Heart & Soul

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HEART & SOUL

CAPITALIST P.6 • SYV SNAPSHOT P.17 • MAN ABOUT TOWN P.19

HOW JENSEN GUITAR BECAME SANTA BARBARA’S THREE-CHAMBERED MUSICAL HEART (STORY ON P.5)

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A TRADITION OF EXCELLENCE SINCE 1926

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Content

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State Street Scribe – Jeff Wing profiles Chris Jensen, owner of Jensen Guitar and Music Co, a Santa Barbara institution and harbor of decades of memories The Capitalist – Warning: If you are a snowflake and prone to taking offense, maybe this column is just not for you Beer Guy – The Black Death that ravaged Europe had a lasting impact on all aspects of life, including beer consumption. Today’s pandemic is having a similar effect.

What’s Hanging – Don’t be fooled into thinking that art has gone into hibernation. It’s summer season and it’s gallery galore in SB.

Fortnight – Fiesta Finale, a virtual book talk, Sundays with the Symphony, the opera and more. All the entertainment that’s fit for print over the next 14 days.

Plan B – Before 2020, this would have been the time of year when we prep for back to school. Now, we have the birds.

E’s Note – Let’s face it, we really miss school but if we’ve learned one thing since classes shifted online: remote learning is possible

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Santa Ynez Snapshot – The High Roller Tiki Lounge has officially soft-opened in Solvang as an homage to all things Tiki Creative Characters – Exploring the many colors, emotions, and phases of the artist Chelsea Owens, who will soon be leaving Montecito Man About Town – There’s no fair in Ventura this year, but the Rubicon Goes Retro Drive-In Concert is a worthy replacement, all from the comfort of your own car

Reaso ason n t o Re aso ason Hnope

On Art – Now open in Carpinteria: Lost & Found, a new coffee bar, gift shop, and treasure trove of “Fantasy Pieces”

I Heart – Elizabeth Rose ventures into Montecito to petition and remind us why the First Amendment is the first

to

Hop e

Until our Lord returns, death is part of our reality. We do not seek it out, but we do not cower in fear before it either because the final word on our life is not our epitaph or our obituary in the local paper but the command of the Creator of the Universe himself that we should LIVE! This is our hope and joy in Christ and it is a hope and joy appropriate in the midst of crisis as well as times of peace and security.

Check our website for more information or give us a call 3721 Modoc Rd, Santa Barbara, CA 93105 EmanuelLutheranSB.org info@EmanuelLutheranSB.org 3721 Modoc Rd, Santa Barbara, CA 93105 EmanuelLutheranSB.org info@EmanuelLutheranSB.org 805.687.3734 805.687.3734

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STATE STREET SCRIBE

by Jeff Wing

Jeff is a journalist, raconteur, autodidact, and polysyllable enthusiast. A long-time resident of SB, he takes great delight in chronicling the lesser known facets of this gaudy jewel by the sea. Jeff can be reached at jeffwingg@gmail.com.

Bohemian Legacy

Chris Jensen and the Musical Heart of Santa Barbara

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hris Jensen is giving me a tour of his palace – a lamp-lit, lived-in, wood-colored grotto that would be a little more expansive but for the guitars that cover every wall and draw the rooms in around you. Spacious enough to allow thoughtful wandering, Jensen’s three salons are not so roomy as to inspire twirling with your arms outstretched – Julie Andrews in an alpine meadow, say. There are music rooms and lessons, pictures all over the walls, posters, gig announcements – sort of a grand Central Station with mother-of-pearl inlays. Underfoot, the timeworn avocado-green carpet dates to 1973, the year Jensen Guitar and Music Co. opened its doors. That year, Charlie Rich had a hit with “The Most Beautiful Girl,” Bowie publicly retired his Ziggy Stardust character in front of a stunned audience at Hammersmith Odeon, and the Roxy opened in West Hollywood. It

was a while ago. “Now, this room back here is where I lived,” Chris says.

Chris is a quiet guy with light red hair and an easy half-smile. Once upon a time he was an analyst at Title Insurance and Trust Company in Los Angeles, but that’s been some time ago. “I had my van in the back,” he says. He looks around, then fans out his hand, gesturing. “I had a little couch right here.” We’re standing in the black-painted, closet-sized vestibule near Jensen’s back door. All around us, timeworn guitar cases dangle work tickets, leaning against the walls and each other like spent bandmates after a show.

“When we turned this into a lesson room I built this loft,” he says. “I built a stairway.” Another gesture. Now he seems to be remembering aloud. “There was a clock in the corner back here. It chimed on the hour,” he says thoughtfully.

“And I lived up there.” He nods his

Sometime in the days before cordless phones – Chris behind the counter

head to indicate some mysterious place above the ceiling. “This was before the fire department told me I couldn’t do that.” Chris obliged the fire department by moving into his van, parked in the alleyway behind the shop, just above an occasionally roaring Mission Creek.

“Then I got a twelve-foot travel trailer and lived in that for a while.” He says this with an air of amused resignation.

He eventually bought a 24’ Airstream and lived in a quaint little trailer village a couple blocks away. “Had one of those Airstream spots right up front,” he

recalls. He grins to himself. “So, walking distance. Yeah.”

These were the gilded early days – a wing and a prayer whose unlikely genesis nearly 50 years ago has evolved into Santa Barbara’s three-chambered musical heart. The shop’s physical deets tell their own story of time coursing through, every interior corner and surface darkened and buffed shiny with wear through decades of that happy communal erosion that smooths the ...continued p.10

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The Capitalist

by Jeff Harding

Jeff Harding is a real estate investor and a writer on economics and finance. He is the former publisher of the Daily Capitalist, a popular economics blog. He is also an adjunct professor at SBCC. He blogs at anIndependentMind.com

The Cancel Culture and Dog-Whistling Warning: You may find this article disturbing. If facts, reason, free speech, and history are offensive to you, I urge you to not read this piece and find refuge in a safe place where you can reinforce your ideas of wokeness, postmodernism, multiculturalism, Critical Theory, Structuralism, Post-structuralism, Deconstructionism, and Marxism. This article rejects these concepts, and, according to the current orthodoxy, such rejection is “hateful” thus my article would be considered to be an “act of violence” against your intellectual and emotional wellbeing. So stop reading any further. I don’t want to hurt anyone.

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f you think the world seems to be going crazy you may be right. I wish I could blame it all on COVID-19, but that would be a copout. We have some disturbing stuff going around. We can’t discuss anything of substance in public anymore. If you disagree with the current ideologies that have taken over academia and much of the popular media, you will be branded as a racist, misogynist, rapist, exploiter, cultural appropriator, slavery advocate and fascist.

I’m not OK with that.

We are now calling this the “cancel culture,” an offshoot of the social justice movement. What started with Harvey Weinstein has morphed into a socialpolitical movement whose advocates see racism, bigotry, hate, oppression, and misogyny everywhere. Any dissent from this new orthodoxy is now labeled “racist hate speech,” a vestige of white privilege, and is an act of violence against protected (“oppressed”) groups. What it is, is a cynical war against free speech and the ideals of Western civilization.

One of their weapons in this war are words. Words are to be manipulated to serve political goals. Protected groups, all advocates of social justice, are “liberated” from the bonds of tolerance and free speech. Intolerance (often violent) to the speech of dissenters is justified to achieve political power. Any means to an end.

As a fan of language I am always interested in new buzzwords. My new favorite word is “dog-whistling.” It’s not a new concept, just new to me. It means that certain words have a double meaning. A word may be innocuous in its dictionary definition, but when used in a political context it has another meaning to some ingroup. You know, like the whistles that only dogs can hear. Examples of dogwhistling are “family values” (“I’m a Christian”) or “international banker” (Jew hater).

According to Harvard professor Steven Pinker, the highly esteemed linguist who was accused of racist dog-whistling, “Dog-whistling is … [a] technique in which you can claim that anyone says anything because you can easily hear the alleged dog-whistles that aren’t in the actual literal contents of what the person says.”

In technical terms this is called eisegesis, which means “interpreting text in such a way as to introduce one’s own presuppositions, agendas or biases.” This is what the cancel culture is all about. They are redefining language as a tool to gain political power. If you were foolish enough to express your opinions publicly, its advocates will search the internet for some instance of racism or misogyny on your part and they will probably find it because the words you used have double meanings, which they can clearly discern. You may not even have known this when you wrote them. You have to be woke to be able to hear these dog-whistles.

It’s pretty easy to get on Twitter and begin labeling people as whatever evil you can think up without a lot of facts getting in the way. Outraged woke people pile on, happy to ruin the victim’s day or life without worrying about truthiness. After all, it’s all about power, not facts. It’s quite totalitarian.

If you yelled at your employees yesterday or twenty years ago and made them feel uncomfortable, put your head on the chopping block. Ask Ellen DeGeneres about this. If you thought defunding the police might be a bad idea, adios racist. Ask professor Harald Uhlig about this. If you made a lot of money, you, my friend, are a “capitalist exploiter” and probably despoiled the planet on your way up. If you believed, based on data available to anyone, that the world is getting better, even for Black people in America, you are a racist.

Ask professor Steven Pinker about that. If you have written positively about bourgeois values such as two-parent families, education, hard work, and civicmindedness, you will be vilified as producing hate speech. Ask professor Amy Wax about that.

Washington and Jefferson are on their s**t list because they owned slaves and were obviously racists. To the woke culture, any of their other accomplishments are suspect and should be rejected because they were racists. If their accomplishments are based on the ideology and history of Western civilization (reason, natural law, classical liberalism, Enlightenment, democracy), those ideas must be rejected as well. If you think Washington and Jefferson have some merit, that is a dog-whistle for racism, and so you are branded a racist.

If the woke orthodoxy is to reject racists and everything they stand for then why don’t they reject Karl Marx? Many of these advocates of the current orthodoxy are Marxists or neo-Marxists who believe in Marx’s theories of social

When you boil it down to the essentials, the cancel culture orthodoxy is not about social justice organization. Marx was a racist and a bigot. He was not charitable in his views of Slavs, Asians and Africans. Ditto Jews even though he had a Jewish heritage.

My guess is that these woke people have no idea of Marx’s philosophy, which was mostly an incoherent advocacy of totalitarian violence with a brutal history.

It amazes me that, in light of the history of socialism, communism, Marxism, and fascism, these ideas still have a following among the woke cancel culture.

All these ideologies are authoritarian, a dangerous thing. When you boil it down to the essentials, the cancel culture orthodoxy is not about social justice.

Their authoritarian ideologies promote racism and inequality. Rather it is about political power and, as we all know, power corrupts. In my book “social justice” is a dog-whistle for authoritarianism.

Publisher/Editor • Tim Buckley Design/Production • Trent Watanabe Editor-at-large • Lily Buckley Harbin

Columnists Man About Town • Mark Léisuré Plan B • Briana Westmacott | Food File • Christina Enoch On Art • Margaret Landreau | The Weekly Capitalist • Jeff Harding The Beer Guy • Zach Rosen | E's Note • Elliana Westmacott SYV Snapshot • Eva Van Prooyen | What’s Hanging • Ted Mills I Heart SB • Elizabeth Rose | Fortnight • Steven Libowitz State Street Scribe • Jeff Wing | Holistic Deliberation • Allison Antoinette Made in SB • Chantal Peterson | Behind The Vine • Hana-Lee Sedgwick

Advertising / Sales Tanis Nelson • 805.689.0304 • tanis@santabarbarasentinel.com Casey Champion • 805-695-1501 • casey@montecitojournal.net Sue Brooks • 805.455.9116 • sue@santabarbarasentinel.com Published by Montecito Journal Media Group, LLC PRINTED BY NPCP INC., SANTA BARBARA, CA Santa Barbara Sentinel is compiled every other Friday 133 EAST DE LA GUERRA STREET, #182, Santa Barbara 93101 How to reach us: 805.845.1673 • E-MAIL: tim@santabarbarasentinel.com

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by Zach Rosen

The Life of Beer After Black Death Zach Rosen is a Certified Cicerone® and beer educator living in Santa Barbara. He uses his background in chemical engineering and the arts to seek out abstract expressions of beer and discover how beer pairs with life.

ale helped spur on the industrialization of brewing as these estates would order large quantities of ale and beer. The increase in demand across all social sectors meant big business for brewing and this naturally attracted investors.

Beer was becoming a lucrative liquid.

There is much to be learned about the life of beer after the Black Death

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s one sits quarantined in home, drinking lonely beers in isolation, the mind naturally looks back at the other major pandemics and wonders how they have affected beer. The Black Death that ravaged Europe through the peak of 1347 to 1351 had a lasting impact on all aspects of life, including of course the beer industry and drinking culture.

Beer (with hops) and ale (without hops) is famous for being one of the few safe forms of water to drink during this time and helped keep people alive before they understood microbiology, sanitation, and the effects of boiling water. While all of Europe was affected, the changes that took place in England following the plague would change the face of brewing and drinking forever.

A BREWING BOOM Several factors led to a boom in brewing after the Black Death. There were fewer brewers left, which meant that they began to brew more consistently.

Laborers were in short supply and were able to demand higher wages, giving them more leisure time, which naturally

led to more drinking. There was also an improved diet that followed the plague.

By the fifteenth century in England, farm workers were eating twice as much meat, half as much bread, and drinking twice as much ale as in previous centuries. This switch from bread to ale meant that more grain was going to brewing than ever before. While there was an initial spike in grain cost following the plague, two decades later the grain price had dropped noticeably. The price of ale fell slowly as well but overall it was leading to bigger profits for brewers.

Both in the aristocracy and lower classes there was a shift from wine to ale with less wine being imported and local urban centers establishing more breweries. In the early thirteenth century big estates tended to produce their own ales to be served on the property but after 1350, wealthy families began to move around less and stay at their properties longer. With the increased consumption, they began to purchase ale from surrounding breweries rather than make it themselves. This trend towards purchasing versus producing

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A SPOT TO SIT With this increase in demand and market, a new profession arose: the tippler. Before the Black Death, brewing was largely a cottage industry where a wife, single woman, or widow of a home (collectively known as alewives) would produce and sell ale as a form of extra income. Some full scale breweries existed in England but much of the ale was produced and sold from a home that served as a bar, inn, or combination of both. As breweries produced more, they were unable to sell all of their ale in-house and relied more on off-site drinking. This industrialization of the process led to a separation between ale brewers and ale sellers, the latter being known as a tippler. While this profession existed before, it became an integral role for selling all of the ale available.

Inns, taverns, and social drinking places have existed since ancient times.

Monks around Europe kept the tradition of being hospitable to travelers alive, but the increased social drinking and rise of tipplers that followed the plague gave birth to what would be later known as the public house, or pub. As pubs became more prevalent, one debate became more and more relevant: on-site versus offsite consumption where a townsperson would fill a container to take home. Pubs were less regulated and owners could increase their profits by shortchanging serving sizes and demanding higher prices. Obviously pub owners, called publicans, preferred to keep the beer under their own roof and this led to more people drinking in pubs.

As ale and beer went from a domestic product to an established industry, there became an increased need to regulate it.

Thus came the rise of the ale-conner. It is unclear when ale-conners began. It is thought to be as early as the twelfth century. Similar to tipplers, the role existed before the plague but grew in

importance as the industry changed.

Ale-conners were an official appointed by a local governing body to regulate the quality of ale in a particular dominion.

Depending on the rules of the area, an ale-conner would set prices for the ale, assure quality, and enforce rules for the local alehouses. There is still some debate about the exact duties and tasks of the ale-conner. The most notable (and questionable) practice is that the aleconner would judge a brew by pouring some of it on the bench and then sit in the spilled beer wearing special leather britches for thirty minutes. If the beer stuck to the britches (or didn’t, depending on who’s telling it) then it was a sign of an inferior brew. While the efficacy of beer squatting still remains in debate, this tale is most certainly false.

Beer historian Martyn Cornell actually traces the same myth through several cultures. Regardless, the title was an honored position and there are still aleconners today, albeit just ceremoniously so (not sure whether the spilt beer sitting tradition remains).

There is more to be said about this story and how these changes led to a shift from ale to beer and brewing went from female to male but those tales have been told before in this column (see “Bewitched by beer” on Pairbeer. com). What we are going through during these times will no doubt have a lasting impact on all aspects of life, including beer and how we drink it.

The Brewers Association recently took a poll of craft breweries with more than 500 responses from around the country. Beer consumption as a whole is down an average of 29 percent with on-site sales down 65 percent, kegs being distributed down 95 percent, and while off-premises sales have gone up 8 percent, this is largely focused on the bigger packaging breweries selling more beer in supermarkets. There will be an uncomfortable number of brewery closures with 45 percent of responding breweries saying that they can only stay in business one to three more months without further aid. In short, support your local breweries. Yet there is some hope on the horizon for the drinking community. The ABC has allowed offpremise, to-go cocktails to be sold from bars and the city has loosened up on outdoor seating spaces for breweries and restaurants. It is hard to tell what the beer scene will look like after this.

The Black Death led to lasting growth in beer and the rise of the pub. The 1918 flu pandemic, coupled with Prohibition, fueled whisky’s popularity and gave birth to speakeasies. Between Zoom rooms and masked encounters, one can only wonder what lasting effects our current quarantine life will have on beer.

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WHAT’SHANGING? with Ted Mills Ted Mills is a local writer, filmmaker, artist, and podcaster on the arts. You can listen to him at www.funkzonepodcast.com. He currently has a seismically dubious stack of books by his bed. Have an upcoming show you’d like us to know about? Please email: tedmills@gmail.com

A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM

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strange, bearded, bedraggled man approaches you wearing a mask. His eyes are wild, as is his hair. You suspect he has gone mad in isolation. Yet, somehow as you gaze into his eyes, a dim memory is sparked within. You recognize this man. He lifts a finger to shush out all other noise. The voice is familiar…

Hi everybody! How are you all holding up? Who knew we’d still be here, half a year into the pandemic? Amazing how we just really didn’t do much about it!

Anyway, you don’t want to know about all that, you want to know how the art community is faring and what, indeed, is hanging. Well, turns out there are some things, as long as you book ahead of time and socially distance.

The man shuffles his hands in a CVS bag filled with papers, receipts, postcards, and newspaper clippings, and begins to intone.

Sullivan Goss has figured out this whole pandemic business better than most, and continues to mount shows, including three at the same time. Everything is by appointment, and for those in the market for art, that tends to be the way things get sold anyway. One exhibit is the first solo show at the gallery by Wosene Worke Santa Barbara Historical Museum is doing its part with its first outdoor exhibition, “Project Fiesta,” through August 22. This is a chance to check out the art, vintage posters, historical photographs and postcards, and other works and bring back that Old Spanish Days feeling.

The exhibit is free and takes place during the museum’s current hours: Thursdays and Saturdays, noon-5 pm, and Fridays, noon7 pm. 136 East De la Guerra Street. www. sbhistorical.org/projectfiesta/ The man stuffs the flyers and clippings back into his bag and shuffles off. You blink and he has vanished. Was it a dream? Will we ever see this strange, art-obsessed man again? Stay tuned and stay safe.

Kosrof, who has been selling steadily since Sullivan Goss first showed his work in October 2019. The Ethiopian abstract painter, who now lives in Berkeley, has made a career of detailed collections of script, iconography, and geometrics. They delight the eye for sure. Next room over is “Califa,” the first solo show by Holli Harmon.

The painter layers history, female figures, nature, and color in works that explore the California dream and its dark side. And finally the Summer Salon is a collection of Goss regulars living and not-so-living, just a sample of the gallery’s scope: Ken Bortolazzo, Phoebe Brunner, David Flores, Inga Guzyte, Channing Peake, Hank Pitcher, Nicole Strasburg, and more. All shows are up through September 21, except for the Salon, which runs through August. Visit www.sullivangoss.com.

A quick shoutout to friend-of-the-show Michael Long, who had a very successful be-masked and distant’ed opening of his latest “Dream Boxes” down at Vita Art Center in Ventura. The show of his fabulous miniatures is up through September 21, and of course you must reserve a spot. Visit www.vitaartcenter.com.

We cannot verify whether the Rondo gang, of which Long is a member, has anything to do with the mysterious “Quaranzine” that keeps popping up in the free library on Canon Perdido Street. Especially as we’ve also seen it appear in other free libraries around town. It’s free, and filled with artists and writers riffing on the pandemic. Look for it and grab a copy. What do you have to lose?

The Santa Barbara Maritime Museum has taken their latest exhibition online with “Virtual SCAPE 2020,” featuring works by the 50+ members of SCAPE (Southern California Artists Painting for the Environment). Everything is for sale (and some things are already sold), with 40 percment of profits benefiting the museum. Artists include Camille Dellar, Myla Kato, Ray Hunter, Rick Garcia, Karen McGaw, Carrie Givens, Peggy Brierton, and more. The site is here: https://sbmm.org/ product-category/scape-2020.

The Spirit of Fiesta continues this year, although masked and diminished. The

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...continued from p.5

Chris and guitars, lots

A very pleased Chris Jensen and the great Chet Atkins

A school bus bought with a traded guitar and Jensen Music guitar lesson studio for a time...

edges of beloved places. Jensen Guitar and Music Co. has the warm, organic feel of a home that has always been here.

But it hasn’t always been here. Chris Jensen invented the place. In freaking 1973.

BOX OF BOBBINS The Jensen Guitar and Music Co. we see today is not the Jensen’s that opened in 1973, which was for a time a single room. Some five years after the grand opening, Chris acquired another space, not exactly adjacent.

We’re standing in there as he speaks.

“It was a stereo shop at the time,” he says. “When they left, we took it over, hauled our electric stuff into this room to separate the merchandise that way.

You know, acoustic and electric.” For five more years the acoustic and electric sections of Jensen’s shop were separated by a chiropractor. Possibly there is a metaphor in there somewhere. “You had to go out and around to go to each part of the store,” Chris says without irony.

Ultimately the besieged chiropractor

had enough and he split. Soon after Jensen opened the electronics section an interesting visitor had arrived.

“One day this guy walks in with a box full of wires and bobbins,” Chris says. “He wanted a space to start to build something up.” Seymour W. Duncan’s arrival at Jensen’s followed several years he’d spent in London, where he’d gone to play music. But instead he had found himself chilling with the day’s pantheon of rock gods – Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, David Gilmour, Hendrix, Peter Frampton, Jeff Beck, et al. The guitarists were all following word of mouth on an avid young American guy who could work tonal magic with customized guitar pickups he wound himself. Having made his way back to Santa Barbara with a dream and a plan, Duncan secured a work bench at a music store on lower State Street but had been asked by the owner to take a hike. He’d headed up to Jensen’s with his raggedy little box. “He knew his stuff, and he was a good player. Cool guy, too. We

had a lot of fun,” Chris says. “Anyway, we gave him that back corner, gave him a desk. He clamped an electric drill to it, connected it to a foot switch and would put the bobbin in the drill and hold the wire,” Chris laughs. “It was pretty primitive.” In 1978 Duncan founded Seymour Duncan Company and would conquer the world. Lots of stuff has happened at Jensen’s over the decades. None of this was inevitable.

MUSIC, MUSIC... MUSIC “I was born in Denver in 1944,” Chris says, “We moved shortly to Waco, Texas where my dad was training as a bombardier in B-17s. One of my earliest memories is war’s over and dad’s back.” Chris’s family moved from state to state, following his dad’s work as an educational administrator and school principal. Always, there was music, family singalongs around his mom’s piano playing, and later a sort of yearly musical talent show the six sibs would perform for each other, their instruments at the ready. Young Chris took piano and violin lessons. “I didn’t like the violin,” he says. “But many years later I heard Papa John Creach play

‘Orange Blossom Special.’ I went out and bought a violin.”

A BRIGHT GOLDEN HAZE ON THE MEADOW Chris was a high school freshman in Long Beach Island, New Jersey, amiably singing in the chorus of his school’s production of Oklahoma. And who was that gyrating onto the scene like a roofremoving force of nature? Hint: rhymes with “pelvis.” Chris quickly picked up a guitar at a flea market and joined the rising army of ne’er-do-wells whose collective tsunami would make of the Eisenhower era a subaqueous ruin on the cultural seabed. It was around this time the Jensens moved to California.

The die seemed all but cast. Post-college, though, Chris landed a great gig at Title Insurance and Trust Company in Los Angeles and began making a mark. In a moment of giddy madness, he and a guitar-playing office pal decided to open up a music store on Sunset Boulevard.

Instead, his would-be partner went back to school to complete his psychology degree, another victim of common ...continued p.22

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AUGUST 2020

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by Steven Libowitz

Tell us all about your art opening, performance, dance party, book signing, sale of something we can’t live without, or event of any other kind by emailing fortnight@santabarbarasentinel.com. If our readers can go to it, look at it, eat it, or buy it, we want to know about it and will consider it for inclusion here.

Special consideration will be given to interesting, exploratory, unfamiliar, and unusual items. We give calendar preference to those who take the time to submit a picture along with their listing.

Fiesta Finale

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OVID-19 has put the kibosh on the big public extravaganza that closes out Santa Barbara’s annual Old Spanish Days festival, but there is still one place you can go to do something in public outdoors to celebrate the city’s most popular summer celebration. Project Fiesta! A History of Old Spanish Days, the Santa Barbara Historical Museum’s annual exhibition, has a new home this year at the museum’s often under-utilized courtyard. People can visit the display celebrating the 95 years of Fiesta history during special hours at the downtown museum, located at 136 East De la Guerra Street, enjoying the exhibits of the pageantry, fashion, and traditions of the city’s most cherished cultural festival for free. The courtyard is open 12 pm to 5 pm on Thursdays and Saturdays, and 12 pm to 7 pm on Fridays, through August 22. Call (805) 966-1601 or visit https://www.sbhistorical.org.

Perhaps even more timely during the pandemic period is the next offering in the Historical Museum’s History Happy Hour at Home series, featuring free talks about local history. “The Spanish Flu in Santa Barbara” delves into the era when the disease ruled Santa Barbara for many months in 1918 and 1919, when schools, theaters, stores, and libraries closed and people stayed home to ward off the spread of the virus. Local historian Betsy Green, author of the Way Back When series of books that celebrate “The History of Santa Barbara: One Year at a Time,” takes us back to that tenuous time when people somehow managed to cope with the crisis without the benefit of the internet, TV or even radio. Visit https:// sbhistorical.org/historyhappyhour for info on how to sign up for the free 5 pm event on Wednesday, August 19.

the Central Library and may be reserved in advance via e-mail (JATurner@ SantaBarbaraCA.gov) and picked up during sidewalk service hours. The play may also be purchased at www. concordtheatricals.com/p/65467/ american-son, while a cinematic version of American Son is also streaming on Netflix. Registration for the event is required, and available online at santabarbaraca.gov/gov/depts/lib/ default.asp.

‘Parallel’ Storylines

Local historian Betsy Green will offer a free talk entitled “The Spanish Flu in Santa Barbara” on August 19

premiere from taking place, but the issue obviously has taken on even more timeliness in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police.

ETC plans to produce the play in the 2020-21 season, if possible, but in the meantime, the company and the Santa Barbara Public Library have teamed up to present a free virtual book club discussion of the play at 5:30 pm on Monday, August 17. The event will be hosted online by the library and moderated by ETC’s artistic director Jonathan Fox and James Joyce, the founder of Coffee with a Black Guy, a program that holds frequent community conversations about race.

Copies of the play are available from

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hisham Matar is the American-born BritishLibyan writer whose 2016 memoir of the search for his father, The Return, won the coveted award the following year.

The book described his journey to Libya to find out what happened to his father, who was an exiled opponent of the infamously brutal Gaddafi regime, after he was kidnapped in Cairo and flown back to Libya, where he disappeared when the author was just 19. That was also the year that Matar discovered the Sienese school of painting, which informs his second memoir, A Month in Siena, which speaks eloquently to a sense of loss and of suspended time, solitude, loneliness, love, and the way in which art can both console and consume us.

In the book, Matar turns to Siena and the art of the 13th-15th century, which had been changed by the devastation of the Black Plague, to find both comfort and clarity after his father was kidnapped, visiting the

Book Talk

In April, Ensemble Theatre Company was supposed to have staged the West Coast debut of Christopher DemosBrown’s American Son. The play is a gripping look at the intersection of racial dynamics and the police that finds the parents of a Black teenager anxiously awaiting news of the fate of their son who may have been confronted by the cops as they spend the night in the police station. The pandemic and the shutdown, of course, prevented the

A cinematic version of Christopher Demos-Brown’s American Son is streaming on Netflix, starring Kerry Washington and Steven Pasquale (photo credit: Peter Cunningham)

Hisham Matar will offer a virtual reading from A Month in Siena on August 23

gallery at lunch where he would spend an hour studying just one painting. He explores his own inner landscape as if walking the outline of an idea, and his story, reviewers have said, reveals much that is timely and connected to our own current world in addressing the limits of grief, how the imagination is altered by events, the indifference of pestilence, and the acknowledgement that both love and art are an expression of faith.

Matar will offer a reading from A Month in Siena and engage in a conversation about the subject and his life as an author in the second installment in a new series of free Parallel Stories events offered by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art via Zoom. Visit https://tickets. sbma.net for details and to register and receive the Zoom link for the 11 am to 12:30 pm event on Sunday, August 23.

No. 5 Alive

UCSB Department of Music’s annual Summer Music Festival is far too imaginative to be curtailed by the coronavirus crisis. Founded in 2016 by then-composition grad student Federico Llach, the festival was created as a celebration of local artists and a forum for composers and musicians to have an opportunity to connect with the community via a variety of new musical approaches. The fest continues to thrive as a student-curated and managed event, with current graduate composition student Raphael Radna serving as the 2020 artistic director as the festival moves online for the first time.

The virtual program is as eclectic as the past in-person ones have been,

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representing styles spanning several musical traditions and centuries of development. Among the featured performers are the Los Angeles-based new music piano duo HOCKET, multipercussionist and vocalist Miguelito León, UCSB composition alumnus and pianist Marc Evanstein, the Nesta Steel Drum Band, UCSB carillonist Wesley Arai, and the ensemble Gamelan Sinar Surya directed by faculty member Richard North. The festival will also feature a children’s concert led by León and a demonstration of a variety of Medieval and Renaissance instruments by composition grad student Matthew Owensby.

Santa Barbara native León’s festopening performance is a fascinating one, as the percussionist and producer who has performed and recorded with Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Band, Michael McDonald, and Ozomatli, among others, will feature a special live-looping solo performance, before the children’s concert offers performances interspersed with introductions to the instruments and

rhythms he uses in his music. Evanstein’s program of original compositions for solo piano and electronics, titled The Computer as Wild Collaborator, features, as the title indicates, the computer as a creative partner. He’ll offer acoustic music that was composed with the aid of custom computer programs as well as interactive piano pieces in which the computer responds live to his actions at the keyboard.

The work by HOCKET, which features UCSB faculty member Dr. Sarah Gibson and fellow composerpianist Thomas Kotcheff, represents its new project, #What2020SoundsLike, comprised of snippets of more than 50 composers’ “varying and moving musical responses to the year 2020,” according to Gibson.

All of the events, which are slated for the weekend of Saturday-Sunday, August 22-23, will be presented for free.

Visit www.music.ucsb.edu/ summerfestival for details and live links, or see the virtual concerts on the UCSB Department of Music’s YouTube channel.

Sundays with the Symphony

The next episode of the Santa Barbara Symphony’s live broadcast series takes place at 3:30 pm on August 23, when the Music-Artistic Director Nir Kabaretti is joined by the symphony’s new Director of Music Education, Kristine Pacheco, to shine a spotlight on students of all levels from the youth program. The young musicians have adjusted to the pandemic through a series of creative virtual activities and the special concert offers viewers the chance to hear from all the Symphony’s various Music Education Center programs, including the Camerata Ensemble (beginner), the Philharmonia Orchestra (intermediate), and the Youth Symphony (advanced).

The episode will also check in with some of the graduate students who are continuing their musical path in the professional world, and feature an exclusive clip from Lorenzo DeStefano’s documentary, Hearing is Believing, about the collaborative project between the Santa Barbara Youth Symphony and local composer Rachel Flowers. Access

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the event via the symphony’s website at www.thesymphony.org/livestream.

Opera’s Online Offerings

Elsewhere in the classical corner, COVID-edition, Opera Santa Barbara has conceded to the current conditions of the pandemic by postponing its 2020-21 season opening production of La Traviata that had been scheduled for September 15 and 17 at the Granada Theatre. It’s set now to take place as the third production of the new season next June. In the meantime, OSB has stepped up its digital offerings via re-running online screenings of its 2018 presentation of Gioachino Rossini’s The Barber of Seville at 5 pm on Tuesday, August 18, and the 18-year-old production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor at 5 pm on Tuesday, August 25. Follow OSB on Facebook (https://www. facebook.com/operasantabarbara) and YouTube (https://www.youtube. com/user/OperaSantaBarbara) for upcoming live streams of other past OSB productions.

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PLANB by Briana Westmacott

E’S NOTE by Elliana Westmacott

When Briana isn’t lecturing for her writing courses at UCSB and SBCC, she contributes to The Santa Barbara Skinny, Wake & Wander and Flutter Magazine. Along with her passion for writing and all things Santa Barbara, much of her time is spent multitasking through her days as a mother, wife, sister, want-to-be chef and travel junky.

Writing is an outlet that ensures mental stability... usually.

BACK-TO-SCHOOL 2020 IS FOR THE BIRDS

T

here is a shrubby tree right outside my kitchen window. Every day as I do the dishes, I watch the birds as they flitter about, eating from the feeders I’ve recently hung from its limbs. This has become one of my everyday pleasures. To think that dishes could be one of my favorite things is ludicrous. I hate doing dishes! But with a little help from ornithology, I’ve mollified my anger.

Here’s the thing, it took me two years before I moved the bird feeders into that tree.

Two years! Why didn’t I shift that birdseed station sooner?

Simply because – change is not easy for humans.

We are creatures of habit.

Once we put something somewhere, it stays. We have our routines, our routes to get places, our morning and nightly rituals. However, 2020 has altered all of this for everyone.

Prior to 2020, we would be at the end of summer My mom captured this picture of me on my very first day of school. I don’t appear to be very happy about the transition. and collectively (typically optimistically) facing a new school year. The sandy, damp towels and swimsuits were replaced with shiny pens and crisp notebooks. Since the year 2000, when I obtained my teaching credential, I considered this time of the year to be my official New Year. Back-to-school signifies the beginning – a fresh start. For ten years before I had my kids, I was prepping classrooms for young students. As an elementary school teacher, I spent hours getting those four walls and everything in-between ready for the new sets of eyes that were going to spend nine months with me. I decorated, arranged, tagged, labeled, and anticipated the unknown set of souls that would become a part of my life. The swirl of excitement and nervousness is the same for students and teachers alike; a classroom becomes a temporary family, and there’s no predicting how that will look. Especially this year.

Prior to 2020, this would be the time of year when I was checking things off lists: backpacks, shoes, binders, lunch boxes, positive attitudes. It was routine; each year, we prepped. When the kids were little, there were cartons of crayons and jackets I labeled with their names (sharpied, not sewn just so you know, I am not that mom).

As they grew, it morphed into locker organizers and trendy school clothes. It all was setting the stage for the future, a whole new year ahead. The only thing on the list this year is a positive attitude.

Change is hard. As we observe a world attempting to restructure the entire educational system, it is not surprising to witness resistance, confusion, even anger, and chaos. I continue to hope for more collaboration, creativity, and buttress. There will not be a perfect scenario for schools this year because we are all living through a far-from-perfect time. Parents, caregivers, teachers, administrators, and students will need to adapt and evolve continually. Even once the schools start, they may be forced to stop at a moment’s notice. When so much is uncertain, one thing that would certainly help would be to put harmony as a priority.

Prior to 2020, I would complain about the dishes in the sink. It made me angry to see them pile up; my sponge was clenched with aggression. This year has

Elli was born and raised in Santa Barbara and is now 14 years old. She has been writing E’s Note in the paper for four years. Elli loves soccer and has been playing since she was in preschool. She especially enjoys traveling the world with friends and family. Her goal is to pursue a career in journalism.

ANYTHING IS REMOTELY POSSIBLE

A

t this point in the summer, we would be up to our necks in back-to-school supplies and stressing over meeting our new teachers and starting new sports, but this year is different. This year all I can do is wait for that one school email to pop into my inbox explaining whether I should prepare to sit at a desk all day or in my bed.

Remote learning seems like it would be simple. When my school first shifted to online, I was excited and relieved that I wouldn’t have to get up at 6:30 every morning to drive to school. What I didn’t think about was the stress of figuring out when assignments are due, the amount of time I would spend trying to figure out new programs, and the headaches I would endure from looking at a screen for nearly eight hours. As the months dragged on, I found myself missing the old early mornings of brewing coffee before my first-period class, and the warm-hearted greetings I’d get as I walked to my locker. Let’s just admit it, we desperately miss school. But there’s not much we can do except stay at home and prepare for the beginning of our new school year, as weird as it might be.

I have not yet mastered the art of online learning, but I’ve picked up on a few helpful ways to stay motivated and make it more fun.

1. The first thing you should do before you start your online learning is to create a document with all your Zoom links and passwords. I found this incredibly helpful, and it saved me from the stress of frantically trying to find the Zoom link before each class.

2. Wake up at least 30 minutes before your first class. I know many of us got used to staying up late and getting up a few minutes before class, but getting

up early and having all of your supplies organized before class was a lifesaver during the last few months of school.

I cannot stress enough how important being organized is. Your teachers expect you to have everything next to you during class, as if you were actually at school, and I’ve made the mistake of assuming it would go unnoticed if I were slightly unprepared.

3. Make your remote learning space enjoyable to be in, because you’re going to be there a lot. Whether you’re at a desk or in your bed, it’s always helpful to feel comfortable during your classes.

Personally, I work better with a cup of coffee and a pad of paper for notes or doodles.

4. I got a lot of headaches during online learning because of the massive amount of time I would spend on my computer. If you experience this, you should try to spend as much time in your free time not looking at your screen or invest in a pair of anti-blue light glasses. These glasses will block out the blue light in your devices so that you don’t develop as many headaches during the day.

5. Make sure at the very beginning of your school year that you know where to find your assignments, where to see your assignment schedules, and how to contact your teachers if you need help.

When you have so many classes, things get confusing, which is one of the major things I struggled with during remote learning. You don’t want to be in a situation where you miss out on an assignment because you weren’t aware it was posted, which is why, if you’re like me and you struggle to stay organized, you should write down your schedule before the week starts to be better prepared.

Good luck and have a good attitude.

delivered far more dirty dishes than any other year on record, and so I’ve learned to birdwatch. In the Bird Tree outside my kitchen window at almost any hour of the day, I can catch a dark-eyed junco, a couple of towhees, or our resident quail family. The scrub jays make messes and scare off the house finch while Anna’s hummingbirds zip around at the tops of the branches. It’s a sight to see, and before I know it, my sink is empty.

Here are my two cents thrown into the tornado of thoughts about back-to-school in 2020: It’s going to be a good year to practice bird watching. Instead of getting mad at the mess in the sink, maybe we can find something positive to focus on and help students to learn to fly in new ways. Remember, all of our hands are covered in suds and genuinely working towards a common goal.

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SYVSNAPSHOT

by Eva Van Prooyen Keeping a finger on the pulse of the Santa Ynez

High Roller Lounge Mermaid Mug

Valley. What to eat, where to go, who to meet, and what to drink. Pretty much everything and anything situated between the Santa Ynez and San Rafael Mountains.

A LOUNGE, WINETAILS, AND A LOVE FOR ALL THINGS TIKI

P

roprietor and drink creator for High Roller Tiki Lounge and Owner/Winemaker of Sort This Out Cellars, Michael Cobb, officially soft-opened his revamped High Roller Tiki Lounge concept in Solvang. The new 1,300-square-foot location is just around the corner from its original location and boasts wine-based tiki cocktails – re-claiming its place as a pioneer in the tiki “winetail” realm. The new Tiki Lounge offers eclectic and popular craft beers and Micheladas, prepared and served by the same ownership and staff as at the original High Roller Tiki Lounge location. The new space is also joined by Cobb’s now 13-year-old Sort This Out Cellars wine label.

The drink menu offers approximately 20 “tiki-tails,” some of which are wine-based versions of classic tiki drinks like the Mai Tai, Blue Hawaiian and the Painkilla, plus a house special and a fan favorite named This Drink Will Get You Lei’d. Cobb also ties Solvang into his custom-designed tiki cocktails and mugs, offering drinks such as the Solvang Siren, Suffering Scandinavian, and the Bloody Viking, as well as his customized, collectible Mermaid mugs produced by Tiki Farm, which Cobb says is apparently quite famous in Tiki barware circles.

The concept was initially born of a “carefully-curated concept, first hatched during my seventeen-year career with Disneyland,” says Cobb, explaining his early Disney run included chef positions at Disneyland restaurants and later included management roles, namely at the exclusive and private Club 33, where he worked for ten years.

Cobb says he helped transition Disneyland’s Polynesian-themed and now defunct Tahitian Terrace to Aladdin’s Oasis Dinner Show, which replaced the Tahitian Terrace in 1993. Disneyland’s Tahitian Terrace originally opened in 1962 and was sandwiched roughly between the Enchanted Tiki Room and the Jungle Cruise in the Adventureland section of the park. The restaurant facility, now the location of the Tropical Hideaway, is no longer in use as a dinner theater, but for its 31-year run it provided a tropical escape to Disney guests, reflected in both its menu and entertainment and, especially, in its atmosphere and décor.

Cobb says as his Disneyland career continued, he became a wine buyer for many of the resort properties, also teaching a sommelier certification education program.

In 2005, he was recruited by a winery in the Santa Ynez Valley, and he relocated his family to Santa Barbara county wine country. “Two years later, in 2007, I launched Sort This Out Cellars label,” says Cobb, noting it is a brand now synonymous with pin-up art, but first inspired by a 1961 photo of The Rat Pack, taken in front of the historic Sands Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

“I wanted a wine label which better reflected the people drinking the wines, not the people making the wines,” says Cobb, explaining Sort This Out Cellars remains a small producer of California wines, crafted from grapes grown throughout California’s various wine regions. Cobb notes he has “essentially” freed himself of the restrictions associated with owning vineyards or producing wines from a single viticultural area, and this freedom is symbolized by the “unapologetic,” “fun,” and “adult” character displayed in the wines themselves, on the bottle labels, and at his new Sort This Out Cellars VIP wine tasting area, tucked away above High Roller Tiki Lounge.

In 2016, Cobb created the first iteration of his High Roller Tiki Lounge out of a personal love for all things “tiki,” combined with a previous foray into the world of winetails which he had been crafting for Sort This Out Cellars’ tasting room for a few years prior.

“We are doing some really interesting things with beverages here and turning people on to new hobbies and interests and cultural groups,” he says. “I think by being in wine country, we get people who discover us – and tiki – who may have never even been to a tiki bar, and we are surely seeing tiki-philes who have never had a tiki drink made with wine. People are seeking out the bar because of their love for tiki, and then we have wine lovers stumbling upon us, wowed by the décor and vibe which is unlike any other in the area.”

High Roller Tiki Lounge is Cobb’s homage to a mid-century pop culture movement, but in particular, the tiki culture that first arose during the Great Depression. Populating High Roller Tiki Lounge is a vintage bar from the 1960s,

similar to one on a Mad Men set – the TV series that aided in tiki’s cultural resurgence. In the lounge, Cobb also showcases a Witco bar, a furniture producer known for its wood-carved tiki designs.

Comprised of a front-room bar and spacious lounge with vaulted ceilings, and a back room with stage for eventual live music and other performances, the new space also includes a 12-foot-long custom-made bench with hand-sewn seat cushions by Alaina Rose Lee of the Polynesian-inspired company, Tiki Leidy, boasting tropicalprint material flown in from Hawaii. The bar lining High Roller Tiki’s street-facing windows is supported by hand-carved tiki poles crafted by Billy the Crud, a woodcarving craftsman famous in tiki circles for his work at other tiki ventures, such as The Golden Tiki in Las Vegas and Ventura’s VenTiki. Billy also built a customdesigned, wooden case for the new High Roller Tiki Lounge, which will eventually house High Roller Tiki Ohana Mugs: High Roller Tiki member mugs which will be stored at the bar and lounge.

Additional whimsical tiki touches adorn the brightly hued, tropical oasis, including custom-made High Roller Tiki Lounge swizzle sticks and the specialorder replica of P.T. Barnum’s Feejee Mermaid. As a nod to Cobb’s Disney roots, a “Cast Members Only” sign also adorns one of the Lounge’s walls, as does a plaque with a beloved Disneyland quote, “Here You Leave Today And Enter The World Of Yesterday, Tomorrow And Fantasy,” a replica of the plaque which hangs over a tunnel entrance to the theme park, near the park’s main gate.

“Disney is where the High Roller Tiki Lounge concept began,” Cobb says. “It was only fitting for me to soft-open the new High Roller Tiki Lounge on July seventeenth, which marked the sixty-fifth anniversary of the park’s 1955 opening date.”

Future plans for the new High Roller Tiki Lounge entail hosting guest bartenders and master mixologists and possibly, a lecture series of sorts, such as tiki experts speaking about the history of tiki culture. Once allowed to resume indoor operations and live music acts, High Roller Tiki will host regular performances and will extend its late-night hours.

High Roller Tiki Lounge is now located at 433 Alisal Road in Solvang. The Lounge will initially be open Wednesday through Sunday, starting at 10 am on weekends and 1 pm weekdays. High Roller Tiki Lounge is 21+, only. Due to COVID-19 measures, food must currently be purchased with drinks (until further notice). For more information call (805) 691-9224.

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CREATIVE CHARACTERS CHELSEA OWENS

Works like “Marination”, are painted in a kind of dance and flow of movement

by Zach Rosen

Even in pieces like “Time & Again”, the painting moves between subject and mood

W

hether it is art, writing, or any other imaginative work, the creative process will take the individual through an unexpected journey. What you set out to create is rarely what the finished work becomes. The process is akin to the path of life. For artist Chelsea Owens, her body of work has captured both, following her own life narrative and the art that has grown from it.

Theater and art had always been a part of Chelsea’s life growing up in a modest home in Virginia and when entering college she pursued a degree in fine art from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She studied abroad in France, practicing still lifes and drinking cheap wine with a group of moody artists living in a castle. Upon graduating she wanted to pursue graphic design and entered the film school at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. While most art-oriented students entered computer animation, she became more interested in production design. It was a pioneering program at the time and she was one of about ten students. During her time in the Bay Area she rented a 5,000-square-foot warehouse with a close friend where they would host lots of productions and Burning Man parties with art installations, paintings, and films. These events were part rent fundraising and part homework as she explored experimental film while finishing her thesis. She made the jump to L.A. to enter the film industry, but after working on a few notable productions she quickly realized that it was an unsavory setting, and one that often favored connections over education. Meanwhile, she met an Italian man and after finding the film industry undesirable, decided to move to Italy to be with him.

The artworks of Chelsea Owens capture her life’s journey

In Italy Chelsea was faced with new challenges, sandwiched between two cultures. From the objectification of women to the lack of independent women role models, her observations of the misogynistic values found in the Italian countryside influenced her art, with many female subjects taking on faceless forms. During this time she dived deeper into her painting while helping her now husband run his businesses. In 2011 she moved to Montecito, looking to raise a family.

Their business in Italy had been going well and they were able to purchase a plot of land and build their own house from scratch, including a custom studio for her artwork. Raising two sons, Chelsea continued to paint over the years. Moving from blue to black, figurative to the more abstract, her art had several phases, each one capturing the narrative of her experiences and emotion.

Chelsea emphasizes that the subjects of her paintings are not the focus, but rather the emotion and feeling behind the piece. Being a sensual person, her

artwork is meant to be touched. She wants the viewer to feel, both figuratively and literally, the color and texture imbued in the artwork. While some of her paintings have noticeable forms, most of her modern work explores the abstract. Looking at her art, objects may pop out of the image with the open interpretation of a cloud: a cloaked figure, the emergence of a heart, the last rays of light from a setting sun. But it is observing the colors and movement of line that they begin to really take form.

A tunnel of canary yellow brings a burst of hope. A wash of morning grey laces the haze of frustration. A flurry of lines captures the rush of life. These different layers of color represent Chelsea’s narrative and what is felt within it.

Chelsea views art as capturing the artist’s individual journey and each of her pieces go through their own journey. An art piece will often start on the floor but is flipped and turned as the painting takes shape. She will start off with drippings and rag splatters before adding detail and structure with thicker painting, always leaving a little bit of the background visible. While she paints with the movement of an improvisational dance, there remains an emphasis on structure and each work evolves with that in mind. Chelsea is a self-described “color chemist”; color is so relevant to the meaning of her work that she is always conscious of the color palette being used and ensures it is cohesive with the moods of the piece.

Some pieces will be given watercolor

and other effects with bleeds, pours, and spills layering depth to the piece.

As she works, some elements become beautiful mistakes while other flaws get taken away, buried under a color of emotion.

Through life’s trials and tribulations the art world has been her base, and even when she returned to Burning Man after a 15-year hiatus, it felt like home (Burning Man is where I first met Chelsea). The narrative mixed with collaboration that Burning Man inspires has been a continued influence on her work, as well as the like-minded creatives one finds out there. This has led her to import some weird to her Montecito studio. Over the years she has hosted artist retreats and painting classes in her home. Her two sons have become a new source of inspiration as she has spent the years exploring and guiding their fresh minds through art.

This even led her to teaching art at Bright Start Preschool, bringing collegelevel art instruction with the explorative Reggio Emilia approach. Having now separated from her husband, she will soon be parting ways with her home here. Chelsea will be moving back to the Bay Area where she can give her sons a traditional neighborhood experience.

With so much of her work capturing the narrative of her life, one can wonder what phase her art will take next.

Visit chelseaowens.com to view her available and past works. A range of works by Chelsea Owens can also be found on Saatchi and Singulart.

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with Mark Léisuré

Mark spends much of his time wandering Santa Barbara and environs, enjoying the simple things that come his way.

A show here, a benefit there, he is generally out and about and typically has a good time. He says that he writes “when he feels the urge” and doesn’t want his identity known for fear of an experience that is “less than authentic.” So he remains at large, roaming the town, having fun. Be warned.

Theater, from the Comfort of Your Own Car

Y

ou drive down the 101, the SUV humming along at a cool 73 mph, enjoying the views of the ocean almost hugging the freeway for nearly half of the journey, then you hang a couple of rights into the entryway for the Fairgrounds at Seaside Park. If this were a pre-pandemic year, you’d be sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic because this particular Wednesday night, August 5, would fall smack in the middle of the Ventura County Fair, the nearly 150-year-old, 12-day extravaganza.

Every year the fair normally attracts hundreds of thousands of people for everything you’d expect at a state fair in America’s midsection: a huge carnival, a zillion 4H competitions, pig races, pony rides, sno-cones, and cotton candy.

Plus lots of music. Last year the nominal entry fee Ventura would have covered free concerts by such aging stars as Styx, Melissa Etheridge, and Tommy James and the Shondells. But not this year.

This summer, there’s no rides.

No farm animals. No horticultural displays. No exhibits. No silly stuff for sale in the demonstration hall that breaks about 24 hours after the fair closes. And no candy apples or corn dogs or powdered sugar funnel cake to give you a tummy ache on the way home. In fact, due to COVID-19 precautions, you can’t even get into the fairgrounds, at least not on foot.

Instead, you drive right into the parking lot ‘round the back, hold your pre-printed tickets up for electronic scanning through the car window as another in a series of Personal Protective Equipment-wearing attendants directs you through traffic cones back toward the entrance. There’s an eerie feeling as you drive past Anacapa and San Miguel halls that would usually be bustling with activity but are strangely dark, the route almost cruelly taunting and torturing us with what we’re missing.

But then you emerge at the main entry gate into the big parking lot and there it is: a huge raised stage with full lighting rigs, with video screens on three sides glowing gloriously in digital HiDef, a little bit of Vegas by the sea. Another mask wearing staffer uses flashlights to guide you to your own personal spot on the pavement facing the stage, and nods when you’ve hit the mark, then

moves off to the next person without a discernible expression. Such is the state of concerts in the COVID-crashed summer 2020.

Yet you find yourself incredibly grateful.

Because this is the first live show you’ve been able to attend since the coronavirus pandemic pushed its way onto our shores and shut down everything. The only other alternative is to watch stuff on YouTube or Facebook Live or, heaven help us, lag-plagued Zoom.

So you gleefully tune the radio to 89.7 FM to marvel as the sound floods the car. And there they are, the four members of the original cast of Forever Plaid, together on stage for the first time to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Off-Broadway sensation. The show is the third of five created for this stage by the Rubicon Theatre in Ventura in a series called Rubicon Goes Retro DriveIn Concert, put together both to keep connection to live theater happening locally in a way that follows safedistancing protocols for COVID and raises funds to help the company survive the shutdown.

Theater royalty David Engel, Leo Daignault, Jason Graae, and Larry Raben are all veterans at this show. The fun-loving foursome are a little gray around the edges considering they’re supposed to be loveable high school nerds who dreamed of being like The Four Aces or The Four Lads but never got their big break because they died in a car crash on the way to their first professional gig. In the original show, they are summoned from the afterlife to bring a little heavenly harmony to a discordant world and to make the album they never got to make in life.

What we get here is a concert version, but it’s great fun, as the aging but spry actors not only deliver some of the biggest songs from the show and its sequels – “Three Coins in the Fountain,” “Love is a Many Splendored Thing,” “Sixteen Tons,” “Perfidia,” and many more – but also share stories between every number.

And there’s still plenty of corny jokes, many of them adapting to the current situation, referenced right after the first number as one of them grabs a tape measure to make sure the microphones are six feet apart before handing each singer a disinfecting wipe.

“We’re here tonight to sing songs that we haven’t sung in ages in front of any human being or vehicle,” one of them says. “It has been a dream of ours for decades to perform like this in the middle of this parking lot.”

The audience shows its approval by honking their car horns, or flashing the vehicles lights. Turning back to look at the scene, it’s hard to even fathom what it must be like from the stage to sing to only metal and glass instead of human faces, and once again I find myself marveling at the ingenuity of the idea to make this happen, and that it works so well.

It comes closer to an actual concert that you’d think, even though we can’t see the other people through their windshields. And there’s a pleasure in

seeing live theater from the comfort of your own car, where you can control the climate and adjust the volume at will.

Meanwhile, the Plaids are putting the finishing touches on the performance, winding down with a Broadway medley from Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, and Sweeney Todd, serving a preview for the final show of the season called Music of the Knights, which plays at the Fairgrounds September 7-9, with a much-anticipated three-night set from Jimmy Messina August 17-19, when the former Montecito resident will be joined by multiple guests every night, including longtime partner Kenny Loggins on August 19.

Get tickets and more online at www. rubicontheatre.org/rubicon-goesretro.

First Run

“One of these days” (. . . one day soon?) you may benefit from the story ideas and resources you’ll find here.

Is today the day?

Just Start.

Started in 2007

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ON ART

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by Margaret Landreau

In the last 18 years, Margaret Landreau has accumulated 13 years of serving on the Board of Directors of Santa Barbara County arts-related nonprofits and has worked as a freelance arts writer for 10 years. She creates her own art in her Carpinteria studio.

NOW OPEN: LOST & FOUND

H

ave you ever wanted to find your own treasure chest to fill with all your very own little treasures? Susan Ochoa has created a trove of such boxes.

She offers them for sale in the new coffee bar and gift shop, Lost & Found, that she has just opened with her sister, Patti Boyd, on Linden Avenue in downtown Carpinteria. Ochoa describes her artwork as “Fantasy Pieces” sharing that some almost create themselves, telling her how to make the pieces fit together.

She starts with a base that is often a cigar box, vintage or “found” box.

Some are petite boxes, some larger chests. She will build her artwork on the inside, outside, and even bottom of the boxes, decorating them with a variety

of shells and materials she collects while beachcombing. Ochoa combs thrift stores and yard sales searching for components to use in her artwork.

As she created more of these treasures, people began gifting her bags of shells and objects for her designs. Each box will take days to create, working on one side at a time while the other sides dry.

“I don’t think there is anything more beautiful than what nature provides us,” Ochoa said. “I was inspired at a young age by sailors’ Valentine’s that were created by men on long sea voyages, often for their wives and loved ones.” Using pictographs put together with shells and related objects, the very old ones are prized collectibles and considered to be historical documents of their time. Ochoa has created wall hangings with a variety of media including macramé, starfish, and shells. She enjoys creating angel wings, decorated with shells, and a variety of hair combs, clips, and picks with these materials. You can find all of these and

more in the new coffee bar.

“The local support has been astonishing,” Ochoa said. She and her sister moved to Carpinteria to be close to their late mother and fell in love with the town. Opening a coffee bar was something that just felt right to them.

Their goal is to offer great coffee at $2 a cup, feature beautiful artwork on the walls, and to create a gathering place for locals to come see their friends or meet new people. She hopes they will be inspired by the artwork and find decorations for their homes, and gifts for their friends and loved ones. Ochoa hopes to add live music in the evenings and feels Carpinteria really didn’t have a venue like this until now.

Ochoa invites you to visit Lost & Found at 905 Linden Avenue in Carpinteria Wednesday-Sunday or contact her at (805) 318-9009, at lostandfoundcarpinteria@gmail.com Instagram @lostandfoundcarpinteria.

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I Heart SB

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By Elizabeth Rose Since 2015, I Heart SB has followed Elizabeth Rose through dating in Santa Barbara and falling in love, a long-distance relationship, living on a 34’ sailboat then sailing from Washington to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. The couple is now engaged, back on dry land, living in an Airstream in Carpinteria. Comments welcome at ihearterose@ gmail.com. For more stories, visit www.ihearterose.com.

PROTESTING SOLO

T

he day after the racial justice protest in Carpinteria, I protested in Montecito.

I didn’t know if others would be out there, holding signs or walking the streets, but I wanted to keep the conversation going. Primarily, in a very affluent community who, generally speaking, live in Montecito to “get away from it all.”

For me, the protest was a way to support my friends in the Black community, speak up for social justice, and take the town’s temperature. Sure, it isn’t L.A. or Atlanta where massive protests raged for days, but I’m a woman who planned to stand alone with a sign that could trigger people. As silly as it sounds, I wondered whether strangers would get overtly vocal or even physical.

That morning, I changed out of a tie-dye top and paisley pants, my usual garb as a writer living in an Airstream, for something more Montecito. I wanted to dress for my audience, which, to me meant a conservative floral sundress and a straw hat with a black ribbon around the brim. Before I left, I grabbed my poster (“Racism is a Pandemic, too”), then headed out the door.

As I pulled off the Coast Village Road exit to the five-way intersection, there were no protestors in sight. So, I surveyed each corner to see which would allow the best view of my sign. The intersection felt too spread out to be noticed, so I kept driving.

After looping the roundabout near the Montecito Country Mart, I circled back to the three-way stop across from the Honor Bar. The busy intersection is deeper into town, I thought, and more easily seen by passersby.

My heart pounded as I parked a block up from the corner where I’d stand, so I put my earbuds in and played Jack Johnson to calm my nerves. With the poster tucked under my arm and my mask secured to my face, I looked like a typical Montecitan enjoying a Sunday stroll. But a minute later, I stepped to the curb and unrolled my hidden agenda.

It’s hard to explain what it is like to stand alone for what you believe in. As a military kid, I grew up honoring the flag and all those who have died for our freedom. The First Amendment is something many men and women still fight for. And thankfully so, it protects freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition is the foundation of my writing career. Although our country has deep issues to mend, I have never felt more proud and more American than I did at that moment. But as I drifted out my daydream and back to reality, panic set in.

I noticed people sitting at the Honor Bar’s patio tables stretching their necks to read my sign, someone snapping a picture, and drivers slowing in front to read.

Finally, after several long minutes, the first honk came, followed by a fist in the air.

Others rolled down windows and lifted peace signs to the sky. Even the highway patrol drove by to smile and wave. I choked up a little as strangers showed solidarity, sort of the validation I needed.

But the First Amendment came back to bite 4135 me when anState older man St. in a red MINI Cooper threw his arms up in disgust, like I ruined his perfect Sunday.

805-967-8282 Another man about my age yelled out, “All Lives Matter!” And a woman, who looked like an elementary school teacher, rolled down her window to cackle and mock me. As I began to feel bullied in a position I rightfully put myself in, a big white Sprinter van honked in support, startling the laughing woman who then quickly sped away. In the 45 minutes I stood there, only three people outwardly disagreed with my presence, half the people responded positively, and the other half pretended I didn’t exist.

I learned we have to keep asking ourselves the hard questions: Why does racism happen, and why do we allow it? What mental work do we have to do to say what’s in our hearts? It’s moments like these – whether reading to educated ourselves, talking with friends and family, or holding a sign on a street corner – that shows our moral courage and determines who we are. Let’s continue the conversation: email me at ihearterose@gmail.com. Let this column be a safe space where we can talk. No matter what you believe, we can learn from one another. All are welcome here.

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...continued from p.10

Chris Martin of Martin Guitars holding an 1860s Martin donated by de la Guerra family, refurbished by Chris Jensen

sense. Chris began fitfully moving in the other direction.

PENCIL, PAPER, AND DESTINY “I looked up the ladder and the higher you got the more boring it got,” Chris says. “You know, two guys smoking behind their desks with a bottle of scotch. It just didn’t look good.” One night Chris was with a group of friends watching a Super-8 film he’d made of a recent canoe trip. For reasons known only to the fates, clarity came like a thunderclap. “In the middle of watching this movie I said, ‘Hey! Heeey!’” Heads turned. “Can I have a pencil and piece of paper?!’ And I went into the next room and I wrote down every step I needed to take to leave the Title Company and open up a music store in Santa Barbara.

A list this long.” He’d earlier visited a friend who’d moved to Santa Barbara, and had been smitten – as sometimes happens.

LUTHIER AND LUTHIER Chris had all but completed his mad slide along the Title Insurance/T Rex continuum. He quit corporate and divested in earnest. “I sold my Jaguar, I sold my Porsche, I sold my Triumph motorcycle,” he says. “I sold my Beaulieu Super-8 camera, and I took all the money out of my retirement account. I bought a fully set-up camper van.” Chris’s transfiguration from establishment sentry to bohemian scene maker was afoot. His landlord in L.A., whom Chris had long since befriended, also worked opening California storefronts for a company that sold wine-making supplies. “He helped me find this place,” Chris says. “It had been a shop called AstroNut, an astrology place.”

More stars aligning. “The space was two hundred twenty-five dollars a month.

Seemed like a lot then.” He bought a redwood display counter from Mike’s Furniture and Fixtures Warehouse in L.A. and that’s the one in the front of the store today. How did he even know how to start? Chris looks at me with an amused expression. “You gotta have

SB Bowl – Chris, Melissa Etheridge, anonymous winner of an Ovation guitar drawing, KTYD Radio DJ, and an Ovation Guitar rep in the ‘80s

Country/bluegrass star Doc Watson with Rick Foster, a Jensen Music instructor circa 1980s

Carlos Clavaria, Little Jimmy Dickens, Chris, and Porter Wagoner at the Grand Old Opry in Nashville, Tennessee on Jensen’s first wedding anniversary, 1994

Jensen’s brick column of fame

a counter, you gotta have a display of the merchandise, and you gotta have a phone. I dove in.”

THE LONG STRANGE TRIP Chris chose wisely, fleeing a wellheeled suit-and-tie gig in L.A. for the vagaries of taut strings, black leather vests, and the danceable pulmonary thump of a life given over to music. He’s seen all kinds of people come through

the shop, many of whom have signed his in-store Brick Column of Fame just to show they were there – from Burning Spear to John Sebastian to dynastic guitar scion Chris Martin IV. How many hangouts can boast that range?

Chris has rubbed shoulders with Chet Atkins, shot the breeze with bluegrass legend Doc Watson, and hobnobbed backstage at the Grand Ole Opry with Little Jimmy Dickens and Porter Wagoner. The encounter with Wagoner took place on his first wedding anniversary.

“I met her here in the store, by the way,” Chris had said earlier of his wife.

“She bought a guitar first. She plays beautiful piano. We had coffee.” The guy still sounds bashful talking about her.

“She loves all the guys who work here and the bands and everything,” Chris says. “She loves music! She’s been my working partner for over thirty years.”

For ten years as fiddler, lead singer, and guitar player, Chris fronted the eponymous Chris Jensen Country Band

– one of the gigs was a Republic Pictures reunion – the classic Westerns and Serials studio shuttered in 1967 that birthed Gene Autry, John Wayne, and Roy Rogers. There’s a picture from the gig on the Jensen Guitar and Music Co. wall.

Chris is standing next to Roy’s wife Dale Evans; as American an icon as ever sang “Happy Trails” by the peaceable glow of a prairie campfire. In the pic Jensen is grinning like the happiest former Title Insurance turncoat ever. Has he looked back? Nope. Grateful? Yep. “If you’ve ever stayed in the theater after a major movie is over and the credits start to roll? That’s my movie,” says Chris. “Family, friends, employees, instructors, customers, musicians, bands, live music venues, City of Santa Barbara, tourists, agents, schools, luthiers, suppliers, media, shippers, lenders, landlords, cleaning ladies and more. The list is endless. I am so grateful to everyone.” He pauses. “You know what else? Since opening, I’ve never had a day I dreaded going to work.”

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