Category Archives: Coast Weakly

Here’s To You City Leaders

Posted on by

Stability is crumbling, Arnie is taking our tax dollars, you gave away the Mvsevm, town’s going broke, citizens are turning out in droves over where to park cars so they can walk dogs, and where are they? On vacation.

Corona

The city hasn’t had a permanent city manager since December, and the recruitment has taken months longer than expected. Interim City Manager Charlene Wiseman agreed to extend her six-month term by two months, but has indicated she won’t stay beyond August.

The leadership void was underscored in mid-July, when both Wiseman and Mayor Dan Cort were away on overlapping two-week vacations.

Here’s To You City Leaders

The Weakly Shames Pacific Grove

Posted on by

for not respecting cultures. Can’t even carry on traditions without being told we are all bad, bad citizens.

Coast Weakly

On the left side, a gallery celebrates the Feast of Lanterns, a P.G. tradition since 1905. Though the signs feature an Asian-inspired font and a bamboo trim, they don’t address why white P.G. high school students started enacting a “Chinese operetta” (featuring Princess Yum Yum) only a few years after P.G.’s actual Chinese-American residents were forced out of town. It doesn’t address what originally inspired the festival’s trademark Chinese lanterns, dresses and art styles. It doesn’t discuss Stanford Ph.D. student – and excavator of the Chinese village artifacts – Bryn Williams’ theory that the Feast of Lanterns tradition sprang out of a human need to romanticize, and appropriate, pieces of the very cultures we destroy.

There always was culture, and from the P.G. Chinese community – but not what the P.C. weenies at the Weakly would want . .
Toms Cafe Tribune 750101
P.G. Tribune, 1974

The Weakly Shames Pacific Grove

Substainable Pacific Grove To Take Over Safeway?

Posted on by

Mayor Cort thinks that adding ‘substainable features’ to a business is somehow beneficial. Maybe more morons will shop there. Disagree and maybe they will impose eminent domain to take over the property and ruin Forest Hill too.

Safeway Forest Hill 3 Forths

Cort says the city-owned Bathhouse, golf clubhouse and golf links should be tapped to make more money. The city should encourage the Safeway on Forest Avenue to expand and add green features, he says, and look for more opportunities to use philanthropy for public services.

Sustainable Pacific Grove To Take Over Safeway?

Stupid Art Galleries – Paint A New Sign, Will Ya

Posted on by

While Pacific Grove lays claim to many family-friendly events – the Butterfly Parade, Good Old Days and Feast of Lanterns – when the sun goes down and the grown-ups want to make merry, P.G. is reliably an early-to-bedder.

But on special Friday nights, the tide turns in the town’s favor during the aptly named Wine, Art & Music Walk.

Oh, look! There are FOUR more galleries just up the street, right?
4 art galleries

Lessee, there’s Trott’s for one
Trotters 2

The gallery with “Ol’ One Eye” for two, but it’s not even open..
One Eyed Willie

The one with the scarves and balloons for Three
Welcome To A Vacant Gallery
And that’s it. There is one former gallery or two. I lose count of ex galleries. Stupid artists, go back to Carmel..

Stupid Art Galleries – Paint A New Sign, Will Ya

Farmers’ Market to Moooooove?

Posted on by

Farm Cow

free coloring pages

The farmers market on Lighthouse Avenue really has not grown since it’s beginning. There’s only so much demand for tomatoes or the sparse offerings of P.G. residents. Maybe if we had more chickens in town there would be an egg booth. Solid Fact: There are not many farmers in P.G. It’s a town of vacant vacation homes and people too busy to walk to town every week in search of carrots.

Change the location & change the format and it might take off. Then the cranky downtown store owners would complain that the market is taking away all the shoppers from downtown.

“Pacific Grove on a Monday afternoon before the Farmers Market was empty: parking everywhere, no people on the street, totally dead,” she says. “With the Farmers Market, there are definitely more cars around.”

The subcommittee will meet over the next few months to explore alternative market locations, including the parking lot behind the Holman building (on Lighthouse and Grand Avenue) and the lot below Pepper’s (on Forest Avenue at Lighthouse), Valuch says.

Meanwhile, in an effort to draw more traffic in the typically sluggish chilly season, Peppard wants to invite vendors from all of Monterey County to participate in the “non-certified” (prepared foods and crafts) section of the market.

Farmers’ Market – Moooooove?

Colossus Of Gold Statue & Artist Together At Last

Posted on by

Cog House Cog Gone

The new owners of the Steinbeck home presented Snick with the inspiration of the comic. The pedestal where the statue stood for many years is now bare.

“I used to make fun of it because it’s the ugliest piece of crap I’ve ever seen,” Farkas says. “Now it’s something of an icon, and I want to save it.”

In 1994 Farkas, a pop artist who works at a P.G. vacuum store, debuted a comic strip in which the statue is hit by lightning and grows to “hideous proportions” to become the “Colossus of Gold,” who rambles through the coastal town of “Specific Groove” lampooning its public figures. Farkas posts the cartoon at Gene’s Barbershop and www.93950.com/cog, and occasionally performs it at P.G. City Council meetings.

Before
Cog House Fence Gone

Colossus Of Gold Statue & Artist Together At Last

Book About Cannery Row

Posted on by

Postcard Cannery Row Hoffman

Cannery Row Post Card – 1970s

Author A.L. Lundy reveals some history of the street now crowded with tourists.

Still, Real Life on Cannery Row has many nuggets of gold. One that made me want to head to Cannery Row with a headlamp suggested that secret passageways connected the Wing Chong Co. building to the adjacent La Ida’s so that opium users could elude police in the ’20s and ’30s. Another sidebar gives away a recipe for “Half-Way House Salsa,” which was a condiment that topped burgers Steinbeck used to enjoy at a bar that was formerly located at 598 Lighthouse.

Book About Cannery Row

Where’s Joe Bennett?

Posted on by

Forest Grove Principal departs. Without fanfare I guess.

Interim principal Beller says he knows nothing about Bennett’s departure and is still assessing whether to apply for the permanent principal position.

P.G. Teachers Association Negotiating President Wendy Milligan, a Forest Grove teacher, says she’s legally bound to a confidentiality agreement regarding Bennett, in contradiction to Lozano’s claim that no one is under a gag order.

“No one can talk about it. It’s extremely confidential,” Milligan says. “It was a very sticky situation. There were some complaints, and finally those complaints turned into action. I want to tell people what’s going on but I can’t, legally.”

Where’s Joe Bennett?

Feast Of Lanterns Going Away For Undue Political Correctness

Posted on by

Not This Pc Again

If this was a minority group mocking some white male American they’d just call it “Cultural Differences” and let it go.

Feast of Lanterns Board President Dixie Layne says she doesn’t know of any response, but declines further comment. Two other board members did not respond to requests for comment.

The board’s apparent unwillingness to discuss the issue perplexes P.G. Councilwoman Lisa Bennett, who notes that the festival organization is unaffiliated with the city.

“The Feast of Lanterns is one of our traditional events, and at the same time, it depicts characters who are ethnic minorities” she says. “It would be a very good thing if the Feast of Lanterns committee were open to talking to people of Chinese ancestry about it.”

Although Bennett says the play isn’t intended as discriminatory, she adds, “I don’t think it’s right nowadays to uphold a tradition that is offensive to an ethnic group. We’ve been told that it is. Now what are we going to do about it?

P.G. resident Sue Parris, chapter director of the National Coalition Building Institute, feels that the play blights an otherwise charming festival. “We do this scene of fake Chinese-ness, and there aren’t any Chinese people involved or even consulted,” she says. “That part seems so unnecessary and kind of backwards. It’s not taking into account the effects on the people who are being portrayed.”

Local historians give the play mixed reviews. Monterey Peninsula College art history teacher Kent Seavey, a P.G. resident, calls it a “nice romantic story” that has nothing to do with the historically important Chinese residents of Point Alones.

Feast Of Lanterns Going Away For Undue Political Correctness