You can’t beat the convenience of a propane grill, but for smoking, slow cooking or just the great flavor that comes from cooking over wood or charcoal, check out one of these grills.
Big Green Egg This combination grill-smoker-oven is a real beauty. The ceramic construction of this egg-shaped wonder can hold at low temperatures for hours or fire up to 700 degrees or more for grilling steaks or brick-oven pizzas. Prices range from $200 to $700 depending on the size. www.biggreenegg.com.
Lodge Hibachi Americans don’t have a lock on grilling technology. The Japanese-inspired Lodge “sportsman” hibachi grill offers great grilling in a small, portable cast-iron unit. $85. www.lodgemfg.com.
New Braunfels For about $100, the drum-shaped New Braunfels grill/smoker is a value-priced barby for the grill enthusiast. The Black Diamond offers an offset firebox for long, slow smoking with indirect heat, aka barbecuing.
Porta-Grill It’s one thing to show up at a Saturday barbecue with a few beef patties and beer in tow, and quite another to pull up with a trailer-mounted Porta-Grill. The trailer body is built of tough 1/10-inch-thick 12-gauge steel and is equipped with dual tail-brake lights, 1 7/8-inch coupler and a swing tongue jack. Prices start at about $2,800. Side of beef not included. www.belson.com.
Weber The Weber is the Budweiser charcoal grill. They’re everywhere and still pretty good. The classic, bulbous-shaped Weber has been grilling up burgers and steaks for years. New “one-touch” ash cleaning makes life easier. Prices start at about $80. www.weber.com.
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Hitting the Funding Vein
Photograph by Felipe Buitrago
Making a point: Patrick Stonehouse hopes that state money can help groups like his care for injection-drug users.
By Steve Hahn
Patrick Stonehenge spends the better part of his day waiting for drug addicts. They come into his workplace, the Drop-in Center on Front Street in Santa Cruz, hand him a collection of drug-tainted, sometimes HIV- or hepatitis C–infected needles, and in return he smiles and hands back an equal number of fresh, clean needles.
Most of the time this is just the beginning of the interaction. The client might look through the donated clothing, take a breather on the cushy couch, grab some clean cookers and alcohol swabs or just stay to talk with Stonehouse and the other volunteers at the center. Sometimes the talk will turn to drug addiction, but often the client is just happy to hear a friendly voice.
Up until a month ago, Stonehouse was completely reliant upon donations from local community members and private foundations to fund the center that he directs. But then came a surprise. In a precedent-setting move, on June 1, the California Office of AIDS supplied $75,000 per year for three years to 10 California programs. In the North Bay, the money was awarded to the Drug Abuse Alternatives Center; in the South Bay, to Stonehouse’s needle-exchange program. This marks the first time such programs have received government money. The total amount handed out by the Office of AIDS was $2.25 million, all of which came out of the general fund and could have been used for other programs if government staff had so chosen.
Not long ago, this would have been unthinkable. The last decade has witnessed a slow but steady shifting of perceptions on needle-exchange programs in the political sphere. Once considered by many politicians an enabler of dangerous drug use, needle-exchange programs are now gaining acceptance as a legitimate public-health measure in even the most conservative corners of the nation.
In California, the programs, part of a larger harm-reduction movement that advocates less focus on punishment for drug users, have gained important legitimacy in the lower echelons of state government. While $75,000 a year may seem like small potatoes, needle-exchange advocates say the symbolism of a California Department of Health Services office throwing its support behind historically illegal programs is enormous.
Kevin Farrell from the Office of AIDS helped analyze the grant proposals and says his office had to turn away more programs than it could fund. “I think the fact that we had 10 successful candidates but 18 unsuccessful candidates speaks to the pent-up demand for this in the state,” Farrell says. “Many of those programs could have been funded. They were very tightly bunched; the quality of the applications was very, very high, and it was tough making those choices.”
The only hurdle remaining is a ban on using state money to purchase the needles themselves. The current monies can be spent by needle exchanges on staff, rent, nonsyringe supplies–anything else except syringes.
But that could change before the year is out. Assembly Bill 110 would free up state money to be used on the purchase of syringes, something that is also illegal on the federal level. The bill has passed the Assembly and the Senate Health Committee and will be heard by the Senate Appropriations Committee after the summer recess in August.
Gov. Schwarzenegger has rejected previous versions of the bill twice already but refuses to take a position on the current bill until he reads the final copy.
Stonehouse and other harm-reduction advocates believe the establishment of needle exchange programs as a legitimate, proven method of reducing HIV and hepatitis C transmission could help accelerate changes on the national stage.
“I think, as with what happened on the county level in California, one moves another in a hierarchical system,” says Stonehouse. “In California, you had ‘This county said yes, and this county said yes, but the state still says no.’ So we’re getting to the point where we’re having more and more states say yes, but the federal government still says no. The idea is that you get enough of the constituents to say yes, and then it’s going to effect the grand change.”
It’s already starting. In May, New Jersey authorized cities to set up and operate needle-exchange programs, and Washington, D.C. may relax its longtime ban on public money for exchange programs.
Even the Texas House of Representatives held a public hearing on implementing a pilot needle-exchange program, and not a single public comment from the Republican-controlled district was lodged against the idea. The House swiftly approved the bill in late May.
While there are still a number of needle-exchange programs across the country struggling to scrape together sufficient funding and forced by law enforcement to operate in the shadows, those days may be numbered as the myths that surround injection drug use fade away.
“I’d like to think the stigma is falling away as people get more educated and knowledgeable about addiction,” says Hilary McQuie of the Harm Reduction Coalition’s Oakland office. “It involves the efforts of a lot of people to shift that public perception.”
Do as the Romany
Try imagining American pop music without the influence of Africa. It’s just that hard to imagine what European music would sound like without what the Romany have given it, in everything from lullabies to Liszt. Popularly called Gypsies, the Romany brought the sounds of Asia to Europe during their thousand-year journey. Gypsy Caravan by Jasmine Dellal is a world-music documentary par excellence, done in the best Les Blank manner. The emphasis on the musicians’ home lives, families and culture matches the exhilarating onstage performances.
Dellal and her colleagues (including Albert Maysles) shoot five bands as they travel together on a six-week tour across North America, fluidly flashing back to the performers’ offstage lives. Renowned musicians in their own lands, the bands have certain slight artistic tensions as they travel by bus. As Romany, says one musician, they have “rhythm, language and feeling” in common. The singer Juana la del Pipa describes Romany music in Spanish as possessing duende, something like charisma; hear it, she says and “tengo frio,” you get a chill. Despite shared heritage, the musicians don’t jam with each other easily at first; Gypsy Caravan notes that they can all most easily play with the band Maharaja, satin-costumed Rajasthanis who play the most ancient music of the Romany.
Dellal demonstrates the vastness of the musical diaspora of the Romany. The Balkan brass band Fanfare Ciocarlia sound a little like the Delhi wedding orchestra played during the titles in Monsoon Wedding, possible evidence of Indian roots. But the musicians here note that they also were influenced by the Turkish martial music that fanfare bands were made to perform for the occupying Ottoman soldiers. When the incredible fusion band Taraf de Haïdouks (“Band of Brigands”) perform, some of their tunes sound like the Hot Club of Bucharest.
Gypsy Caravan ought to whip up more popularity for vocalist Esma Redzepova, the Macedonian daughter of a crippled shoeshine man. Called, without fear of contradiction, the Queen of the Gypsies, Esma is a regal, full-sized woman who declares herself the mother of more than 40 adopted children. Representing the other end of Europe, Esma’s fellow caravaner is Juana la del Pipa of Andalusia, a rugged, throbbing-voiced flamenco singer. Tia Juana is candid about how drugs almost wrecked her family.
Perhaps most fascinating is since-deceased Romanian countryman Nicolae Neacsu of Taraf de Haïdouks, the kind of person even Johnny Depp (interviewed here) revered. This white-hot septuagenarian fiddler demonstrates the art of playing a violin with one hair of a bow.
Naturally, Dellal’s film will be compared with Tony Gatlif’s Latcho Drom. That film followed the Romany from the Asia to the Atlantic, showing us how the vocal ornamentation of Indian singing became the arabesques of flamenco. Gypsy Caravan is even more pleasurable; we feel we get to know the performers and began to search for their faces in a crowd as they spill out into an auditorium or a motel room. Gypsy Caravan does something that’s hard to do today: it not only exposes unheard ethnic music, but it also opens up the world of Romany musicians who are especially (and justly) nervous of outsiders. The Romany here are everything the world thinks they aren’t: hard-working and home-loving.
‘Gypsy Caravan’ screens at the Smith Rafael Film Center, 1118 Fourth St., San Rafael. 415.454.1222.
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Down Past the Roots
Photograph by John Blackwell
Catching air: John Palmer plays with the supernatural on ‘Murder of Crows.’
By Gabe Meline
If there were any justice in the world, John Courage would be out on tour with Neil Young, and their new album, Murder of Crows, would be added to every Americana playlist across the country. It’s that good.
Ask 23-year-old John Courage frontman and alter ego John Palmer about his music’s place in the larger scope, and he humbly stabs at the basics. “I guess ‘folk-rock’ is a broad, horrible, generic term for it,” he says, sitting on a bench in Santa Rosa’s Courthouse Square on a recent Wednesday evening, choosing only two of about 13 different circles from his album’s stylistic Venn diagram. I suppose reaching closer to the point would involve a term too long to bother saying, something like Renaissance-folk-carnival-shanty-gypsy-bluegrass-psyche-baroque-honky-tonk-blues-garage-country-rock.
That’s a lot of cooks in one kitchen, sure, but the hodgepodge works amazingly well. The reason the album towers above the rest of the sounds-the-same twang so often slung as “roots music” is because, rather than stewing all that has come before it into a palatable, unchallenging placebo, Murder of Crows builds instead on those traditional forms with chilling atmosphere, magnetic story line and captivating instrumentation. Additionally, it’s propelled by Palmer’s rough-hewn natural rasp, developed over years of nearly constant performing.
As a teenager in the late ’90s, Palmer played in a Christian ska band called Gone Fishin’, an outfit that I once witnessed but have never heard him mention. Thankfully, when the band John Courage began in 2001 as an incredibly ambitious collective with three guitarists, two tambourine players, a rhythm section, a backup vocalist and a violinist, little, if any, traces of Christian ska remained. It was an epic, if unrefined, start out of the gate for John Courage.
“The aspirations were huge, but I don’t think we were there,” Palmer recalls. “Everybody’s egos were way too big; everybody wanted to be on the front of the stage. When you’re 18 and 19, you don’t know how to step back and let somebody else take the spotlight.”
Once members started leaving the group, Palmer scaled the band down to a three-piece with acoustic guitar, upright bass and fiddle. “But it wasn’t bluegrass,” he stresses. “It was more like rowdy old folk music.”
Around this time, I ran into Palmer after he’d had what seemed like a life-changing experience. While walking through an abandoned parking lot near his house in downtown Santa Rosa in the dead of night, both he and a friend felt a rush of horrifying energy surround, and then pass through, their bodies. (Also, at the time he says his house was inhabited by supernatural beings: “I don’t know if I’d call it ghosts or spirits or energies, but definitely supernatural kind of stuff.”) I noticed a change in Palmer afterward, a sense of humility, perhaps–possibly compounded by the departure of his fiddler and girlfriend, Odessa Jorgensen.
This all translated into heavier situational imagery for Palmer’s new songs, while a quiet respect for the unknown made its way into his voice. (On fingerpicked numbers, he can be as breathlike as M. Ward; for the lower register, he resonates like the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach.) It also meant that Palmer needed to wrangle up another band, and he wrangled well.
Jessica Schaeffer, Muir Houghton, Leila-Anne Brusseau, Emily Jane White, Ephriam Nagler and J. D. Schrieber–all deft practitioners of their craft–make up Murder of Crows backing band, the Apparitions. With the brilliantly unconventional ensemble of concert harp, accordion, cello, violin, junkyard percussion and musical saw, they handle Palmer’s material with requisite care and give Murder of Crows a sleek, otherworldly ambiance. Just before recording, Palmer finished writing the album inside a notoriously haunted house during a getaway on the Mendocino Coast, a perfect intertwining of his musical sense and his belief in the supernatural.
“They both kind of inhabit the same part of my brain,” he reckons. “It’s that same sort of mysticism. Music’s still very mystical to me, because it just comes and goes. It’s just like a very old, familiar sense tingling in your neck.”
Much of Murder of Crows succeeds with the character study; the title track, for example, concerns the brutal killing of a child molester. “I sort of fantasize my own experiences and whip ’em up into something much bigger than they ever were,” Palmer explains. “People hear songs that I said I wrote about them, and they’re like, ‘What are you talking about, man, that shit never happened!’ That’s the beauty of it, you know. I write songs, I spin stories.”
This casual attitude spills over into the inner workings of John Courage. Palmer has played countless theaters, festivals and backyard parties, estimating that he’s written over a hundred songs, but after six years, Murder of Crows is the band’s first official album. (A few handmade CD-R releases precede it.) The unofficial lineup of the band has evolved into a revolving door of the area’s best musicians; these days, even Palmer himself isn’t sure which band members will come to scheduled events.
“It’s sort of like when you’re in a relationship with somebody, but both of you have relationship-phobia,” he explains. “You’re just like, ‘I’m seeing somebody.’ We don’t call it a band, it’s like, ‘We hang out, we’re jamming,’ and sometimes,” he laughs, “they show up to shows.”
Later that night, Palmer gets lucky when the only member who shows up is guitar virtuoso Henry Nagle, bringing the house down with his masterful, complementary fretwork on an original revival-style response to Palmer’s Baptist upbringing called “Will You Be at the Pearly Gates.”
“It might be too late for a kid like me,” Palmer whoops, “who’s got ramblin’ in his soul.” Palmer, who once hitchhiked all the way to Canada and back, is planning to move to Washington in the next few months, and as the song comes to a close, the lines resonate with extra meaning.
“But,” Palmer assures, motioning to the city around him as the sun starts to go down on Courthouse Square, “I’ll always be tied into Santa Rosa. I just need to go out and turn the next chapter in my life.”
John Courage celebrate the release of ‘Murder of Crows’ with three shows this week. Thursday, July 12, at the Ace in the Hole Pub (3100 Gravenstein Hwy., Sebastopol; 707.829.1101); Friday, July 13, at Ravenous (420 Center St., Healdsburg; 707.431.1302) and the official record-release show on Saturday, July 14, at the Phoenix Theater (201 E. Washington St., Petaluma; 707.762.2365). www.myspace.com/johncourage.
Island fever
By Gabe Meline
When the federal government designed a man-made island to serve as an airstrip for the China Clipper at the 1939 World’s Fair in San Francisco, little could they have expected that almost 70 years later, Treasure Island would be the site of the greatest two-day electronica and indie-rock event in the country. Some unknown Navy engineer had the keen awareness to install a large lawn on the west side of the island, offering a beautiful view of San Francisco’s skyline, Alcatraz and both the Bay and the Golden Gate bridges, and–voilà !–Treasure Island is the perfect site for bands to attract festival-goers from around the world.
Chalk it up to Noise Pop Festival organizer Jordan Kurland, who estimates that he and his partner spent about two years trying to find a unique spot in or around San Francisco for an outdoor festival. There’re very few days in a year that the city allows outdoor events to happen at places like Golden Gate Park or Dolores Park, and, Kurland says, “those get spoken for really quickly. But when we got wind of the fact that you could actually do something on Treasure Island, it seemed about as unique a setting as you could get.”
Securing the site was relatively easy, Kurland says, but overseeing transportation is the challenge–shuttling 10,000 people to and from an island not being in the indie-rock guidebook. (Buses will be on a continuous loop from AT&T Park.) The oft-cited problems that plague larger outdoor festivals, though, are easily under Kurland’s control: “We’re not gonna have some of those issues,” he insists, “where people have to wait in linefor an hour to get a $4 water.”
In another convenience to fans, Noise Pop and its collaborator, Another Planet Entertainment, have split the two days appropriately–Saturday hosts mostly top-name electronica artists; Sunday showcases a who’s who of indie rock–instead of mixing the genres and forcing fans to spend $60 a day for two days. “Our ultimate goal is to give everyone a great experience,” Kurland continues, “even if that means we make a lot less money. If we were really looking at just the fiscal side of this, we’d be trying to do something in a really big field, and getting the Red Hot Chili Peppers to headline one day and Kanye West the next. But like we’ve done every year with Noise Pop, we really want it to be a celebration of independent music and culture.”
The Treasure Island Music Festival, featuring Thievery Corporation, Gotan Project, DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist, M.I.A. (above), as well as Modest Mouse, Built to Spill, Spoon, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and M. Ward, runs Sept. 15-16 on San Francisco’s Treasure Island. For tickets and full lineup, see www.treasureislandfestival.com.
News Briefs
Not enough
More commonly referred to as “going hungry,” the condition now officially known in bureaucratic circles as “food insecurity” remains a serious problem in California, with Napa County recording the second highest percentages of all counties statewide. A recently released report by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research found that 30 percent of low-income California residents (which works out to 2.5 million people) cannot afford enough food for their families without sacrificing such other necessities as prescription medications or medical care. For 775,000 adults statewide, the problem is severe enough that they cut way down on how much they eat, or they do without. While the overall numbers have dropped slightly from the 33.9 percent found statewide in the 2003 survey, the authors of the recent report say the improvement is not significant and that food insecurity has many consequences.
“At mild and moderate levels, food insecurity contributes to anxiety and worry, and often results in adjusting the household budget to forego other basic needs in order to make sure that one’s family is fed,” the report explains. “Very low food security results in the disruption of eating patterns and reduced food intake. Children in food-insecure households miss more school and do less well in school.”
About 10,000 Napa County adults are having trouble putting food on the table; that’s 38.4 percent of the population, down slightly from 41.9 percent in 2003. The more recent 2005 figures give Napa the second highest percentage reported statewide, just behind Kings County at 38.6 percent (14,000 people). The lowest rate of food insecurity recorded statewide was 14 percent (6,000 adults) in Placer County, although the report labels this as a “statistically unstable estimate.”
Marin County is listed at 32.9 percent, with 9,000 adults struggling to find food in 2005, up considerably from the 20.4 percent reported in 2003. Sonoma County figures were 23,000 adults, or 26.7 percent, down from 33.1 percent in 2003.
These results are based on surveys of adults living with incomes below 200 percent of the federal policy level, but do not include homeless people or folks with slightly higher incomes who may also experience food insecurity. The UCLA report concludes that “the present estimates in all likelihood underestimate the absolute number of adults touched by food insecurity in California.”
The report also notes that pregnant women and families with children are at the highest risk of food insecurity.
First Bite
For a sushi chef, Remington Cox has three things going against him. One: he’s not Japanese. Two: he’s extremely young (he graduated from St. Helena High School just five years ago). Three: he didn’t go to cooking school.
Yet, Remington–staff refer to him by his first name–has pulled off his first restaurant, C.C. Blue, with aplomb. Turning what some would consider handicaps to his advantage, Remington presents a freer approach to sushi than a more seasoned chef might. He and his ex-business partner, Herman Chin, designed the restaurant to look like it’s under water. Thus ensconced by the eatery’s sea-green glass wall and pebble floor, diners are treated to the sensation of sitting inside an aquarium tank.
One recent Tuesday night, while a manager with the elocution of a stage-player attends to the weekday dinner crowd, Remington helms the sushi bar and chit-chats with a woman perched on a bar stool.
Remington majored in business and learned to prepare food through various restaurant stints, including one in Florence. Much like the chef’s background, C.C. Blue’s menu is also unexpected. An otherwise typical roll–hamachi (yellowtail), unagi (eel) and rice wrapped in seaweed–gets special treatment: the entire thing is battered and fried as tempura. The resulting “Godzilla” maki ($9), drizzled heavily with spicy sauce, yields a decidedly rewarding crunch. Likewise, the Ronnie maki ($14), filled with tempura soft-shell crab and unagi, has the savory fry of a fish stick, juxtaposed with the smoothness of avocado slices sitting atop the roll. But next to these inspired whimsies, the Rainbow maki ($13), though eye-catching and fresh, lacks Remington’s creative pizzazz.
Several fusion dishes also accentuate the menu, from filet mignon with a miso mixed-green salad ($17) to stuffed shrimp with panko and Gruyère ($9) and hamachi carpaccio ($14). Here, again, Remington gives diners a textural treat: the noodles in the miso-based agee udon soup ($16; includes shrimp tempura for dipping) have the surprising chew of tapioca pearls.
With a hearty nod to tradition, Remington also supplies a thorough selection of raw fish. The escolar (snake mackerel) nigiri ($7.50) comes in two giant slices and are just as promised: buttery and succulent, though not as rich as deep-sea toro. On another plate, two sun-bright quail eggs lend a pleasing, custardlike quality to piles of vibrant tobiko (flying fish roe, $5) beneath them. Remington also stocks the hard-to-find uni (sea urchin, $8-$12.50) and toro (bluefin belly, $13-$30), but also the more common maguro (tuna, $5-$12.50).
Meanwhile, the manager’s expert knowledge of sake and wine is evident, but he’s flexible enough to open a bottle Shichi Hon Yari Junmai Ginjo ($28 for 300 mL) for an undecided couple. They give the thumbs up–it’s like drinking chocolate and alcohol.
Speaking of chocolate, Remington, whose second love is dessert, has devised a fascinating bunch of fusion sweets, including chocolate sake mousse with wonton fritters ($10) and rice brûlée with sugar-coated tempura mango ($10).
A word of caution: Sushi restaurants notoriously serve small portions, at least according to many American palates. But there is no need to compensate by over-ordering at C.C. Blue, or you’ll leave stuffed to the gills.
C.C. Blue Sushi Bar & Restaurant. Lunch, Tuesday-Sunday; dinner daily; late-night service, Friday and Saturday. 1148 Main St., St. Helena. 707.967.9100.
Quick-and-dirty dashes through North Bay restaurants. These aren’t your standard “bring five friends and order everything on the menu” dining reviews.
Draught Board
John Fogarty of Creedence Clearwater Revival had a bad time in Lodi. The local bar crowd didn’t care for his songs, and the poor guy couldn’t even afford a train ticket out of town. But me, well, I felt very appreciated the last time I visited Lodi. In fact, a crowd of spirited folks at the Lodi Beer Company, a pub and brewery, was practically begging me to stay and have another drink with them. And another. And another. And another. And another.
That’s the burden one must bear when signed up to be a judge in round one of the annual National Homebrew Competition (NHC), even if it’s past 3pm and we’ve been sipping beer since 10am and it’s starting to rain and I’m on a bike and my train is pulling out of Stockton in just two hours.
The NHC consists of nine regions and two rounds of judging, and is the largest event of its sort in the world. This year, a total of nearly 5,000 beers brewed in kitchens across America and Canada were entered to win, and the Regional West event in Lodi this April saw 572 first-round entries in 26 categories. These homebrews were submitted by 96 hopeful amateurs from Hawaii, Nevada and California, including a dozen or so wine country locals. They sent in a sample bottle of each home-fermentation project, to be tasted, scrutinized and judged by the likes of me. Seventy-eight beers went to round two, held two weeks ago in Colorado, and Sonoma’s own Carlo Camarda took a bronze medal for his IPA, while Byron Burch of Santa Rosa won a silver in the “Other Mead” category.
At the Lodi first round, I judged two flights of beer with a hundred or so other judges in the private-events room of the Lodi Beer Company. A flight of beer in the NHC consists of a half-dozen to a dozen brews, all of the same style. The beers are graded by a panel of two or three people sitting across from each other, looking for all the world like friends sharing a beer–except for their stern faces, the grading sheets and their blazing pens.
The rating system works on a scale of zero to 50, although competition organizers asked us before we started that we not stray below the “courtesy minimum” score of 13, even if a beer really sucks. Tasters within a single panel are also required to remain within a seven-point spread of each other. In other words, if you think a beer is wonderful and your partner thinks the same brew is fit for the nearest stream, you must reconsider your evaluation.
Experienced beer taster and homebrewer Beth Zangari sat as my judging partner and mentor for the stouts. She and I worked fairly efficiently as a panel, each beer requiring about 10 minutes of ponderous sipping and swirling, and we usually wound up with similar impressions of the stout we tasted. The stouts were divided into six sub-categories: dry, sweet, oatmeal, foreign extra, American and Russian imperial. I tasted some fine, creamy, sweet specimens and concluded that he who knows only Guinness is a deprived man.
Oh, the flavors of homemade stouts! Grain, malt, honey, butterscotch, cream, dried fruit, brandy and a plethora more of delicious elements may dominate a beer’s profile. For a beer taster and judge, a knowledge of chemistry is helpful, as is the ability to interweave the aromas and smells detected by the palate and the brain with one’s vocabulary. Not every judge can do it, and even after a sip of the most beautiful, creamy beer, I would sit and watch, amazed and slightly appalled, as Zangari fired off paragraph after paragraph of commentary, while I floundered.
At last she clued me in on a trick: “You’ve got to realize that probably no one is going to read more than two or three reviews by you, and if you use the same phrases again and again, it’s fine. Copy and paste.”
On my second round at the NHC, I joined a pair of Lodi locals, Bert and Roger, for a flight of eight Belgian ales. Together, we sipped from a fine Witbier that carried a wonderful overtone of rich butterscotch–they call that quality “diacetyl”–and a creamy grain profile. I gave it a 38.
“I gave it 16,” Bert said. “It’s a great beer, and the butterscotch is very nice and the sweetness is good, but if you read the guidelines for this style, it shouldn’t have any of those flavors. It should have citrus and a sharp crispiness.”
“Brewing to style” is a very basic skill for an ambitious beer maker to have, and this brewer had goofed up. Sadly, I had to shave 15 points off my score to make our panel’s ratings align a little better, and with that the beer was sent off to the sink for dumping.
There are no monetary prizes in the NHC. Instead, winning beers and their masters receive ribbons, certificates and nominations, such as “Best of Show,” “Meadmaker of the Year,” “Homebrewer of the Year” and several more. Kim Bishop, a mechanical engineer in Santa Rosa, won second place for Fruit Beers in the first round with a raspberry-chocolate porter.
“I’m not so concerned with winning,” she said. “I mainly appreciate the feedback on my beer, though having another ribbon for the wall is nice, too.”
In a day and age so saturated with wine, wine literature, wine sections, wine countries, wine roads, wine bars and wine lists of 400 labels or more, we should commend brewers for imparting new flavors to the diet of America, as well as for their level of craftsmanship. After all, it is the whim and creativity of the brewer that ultimately drives every aspect of a beer: its aroma, flavor, strength, bitterness, sweetness, mouth-feel and body.
“Beer tends to attract people who are a little bit more on the techie side, because with beer you have almost complete control over what you make,” said Byron Burch, an accomplished fermenter of many things and part owner of Santa Rosa’s Beverage People, a homebrewing and home-winemaking supplies shop. “Wine is different, though. It’s a celebration of the seasons. You do need good grapes, but with winemaking an awful lot is done for you.”
Carlo Camarda of Sonoma won first-round first place for his IPA. A homebrewer with 12 years’ experience, Camarda has refined his skills to the point where beer-making is not a game of chance but one of control, and by paying close attention to boiling duration, fermentation temperature, his blend of hops, time in the barrel and many other factors, he can replicate a favorite beer time and again.
“The greatest part of making a beer,” he said, “is after six hours of starting the brewing and a month of fermenting and months more in the bottle, opening it up with some friends and finding that it’s come out exactly how you planned for it to be.”
But sometimes things go wrong. In Lodi, I sipped a Belgian ale that tasted marvelously of activated bread yeast, which is a good thing for bread yeast but a bad thing for beer. The most likely explanation is that some small microbe had colonized the bottle after the cap was sealed.
Other homebrews are remarkably nice, like that amazing oatmeal stout I tasted that carried thick and delicious notes of grain, malt, cream and dried figs, but which we had to sink because it was entered as an American stout. So it goes.
Among other things, a homebrew contest will demonstrate that amateurs can make darn good beer–almost good enough to convince a man to stay, have more and miss his train out of town, but not quite. Not in Lodi, anyway. We all know the Creedence song, and I didn’t want to be singing a similar tune. So I left at just past 3pm, a little bit drunk, while the pens still blazed and the tasters still toiled.
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Ask Sydney
Dear Sydney, I’m feeling unmotivated at work. I’ve been here more years than I should, but came for the benefits, which are good. The not-so-good part is that this place is pretty toxic, both in the attitudes around here and in the building itself. For my first few years here, I felt this place was emotionally toxic to the point of being almost unsurvivable, but my spouse would not let me quit. A few years ago, I was given a gift from the universe in terms of an attitude shift, so while much of what happens here and many of the people I deal with daily are still annoying, I no longer feel emotionally and spiritually battered by my job.
In the past year, I’ve made changes. I divorced the person who was “making” me stay here, and I’ve started training for a new career. My problem is that it will be several years before I’m qualified to leave for my new career. I thought it would be easier to keep working here, since I now see an end in sight. It seems to be the opposite, though. I want so much to quit this (fairly high-paying) job, but I feel stuck, since now that I’m training to do something else, I need the flexibility in my work schedule. I also have made a few very good friends here, which is a huge bonus. In the midst of this contradiction, I find myself wanting to shirk the work I am supposed to be doing. I want to visit with co-workers, surf online, take long breaks, anything except do the work! What advice do you have for me?–Contradicting Myself
Dear Contradiction: It seems as if you have finally come to some sort of peace with your place of employment. As this peace was hard-earned and there are many perks–flexibility, benefits, friends and good pay–try hanging on to the job for the next few years while you finish up the loose ends for beginning your new career. It sounds like you just need a vacation. Everyone slacks sometimes. Unless you work in the ICU unit of a children’s hospital, where slacking is not an option, don’t be so hard on yourself. Instead of quitting and then having to find another job with equal pay, stress of retraining, etc., let yourself relax a little. You’ve worked hard, you’ve got a good track record. As long as you’re getting the necessary things done, the world will not melt if you take long breaks. Take a couple of vacations and keep focused on your new goal. This crappy job is just a means to an ends. Don’t give it more energy than it deserves.
Dear Sydney, there’s this girl at school who wants to be friends, but I don’t really want to be friends with her. I’m an A student, and my classes are hard, so I’m busy studying. She’s not in my grade, so we don’t have any classes together, but even so, if she wanted to get together and actually study, that would be OK with me. The thing is, she just never shuts up! I don’t know if she has many other friends. But between my piles of homework, my chores and my part-time job, I am really busy all the time! I don’t even get to see my own friends very much! It’s summer vacation now, but I just saw her somewhere, and it reminded me that once school starts, I have to figure out what to do. Do you have any advice for me? Oh, by the way, she is a nice person, not some stalker. If she was mean, I could blow her off.–‘A’ Student
Dear A+: It’s not your job to befriend the world. The fact that you care, that you don’t want someone else to be lonely, proves that you have a large and generous heart. But the desire to help other people feel better, even at the expense of your own well-being, while it speaks to your generosity of spirit, can end up being a real burden for you to carry. If your start practicing having boundaries now, you will be better off in the future, when you’re dealing with far worse infractions on your personal space. Be friendly, but don’t become her friend because you feel like you have to. Let her know exactly what you just told me. You have a job, you study, you have chores, etc., and that you don’t have time to chat right now or to hang out. Rather than trying to send out the “leave me alone” vibe and hoping she gets it, possibly hurting her feelings even worse in the process, be honest. Tell her you’re spread thin, but that you would love to hang out or chat when you have a chance. Just not right now.
Greetings Sydney, a friend of mine was offered a nice promotion to a position where he’d be managing others, but on the interview was asked this question by his boss: How do you feel about administering a policy with which you personally disagree? My friend felt trapped. If he said he could not do such a thing, he was afraid that this alone would be a deal breaker and he would not get the promotion. If, on the other hand, he consented to do so, he felt that he was setting himself up to be a company ‘yes’ man. I’d like to get your thoughts on this.–Agida or Acidez
Dear AA: There’s a trend in the interview process, from Wal-Mart on up, to put interviewees in the position of having to swear their allegiance either to the Man or to their co-workers and a sense of morality. With the death of the economy boom and the arrival of globalization, there just aren’t that many jobs out there anymore. This puts employers at a distinct advantage. They can ask ridiculous, hypothetical questions that have no good answer. Then interviewees have to figure out whether or not they should be honest, while remaining complicit in the subterfuge.
Luckily, the question your friend was asked is easier to answer than the classic “Would you turn in your own co-worker?” scenario, because he can answer honestly. He can prove he has good, solid morals by claiming, “If the company wants me to begin sending those with delinquent accounts to a gated prison yard where they are routinely tortured, I’m sorry, I would have to quit. However, if the company wants me to implement a new rule, that I may or may not agree with, I am willing to implement the rule, because this is part of my job description. If the new rule seems to be counterproductive for the running of the company, I would then pursue formal means of making my opinion heard, while still working within the boundaries of company policy.” Or he could just refuse the job. The overuse of hierarchical power dynamics in the business world is nauseating. Imagine if all the best workers refused to work under such conditions. Perhaps then we would see change.
‘Ask Sydney’ is penned by a Sonoma County resident. There is no question too big, too small or too off-the-wall. Inquire at www.asksydney.com or write as*******@*on.net.
No question too big, too small or too off-the-wall.
Slacking Off
Not long ago, my computer crashed and took my entire 10,000-song music library down with it. Hmph.
Luckily, I had a backup–my iPod. Using free software called Senuti (that’s “iTunes” backward) and a Mac laptop, I was able to restore all the songs to my new PC. Unfortunately, the software wouldn’t restore the 20-plus playlists I had built up over the years, leaving me with the momentous and monotonous task of sorting out all my music again. Good times.
While I’m procrastinating, I’ve been checking out other ways to listen to music. I came across another great use for all that excess bandwidth you probably don’t have: www.slacker.com.
Basically, it’s personalized Internet radio à la Last.FM or Pandora, but with some minor functional differences (it populates your “stations” based on a professionally constructed relational database and personal preferences rather than social networks or music DNA) and one major one: you can take it to go on a sleek new device.
The Slacker device is next in the line of “iPod killers,” devices that will supposedly unseat the iPod from its throne at the top of the heap, though few succeed in delivering so much as a minor flesh wound. The folks behind Slacker, including ex-Musicmatch CEO Dennis Mudd, ex-Rio CEO Jim Cady, ex-iRiver CEO Jonathan Sasse and XM cofounder Lon Levin, are banking on the fact that people like the minimal effort required by radio (turn on the radio, select a station and listen) and don’t want to spend time and money building up a digital music library and playlists.
The free service will feature occasional ads and a limited number of song skips, but a $7.50 monthly subscription does away with both and lets you save tracks in your library. The $150 portable device was released last month. It’s got a nice big screen, plays MP3, WMV and AAC files, and easily refreshes itself via USB or WiFi connection. It is not for persnickety music snobs–album purists, catalogue completionists, obsessive mix-CD makers, etc.–all of whom constitute a lovable and considerable block of the music-listening masses. Instead, it’s aimed directly at radio listeners and XM subscribers who want a little more control but no extra work. Hence the name.
Slacker functions like a radio station, coming preloaded with a deep library and virtual stations that, over time, adapt to your preferences when you start flagging your favorites and banning the songs you don’t want to hear. You can also build your own stations and populate them with the artists you want, and select the relative level of obscurity of the songs the player should choose. But the real strength of Slacker is its ability to automatically populate stations around a particular band.
Not happy with the hip-slop I was getting from the hip-hop station, I made it build a new one around A Tribe Called Quest, which it populated with PM Dawn, Beastie Boys, the Roots, Pharcyde, Gang Starr, the Fugees, Digable Planets and a bunch more. Not bad.
A station built around Pavement included Yo La Tengo, Beat Happening, Liz Phair, Modest Mouse, Beck, Sparklehorse, Ween, Rogue Wave, Elliot Smith, the Palace Brothers (!) and the Flaming Lips. Impressive. And after a few days of use, the stations just seem to get better.
I’ve been listening to it all on my stereo at home via Apple’s Airport Express, a wireless router that enables you to stream your iTunes library to your home stereo. Rogue Amoeba’s “Airfoil” software opens the door to almost any other application to stream audio through Airtunes, simply and cheaply ($25). The resulting audio quality won’t impress audiophiles, but it’s more than sufficient for anyone else.
Would it be fun to take it all on the road? Sure. But even though the Slacker device also functions as an MP3 player, I’ll probably pass on it. After all, I’ve already got an iPod and over 10,000 songs to fill it with–if I ever get around to rebuilding those playlists.
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