In the nearly 106 years that Davis has been a city, the City Council has had fewer than 100 members total. Not a big number for a city that now numbers 67,000 people.
Today we talk with Dan Carson, who became the newest former member of the council after losing his seat to Bapu Vaitla last November. We talk a little about Measure H and his lawsuit challenging the ballot statement opposing the measure, a criticized tactic that Carson later regretted. We spend more time on what he learned about the city from being on the council, how he thinks Davis is doing, and what he does and does not miss now that he no longer has the job.
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We have two main threads today: the chaos at Twitter since Elon Musk took over, including why the social platform matters, plus a conversation about social media and whether we’ll ever figure it out. Cindy Shen says we will. She’s a social media expert and professor of communication at the University of California, Davis, and points out that people have always figured out how to get a handle on disruptive technology -- including things we no longer view as technology, such as the printing press.
“Over time, as people become more accustomed to the technology, we don’t see technology as this causal agent," she says. "We realize that humans have agency as well. ... We have a say about how we want to use the technology, maybe to maximize its positive impact and minimize its harms.”
How do we get to this better place? Digital media literacy is a start.
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The end of the year is a big time for giving. Today we talk about what people in Yolo County prefer to give to, what inspires them to donate, and what doesn’t, as measured by this year’s survey of donors from the Yolo Community Foundation. The county has about 600 nonprofits. Executive Director Jessica Hubbard discusses the survey, the limits of the responses, where local wealth comes from, concern for arts/culture nonprofits and other “second responders,” and the outlook for 2023.
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Yiyun Li’s reputation as a writer continues to rise. Her books have earned her several major awards and have taken her to Princeton, where she teaches and serves as director of its creative writing program. In spring 2015, when she was teaching writing at UC Davis, she appeared on Davisville to talk about her work and the short story “A Sheltered Woman” that had won her what was then her latest award. Today we replay that interview from May 18, 2015.
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Derrick Bang says he’s looking forward to seeing Steven Spielberg’s new movie, The Fabelmans, but hopes to pass on the modern-cannibals-in-love story, Bones and All. It’s time for our annual year-end movie talk with Derrick, and Davisville host Bill Buchanan begins by confessing he has seen only one movie in a theater this year. We also get Derrick’s take on some of 2022’s worst movies, some of its culturally significant ones, and how he keeps interested in movies after watching, reviewing and dissecting them since his days at the California Aggie in the 1970s.
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There’s a lot of magic in Vince Guaraldi’s music, especially A Charlie Brown Christmas. This fall Craft Recordings is releasing extended deluxe versions of the holiday classic, and we talk with three of the people involved: brothers Jason and Sean Mendelson, whose late father Lee Mendelson was the executive producer of the Peanuts holiday specials, and Davis author Derrick Bang, who wrote the expanded CD/LP’s liner notes.
We also talk about the soundtrack to It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, which Craft released in August.
Holiday music would be very different if Lee Mendelson hadn’t brought Guaraldi and Peanuts creator Charles Schulz together. We hear about how they met, talk about Guaraldi and the music — and Jason gamely recreates the moment when, as a kid, he was voicing Marcie in the Happy New Year, Charlie Brown TV special and the character gave Charlie Brown a smooch.
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Old rooftop TV antennas can become shovel handles. Discarded bedframes can be feedstock. Owners of balky vacuum cleaners can learn how to maintain them, instead of trash them. Boomers with a house full of unwanted possessions can get advice on handing them off to new uses. Community Mercantile, a new nonprofit store stocked with re-used items that offers this kind of serious recycling to the town, has its grand opening this Sunday, Oct. 30. Today on Davisville, we talk with co-founders Larry Fisher and Stephanie Koop about what they’re doing, and why.
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It’s 1909, and the Golden Fleece Traveling Players have arrived at the Woodland Opera House to present a melodrama, Daughter of the West. But strange accidents disrupt preparations for the performance — and the ghost of William Porter, who has haunted the Opera House since dying there in a fire in 1892, takes credit for the trouble when he appears to one of the company’s players.
This is a partial synopsis of the WOH’s current play, Ghost of the Woodland Opera House, and here’s the Halloween angle — some of the story is true. Today on Davisville we talk with Matthew Abergel and Bob Cooner, the co-authors of the play, which Matthew is also directing.
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Young adult buyers rediscovering a sense of community as they listen to records together. Interest in long-gone bands like Led Zeppelin. High prices for LPs you couldn't give away a decade ago. People emerging from the pandemic who bring in boxes of their vinyl records because they want to get stuff out of their homes, and they don't want the records to be thrown away. Paul Wilbur, the longtime manager of Armadillo Music in downtown Davis, says the current market for LPs and CDs isn't easily explained, but love for music is a big part of it. He’s our guest today on Davisville.
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In a remote Chilean desert, the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization is building a huge telescope that promises to see deeper into space than any optical telescope now existing. The work involves five countries and more than a dozen leading universities and institutes — and the president of the nonprofit that’s building it, Robert Shelton, lives in Davis. He joins us today on Davisville to talk about this huge new eye on the distant reaches of space and what it might show us, like whether we’re alone in the universe.
(The rendering depicts the Giant Magellan Telescope, now being built in Chile.)
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