Skip to main content

Santa Cruz Scrapbook


All Photographs © 2013 Alexander Chow-Stuart.

We are becoming increasingly fond of Santa Cruz, which we visited again recently both for research for a script I'm working on and to celebrate our daughter Paradise's fourth birthday.

 Aside from the fact that we love the ocean with a passion that cannot be fully expressed in words, Santa Cruz has something of the feel I imagine Malibu had in the 1960s - a surf town, with a college feel as well, of course (UCSC is close by), but without the high-end development and casual-chic of Malibu now.
My early morning rumpled look.

 It also shares some of the appeal Miami Beach had when I first moved there in 1990 - when South Beach was first emerging as somewhere hip (I'm not suggesting Santa Cruz isn't already hip), before the massive overdevelopment and condo-ization of SoBe took over.

 In 1990, South Beach was still partly a retirement community, partly a crack neighborhood, mostly Art Deco, and Cuban in a way that is different from now - filled with Cuban families overflowing onto the streets and alleyways, with children playing on bicycles and their papis drinking beer on the steps. I loved it then.
La Bahia, Santa Cruz - echoes of 1990s South Beach.
Santa Cruz has much of that appeal, and all of the qualities of a beach town that I desire: a pier, a boardwalk with rides and amusements (our children are crazy for this particular aspect), beaches that are scattered with huge chunks of driftwood in the early mornings (literally logs of a size that cannot easily be moved without some kind of front loader).

 It also has surf and surfers - and a mix of beaches that are both popular and more natural and secluded, such as the wonderful, semi-hidden coves at Wilder State Park and the stunning rock formations of Natural Bridges State Beach.
Surfers at Santa Cruz.
One of the secluded beaches at Wilder State Park.
Running on the sand at Santa Cruz.
Natural Bridges State Beach.
Our favorite spot to stay in Santa Cruz is at the Coastview Inn at 301 Beach Street (tel: 831-426-0420), a cozy hotel directly across from the main beach, with ocean view rooms that offer the gentle sound of surf at night and stunning sunrises.

 We're seriously drawn to Santa Cruz, and I think we'll be moving there at some point very soon.
Sunrise from the Coastview Inn.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please note that for reasons I have not been able to solve yet, I have enormous difficulty posting replies to comments - so I apologize if I don’t reply!

Popular posts from this blog

The High Tower Apartments and The Long Goodbye

Photograph by Dwayne Moser. This beautiful apartment complex in Los Angeles is called the Hightower or High Tower Complex (the High Tower name refers to the central elevator, I believe), and was designed in 1935-1936 by architect  Carl Kay - and made famous in 1973 by my favorite film, Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (see Why I Love Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye ). Although Altman used the building as Philip Marlowe's apartment in his somewhat post-modern Long Goodbye (the film plays with references to Old Hollywood and opens and closes with the song, Hooray For Hollywood ), the building has another direct connection to Raymond Chandler. It was apparently the inspiration for Chandler in his book, The High Window (the first Chandler novel I ever read), in which Chandler describes the residence of Philip Marlowe as being on the cliffs above High Tower Drive in a building with a fancy elevator tower. (Thanks to the Society of Architectural Historians Southern...
4 comments
Read more

The Story Behind the Immortal Bass Line of Lou Reed's Walk On The Wild Side (VIDEO)

Of all the tributes to, and stories about, Lou Reed over the past week, this is one of the most fascinating - even though it doesn't directly concern Reed himself, but rather Herbie Flowers , the legendary British bass player who created the immortal bass line that opens Reed's massive solo hit, Walk On The Wild Side. When I first heard Walk On The Wild Side, it seemed the ultimate late night New York song: a transgender story (which apparently radio stations in the 1970s and since didn't even pick up on, despite the line, " Shaved his legs and then he was a she ") featuring characters from Andy Warhol's Factory , which sounded as if it had been recorded at about 1 am in some smoky lowdown basement hangout in the East Village. The video above reveals the immense influence of Herbie Flowers - who had worked with David Bowie , who produced Walk On The Wild Side and the Lou Reed album it came from, Transformer , on Bowie's own classic breakout s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Timeless

I haven't written on this blog since 2021, soon after Joe Biden became President and the horrors of the OG Thug passed. I'm still here, I'm still enjoying life, but I have to say that this November worries me greatly. The better part of me cannot believe that America will return a criminal insurgent to the White House...but a tiny part of me wonders if such insanity is possible. I no longer have the faith in humanity I once had; I have most of it but the Fetid Pumpkin took the rest. We'll see come November. Do whatever you can to make it not so. 
Post a Comment
Read more