Youth Group’s Casino Twilight Dogs: The follow-up to the much acclaimed Skeleton Jar-which led to them touring with Death Cab for Cutie-shows that this Australian sensation has an American future. It’s insightful, pretty pop-complete with a great cover of “Forever Young”-a perfect soundtrack to bittersweet life.
Atlantis Found Publishing is launching Words without Voices, an online album art competition seeking digital artwork submissions to illustrate songbook
Dwight Reynolds, a professor with UCSB’s department of religious studies, lectures on the historical impacts of the Silk Road.
It required dedication to come out on Super Bowl Sunday for a mid-afternoon preview of two classical ballets to be performed this coming weekend, but State Street Ballet rewarded its loyal supporters richly, and not only with a delicious buffet.
One Friday afternoon late last August, Bruce Caron, a one-time urban anthropologist turned multimedia consultant, was projecting a very scary map on a wall of the University Club, Santa Barbara’s citadel of tradition and accomplishment. The map, prepared by UCSB’s geography department, was of downtown Santa Barbara. But it showed a very different city from the one we now know. It predicted what Santa Barbara would look like if Greenland’s vast prehistoric ice sheets were to melt, causing the world’s sea levels to rise about 21 feet. Contemplating this cataclysmic possibility were Santa Barbara Mayor Marty Blum and two well-respected scientists from UCSB’s Bren School of Environmental Science: David Lea and Darren Hardy.
If you’ve been paying attention to the world of poetry recently, you won’t have missed Ted Kooser, the United States Poet Laureate from 2004 until last September and winner of the Pulitzer for poetry in 2005. Kooser visited Santa Barbara in 2005 for a reading at UCSB and is returning in March as the keynote speaker/workshop leader for the Santa Barbara Writers Conference Poetry Conference. Kooser is known for his exquisitely evocative description, the accessibility of both his poetry and prose, and his plain-spoken, opinionated essays. Speaking with the man over the phone from his home in Nebraska felt very much like reading his works.
Goleta City Councilmember Roger Aceves named Julie Solomon, a marketing consultant, to sit on the city’s first Planning Commission. The
Skye grew up in Santa Barbara. Kind, intelligent, artistic, and adventurous, he loved animals and nature. A surfer and skateboarder, Skye played soccer and guitar. At middle school graduation, he was named “peacemaker.” In high school, Skye excelled in art, writing, science, and geometry. His senior year, he accidentally drove over a cliff but miraculously survived.
Contentious and gridlocked, the salary negotiations between the Santa Barbara School District and its teachers took an unusual turn last week, as more than 100 high school students skipped school in a show of support for their teachers. Risking Saturday detention and possible repercussions on the home front, dozens of San Marcos High School students ditched class last Friday in an effort to call attention to the labor talks between teachers and district officials currently being mediated by a state official.
Not to knock Moving Units, but the success of their concert at UCSB’s student hangout spot, the Hub, could mostly be attributed to the event’s planners and not the musicians themselves. The Hub, for the uninitiated, occupies the bottom story of UCSB’s University Center. Associated Students Program Board, however, realized the Hub’s potential as an event space and launched AfterHours@theHub, a concert series that utilizes the area in a way it should have been years ago.
