The quintessential Santa Cruz festival: What would that look like?

Remember fun? Yeah, whatever happened to fun?

I’m referring to a specific kind of fun — fun in large numbers, fun with strangers, fun designed around or channeled toward a particular passion — intoxicating, see-and-be-seen, bucket-list fun.

I’m talking about festivals.

A decade or two ago, we lived in a world fat with festivals — music festivals, film festivals, food festivals, art festivals. Now, post-pandemic, something is askew. Too many examples of mass celebration, themed around the things we humans tend to love, have died, or worse, become grotesque and bloated caricatures of their younger selves.

Tickets to many of the major music festivals are laughably expensive. It takes more than a bit of moxie to keep your Coachella experience, for example, under $1,000 a head, if you factor in travel, parking, merch and food (hope you enjoy that $18 cup of lemonade). And all that is without four walls and a roof. Sure, Coachella is the Super Bowl of music festivals, but it’s not like you’re getting a huge break by going to any of the lesser fests. (You can steal that marketing idea: a festival for people who don’t want to sign over a whole paycheck to see a show, the “Lesser Fest.”)

Burning Man — yes, children, it was once considered fresh and cool — is now a punchline, and that was before the nightmare of last year’s event, causing many to question its future. Closer to home, the Gilroy Garlic Festival quietly folded up its tent a couple of years ago, brought low by a tragic shooting in 2019 and the pandemic that followed. Sure, there are plenty of other food festivals out there that are still going, but the Garlic Festival was a textbook example of a marketing success story, a festival that brought in crowds from all over the world on the back of “the stinking rose.”

All of this is prelude to say that, in this era when it seems like the tide is going out on big cultural festivals, there are folks locally who are working to establish some new kind of splashy annual event in Santa Cruz County — not just another weekend beer/wine festival, but something audacious and ambitious, something that would serve as Santa Cruz’s calling card to the rest of the world.

To which I say: Huzzah, hooray, and bring it on. 

Particular events may bloom and die in due time, but fun never goes out of style, and with so many big-ticket name brands reaching cultural exhaustion, this might be the ideal time to envision the next big thing.

What will it be? That’s still very much up in the air, though many of the major arts organizations and businesses in the county are taking the first steps in building something monumental. 

Certainly, the county already has several wonderful niche festivals, smaller-scale weekend events that cater mostly to locals with a kind of quintessential Santa Cruz vibe that give them a distinct personality, including live music, art and wine and stand-up comedy. These kinds of events have proved to be durable and sustainable, largely because they have remained modest in scope and scale. 

What’s being discussed now is something different than that, so much so that many of the early planners are resisting the term “festival” altogether. After all, Burning Man, Coachella, Comic Con, South by Southwest — none of these entities are commonly called “festivals,” though that’s what they are. In fact, they have become big enough to transcend the term.

What local artists and arts organizations are hoping to build is an event that will make Santa Cruz County an “arts destination.” That term basically means creating something by which Santa Cruz would be known on a regional, state — even national or international — level, something worth traveling to see, something with a wow factor big enough to coax someone in Oakland, or Fresno, or San Luis Obispo to get in the car and head to Santa Cruz.

It’s a big ask. And whatever emerges from these local discussions almost certainly won’t be a big thing in the beginning. It’ll have to start modestly and build to something. That’s why now the ambition should be big enough to be aspirational, to have room to grow into.

The talk in the early stages is to dedicate an entire month to this still-unnamed event. The early contender is April, and the idea thus far is to cast a net as wide as possible in terms of arts offerings, from the visual arts to the performing arts, even the literary arts. It would also seek to activate venues across the entire county. There’s an obvious forebear here — First Friday — which has reflected Santa Cruz’s inherent artistic personality in its diversity and eccentricity. 

But a whole month of First Friday-style happenings is still not enough to draw in out-of-town interest without some sort of hook, secret sauce, killer theme. And that’s where the brainstorming comes in. 

So, let’s pin some ideas to the board, you and me. What do you think would get the outside world’s attention and seduce visitors to come to Santa Cruz? 

Celebrity is the obvious first thought, but unless, say, Adam Scott wants to host an improv festival in his hometown with all his famous friends — not likely — then that’s probably a dead end. 

My hunch is to find some particular interest that no one else is speaking to, and own it. And Santa Cruz offers an example of that from about a decade ago, when the Museum of Art & History, under the leadership of Nina Simon, put together a festival dedicated to the art of fire. It’s true — downtown Santa Cruz was replete with various fire-spewing rockets and machines, and the wow factor was memorable. For obvious reasons, the only playing with fire that anyone local wants to do these days is purely metaphorical. 

Still, the idea of becoming the go-to place for a particular kind of thrill is promising. But what could move the needle?

How about a “Lost Boys” cosplay festival, embracing the whole “Santa Carla” mythology, inviting everyone to dress up as their favorite ’80s vampire, and inspire artists to riff on “Lost Boys” in all its lurid camp appeal? Have writers perform their “Lost Boys” fan fiction? 

Santa Cruz is also known for its self-referential graphic arts, most notably the Santa Cruz Skateboards “red dot” logo, though also through Tim Ward’s “Life at Sea” line of logos. Imagine an art festival where artists attempt to come up with a new super-cool Santa Cruz style logo.

The most ready-made ideas to attract attention are often the most transgressive. Perhaps with psychedelics decriminalization right around the corner, Santa Cruz could become an epicenter of new psychedelic-inspired art and music. Lean into the trippy part of Santa Cruz’s hippie legacy and bring it up to date for the 2020s. I’ve always touted a body-art festival as a promising possibility on the perhaps crude notion that art applied to naked human skin is going to attract more eyeballs than art applied on canvases or walls. 

There are likely all kinds of issues that would make the above ideas untenable in the long run — maybe they’re genuinely bad ideas — but that’s the whole point of brainstorming. 

We’ll be following this process as it goes along, but right now, let’s hear your ideas. What is the secret sauce that will make a big Santa Cruz festival a genuine cultural phenomenon beyond the 831 area code? What will sell the event? What do you think would be the marketing masterstroke to make a local festival so successful it doesn’t even need the word “festival”?

Drop us a line: wallace@lookoutlocal.com. For a short time only, everything is on the table.

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