These days, it seems all my friends are gettings Missed Connections™. But never me. Never me. Is it some sort of character flaw, Rold Gold Pretzels? Is it because I didn’t buy mushrooms off of that guy who offered them to me from his moving bicycle tonight? Do I lack that “joie de vivre” that inspires greater men to lie curled around their porcelain thrones until the first rays of dawn grant sweet, sweet oblivion? Could it simply be because I spend my Friday nights looking at bookshelves on Craigslist, alpha-testing Firefox plugins and drinking the Raynal V.S.O.P. that I purchased for $9.99 at Trader Joe’s to “cook with”? Do the women of today have something against rhetorical questions, Rold Gold Pretzels? Well, here’s a Missed Connection™ for you:

Mojitos on the moon – m4w

You: A tall, beautiful blonde in a long green coat that probably came from Urban Outfitters but could have been military surplus if you ignore the egregious violation of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”

Me: The dude who was mocking (to no one in particular) the 15-minute Girls Gone Wild infomercial(?!) on TV to cover the fact that I was paying it rather too much attention.

I would have struck up a conversation, but you were too busy showing off your engagement ring.

Yes, Rold Gold Pretzels, it was exactly like that one Alanis Morissette song “Ironic”, except that Alanis didn’t want to write about the part where if she walked into the Asti I would burn her with my cigarette.

In conclusion, please send me at least 1 but no more than 3 women who are too neurotic or socially inept to communicate except via anonymous “year 3000 bullshit” classified-ad-type web sites. Plus one box of your assorted pretzels.

Best Regards,
Ethan James

P.S. Let’s all send our very warmest Vitamin C4 Spring Break Wishes to Hiram Coffee, who is serving as roadie for The Devil Makes Three until late this month. Even though he is a jerk for leaving us and I need his help for all of my “real” “articles”. Last I heard, he was in Vegas and had just ridden a mechanical bull. He may or may not have soiled himself. I wasn’t entirely clear on that last bit, as it’s difficult to convey tongue-in-cheekedness via SMS without emoticons.

P.P.S. FUCK emoticons.

Everyone knows about the Boardwalk (evil), the UC (unpopular) and the semi-circular ledge at the north end of Pacific where you can whisper into one end and your buddy on the other end can hear you just as if you were talking into his ear (awesome). This post is not about those hotspots.

Raise your hand if you know anything about Santa Cruz Biotechnology, Inc. Well, let me educate you. They are world leaders in deriving well-characterized transfected lysates. They offer over 2,500 lysates of human gene specific transfected 293T cells, and over 1,700 mouse gene specific transfected cells. For sale. On the internet. To any terrorist or communist with a credit card. I may not know what a transfected lysate is, but I know a couple other words that end with “fected”. Well, actually just one. Is it too early to presume that Santa Cruz Biotechnology, Inc. is blinded by hubris and greed, that their “transfected lysates” will spread and mutate, hastening the zombie apocalypse and bringing humanity to its knees? Only time will tell, but as far as snap judgments go I think that’s a pretty sound one. Fuck you, Santa Cruz Biotech.

For further examples of trespass against God, we need look no further than our town’s own history. I think everyone kind of assumed that Santa Cruz was founded by a missionary traveling up the coast looking for a chill spot to crash, and this is true. In 1774, Father Palou happened upon this fertile crescent north of the Monterey Bay and decided that it would support a large and prosperous mission. In 1791 he got around to erecting a cross and proclaiming “Let’s do this”, which by modern beach town standards is some pretty good turnaround time. The mission was built shortly thereafter.

That very winter, Mission Santa Cruz was flooded. The padres decided it might be a good idea to build it on a hill this time around. That was probably a good call, as it allowed the mission to enjoy almost six years of prosperity. Well, apart from some mild-to-moderate fire damage in 1793, most likely caused by the Quiroste indians in the area. It would appear that there was some sort of philosophical disagreement between the padres and the natives regarding work and education. Mainly regarding how much free labor the Quiroste were expected to provide (some thought “none”, others, “a lot”) and whether or not the padres should be allowed to discipline the natives with metal-barbed whips when they failed to memorize the Bible quickly enough. More on that later.

That brings us to 1797, when California Governor Diego de Borica entrusted some land to Miguel de la Grúa Talamanca y Branciforte in the interest of capitalizing on some sweet beach-front real estate. The brochures promised “neat, white houses”, farm tools, clothing and a substantial paycheck to any colonists who came to till the fertile soil along the San Lorenzo. Surprisingly enough, these claims turned out to be false. Even more surprisingly, the only people who got duped were a bunch of convicts from Guadalajara, sent here by the powers that be. This is the first documented example of another town sending its degenerates and undesirables to Santa Cruz, but certainly not the last.

These settlers were pretty mad when they showed up and there was nowhere for them to live and nothing for them to eat. They soon settled into their routine, kooking the Quiroste locals and not really farming much of anything. They did contribute one thing to their community – they constructed a racetrack so they would have somewhere to blow the money they were getting from the government. Let’s save all questions and discussion for the end, please.

In 1802, the Spanish crown realized what was going on and stopped sending welfare checks. Much to the relief of the few padres who could bear to stick around and watch the grisly social experiment unfold, many of the Branciforte settlers decided to try their luck over the hill at the Pueblo of San Jose, which I am told was also not doing so hot. Now that they were no longer being hit up for cigarettes and change every time they turned around, the residents of the mission were able to focus on their real passion: beating the natives.

By 1812 what Quiroste remained were getting pretty tired of the whole situation. They did what any of us would wish to do under the circumstances. They kidnapped Father Andres Quintana, an especially metal-whip-happy motherfucker, and beat him to death. To drive the point home, during the beating they smashed the living hell out of his genitals. Let this be a lesson to anyone considering fucking with some indigenous people. The possibility that your nuts will be smashed is very real. There is historical precedent. I back it.

I imagine this kind of took the wind out of the other padres’ sails, which would explain the events of 1818. When Argentine corsair Hippolyte de Bouchard showed up on the scene – just, you know, pirating around – the residents of Mission Santa Cruz hightailed it to Soledad for the duration. They asked (very nicely, I expect) the remaining residents of Villa de Branciforte to safeguard their valuables while they were in hiding. The Branciforteans decided that the best way to safeguard the padres’ belongings would be to, naturally, steal them all. And destroy anything they couldn’t carry. It makes sense. This way, de Bouchard wouldn’t get any of it, unless one of Branciforteans traded something to him for crack.

The padres did return, but you could tell their hearts were no longer in it. I doubt they even cared very much when the land decided that it had had its fun and destroyed their mission in a series of earthquakes throughout the 1840s and 1850s. The mission that stands next to the Holy Cross Church above downtown is, in fact, a half-size replica financed by Gladys Sullivan Doyle in 1931.

I hope this has been an informative little trip into our town’s past. The major lessons we should all take from this include: don’t fuck with the locals (if you value your balls), don’t let outside mayors send their troublemakers here, and above all, let’s keep Santa Cruz godless.

Brought to you by the Vitamin C4 Institute for Revisionist History

More like The Awesome! Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get down to business. I recognized at least a couple of these guys from Harry & The Hitmen, the most technically accomplished and interesting Santa Cruz jam band that I never really cared for. I’ve never been a jam band kind of guy, I’m more interested in what would it would sound like if you tried to play the Fibonacci sequence on a Guitar Hero controller, but that’s my personal struggle. In fact, why am I even writing about music?!?

The Terrible! carries over a lot of the, well, the cred from H&TH, the precision and the fluidity and the soul, and then makes it more… apocalyptic. It’s still precise but it’s extremely discordant at the same time, with a healthy smattering of epic guitar wheedling over a nice solid doom-y bass line. I think it’s how the Pixies would sound if they all at the same time discovered that their families had been murdered. It’s the kind of music I would want to be listening to on an elevator on the way to the 88th floor of an office building to face off with my arch-nemesis who has made a name for himself in the world of organized crime and is also quite good with throwing knives. I back it.

Ethan James

My first thought when Nan Miller started singing was “Oh my God! That guy has a setting on his microphone that makes him sound like M. Ward!” It was just one of those little half-egg-shaped deals, but I thought what with technology being what it is and all that I just might have stumbled onto something ground-breaking. I still think that would be a good idea (patent pending, motherfuckers) but once the song was over and he paused to say something cute back to the giggling audience sitting cross-legged in a semi-circle around him, I realized that it was just a normal mike. There was a little reverb on it or whatever, but it was really all his doing.

This turn of events inspired dueling emotions. On the one hand, I was excited that his voice really is that silky and ethereal and nuanced. On the other, I was pretty bummed because my dreams of sounding like M. Ward are apparently much farther away than a special order at The Starving Musician. Nan went on to give us several more soulful, heart-string-intensive ballads in addition to a very nice Leonard Cohen cover that I didn’t recognize. Make yourselves easier to find on Myspace, people, all of this arduous fact-finding has delayed my trip to Safeway too long already. I found myself quite entranced, and the crowd gobbled it right up. They did, however, call out several songs by name, not to mention some anecdote from Nan’s past, so I’m going to go ahead and file them under “biased”.

In summation, I can’t be 100% sure who Nan Miller looks to for influence, once again because of the no Myspace thing, but I’d wager we’re looking at a roster of folk-rock legends and iconic singer/songwriters like Cohen and Dylan and all the usual suspects. Presupposing this, I’d say he’s done a very studious and successful job of emulating these heroes. That’s both a compliment and a criticism in a sense, but it’s a lot more of the former.

Ethan James