Re: OT SANTA CRUZ site of the Y2K9 International Live Looping Festival

["L.Angulo" <labaloops@yahoo.com>]

Santa Cruz fuckin rocks 
period.


www.myspace.com/luisangulocom


--- On Thu, 12/11/08, Rick Walker <looppool@cruzio.com> wrote:

> From: Rick Walker <looppool@cruzio.com>
> Subject: OT  SANTA CRUZ   site of the Y2K9 International Live Looping 
>Festival
> To: "LOOPERS DELIGHT (posting)" <Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com>
> Date: Thursday, December 11, 2008, 4:26 AM
> This is a fascinating article about the city that has
> declared International Live Looping
> Day in the city for the last five straight years and still
> boasts perhaps the largest
> per capita population of live looping artists of any city
> on the planet.
> 
> I'm proud of this place so I wanted to share it with
> all of you who have played the
> Y2K festivals in past years or are considering doing so.   
> Rick Walker
> 
> 
>    The Leftmost City: Power & Progressive Politics in
> Santa Cruz
> 
> 
>        by G. William Domhoff
> 
> 
>        December 2008
> 
> Santa Cruz, California may be the most politically
> progressive city in the United States.An unlikely
> confederation of socialist-feminists, social-welfare
> liberals, neighborhood activists, and environmentalists has
> stopped every major development project since 1969 and
> controlled the city council since 1981. Berkeley,
> Burlington, Madison, San Francisco, Santa Monica -- none of
> them had as progressive a government for even half as long.
> 
> Since most cities are usually controlled by real estate
> developers and their buddies, Santa Cruz is a good test case
> for comparing theories of urban power. Atypical cases are
> helpful in eliminating theories from consideration if they
> cannot explain the unexpected events.
> 
> That's why Richard Gendron and I wrote /The Leftmost
> City: Power and Progressive Politics in Santa Cruz/
> <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0813344387/adamschneishomep>
> (Westview Press, 2009). It concludes that the growth
> coalition theory
> <http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/local.html>
> of urban power is the one urban theorists should build on
> because the basic political conflict in Santa Cruz pitted
> downtown landowners and real estate developers against
> neighborhood activists, who unexpectedly triumphed because
> they had the help of faculty, staff, and students at UC
> Santa Cruz, the most liberal public university in the
> country, as well as environmentalists who wanted to protect
> the beautiful coastline from Santa Cruz to San Francisco. We
> then point out the weaknesses of the three main alternatives
> to growth coalition theory: public choice theory, urban
> Marxist theory, and public choice theory, which are also
> discussed on this site
> 
><http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/rival_urban_theories.html>.
> 
> This Web site can be considered a supplement to that book
> for those who want to know more about the history of the
> city and the political leaders who have run it. It also
> provides information on other books and Web sites about
> Santa Cruz.
> 
> 
><http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/santacruz/images/map-california.jpg>
> 
> Map of California
> [enlarge]
> 
><http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/santacruz/images/map-california.jpg>
> 
> 
> 
>      About Santa Cruz
> 
>      Santa Cruz is a picturesque city of 58,000 people on
> the Pacific
>      coast, 75 miles south of San Francisco. It may not be
> paradise,
>      but it's a very attractive place to live compared
> to many American
>      cities. Nestled on a ten-mile strip of coastal shelf
> land between
>      the heavily forested Santa Cruz Mountains to the north
> and the
>      shorelines of Monterey Bay to the south, the city has
> breathtaking
>      vistas
>     
> 
><http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/santacruz/images/wharf-bay-monterey.jpg>
> from
>      both its hillsides and beaches.
> 
>      The city enjoys an invigorating climate with moderate
> temperatures
>      year round: no snow or freezing weather in the winter,
> and very
>      few days in the summer with high humidity or
> temperatures above
>      85°F. Most of the rain is in late fall, winter and
> early spring,
>      leaving many months of the year virtually free of
> precipitation.
>      The wind can be chilly near the ocean, and the fog a
> bit
>      depressing when it hangs on late into the day for a
> week or two,
>      but most days are sunny and clear.
> 
> 
>      A Brief History of Santa Cruz
> 
> 
><http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/santacruz/images/giant_redwood.jpg>
> 
> Logger on old-growth redwood tree, early 1900s
> [enlarge]
> 
><http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/santacruz/images/giant_redwood.jpg>
> 
> 
> Thanks to a fast-flowing river and the heavily forested
> mountainsides, Santa Cruz had a number of natural assets
> that made it possible for real estate owners in the little
> central business district to attract capitalists and workers
> to the area. The river currents were ideal for powering
> lumber and paper mills, which provided a major boost for a
> timber industry that was profitable first and foremost
> because of its giant redwood trees, renowned for their
> beauty, durability, and resistance to decay and insects. An
> ample supply of madrone and alder trees, which provided a
> good base for making explosives, brought a manufacturer of
> blasting powder and gunpowder to an area in the mountains a
> few miles northeast of the city.
> 
> 
><http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/santacruz/images/lime_kilns.jpg>
> Lime kilns at the Cowell Ranch (now UCSC)
> [enlarge]
> 
><http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/santacruz/images/lime_kilns.jpg>
> 
> The abundance of bark from tan-oaks -- a cheap source of
> the tannic acid necessary for tanning hides -- led to a
> large tanning industry; by 1870, ten tanneries, making use
> of hides from the Mission Santa Cruz and the few remaining
> cattle ranches, supplied half the saddle leather produced in
> the state. And the limestone in the hills and mountains
> behind Santa Cruz became valuable because of its role in
> making plaster and mortar for use in the construction of
> stone or brick structures, leading to the development of
> several limestone quarries that by 1880 were supplying more
> than half of the lime used for construction in the
> fast-growing cities of San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, and
> Sacramento.
> 
> 
><http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/santacruz/images/suntan_special.jpg>
> 
> A 1947 "Suntan Special" train arrives from theBay
> Area
> [enlarge]
> 
><http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/santacruz/images/suntan_special.jpg>
> 
> 
> Because of its beachfront setting, Santa Cruz started to be
> a tourist destination very shortly after California became a
> state in 1850, and it has long been known for its laid-back
> atmosphere and beachfront amusement park and boardwalk,
> complete with an old-fashioned wooden roller coaster -- the
> Giant Dipper -- that dates back to 1924. Santa Cruz is also
> renowned as a great place to surf or watch surfing contests,
> earning it a mention in the Beach Boys' 1963 classic
> "Surfin' USA."
> 
> Santa Cruz became a college town in 1965 with the opening
> of a new campus of the University of California. The local
> landowners were overjoyed by winning the competition for the
> new campus; they envisioned huge growth based on new
> industries that wanted to be near a university. But no new
> industries arrived. To their chagrin, however, the campus
> became a competing power base, with its faculty, staff, and
> students providing neighborhoods with the added money,
> expertise, and leadership necessary to reject or control new
> real estate developments when they impinged on the quality
> of local life. The campus became even more of a "Trojan
> horse" after 1971, when the 26th Amendment granted
> voting privileges to 18- to 20-year-olds and made an already
> activist student body into an overwhelmingly progressive
> voting bloc large enough to swing elections in a
> pro-neighborhood, pro-environment direction when it could be
> mobilized.
> 
> Click here
> <http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/santacruz/history.html>
> for a much more detailed history of Santa Cruz and its
> growth coalition.
> 
> 
>      The 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake
> 
> 
><http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/santacruz/images/pacific_garden_mall_damage.jpg>
> 
> Damage from the 1989 earthquake
> [enlarge]
> 
><http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/santacruz/images/pacific_garden_mall_damage.jpg>
> 
> 
> Beyond its atypical power structure, there is another
> reason why Santa Cruz is an interesting test case: eight
> years after the progressives finally took control of the
> city council, they faced an unprecedented challenge when the
> main business district was almost completely destroyed by a
> large earthquake that struck the area on October 17, 1989,
> with its epicenter just 10 miles from Santa Cruz. Three
> people were killed in the downtown area and nearly half of
> the downtown buildings had to be torn down, with many others
> suffering damage that required major repairs. Stunned city
> residents huddled in grief as they saw the entire downtown
> core being fenced off.
> 
> The downtown businesses that didn't go bankrupt or move
> elsewhere had to move into large tent-like pavilions that
> were hastily erected on city parking lots just outside the
> cordoned-off area. In the process, the quake also put power
> issues on the table once again. It handed the disheartened
> business leaders what some of them saw as a golden
> opportunity to regain their political ascendancy by showing
> how necessary they were to economic prosperity. For the
> progressives, the disaster was fraught with political
> danger: they needed to rebuild the downtown in order to have
> the tax revenues to continue their ambitious social
> programs, but they feared and distrusted the downtown land
> and business owners after almost two decades of bitter
> political warfare.
> 
> After a long political argument between the progressives
> and the downtown business community (which is discussed in
> detail in /The Leftmost City/), the city slowly recovered in
> the late 1990s and now has a new Pacific Avenue that is
> almost as vibrant as the old Pacific Garden Mall.
> 
> 
> For a more detailed account of the history of Santa Cruz
> from a sociological perspective, please read the document
> entitled "The History of Santa Cruz"
> <http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/santacruz/history.html>,
> which leads directly into"Progressive Politics in Santa
> Cruz"
> 
><http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/santacruz/progressive_politics.html>.
> 
> 
> <http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/santacruz/?print>