Posts for Locals
Posted by paulrivas on: January 16 2009
First, special thanks to the Daily Sound for publishing Nick's story before anyone else in town! The following is the contents of a letter I've just sent to the SB Independent, following yesterday's publication of Nick's mother's explanation of his heartbreaking situation, in the hope that it'll be in the paper next Thursday.
***
I met Nick more than 10 years ago, when I was a camp counselor at the City of Santa Barbara's free summer recreation program at McKinley School. Nick and his younger brother Pat were just two more kids whose hardworking parents probably had nowhere else to send them. My coworkers and I supervised 100 kids a day, every summer, for several years. There must have been thousands.
I remember a great many of them for various reasons, but there are an exceptional few who still stand out. We counselors fought with each other to get these kids in our groups. These were the kids we'd never have to worry about. They wouldn't practice wresting moves on anyone at the swimming pool, they wouldn't torture sand crabs, and if there was a ball left at the far end of the playground, they wouldn't hesitate to run and get it. If they had younger siblings, we wouldn't have to worry about them, either, because the big brother or sister was so great. In short, these kids made our job easier. Nick Cavalier was one of these.
Active, friendly and even-tempered, Nick was a camp counselor's dream. Blessed with a common sense and self-awareness that seem so rare these days, Nick was one of those kids who made me love my job. He was also one of only a handful of participants in our program over the years who inspired such confidence in the staff that he was eventually made a counselor himself. He was that great.
I've run into Nick often since our summer recreation days, although lately I'd wondered where he'd been. Last week, I learned of his tragic situation. While I was sick with sorrow for him and his family, I was not a bit surprised to read that he had been attacked while coming to the aid of a friend. Nobody who knew Nick could have expected him to have acted any differently.
I encourage anyone who has met Nick and been touched by his exceptional nature - or anyone who has simply heard his story and found it impossible not to want to help - to contribute to the Nicholas Cavalier Rehabilitation Fund at any Santa Barbara Bank & Trust branch.
***
Read the Daily Sound article:
http://www.thedailysound.com/010609cavalier
Watch the KEYT video:
http://www.keyt.com/news/local/37286054.html?video=YHI&t=a
Read what Nick's mom wrote in the SB Independent:
http://www.independent.com/news/2009/jan/15/story-nicholas-cavaliers-brain-injury/
***
UPDATE: Please joins us for evening of food, drink, music and prizes, all in support of our friend and young local hero Nick Cavalier.
Thursday, February 5, 5-8pm at Ruby's Cafe, 734 State Street.
Raffle, Silent Auction and free entertainment!
Music by Tripdavon.
Prizes sponsored by:
Channel Islands Surfboards
Powell Skateboards
Segway of Santa Barbara
SkateOne Skateboards
Surf-n-Wear's Beach House
Z Brand
Kalyra Winery
and MANY MORE to come!!!
Posted by paulrivas on: February 20 2009
Tomorrow night at 9pm all card-carrying Santa Barbara and Goleta locs will have a rare opportunity to see one of their favorites perform. SB/Goleta bros Los Vikings XIII are holding their album release party at Roundin' Third, way out at 7398 Calle Real between Glen Annie and Winchester Canyon. The show will likely consist of two one-hour sets.
Los Vikings XIII is the country collaboration between guitarist/vocalist Eric Dyrenforth (San Marcos '94) and drummer Brian LeBlanc (Santa Barbara '96). Dyrenforth's recent projects include jazz standards as Don Francisco de Goleta and "unsophisticated jazz" with his band The Double Zeros. LeBlanc is the well known leader of local thrash heroes Civil Unrest. Los Vikings XIII plays original songs as well as American folk classics like "Wreck of the Old 97".
The Santa Barbara Man About Goleta has learned from Strickley Lokes, Esq. that the album is "some seriously essential shit, a bona fide piece of Santa Barbara music history that the true SB loc will feel spiritually moved to add to her or his collection, so bring cash, motherfuckers." Not wanting to give too much away before the big night, Lokes also said the album itself is part music and part art piece.
While Los Vikings XIII does not expressly forbid transplants and stus from attending, the hardest of their hard core fans have been known to react viscerally to gentrifiers. The Santa Barbara Man About Goleta implores anyone who did not attend high school locally to employ the phrase "I'm down with Foothill School" in the event of a kerfuffle.
Posted by paulrivas on: January 08 2009
8:25 - Arrive at work for the first day of winter quarter. Everybody who didn't get her or his shit together over the holiday break - which is basically everybody - will be scrambling trying to get a clue before the crucial deadlines come later this month. It will be the busiest workday of the school year thus far.
8:26 - Begin by answering the emails that have piled up during two weeks off. Drop-in hours aren't until 1:30, there's the morning to get caught up. A few folks will finagle their way in though, and it'll be easier to just answer their questions now. Drop-in hours are
always a zoo.
12:00 - Lunchtime basketball. The game is sloppy and crowded after we've all been at home getting fat over winter vacation.
12:20 - Al Cerda hammers me on a drive to the basket.
12:40 - Al Cerda hammers me on another drive to the basket, this time with a forearm to the nose, and 1! Good thing he only weighs 150 pounds.
12:41 - Try and walk it off but man it hurts.
12:42 - Paul Fleischauer takes a look and assures me my nose is still straight. He and my dad have been playing in this game together for eons, and I put a lot of stock in what he
says. I went to school with one of his kids.
12:43 - We play on. Warmed up and stretched out now, and playing well. My team is on its way to winning our second game to 15 buckets.
12:55 - Steal the ball from a player not worth naming, tapping it to Matt Hurst. Get it back on a breakaway and lay it in, slapping the glass backboard on the way up at a height that says, "I'm going to run circles around everybody for the next two weeks until they work off their holiday sloth."
12:56 - Hustle off the court to the showers, careful not to touch my face hard enough to know just how bad it hurts.
1:10 - Back at work, there's already a line. Might as well start now.
4:35 - The last of the drop-ins goes away happy. Fifteen people came through my office, one after the other. No time to think about anything. Surely one of them would have said something if the guy giving them all the answers' nose wasn't on straight. Surely one of my dozen co-workers would have noticed if my nose wasn't where it should have been, you know, in relation to the rest of my face.
5:35 - Walking out the door, call my good friend Tommy B. Burgher III. Like a lot of SB locs, he lives with his parents. Rivas Cultural Services lives with his girlfriend... and her parents. Go hang out at Tommy's for a while.
6:45 - Relaxed now, allowing myself to consider my face. Decide it hurts. Something isn't right.
6:46 - Go to the bathroom to have a good look. My shit's crooked. This is a nose that would never be confused for straight. How is it that no one said anything?
6:47 - It's straighter now, but good golly, what a sound, like the tiniest baby bird falling from its nest and crunching every bone in its body upon impact with the sidewalk far below.
6:48 - Now it hurts for real. Get some ice from the Burgher family fridge.
6:55 - Tom B. Burgher Jr. comes home to one of his son's idiot friends sitting on his couch with an ice pack on his nose. Ever serious, he asks if the young man needs medical attention.
7:05 - Pain is getting worse, spreading throughout the face and forehead. Decide to drive home and get out of these nice people's nice house.
7:27 - Walk in and tell Clare, "Chuli, me rompieron la nariz."
7:30 - Clare and father decide a trip to the ER is in order. Evidently they ‘don't want to be responsible for any delayed after-effects,' like Julianne Moore in The Big Lebowski.
7:50 - Arrive at Goleta Valley Hospital ER, clothes changed and book in hand, ready to wait my turn. Immediately ahead of me in line are a guy who burned his lower leg so badly in a campfire that the his sweatpants are stained the color of rotted pus, and a boy with Down Syndrome who's been vomiting. Ahead of them is an enormous man who somehow tripped on a basketball and broke his ankle. Can't picture him anywhere near a basketball.
8:20 - Clare explains to the boy's stepmother that my injury probably isn't a big deal, but better safe than sorry.
8:21 - "You only have one face," the woman says in earnest agreement.
8:45 - ER reception guy finally calls me back to take my info. He broke his nose five times before getting it surgically straightened. "How much pain are you experiencing, right now, on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being none and 10 being unbearable."
8:46 - Not in pain very often, and don't know how to answer. "2." There goes my chance to score some goofballs. He sends me back to the waiting room.
9:15 - Called into the exam room to wait some more.
9:30 - ER doctor comes in, followed by scribe. Without warning, he manhandles me. If it wasn't broken before, it surely is now. But there's no vomit-inducing sound this time, that's already out of the way. He says the amateur straightening job mostly did the trick, but there's just one more thing...
9:31 - Entire body goes rigid, as if electrocuted, or very much like Keanu in The Matrix when they first plug that jack into the back of his neck. There's two inches of extra-long Q-tip up my nose. How much farther to the brain? He's pushing on one of the bones way up there, hard enough to lift me out of the chair. This can't be regulation. He says it is. There's a bone that's crooked and he has to bend it back into place.
9:35 - "You've broken your nose before." If he says so. Remember my last ugly basketball injury, a big corn-fed white boy's elbow to my nose that made me bleed like crazy and left me woozy for hours.
9:36 - "There's not much we can do. We don't X-Ray broken noses any more because we decided we were just taking pictures of broken bones. I may have a splint around here..."
9:43 - Doctor never comes back. Reception guy says to call an ENT doctor when the swelling goes down in four or five days, to make sure everything is more or less where it should be. If it's still crooked, the ENT can straighten it.
9:44 - "NASAL FRACTURE CONFIRMED," the report says.
Posted by paulrivas on: November 20 2008
First, my profuse apologies for not having kept you the readership current on developments at Rivas Cultural Services, where we've been held up in muck for the last couple weeks somewhere between Too Busy to Write and Outright Sloth.
Our Lompoc desk is reporting that my cousin Bonnie and her boyfriend Bugsy just had a baby boy, Bo. Details pending confirmation at Thanksgiving. Our Catastrophe desk is reporting that my aunt Marsha and uncle Keith's house was one of two that didn't burn on their part of Conejo Road. Everyone from Santa Barbara must know 10-20 households who lost everything. Our Vice desk is reporting that Club Social San Antonio hosted a 19% charity poker tournament last Friday. Nineteen dudes and one chick paid $40 to get after prizes of $450, $150 and $50. $150 more went to a rogue student group whose name no one asked. White Power for Obama, Sodomites for Prop 8 and Level 5 Vegans for Dolphin Slaughter are all penciled in for future charity action.
I've heard two interesting things about the fire: 1) Elizabeth Robinson on 91.9 KCSB said we should realize that those who worked in the homes that burned are now out of a job, and 2) the president of Dyrenforth Acquisitions said that the fire was the best thing that could have happened to the economy in Santa Barbara, and that all the tradesmen will now have all the work they want for the next five years. It's tough to argue with either, I think. Housecleaners are unlikely to be eligible for unemployment benefits, and there are now probably close to 500 structures (my estimate of 250 "homes" times one legal and one illegal structure per home) that need to be rebuilt bigger and better than ever. Remember what happened on Sherwood after the Painted Cave fire? A bunch of broke-ass shacks burned and were replaced by castles. I wonder if this will happen on Conejo, where there were more than a few places that had seen better days.
Next, a review of the epic Café Tacuba show at the Ventura Theatre theater in Ventura.
Rivas Cultural Services
Santa Barbara - Mexico City - Buenos Aires
Posted by paulrivas on: November 03 2008
There were 40,000 people in IV this weekend, yet only 200 citations, 41 of which did not even lead to arrest. The wet weather certainly had something to do with the mellower nature of the weekend, but 200 seems like an awfully low number of law breakers given a crowd of 40,000 crammed in a space that is woefully overcrowded at 10,000. Jam-packed, frustrating weather, all that booze and nowhere to run around drunk?
I was initially surprised that the high number of arrests I'd predicted hadn't materialized. Upon further reflection, however, Rivas Cultural Services believes this is just another example of what the Santa Barbara Man About Goleta observed at the Radiohead show: that Americans spend their lives trying not to get sued. At Radiohead, no one danced, and no one violated anyone else's 3.5 inches of buffer air. People had paid hundreds for those tickets, and they weren't about to waste them by getting dragged out by security for spilling beer on someone's $400 shoes. The pit at the Radiohead show had the feel of several hundred fans of staying out of court having a great time, and my guess is that Isla Vista this Halloween had the feel of tens of thousands wondering where the wild things were.
Rivas Cultural Services remembers the Mad Max state of things in Isla Vista during the Halloweens of the 1980s, and is astonished that so many people still bother to drive here for a party that has fizzled from riot to junior high school dance. Maybe its harmlessness these days is exactly what makes it so appealing to a generation that was born soft. Driving away from the mass gathering Friday afternoon, I saw more than one group of young people lurking around the Super 8, looking for some clue that something interesting would happen to them that night. Who comes to IV to party and stays at the downtown Goleta Jiffy Lube?! Soft kids who drive BMWs leased by their parents and are afraid of being sued by other rich kids if they should happen to accidentally pass out and pee on someone else's couch, that's who! Next year, let's hope they save the earth the gasoline, stay in Orange County and watch Saw VIII.
Posted by paulrivas on: October 24 2008
Rivas Cultural Services hit up the Orchid Bowl last Saturday night for a beer with the famous Kevin Witherell. We met his paramedic girlfriend and her paramedic colleague at the bar, drank beer and ate appetizers. It was the first time I'd ever been to Zodo's. I haven't been bowling in ages, but in high school it was a semi-regular part of my program. I always preferred San Marcos Bowl though. They had these punch cards that would allow you to bowl 50 games for $10. No wonder they went out of business. Anthony Garibay, Dan Kilgore, Chris Ducale and I also used to love to play some ruthless games of air hockey there.
So while sitting there at the Zodo's bar for the first time, I got a tap on the shoulder. At the other end was Brian Hiefield, who has apparently parlayed his misspent youth as a SimCity addict and geography major into a city planning job with Goleta City of Goleta. With him was my buddy since third grade at Foothill School, Matt Graham, and his fiancee Katie Golus, the Matt Graham and Katie Golus that I understood, via Facebook, to be in Boston! But they're not in Boston, not even a little bit! They live on Paradise Road! These are people I've known at least since La Colina Junior High. Brian's been in Santa Barbara ever since, and Matt and Katie have been back in town a few months now, but I haven't any of them in almost 10 years. I ride my bike to work right past the Goleta City of Goleta offices two or three mornings a week, yet have still never seen Brian.
There are probably 20 people that fit in this category whose faces I've only seen on Facebook, and even then only in the last few months: folks who've been here ever since high school but apparently haven't been hanging out where I've been hanging out. We all agree it's surprising that we've never run into each other despite none of us having been in hiding. I wonder how many of them I would have enjoyed hearing from all these years, and how many of them I have nothing in common with?
Posted by paulrivas on: September 22 2008
Now that I'm living deeper in Goleta than I've ever lived in my 30 years in Santa Barbara, I've been frequenting my favorite Goleta joints more than usual and discovering new neighborhood favorites. I've been in the Mercury Lounge more times in the last month than I had previously since returning to Santa Barbara at Christmas.
Last Thursday, finding myself in downtown Goleta and needing a haircut, I make a bee-line for Goleta Barbers, which I had passed by on a previous trip to the Paperback Alley and identified as the perfect neighborhood barber shop. (Rivas Cultural Services refers to the area around Hollister Avenue between Kellogg and Fairview as "Downtown Goleta", not "Old Town Goleta".) Goleta Barbers is not Fairview Barbers. Fairview Barbers was a white man's barber shop in the Fairview shopping center. Goleta Barbers is a brown man's barber shop on Hollister, a few doors up from the Paperback Alley.
It was 5:15 when I walked in and saw the sign saying the place closed at 6:00. Both barbers were busy and there were at least two guys waiting for haircuts, but I decided to take a chance on the barbers not wanting to turn down last-minute customers, and sat down. One of the guys waiting - the only white guy in the place - turned out to be none other than Jeremy Anderson, my third grade classmate. Each of us was genuinely glad to see the other, despite the fact that we probably only ever really exchanged words on a few occasions throughout elementary, junior high and high school. When Jeremy got off the chair, he extracted some well crumpled bills from his the right front pocket of his blue Dickies, turned to the barber, and said, "Thanks for cutting my hair, homes."
The only guy who came in after me, and validated my already questionably late arrival, was Hector Guerrero, who is bros with Ray Lopez, who is my friend Bubba's sister Kara's husband. We hadn't seen each other in years either, and Goleta Barbers provided the perfect space for a catch-up conversation between two Santa Barbara locals who never really had much to do with each other due to being several years apart in age, despite being good friends of the famous Robison family.
In addition to the barbers and paying customers, there were also a few high school kids hanging out that afternoon. These guys seemed to be happy in their daily routine of passing a few free hours at the barber shop, chilling with their bros and occasionally hopping into a barber chair for a free touch-up during any breaks in the paid action. These guys all had shaved heads. They had shaved heads, and they were getting haircuts. This made me feel soft. My hair was longer than anyone's in the shop, as I knew it would remain even after my turn in the chair. (Hector's hair looked sillier than mine, but only because he'd insisted on maintaining a combing regimen that had proven to be incompatible with his current hairdo, grown-out as it was.) I imagined the others in the room classifying me as the least hard in the room, due to the length of my hair. I also assumed they were more curious about me than anything, being that I'd never been there before but walked in sure that I'd come to the right place. In my mind, I proved my worthiness as an honorable local customer by being a lifelong schoolmate of the only white guy in the room, and being a long-lost associate of the Mexican-American most in need of a haircut in the whole place. It was a very Rivas Cultural Services moment.
Rivas Cultural Services backs the Goleta Barbers. They're a friendly, accommodating bunch of barbers who obviously take tremendous pride in their trade, as well as tremendous pride in the role they play in the community.
Posted by paulrivas on: March 18 2009
Browsing at the Goleta Library the other day, your Santa Barbara Man About Goleta came across a DVD of Peril and perseverance: a history of disasters in Santa Barbara. The documentary was produced by the City of Santa Barbara for CityTV Channel 18, and promised, "fires, floods, earthquakes, landslides, toxic spills, and even tsunamis", not to mention wild stories by real-life old-timers and a little disaster preparedness on the side.
Ever wonder why Santa Barbara is in love with Spanish architecture? The answer's in the film! Every wonder how many gallons of water per person per day you should squirrel away in preparation for The Big One? The answer's one (1), and it's also in the film! Do you know Chris Zwicke? Well his wife Christy is the host of the documentary!
At the very least this is a worthwhile hour of locally produced infotainment that anyone who knows anyone who was bummed about our recent fires should check out. At its best, it's an important piece of the historical record, collecting local people's reactions to our area's history of natural disaster in a nicely watchable little hour.
"Peril and perseverance" is currently available, right now, at the Goleta and Montecito branches of the Santa Barbara Public Library. The Carpenteria, Downtown and Eastside branch copies are currently checked out, but you can reserve a copy online for 50 cents.
Posted by paulrivas on: March 23 2009
Cruising downtown Goleta last week, I happened into the antique store on Hollister. For sale in the display case immediately to the left of the front entrance is a copy of the 1966 local classic Goleta: The Good Land, by Walter Tompkins, in its original cellophane, for $175!
Would the Santa Barbara Man About Goleta shell out 2000 Mexican pesos for the bona fide piece of the local historical record? Or would he bid on the already-open $5.99 copy currently for sale on ebay? The answer, as regular readers will already have guessed, is none of the above. In lieu of paying anything at all, I went straight to the Goleta Library history section and checked the sucker out for three weeks, free of charge.
To show my unbridled enthusiasm for Goleta: The Good Land, which I'm only one third through yet, here are a few highlights through the 1870s:
1833 - the first baby born in Santa Barbara to American parents pops out.
1840s - Juan "Flaco" Brown, the Californian Paul Revere, covered the 630 miles from L.A. to Monterey on horseback in four (4) days to warn of an American attack on Mexican installations, a record Tompkins claims had never been equaled.
1859 - The only simoon ever recorded in North America hit Goleta, causing the temperature to rise to 133 degrees Fahrenheit and birds to drop dead in midair.
1862 - The Reverend Thomas Starr King, for whom the storied local nursery school of which the Santa Barbara Man About Goleta is a proud graduate is named, married Col. Hollister and wife Annie, for whom Glen Annie is named.
1860s - The first saloon is at Hollister and Fairview, causing this budding village to be known as Whiskey Flats, in contrast to the other budding village at Hollister and Patterson called Old Goleta, which was populated exclusively with abstainers.
And my favorite, from the 1870s - Ellwood Cooper, for whom all the many Ellwoods around town are named, was himself named after an English writer who read for the blind poet Milton. In a letter to a relative, Cooper advised:
"The people who have come here are rather above the average, and most have means. There are very few squatters. In fact, that class cannot get on here. This is no place for poor people, and I would discourage all such from coming."
Goleta has been economically out of reach of the lower classes since at least the 1870s! Talk about no nacos!
Posted by paulrivas on: March 26 2009
This Rivas Cultural Services acquisition was commissioned by the life artist Bubba Ray Robison, who intends to wear the hat once and sell it for $4000. The hat was purchased for $10, pins and all, from a "17% off" case at the antique store in downtown Goleta. The underside of the white felt is inscribed with the name "LUGO" in faded black magic marker.
Posted by paulrivas on: April 01 2009
If you missed the first half of this discussion, here it is.
The Santa Barbara Man About Goleta believes that the familiar old “Goleta – The Good Land” license plate frames were inspired by the title of this book. The title was selected from a great many submissions in a 1965 Santa Barbara/Goleta-wide contest to name the local history, which was commissioned by the Goleta Amvets. The phrase originally appeared in a Spaniard’s 18th century assessment of the Goleta Valley, which stated, “It is all a good land.”
Having finished the book over the weekend, your Santa Barbara-born Goleta blogger has spent this week telling UCSB stus how lucky they are to live in his town and regaling them with historical anecdotes gleaned from this historic work, such as:
1870s – San Francisco streets were paved with asphalt mined on the More ranch, owned by T. Wallace More, the Scotsman for whom More Mesa is named. More’s son-in-law, C.A. Storke (the father of the publisher), said, “the three greatest men who ever lived were Jesus Christ, Abraham Lincoln and T. Wallace More.”
1870s – So many Scots emigrated to Goleta that a ginormous “Scottish-American Picnic” was held every fourth of July in Tucker’s Grove, the oldest park in Goleta. This tradition ended when World War II broke out.
1890s – The Vieux Carré in New Orleans was paved with tar from a deep shaft mine located on the present site of the UCSB Drama/Dance building.
1890s – Yaple Avenue, where my classmate Jim VanBlaricum grew up, was the site of an experimental farming project where spineless cactus were grown for use as cattle feed.
1899 – The Naples viaduct (that train bridge on Dos Pueblos Ranch) was built in five days.
1900 – The population of Goleta was 500.
February 1942 – A submarine said to be Japanese sat off the Ellwood shore and for a full 40 minutes fired 29 shots at the Ellwood oil fields. All but a few of the shells were duds, and the attack caused a total of $500 damage. An hour later, a blackout was declared from Monterey to San Diego. Two hours after than, US planes finally showed up and dropped flares. And here Tompkins makes the point that given that Goleta’s defenses were withdrawn from the Marine base just one day before the attack, and that the alleged Japanese sub was sitting in plain sight and firing away without any reciprocity by American forces, the sub was more likely American than Japanese, and the apparent incompetence of the attack was intentional in order to stir up support for the war effort.
World War II – Bill Hollister keeps 300 Nazi prisoners of war on the Archie Edwards ranch beyond Dos Pueblos. The Nazis were put to work harvesting crops, and the old POW camp fences were still visible when Tompkins wrote the book.
1948 – The population of Goleta was 1500.
1952 – Tomás Ygnacio de Aquino, the last full-blooded Canaliño (Chumash) Indian of the 12,000 living in Goleta when the Spanish arrived in 1769, dies penniless in the hospital.
1962 – The General Plan for the Goleta Valley called for rapid transit on the existing train tracks or a monorail running parallel to Highway 101 in order to alleviate traffic.
That was 1962, and we still aren’t even close to having anything like that anywhere between L.A. and San Francisco!
That’s it for Goleta: The Good Land. The Santa Barbara Man About Goleta hopes you’ve enjoyed these historical bits, and gives the book his highest recommendation.
Rivas Cultural Services associate and Goleta hero Mike Fitzgerald, himself a descendant of the famous Sexton and Doty families mentioned several times in Goleta: The Good Land, recommends Fourteen at the Table, another Tompkins classic.
Posted by paulrivas on: April 15 2009
It is Rivas Cultural Services policy to avoid Isla Vista, but the Santa Barbara Man About Goleta made an exception last Saturday night on the occasion of fellow 1997 San Marcos High School grad Nick Spears performing stand-up at a Laughology event at UCSB's Embarbadero Hall in IV. Spears is an Orange County comedian and the voice of "The Machine Videos", a series of silly pro-Sasha Vujacic videos recently featured on NBC.com and the best Yahoo! Sports "Ball Don't Lie" sports comedy video of 2008 made by Garrett Lynn, who I believe was once a teammate of mine on the GYBA Clippers.
Spears did 10 minutes as a last-minute fill-in as one of four openers for the half-Filipino half-Jewish Brent Weinbach. The Santa Barbaran started with a Fast and Furious bit and closed with a story of driving with an open container to the Dark Knight premiere. As he explained to me after the show, Spears happens to be in a feud with another of the comedians who performed Saturday night. Evidently, the latter rounded up his entourage and walked out on one of Spears' previous performances in frustration at Spears being given higher billing, so Spears himself walked out on homeboy Saturday night. The Santa Barbara Man About Goleta hereby assures Nick Spears that he didn't miss anything - that other guy wasn't funny.
The headlining Weinbach was impressive. He's been called "post-multicultural", which you good people will know is exactly what the Santa Barbara Man About Goleta is all about.
Posted by paulrivas on: April 24 2009
The Santa Barbara Man About Goleta loves the Multicultural Center (MCC) at UCSB. In fact, when he interviewed for a job in the UCSB Department of Communication, he cited the MCC's Wednesday film series, with its cool topics and free coffee, as something no undergraduate should miss. The three white interviewers' response was to look at each other expectantly and shrug. MCC? Multicultural? Never heard of it.
However, this Wednesday's film, Hijos de la guerra, which the MCC flyer (the MCC produces more flyers than China does Chinese food) billed as, "a multi-award feature-length documentary film about the world's largest street gang: the Mara Salvatrucha, also known as MS-13", is an example of exactly what the MCC should not settle for: movies that win awards not because they're good movies but because they're movies about good topics. Yes, MS-13 is a fascinating topic with many facets, but no, the film did nothing to explain anything beyond what could have been learned in five minutes on Wikipedia.
The film was very well attended, with about 40 people being forced into an overflow room beside the packed MCC theater, among them your Santa Barbara Man About Goleta, Rivas Cultural Services associate Shane Amaya, and the latter's mother, ex Santa Barbara News-Press reporter Melinda Burns.
My interest in the film was twofold. At a crackhead park in South L.A., Goleta native and life artist Bubba Ray Robison teaches P.E. at a charter high partially populated with MS-13 members. And in downtown Santa Barbara, my beloved and I lived next door to a house that our landlord said housed Mara Salvatrucha.
I'd been hoping for some kind of hint at what my old neighbors might have been up to in there, or what relationship MS-13 has with the Crips or Bloods or Echo Park Mexicans, or how exactly MS-13 grew to be the world's most violent motherfuckers, but none of that was in the film. There were a few gang killings caught on tape, and some scenes of deplorable Salvadorean prison conditions, and some interviews with the gang's founders and the US law enforcement agencies trying to destroy MS-13, but all very common sense and predictable and lacking insight.
Posted by paulrivas on: May 19 2009
Like John Thyne III of Goodwin & Thyne and legendary Coach Jerry Pimm, Rivas Cultural Services occasionally takes meetings at Saigon In and Out downtown. So, too, evidently, does fringe mayoral pretender Justin Michael, aka Justin Slatkin aka JMike! aka Mr. Santa Barbara, Jr. aka JBama!
Although the two had never met, the Santa Barbara Man About Goleta has long been friends with Justin Michael on Facebook and recognized him immediately upon seeing him Friday night: accompanied by two associates, the man formerly known as Little Justin Slatkin was eating ph? with a fork and spoon at the table closest to the restroom.
On her way back from peeing, my fiancée - a former classmate of Justin Slatkin's - greeted JMike! and mentioned being engaged, to which the candidate replied with alarmingly heartwarming sincerity, "Good for you!"
In later conversation with friends outside the restaurant, I was speechless to suddenly find the man who calls himself Mr. Santa Barbara, Jr. looking me straight in the eye.
"Fiancé," he said, and then he shook my hand and slunk off as everyone went back to doing what they were doing.
Posted by paulrivas on: June 15 2009
I'd always thought of Fairview Barbers as a white man's barber shop: Gaucho Joe O'Brien used to say that the Fairview Barbers did the only good flattops in town, and when Herr E.F. Dyrenforth went there recently and asked for a "high and tight", "the peckerwood behind the chair didn't hesitate for a second."
Although your Santa Barbara Man About Goleta is as white as he is Mexican, as a matter of custom I like my barbers Mexican, or at least as Mexican as I am, like fellow half-Mexican John Salvador of Amigos Haircutting, who cut my hair from age 0-29. Lately, I've been partial to the all-Mexican Goleta Barbers, where only the hardest and downest white boys go.
Yet when I found myself in the Fairview center the other day and needing a haircut, perhaps feeling extra white after a running shoe purchase at SB Running and an ultra-soft toilet paper purchase at Vons, I didn't hesitate to head straight for Fairview Barbers. There I was welcomed by not only three good white barbers but also a token Mexican one, and what I presume to be the lowest regulation haircut prices in town at $14.
Seeking to establish my credibility as a local, if not a regular in that place, I regaled those gathered in the little shop with tales of some of the Santa Barbara Man About Goleta's more colorful adventures. The subject of baseball arose, prompting the Head White Barber In Charge (HWBIC) to consult the publication formerly known as Santa Barbara's local paper. He found what he was looking for, but it gave him no pleasure: "Here it says these boys played together since Little League! Well no they haven't - they don't play Little League in Santa Ynez, they play Pony League."
"You're damn right," I said. "And as a former member of the Pony League Mustang Division all-star team that stomped the Santa Ynez boys 11-5 in the summer of '88, I take offense to that! Little League, sheeeit!"
"Atta boy!" the barber said. "You can take a leadoff in Pony League, which you can't do in Little League..."
The conversation continued for the duration of my haircut and even into the standard Oster handheld massager shoulder massage that has always come free with every trip to Fairview Barbers. Afterwards, whites, browns and half-breeds alike thanked each other profusely, each glad for this intersection with the other's world, and promised to keep keeping it real, Pony League style.
[Other members of that Mustang all-star team: Brian Lopez, Charlie Van Dyke, Dino Campanella, Ryan Lopez (white), Tony Zuniga, Everett Schroeder, Joey Cordero, Adam Webster, Carlos Lopez, David Amerikaner, Joey Holguin and Ben Owen]
Posted by paulrivas on: June 23 2009
"Go ahead, give yourselves a hand!" said moderator Craig Smith, the local blogger famous for chronicling the News-Press meltdown. And with that, the packed house of journalistic heavyweights, concerned citizens and armchair activists, like your Santa Barbara Man About Goleta, indulged in an inspirational and self-congratulatory round of applause, alternately saying to ourselves in our heads, "We want our news!" "We're on the correct part of the spectrum!" or "¡Muerte a los ricos!"
The moderator and five panelists were all nationally renowned in their respective fields. The crowd included nearly everyone who is worthwhile in local journalism, a lot of very clever local luminaries, plenty of us everyday slobs and even a few News-Press goons. And yet solidarity reigned, as all who had gathered enthusiastically agreed that nobody knows what the future of journalism is but that something must be done.
"I write about this stuff all the time, and I don't have a clue," began LA Times man Jim Rainey. What's certain is that the days of department stores dropping 75 grand on a full page of bra ads are over. Those were, however, good times. "Not to mention uplifting!" Craig Smith chimed in, and the crowd went wild.
Susan Paterno was sued by Wendy McCaw for her article on the News-Press situation in American Journalism Review. She won her case and the case even set a legal precedent, but the American Journalism Review is now on the verge of financial ruin after going up against McCaw's billions of dollars and will to destroy. Paterno emphasized that journalism as we knew it is definitively behind us, and that the murky future lies somewhere out there on the Internet.
Explaining the ins and outs of the Internet as a medium for journalism was old-school newsman Jerry Roberts, whose family has also been financially bludgeoned as a result of his being sued by McCaw. Roberts described the virtues of blogging and citizen journalism with the enthusiasm of a beginner. Himself an example of the niche audiences that have proliferated and replaced the mass general interest audiences on which paper news relied, the first thing Roberts reads every morning now is a utilitarian political news site full of annoying ads called Rough & Tumble, whose owner is making money but only by working 12 hours per day on it. "The question is how to marry the public interest or public trust of journalism with the Wild West of the Internet."
With the facts well established, top local journalist Nick Welsh was free to steal the show. "When journalists get together now," Welsh opened, "the first thing they ask each other is, ‘Are you alive?'" He reckoned it will take four or five years before we really know the fate of newspapers. He was quick to admit that newspapers have never been infallible, but maintained that there is no substitute for having a paid news reporter cover strange and twisted events like School Board meetings that normal people rightfully find unbearable: "It doesn't get any more insane than that!" Believe it or not, The Santa Barbara Independent is now the seventh largest weekly newspaper in the country. However, in the early 1980s, the Independent's predecessor the News & Review could barely manage to pay its workers anything other than local business trade coupons. "I was going around with no pay in my pocket," Welsh recalled, "but I was wearing $200 sunglasses!" When Welsh stated simply, "Wendy McCaw and Marianne Partridge: both strong women who are named after birds," the crowd laughed as though this thought had literally never occurred to anyone before.
Dick Flacks (pictured, photo by City2.0 founder Warren Schultheis) came on to rally the crowd with a fist-pumping finale. He reminded everyone that the Independent, the Daily Sound and Noozhawk employ a total of fewer than 10 full-time news reporters, as compared to the 55 people in the News-Press newsroom back when Jerry Roberts still worked there and it was still a legitimate outfit. Something will have to fill this news gap locally, and it's up to local people to determine how to support efforts in this direction. He cited NPR, PBS, Democracy Now!, ProPublica, the Center for Investigative Reporting and the Center for Public Integrity as good examples of quality newsgathering operations that are contrary to the mega newspaper model.
Following the conclusion of the program, and probably either still high on activism or just joking, Flacks called Santa Barbara Man About Goleta, "the best blog in America." He also said that as soon as he heard that I was coming he knew it'd be a full house, whatever that means.
For more coverage of this event, see Matt Kettman's recap on independent.com. Kettman was the crack editor of your barbareño por Goleta's recent gaucho story and is an associate of Rivas Cultural Services. Noozhawk.com also covered the event, and in their lead photograph the Santa Barbara man about Goleta's right arm is clearly visible. This City 2.0-powered summary was written with the express intention of supplementing these articles by highlighting the funny stuff they didn't see fit to print.
Posted by paulrivas on: July 13 2009
On Argentine Independence Day, 2009, in Santa Barbara, California, the Rivas Cultural Services history of the gaucho as UCSB mascot and South American cowboy was published on the cover of The Santa Barbara Independent. The story features photos of Argentine gauchos by Clare Nisbet and will be on newsstands through Wednesday. It's also available online, but this is a Santa Barbara Man About Goleta joint best enjoyed in print.
(Photo by Clare Nisbet)
Posted by paulrivas on: August 05 2009
During this Old Spanish Days time of year, when white people are more inspired than ever to eat Mexican food, cultural understanding is at a premium. This Fiesta, Rivas Cultural Services has asked Santa Barbara Man About Goleta to explain, once and for all, why some people insist on saying Fiestas, plural, when talking about Fiesta, singular, as in, "It's Fiestas!" or "Are you going to Fiestas tonight?"
What's their deal? Why can't they just say Fiesta like the rest of us? And why does it seem to be only Mexicans and their associates who can't get it right?
In Spanish, fiesta generally means "party". Dos fiestas means "two parties". (Tres fiestas is a desmadre, but that's neither here nor there.) However, the word fiestas in the plural, all by itself or when followed by an adjective describing the nature of the parties to be celebrated, usually refers to a widely celebrated day or period of parties. Fiestas navideñas are Christmas-season celebrations, and fiestas patrias is the general term for the national celebrations that take place in Latin American countries around their various independence days. For example, Mexico's fiestas patrias are September 15-16. That's why some people (Mexicans, mostly) say Fiestas instead of Fiesta.
Regarding Santa Barbara's Fiesta, the beautiful, talented and highly intelligent young woman pictured above is one of your Santa Barbara Man About Goleta's 30 cousins from the Mexican-American half of the family. Her name is Mercedes, a Spanish word often meaning "mercies". The Lompoc native is named after our Mexican great-grandmother, but our family pronounces her name like the name of the luxury automobile brand, which quickly led to her more often-heard nickname of Sadie, which brings to mind American hillbillies.
Mercedes will be dancing in the various Fiesta events around town on Saturday listed below. If you check out her show, tell her that Cousin Paul says "hi" and that you're down with Fiestas!
10am - Children's Parade
Noon - El Paseo
2:30pm - Courthouse
3:45pm - MacKenzie Park
5:15pm - Our Lady of Guadalupe
8pm (tentative) - Courthouse
(Photo by India Madden)
Posted by paulrivas on: October 08 2009
Lou Dillon was a horse, and Lou Dillon Lane marks the pasture his owner purchased for him to hang out on. I read it in Pathways to Pavements: The History and Romance of Santa Barbara Spanish Street Names, published in 1950, by Rosario Curletti.
The book was a birthday gift from my friend since the third grade, R. Efrén Hernández, Undercover Mexican. (Some may know Hernández as The Artist Formerly Known As Ryan Hernandez, which is how his name appears in the files of the local surveillance contractor and authority on weirdness, Dyrenforth Acquisitions.)
So if Lou Dillon was a horse, who were Anapamu and Yanonali? Indian chiefs, of course! What about Haley? Well, Haley surveyed Santa Barbara’s first streets in 1851. And Robbins? Robbins was the only American barbareño to have one of the original 51 SB streets named after him (near Harding School), which makes him Santa Barbara’s original loc.
Santa Barbara’s original resident mystic was Valerio, a troglodyte who stocked medicinal herbs and chingaderas. According to Curletti in Pathways to Pavements, in the early 1950s there were still old-time Santa Barbara residents who would refer to a child’s messy room as a “cueva de Valerio”.
State, Bath and Garden were originally named Estado, Baños and Jardines. Of these three, Estado is the only name that Rivas Cultural Services currently hears local Mexicans say in Spanish. Speaking of Spanish, consider Calle Cita, behind Monte Vista school. Calle Cita means Appointment Street, but Curletti says it was probably intended as Callecita, or Little Street.
Posted by paulrivas on: October 15 2009
Note the date: not the Mexican 1-11-09 for the first of November, but the American 11-1-09 for November the first. Rivas Cultural Services suspects this was posted by an American-born Spanish-speaker going after the Mexican dollar. Gotta love it! Ni modo; apparently there's nothing but desmadrosos in downtown Goleta anyway.
Posted by paulrivas on: October 19 2009
'Member the VIP ramp that was on this very spot, demolished in 2006? Rivas Cultural Services associate and life artist Bubba Ray Robison worked at the Cinema for so long, he literally saw it all. Once he even caught a homeless gentleman barbecuing on the roof. True story. He was changing the reel and heard a ruckus, and up top was a bum with a Hibachi and sliders.
The worst movie I ever saw here was Jingle All the Way. I reviewed it for Mal Parker's San Marcos High School Spanish 9-10 class newspaper in 1996. The headline translated to, "Let's hope this is the last we see of Arnold!".
Posted by paulrivas on: October 22 2009
Imagine you're a writer, and you write "MBS", "SIM", or "BASIK". Nobody knows what it stands for except you and your bros. But which name would you rather have people think was your name?
"Mad Balls, Son!" or "More Bull-Shit"?
"Secret Information Man" or "See, I'ma Menace!"?
"Bad-Ass Subversive Intelligence Knetwork?" or "Big And Shitty Ink Krimes"?
Rivas Cultural Services will be at its Manhattan desk for the next four days, listening to the Wild Style soundtrack over and over again and contemplating the significance of tagging on a document destruction truck.
We'll also be liaising with Nisbet Nursing Services and their associates Anderson Concierge Services. New York contacts are encouraged to call 805.689.7708 and leave a message in Spanish to arrange a meeting.
Posted by paulrivas on: October 29 2009
To a Mexican who knows no English, this beer-sponsored sign in downtown Goleta would read, "Special - the brand of leche called Milk - 2 gallons for $4.99". To a bilingual person, it's just a special on milk. Either way, if you speak Spanish, you're buying this leche.
If you don't speak any Spanish, you're probably not in downtown Goleta. But if you're there anyway looking for milk and the word MILK catches your eye, the sign would read, "Especial - the brand of milk called Leche - 2 gallons times $4.99". Of course this doesn't make total sense, but if it's a milk emergency then this Leche stuff certainly warrants further investigation.
Two weeks ago, Santa Barbara Man About Goleta found evidence of American-born Spanish-speakers going after the Mexican dollar in downtown Goleta. This beer sign for milk appears to be an example of a bilingual business owner going after both the Spanish-speaking and English-speaking dollars! That's twice as many dollars!!
Rivas Cultural Services thinks this is awfully crafty, and redolent of the Chapulín Colorado rubbing his hands saying, "¡No contaron con mi astucia!"
Posted by paulrivas on: November 14 2009
What do you make of this sign? Can’t you just see a bilingual fellow saying “tese” out loud as he types “this”? Typos can happen to anybody, and Wednesday’s a doozy, but only an English language learner would ever sign a company message “Habit Management”. Drugs? Gambling? Late-night pints of ice cream? No problem!
Posted by paulrivas on: November 19 2009
...and yes, that Kevin Greene jersey is autographed.
He's local boy Dan Najera, of Rancho Najera, and he also invited Rivas Cultural Services to go see Amy Goodman last night.
Contradiction? Nope. American, baby!
Posted by paulrivas on: December 13 2009
I lived on El Sueño until I was eight. My dad had worked at Stop 'n' Shop back when Miratti still owned it. My mom said Miratti was shady and my dad said he was shady but he was a good guy. My grandma lived on Old Mill Road, in the mobile home park next to Blue Skies.
I used to have to lie and say I lived on Old Mill Road. So that I could go to Monte Vista school and not Foothill, I was made to lie as a six-year-old. It sounds insane now. By third grade I was at Foothill anyway but still felt like a creep. Every year we had Thanksgiving and Christmas at my grandma's house on Old Mill Road. I saw a lot of this sign as a kid. I guess that's why I like it.
What does the Blue Skies sign mean to you? Is it in Santa Barbara?
Posted by paulrivas on: January 18 2010
Dear Family and Friends,
Clare and I got married on December 22 in the Cayman Islands. Clare’s younger sister Julie was the only guest and served as Witness #1. The photographer doubled as Witness #2, something he hadn’t been expecting. I’d insisted we not tell him ahead of time so he couldn’t charge us extra.
Julie has a Santa Barbara friend living on Grand Cayman. This led to Clare and I booking a trip there and Julie booking a flight there, too. When a friend of Clare’s heard about our vacation plans, she accused Clare of conspiring to elope. In fact, it had never occurred to us that getting married in the Cayman Islands was easy.
I signed us up for the Simply Basic: location, ceremony and $200 in Caymanian paperwork for one low price. They even threw in the wedding vows. Once the official learned we weren’t Christians, she gave us a choice between Mystic Union and Visitor Type 1. We went with Visitor Type 1, which seemed to be exactly what we wanted and one more step to happiness skipped entirely.
The location choices were beach or tropical gazebo. Not wanting to get my nice shoes dirty, I chose gazebo, which ended up being in the official’s front yard in a down-market and occasionally dodgy part of the town of West Bay. The gazebo had a crimson astro-turf runway, and the photographer insisted on abandoning it for the beach as soon as the ceremony was over.
We stayed at a fancy B&B run by lovely people, whose other guests included a guy called Paul Reavis. This Paul Reavis guy works on drones for Northrup Grumman in Afghanistan, which their website says means, “bringing new combat multiplier capabilities to the warfighter faster”. I asked him if when he left Afghanistan in a military cargo plane he got to wear one of those seatbelts that comes down over the shoulders, like in the movies. He said he did, and I got a kick out of it.
Julie arrived two days later than expected after being snowed-in in Boston. By the time we got back to our room after picking her up from the airport is was 3:45 pm on the day of our five o’clock wedding. Clare only got to freak out about her wedding for an hour instead of months, and I only got two tries to tie my tie a passable length. Julie had to help us both.
Clare drove us from our place on Sticky Toffee Lane to the ceremony, on the left side of the road, as she had done expertly all week. “Here Comes the Bride” played on the gazebo boombox until the official told Julie to pause it. We each wore a ribbon of tartan flair around one wrist and had tropical flowers. Our rings weren’t made yet, so we used twine. When the official said “holy” the first time, we thought she was just being nice. Then she surprised us with a prayer not previously discussed in Visitor Type I, and all we could do was do our best.
We ate an extravagant dinner that saw me devour the biggest lobster ever on my first time ever eating lobster. Julie’s friends joined us later and treated us to desserts that included the sticky toffee pudding after which our little lane was named. The next day Clare and Julie played with dolphins at the lagoon down the road. I took pictures and talked to Joe Tourist from Connecticut and tried to remember that this was my life and to refer to Clare as my wife.
Best wishes,
Paul
P.S. Clare’s back in Manhattan now. I’m going there for six days in February and she’s coming to Goleta for eight days in March. If you’ll be in either of those places, please look us up: Clare Nisbet or Paul Rivas. (But we’re married now.)
Posted by paulrivas on: February 06 2010
A friend of mine who has the word GOLETA tattooed across his beer belly refers to the members of our own local military-industrial complex as dolphin-bombers. If you know any dolphin-bombers, or have anything to do with the University of California, then The University of Nuclear Bombs is for you. See it before someone over at Raytheon gets drunk at Pepe’s on his lunch break and accidentally blows us all sky high!
The documentary provides a historical examination of the UC’s involvement in the production of American weapons of mass destruction at the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore nuclear labs. Despite the popular UC Regents excuse that, “the University is basically doing science”, 85% of the labs’ federal funding is for weapons. In fact, every nuke in America’s arsenal was designed by the University of California, with the help of the $7 TRILLION that the US has spent on nuclear weapons since World War II.
The film argues that UC scientists are not just servants of the Department of Defense but actually policymakers, and shows H-bomb wiz and UC professor Edward Teller urging President Reagan to increase the country’s nuclear program. Reagan’s appearance elicited hisses from the audience, but even President Obama’s new federal budget calls for an increase in funding to these Armageddon salesmen.
Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as engineering death to the enemy; fuck-ups happen all the time at these labs. Dig even two inches deep in the park beside the Lawrence Livermore lab and you'll find elevated amounts of plutonium (doh!), a substance the lab has previously stored in ordinary paint cans. In 2008, a mock terrorist team sent to the Lawrence Livermore lab was able to carry out its two objectives: to create a poor man's WMD and steal plutonium, despite the lab having a year to prepare and being told to within two hours when the pretend extremists would be arriving.
Along with such famous faces as Noam Chomsky, UCSB sociology grad student and the author of Goleta, the Bad Land, Darwin Bond-Graham, is frequently quoted in the film, and Goleta native Steve Stormoen (DPHS 2003) also appears. Rivas Cultural Services associates Vanesa Ledesma and Ben Tolksdorf were also named in the credits.
In the Q&A following the screening, Bond-Graham paid the filmmakers the highest compliment an activist can issue when he said, “I’ve been causing trouble for the Regents since 2002. I've had a lot of people tell me they want to make a documentary about this, and these guys have been the only ones to follow through.”
Go see The University of Nuclear Bombs on Monday at 1pm at the art museum.
Posted by paulrivas on: February 10 2010
Before the 11th of September became 9/11/2001, it was el 11 de septiembre de 1973. On this day in Chile, a Nixon-backed military coup put the murderous dictator Pinochet in power in place of the democratically elected government of Allende. The members of Allende's cabinet were rounded up as prisoners of war and confined to a military camp on Dawson Island, at the southernmost tip of South America, where they remained for one year until their release was brokered by the Red Cross, United Nations and Teddy Kennedy.
Dawson Isla 10 is a fictionalized but realistic account of the prisoners' experience, based on the diaries of Sergio Bitar, known at the camp by his assigned prisoner name of Isla 10 (Island Barracks prisoner #10).
As the guy in charge of preparing 40 UCSB students per year to spend a semester or two in Chile, Rivas Cultural Services was very keen to seen this film. Feel free to leave a comment expressing surprise and/or dismay that only one of the 27 students going next fall was in attendance. She was in good company, though, as such local luminaries as Dick & Mickey Flacks and Victor Fuentes were there, as were local celebrities Ed & Toni Holdren.
Perhaps most remarkable about the movie is that it was actually filmed on Dawson Island, in an environment so forbidding that the crew could not have been enjoying conditions much better than those of the prisoners in the film, minus the beatings, forced labor and worse. The first minutes included documentary footage of a humanitarian delegation's visit to the premises, during which a guard stumbles over his words to try and explain the concentration camp vibe of the prisoners' accommodations.
The prisoners' will to get out alive and the personal conflict on the part of some of the guards at the fact that they were imprisoning their fellow countrymen - which even led to incidents of outright compassion - were also extraordinarily well portrayed. There's even some humor, as one would imagine there must always be, even in such dire circumstances. At one point, the lieutenant in command asks one of the more sympathetic soldiers, "¿Usted es tonto, o se hace?"
Go see Dawson Isla 10 tomorrow at 1:15pm at the Metro 4.
Posted by paulrivas on: March 11 2010
This one's going straight into the handmade Mexican rental announcements file!
When I called the number, I got the default voice-mail greeting in English but left a message in Spanish, asking about renting the room for a cousin I have coming. A woman called me back and got my default voice-mail greeting in Spanish. Then I called her right back and we spoke in Spanish.
The living room at 1130 San Andres is available right now to share with a young woman. The cost is $250 per month. The apartment also has one bedroom shared by two people and another shared by three more, with one bathroom.
Do you wanna learn Spanish? Are you down with cheap rent? If you answered Simón or ¡A huevo! to either of these questions, then ¡Viva México, cabrones!, because Rivas Cultural Services may have found just the thing.
This springtime, immerse yourself in Mexican culture and the Spanish language right here on the American Riviera! Ni modo que sean siete con un baño.
Posted by paulrivas on: April 09 2010
On this day, the Rivas Cultural Services cobalt blue '69 Volkswagen Beetle wasn't even the coolest old bug in its lane!
The Santa Barbara Man About Goleta-mobile was purchased in Lompoc in late '68 by Eugene Zandona of Santa Barbara's lower Eastside. He had to go to Lompoc to get it because they were all out of cobalt blue in Santa Barbara. When old man Gene's bum leg made driving it too difficult, he gave the bocho to Rivas Cultural Services in 2004, at which time it had 132,000 miles. Der Volks Werks down on East Gutierrez Street does the maintenance.
Have you ever noticed that there are a lot of old VW bugs in Santa Barbara and Goleta?
Posted by paulrivas on: May 26 2010
Down on Haley, William Hughes leads group core conditioning classes at ungodly hours. A Certified Personal Trainer, Hughes is one member of the team at Prevail Conditioning, a small gym that's friendly enough for 135-pound weaklings like me but fancy enough for elite athletes.
Ordinarily, Rivas Cultural Services would say that going to the gym of a sunny Santa Barbara springtime morn is an absurd way to get exercise, but a confluence of extraordinary circumstances led to my participation in not one but two early-morning workouts last week. Not only did I thoroughly enjoy myself the first time, but I was so sore that I couldn't afford to not go back and work the soreness away.
Hughes has so many fitness apparatuses at his disposal that he can make you feel any amount of burn you desire, on any muscle. Or, if you want them all to burn, he can do that for you, too. All it takes is an hour divided into light warm-up, three different circuits of several exercises done three times each, and an active stretching cool-down. You'll be at work by 8am feeling unstoppable!
If Prevail sounds familiar, it's probably because John Zant mentioned it as the place Josh Johnson is training in his cockamamie but inspired quest to become an NFL kicker. If Johnson sounds familiar, it's because his dad was the late O. Tully Johnson, the ruthless principal of Foothill School in the 1990s.
Local people may know Hughes from his fitness classes at Spectrum, or his gig at UCSB, or his post at Tonic, but beneath his omnipresence he's a former D-III football player and sprinter with a knack for making all sorts of people feel comfortable about being in a gym. Let him help you get after it by emailing will@prevailconditioning.com or calling (805) 294-2661.
Posted by paulrivas on: June 08 2010
Every Spanish-speaker knows that a yarda is the length of measure just shy of one meter, but we here in Aztlán know that yarda is also the Mexican immigrant's preferred term for an American-style yard sale! Now dig the spelling of Dutton Avenue. Dutto, as in, "la yarda está en la Dutto," which is exactly how Dutton might sound from the mouth of a newcomer. And whereas even the most recently arrived paisa knows what Friday and Saturday are, and that one follows the other, not every white-bread American is going to be able to make sense of the equivalent vie-sáb abbreviation. Strangely, this combination of a Spanish regionalism, a misspelling and at least two instances of haphazard capitalization is equally intelligible in either language!
Rivas Cultural Services suspects this sign was made by a Mexican marketing maven who's so new to town that he doesn't even know his address, but who's already keen to sell secondhand items to English-speakers. Talk about echándole ganas! This is exactly the sort of immigrants this country needs!
By the way, if you're not hip to Timbers, it's the biggest club in town and located way out by Winchester Canyon. For a while there was even a shuttle running from Milpas Street.
Santa Barbara Man About Goleta celebrates local color with bilingual humor and California style. Rivas Cultural Services are international advisers expert in Latin America and budget travel.
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