Green Gold

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05.28.08

As Tina Montgomery, project manager for the Sonoma Mountain Village, gives me a tour of the Rohnert Park site, which is in midconstruction, I try to keep an open mind. With development, there is always controversy, and I don’t want to be lured into believing that something is a positive action for the community only to discover later that I have been overly gullible, unable to tell the difference between real sustainability and corporate brainwashing.

This isn’t to say that I don’t want to believe. I do. I want to see something good here. We need places to live, especially in the North Bay, but I’m getting a little tired of “sustainable” housing at half a million dollars, no rentals anywhere and “green” living for those who can afford it. I want to see green buildings where I could live, not just my rich neighbors. Sorry to be so selfish, but it’s getting harder and harder to admire how green the wealthy can be. What about me and my family?

I’ve read the stats. Sonoma Mountain Village is the largest privately owned solar installation in Northern California, covering over 88,000 square feet. It will boast a village square with a daily farmers market, a movie theater and environmentally conscious businesses—no big-box stores allowed. There will be a neighborhood grocery store, dog parks, an all-weather soccer field and edible landscaping. The project is pedestrian-oriented and zero waste, with a sustainable water system, affordable-by-design housing, natural habitats and abundant wildlife. But can such a rattle of green faktz be believed?

According to BioRegional Development, an independent environmental group operating out of the United Kingdom, and the World Wildlife Foundation, who have partnered to develop the One Planet Living (OPL) model, Sonoma Mountain Village actually is what it claims to be. As such, it has been certified by OPL, making it the first community in North America, and one of only three officially endorsed developments in the entire world, to adopt the 10 conditions for sustainability outlined by the OPL.

The idea behind the OPL model is that if everyone lived like your average North American, we would need five planets to live on. If everyone lived like your average European, we would need three. If everyone lived by the One Planet model, we would need one, which, I’m sorry to break it to you, is all we actually have.

Until fairly recently, the 200-acre site in Rohnert Park that once housed Agilent Technologies had been an empty wasteland as outsourcing and eventual closure left 3,000 people unemployed and the warehouse-sized buildings empty. Now Sonoma Mountain Village is actively working toward its goal of creating a community of 1,900 homes and over a hundred businesses, all of which will meet the One Planet Living Communities guidelines by the year 2020. This means zero carbon, zero waste, sustainable transport, local and sustainable materials, local and sustainable food, sustainable water, natural habitats and wildlife, culture and heritage, equity and fair trade, and last but not least, the health and happiness of the community members.

Sound ambitious? I would say so, but Brad Baker, CEO of Codding Enterprises, which owns the development, is obviously looking to the future. If developers don’t change their ways, no one is going to buy anything, because we will all be dead.

But what about affordability? Sorry to be stuck on this, but I would love to live somewhere where I can walk everywhere, can eat the bushes, live in a LEED-ND Platinum certified house and not have to feel guilty for breathing. By the time we reach the end of our tour—which includes walking through Codding Enterprise’s on-site recycled steel plant, where eight recycled cars, as opposed to about 43 trees, will be used to make the frame for one home—I’m convinced I’ll never be able to afford it. Add to my low income the fact that everything I’ve seen so far is esthetically pleasing, and that the homes will be designed by different architects to avoid that despicable “cookie cutter” feel, and I figure my chances are about nil.

Montgomery is full of reassurances. For one thing, there will be affordable rentals and for-sale houses that go above and beyond municipal requirements. Affordable-by-design homes are smaller and aren’t as fancy as, say, the one down the street selling for $2.5 million, but they are built with the same level of commitment to efficiency of design, and they are projected to break in around $300,000. Will Sonoma Mountain Village be as irresistible as it promises to be? Only time will tell. For those interested in having a peek, model homes should be ready for viewing in the fall.

For more information on Sonoma Mountain Village go to www.sonomamountainvillage.com. For more information on One Planet Living, go to [ http://www.oneplanetliving.org ]www.oneplanetliving.org.


Planting the Seeds of Crisis

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Planting the Seeds of Crisis

05.28.08


T he global agriculture market is busy cooking up a recipe for disaster. World grain production is on the rise, but this cheap oversupply has put millions of farmers in developing nations out of work. Equally problematic, policy makers are increasingly directing edible calories toward biofuels and animal feed. Meanwhile, impoverished humans starve.

At center stage in this misallocation of food is the modern practice of monocropping, or monocultures, in which one plant is sown exclusively. At first glance, selecting for the most lucrative, high-yield variety of plant and covering one’s acreage with it and nothing else seems like a very methodical and sophisticated idea; such crops are easily planted and tended, and entire fields can be harvested in one fell swoop. But monocultures facilitate two serious matters: pests and soil depletion.

The latter results when a farmer perpetually cultivates a single type of plant on a given parcel of land, which steadily drains the earth of a particular spectrum of soil minerals. Eventually, such farmland grows off-balance and may eventually be rendered completely inadequate for agriculture. In fact, experts guess that at its current rate, soil depletion will leave the planet without farmable land in three to five decades, at which point the game will be up for biodiesel engines, cows and human beings alike.

Victory Gardening

John Jeavons, an innovative farmer, lecturer and author based in Willits, says that solutions as simple as home gardening can alleviate such serious problems. Jeavons is an advocate of biointensive farming, an ancient system of agriculture that he has helped rediscover over the last 30 years and which fosters biodiversity, intersperses different crops on small and vibrant plots of land, retains groundwater in the earth and naturally replenishes soils. Jeavons’ hope is to see a return to a local, organic, regenerative farming system in which people everywhere embrace the lost art of growing food.

“With soil loss, the world is entering a new time of crisis,” he says. “But the wonderful thing is that we have the power to change it in our own backyards.”

But is home gardening enough? Can it supply the calories to feed families, not to mention the world? Devlin Kuyek is a Montreal-based researcher with GRAIN (Genetic Resources International), an organization that advocates sustainable agricultural biodiversity. Kuyek says the problems facing agriculture today are global in scale, and that most communities, especially urban ones, have lost all power over where their food comes from.

That, he says, must change.

“People need to start feeding themselves again. The government needs to give people back their lands.”

Once Upon a Time

Localized, diverse, healthy agriculture was once the way of the world, before land consolidation, global markets and the capacity for long-distance transportation changed everything. People ate strictly what they grew locally, and gardeners and farmers cultivated a wide and colorful range of edible plants. In turn, this biodiversity maintained soil health and mineral balance, as did composting, which recycled organic matter back into the earth. The soil stayed rich and a diversity of foods sustained societies.

Industrialization altered everything. Division of labor pulled people away from their land, sending them en masse to cities where they worked at specific tasks, leaving the farmland in the hands of fewer and fewer landlords. These remnant farmers discovered that they could streamline their operations by focusing on commodity crops at the largest scale possible. They sold and shipped to increasingly distant markets, and the local urban populations likewise began importing foods from farther and farther away. Enjoying a diverse diet remained possible, as it is now in most California communities, but the fruits, grains and vegetables at the grocery store today come from separate fields, often thousands of miles apart.

For the moguls of today’s ag industry, there is little incentive to do as Jeavons recommends and grow biointensively. Large-scale producers are interested in high yields, not in intermingling various crops together, farming organically and leaving much land permanently feral to promote beneficial insect habitat. Such tactics are not conducive to reaping profits. Or are they?

One study, published in 2006 and directed in part by UC Berkeley postdoctorate Lora Morandin, at the time a student at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, found that Canadian canola farmers who allowed 30 percent of their land to grow wild and uncultivated produced higher gross yields and more than double the profits due to an increased presence of pollinating insects inhabiting the brush.

Jeavons’ biointensive farming system also produces dramatically boosted yields—nearly double that of conventional agriculture—while replenishing the soil. Jeavons cultivates one-third of an acre with a systematically diversified array of many edible plants, including a backbone of grains and high-calorie root crops. The land serves as a classroom and lab for Ecology Action, a nonprofit organization dedicated to developing high-yield farming methods by which individuals can grow all their own food on small plots of land while consuming a minimum of resources and sustaining soil balance.

Dump ‘n’ Run

But not everyone is dancing in the garden. While an advocate of genetic diversity and sustaining soil, Sonoma State University’s director of sustainable landscapes Frederique Lavoipierre says biointensive farming is not practical as a means of feeding the globe.

“We’re blinded in [the North Bay],” she says. “We have an ability to easily grow things almost all year long. In other places, they have a three-month growing season, and they need to produce intensively. There is a certain level of efficiency that we need to consider.”

Monocultures are often the best way, Lavoipierre says, and they can even be produced in sustainable situations; the crops must simply be rotated seasonally to alleviate pressures on the soil’s nutrient supply, replenishing its mineral load and maintaining balance. Trees and grapevines can obviously not be switched out season after season, but cover crops like weeds, grasses, crimson clover and edible vegetables, if allowed to thrive among the trunks, can nourish the soil and preclude the need for fertilizers.

Monocultures are devastating the security and stability of food production, says Kuyek, whose book Good Crop / Bad Crop: Seed Politics and the Future of Food in Canada hit shelves in December. The postmodernized world has seen a drop in nutritional value in staple crops, an increased reliance on pesticides and fertilizers and a severe loss of genetic diversity.

“Canada and the United States have been convinced of the vision of industrial agriculture, modernity, science and increased productivity,” he charges. “People have stopped paying attention to pest problems, soil depletion and the water supply. Western science has totally dismissed ancient seed systems, but the diversity of plants used to be amazing.”

In Mexico, thousands of varieties of corn once grew, but many of the peasant farmers who stewarded such brilliant diversity have been put out of business. Kuyek says that U.S. farmers are largely at fault for overproducing, flooding Mexico’s market with underpriced corn and undermining Mexican growers. Growers in the States have done the same thing to Haitian rice farmers, who sufficiently fed their country as recently as a few decades ago. But in 1986, the Haitian government opened its doors to U.S. rice.

“We undercut their producers with cheaper imports,” Kuyek says. “It’s called ‘dumping.’ They had to give up on their own production, and they’ve become dependent on our imports.”

The United States also destroyed Haiti’s once prolific sugar industry, infiltrating the island with American sugar and squashing the local production. Today, Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 82 “low-income, food-deficit countries” currently depend on imported food and are forecasted to purchase 82 million metric tons of grain in 2008. These countries’ traditional agrarian systems have withered, leaving many people jobless and, ironically, scarcely able to afford the overtly cheap imported foodstuffs that put their own farms out of business in the first place. Nations worldwide have come to similar economic ruin under the crushing hammer of global agriculture.


Dirt Is Gold

The United Nations FAO reported that global grain production increased during 2007, though not quite at pace with the earth’s growing population, and according to the USDA, the world’s emergency supply of grain is diminishing. In December 1999, the earth’s warehouses held 116 days of surplus food; today, we have 50 days’ worth.

Jeavons attributes this decline to population growth, global warming complications and soil deterioration. The United Nations FAO estimates that soils worldwide are being depleted between 13 and 80 times faster than they are being restored. Rising fertilizer costs due to climbing oil prices have prompted many farmers to curtail their use, in turn producing less food of decreasing nutritional value on soils of diminishing quality. Soil is lost to erosion and weathering, too. Cover crops would prevent such deterioration, yet most of the world’s farmers disdain “weeds,” preferring fields, vineyards and orchards uncluttered by alien plant life.

SSU’s Lavoipierre is perplexed.

“I just don’t understand this feeling that people have where they think they need to remove everything and clean-cultivate the ground. They remove all the biomass and the roots. They basically remove the structure of the soil. I don’t understand the reasoning behind this.”

The good news is that more and more farmers understand and appreciate the importance of soil sustainability. They see farming not as a way of growing food, but as a way of growing soil, the product of which is good food. Biodynamic agriculture, for example, promotes techniques that cultivate a living ecosystem among the crops, between the rows, overhead and, especially, underfoot. German philosopher and gardener Rudolph Steiner developed this spiritual earth science in 1924 after investigating reports from nearby communities that nutritional integrity of crops was decreasing and health of villagers failing.

“In those days, people were much more connected to their land,” says Colby Eierman, director of gardens at Benziger Winery, which utilizes biodynamic practices. “Their life stream was right off the farm, and it was not a far stretch to connect their health to what was coming from the land.”

Steiner perfected a system of growing cover crops, fertilizing with fresh manure and providing habitat for a diverse food chain of insects. Done right, biodynamic farming improves the health of the plants and of the soil, which Steiner recognized as a complex living ecosystem. Benziger is certified biodynamic, and Eierman concedes that adhering to the requirements for certification is relatively costly.

“We find it to be a significant investment,” he explains, “mainly because you’re investing a significant portion of your land in plants other than grapes.”

These cover crops promote soil nourishment and habitat for predatory insects. But the sacrifice of acreage is worth it, says Eierman, who swears the wine is as good as wine gets.

The land stays happy, too. Whereas conventional farming leaches every bit of profit that it can from the soil through what Eierman calls a “soil deficit program,” biodynamic farming is far less intensive.

Most farms, says Eierman, see soil as a base for simply upholding plants as they await harvest.

“In biodynamics, it’s the exact opposite. We want to grow rich soil, and this system deals with soil depletion at the highest level. All efforts are put toward soil health, because soil is sacred.”

But done incorrectly, warns Lavoipierre, biodynamic systems can still deplete soils. So, too, can organic farming.

“Organic farms may use organic fertilizers, but they’re coming out of the earth from somewhere else,” she says. “That is clearly not a balance.”

Back to the Backyard

Many experts agree: Poorly managed monoculture farm systems are draining the earth of its vitality, and by some estimates the earth bears as little as 36 to 52 years’ worth of farmable soil. If communities only fed themselves, says Kuyek, such uncertainty might dissipate.

“There has to be a return to local food systems. That’s the only answer. That’s the only way that people can take charge of feeding themselves again. Only local food systems provide a sense of a community’s needs.”

The idea is that when people produce their own food, they take better care to produce it right. Diversification of crops inherently follows, which keeps life on the table interesting. Plant health improves and soils thrive.

Unfortunately, few of us know anymore how to care for and cultivate the earth.

“It’s not only our water tables, genetic diversity base and soil base, but we’ve lost our skill base,” Jeavons says. “Just one person in 625 in the United States is a farmer on a tractor. Almost no one grows their own food supply anymore, and it’s very important that we rejuvenate our skills as farmers.”

Our plants are vanishing, too. Experts estimate that a mere 5 percent of plant varieties once commonly grown are still available today. Worldwide, nine-tenths of our calories come from 20 crop species, and four plants—rice, corn, wheat and potatoes—provide half of our calories. The livestock and biodiesel industries aren’t helping. Together, they devour some 50 percent of America’s grain production. To make matters worse, the captains of these industries have little interest in maintaining genetic diversity or maintaining nutritional value in the plants. Seed selection is driven by concern for caloric yield alone.

That’s how it’s been since approximately 1900, says Kuyek.

“In the last century, human nutrition has never been a concern. The focus is all on yield, hybridization, crop density and the ability to absorb fertilizers, and overall in the United States and Canada, there’s very little genetic variation anymore in corn and soybeans. This has left us extremely vulnerable.”

The threat of famine, even in the U.S., is plausible. We need only look back to 1970. That year, farmers nearly lost the nation’s corn crop when a particular gene in a widely grown hybrid variety facilitated the spread of an aggressive fungus. Eighty percent of the country’s corn crop withered. The Irish potato famine was also result of inadequate crop diversity. In the 1700s, the island nation borrowed a favorable potato variety from Peru, which had long subsisted on countless varieties. A century later, in 1845, the water mold Phytophthora infestans ravaged the nation’s potato fields on which the populace by now relied. By 1849, over a million Irish had died.

“They should have been diversifying that crop,” says Lavoipierre. “They had one variety and lost it all to Phytophthora. Diversity is like insurance, and we’re losing our diversity. What’s happened to America’s corn is truly frightening. We’ve thrown out so much genetic diversity that people should be scared.”

Seed banks exist around the world. One, established in February in the Svalbard Islands of the Norwegian Arctic, has been dug deep into the permafrost, where freezing temperatures persist all year. With the capacity for as many as 4.5 million seed samples, the facility, operated by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, has been heralded as a triumph in protecting the security of our future food security. Concern has been expressed, however, that it creates the possibility that, should a seed variety vanish in the outside world, the surviving vaulted sample could be snatched up, patented and even genetically modified by powerful seed corporations.

For now, television coverage of food riots and famine worldwide gives Western viewers a comforting distance from the severe problems of the 21st century’s global agriculture system. But Americans depend on soils and farming as much as any other nation, and it may be just a matter of time before the crisis hits home.


An Open Letter

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05.28.08

Dear Corporate Broadcasters:

Remember bombs dropping while your video footage awed us half a decade ago? Public opinion had largely coalesced around the president, pumped up by broadcast media’s unrelenting pre-war, Super Bowl&–style, whiz-bang enthusiasms. One big reason a majority of the public backed the Iraq invasion was because you in the mainstream media had failed in your mission to investigate what we now know were false pre-war claims and assertions. You traded objective inquiry for cheers and talking points.

Open societies require free, wide-ranging discourse and self-examination in order to remain open and free. These practices are especially critical when violent conflict is proposed. But those who dared question or presented facts contrary to let-’em-have-it excitations were simply disappeared, à la Phil Donahue, or not allowed on “your” airwaves in the first place.

In short, you, the entire corporate broadcast news industry, stand guilty of propagandizing We, the People of the United States of America, compelling us to support a baseless, morally reprehensible and illegal war. You overwhelmed the American public with a staccato war-mongering repertoire of lies, fear, high-tech romance, giddy bravado, lapel-pin patriotism and hormonal rage spilled from the maws of an unending chorus of financially conflicted and ethically putrefied old brass and right-wing babbleheads. And then we went to war.

Your payback? A spike in viewership, listenership and profits—and no more silly congressional talk of broadcast regulation. In fact, the Republican-dominated FCC just recently handed you yet another deregulatory plum, though that ruling is now threatened by Congress.

Broadcast media’s pompon cheers encouraged the killing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi innocents and the destruction of a sovereign nation’s infrastructure as well as many of civilization’s seminal cultural artifacts. By “misunderestimating” war’s impact, you share blame in driving the diverse religious sects and tribal groups that we Americans can still hardly discern from each other into desperate warring factions. Consequences of these actions have led to one in five Iraqi’s being forced into internal displacement, or else fleeing their country altogether.

You, America’s corporate media, failed to adequately investigate, research, question, counter, analyze or debate a dizzying array of now proven false claims presented as fact by the G. W. Bush administration. Moreover, you ignored, prevented and continue to exclude voices of truth and reason (Ritter, Chomsky, Zinn, et al.) from participating in discourse concerning our violent overseas activities, while even today you continue to provide a forum for those who have been demonstrably wrong about Iraq from the beginning.

America’s newest showroom conflict will likely be with Iran. How well have you covered this issue so far? Aside from pieces that a Joint Chiefs leadership change might have something to do with disputed Iran policy, and vague mention that certain cabinet members might favor negotiating with Iran over bombing it, no one aside from Bill Moyers seems interested in or capable of critically examining the Iran situation.

And yet this is the law: We, the People, own the airwaves. Arms manufacturer General Electric does not. Rupert Murdoch, Clear Channel and Disney do not. You, the broadcast media, lease time on our commonly held airwaves at our pleasure and discretion. We lease these public airwaves to you, and you in turn are charged with broadcasting in our public interest. For that we permit you to produce commercial revenue. But while you do make your money, you rarely program for the public good.

Congress must reform and bolster legislation dealing with licensing corporate broadcast media, that these media sources be obliged to comply with all laws concerning broadcasting in the public interest and to make certain that the Justice Department fully enforces them. Should a broadcaster fail to comply, that license should be revoked.

These are a few media reform recommendations:

• That broadcasters pay a fair sum, which you have not, for the right to commercially broadcast.

• That the American public require all broadcast license ownership return to the commons should any broadcaster leave the air.

• That broadcasters be proscribed from engendering propaganda.

• That candidates for office receive free and equal air time.

• That commercial news and opinion programming be dramatically expanded to offer the widest range of ideas and opinions in order to assure that a more vibrant democracy might flourish and prosper.

By honoring and renewing your compact with the American people, not only does the broadcast news industry stand to regain a measure of respect and legitimacy, but you may just help save our struggling democracy.

Open Mic is now a weekly feature in the Bohemian. We welcome your contribution. To have your topical essay of 700 words considered for publication, write [ mailto:op*****@******an.com” data-original-string=”7WWQStYQ7jELyvFITXhoeA==06ahxR4hFdvpUNWQaCqMEU3NQtDFdI4XMr1UAHQgr07PnXfcYGdp9nxS/SOpzZtiK2TyBXgNpJak5vViGOnZejPxcJa3yG9qghDPHdyE7UZzQo=” title=”This contact has been encoded by Anti-Spam by CleanTalk. Click to decode. To finish the decoding make sure that JavaScript is enabled in your browser. ]op*****@******an.com.


News Briefs

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ISSUEDATE

night of the living wage

A family of four living in Sonoma County must earn $57,728 a year simply to meet their basic needs. So states the 2008 California Family Self-Sufficiency Standard. Napa County is slightly more costly than Sonoma, while living in Marin County drills that same four-member family for a mind-numbing $73,576 each year. And that’s just to squeeze by. With stats like this, it’s no wonder North Bay municipalities are scrambling for creative ways to keep working families housed and fed.

On Monday, June 16, the city of Petaluma considers one creative plan to measure the impacts of business growth upon members of its community. As reported earlier in these pages (“True Cost,” March 5), community impact reports, or CIRs, are being considered by Petaluma to be matched with already mandated EIRs to provide a more comprehensive picture of how any proposed development affects them. The CIRs are designed, according to the Living Wage Coalition of Sonoma County, to factor in “the potential impacts of proposed large retail projects on small businesses, public health and social services, job quality and affordable housing.”

Ben Boyce of the Living Wage Coalition describes how this works. “If a business pays substandard wages with low benefit ratios, then it’s going to have a measurable impact on public services in the form of things like affordable-housing subsidies, food-stamp usage and usage of public health facilities. So what we’re saying to public policy makers is that we need to look at all of the impacts of a particular business.”

To get a notion of how high the North Bay’s cost of living is, just compare our stats with those of Portland, Ore. Sperling’s Best Places rates Portland-Vancouver-Beaverton as being 27 percent cheaper to live in than Santa Rosa-Petaluma. And the $57,075 it takes to make ends meet in Sonoma County? Portland, one of the most desirable metropolitan areas in America, is $15,000 a year less expensive, a savings of $1,250 each month.”

This [CIR] process helps weight the decision-making process in favor of the more responsible businesses that pay better wages, provide better benefits and are less of a drain on the public sector,” says Boyce. “Our mission is to improve living standards for working people.”

The CIR meeting is slated for Monday, June 16, in the Petaluma City Council Chambers, 1 English St., Petaluma. 7pm. For details, call 707.478.9663.


Secrets and Lies

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Secrets and Lies

05.28.08

This is the second of a multipart series on the state of the economy and how we got here.

About a decade ago, I was cross-country skiing in Aspen with another trader from Wall Street, a guy named Vince who worked at Bear Stearns. At the time, Vince was worth perhaps a few million dollars. Today, he’s worth about 3 or 4 hundred million.

We were as happy as blue jays as we skied through the groves of pine. At the old Independence Homesite, the once thriving mining camp and stagecoach stop along the Roaring Fork River that became a ghost town once the fast-moving trains came to Aspen and the gold played out, Vince called out to me. “Hey, Johnny,” he said. “Let’s stop for a minute.”

I turned to him.

“Wanna know something?” he asked. “There’s gonna be a new gold rush. It’s called swaps and derivatives.”

“What are swaps and derivatives?” I asked. “Never heard of ’em.”

“You will, Johnny,” Vince said. “You will.”

We leaned against a log fallen from a roofless cabin. “It’s a market that’s gonna be in the trillions of dollars,” he said. “And it’s gonna be a very esoteric market. Too hard for lawmakers and regulators to understand. So lawmakers and regulators won’t even try.

“It’s gonna be an unregulated and unrestricted market. We traders are gonna have this gold rush all to ourselves. Swaps and derivatives are also gonna be hard for auditors to value. So auditors won’t bother us either.”

I blinked stupidly.

“Swaps and derivatives are gonna be hard even for the senior executives at the companies we work for to understand. So our bosses won’t bother us. How cool is that?”

He smiled. “And guess what? Swaps and derivatives are gonna be virtually hidden from the American public. No class-action investor lawsuits. No pension funds blowing up. No stories on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. No election year calls for reform. Swaps and derivatives won’t ever be a campaign issue, because no one will have ever heard of them. At least not for a while. I’ll give us 10 years.”

Vince poked my ribs. “We’re gonna make a ton of money originating and underwriting this shit, and then another ton of money trading this shit. We’re gonna be able to gamble with borrowed money and take really crazy risks. How beautiful is that, huh?”

I nodded.

“But the really beautiful thing is that, if we get into trouble, the American taxpayer is probably going to have to bail us out.”

He paused.”That isn’t true for stocks and bonds, of course.” He winked. “Stocks and bonds are fuckin’ old school.”

The late CNBC commentator Seth Tobias once told me, “Hedge funds do not lie. They have no secrets. Investment performance over time tells the whole tale.”

Two words resonate: lies; secrets. Which brings us to swaps and derivatives.

As the name would imply, derivatives are “derived from” something else. In calculus, derivatives are measurements of how a function changes when the values of its inputs change. Loosely speaking, that’s a pretty good definition for what happens on Wall Street, too.

When traders trade derivatives, they aren’t trading on the prices of stocks, bonds, treasuries, commodities or foreign currencies—the usual stuff. They’re trading on things related to, or derived from, “the usual stuff.”

Here’s an example from football: When most people bet on the Super Bowl, they’re betting on the outcome of the game. The point spread is usually figured into the bet, so that the team not favored to win is given points or equalized with the favored team. The oddsmakers in Las Vegas calculate the spread.

But other oddsmakers are also very busy. They come up with bets, or inputs, for any aspect of the game that ultimately yields the final score. You can bet on which team has the most passing yardage or rushing yardage, which team has the most tackles or sacks or interceptions, which team kicks the most field goals. You can even bet on which team wins the coin toss before the game even starts.

Same with derivatives. On Wall Street, you can bet on anything that goes into the pricing structure of anything else that is formally traded as a registered security.

Currently, some derivatives are exchange-traded, but most are not. Most trade in secret, in markets called dealer markets, and there are many more flavors of derivatives than Baskin-Robbins ever had ice cream flavors.

I’ll pick just one letter of the alphabet. How about C? Here are just a few flavors of derivatives beginning with the letter C: calendar spreads, capital guarantees, cash-flow matches, collateralized debt obligation, commodity ticks, constant maturity swaps, constant proportion portfolio insurance, contango, contracts for difference, correlation trades, credit default swaps, credit default swap indexes, credit derivatives, credit spreads on bonds, credit spreads on options, credit spread warrants, currency futures and currency swaps.

That’s just one letter of the alphabet. The total value of derivatives in the derivative markets beginning just with the letter C is in the many trillions of dollars.

Swaps are a type of derivative. In a swap, two parties agree to exchange one stream of cash flow for another stream of cash flow generated by underlying assets. Those cash flow streams are called “legs.”

These cash flows are calculated as coming from what’s called a “notional principal amount.” The notional principal amount is usually backed by a real asset, like a bond. (But lately, a lot of junk wants to be called bonds.) Other words for popular bond-type investments in today’s Wall Street parlance are CMOs (collateralized mortgage obligations), CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) and SIVs (structured investment vehicles).

But it’s not always a bond or bond wannabe that backs a swap. It could be a basket of foreign currencies. It could be a basket of commodities. Assets indexed to the price of oil are very popular right now, as oil is extremely volatile and hitting new highs almost every day.

The important thing about some of the underlying swap assets is that they can be exotic or opaque. These particularly weird assets are usually thinly traded or hard to value, and sometimes they are nearly worthless, although this is often not immediately obvious. Regardless, the underlying asset backing a swap must throw off streams of cash or cash equivalents, at least in the beginning—that’s why they’re called legs. But legs slow down. Sometimes they stop. Ideally, legs work together, like the legs of a centipede. But sometimes, the centipede goes spastic.

As the assets behind swaps are usually not exchanged between the parties, swaps can create an unfunded exposure with respect to the underlying asset or principal amount. Parties can earn profits or losses from the price movements of the assets without ever actually having to own or control them or post a penny in collateral for the notional value of the asset.

When used properly, swaps can be used to hedge against certain risks, like big fluctuations in interest rates. They can also be a sort of insurance against companies going bankrupt and their bonds going into default.

When used improperly, swaps can be used to irresponsibly speculate without ever having to put up any real cash and they can be used to manipulate markets in gross and ugly ways.

Here’s a particularly gross and ugly example pulled from a British Bankers Association report. The case study cited in the report is now used at the CFA Institute to train certified financial analysts. Here’s why I’ve come to equate swaps and derivatives with lies and secrets: “The market for credit derivatives is now so large that in many instances the dollar amount for credit derivatives outstanding for a particular bond issue is vastly greater than the actual value of the bonds outstanding. For example, Company X may have $1 billion in outstanding debt and $10 billion in credit derivatives outstanding. If such a company were to default, and the recovery to creditors was only 40 cents on the dollar, then the loss to the investors holding the bonds would be $600 million. However, the loss to the sellers of the credit derivatives would be $6 billion.

“Considering this amplification effect, unethical executives could engineer the bankruptcy of their own company, and thus, arrange for their company to needlessly default on their bonds so as to collect on their credit derivatives contracts in secret, offshore accounts. The trick to pulling this fraud off is that the bankruptcy must be sudden and unexpected, with unavoidable loss in the company’s bonds.”

Sounds a lot like Bear Stearns, doesn’t it?

Since their demise, I have heard from more than one credible source that the bankruptcy of Bear Stearns was a highly sophisticated pump-and-dump scheme. While the Bear Stearns bailout probably cost the American taxpayer something like $35 billion, Bear Stearns held credit default contracts carrying an outstanding value of $2.5 trillion.

Gulp.

Regardless of the $35 billion price tag, the rescue at Bear Stearns did nothing but buy time. The rescue did nothing to protect the broader economic system. One could even argue that the federal government’s intervention will ultimately encourage riskier, more speculative behavior on Wall Street. Maybe even corrupt, criminal behavior.

To avoid this surety, the United States must do the following, and do it quickly:

• Consolidate the regulatory powers of the Federal Reserve Bank, the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Securities and Exchange Commission into one agency. Strengthen existing laws that are vague and ambiguous, and often lead Wall Street into what Barney Frank, chair of the House Financial Services Committee, calls “moral hazards.”

• Define, regulate and restrict swaps and derivatives. We must reconsider—and as a nation, perhaps publicly consider for the very first time—swaps and derivatives and the shadow banking system in which they trade.

• Wall Street must upgrade IT systems to reduce the backlog of “unprocessed” contracts. The notional value of these outstanding contracts must not be allowed to exceed the notional value of the deliverable bonds or other underlying asset classes which back them.

• Investment banks such as Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, UBS, etc., should have to disclose off-balance-sheet risks while also making those firms subject to federal audits, much like commercial banks are required to do.

• Investment banks must set aside reserves for potential losses to provide a private-sector cushion during financial panics. The American taxpayer can no longer afford to bailout the fat cats of Wall Street.

• The originators of CMOs, CDOs, SIVs and other alternative debt must retain a portion of the loans they make, while also requiring the investment banks who securitize this debt to also retain a big portion. It is unacceptable for bad loans to be passed on to unsuspecting buyers, like many pension plans.

• Rating agencies, like Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch must formally distance themselves from the investment banks whose products they are paid to rate.

The nice thing about George Soros, 77 years old and one of the world’s most successful investors and richest men, is that he can afford to be honest. On April 17, I flew to the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels to hear Soros speak. I had no other business in Brussels. Soros talked about how the proliferation of new and unregulated financial instruments, like swaps and derivatives, created the credit Godzilla that the world is now wrestling with. “Worse than wrestling,” murmured the Swiss banker sitting next to me. “More like a SmackDown vs. Raw.” I was surprised that he knew anything about the WWE.

At the podium, Soros said, “I consider this to be the biggest financial crisis of my lifetime. The superbubble that has been inflating for the last 25 years is finally bursting.” Soros warned that the hyperinflating consequences of funny money, like swaps and derivatives, may last through “our lifetime, maybe the lifetimes of our children.”

Soros saw the seizing up of credit markets at about this time last year. He bet his hedge fund on it. Seeing something that very few other people saw or intuited, he came into his office and made a few bets. By the end of the summer, the subprime mess was front-page news, and his last-minute bets paid off roughly $4 billion, a 32 percent return for his fund.

Critics generally charge that Soros has a doom-and-gloom attitude. They further maintain Soros occasionally makes statements that are variously hysterical, reckless, apocalyptic or irrational—comments that have a nasty habit of being taken seriously and spooking financial markets around the world.

But what do critics know? They aren’t multibillionaires like Soros, are they?

Money talks. Bullshit walks.

And guess what? It gets a federal bailout, too.

John Sakowicz is a Sonoma County investor who was a cofounder of a multibillion-dollar offshore hedge fund, Battle Mountain Research Group. Ryan Morris and Andy Schexnaydre assisted with research for this article. Next up: The New Master Race.


We’re All Just “Fools”: Strummin’ and Drummin’ with Meric Long of the Dodos

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  The Dodos: Meric Long & Logan Kroeber

A friend of mine, we’ll call him the Music Guru (he’s where I go for all the fresh insider info from the alternative music scene), feverishly texted me late one night about a month ago. He had just seen a show at a small New Haven club and told me that he had seen the sharpest set he had seen in a long time, played by a new band called the Dodos. A short time later, the name kept popping up everywhere. I would be surfing an old friend’s MySpace and the signature track “Fools” from Visiters, their debut album as the duo, began playing in the background. NPR did a feature on them, their list of tour dates keeps growing and growing and now they’ve taken off to Europe to charm more avid music fans. The Dodos. Where on earth did they come from?

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The Thin Man

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The Thin Man

05.28.08

E ach Wednesday and Sunday at 7pm until June 22, the Smith Rafael Film Center honors Jimmy Stewart’s 100th birthday by screening some of the best of his classics. Here are two short reminders of what you don’t want to miss .

‘The Shop Around the Corner’ (June 1)

Ernst Lubitsch’s 1940 classic with Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, The Shop Around the Corner , is a romantic comedy in the finest classic style—light, sophisticated and glowing with William Daniels’ creamy lighting. Alfred Kralik (Stewart), dyspeptic from some inferior goose-liver pâté, is the best salesclerk at Matuschek and Company, a small notions store. On this day, a woman he thought was a customer, Klara Novak (Margaret Sullavan), turns out to be just another job seeker. To Alfred’s disgust, Klara is hired on as a saleswoman.

The rivalry between the two clerks is the backbone of the story, yet the film is actually a heavenly romance. Both Klara and Alfred are conducting affairs through letters with strangers; neither ever realizes that his/her soul mate is actually the colleague he/she is spatting with all the live-long day. (Shop was remade by Nora Ephron as the Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan vehicle You’ve Got Mail .)

Lubitsch was bold to make a Christmas movie about retail work, a reminder of how love and generosity have to fight for a place amid pestering customers, sagging sales and mandatory overtime. Speaking of work, Nora Ephron certainly had her work cut out for her.

‘Rear Window’ (June 15)

When Alfred Hitchcock’s devastating classic Rear Window was released in 1954, it was greeted as the perfect trifle. As was said of Max Ophuls’ films, it’s superficially superficial. Rear Window , since re-released in a beautifully restored print, tells the story of an affable voyeur, a news photographer named L. B. Jefferies (James Stewart).

Laid up in a wheelchair in his studio apartment, recovering from a broken leg, Jefferies spies on his Manhattan neighbors across a courtyard. The action, confined entirely to that courtyard, takes place during a heat wave, when the neighbors’ windows are open and their lives are revealed to him. One day, he sees evidence in a neighboring apartment that a husband has murdered his wife.

Rear Window ‘s boundlessly clever techniques mirror the same mystery that a good film provides, and it comes to a terrifically simple point. In an instant, Jefferies is transformed from a watcher to the watched, the focus of all eyes in his courtyard. And the moral, according to Jefferies’ nurse, Stella, played by the all-wise Thelma Ritter, is “Someday, you’ll see something out the window that’ll get you into trouble.” It’s a caution every moviegoer ought to heed.

Sure, it’s all a trifle—or it would be in the hands of any director less troubling than Hitchcock. This gorgeous thriller boasts a strong subplot about a man who has had one leg in a trap for weeks and is anxious not to get the other one caught. Jefferies is under pressure to marry his affluent girlfriend, Lisa (Grace Kelly). Wordlessly, Hitchcock relates the backstory of how Jefferies broke his leg by casting his lens over a few framed photographs. We see that Jefferies is a man who has photographed wars and auto races; we see that he’s being urged into marrying Lisa and starting a new career as a society photographer.

As a sort of joke, Jefferies has framed the negative of a glamour photo of Lisa. She has white pupils and black teeth—it’s a portrait as romantic as a jack-o’-lantern. As he tries to hold the insistent Lisa back, Jefferies watches a pageant of men and women through the windows of the other apartments. (“Everything [Jefferies] sees across the way has a bearing on love and marriage,” Hitchcock once explained to his interviewer François Truffaut.)

John Michael Hayes’ screenplay, from a story by pulp genius Cornell Woolrich, never got the praise it deserves. (“I thought the rain would cool things down—all it did was make the heat wet.”)

And the older you get, the better Hitchcock’s films look. What dignity Hitchcock gives middle-aged angst here—as in Vertigo , which begins where Rear Window ends, with Stewart dangling over the abyss.

In addition to the above screenings, the Rafael tribute schedule includes ‘Winchester ’73’ (May 28), ‘Anatomy of a Murder’ (June 4), ‘Harvey’ (June 8), ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington’ (June 11), ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’ (June 18) and ‘Two Rode Together’ (June 22). 1118 Fourth St. San Rafael. 415.454.1222 .


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Wine Tasting Room of the Week

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Wine Tasting Room of the Week


Malbec, the red grape that is seldom invited to party with Cab and Merlot in Bordeaux, and then only as a 2 percent wallflower, is king of the dance floor in Argentina. Recently, I took a gander at the signature wine of down under and over (“The Malbec Diaries,” May 7), and found it cheap and plentiful but darn hard to get a taste of. Also, quite far away. Here at home, an adventuresome shopper with a piqued palate will find that imported Malbecs are priced upwards of $7.99—and who wants to take a chance with money like that? If we could only just pop down the road, and as though through a looking glass, enter a bucolic valley where dramatic mountains tower over cattle grazing on green pastures, and find a hearty Malbec at every winery.

I’m telling you there is such a place.

Bienvenidos a la Vallee de la Luna. Malbec has a small toehold in the area between Glen Ellen and Kenwood, where at minimum five wineries, conveniently lined up along one stretch of Highway 12, make it. The only problem with making a little expeditionary survey of Malbec here is that there isn’t nearly enough of it.

Mayo Family Winery’s Reserve Malbec is so popular it’s sold-out until the next release in October. Ditto for Arrowood Winery, whose 150 case-lot of 2005 Malbec will mainly ship out to its wine club. At Chateau St. Jean Winery, eschew the crowded tasting room and gift shop, walk briskly through the manicured gardens, stride confidently into the sumptuous wood-paneled Reserve Room, and ask straightaway for the Malbec. Staff may be bemused, but accommodating.

The 2004 Sonoma County Reserve Malbec ($60) is a pleasing example, supple and well-rounded, like a better Merlot with bright cherry, plum and spice, but with characteristic Malbec undertones of Red Vines and rubber. Three hundred cases of St. Jean Estate Vineyard Malbec ($50) come from the volcanic hills just above the winery. They call it more “Argentinean” in style, and, lo, it’s sold-out.

On the valley floor, St. Francis Winery & Vineyards is also getting into the game with a new estate planting. Its McCoy Vineyard Malbec—a rich and warm wine, if not varietally typical—is sourced from the Mayacamas, and is crazy limited. Even at a single vineyard tasting for the industry, it was only brought out from under the table slyly, like contraband absinthe. Blackstone Winery’s 2003 Lake County Malbec ($25) has changed in price and flavor in half a year. At first taste, I noted that its chemical bouquet of “industrial cherry fruit” was enticing; now that’s more like a squirt of chocolate essence in port, with acidic, intense red berries accenting a lush, balanced palate with a lingering finish.

More prevalent than a novelty, Valley of the Moon Malbec is almost a trend. Winemakers here have done their homework with this heretofore novelty grape, and they seem to have got it right. Is it true to the Argentine? Muchos veces, creo que mas mejor.

Mayo Family Reserve Room, 9200 Sonoma Hwy., Kenwood. 707.933.5504. Open daily, 10:30am to 6:30pm. Arrowood Winery, 14347 Sonoma Hw., Glen Ellen. Open daily, 10am to 4:30pm. 800.938.5170. Chateau St. Jean, 8555 Sonoma Hwy., Kenwood. Open daily, 10am to 5pm. 707.833.4134. St. Francis Winery & Vineyards, 100 Pythian Road, Santa Rosa. Open daily, 10am to 5pm. 888.675.9463. Blackstone Winery, 8450 Sonoma Hwy., Kenwood. Open daily, 10am to 4:30pm. 707.833.1999.



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Family Matters

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Family Matters

05.28.08


As a play about grief and post-tragedy family dynamics, David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole is just about perfect. Setting aside the penchant for absurd situations and bizarre, eccentric characters that he exhibited in such works as Fuddy Meers, Kimberly Akimbo and Wonder of the World, the playwright here displays a thrilling and gorgeously grounded voice, winning the Pulitzer and a trunk full of Tony awards for this 2006 work in the process.

With co-directors Sharon Winegar and Scott Phillips’ finely paced new production at the Sonoma County Repertory Theater, Lindsay-Abaire’s wise and moving masterpiece finally comes to the North Bay. Featuring a strong cast adept at underplaying their interactions and line deliveries while revealing the powerful emotions that bubble below the surface, this is a magnificent show, another notable achievement for the Rep in a very strong year.

Eight months after the accidental death of Danny, their four-year-old son, Becca and Howie (the excellent Jennifer King and Peter Downey) are each dealing with their grief in different ways. Becca prefers not to talk about the tragedy, while Howie will tell anyone who asks about the day his son chased his dog into the street in front of a car. He clings to physical reminders of his son, routinely watching home videos of Danny at play.

Meanwhile, Becca is packing away all of Danny’s old drawings, books, clothes and toys. She wants to sell the house; Howie wants to keep it. Becca has given Danny’s dog away; Howie wants it back. He seeks the comfort of sex; she finds the notion tasteless and selfish. Both are clearly in a state of shock, but only Becca actually allows herself to look the part, moving about her daily routine as if half asleep. She is the flip opposite of Howie, whose anger and grief are stuffed so deep down that they only appear in flash eruptions which he is quick to suppress.

Becca’s situation is complicated when her party-girl sister, Izzy (Melissa Thompson Esaia, absolutely magnificent in her first Rep appearance), casually announces that she is pregnant. Becca knows she should be happy for her sister, but somehow can’t make it happen. Becca’s off-kilter mother, Nat (Peggy Van Patten), tries to offer comfort, but her attempts to compare her daughter’s suffering to her own—she lost a son to suicide—are only resented. The constant appearances of Jason (Jason Robertson), the young man whose car struck Danny, at first seem to be another roadblock, but eventually offer Becca her first real opportunity to work out a kind of healing for herself.

The direction is first-rate, grounding the events in a wholly believable everydayness, and the cast, eschewing the kind of visible overacting that often mars these kinds of dramas, is entirely wonderful, the very definition of a great ensemble. The power of the play is Lindsay-Abaire’s recognition that these people are not unusual, and nothing they are going through is unusual. When hope comes, it comes in little ways, as when Nat explains that grief never goes away but eventually grows small enough to carry around. Rabbit Hole is a beautiful play, one of the best American plays of the last 10 years, and with this solid, sensitive production, the Rep shows us exactly how great it is.

Noël Coward’s Private Lives was reportedly written by the famous English playwright in three days—and went on to run on Broadway for almost a year. That was 1931. It has since been revived on Broadway seven times and is beloved as an example of Coward working at the top of his game. Today, nearly 80 years later, Coward’s game appears to be a much nastier one than it might have seemed upon delivery, with all those evil but hilarious witticisms piling up.

Whatever embedded misogyny still exists in the play is mostly leapfrogged in a delightful new production at Cinnabar Theater. The play is smartly directed by Carol Mayo Jenkins with a cast that tackles not only the British accents one expects from a drawing-room comedy, but also aims, and largely succeeds, at finding the human beings beneath the strutting, griping, cheating, lying, fighting, joking and wry quipping of two couples who pretty much fall apart on their simultaneous wedding nights.

Elyot (John Craven, looking dashing and dapper) is a slightly older divorced man of wealth who’s just married the much younger Sybil (Rebecca Castelli). Sybil is thrilled to be taken to France for her honeymoon but won’t stop pestering Elyot for details about his first marriage to a woman named Amanda. In short order, it is revealed that Amanda (played with vivacious decadence by Tara Blau) has come to the same French hotel on her own honeymoon with her uptight, prim and proper new husband, Victor (Dodds Delzell). Of course they are given adjoining rooms.

When Elyot encounters Amanda lounging on the next-door patio, he immediately realizes, as he tells Sybil, that something terrible will happen if they don’t leave immediately. Sybil refuses, adopting a hilarious pout that won’t go away. Despite their initial attempts to fight it off, Elyot and Amanda are back in each other’s arms in short order, trying to figure out how to dump their new spouses and run away together.

The chief delight of the play, of course, is the language. No one was better at packing a script with clever, borderline evil lines than Coward. The nastiness even extends to the charming stuff, as when Elyot sweet-talks Amanda with the words, “Death’s very laughable, such a cunning little mystery.

Come and kiss me darling, before your body rots and worms pop in and out of your eye sockets.” Such lines must be performed with a perfect balance of farce and realism, and in this Private Lives, the cast works wonders, making us love them, hate them and ever so slightly want to be them, until the last indelible, delectable insult.

‘Rabbit Hole’ runs through June 22 at the Sonoma County Repertory Theater. Thursday&–Saturday at 8pm; also, June 15 and 22 at 2pm. 104 N. Main St., Sebastopol. $18&–$23; Thursday, pay what you can. 707.823.0177. ‘Private Lives’ runs through June 14 at Cinnabar Theater. May 30&–31, June 6&–7 and 12&–14 at 8pm; June 1 and 8 at 2pm. 3333 Petaluma Blvd. N., Petaluma. $20&–$22. 707.763.8920.


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The Boys of Summer

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The Boys of Summer

05.28.08

I only had to see the previews to Iron Man to know we’d all been duped. According to the hype, the film is about some right-wing wacko named Tony Stark who becomes a POW and simultaneously turns both liberal and invincible after tricking his captors into letting him weld together a bad-ass metal suit. Once outfitted as the mighty Iron Man, he is able to fly at warp speed and have sex with Gwyneth Paltrow—a pretty nifty superpower, but not exactly what the movie is about. At all.

With apologies to my fellow comic-book nerds, Iron Man is about one thing and one thing only: Robert Downey Jr. finally catching a break. The fact that this über-talented actor has managed to stave off drug addiction long enough to remind us of his talents is some sort of miracle, one that fans have been praying for ever since the star of Chaplin and Air America disappeared into the L.A. correctional system in 1996. The fact that the Hollywood of Downey Jr.’s prime—the one that contained a pre-24 Kiefer Sutherland and pre-shoplifting Winona Ryder—now belongs to younger men (like Tobey Maguire) just makes his career resurrection all the more poignant. Like Iron Man’s transition to the silver screen, it has been a long time coming.

This summer is a surprisingly fragile time for movies. After Heath Ledger’s shocking death earlier this year, moviegoers have a chance to reacquaint themselves with this marvelously talented actor, who appears as the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight. Fans of the Batman saga will recall that resurrection plays a large part in Joker mythology, a macabre similarity to Ledger’s posthumous performance.

In the same movie, the often-overlooked Christian Bale disappears under the skin of Batman—this time literally. The Hollywood hype machine has largely neglected Bale’s performance as a selling point; the previews for the movie showcased far more of Ledger’s eerie American accent and Chelsea smile than any of Bale’s brooding. And then there’s Downey Jr., a larger-than-life actor who, much like Tony Stark, rises from the ashes of his illicit past to take on a mantle of heroic sobriety.

What this summer’s multiplex screenings offer is not so much a chance to escape into the popcorn-scented bliss of an air-conditioned fantasy land as an opportunity to consider several surreal instances of art imitating life. Who can behold Ledger’s haunted supervillain and not see the star of Brokeback Mountain wrestling with his own very real demons? Who can see Downey Jr.’s hardened face and not think that the pain reflected there has more to do with being down-and-out in L.A. than down-and-dirty as an iron welder? And what movie fan can possibly stand to see Christian Bale stuck back in the cinematic shadows, his long delayed ascension to superstardom quashed, yet again, by a series of unfortunate events?

When director Christopher Nolan’s first Batman movie, Batman Begins, premiered in 2005, Roger Ebert called it “the Batman movie I’ve been waiting for.” Under Nolan (the visionary director behind 2000’s Memento), the film was a marvel of cutting-edge special effects and charismatic acting. Everyone from Michael Caine to Liam Neeson rose to the occasion. There was only one flaw: Katie Holmes. Holmes’ unremarkable performance as damsel-in-distress Rachel Dawes was blamed for any and all of the movie’s failings. As a result, she has been replaced by the edgier Maggie “I’m not fricking Katie Holmes!” Gyllenhaal in the sequel.

Batman Begins still did extremely well at the box office, but without a spunky babe to match his brooding sexuality, Christian Bale may have been denied the chance to become, as Tobey Maguire did in Spiderman, a household name. To this day, the talented Bale is known more as “the guy from American Psycho” or “that kid from Newsies” than the powerhouse leading man of a $400 million franchise.

Blaming the delayed rise of Bale’s star on Katie Holmes is, of course, going a bit far. Like Colin Firth, appreciated by a select group of female film fans who have had the good sense to notice him, Bale is a specialized taste. He’s handsome, but he’s no Brad Pitt. There is, indeed, something about his appearance that lends itself to instability. Depending upon the inclinations of the makeup artist, he could be a hot romantic lead, as he was in 1994’s Little Women, or a sleep-deprived freak, as in 2004’s Machinist. In fact, other than Batman, the most gorgeous Bale has ever been was as serial killer Patrick Bateman in the 2000 film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, where, clad only in a pair of glowing white Reeboks, he famously pursued a shrieking prostitute with a chainsaw.

Bale has had more crowd-pleasing roles. As in Ellis’ novel, his Batemen repels at a fundamental level, the subject matter surely earning him zero points on the Heartthrob-o-Meter. But the combination of deceptively clean-cut sexuality and cruel vapidity he brought to American Psycho will surely go down in movie history as the work of a daring and brilliant actor. It is fitting that he should be cast alongside Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, because his career is incredibly similar.

Like Bale, Heath Ledger made a name for himself by playing against type. Pegged as a matinee idol for his work in films like 1999’s 10 Things I Hate About You and the following year’s Patriot, he seemed on his way to becoming an entertaining but not particularly hefty actor. Then he took a small but affecting role as Billy Bob Thornton’s son in Monster’s Ball. While Halle Berry shrieked her way to an Oscar win, Ledger’s quiet despair as a lost young man seeking comfort in illicit sex is a far more masterful performance. His next role, as the lovelorn Ennis Del Mar in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, was even better.

Playing against type seems to either work (Charlize Theron in Monster) or not (Jennifer Aniston in Derailed). It’s the Hollywood equivalent of separating the wheat from the chaff. Actors like Bale and Ledger happen to excel at it. Bale has sung in Newsies, slain futuristic dragons in Reign of Fire and starved himself to death in The Machinist. Ledger has, of course, portrayed Ennis from youth to middle-age in Brokeback, jousted to Queen in A Knight’s Tale and, in one of his quirkier roles, played a high school rebel rumored to have “sold his lung on the black market to buy a speaker” in 10 Things I Hate About You. That these two titans of young Hollywood were set to appear in a film together should have been an occasion for joy.

Then, of course, the unthinkable happened.

Ledger’s passing reminds us that, in an age where anyone on YouTube can become famous, true talent is a distinctly different and precious thing. Whether or not you think artists are important to society, most of us will be touched by the work of one of them over the course of our lives. When you see Ledger sink to the floor, cradling his dead lover’s jacket in Brokeback Mountain, it doesn’t matter that he’s really a Hollywood actor with money to burn. It only matters that he’s plugged us back into the human experience that desk jobs, gridlock and all the other evils of the world constantly distract from.

So when I heard that Ledger had died, I began to think that The Dark Knight had just gotten a little darker. Anticipating an acting showdown between two of my generation’s greatest talents, I watched the teaser trailer and thought, “Heath doesn’t look happy.” His tortured-looking Joker reminded me of all the rumors I’d heard: that he committed suicide, that he wasn’t sleeping, that he was, in fact, human. If Christian Bale does emerge as Ledger’s successor, it will have to be somewhere down the line. Before it even opens, The Dark Knight is Ledger’s movie. And it ought to be that way.

When the lights go down and the shadowy images of Gotham City go up, I’m afraid it’s those sort of thoughts that, far more than brooding superheroes and special effects, are going to haunt me.


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Green Gold

05.28.08As Tina Montgomery, project manager for the Sonoma Mountain Village, gives me a tour of the Rohnert Park site, which is in midconstruction, I try to keep an open mind. With development, there is always controversy, and I don't want to be lured into believing that something is a positive action for the community only to discover later that...
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Planting the Seeds of Crisis

05.28.08T he global agriculture market is busy cooking up a recipe for disaster. World grain production is on the rise, but this cheap oversupply has put millions of farmers in developing nations out of work. Equally problematic, policy makers are increasingly directing edible calories toward biofuels and animal feed. Meanwhile, impoverished humans starve. At center stage in this misallocation...
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An Open Letter

05.28.08Dear Corporate Broadcasters:Remember bombs dropping while your video footage awed us half a decade ago? Public opinion had largely coalesced around the president, pumped up by broadcast media's unrelenting pre-war, Super Bowl&–style, whiz-bang enthusiasms. One big reason a majority of the public backed the Iraq invasion was because you in the mainstream media had failed in your mission to...
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News Briefs

ISSUEDATE night of the living wageA family of four living in Sonoma County must earn $57,728 a year simply to meet their basic needs. So states the 2008 California Family Self-Sufficiency Standard. Napa County is slightly more costly than Sonoma, while living in Marin County drills that same four-member family for a mind-numbing $73,576 each year. And that's just to...
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Secrets and Lies

05.28.08This is the second of a multipart series on the state of the economy and how we got here. About a decade ago, I was cross-country skiing in Aspen with another trader from Wall Street, a guy named Vince who worked at Bear Stearns. At the time, Vince was worth perhaps a few million dollars. Today, he's worth about...
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We’re All Just “Fools”: Strummin’ and Drummin’ with Meric Long of the Dodos

  The Dodos: Meric Long & Logan KroeberA friend of mine, we’ll call him the Music Guru (he’s where I go for all the fresh insider info from the alternative music scene), feverishly texted me late one night about a month ago. He had just seen a show at a small New Haven club and told me that he...
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The Thin Man

05.28.08E ach Wednesday and Sunday at 7pm until June 22, the Smith Rafael Film Center honors Jimmy Stewart's 100th birthday by screening some of the best of his classics. Here are two short reminders of what you don't want to miss . 'The Shop Around the Corner' (June 1)Ernst Lubitsch's 1940 classic with Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan,...
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Wine Tasting Room of the Week

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Family Matters

05.28.08As a play about grief and post-tragedy family dynamics, David Lindsay-Abaire's Rabbit Hole is just about perfect. Setting aside the penchant for absurd situations and bizarre, eccentric characters that he exhibited in such works as Fuddy Meers, Kimberly Akimbo and Wonder of the World, the playwright here displays a thrilling and gorgeously grounded voice, winning the Pulitzer and a...
Read more

The Boys of Summer

05.28.08I only had to see the previews to Iron Man to know we'd all been duped. According to the hype, the film is about some right-wing wacko named Tony Stark who becomes a POW and simultaneously turns both liberal and invincible after tricking his captors into letting him weld together a bad-ass metal suit. Once outfitted as the mighty...
Read more
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