After months of speculation and often emotionally charged hearings, the Goleta Water District voted unanimously to place the burden of water rate hikes on urban dwellers, rather than the initially proposed farming and agricultural operators.
At the Santa Barbara Bowl, Sunday, June 11.
The cowboys and cowgirls over at KJEE have done it again, burning the midnight oil to orchestrate episode two of the Summer RoundUp. Promoters have been working interminably for nearly two months, with commercials and advertisements around every corner of Santa Barbara, and, fortunately, their work paid off last Sunday at the Bowl.
Who would’ve thought that the stars of last weekend’s big movies would’ve been an animated car and Al Gore? You can just see Jay Leno salivating at the comparison. But we live in funny times.
Gore’s movie, of course, is An Inconvenient Truth – essentially a PowerPoint presentation illustrating how climate change is pushing us toward world destruction. Using a series of clever diagrams and alarming photographs of receding glaciers, dry lakebeds, and flooded cities, Gore – belying his reputation for stiffness – personably sums up current science on global warming (see accompanying box). On the strength of rave reviews the documentary has done well in its first week nationwide at 122 theaters; tomorrow it is scheduled for even wider release.
CHILDREN’S PLAY: As the theme of his fourth annual Santa Barbara Chamber Music Festival (June 16-18 at the First Congregational Church), founder and music director Daniel Kepl has rather shrewdly chosen the title Immigrant Nation, and is featuring composers who are the “children and children’s children of immigrants to this country from all over the world.” They include Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, Robert Muczynski, Pierre Jalbert, Norman Dello Joio, Gabriella Frank, Joan Tower, Richard Pearson Thomas, Richard Lavenda, Samuel Barber, Arthur Foote, Ingolf Dahl, and Santa Barbara composer Leslie Hogan.
In this photo, John Gray is leading a tour of Goleta Slough early last December. This is how his colleagues will always remember him: marching through a wetland restoration site, fixing what humanity had wrecked, and telling us what was and was not successful in the project. We were all excited on the tour because ocean fish were entering the wetland after the tide had been blocked for 50 years.
Affordable-housing advocate Mickey Flacks and Santa Barbara Community Action Network (SBCAN) filed an appeal to block the Santa Barbara city Planning Commission’s recent approval of a proposal to tear down a 10-unit apartment complex at 85 N. La Cumbre Rd. and replace it with eight upscale condos and one below-market unit.
Last February, on the Film Festival’s closing night, a dozen or so college students meandered onto the Arlington’s stage amidst an announcement about a cappella music. “Oh great, a cappella,” I grumbled, in chorus with my equally dismayed friends, figuring we’d be treated to an unbearably boring – if not plain embarrassing – set before the movie screened. To me, a cappella meant slow, beat-lacking love songs and show-offish vocal acrobatics, a style that hadn’t appealed to me since my Boyz II Men days back in junior high (which I admit sheepishly).
The City Hall powers-that-be saw fit to hold a grand opening celebration for downtown’s Granada Garage several months after it opened for business. After much grazing and mingling, Mayor Marty Blum and all the city councilmembers – with the exception of Brian Barnwell – gathered for a ceremonial ribbon-cutting for a parking structure that went up after three false starts, lawsuits, redesigns, record winter rains, and the fatal heart attack of its chief engineer, George Gerth.
He was happiest, I think, pointing out some ridiculous tissue of lies created by the systems surrounding us. Now that Steve KirkPatrick is dead, so young at 53, I see him in my mind’s eye with one facial expression: a large smile and an incredulous look, laughing and shaking off some preposterous farce he’s punctured with sheer rationality. Not that he wasn’t a regular guy – he loved his children, had great friends, and played a mean game of poker – but he was also my first friend in high school who took an active interest in the American economy, frequently laughing and offering critiques of administration foolishness like the Whip Inflation Now stratagem. His bite was hardest during the Nixon, Ford, and Carter years.
With parents organizing to propose a charter school in the Hope Elementary School District, officials held an impromptu informational hearing Monday night with a Los Angeles-based lawyer who specializes in charter-school policies.
