With panel discussions, readings, exhibits and a costume ball spread between the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History and UC Santa Cruz the weekend of Oct. 13-15, the 2023 Festival of Monsters will explore topics involving the literary and cultural images of monsters, while still acknowledging the fun factor.
City Life
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New ‘Ten’ show opens ‘art season’ in Santa Cruz
Aiming to showcase the “endless” pool of Santa Cruz County arts talent, the group show “Ten” opens Saturday at the Radius Gallery at the Tannery and M.K. Contemporary Art, formerly Curated By the Sea. Gallery owner Melissa Kreisa says “Ten” can be an annual event and, coinciding with the annual Open Studios, herald a fall art season in a county brimming with accomplished artists.
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Midtown Fridays ending season with a bang as organizer celebrates a milestone
The Sept. 29 edition of Midtown Fridays will be double the size of the usual block party along Soquel Avenue, with Santa Cruz legend James Durbin headlining and 30 vendors lined up. All that comes as organizer Matthew Swinnerton celebrates 10 years in business for his one-man company, Event Santa Cruz. “We have a lot of manufactured experiences to connect people,” Swinnerton says of the current scene and how Event Santa Cruz aims to be different. “And I always wanted to make sure ours were genuine.”
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Urban density is coming to downtown Santa Cruz. This group wants to stop the city from getting taller.
Santa Cruz’s downtown expansion plan is aimed for the lots that currently host Kaiser Permanente Arena, Ace Hardware and Firefly Coffee House. The city has capped building heights in the area at 12 stories. That is still too tall for some. A group called Housing for People is circulating a petition that asks residents whether they want to be able to vote on projects that propose to reach taller than existing height limits on local land.
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Nina Simon’s new path: A daughter’s story of love, told in the form of a murder mystery
Nina Simon, former director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, put her life and nonprofit leadership on pause in 2020 to care for her mother after a cancer diagnosis. What “started out completely like a fantasy or a distraction” evolved into “Mother-Daughter Murder Night,” a mystery novel she’ll discuss Tuesday at Bookshop Santa Cruz.
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Whether your jam is Fleetwood Mac or Mitski, Streetlight is the place to listen in on new albums
Downtown Santa Cruz’s Streetlight Records is hosting a listening party for Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours Live” album on its release day next Friday, and you can hear Mitski’s latest, “The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We,” there, too, before it hits shelves.
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Amy Ettinger’s terminal cancer diagnosis is gut-wrenching news for Santa Cruz’s literary community
In a personal essay in the Washington Post, longtime Santa Cruz journalist and author Amy Ettinger, 49, revealed her terminal cancer diagnosis. It’s “one of the bravest and most forthright things I’ve ever read about the experience of facing death at a young age,” Wallace Baine writes.
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With death of Linda Burman-Hall, Santa Cruz loses one of its great artistic souls
Linda Burman-Hall, founder of the Santa Cruz Baroque Festival and a professor emerita at UCSC, “was an intellectual voracious mind and lover of an astonishing range of musical traditions,” Wallace Baine writes.
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Redwood Records emerges as a new touchstone of downtown Santa Cruz arts culture
A little more than a year after Metavinyl closed in downtown Santa Cruz, Redwood Records has taken its place as the pillar of the downtown records scene, thanks in large part to its participation in the growing First Friday arts event. This Friday, Redwood Records will bring in one of its most ambitious acts yet — San Francisco singer-songwriter Gilberto Rodriguez — to perform live in the store at Cedar and Maple.
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Santa Cruz Shakespeare takes a bow for 2023 season; next stop, a big 2024
It’s the final weekend to see “The Taming of the Shrew,” “King Lear” and Lauren Gunderson’s “The Book of Will” in the Grove at DeLaveaga, but an expanded five-production season is in the works for Santa Cruz Shakespeare next year.