Los Angeles has long had a Bike Kitchen. San Francisco has one too, not to mention San Diego and Davis. And if Ed France-a 25-year-old cycling enthusiast two years out of UCSB-has his way, Santa Barbara will soon join the California club of culinary velocipedes.
With the beloved Santa Barbara Bowl out of commission, followers of KJEE’s annual Summer RoundUp were directed to the gates of the Ventura Fairgrounds for a coastal reincarnation, dubbed the Seaside Beach Ball. But despite the sorely missed Bowl, stellar performances by Cold War Kids, Queens of the Stone Age, and Chris Cornell saved the day.
The Santa Barbara Rape Crisis Center (SBRCC) has announced three upcoming Women’s Self-Defense Workshops that will take place throughout the summer. The workshops are open to women and girls, ages 13 and older, of all levels of physical ability. Each four-hour workshop offers training in awareness, assertiveness, and physical self-defense techniques in an empowering, supportive, and fun environment.
Have you ever dreamed of saving money by getting rid of your car-or your family’s second car-along with auto loan payments, insurance payments, and maintenance costs? I know I have. But when I figured in the cost of taking a cab to go shopping and renting a car for a trip to the countryside, it didn’t quite pencil out.
The choice has been around for years now, but for whatever reason, those who choose to fuel their vehicles with earth-friendly biodiesel gasoline tend to hail from the “hippie” set. Catch a car puttering past on biodiesel and there’s a good chance the driver will have a big beard, a taste for tofu, and a Grateful Dead album playing at high volumes rather than a three-piece suit, a $60 haircut, and a healthy stock portfolio.
For Australian singer/songwriter Fiona Kernaghan, the how of her emergence as a musical force is just as intriguing as the why. As part of the first family of Australian country music, her evolution in the business can be attributed, at least in part, to a monster truck. And not just any monster truck; it was a record-setting, jet engine-powered truck that went by the name of Waltzing Matilda.
With its title taken from a line in a Sylvia Plath poem (“Tulips”) and a character’s dog named after Jack Kerouac, one might expect For Sheer Love of Me to be some kind of derivative, American-influenced postmodern trifle. Yet this excellent play, well directed by Mikko Viherjuuri and beautifully acted by the cast of four, is anything but a meta-fictional exercise.
One of the chronic problems confronting downtown bike commuters is bicycle parking. There just aren’t enough bollards, streets signs, and bike racks to get the job done. And not many people want to leave their high-end bikes-or even their modestly priced machines-affixed to paint-scraping surfaces or exposed to the vagaries of the elements, not to mention would-be thieves.
SOhO GOES POP: Chris Barron has come a long way since bursting onto the mainstream music scene in the early ’90s as the lead singer of Spin Doctors. From being nominated for a Grammy and gracing the cover of Rolling Stone to overcoming a vocal paralysis that threatened to end his singing career, Barron has truly seen all that rock stardom has to offer.
We are surrounded by the basic ingredients for human survival, but most of us don’t even know it. That’s one conclusion to be drawn from the new book Chumash Ethnobotany by Jan Timbrook, curator of ethnography at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.
