Shaken, Stirred

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the arts | stage |

Photograph by Ron Severdia
Over Ice: Eric Burke and Beth Deitchman co-star in ‘The Cocktail Hour.’

By David Templeton

T he Cocktail Hour by A. R. Gurney is a plotless play about a play with no plot. In two acts of gently twisting dialogue and beautifully escalating tension, the playwright shows off his understanding of the power of theater and his sense of the sharp-edged love-hate-love dynamics of family relationships, all while spinning a play that is rich in poetry and resonant with meaning—whether or not anything actually ever happens.

It is not an easy play to direct, nor a simple one to act, yet in the Ross Valley Players’ sweet-and-salty new production, director Mary Ann Rodgers leads her perfectly pitched cast through Gurney’s comedy-drama with a light hand, beautifully sly misdirection and a clear sense of feeling for the themes that, in this marvelous and lovely show, makes Gurney’s rough-hewn poetry look effortless and inevitable. While not claiming to have caught every recent play staged by the 77-year-old RVP, the oldest continually operating community theater company on the West Coast, I can say that The Cocktail Hour is the best, most complete and satisfying RVP production this reviewer has seen to date.

John (deceptively underplayed by Eric Burke) is a frustrated, recently sober part-time playwright who, sometime in the mid-1970s, has returned to his family home to obtain permission from his stuffy upper-middle-class father, Bradley (T. Louis Weltz), to produce a new play that is based, all too conspicuously, on the family. The manuscript, which almost becomes a character itself, is titled The Cocktail Hour , inspired by John’s parents’ near-religious nightly ritual of throwing back stiff drinks in the living room before stumbling to the dining room for dinner. This, we are told, is how “civilized” families behave.

In his Cocktail Hour , John caustically describes his wound-up, dog-loving sister, Nina (Beth Deitchman), as one who “keeps everything in an amazing state of suspended animation.” As synchronicity would have it, John has arrived just in time for the family’s cocktail hour, which on this night stretches out longer than usual due to some domestic pot-roast problems with the never-seen cook, either named Sharon Marie, Sheryl Marie or Shirley Marie, depending on which family member is discussing her.

John’s mother, Ann (Christine Macomber, delightfully peeling back layer after emotional layer), is appalled at the thought of yet another play based on her son’s obvious family-directed suspicion and hostility (“Plays are so noisy,” she says), but not as appalled as Bradley, who upon hearing that he is the central character, offers John $20,000 not to produce it.

One of the delights of Gurney’s brilliant script is the way it begins to mirror the fictional script described by John in bits and pieces, including the dramatic twist that comes just before intermission and the climactic “kicker” that concludes every effective play, this one included. Sometimes played with vaudevillian exaggeration, the production stays just this side of farce, gracefully maintaining the believability of genuinely shaded characters. Nina’s only complaint is that her role in the play is too small. “Do I get to bring in trays or do I only carry a spear?” she wants to know.

The set by Bruce Lackovic is a wonder of interior design, with multiple layers of East Coast kitsch, from the garish green bubbles of the all-important bar area to the thrust-stage living room—complete with comfy couch and tasteful curios—to the fireplace and encyclopedia-laden bookshelf, which earns its own laughs every time John contradicts his father’s “facts” by offering to look it up and see. Says Bradley, “We are not going to destroy the rhythm of the conversation with a lot of disruptive excursions to the bookcase.”

The dialogue is both satirical and authentically bitter, a balancing act pulled off by a cast capable of tugging hearts and provoking laughter in the same breath. Remarking on the way critics have responded to the family as portrayed in her son’s previous plays, Ann observes, “They think we are all superficial, Republican and alcoholic, when only the latter is true.” That line, both funny and sad, is typical of Gurney’s playfully wise, magical script.

His best trick, however, is the way he brings things to a stunningly grounded, unexpectedly loving conclusion. While some playwrights might punish such families for their sins, Gurney seeks ultimately to forgive, turning what might have been a gut-busting tragedy into something much more transcendent: a long days’ journey into light.

‘The Cocktail Hour’ runs Thursday–Sunday through Feb. 17 at the Barn Theater within the Ross Art & Garden Center. Friday–Saturday at 8pm; Jan. 24–Feb. 17, Thursday at 7:30pm and Sunday at 2pm. $16–$20; Jan. 18 at 7pm, pay-what-you-will tickets available. Barn Theatre, Marin Art and Garden Center, 30 Sir Francis Drake Blvd., Ross 415.456.9555.



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We’re All from Mars

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01.16.08

The clear message from science research is that there are real differences between human males and females. Some are profound, some not, and some are rather funny. Research shows that males and females differ in numerous ways. Here is a smattering of salient differences:

— Everyone’s brain starts out as female. The brain of a male becomes masculine by the male hormone testosterone. If the testosterone is not strong enough early enough, masculinity does not occur.

— Women have a physically smaller brain by about 12 percent, but they have 11 per cent more brain cells (neurons).

— Studies show that women tend to recall memories of events earlier in their lives than men do.

— Men and women tend to have differing self-concepts. Males rate themselves higher on such things as giftedness, power and strength. Females rate themselves higher on likability and morality.

— On average, females are four to six weeks more mature at birth than males. They are two years more mature at puberty than males.

— Men can read smaller print better than women, but women can hear better.

— Men are three times more likely to stutter than women.

— Women are three times more likely to speak sooner and make fewer speech mistakes than men.

— Males have better spatial and quantitative skills. In school, they generally score higher on math tests and do better on tasks that require visual and spatial perception.

— As adults, men are more physically aggressive than women. Anthropologists have reported that physical violence, where it occurs at all in a society, typically occurs first and foremost among men.

— As adults, men’s dreams tend to have more violent content than women’s. Men tend to verbally express themselves in more overtly violent ways than do women.

— From birth onward, males perform below females in virtually all tests of behavior. The exceptions are those areas requiring sheer physical strength, large muscle coordination, and spatial/distance perception. For example, the handgrip of a five-year-old boy is often twice that of a five-year-old girl.

— As females are ahead of males in verbal performance, and verbal performance is usually essential to most skill areas, females outperform males in most skill areas.

— Males tend to be more “self-centric,” while females tend to be more “socio-centric.”

— Females are more secure emotionally and thus can afford to be more social and extend themselves to others. Males are more insecure emotionally. This difference starts from birth. For example, if a one-year-old male is startled by a loud noise, he tends to freeze for a short period and starts to cry. A one-year-old female tends to be far less affected by the noise. Psychologists conclude from this that male babies seem to need more control in their surroundings; they are still struggling with themselves.

— Patterns of dealing with depression differ. Stanford University researchers found that when a man is depressed, he tries to distract himself more and dwell upon it less. But when a woman is depressed, she tends to dwell upon it more and distract herself less.

— Women are three times more likely than men to take psychiatric medications.

— Men produce and use 52 per cent more brain serotonin than women.

— Women have 133 more genes expressed in every brain cell than men have.

— Women are more susceptible to chronic headaches than men.

— In head trauma, a man’s brain is more easily damaged than a woman’s.

— Women are twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease compared to men. Men are twice as likely to develop Parkinson’s disease compared to women. Males are six to 10 times more likely to have attention deficit disorder than females. Females are nine times more likely to have an eating disorder than males. Women are three times more likely than men to develop multiple sclerosis.

— Women are more likely to recall childhood memories than men.

— Men tell jokes far more often than women. Although men and women laugh just about equally, women smile more often than men, men laugh longer and louder, and women are more likely to giggle.

— Studies show that far more women than men can sing in tune.

— Men focus language in the parietal lobes when of a lower IQ group, and in the mid-brain if in a higher IQ group. Women focus language in frontal lobes when of a lower IQ group, and in the mid-brain if in a higher IQ group. Thus, the advanced midbrain may be the mutation from whence intelligence rose initially.

Although there are many differences between males and females, research has also established that there are greater differences within the genders than between them. Whatever such differences do exist, they are never important enough to justify any discrimination. But, male or female, you already knew that.

A former Napa resident, Stephen Juan, Ph.D., is an anthropologist at the University of Sydney in Australia where he is the Ashley Montagu Fellow for the Public Understanding of Human Sciences.

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 op*****@******an.com.


First Bite

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01.16.08

E ditor’s note: First Bite is a new concept in restaurant writing. This is not a go-three-times, try-everything-on-the-menu report; rather, this is a quick snapshot of a single experience. We invite you to come along with our writers as they—informed, intelligent eaters like yourselves—have a simple meal at an area restaurant, just like you do.

It’s easy not to see Blu, which bills itself as an “American Eatery,” on Second Street in Petaluma, just opposite the movie theater. It blends in with all the new buildings made of steel and glass. Inside, you might be anywhere, though on a dark, rainy day, I felt I was in Edward Hopper’s painting Nighthawks.

Blu has an unmistakable American ambiance, and the food couldn’t be more American, either, with eggs and burgers (made of Harris Ranch beef) in abundance. Like the solitary characters in Hopper’s painting, you can sit at the counter, and, like them, you can watch the short-order cook flip bacon and fry potatoes, the same way that short-order cooks have done it since Hopper’s day and before.

I arrived for breakfast after a night without sleep, and the strong black coffee brought me back to life. Three cups had me wired. I looked for something different and tried the lemon ricotta pancakes ($7), which are light and fluffy and really taste like fresh ricotta cheese. But two thin pancakes weren’t nearly enough to satisfy my hunger, so I had the granola ($6), with fruit and “sweet milk,” as it’s described on the menu, which turns out to be milk in a pitcher and honey in a jar. You mix the two yourself, and make it as sweet as you want or not at all. My early-morning breakfast companion, who hadn’t slept either, had the eggs Benedict ($11) with ham on brioche toast covered with Hollandaise sauce, and pronounced it “impressive.”

Lori Shea, who owned and operated the always popular Caffe Giostra in Petaluma for years, presides over Blu, and she knows what local customers like. There’s mac ‘n’ cheese ($8) made with penne pasta and three cheeses; fish tacos made from cod ($12); milkshakes—chocolate and vanilla ($5)—thick and sweet; and grilled cheese sandwiches ($7), also with three cheeses, cheddar, Gruyère and fontina. After all, it’s Petaluma: cheese, eggs, butter and milk are big.

No, it’s not gourmet, and I suppose that’s why Shea calls Blu an “Eatery”—not exactly a restaurant and not really a cafe, either. Something in-between where you can sit at the counter and pretend you’re in an Edward Hopper painting, waiting for something to happen or nothing at all. Blu is the kind of place where you can blend in and become anonymous. Reservations aren’t necessary; they’re not even recommended.

Blu, An American Eatery, open for breakfast, lunch and dinner, Tuesday&–Sunday. 140 Second St., Ste. 100, Petaluma. 707.778.6965.


Quick-and-dirty dashes through North Bay restaurants. These aren’t your standard “bring five friends and order everything on the menu” dining reviews.

Back in the Light

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Back in the Light

01.16.08

F or someone long hailed as the heir to country-rock legend Gram Parsons, Ryan Adams, who shares Parsons’ birthday, has some very unlikely fans. Case in point: a drunk young man in sunglasses waiting for a concert at the Berkeley Community Theater last summer, wearing only a huge American flag as a presumed tribute to the singer’s breakthrough Gold album. “They say he’s clean, but I don’t buy it,” the fan said about Adams’ new-found sobriety. “If he’s not doing heroin, that’s cool,” he continued, with all the enthusiasm of a frat boy before a toga party. “But I hope he’s hammered tonight.”

Yes, the inebriation of Ryan Adams, who plays San Rafael’s Marin Center Jan. 23, is legendary. The former Whiskeytown frontman has, for many, become the modern-day equivalent of the Replacements, an elegantly wasted persona that contrasts and complements a wealth of outstanding music. Bay Area fans certainly got a taste of this at the infamous Palace of Fine Arts show in 2006, where Adams drunkenly butchered Grateful Dead songs with guest Phil Lesh in a brief, sub-par set infected throughout by his lengthy, near-schizophrenic mumbling.

But despite his goofball stage banter that night in Berkeley—which included nonsequitur whispers, repeated interjections of “Aw, snap!” and a lengthy dissertation on his love of Cheez-It crackers—Adams delivered a crackling, seemingly effortless set of new and old favorites that proved his music itself is most worthy of attention. The prolific sensation was back—older, wiser and with confirmed longevity to replace the alt-country poster-boy mystique he passed on to Conor Oberst a few years back.

This renewal stems in no small part from the incredible Cardinals, the Band to his Dylan, whose astounding musicianship injects endless jolts of energy into his material. This new synergy helped make last year’s Easy Tiger his best album in years and a vibrant return to form reminiscent of Heartbreaker and Gold, sans the filler. Self-editing has never been a strong point for the prolific Adams, who’s released nearly 20 records in the last three years, including novelties like his tongue-in-cheek hip-hop album from alter ego DJ Reggie. And Tiger‘s short running time is a large part of what makes it his most focused, cohesive effort to date.

Though a chiefly somber affair lyrically chronicling his recent emergence from addiction, Easy Tiger possesses an underlying sense of hope throughout its ebb and flow of subdued lullabies and bouncy rockers. Brilliantly filtered through Jamie Candiloro’s crisp production, Adams regains his footing from the very first song, “Goodnight Rose.” “The sun will come up again,” he sings before a bittersweet blast of guitar and cymbals, later urging himself, “Go on to bed / The bar is closed.”

Despite the cheeky “4:20” appearing on Adams’ wristwatch on the album cover, the heartbreak is ubiquitous, with Adams “spinning out of control” in “Everybody Knows.” On “Halloweenhead,” a swaggering rocker laments a “head full of tricks and treats” that leads him “through the nighttime streets.” Most impressive is the gentle ballad “Two,” in which Adams turns a pop music cliché into a poignant recount of escalating habits. “It takes two, when it used to take only one,” he sings, sounding helpless and vulnerable.

The recently released Follow the Lights EP further showcases his tight backing unit and brings his navel-gazing up into the realm of his usually charming covers. He sings with tragic authority on a countrified version of “Down in a Hole,” the Alice in Chains grave-pit soliloquy, making his thoughtful 2003 cover of Oasis’s “Wonderwall” seem nearly as vacuous as his rendition of the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” at the disastrous 2006 Palace show.

Having taken a huge lyrical leap forward, this period is a musically stylistic breather for Adam, who followed 2003’s supercharged, punky, glam-rock album (Rock and Roll) with a maudlin, Smiths-like mope-fest (Love Is Hell) in 2004. He’s finally perfected his most famous derivation, now boasting a more authentic empathy with the country-western crooners he’s always emulated.

With two albums already in the pipeline, Ryan Adams won’t make us wait long to see if his experimental fancy has survived the darkness as well as he has.

Ryan Adams and the Cardinals appear on Wednesday, Jan. 23, at the Marin Center. 10 Avenue of the Flags, San Rafael. 8pm. $38.50. 415.499.6400.


Red Wine & Butter

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Red Wine & Butter

01.16.08

Prologue

B ully looks so great that I demand to see her ass. A tall slender woman some 15 years my senior, she dutifully turns around. Damn.

Bully has found a new religion, and it’s called Adventure Boot Camp, a women-only outdoor hour of daily exercise that she’s done five days a week for four straight weeks. Bully loves it, her skin loves it, her flat-flat tummy loves it and anyone can see that her ass loves it.

Like all recent converts, Bully loves it so much that she wants me to love it, too. To convince me, she tells outright lies: “It’ll be fun.” To convince me, she utilizes numbers: “It’s only three weeks this session, and you only have to go three times a week. ” To convince me, she peers into the future: “It’ll really help you with those last 10 pounds.”

I consider those last 10 pounds. Over the past year and a half, I have bored myself to tears by whittling away at 30 other pounds of former me. I walk or ride my bike five days a week and, during the day, eat meals that include such wretched algebra as seven almonds, one apple and two ounces of hard cheese. But at night, glorious wonderful night, I slip through the veil that no dieter should enter. I have red wine and butter.

I have no intention of ever giving up red wine or butter, but 24-mile round-trip bike rides to work and swift six-mile marches up hills haven’t budged me past that last nagging 10.

There are other considerations. I’ve never worked out at a gym, don’t know how to use weights and quit yoga when the instructor made us team up with sweaty strangers. But most of all, there’s the phobia issue.

“Do you have to run?” I ask Bully.

I can’t run. Physically, it’s within my realm of motion, but psychologically, I’m paralyzed. Something about big boobs and high school track ovals and an adulthood of smoking. I can bike with happiness, hike with ease. Running, I’m all short stocky legs and awkward heavy body, an early ancestor just coming upright who’s been inexplicably forced into Nikes.

“Only if you want to,” she assures.

“Is it really at 5:30 in the morning? Outside?”

“Yeah, it’s kind of nice. You get used to it. I like doing crunches while I watch meteors.”

I study Bully’s face. She’s lying again.

“I guess I could pretend that I’m a TV anchorwoman on a morning show,” I reason, warming to fantasy. The last time I watched morning TV, Jane Pauley co-anchored The Today Show. I’ve always liked Jane Pauley. Such thick hair and such a smart husband. “They have to go to bed at 8 to get up at 4:30.”

Bully nods encouragingly. “They sure do!” she says enthusiastically.

She can smell the kill.

Later that week, Bully has a message for me. “Either you sign up or your ass is grass. And I,” she pauses dramatically, “am the lawn-mower.”

I look at the Adventure Boot Camp materials. I see that it’s run by a woman named Rae (no one’s name but my own is accurate). It’s held outside in my son’s high school quad. “Campers” bring flashlights, mats and five-pound hand weights to lug about. There is a form that lists the many things we must swear not to do. Like swearing. Furthermore, we are neither to say nor consume doughnuts, Ho-Ho’s, Ding-Dongs or Twinkies.

That’s easy. Bully had to sign a form promising she wouldn’t drink alcohol during her first four-week course. My luck is high: my package doesn’t have that form. Boot camp amortizes out to $15 a day. Isn’t that worth 10 pounds? She promised I wouldn’t have to run. I’m actually kind of scared of Bully. I sign up.

Diary

Sunday, Nov. 25 Rae calls in the afternoon just as I’m finishing the Thanksgiving weekend with gusto. During the past four days, I have grown used to eating anything tempting and have said good-bye to the holiday with a large egg salad sandwich heaped with pickles unabashedly spread on white bread, replete with a huge handful of Kettle chips and a Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale. I’m contemplatively rolling a lovely organic ciggie when the phone rings. Can I come down right now to be weighed for boot camp and have my body mass index taken? I light the ciggie discreetly. Exhale. Um, no.

The punishment is swift: I agree instead to go at 5:15am on Tuesday to have Rae pinch me with her calipers to detect exactly how much ugly extra fat I’m carrying. I hate Bully.

Nov. 26 Woke up at 2am, panting that I have only two-and-a-half more hours to sleep. I’m worried about running. Really worried.

I get up at 4:30am, have a cup of weak tea with an ice cube in it and stare listlessly at three column inches of the Sunday New York Times. It’s too early for the local dailies to arrive. This single issue will keep me dully fascinated in the early hours for the rest of the week.

We’re supposed to eat something “light” before boot camp, but I have no idea what that might be or how I’d begin to ingest it. I brush my teeth, struggle into several layers of clothing and leave the house. Once at the school, I warm up by fruitlessly trying to find a way around the locked gates instead of just going in the way Bully told me to. I finally find my way into the quad, where insurance lights dimly illuminate the fetid pavement. It’s 20 degrees outside. I am wearing three T-shirts, two sweatshirts, a vest, a new $2.99 hat and some unearthed children’s mittens. I will never be warm again.

Some 30 women assemble in the half-dark. Among us are an orthodontist, a real estate agent, a personal trainer, a manicurist, a retired airline executive, a hair-dresser and several business owners. A handful are Bully’s age, perhaps five are in their early 20s and the majority are forty-something like me.

Rae is preternaturally chirpy, as she should be, and starts us out doing—clusters? chompers? swingees? I think it’s choppers. Something with our weights. Then we go down to the track and start off with a walker’s relay, lining up in small groups and taking turns rushing to the front of the line. I dutifully get behind the betraying Bully, who sets off at a quick pace that’s really a jog with less footwork. We have to repeat our names as we puff up for the baton, but mine’s got too many syllables. Then it’s around the track, those who want to run running, those like me walking.

We return to the quad and lie on our mats, doing various painful abdominal gyrations. My section of pavement smells distinctly of puke and dog shit. My son says he never even steps foot in this quad. He is incredulous that I would voluntarily lie down in it. There is a small murmur. Veteran campers know the light; it’s 6:30am. Fuck Ding-Dong shit. Twinkie goddamn Ho-Ho. I have survived.

Tonight, I dream that my husband and I are running—running!—so fast inside a wood-floored empty Victorian that we both get the idea at the same time to drop and slide. We slide so quickly that we are just about to slam into a huge antique wooden staircase when I wake up with a start, shouting. I have mixed my anxiety about boot camp up with that dreadful arty Fur movie we just rented with Nicole Kidman as Diane Arbus, all old NYC apartment buildings and Robert Downey Jr. in 20 pounds of facial hair.

Nov. 27 My butt hurts. So does the front of my neck. (So, honestly, do my knees and inner thighs and hips, but all I’m admitting to are butt and neck.) I meet Rae in the high school girl’s bathroom at 5:15am as agreed. “It’s nice in here!” she enthuses, messing around on the floor getting the calipers out and setting up her evil, lying scale. It’s nice in here because it’s probably 35 degrees instead of the 25 it is outside. She pinches my right arm, my right thigh, my stomach. Gets out her tape and takes measurements—no wonder my bras never fit! Mutters about quadratic formulas and accidentally gives me a body mass index number that, according to the government standard, would only be accurate if I weighed 70 pounds more.

I step on her evil, lying scale. It reads five pounds more than I weighed the last time I stepped on a scale. I couldn’t have gained five pounds over the five days of the Thanksgiving holiday, could I? I review the week’s menu. Sausage rolled in puff pastry, pumpkin spice cake with cream cheese frosting, sour cream mashed potatoes, that egg salad feast. Naw. Must be my six shirts.

Huddling in this high school girl’s bathroom is the only time I will see Rae’s face during the entire predawn darkness of boot camp.

Outside, we use rubberized bands around our ankles to “monster walk” the track. I could tackle the “advanced” stairs but am afraid to offer to do anything advanced. We do push-ups. Wussies like me do ours against a wall. I really like push-ups against a wall. I’m delighted that I can push anything up at all.

Later, I ache so much that every step in my oversized second-hand men’s cowboy boots is just a deathlike shuffle. I think longingly of 8:30pm, when it’s safe to go to bed again.

Nov. 29 Every single part of my body has hurt for most of the week. Instead of feeling energized, I feel invalid, like I have fibromyalgia. Today, my inner thighs and, curiously, right elbow are really bad.

It is again 20 degrees, and clear. Our bodies steam like football players do as we exercise. It truly is like some kind of a dream doing this in the dark in the freeze. We go to the track and Rae exhorts us to run. By not focusing my eyes on anything in particular, avoiding all notice that this is a high school track, I make it almost halfway around before walking. I remember the feeling from learning to walk fast, being weighted down to the ground and unable to make my dread and energy and muscles lift up. Remembering it assures me that this might get better.

Dec. 3 Because of a rain, the smells of puke and dog shit have thinned and spread. Bully hosted us to dinner last night but slept right through camp this morning, having had only little bird sips of wine and plenty of water and soup without cream. Ha. We do mat work standing in a circle and then hit the track. I make it an eighth of the way and have that shin-splint feeling that means I’m not doing it right. I wonder if I’ll ever learn how to bring the energy up my body or if I’ll always just plain hate running forever. We meander on a jog around the high school, poor Rae probably never having been there in the daylight and so constantly surprised at little hills that stop at doorways and staircases that tumble down to nowhere.

I’m not in any better shape than I was last week, but I’m in less pain and am surprised that I can do some stomach things—generally those muscles are solely devoted to dispatching dinner.

Trying to get a “bounce” from the boot camp, I biked 13 miles Friday morning before work and walked six miles Saturday morning. I am always hungry and sleepy now.

Dec. 4 As part of my bump-it-up strategy, I ride my bike into work so I can ride home with my son after his early-evening guitar lesson. It’s pouring rain in the morning, but I think it will be “fun” to ride in the rain. I am “wrong.” The rain clears by afternoon, and I meet him for a giddy ride the 12 miles back, so dark on the trail that we go two miles an hour, the illumination of both our headlamps nothing against the deep black. We reach the highway, which is where I go into Dumb Mom mode.

(When my sons were younger, Dumb Mom would make such errors as coaxing them to fling themselves down short waterfalls, for example. They’d wisely protest that the waterfall was too steep or the water too fast or that they were too small. Bosh, I’d say, and go down the waterfall myself to show them how safe and easy it was, emerging a few moments later sputtering water, bleeding and bruised.)

I suggest to my son that it’s safe to ride an eighth of a mile up Highway 116 against traffic. He warns me that once we have headlights pointed at us, I, at least, won’t be able to see. Bosh. The road’s empty! It’ll be fine. We set out up the narrow dirt shoulder. The first set of headlights blinds me so totally that I try to come to a complete stop. But I can’t tell where the shoulder ends. I put my left foot out and touch nothing before making a soft, slow-mo’ tumble directly into highway ditch entirely gorged with trash and rainwater. Once he stops laughing, my son and I walk our bikes up the road home, where I tell my husband that I need to change my clothes because they’re soaked in sweat. I know he’ll raise a fuss if he discovers why they’re soaked in filthy highway ditch water.

Dec. 5 I stayed up too late after the ditch-water incident and get up after just five hours of sleep to go to boot camp. I walk all around the campus trying to find Rae or the group. Today is “hike” day, when we’re supposed to run routes through the darkened town. I find the group out in front, and Rae’s sister-in-law seems to be in charge. She says, “OK, well then, let’s go,” and we slowly, with no directive or reason or exhortation to do anything, head up the street in the dark. Three people run, the rest of us walk. Rae doesn’t show. Bully and I enjoy a fast 45-minute jaunt that we could have done without paying $15 or getting up at 4:30am. I e-mail Rae later to see if she’s OK. She sure is. She slept in. Tonight I miss my son’s holiday band concert; I’m just too tired to go. This boot-camp commitment seems incredibly wrongheaded.

Dec. 6 Knowing that the group is somewhat irritated by yesterday’s abdication, Rae gives us a rousing good workout. We move the entire time, alternating between the track and weights. I can run almost halfway around now. My hair is entirely soaked in sweat by the time I’m done. Another woman smugly tells me that she never eats after 5pm if she’s got boot camp the next morning. I rarely ever get home before 7pm. I have an unkind thought but suppress it.

Dec. 10 It’s back in the low 20s, but today’s workout is seamless. We do circuit course stuff like hop-scotching that is strangely challenging. Left foot, right foot, both feet—my brain barely remembers how to do it. I have to try again and again and really concentrate on the hopscotch pattern on the asphalt to correctly nail left foot, right foot, both feet. I look up, proud, but there’s no smiling mother there to congratulate me.

I can run against a rubber band tied to the chain link fence. I can pass a weighted medicine ball to a neighbor and get it back again. I can run in tight short circles around tiny orange pylons. Actually, I can kind of run, period—just not on the track: it brings back all the terrible memories of exactly how long a quarter of a mile is. On that dreaded oval, it’s long enough to learn at least the first horrible details of how Michelle lost her virginity to that senior on the water polo team or to plan an ill-advised party at someone’s house when their parents go away next weekend.

Dec. 11 It’s not that I dislike groups. It’s not that I’m so wildly out of shape or overweight that I can’t keep up. It’s not even that I detest getting up at 4:30 in the morning and reading three column inches of last Sunday’s New York Times. I am simply not a boot-camp person. I am now faster than some people. I am still slower than most others. My pushups are better. I can maintain the plank pose. Throw bands around my ankles, and I’ll do a mean Monster Walk. But I don’t like it.

And I am in the distinct minority.

During cool down today, we do yoga poses, we arch and stretch and hold for strength and look up at the pitch-black sky and pant. My brain clears briefly and I remember the pleasures of yoga with a sharp longing. Rather than moving from one form of physical exertion to the next, I prefer the mind-emptying continuum of an hour’s bike ride, a wearying hike, a long yoga session.

Epilogue

I ditch the next day. It’s a “hike” day, but I’m over that. I get a cold Thursday, see no point Friday. The session ends. I take my morning walk on Saturday at a reasonable hour, when owls are home abed. Leaving the main highway to go up my favorite road, a mile-plus tilt that goes gently straight up, I push off more sharply with my feet. I run. Just a little. My calves are heavily in love with gravity, I can barely lift my legs. I stop and walk fast. My breathing regulates. I run again. Short puffs, little spurts. I walk. I run. I wrunk. I like it.

The next weekend, I bike over to Rae’s house for my post-boot camp assessment. She pulls out that evil, lying scale. I step on. I’ve gained a pound. Of course. I’ve been working out five days a week for some 19 months while remaining deeply engaged with red wine and butter. Do I really think that nine days of boot camp are going to cause me to suddenly be mistaken for Mary-Kate Olsen?

Christmas comes and with it the self-laden hardship of the avid mother. I awaken at 8:30am, and it is too early for me. I go to bed at 9pm, and it is too late for me. I trace the letters “h-i-b-e-r-n-a-t-e” on the steam inside the kitchen window before I clean it. I don’t even think about going outside into all of that and exercising.

But then, in the first full week in January, some internal fog lifts. I get up easily at 5:30am, just like I do in the summer. I look mildly out into the cold pitch black. I put on six shirts. I take my weights out to the driveway. I do choppers and then push-ups against the house. I walk out to the road, and I run.

Sidebar: Hut, Two, Three

John Spencer Ellis, the Southern California&–based fitness guru who created the Adventure Boot Camp model some seven years ago, calls 5:30am “The No Excuse Hour.” He explains: “Six a.m. or 6:30am encroaches on the ladies getting back to their houses and getting their kids off to school or their husbands off to work. It seems to be the most opportune time to exercise.”

There may be some science behind it, too. “When you exercise in the morning,” Ellis explains, “it stimulates your body for a longer period of time during the day. Exercising in the evening, even though your body can be warm, can be disruptive to your sleep because it changes your metabolic cycle. Exercising early on is the best way to stimulate your metabolism.”

Ellis may be best known to a wide market for his televised boot camp training of the Real Housewives of Orange County. In that episode of this reality show, his faux-breasted boot campers receive the terrible surprise of him arriving at their homes to assess their cupboards. (“You wanna know why your butt is so big?” he shouts, holding aloft a box of Honey Nut Cheerios. “This is why!”) To those in the fitness field, he’s well known for helping to set the certification standards for personal trainers, among other achievements. Ellis started Adventure Boot Camp in 2000. There are currently 250 locations in nine countries, and he expects that figure to double by next year. Ellis trains the instructors and mentors them for a year, but the operations are not franchises.

Why the boot-camp model? “I’ve been working out since I was 12 years old, and I get bored at the gym,” he says. “I expect that other people would, too. And being outdoors is so wonderful. Eighty percent of Americans who exercise do not use a gym or a health club.”

Asked who goes to boot camp, he doesn’t hesitate. “They’re the same ladies who do personal training. It wasn’t a big stretch of my imagination to see who would be a good fit for boot camp. And it’s a lot more cost-effective. It’s $15 an hour for the camp, as much as $150 an hour for a trainer.”

Moreover, Ellis stresses the camaraderie of the boot-camp experience and the programming that allows everyone to succeed a little bit every day. “We want people to have a safe workout,” he says. “Boot camp should not be how much you can endure.”

Adventure Boot Camps thrive in Napa, Petaluma, St. Helena, San Rafael, Sebastopol and Sonoma. To learn more, go to www.adventurebootcamp.com.


The Thinking Cure

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The Thinking Cure

01.16.08

W as Tony Soprano really depressed?

In the late, lamented HBO series The Sopranos, Mafia boss Tony Soprano’s confessions to his psychiatrist opened a window on the fragile psyche of an extralegal executive. We discovered that Tony—a man who has killed with his bare hands—once dreamed a bird had absconded with his penis. More importantly, we learned that no man, no matter how tough, is impervious to depression.

There’s no second-guessing his sadness, but does Tony really suffer from a genuine depressive illness, a breakdown of normal psychological functioning? And what about the rest of the Prozac-popping multitudes? Are they truly sick?

These are some of the many questions sure to hound readers of The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder (Oxford University Press; $29.95), a tightly reasoned, paradigm-shaking new book. Written by Allan Horwitz, a specialist in the sociological aspects of mental health at Rutgers University, and Jerome Wakefield, a professor in the School of Social Work at New York University, The Loss of Sadness should alter the official definition of depression, change the way we get mood-enhancing drugs and clarify how effectively American culture delivers well-being.

If the numbers are to be believed, serious depression is the dark lining in the silver cloud of capitalist abundance. “There is more purchasing power, more music, more education, more books, worldwide instant communication, and more entertainment than ever before,” the psychologists Ed Diener and Martin Seligman wrote in 2004. “But contrary to the economic statistics,” they continue, “all the statistics on depression and demoralization are getting worse.” Horwitz and Wakefield show that this claim is not clearly true.

According to epidemiological estimates, major depressive disorder afflicts one in 10 adult Americans each year. Outpatient treatment of depression in the United States increased 300 percent between 1987 and 1997, the last year for which comprehensive statistics are available. By 2020, according to the World Health Organization, depression will trail only heart disease as the leading cause of disability worldwide. As Seligman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has written, “We are in the midst of an epidemic of depression, one with consequences that, through suicide, takes as many lives as the AIDS epidemic and is more widespread.”

What accounts for this deadly, rapidly spreading malaise? Nothing.

According to Horwitz and Wakefield, “There are no obvious circumstances that would explain a recent upsurge in depressive disorder.” The ranks of the depressed are bulging, they argue, because the clinical category fails to make the elementary distinction between normal, functional sadness and true mental disorder. The depression data are littered with false positives: jilted lovers, white-collar workers who missed out on a promotion, kids nobody asked to the prom. People who suffer but aren’t sick.

The Loss of Sadness argues that Darwinian natural selection has equipped us with a “loss response” system. We are built to be saddened by loss, just as we are built to be enlivened by success. A genuine depressive illness requires the “harmful dysfunction” of the loss system. Even bouts of quite profound sadness—say, a month-long funk following a devastating romantic reversal—can be perfectly consistent with the proper function of our mental machinery. A response to loss of a duration or intensity out of proportion with the precipitating event often signals the breakdown of proper function; so do symptoms without an intelligible cause.

Similarly, the failure of the fog to lift after well-motivated sadness has run its course could signal dysfunction, like a heart that hammers too long after a race. If you mourn your dead schnauzer for two weeks, you’re probably normal. If you’re still blue after two years, you have a problem.

Since its third edition was published in 1980, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) , the standard handbook used by clinicians to classify mental problems, has defined major depressive disorder with a complex checklist of symptoms. In order to meet the exigencies of 15-minute doctor’s visits, the few diagnostic qualifications calling for expert judgment were stripped away to produce a simple rule of categorization that family doctors, mental health epidemiologists, and even—or especially—computers can apply.

To simplify only slightly, if a patient meets five of nine mundane requirements over the course of two weeks, he or she qualifies as suffering from major depression. The checklist: a persistently low mood; a diminished interest or pleasure in almost everything; an increase or decrease in appetite leading to a gain or loss in weight; too much or too little sleep; fatigue or low energy; fidgetiness or listlessness; feelings of worthlessness or guilt; difficulty concentrating or indecisiveness; thoughts of death, suicide or an attempt at suicide.

The DSM admits a single exception: If the symptoms are precipitated by the death of a loved one, they represent normal grief and there is no disorder.

But as Wakefield and his team showed in a 2007 study, one in four people diagnosed with major depressive disorder exhibited symptoms only negligibly different from those of the bereaved. They, too, were responding to major losses; it’s just that the precipitating events were not deaths. In both sets of cases, the sadness came on the heels of a genuine loss, and was similarly deep and long-lasting. For Horwitz and Wakefield, it is the context within which symptoms present themselves, not just the fact that they exist, that divides sickness from health.

Thanks in large part to pharmaceutical companies trying to sell us and our insurers on the idea that every bout of the blahs is a treatable medical disorder, more Americans than ever attribute depressive symptoms to a “chemical imbalance.” But we should not expect a swift correction in the way depressive disorder is diagnosed, no matter how strong Horwitz and Wakefield’s case is. Thousands of mental health studies, thousands of careers and tens of millions in research funding are wrapped up in the very diagnostic category that they claim is fundamentally broken. Doctors who are paid by insurance companies have an interest in keeping the category permissive. So do pharmaceutical companies wanting to boost sales of mood enhancers. And so do the ordinary people who feel better on Prozac, Wellbutrin or Effexor, whether or not they genuinely qualify as disordered.

The evidence suggests that antidepressants work just as well as, and are cheaper and less time intensive than, cognitive behavioral therapy. Drug marketing seems to work as well: Advertising can increase demand when people were previously unaware a product was available. The hugely increased diagnosis of depression and the correspondingly huge increase in the use of mood-enhancing drugs may be a sign of improvement in the way we feel. If antidepressants generally do make people feel better, an increase in usage should mean a decrease in sadness. Promiscuous diagnosis may be a boon for the national mood.

Interestingly, the evidence for an increase in normal sadness is also scarce. Data on “happiness” or “life satisfaction” from the huge General Social Survey flatly contradict the depression data. The percentage of Americans reporting themselves in the lowest category of life satisfaction dropped slightly over the past 30 years, just as rates of diagnosed depression were exploding. We should expect an epic epidemic of sadness, not to say depressive illness, to at least register in the life satisfaction numbers.

And if depression is booming, why do the suicide trends look so rosy? According to data from the U.S. National Center for Health Care Statistics, the overall suicide rate in 2003, the last year recorded in the U.S. Statistical Abstract, was barely higher than the rate in 2000—which was lower than that of any of the previous 50 years. Suicide among teen boys did hit a record high in 1990, but rates have declined sharply since then, perhaps because of the increased availability of antidepressants.

Indeed, in 2006 a group of UCLA medical researchers found a strong statistical association between the decline in the suicide rate and the growth in the number of people taking fluoxetine (generic Prozac) during the 1990s.

The alleged epidemic of depression simply doesn’t exist. Millions who have been diagnosed with major depression never had it in the first place, even if their lives were nonetheless improved by the drugs they were prescribed. We risk our very real and very satisfying prosperity if the self-assigned stewards of public health insist on “treating” our illusory unease. That would be depressing.


Basket Case

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Basket Case

01.16.08

A t age 43, the editor of the French Elle, Jean-Dominique Bauby, was felled by “a cerebro-vascular accident.” It left him lucid but locked inside his paralyzed body. Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly takes the inside angle on Bauby’s story. But mostly what the much-lauded film does is show us imprisonment from the prisoner’s view. Thus, we end up longing for what all prisoners long for: escape.

In voiceover, Bauby, played by Mathieu Amalric, mutters responses to his physicians when they say inanities like “I’m afraid it’s just one of those things.” There is a consolation prize, though, in the beautiful, passionate speech therapist named Henriette (Marie-Josée Croze), who coaxes “speech” out of Bauby’s one remaining muscle, the lid of his right eye. “This is the most important job I’ve ever had,” she says. (Michael Moore must be right about the French medical system.) Holding up a chart with the alphabet on it, the nurse allows the silent patient to speak one letter at a time.

The story of a man blinking out his memoir sounds spiritual, but it’s also about the tremendous power of ego. I think it’s the egotistical quality that made a director like Schnabel try it out. As a fine artist, Schnabel has an eye for the shiny stiffness of a formal Victorian gown or a sea breeze flittering a thin skirt around a brown thigh. But the voiceovers from Bauby’s book aren’t urgently written as you’d imagine from a book semaphored by an eyelid.

The fantasy sequences and flashbacks give us relief from the tight close-up of Amalric’s one lolling eye and one twisted mute lip. And unlike Christy Brown, who was a slum kid who trained his palsied left foot to write, Jean-Do was a famous man when he had his stroke. A magazine editor, his memories are fashion-magazine-worthy. The ordinariness of the ideas are right in the title: Bauby’s submerged shell and the flittering butterfly, his soul.

Catholicism sets in when the devout Henriette, moved to anger and tears when Bauby blinks out the message “I WANT DEATH,” hauls him to church and communion, leading to an ambiguous flashback (the film’s finest moment) of Jean-Do touring the Catholic tourist trap Lourdes. Bauby must have done something right by the Virgin Mary. He’s surrounded by devoted women who chant letters endlessly to encourage his self-expression. Onscreen we see reveries: a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, an iceberg calving its ice, Marlon Brando in his guru makeup from Candy.

And the point? Those who endure life-threatening illnesses will wish they’d been nicer to their wives and kids. (Or live-in lover, in this case.) Emmanuelle Seigner plays the lady who mothered Jean-Do’s three children and who was left for a mistress. Seigner’s I-was-just-rogered-five-minutes-ago look is, as always, enrapturing, and Max Von Sydow’s small part as Bauby’s father has fierce dignity and affection.

Otherwise, this movie is a hymn to convalescence. In this, his third story in a row of a moribund artist, Schnabel persists in a sequence of druggie images, exploring not depths but shallows.

‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’ screens at the Smith Rafael Film Center (1118 Fourth St., San Rafael; 415.454.1222) and the Rialto Cinemas Lakeside (551 Summerfield Road, Santa Rosa; 707.525.4840).


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Out of Body

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Out of Body

01.16.08

F or the past eight years, I’ve worn one of those over-the-shoulder messenger bags almost everywhere I go. When I first put it on, I felt strangely more in command; on the occasions when I lose it, it’s as if a part of myself is missing, and I feel panicked.

I used to think that my attachment to the messenger bag was purely functional, like needing to be in possession of a set of keys—or at its worst, a childish security-blanket impulse. But as the years accumulate and the bag remains on my back, my brain increasingly treats it as an actual extension of my body. I’ve grown so accustomed to its presence that, even when I’m not wearing it, I compensate for the extra space it normally takes up when I walk through doorways or navigate my way around a crowd of people.

Turns out, there’s a scientific explanation for this. In Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee’s latest book, The Body Has a Mind of Its Own: How Body Maps in Your Brain Help You Do (Almost) Everything Better (Random House; $24.95), the mother-and-son team illustrate how highly detailed areas of our brain not only correspond to different areas within our physical body, they can actually include areas outside of the body. With a malleable sense of personal space, the body maps in our brain can adjust to incorporate our clothes, our writing utensils and, yes, even our messenger bags.

Thus, when we play video games, our body maps extend to the game controller and the images on the screen; when we hit a baseball, our body maps extend to the tip of the bat; when we have sex, our body maps extend to envelop our partner.

This has huge implications for science’s understanding of the mind-body connection, but luckily for the average reader, the Blakeslees break it down in a basic and understandable way. “There are books that are just for science junkies,” admits Sandra Blakeslee by phone from her New Mexico home. “But we thought, right from the get-go, ‘Well, everybody has a body and everybody has a brain, and it’s kind of a mystery to them as to how the body and the brain communicate.’ But it’s not a mystery. There’s all this new neuroscience that we wanted to make available to people.”

Indeed, neuroscience is booming. In 2000, Blakeslee, a New York Times science writer of 40 years, attended a meeting in Los Angeles where she was introduced to Alessandro Farnè, an Italian scientist. Farnè’s demonstration suggested that what we refer to as “personal space”—the surrounding area of our body that we generally do not want invaded—actually occupies real estate in the brain’s parietal lobe. “Every point in that space is mapped in your brain,” Blakeslee explains. “That space is part of you. You own it. And when people say, ‘You’re in my space,’ it isn’t a metaphor, it’s true.”

What about the musician who plays the guitar so naturally that it seems like a third arm? Or the soccer mom who drives an SUV as if it’s an extension of her body? Or the amputee who still feels the phantom pain of a long-gone limb? Quoting recent breakthrough studies, Blakeslee asserts that in an area in these people’s brains, the object is literally morphed into the brain’s body map as a part of the physical self.

One of the book’s most hands-on chapters deals with weight loss; more precisely, it confronts the battle between the body image (how we see ourselves) and the body schema (the actual physical properties of our person). Often, people who have lost weight will still “feel” fat, because their body maps remain attuned to a larger body. Getting the brain back in tune with the body is a scientifically proven way to keep weight off, Blakeslee says. “People who are overweight are not in touch with their bodies. They’re actually almost in a paralytic state with their body. They don’t see their body very clearly in a mirror, and they don’t feel their bodies.”

Using celebrities as examples, the Blakeslees outline how strengthening the body schema can successfully overcome a dysfunctional body image (Oprah Winfrey’s vastly touted weight-loss victory) or capitulate to insecurity (the horror that is Michael Jackson). The authors illustrate how body-map defects are a cause for the highest-paid player in baseball, Alex Rodriguez, to lead major-league third-basemen in errors in 2006; how the golfer’s plague of the “yips” caused Ben Hogan to choke on the 17th green of the 1956 U.S. Open; and why Fred Astaire dancing with his shadow isn’t such a stretch, since shadows, as annexations of our physical self, register on our body maps as well.

Constantly examining body maps while going about everyday life could very well drive the average person crazy, but for those with highly attuned body maps in certain areas—pianists in the fingers, tennis players in the limbs—the Blakeslees make a startling case for motor imagery. In developed talents, the mere act of imagining the body performing certain tasks has been proven to strengthen muscles and increase performance. No wonder Kobe Bryant takes time at the foul line to imagine the ball going through the hoop.

The Body Has a Mind of Its Own covers some serious ground, particularly in the final chapter regarding the insula, a part of the brain that up until recently had been thought of as an unimportant flab—sort of a cerebral appendix. “It turns out to be considered an extremely advanced part of the brain now,” says Blakeslee, citing the insula as a body-mapping mechanism of internal senses, an awesome translator of felt body state into social emotions. Problems regarding schizophrenia, chronic pain and addiction lie in the right frontal insula, Blakeslee says, and the area is just now being explored as a center for the power of belief.

Blakeslee admits surprise at learning that specific areas of the brain can trigger phenomena that she had previously written off as “whoo-whoo” nonsense—out-of-body experiences, for example. In Belgium last year, an electrode treatment suggested that an out-of-body experience can be traced to a part of the brain known as the temporoparietal junction. And though science can’t yet address things like astral planes or healing touch, recent studies tilt toward the idea that where New Age mysticism and science had once been at odds, they may soon join up and hold hands.

Will we ever fully understand the human brain? Blakeslee laughs at the question. “I think, as in all science, every time you make some wonderful new discovery, it opens up another dozen questions. That’s the way science works. You answer things, and then you have more questions. So, fully understanding the brain? It’s so complicated. It’ll take a very long time.”


What Is Hip?

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What Is Hip?

01.16.08

M y friend and I used to play a time-killing game on the subway called the Deal Breaker. The setup was that you meet a man or woman who is perfect except for one very horrid thing. Is that horrid thing a deal breaker?

The game can go on for hours, and its most delightful aspect is the shallowness of the deal breakers. A fondness for scat play, being Matt Damon’s twin brother and refusing to eat onions in any form have all been hypothetical deal breakers.

I’ve played this game with multiple people, and one sure-fire deal breaker is a passionate devotion to Celine Dion. (In this instance, “devotion” is defined as being strong enough to merit multiple trips to Las Vegas to see her show, proudly displaying autographed Dion glossies or ownership of all scents in her signature line of perfume.)

But why is Celine Dion so awful as to negate even possible pretend relationships in the course of the Deal Breaker game? Who of us even knows what she sounds like? I, for one, can name only one Celine Dion song off the top of my head—you know, that one from Titanic . That’s it.

This snap judgment of taste is what prompted Carl Wilson to plumb the depths of Celine Dionity in his new book for Continuum’s 33 1/3 series, Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste ($10.95). Each slender paperback in the 33 1/3 series features a literate music lover penning an entire book on a single life-changing album—mostly albums that would not seem out of place on Rolling Stone’s “Top 100 Albums of All Time” list.

Wilson, a critic and editor for Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe and Mail , departs from the rapturous tones of his 33 1/3 colleagues by examining not why he loves Dion, but rather focusing on the idea that cool people hate Celine Dion because they are supposed to. The image-conscious have been conditioned to reject her.

The hypothesis forces us to consider what “cool” is in the first place. A satisfactory definition is elusive, because coolness itself is vaporous and shifting. One does not attain coolness from trying to be cool, as most of us painfully discovered sometime between sixth grade and our junior year of high school. Coolness just happens, which is why it’s so easy to sniff out bullshit cool.

I know I’ve used Dion as a generic example of lameness in these very pages; she’s an excellent go-to when listing indicators of ill-tuned cultural radars. I’ve shoved her into a category along with Jack Johnson and Josh Grobin: theirs is music for people who don’t like music, those whose intellect or emotional response to sound is underdeveloped or who simply don’t know any better.

Just why some very middlebrow things are acceptable in the realm of coolness—wearing a wardrobe comprising primarily jeans and T-shirts, a fondness for the coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts, buying half of your groceries at Trader Joe’s—and why others are not is baffling. To be honest, I think about this kind of stuff all the time. When is it OK to make fun of stuff that’s lame, and what makes it lame? How much of music criticism is pure bias, and how much is careful consideration?

But the job of a music critic is not to state if music is cool but to put its artistic merit in a larger context, to assess its importance in the grand scheme of culture.

To her credit, Dion has never tried to be cool. And not being cool hasn’t hurt her popularity; she’s sold at least 200 million albums worldwide. That Celine Dion is important as an entertainer is indisputable; you can’t argue with 200 million albums. And even though Dion is not cool in the eyes of the cool, odds are that at least one of her albums has changed someone’s life the way Ramonesmania changed mine.

I still don’t like what I know of Dion’s music and probably never will. But Wilson’s efforts to examine the rote critical assumption that Celine Dion’s music blows ass digs up all kinds of fascinating issues about the nature of taste and the hierarchy of pop culture. The idea that one needs a hall pass, so to speak, to admit liking an artist like Dion is past its prime. It doesn’t pay to be a snob. That’s a deal breaker .


Letters to the Editor

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01.16.08

The American WAy

Having just acquired Guitar Hero III for my son (I’ve yet to play it) and being a local musician for over 30 years, I read with interest the article that portrayed poor musicians not getting their piece of the pie (“Gaming Ghetto,” Jan. 2).

I was actually feeling guilty for buying the game until the next day when my issue of Guitar Player magazine arrived in the mail. It had a similar story, yet this article quoted, by name, musician after musician who raved about how fun and rewarding it was for them to have worked on the game. The jobs the musicians took were no different from mowing a lawn. You do this work, you get this much money. It’s your choice to take it or leave it. That’s kinda the way it works here in America, or is that the inequity the writer was really trying to point out?

When do you think the last time Chevron gave money to their mini-mart employees for the “banner” year they had? I also don’t recall Jimmy Page or Glen Campbell crying sour grapes when the Monkees or Billy Joe Royal had a million-selling hit using their guitar tracks in the ’60s. If the writer really wants to help out starving musicians, then take on the RIAA and folks like Clear Channel who are really screwing the artists. You think it was tough getting musicians to talk bad about Guitar Hero, wait till you try to get anyone with (or hoping to have) a recording contract to talk on record about that.

I think it’s time to plug in the game.

J. M. Berry

Sonoma

In yer head

Re “Gaming Ghetto,” I’m having difficulty having sympathy for a group that can’t even figure out what their time is actually worth. “Sweatshop” implies slave labor, which is not the case here as these musicians were free to do the work or not. Nice effort creating a problem where there is none.

The workers got the pay they negotiated for. Not the pay offered to overseas musicians who don’t exist. Should companies work toward zero profit, dividing up all the money made off of projects to their employees? If a black van kidnaps musicians for forced labor, then I’ll lend an ear. Until then you might want to focus on reality instead of the high-tech “sweatshops” that exist only in your head.

David Dorcich

Sunnyvale

Just Glad to Have a Bloody Job

In “Gaming Ghetto,” you forgot one very important issue regarding the “sweatshop” laborers: supply and demand.

Not only are we as creative types pressured from overseas competition, but also right here at home. “Media Arts” schools like Expression and Full Sail are churning out far more entry-level media arts grads than ever before. Are there real jobs for all these grads? Of course not.

So for the few of us lucky enough to actually have a job in the video-game profession, you’d better bet your ass that I’m not jeopardizing my job. Considering that there are probably a thousand qualified artists ready to take my job if I leave, the idea of asking for better pay, fewer hours (60-plus per week) or royalties (ha ha ha!) is pretty absurd.

A Musical Sweatshop Worker

San Francisco

Green Zoned

While the efforts to bring green awareness to the North Bay are highly commended, it would be nice to have satisfaction in personal efforts to follow up on the information given (Green Zone, “Green Housekeeping,” Jan. 2). It could be my lack of computer illiteracy, Luddite that I pretend to be, yet I could not access www.recyclenow.org through either google or yahoo. I have also discovered that the www.sonomacompost.com site only accepts organic compost. While I try to buy organic as much as I can afford, not all foodstuffs are available or affordable in organic form. I also wonder how the company itself validates the organicness of its received garbage. Is their a certification program for used vegetables?

Mykal Funguy

Santa Rosa

Ikes! Editing Error Alert! We apologize. Recyclenow is a dot-com, not a dot-org.

Regarding the organic purity of one’s compostable trash, we just say thanks Mister Mushroom. Gianna de Persiis Vona is looking into that for an upcoming Green Zone column.


Shaken, Stirred

the arts | stage | Photograph by Ron Severdia Over...
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We’re All from Mars

01.16.08The clear message from science research is that there are real differences between human males and females. Some are profound, some not, and some are rather funny. Research shows that males and females differ in numerous ways. Here is a smattering of salient differences: — Everyone's brain starts out as female. The brain of a male becomes masculine by...
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First Bite

01.16.08 E ditor's note: First Bite is a new concept in restaurant writing. This is not a go-three-times, try-everything-on-the-menu report; rather, this is a quick snapshot of a single experience. We invite you to come along with our writers as they—informed, intelligent eaters like yourselves—have a simple meal at an area restaurant, just like you do. It's easy not...
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Back in the Light

01.16.08F or someone long hailed as the heir to country-rock legend Gram Parsons, Ryan Adams, who shares Parsons' birthday, has some very unlikely fans. Case in point: a drunk young man in sunglasses waiting for a concert at the Berkeley Community Theater last summer, wearing only a huge American flag as a presumed tribute to the singer's breakthrough Gold...
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Red Wine & Butter

01.16.08PrologueB ully looks so great that I demand to see her ass. A tall slender woman some 15 years my senior, she dutifully turns around. Damn.Bully has found a new religion, and it's called Adventure Boot Camp, a women-only outdoor hour of daily exercise that she's done five days a week for four straight weeks. Bully loves it, her...
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The Thinking Cure

01.16.08W as Tony Soprano really depressed?In the late, lamented HBO series The Sopranos, Mafia boss Tony Soprano's confessions to his psychiatrist opened a window on the fragile psyche of an extralegal executive. We discovered that Tony—a man who has killed with his bare hands—once dreamed a bird had absconded with his penis. More importantly, we learned that no man,...
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Basket Case

01.16.08A t age 43, the editor of the French Elle, Jean-Dominique Bauby, was felled by "a cerebro-vascular accident." It left him lucid but locked inside his paralyzed body. Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly takes the inside angle on Bauby's story. But mostly what the much-lauded film does is show us imprisonment from the prisoner's view. Thus,...
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Out of Body

01.16.08F or the past eight years, I've worn one of those over-the-shoulder messenger bags almost everywhere I go. When I first put it on, I felt strangely more in command; on the occasions when I lose it, it's as if a part of myself is missing, and I feel panicked.I used to think that my attachment to the messenger...
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What Is Hip?

01.16.08M y friend and I used to play a time-killing game on the subway called the Deal Breaker. The setup was that you meet a man or woman who is perfect except for one very horrid thing. Is that horrid thing a deal breaker?The game can go on for hours, and its most delightful aspect is the shallowness of...
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Letters to the Editor

01.16.08The American WAy Having just acquired Guitar Hero III for my son (I've yet to play it) and being a local musician for over 30 years, I read with interest the article that portrayed poor musicians not getting their piece of the pie ("Gaming Ghetto," Jan. 2). I was actually feeling guilty for buying the game until the next...
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