At UCSB’s Campbell Hall, Tuesday, April 25.
It never really came together last Tuesday night during the Mavis Staples and Taj Mahal concert at UCSB. A full house of folks showed up at Campbell Hall for a night of world-class and soulful music to the 10th degree and-while the artists did everything but disappoint-the audience never seemed to bite.
The heart and soul of the South Coast came out in full force this week as the largest public demonstration in the history of Santa Barbara hit the streets for a celebration of immigrants’ rights. As part of the nationwide A Day Without Immigrants rally, more than 20,000 men, women, and children-a vast majority of them Latino-made their way up State Street on Monday afternoon dressed in white, waving American flags, toting signs and banners with headlines like “No Immigrants No Business,” banging drums, and chanting the uplifting rallying cry of the day, “¡Si, se peude!” (“Yes, we can!”).
The Devereux School in Goleta was rocked last week by news that school officials intend to shut down two of the school’s more popular residential programs, as well as its day school-effectively cutting loose 87 developmentally disabled children and terminating more than 200 jobs in the process.
S.B. Chapter Underneath a beautiful sliver moon and in between rain clouds, the newest old American pastime officially arrived in Santa Barbara two Thursday nights ago.
To visit Naples in springtime is to bear witness to the sublime. The Gaviota coastal mesa is a sea of swaying mustard grasses that give way to the shimmer of the Pacific and the majesty of the Channel Islands beyond. A rolling patchwork of green foothills and centuries-old agricultural land climbs inland toward the Santa Ynez Mountains in a procession of oak trees, willows, sycamores, sage scrub, and wildflowers.
Cindy Sheehan-arguably the nation’s best-known peace activist-visited Santa Barbara last weekend on the two-year anniversary of her son Casey’s death in Iraq. Sheehan became famous late last year when she camped outside of President Bush’s Texas ranch, demanding a face-to-face with the commander-in-chief.
More than 300 people packed into the David Gebhard room at the City’s Community Development building last week as the longstanding public debate regarding hiking trail access in Santa Barbara’s front country was renewed with a vengeance.
If April showers really do bring May flowers, the entire South Coast will resemble a budding botanic garden by the end of the month. A curiously strong winter storm with no respect for the spring season ripped into Santa Barbara County last Sunday afternoon, bringing about record-setting rainfall, flood warnings, and generally soggy mayhem that lasted through Wednesday.
A week after receiving unfavorable feedback from Santa Barbara County supervisors, the authors of a Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) feasibility study for the Santa Barbara Ranch found far more sympathetic ears at the Santa Barbara City Council meeting Tuesday night. With a pending application to build between 54 and 72 luxury estates on the oceanfront hills of Naples, open space advocates and environmentalists are urgently seeking a way to protect what many consider the gateway to the Gaviota Coast. The TDR plan would exchange some development rights from the 800-acre Naples area to city-owned property in downtown Santa Barbara and some county holdings.
This story has nothing to do with fear and loathing and everything to do with hope. This is a tale about heavenly light in the dark depths of a starless night, glimmers of triumph in the face of certain soul-snapping failure, and rising from the ashes of financial destruction to cover a nine-point spread in double-overtime. It’s about booze-soaked, cigarette-stained faith in the underdog, about risk and reward and having irrational confidence in the latter.
