David Sedaris has a mean streak. I guess I should have been prepared for it from having read his books, but somehow, what comes across as a wicked sense of humor on the page sounds downright cruel when it’s said out loud.
In the Hole: Michael Santos, the Lompoc federal prison inmate who wrote three books and earned a master’s degree while behind bars, has been tossed into solitary for reasons that aren’t clear. From what I hear, prison officials claim that his latest book, Gangsters and Thugs, with true stories and a wake-up call to at-risk young people, is a business and therefore not permitted.
As UCSB’s final quarter crawls toward summer and the urge to let loose grows stronger, there’s no better time to reacquaint yourself with a 16-year Santa Barbara staple. Bill’s Bus makes five trips a night every Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday from I.V. to downtown S.B. so you can responsibly get your drink on.
This Week in History
Tucked away in a quiet corner of the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles is the Metro Gallery. Nestled at the foot of the reservoir that gives the area its name and just a short distance from Sunset Boulevard, the gallery currently hosts A Sense of Place, an exhibition of new works by Southern California photographer Ann Mitchell.
If you happen to be in Paris this week, stop by the Louvre for a little taste of home. S.B. residents Colette and Gabriel Speerages 11 and 9, respectivelyhave been chosen along with eight other children from California to show their work at the world-famous museum. Pictured is Gabriel’s “King Arthur and His White Horse.” Call 969-9661 for info.
In a small two-bedroom home, nestled anonymously on the upper Westside of Santa Barbara, the lights are humming right now. Vaguely Victorian in style with a white picket fence and a well-manicured front lawn, the home does little to betray the blooming emerald harvest growing inside its walls. A woman walking her dog passes by the driveway, urging her four-legged friend to “do your business,” never giving a second thought to the perpetually drawn window shades of the back room, the constantly spinning electricity meter humming in the side yard, or the sweet odor of fresh ganja blowing in the breeze.
I don’t know if they still teach grade-school kids how the native American Indians showed early settlers how to plant corn, beans, and squash together for maximum harvests of all three, but it is a formula that has worked for thousands of years.
Compared to the 20,000 or more Santa Barbarans who marched miles last year for immigrant rights, the turnout for this year’s immigrant rights procession was modest. About 500 people walked the few blocks to the Courthouse Sunken Gardens from Alameda Park on May Day.
Robin Cox is a man of many hats-composer, violinist, bandleader, Internet radio programmer, and impresario among them. On Sunday night at Center Stage, Cox manned his fiddle and led his long-standing ensemble, and the concert served as a tidy lesson in the history of minimalism, a pillar in Cox’s work. Any minimalist history lesson should include reference to that seminal “greatest hit,” Terry Riley’s deceptively simple 1964 piece In C.
