association, and the visitors association for the whole Valley and its six little towns. We partner with all the other visitor centers here. We are the marketing and PR arm of the Valley.”

Restaurant Week brings people into restaurants during a traditionally slow time, giving chefs and restaurateurs an opportunity to showcase their tastes and talents to a wider audience. “It also draws some of our hospitality staff into restaurants they don’t normally go to, so they can share what they know with tourists,” says Jessy, adding, “and we hope locals can enjoy what’s around them… for bragging rights.”

Participating restaurants have posted their menus online at www.dinesyv.com.

Featured course selections include: Prosciutto-wrapped asparagus with poached egg (Avant Tapas & Wine in Buellton), Grilled Pork Loin with Edamame fried rice & salsa verde (The Ballard Inn & Restaurant in Ballard), and mud sundae with coffee caramel cookie with ice cream, whipped cream, hot fudge, caramel, and pecans (Sides Hardware and Shoes A Brothers Restaurant in Los Olivos).

Historically, “this has been a highly attended week, [reservations] book out really quickly. It’s a time to plan out my week where I get to go to restaurants I don’t normally go to,” says Jessy, noting there is currently a lot more creativity happening in the Valley, and Restaurant Week debuts some of the direction the Valley is going, “it’s more cutting edge.”

Several tasting rooms and wineries will also be offering special wine and small bite pairings, and a handful of hotels will offer hotel packages or discounted rates.

Reservations are highly recommended. Menus are being added daily. For more current information, visit www.dinesyv.com. Mark your calendars for Visit SYV’s Craft Beer Month in May, and Wine Month in September.

Eva’s Top Five Faves:

My personal picks, best bets, hot tips, save the dates, and things not to miss!

The Green Machine – El Rancho’s coffee and juice bar now features freshly made fruit and vegetable juices and smoothies. My favorite is the Green Machine: kale, cucumber, romaine, spinach, apple, lime, and ginger. $5.49/12 ounces. 2886 Mission Drive, Solvang.

Forever Posh Farewell Sale – After close to 14 years in business, owner Cherise Osha is closing the doors to her women’s clothing boutique, and everything is up to 70 percent off: cashmere, bags, belts, accessories, clothing, and jewelry. I scored an unbelievably soft, grey, cotton-blend hoodie for 40 percent off. 3583 Numancia Street in Santa Ynez.

Zaca Mesa Valentine’s Barrel and Truffle Tasting – Bacchus, Cupid, Zaca Mesa, and Apollo (the patron god of music and poetry) want you to eat chocolate, fall in love, listen to music, and drink wine on Valentine’s Day from 11am to 3 pm at Zaca Mesa Winery 6905 Foxen Canyon Road. $25 per person RSVP to Angela Harrison at angela@zacamesa.com, via phone at (805) 688-9339, x311, or www. zacamesa.com/wine_store Solvang Farmers Market – 2:30 to 6 pm, every Wednesday; Grab an aebleskiver and a hot cup of coffee as you stroll through rows of local produce, flowers, nuts, cheeses, breads, and other delicious fresh foods. Downtown Solvang on First Street, between Mission Drive (Highway 246) and Copenhagen Drive – rain or shine.

Vintage Motorcycle Museum – The collection is quite broad with something for everyone, ranging from a 1910 FN to the present, and across all makes. Open weekends 11 am to 5 pm, and by appointment mid-week. 320 Alisal Road (805) 686-9522. Admission is $10 per person.

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...continued from p.27

on Tuesday, we get the chance to see Lenny Kaye, the downtown New York punk rock pioneer who has slashed and crunched his way through a fourdecades-long partnership with the great rock poetess Patti Smith. They’ll be at the Granada, which seems like it would be more suitable for Ford while SOhO would work for Smith, but, you know, economics and all.

Sounds at SOhO

There’s another worthy entry for that same Monday night, January 26, by the way: the all-female saxophone quartet the Tiptons – formerly known as the Billy Tipton Saxophone Quartet in honor of the jazzer who posed as a man for half a century during the mid-20th century. Check ‘em out at SOhO... The following night at the upstairs downtown restaurant and music club brings Café Musique doing a CD release concert for their third disc, Half Step Behind. The Central Coast-based band plays what they call “gypsy, swing, tango, folk & wildclassical” – which covers most of what you can play with a lineup of violin, accordion, guitar, and bass.

Bonus: the wonderfully folksy harpist Laurie Rasmussen opens.

The next five entries all take place at SOhO, too. Thursday’s “Songs for Cinder” (January 29) brings together quite a few members of the Santa Barbara singer-0, show is also a benefit, but this one is for the club itself, as SOhO stages its third monthly concert of the year long series celebrating its 20th anniversary. The Dirty Knobs, the LAbased conglomerate of studio musicians and sidemen led by Mike Campbell of Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers fame, who play tons of classic rock covers and plenty of originals, will be joined by John Kay, the lead singer of Steppenwolf. Born to be wild, indeed.

Jann Klose won four 2014 Independent Music Awards, including one for his cover of Tim Buckley’s “Song To The Siren”, and sang Buckley’s parts in the movie Greetings from Tim Buckley. He shares the stage with Daniel Champagne at SOhO on Sunday, February 1.

Banjo Babes are the trio of five-string banjo players Sharon Martinson (of Wyoming’s The Littlest Birds, the oldtimey duo that returns to SOhO in April), Central Coast songstress Erin Inglish and Ventura’s Donna Lynn Caskey. They’re on tour in a showcase sporting new music and a limitededition international Banjo Babes 2015 calendar. (And you thought Banjo Babes was a contradiction in terms.) Hear ‘em at SOhO on Monday, February 2, which – we are definitely not saying

coincidentally – is Groundhog Day. Carole King turns 73 on February 9, just six days after SOhO hosts a tribute show to the legendary singersongwriter, who began in the Brill Building and forged a tremendous career for herself a decade or so later (1971’s Tapestry held the title of bestselling album of all time for a number of years). Our question, though, if it was too late, baby, back in 1971, just how tardy are we now?!?

More Music

“Wall of Sound” used to refer to records produced by Phil Spector back

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in the 1960s. Now, Spector is behind bars for murder and Kodo, Japan’s most celebrated taiko drumming ensemble, has taken over the term for the resounding reverberations produced by the exuberant group, whose performances are as much an athletic event as a concert. Shinto dancing and visual theater add to the driving rhythms, which will throb at the Granada Theatre on Wednesday, February 4, courtesy UCSB’s Arts & Lectures.

Heading north, Tales From the Tavern’s next series of six biweekly singer-songwriter concerts gets

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underway at the Maverick Saloon in Santa Ynez that same night with an impressive double bill of Jon Dee Graham and Iain Matthews.

Finaly, The Rhythm Arts Project (a.k.a. TRAP)’s upcoming benefit concert is headlined by Bill and Tamara Champlin, who appeared just a couple of weeks ago as part of Bill’s legendary Sons of Champlin band at the Lobero Theatre. Also on the bill for the Friday, February 6, show at the ultra-intimate Adobe-Hill are Brenda Russell, Tata Vega, and the powerhouse band of session players known as Pockets.

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...continued from p.7

Raising Minimum Wage

The growth of productivity since the 1970s has skyrocketed; while wages have stagnated or remained flat, real income has not risen.

Historically, the rise in the minimum wage from post-WWII 1950 until 1970 has shown a steady rise in real wages accompanied by a rise in productivity and greater expansion of industry. This was at a time when unions were at their finest; nowhere during that time did a rise in wages negatively affect business.

All throughout the history of capitalism, the business community has always cried wolf, or better yet, bewailed Chicken Little’s lament that the sky is falling whenever there is a demand for a rise in wages. The hue and cry that business will be devastated and jobs will be lost never ceases. Yes, some jobs are lost and some businesses will try, overall, to outsource or automate, but in the big pictures, this is not the case. Business always moves forward and manages to increase profits and expand.

Capitalists incessantly complain that it is small businesses that are hurt by wage increases. In some areas, as I mentioned, they do – but again, that is negligible in the overall scheme of capitalist growth and expansion. Historically speaking, every time a wage increase has occurred in the U.S., profits and productivity have risen proportionately.

It stands to reason, even if small businesses are hemorrhaging profits, doesn’t capitalism demand that those businesses that can’t tow the line go under? After all, if certain businesses can’t make the cut, they don’t deserve to survive. However, if we are to follow the capitalist playbook, the workers are to blame for screwing up the good works of the enterprise. It’s not the fault of the capitalist who failed to research the market or implemented poor management systems, but the blame

falls on the worker for asking for a living wage. Somehow, a living wage is not part of the equation for a successful business model. Only when demands come from labor is the destruction of the business the fault of labor.

Let’s look at that for a moment.

If a business can’t take the heat in a certain market, then by the law of the jungle, it should fail and deservedly so, according to the capitalist survival of the fittest plan. If that is the case, then not meeting the demand for a living wage on the broader market should also be a mortal sin for a business.

Wait a minute, isn’t it part of the greater scheme of the capitalist system to try to improve society for the betterment of all? Oh, I forgot, capitalism is not in the business of social welfare. Their raison d’être for existing is profit – profit at all costs. Well, that makes all the difference in the world in a capitalist model.

Businesses don’t have to do anything for society. The obligation is strictly to make money, and part of that obligation is to squeeze the workers as far as they can bear. I thought the purpose of society, regardless of its politico-economic system, is to try to help humanity survive for the benefit of its citizens, not to promote the mechanism of some engineered economic system that only cares about itself. How stupid of me, I guess I shouldn’t put the welfare of humanity before the welfare of business.

Capitalism is a dynamic system, it works one way: to move as much wealth away from society to its side – from the 99-percent side to the one-percent side.

The bigger it gets, the more profit it needs; it will go to any length to increase that profit even to the detriment of society. It will lower wages at all costs; It is unrelenting in its quest for greater profit, and it absolutely can’t do it without lowering wages, even to its own peril.

Back to the rise of the minimum wage, here is something to think about: if you

look at the scale of productivity verses wages from the 1970s to the present, you will see a huge gap between the two, more than at any time in modern history.

What does this mean? It means that someone is getting ripped off. Checking with the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. productivity grew 80 percent between 1973-2011, while the hourly compensation rose just 39.2 percent and the median hourly compensation gained only 10.7 percent. Workers created all that productivity but were not fully compensated for it. If wages were commensurate with productivity over the last 30 years, proportionally, the per hour wage would be somewhere around $20 per hour.

Business will never voluntarily increase wages. Any time wages were increased any time in history since the industrial revolution, the working class had to fight for it, so too with benefits and working conditions. Ironically, even when business is doing stupendously well, it never offers to raise wages. In fact, it goes to great lengths to stifle any hint of wage increases.

Also, no matter how low the wage is in the U.S., it’s never low enough for business. That is why “free enterprise” always goes abroad to find the cheapest labor that it can find. If Mexico is cheap and Thailand is cheaper, they will pull up stakes and flee like rats on a sinking ship, and go to Thailand or what country whores itself out to capitalists.

So next time someone states that a rise in the minimum wage will hurt business, ask yourself when will there ever be the right time to raise wages.

Answer: there will never be a “right” time to raise wages, unless the working class fights for it. Capitalists (I’m sorry, I shouldn’t use that term it sounds so Communistic. I’ll change it to “the captains of free enterprise”… next time) will never give that raise, because it cuts.

Paul Kontos Santa Barbara (Jeff Harding responds: Thank you for your letter, Paul, but I think you know I disagree with every point you mention about the capitalist system. I doubt I’ll change your mind by anything I’ll say here. Your analysis is a typical Marxian view of capital vs. labor. While that line of thinking has mostly disappeared from the Earth because of the failures of that theory, it still exists, especially in Progressive circles and certain academic departments of our colleges and universities (at least in noneconomics departments). I only ask you to consider the regimes in this world that embraced the concepts you advocate and how they have “help[ed] humanity survive for the benefit of its citizens.” They have failed miserably. Yet those countries that have embraced capitalism have provided

great benefits for its citizens. No system is perfect because we are imperfect creatures.

Capitalism, as Winston Churchill would say about liberal democracies, may be the worst system on the planet… except for all the others. – JH)

Cuba Confidential

I want to correct some misconceptions you have made about Cuba in your article (Sentinel #3/26). Your hyperbolic statements about Cuba being under the yoke of oppression, starvation, and hopelessness is patently wrong. The fact is Cuba was one of the most povertystricken nations in the world before the revolution. It was a barbarically oppressive regime lead by a hardline dictator backed by the U.S. There were no democratic rights nor human rights to speak of, and the massive incarceration and torture of its people was the order of the day.

Since the revolution, Cuba has the lowest infant mortality rate than the U.S. Illiteracy is almost non-existent, and health care is free and universal and one of the best in the world. There is free education from preschool through university. They have universal voluntary suffrage – with local democratic elections occurring every two years and national elections every five years. The last election in 2013 brought in a 90.8 percent turnout. This puts to shame the American-dominated corporate bought election system where you’re lucky to get one-third of the electorate to vote. And… on a CNN rating of the 20 happiest countries in the world, Cuba comes in at number 12. The U.S is not even rated.

The first comment American conservatives ask when denigrating a political system they don’t like is to claim that people from societies like Cuba don’t have the right to vote in free enterprise. No they don’t, not any more than the U.S. citizenry has the right to vote in Communism. And why would the Cuban people want to put back in place an exploitive economic system where profits come before people?

As for starvation, I don’t know where you get that. Yes, the economy is weak in some areas due to the immoral and oppressive embargo and attempted sabotage set up by the U.S. for the last 50 years. This in no way is fault or deficiency of Socialism. The blame for that goes to the right-wing Cuban lobby and the profiteers in the U.S. As far as labeling Fidel Castro and Che Guevara as murderers and torturers, it depends on your ideological position.

Were they justified in going to war, with all the atrocities that come with it, to liberate the people of Cuba and other countries from oppressive dictatorial thugs who ravage their countries by

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murder, theft and corruption, or were they not? I think most reasonable people would see their justification.

Jenny Kontos Santa Barbara (Jeff Harding responds: Jenny, I have to admit that when I read your letter I was quite shocked and offended by it. One doesn’t always see many people praising an oppressive and corrupt regime.

You point out certain statistics about the Castro regime’s infant mortality, literacy rates, free health care, and universal suffrage where you believe Cuba is superior to the U.S. While this may be what they say, on the ground in Cuba is a different story. First, the statistics put out by the Castro regime are not to be believed and it is well-known that they fudge the data. If you wish to believe a corrupt regime, fine, but the evidence on the ground contradicts the assertion that anything they do is superior to any capitalist country. Medical care? Sure it’s “free” but delivery is poor and often unavailable. If it’s so great, why did Fidel go to Spain for surgery?

Food security? You know that food is rationed in Cuba because food production is still deficient as a result of central planning and rationing – though things have recently improved because of miniscule liberalizations of the economy which allow farmers to profit from small plots they farm.

But the fact is that for many, especially in rural areas, food is still hard to get, especially meat. Even if you have a ration ticket allowing you to buy your allotted halfpound of beef and one pound of chicken every two weeks, it often is not available.

You can’t be serious when you say that people get to vote. Every Communist country has a large voter turnout, but so what? There are no free elections. Try protesting the regime and see how fast you end up in jail. It’s a brutal dictatorship that doesn’t permit dissent or opposition.

When you say that the economy is weak in certain areas, you must be joking. The Cuban economy is one of the weakest in the world. If Socialism is so good, why hasn’t it improved the lives of ordinary Cubans in 50 years? Since other nations trade with Cuba, the U.S. embargo has nothing to do with their failures. If Cuba is so wonderful, why has there been a mass exodus of its citizens who feel they have escaped rather than just have emigrated?

Why is its infrastructure crumbling?

Socialism has failed in every country every time it has been tried, and the end product is usually totalitarianism, oppression, and poverty. Cuba is no exception to the rule.

The Castro brothers and their Stalinist clique are corrupt, morally bankrupt, incompetent tyrants. I find it offensive that you justify murder and torture as valid tools of this or any regime. If there is a war going on there, it’s the Castros versus their own people. Your hero Che Guevara was one of the worst offenders. Read, as I have, The Che Guevara Myth and the Future of Liberty by Alvaro Vargas Llosa, and tell me that the murders and tortures he instigated were justified by the ends. – J.H.)

Open Letter to Council Member Cathy Murillo

Everyone benefits from a vibrant and healthy business environment. We are a group of independent business owners on the Eastside seeking to organize a business improvement district (the “BID”). We’ve worked hard over the past few years and it has paid off: everyone agrees that conditions in the Milpas area have dramatically improved. Through the BID, Eastside businesses will provide for a cleaner, safer business district, and sponsor promotion and special events to bring more patrons to our area. All this can be accomplished for less than $1 per day, per business in most cases.

You decided to oppose the BID before we even had a chance to present it to you. You have been walking our neighborhood recruiting business owners to oppose something that will bring them more business, create jobs, and increase sales tax revenues to the city… at no cost to taxpayers. We have met with you twice to provide you with the facts about the BID. Although you know the truth, you have been deliberately spreading false information to Eastside businesses and community members.

You’ve said that the BID is a “new tax.”

The BID does not result in any new taxes.

It provides a mechanism for businesses in the BID to pay for enhanced services that benefit them directly and that they control directly. The businesses decide what services the BID provides (e.g.,

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graffiti cleanup) and what community events to support (e.g., the Milpas Holiday Parade and Lights).

You’ve told business tenants that the BID will assess their landlords, who will then pass the assessment directly to tenants… that their “rents will increase.” But you know that the BID proposal excludes property owners from assessments, so there is nothing for landlords to pass through to tenants.

You’ve also told people that there will be BID assessments on residences – again, not true.

You claim that the ultimate goal of the BID is “gentrification” that will “drive out local businesses.” We’re proposing to pick up litter, wipe off graffiti, clean the sidewalks, do some promotion, and create some great cultural events. These things are good for businesses – the existing businesses on the Eastside.

You’ve misrepresented your personal opinion about the BID as though it were the official position of the City of Santa Barbara. Naturally, business owners are fearful of supporting something they’ve been led to believe the city opposes.

Finally, what’s wrong with events like

33

the Trick or Treat on Milpas Street and Milpas Christmas Parade? These events are for our area families and children, and they help promote the Milpas Corridor. This year, you organized people to use the Christmas Parade as a venue to protest the BID! The same Christmas Parade that you walked in as an elected city official...

You are the only city official opposing independent business owners trying to improve their Eastside neighborhood.

Yet you didn’t have any objection to renewing the downtown BIDs. So why are you working so hard to sabotage our neighborhood’s effort to improve itself?

Signed, Gene Bantilan Alan Bleecker Chris Cowan Rick Feldman Jason Ferria Bruce Giffin Paul Gifford Natalia Govoni Santos Guzman Jed Hendrikson

Ernie Lopez Bea Molina Dave Peterson Julianna Reichard Bob Shoppe Natasha Todorovic Chris Wood

Observations from Paradise by Genivieve Le Duc

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UP CLOSE

W W W. S A N TA B A R B A R A S E N T I N E L .CO M

BY JACQUELYN DE LONGE

Our former restaurant reviewer takes a closer look at the people, places, and things that make Santa Barbara so unique. This freelance writer’s credits include Chef’s Profile for Food & Home Magazine, repeat comedic monologues for the national play, Expressing Motherhood, and many more. If she is not writing, practicing Pilates or yoga, you can find her chasing her two kids and two dogs around Santa Barbara.

The Call of the Wild The dragons huddle together

The adventure seeking fun loving staff at Wilderness Youth Project

“T

oday we went to Yoda’s lair! It was little and covered in leaves and there was water, but he wasn’t home. We had to climb through the bushes to find it and the branches were like hands with long fingers, and we went through booby traps and I broke one of them so it wouldn’t get us.

And I wasn’t afraid. Mom, I love going to my camp (WYP).” – Henry 5.

My beaming son rattled on about his outdoor adventure from the backseat as I drove him home from his second day at Wilderness Youth Project (WYP).

Hardly pausing to gulp a breath, he told of his new friends and counselors, and though he couldn’t recall some of their names he remembered the color shirts they were wearing. I looked as his excited mud-caked reflection in the rearview mirror and couldn’t help but beam on the drive home, too. His happiness was positively contagious.

I first came across the Wilderness Youth Project last summer when I was looking for a full-time camp for my then four-year-old son and two-and-ahalf-year old daughter. Since my girl was too young to attend, I did not look into their program any further and found a suitable option for the two of them.

Then last month, I approached my son’s teacher at the Orfalea Early Education Learning Center located off campus at SBCC and asked her opinion on local Santa Barbara after-school programs.

My son thrives at school every day and has a growing curiosity and energy level that I am having trouble maintaining on my own. It seemed only logical to seek out a fresh crew that could keep up with

his racing mind and body.

The first program out of her mouth was Wilderness Youth Project. It is a year-round non-profit organization that focuses on a child’s deep connection to nature to foster a life-long love of learning through active outdoor experiences and mentoring. For the past 15 years, WYP has been discovering Santa Barbara’s wild backyard rain or shine, taking kids on explorations of Ellwood Park, Lizard’s Mouth, the Santa Ynez River, and many other natural treasures, returning them back to their parents with leaves in their hair and dirt or sand everywhere.

The core activities WYP teaches foster awareness, thankfulness, and the art of questioning. There are few ‘No’s’ from the counselors and instead a lot of encouragement for the children to search and discover the answers they are seeking. Youths are supported in their individual interests and allowed to let their curiosity run free (fully supervised of course).

After signing my son up for the one day-a-week winter program, I reached out and got in touch with Michelle Howard, Development Director at WYP. Celebrating her 10th anniversary with the organization, Howard had nothing but positive insight as to the strength and importance of the outdoors. “I really identify with Wilderness Youth Project. It offers a beautiful opportunity for kids to connect with nature and how the WYP is able to fit into our scheduled days is really exciting. Playing outside is a child’s right. Kids need to explore their

There is as much play in the water as there is on land

physical capabilities and see what they can accomplish. It makes them much more confident.” Seeing a change in my son, Henry, after only two weeks, I have to agree with everything she says and even the WYP’s motto: Nature makes children smarter, happier, and healthier is a spot-on proven fact.

There is a tangible passion with the employees at Wilderness Youth Project.

Many of the staff have been with the organization for almost a decade and have had the opportunity to watch children grow up into conscientious, empathetic young adults who care about their surroundings. They are a group of well-educated nature lovers who dedicate themselves to enriching the next generation.

Founded 15 years ago by Warren Brush and Cynthia Harvan, Wilderness Youth Project has become the after-school and summer program for local young children. Their popular programs continually fill up year-round and keep a running wait list should a spot become available. They have day camps for younger participants and overnight campouts for the bigger kids.

They group the children into four age groups starting at three through teens; Chickadees, Grasshoppers, Young Eagles, and North Wind Leaders.

But the WYP is not just for children;

it also hosts host adult campouts and workshops that focus on learning the WYP’s mentoring strategies, developing outdoor skills, and refreshing your body and spirit. There are family campouts during the summer and the WYP is pleased to introduce the new Family Backpacking trip starting this May. I’m not sure we are ready to commit to an overnight family adventure just yet, but it’s getting closer as my son continuously asks, “How many more days until ‘camp’ day?” every day of every week.

When I pull up to the meeting grounds at Tucker’s Grove and park next to the row of long white passenger vans, Henry can’t wait to get out of the car and sprint to his group, the Grasshoppers. Before I can even say goodbye or handover his car seat and backpack, he has already hopped off into the surrounding bushes, joining the other children lost in play as they wait for everyone to arrive. I leave him to explore his call of the wild, knowing that he is looked after and safe.

The boy I pick up a few hours later will have strengthened his sense of self and discovered his own little place in the Santa Barbara wilderness.

Wilderness Youth Project www.wyp.org

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...continued from p.9

as a separate product line from the other Firestone beers.

Trademark and copyright law is subject matter that is foreign to me, and most of what I know is based off of beer articles I’ve read or from conversations I’ve had with one of the few lawyers out there that specialize in beer law. I’ve heard that not filing lawsuits can result in the brewery losing future legal protection of their trademarks and copyrights, but I do not know the intricacies of this statement.

Here’s what I do know: yes, Lagunitas was the first brewery, or at least one of them, to start using the three-lettered acronym to label their India Pale Ale, and I do realize that the IPA segment is a huge portion of the craft beer market.

While this lawsuit was valid in a court of law, it still seems that this lawsuit was reaching and probably ended up doing their brand image more harm than good. As breweries become bigger and bigger businesses, it is important for them to not forget that many craft beer drinkers still don’t view these companies as businesses. And a beerdoe is always willing to voice his opinion.

Is Collaboration the Answer?

As I was thinking about this article, I knew I had to mention the beer

Collaboration Not Litigation Ale. So it was timely when I walked into the beer aisle of Whole Foods Market and spotted the newest batch on the shelves.

The story of this beer has been told thousands of times in the beer world as a rallying cry and proof of the camaraderie that exists in craft beer.

Collaboration Not Litigation Ale was originally a collaboration beer between Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian River Brewing Co and Adam Avery of Avery Brewing Co. In 2004, it came to their attention that they both had a beer named Salvation. When the two agreed that it was not a problem, they decided to get together and brew a beer that blended the characters of the two conflictingly-named beers. In 2006, Vinnie headed over to Adam’s brewery and brewed an exact copy of his Salvation on their system. They then blended this beer with a batch of Avery Salvation and gave it the title Collaboration Not Litigation as a statement on the friendly, non-competitive, spirit between the two breweries.

All three beers still exist today, so it is fun to see how their flavors tell this story. Avery’s Salvation is a Belgian-style pale ale. It has a candy-like sweetness and peach pie aromas, with some spiciness from the hops and high alcohol

content. It has been a while since I’ve had Russian River’s Salvation, but I remember the beer as a unique hybrid style. It was not fruity enough to be considered a Belgian-style dubbel, and not spicy and phenolic enough to be a Belgian-style strong dark ale. The beer had a light toffee-like sweetness, with an underlying roastiness and aromas of dark fruits with a hint of banana.

Collaboration Not Litigation is now in its eighth batch. Blending a dark-colored and a light colored brew has an interesting effect. The beer has a spectrum of colors that give it a certain sunset quality with a deep-orange color bleeding into red and brown highlights. The flavors also pick up this blended quality.

In the aroma, you get honeysuckle and apricot accents from the Avery brew and dark cherries, oak, and raisin notes from the Russian River version. The beer is brewed with Belgian candy sugar and raw turbinado sugar. Both of these sugars ferment out completely, boosting the alcohol and lightening the body.

Despite this, the beer still has a fairly thick body and a sticky mouthfeel from the residual sugars. The sweetness has a toffee and amaretto-like character. The added sugar and Belgian yeasts give this beer some higher alcohols, imparting a hot character to the beer. The presence

of these compounds in a beer means that it will age well so, just like some of these lawsuits, it is probably best to sit on this one awhile and not act immediately.

When looking at the three beers, you can tell that Collaboration Not Litigation Ale is more than the sum of its parts. The beer’s blended character that comes from these two beers of different styles, but the same name, could not be produced from a single brew. Its flavors go to show that two friends working together can accomplish more than two competitors out-lawyering one another.

With the frequency of trademark and copyright infringement lawsuits occurring in the craft beer world, many have been asking whether this particular beer would still exist if these two breweries clashed today. In interviews, both brewers have hinted at their naivety at the time.

As for me, I look at the fact that this beer is still being produced. Yes, we are facing new challenges in the changing world of craft beer but much of the camaraderie and idealism still exists in the industry and culture today, even if it is delicately balanced. Case in point: Lagunitas dropped the lawsuit. Not because they didn’t have a case, but because the beer drinkers did not approve. And the customer is always right.

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