Gimme Mo’
Keb’ Mo’ tries out a new album on Carmel’s Sunset Center.
Keb’ Mo’ has never been a man who wants to become a victim of comfort. As proof, the three-time Grammy-winning bluesman left Epic Records to release his new album Live and Mo’ on his own ...
Grand Stanzas
Big Sur’s Carolyn Mary Kleefeld expands her churning catalog of poetry and art with Vagabond Dawns.
Big Sur poet and artist Carolyn Mary Kleefeld can often be found on the cliffs of Big Sur reading poetry to a resident condor. “Art is where I gamble,” she says. “It’s Taoistic and intuitive.” ...
‘Scoobie Doo on Acid’
Zombie Voodoo Scream Party takes over Golden State for a freaky week of Halloween theater.
Rider McDowell grew up watching his mother rehearse off-Broadway plays from the wings of various New York theaters – and was bored to death by most of what he saw. “I hate off-Broadway shows. Theater ...
Unprecedented Portraits
Monterey Symphony commissions Dave and Chris Brubeck’s Ansel Adams: America.
Ansel Adams once said, “The negative is comparable to the composer’s score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.” Now Adams’ extraordinary black-and-white photographic “performances” have been set to music ...
Ghost Tree Eulogy
Pebble Beach’s rare-but-behemoth break rapidly went from secret to famous to, now, off-limits.
The end of the Ghost Tree era was as inevitable as the tide. When the draft plan for the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary was generated back in 2006, the tow-surfing community knew it was ...
Wider Angle
The local United Nations Association chapter expands its flagship film festival.
Our world just got bigger. For the past eight years, Monterey Bay Chapter of the years United Nations Association president Larry Levine and his small crew of volunteers have hosted a traveling festival of international ...
Above Board
A high-flying look at the world’s fastest growing water sport.
When I was 12, a friend received a two-line stunt kite from some weird uncle. The thing came with a handlebar and a bunch of tangled lines and was shaped like a bat wing. In ...
20th Anniversary -- Artistic Drama – Literally
The last 20 years of local theater, dance, lit, jazz, classical and visual arts hit quickly. So does this analysis from a former P.G. poet-in-residence.
THEATER The Inspired • In September 1988, Stephen Moorer and the GroveMont Theatre Arts Center produced Early Girl, a decadent little play about a prostitute. An unsentimental and frequently hilarious look at the profit motive ...
Natural Cathedrals
Robinson Jeffers’ and John Steinbeck’s legacies are reconsidered at an upcoming celebration.
The landscape of Monterey County elicits a powerful reaction from us ordinary mortals. We’re confronted by the relationship between our own terrifying insignificance and the vast unknowable universe– or the wild comforts of God. Or ...
After 10 years, Thompson gives up poetry classic’s reins.
Poetry is thankless. It’s completely unmarketable. It’s the most punk of all art forms. It’s a world made up of almost no capital and 100 percent soul. Most people are never going to get paid ...
The Big Shot
Local photographers among nominees for the world’s best XXL Biggest Wave photo of the year.
When Sand City photographer and surfer Wayne Kelly arrived at Ghost Tree just after dawn on Dec. 4, he wasn’t impressed. “The buoys indicated there was the potential for XXL-sized waves, but I was kind ...
The Gunslinger
Monterey’s Robert Ashmore shoots the breeze on the commerce of arms.
Monterey gunsmith Robert Ashmore bears a striking resemblance to Hollywood’s Sam Elliot—right down to the handlebar mustache and cool Western drawl. He stands easily behind a glass counter loaded with pistols and talks about the ...
Hell Hole
The Monterey County Jail is an overcrowded pit of violence and despair. There is no plan to fix it.
The light is a sickening green. It washes over the stainless steel tables and toilets, the smooth concrete, the flaking paint, the steel bars and expressionless faces of the inmates. Their faces give away nothing, ...
Mass exodus brings new ideas and inexperienced politicians.
Four years ago, the Monterey City Council had more than 100 cumulative years in office among them. After the November elections, regardless of who wins, it’ll have all of eight. “I’ve heard from a lot ...
Sheriff’s deputies bust three huge pot farms in less than a week.
Perhaps they should rename it the Los Pot-res National Forest. Last week, Monterey County sheriff deputies engineered another marijuana farm bust, bringing their 2006 total close to a whopping 40,000 plants thus far. On Sept. ...
Grease Guzzler
California’s second biodiesel plant sets up shop in Gonzales.
Shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, Richard Gillis was sitting with some friends in a Guadalajara, Mexico hotel talking about how the terrorist attack would affect America. “Suddenly we realized we were talking about power,” Gillis ...
Big Picture
LightHawk allows a moving look at the state of ocean protection.
Our tiny Cessna 182—a plane not much bigger than a car—banked left around the corner of Point Pinos. The breathtaking lower jaw of the Monterey Bay wheeled gracefully below us like some classic beauty with ...
The Translator’s Poet
Robert Mezey brought Borges’ and his own works to vivid life.
Jorge Luis Borges loved paradox, the search for meaning in things, the labyrinth as a symbol of human perplexity. The Argentine genius’ short stories were mystical and diabolical. He played games with time and infinity. ...
Playing With Pain
The Renaissance Faire experience parallels the best and worst of Old England.
For most, life in 16th-century England was pretty grim. It was short and dirty and full of humiliation, suffering and the menace of unexpected death. At the time, England was poor, relatively powerless and under ...
Strange Days in Monterey
Sea Studios wants to know how people talk about climate change.
While news of climate change, species loss and deforestation dominate headlines and airwaves, the local producers of the critically acclaimed TV series Strange Days on Planet Earth are conducting an experiment to study how people ...
Firing Blanks
A WWII enactment channels the confusion of war on Fort Ord.
Things started getting weird at Saturday’s World Word II reenactment when the blonde children slouched onto the scene wearing Hitler Youth Movement uniforms. Surrounded by some American GIs and a pair of tense MPs, the ...
Theater Folk
Community theater is about community, but it still has its stars.
>>FALLARTSPREVIEW It’s hard to explain the intimate crucible of a full-blown theater production: the stress of rehearsal, the terror and determination that permeates a company of actors and crew locked in the struggle of mounting ...
Coalition including local group prevails in lawsuit against Bush EPA.
Score one for local conservationists Helping Our Peninsula’s Environment (HOPE) and eight other environmental groups. Last week a federal judge ruled that the Bush administration “plainly violated” the Endangered Species Act and overturned a regulation ...
Photographing Phantasms
Show at Carmel’s Center for Photographic Art explores creatures real and imagined.
All manner of glossy postcards and thick press packets flow through the Weekly every day. For the most part, this river of artwork and reception announcements just rushes through our in-boxes, pours across our desks ...
Environmental Groups Support Storm Water Plan
Carmel and Pebble Beach Company won’t sign on.
The Natural Resources Defense Council and Friends of the Sea Otters have lent their support to the Monterey Region’s Storm Water Management Plan. The plan, five years in the making, is intended to monitor and ...
Done Fishing
State names Marine Protected Areas.
With armed Fish and Game wardens lining the Beach Resort Monterey conference room and allegations of physical threats casting a pall over the proceedings, the Fish and Game Commission slowly drew a patchwork net of ...
Opponents say bill would kill community media.
California legislators returned from a five-week summer vacation Monday to address hundreds of bills requiring final votes, including AB 2987, the controversial bill designed to help telephone companies get into the cable TV business. The ...
Clean Water Solution
One thing is missing from the Peninsula’s plan to take toxics out of its runoff: Money.
A hard rain pours off the steep, Victorian roofs of Pacific Grove. It rushes into and over the gutters and down the drainpipes. It pools in the gardens and floods down the stairways. It rushes ...
Shakespeare Summer
Pac Rep launches its annual Festival, and Western Stage brings the Bard to Hollywood.
Every year the Bard casts a long shadow across the Monterey Peninsula. It’s a landscape he (or whoever wrote his plays) may have been familiar with. It’s believed that England’s greatest privateer, Sir Francis Drake, ...
In the Zone
The Actors Collective builds on a brief but spectacular tradition.
You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension—a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance, ...
No-Fish Zones Get Another Hearing
A comprehensive plan for Marine Protected Areas on the Central Coast of California continues to work its way up the regulatory food chain. The state Fish and Game Commission heard a full day of testimony ...
Back in the Grove
Daniel Davis returns to PG politics.
It’s deja vu for Daniel Davis in Pacific Grove. Last week the City Council appointed the former councilman to complete the last five months of now-Mayor Dan Cort’s council term with a 4-1 vote. The ...
Recall on City Hall
Monterey activists want voters to decide on $14 million Public Service Center.
A small group of Monterey activists want to prove that an “overwhelming majority” of the city’s residents oppose the controversial Public Service Center by putting the $14 million, 35,000-square-foot office complex to a vote. Mike ...
Mudslinging Contest
Former Monterey County district attorney says he found a corrupt mess in Hollister.
San Benito County District Attorney John Sarsfield lounges behind his desk in Hollister in blue jeans, tennis shoes and a black T-shirt depicting Stewie, the Machiavellian baby from the animated television show Family Guy. Sarsfield—a ...
Time Travelers
The bison of South Monterey County have taken a strange journey, and it’s not over yet.
I’m driving through Fort Hunter Liggett in a blue pick-up with Regina Quiñones, her partner Somar (who declines to give his last name) and their 7-year-old son Okhuse. We are hunting for a herd of ...
Dialing for Dollars
Telecom industry pumps millions into AB 2987.
On June 19, state Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez threw out the first pitch at a San Francisco Giants game in AT&T Park. In itself, it wouldn’t be a very newsworthy event—especially since the Democratic lawmaker ...
An Explosive Drama
Talking To Terrorists exposes the people behind the masks.
Four paramilitaries in fatigues aim AK-47s with laser-scopes over the heads of the audience as a child screams. The opening image of PacRep’s powerful new piece of documentary theater, Talking To Terrorists, is just the ...
Scavenger Hunt
Scientists catch and test the condors that ate squirrels shot with lead-based bullets.
Monterey County condors made national news last week when 11 of the 13 condors from Pinnacles National Monument were observed feeding on dead squirrels. Biologists feared that the squirrels had been shot with lead-based ammunition ...
Fisherman’s Friend
Chet McAndrews helps disabled vets get out on the water.
>>LOCALHEROS The vet was only three months removed from a devastating combat injury. Confined to his wheelchair, he was scared to death of leaving the hospital, let alone getting lifted onto the deck of a ...
500 Miles from Moab
Local outdoorsman prepares for punishing eco-race.
Advisory Council Coordinator Paul Chetirkin sits at a computer in his Monterey Bay Sanctuary office with a 30-pound pack full of sand on his back. “I’ve been wearing it full-time for the past month,” he ...
Wise Fools Parade
William Saroyan is rediscovered in Salinas.
The Western Stage’s production of William Saroyan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Time of Your Life is so relaxed and intoxicating it feels like a three-beer buzz. Among the dim light and the fog of alcohol, ...
Mayorless in PG
Jim Costello’s out—now who will lead Pacific Grove?
On his last day on the job as mayor of Pacific Grove, Jim Costello found himself playing lawyer. Costello, 62, announced his retirement May 23 after being diagnosed with a rare, chronic cancer called Waldenström’s ...
Frontier Journey
El Teatro Campesino presents third installment of
It’s illegal to run over chickens in San Juan Bautista. They roam freely through the downtown, protected by law. It’s always a surprise to discover that one of America’s greatest living playwrights will premiere a ...
Museum Quality
Esther Trosow continues to catalog Pacific Grove history and culture at the PG Museum of Natural History.
Archivist, museum exhibit creator, costume maker, Web designer, historic activist, wry observer of human oddities—Pacific Grove’s Esther Trosow has one expansive resume. She’s also probably done more to preserve and celebrate the history of “America’s ...
Kanalakis Kills
Sheriff easily outguns opponents.
The election which had shaped up to be a showdown at the Monterey County corral turned out to be a massacre. Incumbent Mike Kanalakis was virtually guaranteed another four years as sheriff before his main ...
Horror Show
Francisco de Goya’s 18th century prints resonate with Steinbeck’s times, and ours.
Los Caprichos resides somewhere between the grotesque and the sublime. Originally published in 1799, this set of 80 etchings by Spanish artist Francisco de Goya is among the most influential series of graphic images in ...
Body of Work
SpectorDance debuts a new Rock Ballet.
Live rock and classical ballet? At first the restrained grace and precise choreography of ballet set to the hard backbeat and loose boogie of rock ‘n’ roll seems like an odd combination. But it works. ...
Birdman of PG
New exhibit at Museum of Natural History celebrates the peripatetic Rollo Beck.
Rollo Beck (1870-1950), the godfather of Monterey Bay birding, was a turn-of-the-century adventurer, scientist and world traveler who amassed one of ornithology’s most important collections as he helped prove some of Charles Darwin’s controversial theories. ...
Capital Pee
Urinetown, an extended pee-pee joke, really is funny.
In Urinetown (the Musical), it’s a privilege to pee and you better not forget it or the cops will drag you off to Urinetown (the gulag). The city’s poor scrounge pennies and huddle in long ...
Jailhouse Politics
Sheriff’s race centers on big problems at county jail.
Mike Kanalakis walks over to a man on a bench in front of the Pacific Grove Post Office. “Hi, I’m Mike Kanalakis,” he says, shaking the man’s hand and smiling. “I’m looking for support for ...
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