Features

Myth Boosters

Joseph Campbell’s lifelong exploration of the power of myth gets a month-long festival.

Like DNA, myths – the stories that surround us – inform what we do in and with our lives without us knowing it. In a way, you might say, they are the force. With that ...

On the Tan Carpet

A glance back at the best looks at Pebble Beach Food & Wine 2013.

When it comes to high cuisine, the culinary throng loves to say, “You eat first with your eyes.” At the weekend’s sixth annual Pebble Beach Food & Wine, that certainly applied to star Southwestern chef ...

Picks of the Litter

Our absolutely brilliant picks help prepare viewers as Oscar night looms.

The Golden Globes are behind us, and the Oscars are just a few weeks away (Feb. 24). I’ve looked at the nominations announced last week and done my best to give you a crib sheet ...

State of Mind

NAMI Monterey County offers support to mental-health clients and loved ones.

Monterey County Behavioral Health and the nonprofit group Interim spend almost $40,000 a year on Monterey-Salinas Transit passes for their mental-health clients. Without the bus tickets, many wouldn’t have rides to doctors’ appointments, meetings, school, ...

Hostel Environment

The planned Fort Ord hostel brings eco-design, adventure travelers to the old military base. 

The Monterey Hostel counts some 10,000 overnight stays each of the last two years and is on track to break 11,000 this year, says Peter Kambas, president of the Central California Council of Hosteling International. ...

Helping Hands

The Rice Plus Project feeds thousands every month with an all-volunteer crew.

Dozens of rain-gear clad volunteers stood outside in the storm and passed wet, slippery bags of rice off to the next pair of hands in the human chain they formed, from the street, down a ...

A Gift of Wow

The Weekly’s list of easy-but-amazing local gifts – yes, you can give Father Time, or the entire ocean – makes economic stimulation fun.

As this paper hits the streets, it’s Dec. 13. And if you follow the tradition of giving the people you like gifts for Hanukkah, Christmas or Kwanzaa – or, hell, just because everyone else is ...

Lighthouse Presents

The independent movie house screens a winter’s harvest of holiday films and much, much more.

Holiday films have long earned a place in December’s occurrences of chorales and carols, Nutcracker dances and Christmas plays, traditional meals and shopping deals. In the rush to harness the tide, Century Cinemas has got ...

Late Bloomer

Peace of Mind Dog Rescue give senior dogs like Lily a second chance.

Lily’s future didn’t look so bright. The 6-year-old Hollister stray, a black-and-white Chihuahua-rat terrier mix, was headed to the shelter where she would join a lot of other Chihuahua mixes, many of them younger and ...

Read All Over

Even as national book chains sputter, local booksellers see a bright future.

When Matt Sundt’s mother decided to clear out her cookbook collection – some 2,500 strong, including titles like Cooking with Love and Butter, a 1977 paperback, and Tennessee Favorites, including a page of instructions for ...

Overtaking the Cake

Parker-Lusseau yule logs are an indulgent holiday tradition.

Yann Lusseau plunges a lean forearm into a 40-quart stainless-steel bowl and whirls a thick pool of fresh custard, melted chocolate and whipped cream. The motion is as artistic as it is athletic: Decadent brown ...

For the Love of Literacy

Performances at Monterey County Free Libraries show there’s more to books than reading.

There’s no need to use library voices when a puppeteer, Bollywood dancer or magician is on stage – even when that stage is in the library. And performances like that are now part of regular ...

Thing Theory

Local shopping might mean spending more, but the dollars go further – mathematically and philosophically.

Three months ago, President Barack Obama’s poorly phrased remark about business – “You didn’t build that” – looked like it could’ve cost him the election. It didn’t, but his message – one about collective creation ...

More Than a Toy Story

For the Least of Us keeps kids of incarcerated parents close year-round, closer during the holidays.

It’s been five years since Phoebe and Dylan spent Christmas with their father. He’s in prison, and their mother is hardly around, their grandmother says. So it meant a lot to them last year when ...

Every Time a Bell Rings

Loaves, Fishes and Computers earns its tech angel wings.

Teach a man to fish, so the saying goes, and you feed him for a lifetime. Teach a man, woman or child to use a computer, and you help them find housing, look for a ...

Making Waves

BLUE Ocean Film Festival’s featured flicks run to the horizon. Here are several to prioritize.

There are more than 100 films ready to be spooled up – or, actually, inserted in Blue Ray projectors – in the ocean-deep line-up of the BLUE Ocean Film Festival and Conservation Summit. They’ll be ...

On the Level

The Monterey Bay Film Festival bursts with leading minority and upcoming student filmmakers.

How many black filmmakers can you name? I can think of Spike Lee, Charles Burnett (check him out), Gordon Parks, Forest Whitaker, Tyler Perry, the Hughes Brothers, John Singleton. Um. That’s about it. Why does ...

Life is Shorts

Hundreds of short films boil down to the Big Sur International Short Film Screening Series grand prize Sunday night at the Henry Miller Library.

For me, the Big Sur International Short Film Screening Series didn’t begin with the first public screening on June 6. It started April 4 with an email from Magnus Toren, Henry Miller Library’s director and ...

Forward March

A new documentary – and an exchange with now-legendary enviroactivist Bill McKibben – illuminate how we go about

In the sustainable-business documentary Fixing the Future, which just got its simulcast debut in Monterey Wednesday, host David Brancaccio is asked a heavy question: “Do people exist to serve the economy, or should the economy ...

Artistic Explosion

CSU Summer Arts unloads a month of improv, animation, art, theater and film on Monterey County.

There’s a flood of arts and culture coming to the Peninsula, and its headwaters are building up at CSU Monterey Bay. The California State University system’s Summer Arts program, which began in 1986 and has ...

Films, Unspooled

Cherry Center’s Backstory studies Robert Altman’s later successes.

Malcom Weintraub loves seeing, studying, reading and talking about film. For the next four weeks, he will indulge in showing them for the latest round of the Carl Cherry’s Backstory series, this one focused on ...

Let’s Get Lit

An Irish literary masterpiece and two Big Sur works of poetry bookend the weekend.

James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses is the Mt. Everest of Modernist literature, a novel so challenging and complex that few people attempt to read it, fewer finish, and fewer still grasp it. Two friends of ...

Double Feature

A new Share a Movie with MoM plus the classic Films in the Forest spool superb films.

Two local film series launch within days of each other, and though they seem like similar animals, they have different stripes. Armed with a new projector and stereo sound in their 90-seat theater, the Museum ...

Sound Tribute

The Hunger Games inspires a powerhouse list of top movie tracks.

The release of the hit film The Hunger Games and its accompanying soundtrack, including original tracks from artists as diverse as Arcade Fire and Taylor Swift, had some thinking about the history of pop music ...

A Hub’s Hubbub

The Salinas Asian Festival gets at the dynamic identity of Chinatown.

Salinas’ Chinatown neighborhood is cordoned off by cyclone and iron fences, and train tracks. It can be tricky to get there, purposefully or by accident. Social service nonprofits like Dorothy’s Place, which feeds homeless and ...

Diaspora Unraveled

Robust Jewish Film Festival features a documentary that tracks Holocaust survivors all the way to Monterey.

When Gabor Kalman returned home in 1945 after years of hiding, his ransacked house had become a Russian stable. But his family reunited and started over, and his parents got into the lumber business. It ...

Genius Overload 

More than 50 luminaries gather in Monterey for The Entertainment Gathering 6.

Pebble Beach Food & Wine isn’t the only high-priced event bringing creativity to the Peninsula this weekend. While culinary icons including Thomas Keller and Masaharu Morimoto make foodies’ mouths water in Del Monte Forest, leaders ...

Long and Short of It

The Banff Mountain Film Festival showcases 10 films about outdoor adventurers and how they use nature to make sense of it all.

Australian Tim Cope is three years into a journey that has taken him by horse from Mongolia to Hungary. Cope, who never rode a horse before this trip, set out to follow in the footsteps ...

Ultimate Oscars

Categories need not apply with this best-of-the-best assessment of the Academy Awards.

When the first Academy Awards were handed out in 1929, there weren’t fixed categories. Warner Bros. received an Oscar for producing the first talking motion picture, The Jazz Singer, and Charlie Chaplin scored honors for ...

Reading History

Monterey County Free Libraries celebrates 100 years of service

One hundred years ago, the RMS Titanic set off on its first and last voyage; the African National Congress, which today governs South Africa, was founded; Paramount Pictures and Universal Pictures started operations; and European ...

High Five

A handful of especially satisfying adventures for New Year’s Eve

Roman Banquet at il vecchio New Year’s Eve is a time for overindulgence. And the Romans were experts. A small preview of the night’s menu includes lasagna romana with beef and pork ragu, timballo di ...

Hearty Party

First Night packs in the most intrigue of any event of the year.

First Night Monterey isn’t the last party of the year – other venues stretch deeper into the night. Alcohol isn’t permitted, so it might not qualify as the most raging party. So how does First ...

Inspiration Destination

Sedaris got dark, Sizemore got real and the Weekly kept listening through a 2011 stocked with stars.

Across conversations with comedian Paula Poundstone and playwright Ann Randolph, composer Philip Glass and artist Shepard Fairey, actor Tom Sizemore and Carmel Bach Festival conductor Paul Goodwin, I had the chance to harvest rich insights ...

Coral Reefs and Choreography

SpectorDance’s Ocean brings dance and science to classrooms and the stage.

Fran Spector Atkins tells a story about interviewing Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute ocean chemist Dr. Peter Brewer for Ocean, SpectorDance’s latest multimedia dance work. The dance company partnered with MBARI, the National Steinbeck Center ...

Traumatic Arts

Central Coast Center for Independent Living helps victims put a face to traumatic brain injuries.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but some photos do more than share a story. Victims of traumatic brain injuries (TBI) attending a support group at the Central Coast Center For Independent ...

Hunger Pains

Local nonprofits feed more mouths with fewer dollars.

’Tis the season for roasted turkeys and hams, decadent cookies and crab feasts. But not for one-fifth of Monterey County residents. It’s a sad dichotomy: people going hungry in the salad bowl of the world, ...

Acting Against AIDS

Central Coast HIV/AIDS Services educates to help stop disease’s spread.

It’s been 30 years since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the first U.S. cases of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). The dark cloud of a death sentence that hung over those who ...

Leading By Example

SPCA’s Take the Lead program trains at-risk kids to train shelter dogs

Whether it’s a small group of middle school students in Salinas or at-risk youth at a probation center, the SPCA for Monterey County has found a way to train dogs while serving young people in ...

Seaside Sprouting

Return of the Natives brings environmental education home.

In 1993, a group of Salinas teachers surveyed their drab campuses and decided they should really look prettier than prisons. When they teamed up with native plant experts at Elkhorn Slough, Moss Landing Marine Labs ...

Ricky’s Return

Local product/resurgent comedian Ricky Del Rosario gives the Planet the giggles.

Ricky Del Rosario has an ethnically ambiguous, almost familiar blend of physical characteristics that conjures Obama, Steadman and John Leguizamo. His father is Filipino and his mother Hungarian, German and Italian. “My dad got a ...

Reel Real World

The 12th UNA International Film Festival brings depth and song to hard topics.

At the movies, there is often Disney escapism… and at the far opposite end of the spectrum, there is the 12th Annual International Film Festival presented by United Nations Association (UNA) in Monterey, which broaches ...

Just in Time for Halloween

Ten shockers we're guessing you haven't seen.

For the past ten years, Dr. Montag, Kato the Black Hornet and I have been bringing you the best lineup of wild, crazy and scary shockers at our disposal on Remo D.’S Manor Of Mayhem. ...

Celluloid Matters

The Carmel Art & Film Festival launches a deep and dramatic schedule of star-tinged events.

It’s just a fact of our culture: Film trumps visual art. Actors, directors, shoots, sets, gossip, previews, reviews, merchandising, festivals – all that film stuff captivates us. Art, on the other hand, not so much. ...

It’s Gold, Jerry

Jerry Seinfeld delivers his stand-up to a full house at Monterey’s Golden State.

Jerry Seinfeld has a lot of Porsches. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But he’s got enough that his people won’t say how many. Presumably that’s because he doesn’t want to appear too rich ...

Lunching with Lobbyists

Current lobbying dollars behind the fumigant methyl iodide might be small, but they go deep enough to shift grassroots allegiances.

Public health advocates and conventional farmers have found something to agree on in the controversy surrounding the fumigant methyl iodide: It’s very potent stuff. “If it wasn’t toxic, we wouldn’t be interested in using it ...

To Air, With Humans

Sean D. Tucker, Canadian Snowbirds lead symphony of aerobatics at International Airshow Salinas.

Normally International Airshow Salinas organizers like it when stunt planes lead the news. Not this time. On the heels of the fatal crash that killed 10 at the Reno Air Races a week before its ...

East Epics

Chinese acrobats, rare Kabuki theater swoop into World Theater.

When the thunder spirit Kaminari roars against Sendo, a boat man wearing a feminine mask, it will be the first time the two Japanese Kabuki characters meet on an American stage. They’ll do it Sunday ...

Short Film Complex

Big Sur Short Film Series building to a climactic gala finish. 

When it comes to Big Sur International Short Film Screening Series, even the popcorn is special. The organic kernels are popped fresh on a stove top with help from a combination of canola and extra ...

Dusty Roads

The Untainted Utopia of Summer Camp in Big Sur. 

“Hi, gang, I’m here for another year!” “Hi, here for another year!” roars a crowd of a few hundred Boy Scouts, adult leaders, parents and a few dozen camp staff. “No, no, no, that’s not ...

Campy Flicks

Ten classic camp movies that will launch you into summer.

Summer camp can mean a lot of things: a first kiss, a first horseback ride, a first time away from home. It also means lots of rich material for movies. Here are 10 summer camp ...

Loud and Proud

A Pacific Grove student vies for national POETRY OUT LOUD title.

What is a poem? The question pops into my head as I’m driving home, exhausted and satisfied after hosting another weekly edition of The Rubber Chicken Poetry Slam & Open Mic at East Village Coffee ...

Screen Savers

Monterey Bay Film Festival lights up minds in Pacific Grove, at CSUMB World Theater.

Revolution is in the air at the fourth annual Monterey Bay Film Festival, which takes place this Friday and Saturday, April 8-9, with a diverse group of offerings from international filmmakers, teen film students and ...

Amazing Race

A different sort of education documentary schools Carmel, then Monterey.

Documentary films on America’s flawed education system aren’t rare, but the recent momentum behind Bay-Area produced Race to Nowhere certainly is. Despite the fact that marketing for the film is purely online and word-of-mouth, the ...

About Last Night

First Night Monterey was an all-inclusive closing party to 2010.

Everyone was throwing or attending a New Year's Eve party to close out the first decade of the millenium. Locally, though, probably no one place could match the size, scope or the depth of creativity ...

Real Estate

Features

Contact us at 831-394-5656