Live Oak Fire Quickly Extinguished
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The fire department was called to a fire this morning at approximately 8:40 a.m. in the Live Oak neighborhood. The fire was limited to Sp 4 in the Trailer Haven mobile home park, 2630 Portola Dr.
It was quickly extinguished by fire fighters from the Central Fire District. There were no injuries, according to Fire Inspector, Mike DeMars. Only one person was in the structure at the time. The fire was still under investigation when this story was filed.
Parking Lot Serves as Rest Spot
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This last week in a Live Oak parking lot, a man rested comfortably in what looked like a well furnished open air camp site. It wasn’t long before his rest was interrupted by a deputy.
In a Last Ditch Effort, The Seattle PI Goes Online Only
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Last week, forced with the ultimatum of closing for good or going online only with a dramatically reduced staff, the Seattle Post Intelligencer made an announcement. They were going online only, and March 17th was to be their final print issue.
Here is a video they put together to commemorate the sad day:
The Post Intelligencer has been serving Seattle with daily news since 1863. Since 2000 however, the newspaper has been losing money every year. All I can think of when I think of the Seattle PI is an article written by Clay Shirky that continues to inspire me every time I read it. Intimate knowledge and intelligent analysis oozes from every sentence in his article entitled Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. Here, Shirky cites a number of reasons why newspapers failed to adequately prepare for the future. I’ll briefly summarize them:
- “The ability to share content online has grown.
- Walled gardens have proven unpopular.
- Digital advertising has reduced inefficiencies, and therefore profits.
- Dislike of micropayments have prevented widespread use.
- People have resisted being educated to act against their own desires, and not share content.
- Old habits of advertisers and readers have not transfered online.
- Ferocious litigation has proven inadequate to constrain massive, sustained copyright infringement.
- Hardware and software vendors do not regard copyright holders as allies, nor do they regard customers as enemies.
- Suing people who love something so much they want to share it really pisses them off.
- The competition-deflecting effects of printing cost got destroyed by the internet, where everyone pays for the infrastructure, and then everyone gets to use it. And when Wal-Mart, and the local Maytag dealer, and the law firm hiring a secretary, and that kid down the block selling his bike, were all able to use that infrastructure to get out of their old relationship with the newspaper publisher, they did.”
Now, there is a wealth of knowledge in Clay’s historical and timeless synopsis of our current situation. And I believe he is right when he states that “what we need now is journalism” and that “for the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.”
We are living through a revolution as we speak. The old way of getting our hard-hitting, local information is breaking. Salaries and jobs for investigative journalists are becoming non-existant under all current models, and this is why many of the emerging models rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. However, it would be a mistake to think that a passionate amateur with a dedication to the facts and a drive to produce the best investigative works possible can not produce something on par with your paid journalist. It would also be erroneous to assume that most amateurs currently have this drive and dedication. After all, a paycheck is a hell of a motivator.
Something will emerge from all this. If people value information, local news, and investigation -which I think they do, then something will emerge. Yes, Clay is right that many if not most newspapers will break before the new model emerges -but a new model will emerge. There will always be attention and interest in local news, for it effects everyone at their core level: where they live. Local news is the one thing you can talk about with literally anyone else who lives in your town.
Local news isn’t going anywhere. It may however pack its bags for a bit, take a vacation and return to us sun-tanned if out of shape and barely recognizable as the same person who left.
The real moral of this story is that it’s time for us to start putting our heads together, and working together, to make sure local news lives on in Santa Cruz as a strong and vibrant tradition. Do not respond to citizen journalists with hate, or disrespect, or hostility. These are the people giving up their time so that when the day does come, and when the only daily newspaper in town closes its doors (god forbid), there will be something, some model, some source for news which may not be perfect, but at least it will exist. And by the mere fact of its existence, there will be potential to improve it.
Business is Booming at the New Whole Foods
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Four days after a new Whole Foods location opened on Soquel Avenue, it is clear that the Santa Cruz community has chosen, en masse, to shop there.
Pulling into the Whole Foods parking lot at approximately 4:00PM on Saturday the 21st of March, just four days after the Whole Foods on Soquel opened, I was amazed. I couldn’t find a parking spot. There was not one empty space in a lot that, by my quick estimate of counting space, contains at least 250 parking spots.
After driving in circles for a few minutes a car finally left a spot in front of me and I pulled in. Locked the car. Walked up to the entrance of the store.
Immediately I notice a chalk board, written on in bright, neon colored chalk, detailing community events. On the board were slots filled with printed calendars that show you the planned events for the current month of March as well as next month, April. Today from 11AM to 3PM was a BBQ Demo. I had just missed it.
Entering Whole Foods, the first thing that greets you is the produce section. Their produce section is enormous, especially by Santa Cruz standards. It takes up one entire section of the store, from the front wall stretching all the way to the rear. Almost everything in this section is organic, including pears, grapefruit, minneolas, limes, Hass avocados, tomatoes, garlic, apples, grapes, and more. Their vegetable selection is equally organic and voluminous. They have organic red, green and rainbow chard, yams, potatoes, taro root, zucchini, carrots, broccoli, onions and more, all organic.
What really sets Whole Foods produce section apart are the exotic items that are stocked, like pioppini, chantrelle, and lions mane mushrooms. They even have ostrich eggs for 29.99.
Their seafood section includes Dungeness crabs for 8.99 per pound, littleneck clams for 6.99 per pound, and BBQ oysters for 99 cents each. Their fish selection includes cod, ahi tuna, swordfish, tilapia, king salmon, butterflied trout and opah.
In addition who regular fish and shellfish, they have pre-skewered kebabs of shrimp, mini jamaican jerk crab cakes for 2.99, large crab cakes for 5.99, and salmon burgers for 4.99.
When I talked to an emlpoyee in the seafood department, he said that the crab cakes were selling particularly well.
Also on ice were full coho salmon, and you can order then whole or half.
Their meat section is impressive. None of their lamb, chicken, pork, buffalo, quail or beef is grown with hormones or antibiotic, and all of it is fed a vegetarian diet. In addition, all of the suppliers of meats from their butcher section are regularly audited by independent third parties.
You can get things like ground turkey breast, pesto chicken sausage, buffalo hot dogs, buffao steak, any kind of beef steak you can imagine, and bacon that is completely nitrite and nitrate free. The prices are a little high, with Rib Eye steak going for 9.99 per pound and 7.49 per pound of ground turkey.
They also have a carving station in the middle of a busy aisle. Admittedly, its just a tad strange to walk by an enormous leg of beef being cut up in the middle of the store. They really want to hammer home that they do custom cuts. They also had hot samples of chicken breast and pork.
Now on to their cheese section. I am a huge fan of blue cheese so I was particularly interested in their offerings. In blue cheeses alone they had countless varieties including Maytag, Buttermilk, Roaring 40s, Point Reyes, Black River, Cambozola, Danish and more.
The prices for their blue cheese ranged from 6.99 per pound for Black River blue to 19.99 per pound for Blue Oregon.If you are a true blue cheese afficionado, you should be adequately satisfied with their selection.
The rest of the cheese deparment has your usual suspects: Cheddars from Vermont, dry jack from California, Gruyeres from Switzerland, Brigante from Italy, Garroxta from Spain, and so on. They even have a Parmagiano Reggiano from a small cheese maker in Italy who only makes 10 wheels per day.
Their wine selection is divided into Domestic Reds, Import Reds, Domestic Whites, Import Whites, and a few niche categories like sparkling wines.
I perused their red wine selection and found wines from Chile (Calina), South Africa (Goats do Roam), Australia, Spain (Protocolo), Italy (Taurino), France (Chapoutier), and so on. Their domestic reds section featured wines almost entirely from California. In fact, if there are any domestic red wines not from California, I didn’t see them.
The nice thing about their wine section is that each wine has a tag next to it with a checklist of characteristics for that wine, including fruity, peppery, robust, sweet, chocolatey, long finish, dry, tangy, tannic, earthy and supple. So now not only can you impress your date with a fine wine, you’ll know to descrive it as earthy and supple with a long finish.
The bakery section has a few bread selections, including speeded sourdough for 4.99 per loaf, and a “family loaf” for 5.99 (pictured right).
However, where the bakery section of Whole Foods really shines is the sweets. They have canolis, cream puffs, eclairs, fruit tartlettes, cheesecakes, cupcakes, chocolate covered strawberries, brownies, cookies, creme brulee, and a lot more. All fresh baked.
The prices are a little high. A full New York cheesecake costs 29,99, and cupcakes range from 1.99 for a chocolate frosted to 3.59 for a vegan vanilla or a vegan carrot.
The bulk food section features over 140 different foods, most of which are organic. For example, I found organic pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, almonds, walnuts, pecans, rolled oats, couscous, granola, pine nuts, hazelnuts, raisins, whole wheat flower, flax seeds, trail mix, figs, and more.
Also in their bulk foods section is bulk wildflower honey, bulk extra virgin olive oil, bulk raw agave nectar, and bulk soy sauce.
The prices for most of these bulk items range from $1 and change to $3 and change.
Next to the bakery section of the store is a buffet section. For 7.99 per pound they serve dishes like mashed potatoes and turkey gravy, polenta with mushroom marinara, grilled vegetables, chicken korma, teriyaki tofu and more.
Their salad bar, which is also 7.99 per pound, offers beans, peas, red yellow and green peppers, tofu, broccoli, beets, eggs, olives, cheeses, and all the fixins of a full salad bar.
Next to the buffet section is a taqueria station where you can build your own burritos for 6.99 (vegetarian) to 7.99 (with meat). Next to that, a pizza station where you can get hot pizza for 2.99 per slice or 15.99-16.99 for a full pizza. The pizzas and the slices are small however, but they are gourmet styles.
Next to the pizza station is a coffee / juice bar station where you can get a cup of coffee for under $2, Kombucha from the tap, and freshly juiced wheat grass.
In the end of the whole experience, my first though is that the competition is dead in their tracks -and I say this completely distraught at the proposition of any of the competition going out of business and at the same time utterly impressed by Whole Foods. This place is like the Wal Mart of health food -a one stop shop for everything. Where else can you get pizza, burritos, agave nectar, kombuca, wheat grass, chicken korma, antibiotic and hormone free meat, nitrite free bacon, and farm raised salmon?
Whole Foods is a succesful publicly traded company because they understand their market incredibly well, and offer them everything they want in a presentation that is visually inviting and engaging.
Consciousness about the quality of the food we eat is incredibly high in Santa Cruz, which not only created the opportunity for Whole Foods to move in, but also contributed to their immediate success. Already, Whole Foods is doing a lot of business. Much, if not all of this business will come at the cost of business done with other food stores, especially those that cater to high end, quality foods like New Leaf and Staff of Life. With Whole Foods buying in such bulk, smaller competitors get locked out of the opportunity to stock certain items.
Love it or hate it, can’t live with it or can’t live without it, Whole Foods is here to stay on Soquel Ave. And like I said earlier, I am thoroughly impressed.
Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
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Required reading for anyone who has ever read a newspaper.
Originally published by Clay Shirky on his blog at Shirky.com.
Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry’s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it.
One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.” I think about that conversation a lot these days.
The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several. One was to partner with companies like America Online, a fast-growing subscription service that was less chaotic than the open internet. Another plan was to educate the public about the behaviors required of them by copyright law. New payment models such as micropayments were proposed. Alternatively, they could pursue the profit margins enjoyed by radio and TV, if they became purely ad-supported. Still another plan was to convince tech firms to make their hardware and software less capable of sharing, or to partner with the businesses running data networks to achieve the same goal. Then there was the nuclear option: sue copyright infringers directly, making an example of them.
As these ideas were articulated, there was intense debate about the merits of various scenarios. Would DRM or walled gardens work better? Shouldn’t we try a carrot-and-stick approach, with education and prosecution? And so on. In all this conversation, there was one scenario that was widely regarded as unthinkable, a scenario that didn’t get much discussion in the nation’s newsrooms, for the obvious reason.
The unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this: The ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiencies, and therefore profits. Dislike of micropayments would prevent widespread use. People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking. (Prohibition redux.) Hardware and software vendors would not regard copyright holders as allies, nor would they regard customers as enemies. DRM’s requirement that the attacker be allowed to decode the content would be an insuperable flaw. And, per Thompson, suing people who love something so much they want to share it would piss them off.
Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.
When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.
* * *The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes (save the unthinkable one) was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift. As a result, the conversation has degenerated into the enthusiastic grasping at straws, pursued by skeptical responses.
“The Wall Street Journal has a paywall, so we can too!” (Financial information is one of the few kinds of information whose recipients don’t want to share.) “Micropayments work for iTunes, so they will work for us!” (Micropayments only work where the provider can avoid competitive business models.) “The New York Times should charge for content!” (They’ve tried, with QPass and later TimesSelect.) “Cook’s Illustrated and Consumer Reports are doing fine on subscriptions!” (Those publications forgo ad revenues; users are paying not just for content but for unimpeachability.) “We’ll form a cartel!” (…and hand a competitive advantage to every ad-supported media firm in the world.)
Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.
With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.
* * *Elizabeth Eisenstein’s magisterial treatment of Gutenberg’s invention, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, opens with a recounting of her research into the early history of the printing press. She was able to find many descriptions of life in the early 1400s, the era before movable type. Literacy was limited, the Catholic Church was the pan-European political force, Mass was in Latin, and the average book was the Bible. She was also able to find endless descriptions of life in the late 1500s, after Gutenberg’s invention had started to spread. Literacy was on the rise, as were books written in contemporary languages, Copernicus had published his epochal work on astronomy, and Martin Luther’s use of the press to reform the Church was upending both religious and political stability.
What Eisenstein focused on, though, was how many historians ignored the transition from one era to the other. To describe the world before or after the spread of print was child’s play; those dates were safely distanced from upheaval. But what was happening in 1500? The hard question Eisenstein’s book asks is “How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?”
Chaotic, as it turns out. The Bible was translated into local languages; was this an educational boon or the work of the devil? Erotic novels appeared, prompting the same set of questions. Copies of Aristotle and Galen circulated widely, but direct encounter with the relevant texts revealed that the two sources clashed, tarnishing faith in the Ancients. As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn’t know what to think. If you can’t trust Aristotle, who can you trust?
During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change — take a book and shrink it — was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word. As books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, they expanded the market for all publishers, heightening the value of literacy still further.
That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.
And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.
* * *If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other. In a notional town with two perfectly balanced newspapers, one paper would eventually generate some small advantage — a breaking story, a key interview — at which point both advertisers and readers would come to prefer it, however slightly. That paper would in turn find it easier to capture the next dollar of advertising, at lower expense, than the competition. This would increase its dominance, which would further deepen those preferences, repeat chorus. The end result is either geographic or demographic segmentation among papers, or one paper holding a monopoly on the local mainstream audience.
For a long time, longer than anyone in the newspaper business has been alive in fact, print journalism has been intertwined with these economics. The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau. This wasn’t because of any deep link between advertising and reporting, nor was it about any real desire on the part of Wal-Mart to have their marketing budget go to international correspondents. It was just an accident. Advertisers had little choice other than to have their money used that way, since they didn’t really have any other vehicle for display ads.
The old difficulties and costs of printing forced everyone doing it into a similar set of organizational models; it was this similarity that made us regard Daily Racing Form and L’Osservatore Romano as being in the same business. That the relationship between advertisers, publishers, and journalists has been ratified by a century of cultural practice doesn’t make it any less accidental.
The competition-deflecting effects of printing cost got destroyed by the internet, where everyone pays for the infrastructure, and then everyone gets to use it. And when Wal-Mart, and the local Maytag dealer, and the law firm hiring a secretary, and that kid down the block selling his bike, were all able to use that infrastructure to get out of their old relationship with the publisher, they did. They’d never really signed up to fund the Baghdad bureau anyway.
* * *Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?
I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.
Imagine, in 1996, asking some net-savvy soul to expound on the potential of craigslist, then a year old and not yet incorporated. The answer you’d almost certainly have gotten would be extrapolation: “Mailing lists can be powerful tools”, “Social effects are intertwining with digital networks”, blah blah blah. What no one would have told you, could have told you, was what actually happened: craiglist became a critical piece of infrastructure. Not the idea of craigslist, or the business model, or even the software driving it. Craigslist itself spread to cover hundreds of cities and has become a part of public consciousness about what is now possible. Experiments are only revealed in retrospect to be turning points.
In craigslist’s gradual shift from ‘interesting if minor’ to ‘essential and transformative’, there is one possible answer to the question “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.
Journalism has always been subsidized. Sometimes it’s been Wal-Mart and the kid with the bike. Sometimes it’s been Richard Mellon Scaife. Increasingly, it’s you and me, donating our time. The list of models that are obviously working today, like Consumer Reports and NPR, like ProPublica and WikiLeaks, can’t be expanded to cover any general case, but then nothing is going to cover the general case.
Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.
When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.
We don’t know who the Aldus Manutius of the current age is. It could be Craig Newmark, or Caterina Fake. It could be Martin Nisenholtz, or Emily Bell. It could be some 19 year old kid few of us have heard of, working on something we won’t recognize as vital until a decade hence. Any experiment, though, designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past.
For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.
Writing Contest Reminder
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Just a friendly reminder that entries for the Cournalist’s first writing contest are due on March 31. We’ve had some solid submissions, but there is still plenty of opportunity for competition.
Here’s a snippet from the original announcement detailing some of the rules -
On March 31, Graham and I will take the day off and begin sorting through all of the submissions. On April 1, we’ll announce the top three articles. First place will receive $100. Second place will receive $50. Third place will receive $25. Also, as an added bonus to everyone, we’ll buy a set of business cards for any cournalist who submits more than three articles over 400 words this month.
You can also read the original entry here.
Best and good luck!
Local artist transforms junk into guitars
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Robbie Schoen doesn’t play guitar. Like most people, he’d never made one either. But a few years ago, as he raced down Highway 1, the glint of a rusty catalytic converter on the side of the road caught his eye.
“It was saying take me home and string me up,” said Schoen, a Santa Cruz sculptor whose exhibit “Spare Guitars” is currently being shown at the Felix Kulpa Gallery & Sculpture Garden.
And that’s exactly what he did. With the help of a friend, who’s been repairing guitars for 30 years, Schoen fashioned that rusty piece of metal, once belonging to a GM car or truck, into a fully functioning electric guitar.
The first guitar, “Wreck & Roll,” was sold and a series was born. Of the 13 guitars he’s currently working on or finished, he has used shovels, skateboards, shredded tires, a parking sign, a satellite dish, an Ouija board and other objects.
“Probably the most popular is the Millennium Fender,” he said. It is furnished with a Star Wars Millennium Falcon toy he found in an antique shop. “It really captures peoples’ imaginations. People come in and say, ‘I had that toy when I was little.’”
These days, friends bring odd knickknacks that they’ve found in their home or in antique stores to him. His toilet seat guitar was made out of a toilet seat a friend who owns a secondhand material builder’s yard gave him. But he still keeps his eye out for just the right object for his next project.
“I’m constantly keeping my eye out for something that I can use,” Schoen said. “You just wait and eventually you’ll find something that fits right in.”
He has previously showcased his “Spare Guitars” series in San Francisco at The Dark Room. He has sold two for $2,400 a piece. One of these new owners, Isaac Frankle, who purchased a shovel guitar, has become something of a local sensation playing the shovel guitar on the Internet and at local venues.
“As sculptures they’re great, but when you find out they’re fully functioning guitars it’s really exciting,” he said. “You can go on YouTube and actually see the ‘shovel guitar guy.’”
Schoen hopes by recycling discarded objects into functioning guitars that he’ll enlighten peoples’ lives.
“When you come to a gallery, you’re pulled out of your routine then it [the art] hits you like a thunderbolt,” he said. “That’s what art is for.”
No word on whether a thunderbolt guitar is in the works, but donated junk continues to come in.
Check out “Spare Guitars” at the Felix Kulpa, located in downtown Santa Cruz on Elm Street. See the map below for the exact location.
This article was originally published in the Courant Times on Dec. 13, 2008. You can contact the author at daniel@cournalist.com.
Read more of Daniel Wilkinson’s work at his blog.
Survey #4: Follow-Up On Alternative Energy
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Last week it was most striking that 43 % of the respondents answered that they ride their bike and/or the bus to work two or more days per week. So this week, I decided to go back and take a second look at that question and expand on it to break it down into more detail. I wanted to really find out just how many people were commuting by bike or bus.
Looking at the overall results, it is apparent that the two surveys are in agreement about how many people ride their bikes or take the bus to work two or more days per week.
This week, 33% of the people fit into that category, while last week 43% of the people surveyed fit into that category. Assuming a random error margin of +/- 10%, the two surveys are in complete agreement. The hard core alternative commuters, who ride the bus or bike or carpool or walk to work 5 or more days per week, comprise 40% of the total. People who do these things two or more days per week make up 55% of the total.
I also asked a few unrelated questions including, “Do you think the Obama stimulus package will provide enough funding for alternative energy?” Very few people had confidence in the Obama plan for alternative energy. Regarding whether the mall should be converted to a pedestrian-only street, people voted almost two to one in favor of the idea.
Cournalist Survey 4
Do you ride your bike to work?
Occasionally 5%
1 day per week 8%
2 days per week 0%
3 days per week 3%
4 days per week 3%
5 days per week 8%
6 or more days per week 5%
don’t ride 73%
don’t know 0%
don’t care 0%
Do you take the bus to work?
Occasionally 13%
1 day per week 3%
2 days per week 3%
3 days per week 3%
4 days per week 0%
5 days per week 13%
6 or more days per week 5%
don’t ride 65%
don’t know 0%
don’t care 0%
Do you walk to work?
Occasionally 15%
1 day per week 0%
2 days per week 0%
3 days per week 5%
4 days per week 0%
5 days per week 5%
6 or more days per week 5%
don’t walk 70%
don’t know 0%
don’t care 0%
Do you carpool?
Occasionally 8%
1 day per week 0%
2 days per week 3%
3 days per week 3%
4 days per week 0%
5 days per week 10%
6 or more days per week 0%
don’t carpool 73%
don’t know 0%
don’t care 0%
no answer 5%
Do you believe the Obama stimulus package will provide enough funding for alternative energy?
yes 18%
no 38%
don’t know 38%
don’t care 3%
not enough 3%
no answer 3%
Do you believe the Pacific Garden Mall should be converted into a walking mall (pedestrians only, no cars)?
yes 53%
no 28%
don’t know 13%
don’t care 5%
partially 3%
What questions should be discussed next week?
Do you believe that global warming is caused by humans?
Do you have confidence that the economy will get better?
What to do if the power goes out?
What is the real reason behind the Iraq war?
Does CPS want to take children away from their biological Fathers?
If you don’t get out of driving your car, why not?
Should bikes be excluded from hwy 9?
Do you know anyone who has lost their job in the current economic downturn?
How was your day?
Do you skate or surf?
Polyamory and open relationships.
What is the single thing that will change the world? (Spiritual enlightenment needed.)
How can we improve the esthetics of downtown? Should cars be allowed to park on Pacific?
What do we need to change on the mall?
Have a workshop that makes human powered art vehicles?
Do you walk or bike to other places? (I ride my bike to the mall.)
Get rid of public pot smokers.
Do you think the street musicians should do something better?
Is pizza good?
Should Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice be arrested for war crimes?
Do you think that Santa Cruz should ban air conditioned, non open windowed office
buildings (for health to combat indoor air pollution)?
John Thielking conducts a weekly survey on Pacific Ave.
Outlook is Ominous for Watsonville Schools
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UPDATE: The PVUSD is currently in session at Aptos High School, and will vote on the final version of the proposed budget tonight.
WATSONVILLE — Hundreds of teachers, parents and students packed Ann Soldo Elementary School beyond capacity last night to hear the PVUSD’s latest budget proposal. Outside dozens more people barred from entering held up signs and chanted, “Open the doors!”
Hoping to close a $14 million deficit — reduced from $17 million earlier this week — the proposal called for the elimination of 227 jobs, a reduction of healthcare benefits by 12 percent and other cutbacks.
The cuts left almost no one untouched. They will impact 9 percent of teaching jobs, 10 percent of administrative jobs and 16 percent of classified worker jobs from the district. Many after school programs will be eliminated. Teachers will pay more for their health care as well. Co-pays, deductibles and prescription drug costs will all increase.
The proposal also will eliminate the few remaining nursing jobs in the district.
Last week, a similar meeting was postponed because of overcrowding. Last night, the problem was even worse.
“We told them we were going to pack the place,” said Don Brown, a veteran teacher at Watsonville High School. “As teachers, we have to prepare for class. These guys should have prepared with a larger venue.”
The situation grew tense at moments as the overflowing crowd banged on the doors and chanted over megaphones. The board of trustees threatened to close the meeting to the public at one point.
But as the meeting progressed, the crowd thinned.
Teachers dressed in “Got Future” t-shirts voiced outrage at the cuts saying administrators should suffer the same consequences as teachers. PVUSD administrators are among the highest paid in the county while their teachers juggle the lowest salaries. Many teachers emphasized this point.
“The top administrators just received an 8 percent raise last year,” said Annette Barity, a math teacher at Watsonville High School. “If they want us to take pay cuts then they should too.”
Many teachers also said that the district should close The Towers, the district’s administrative offices that housed a hospital prior to the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. They said the offices could easily be housed in cheaper and more energy efficient facilities saving the district thousands of dollars a year.
The district argued that there was no available property in Watsonville that fit the bill.
Because of the drastic cuts, Pablo Barrick, a teacher at Watsonville High School, said he and his wife had debated moving to Texas where they could make nearly as much money but pay much less on a mortgage. “I grew up here,” he said. “I’m very much a product of this school district. I’d hate to have to leave.”
There were a few bright spots in an otherwise depressing budget. School libraries, which many people thought would be cut, were saved by the district. Also, teachers will enjoy a higher annual dental allowance in the coming year.
Still, the mood was ominous inside and outside the school as many teachers weighed their future.
“The district needs to recognize its most valuable asset – its people,” said Brown.
Impassioned plea of Watsonville student
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This video was taken outside the PVUSD meeting Wednesday, March 4th.
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